by Sudhir Kakar
The reputation of the Lodhas is of a mercurial and violent people who are always in the forefront of a riot from the Hindu side, ‘They will kill as many people in two hours as the rest will in a week,’ says an old Hyderabad resident who has studies the community closely. They claim to be Rajputs, the traditional martial caste and the sword arm of Hindu society although this claim is often disputed by others. In spite of their taking a leading part in religious violence, their economic ties with Muslims are close. Muslims are the main customers of their lethal brew, both as retailers and, together with the Dalits, the poverty-stricken Hindu outcastes, as its consumers. Even socially, they have adopted some Muslim customs. Although they regard Muslims as their chief enemy, it does not prevent them, for example, from regularly visiting Muslim shrines, the dargahs, in a spirit of devotion.
Mangal Singh’s house is in one of the crowded localities of Hyderabad where there is a large concentration of Lodhas. The bazaar running through it has shops stocking somewhat more expensive goods but in essence differs visually from other similar bazaars of the city only in one curious particular. This is the occasional sight of two to three men on bicycles wearing very loose clothes, emerging from one of the alleys and, with a look of determined concentration, furiously pedalling away to turn and disappear into another alley. These are the liquor carriers, wearing bicycle tyre tubes full of the illegal stuff tied around their bodies, on their way to various distribution centres in the city.
A young-looking 40, Mangal Singh is a handsome man who laughs easily and has a kind of manic charm about him. He walks with the compact, swaggering gait of a wrestler, with shoulders swinging like a young woman’s hip, as he proudly shows us around his house and his vyamshala, the gymnasium, both of which are situated in a large compound just off the road and very near the river. The gymnasium, which trains more than a hundred boys and young men, consists of two rectangular halls adjacent to each other. The first hall is used for weight training. There are wooden dumbbells, iron tyres to be put around the neck to strengthen the neck muscles, parallel bars, ropes hanging down from iron rings in the ceiling, and many other contraptions for the pulling, pushing and lifting of weights. The whitewashed walls are lined with coloured lithographs and posters. There is a lithograph of the reclining god Vishnu, his face shaded by the hoods of the hydra-headed snake, Sheshnag. There is a poster of one of his incarnations, the God Rama in his heroic pose with a long bow and a quiver of arrows visible above his shoulders. There is the portrait of the goddess Durga in her ferocious form, in the act of killing the buffalo demon, Mahisasura. Threre are portraits of the Hindu heroes Shivaji and Rana Pratap, who have come to epitomize Hindu resistance to the Mughals; there is also the reproduction of a popular painting of Nehru looking down from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort, the Indian national flag flying proudly behind him as he pensively faces a large crowd, the faces of the leaders of India’s Independence movement—Patel, Rajagopalachari, Kripalani, Maulana Azad—clearly recognizable in the forefront.
The other wall, too, is covered with pictures. There are three large portraits of wrestlers, one of them Mangal’s own guru. The other two are famous wrestlers from the Thirties and Forties, each in a loincloth and standing with his feet and arms a little apart, in the pose where they are ready for grappling. Pointing to one of the pehlwans, who has very close-cropped hair and a thick moustache, Mangal Singh informs me that this man was the prime accused in Hyderabad’s first major riot between the Hindus and the Muslims in 1938, when the state was ruled by the Nizam. This pehlwan, I forget his name, had killed one of the leading members of the Razakars, the Nizams’s unofficial Muslim militia, and then disappeared. He is still believed to be alive and living in a remote area of Nepal where he now pactises the austerities of a holy man.
There are many coloured lithographs of scenes from the Independence movement—Gandhi leading a long line of volunteers on his march to the sea, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre where British soldiers are shown firing into the trapped crowd, men caught in the act of falling down, clutching at their chests from which blood is spurting out, open-mouthed in silent screams. Then there are lithographs depicting scenes from earlier periods of history: small Hindu children being thrown up and impaled on the spears of the Razakars, Indian soldiers being blown up from the mouths of cannons by the British after the failure of India’s first war of independence, the Sepoy Mutiny as British historians called it. Pointing to the Razakar picture, Mangal Singh informs me, ‘This is what used to happen all the time in those days in Hyderabad. Hindu girls were picked up from the streets or the fields at any time at the will of Muslim nobles and raped. That is why our girls started marrying so early. If a girl had a mangalsutra around her neck and payals around the ankles (the signs of marriage), she was not kidnapped.’
There is a further series of pictures depicting Muslim atrocities from the long period of Islamic rule: Banda Bairagi and his followers being beheaded by Muslim soldiers, the martyrdom of the Sikh Gurus, Mahmud of Ghazni destroying the famous temple of Somnath as shaven-headed Brahmin priests look up with bulging eyes and mouths open in iuncomprehensible horror. Next we come to a photograph of Subhash Chandra Bose, the stormy rebel of the national movement who sought an alliance with Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan during the war to violently overthrow the British empire in India. Next to it is a full-sized wooden statue of Gandhi which is overturned and lies on its side, facing the wall. ‘There was a high wind a few days ago and Gandhiji toppled over. He has his back to this country,’ Mangal Singh jokes.
‘How is it that you have Gandhiji, the apostle of nonviolence, together with the violent Hindu heroes next to each other?’ I venture to ask.
‘First, I talk like Gandhiji,’ he replies with a smile. ‘Only when talk fails, I use force like Shivaji or Bose.’
The second hall is dominated by the akhara where the actual wrestling takes place. About four feet under the floor level, the akhara is a flat smooth rectangle of reddish coloured mud mixed with oil and finely threshed stalks of wheat, covering about half the area of the hall. Presiding over it is a Shiva lingam; a garland of fresh white jasmine flowers and sticks of burning incense bear witness to its daily morning worship. On the other side of the room, next to the wall, there is a small temple of Hanuman, the ascetic patron god of Hindu wrestlers. The idol is smeared with red paste, flowers are strewn around its feet, and incense sticks bum from between the toes. On the wall itself there are photographs of famous wrestlers—I recognize Guru Hanuman from Delhi among them—as well as photographs clipped from Western bodybuilding magazines and pasted to the walls. The slightly fading photographs show off the oily sheen of bulging biceps, thundering thighs, and sculpted pectorals. One entire side of the hall is without a wall and opens out to the river and a peaceful scene of dark-skinned women with sarees tied above their knees, whirling wet clothes above their shoulders and bringing them down with rhythmic thuds on flat stones to clean them of dirt. Mangal Singh draws my attention back to the gym when he points to the corner next to the temple where some loincloths are hanging on a wooden post. ‘Earlier we used to have spears and swords. Nowadays, of course, they put you in jail if you have even a knife for your self-protection. Many young men prefer to learn karate these days,’ he continues to enlighten me. ‘Karate makes the sides of your hands into killing instruments by deadening sensation in that part. They burn the side of the hand and dip elbows in boiling salt water till all sensation is lost. But Indian-style wrestling is still superior where you can kill a man once you grapple with him. Karate is only good for long-distance fighting. Once you get in close to the opponent as in Indian-style wrestling, karate is useless.’
The Muslim taleemkhana does not differ substantially from the Hindu akhara. There will be fewer photographs and, of course, no idol of a Hindu god. It might have an ayat from the Qur’an on a wall or a coloured print of the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest shrine. Comparatively speaking, with its greater profusion of religious icons, th
e Hindu gymnasium appears more Hindu than the more neutral taleemkhana appears Muslim. The Muslim training regimen is the same as the Hindu one except that the wrestlers will say the prescribed dawn prayers at home before coming to the taleem. They too will drink crushed nuts and crystal sugar mixed in water or milk after the training is over for the morning but, in contrast to the Hindu, eat great quantities of mutton.
It had not been easy to meet Mangal Singh. We had to go through friends of friends of friends before the meeting finally took place. Once it happened, though, Mangal Singh talked so freely and without any apparent suspiciousness or guile that I wondered why it had been so difficult in the first place. He did not quite understand what my psychological study of Hindu-Muslim violence was all about. (I confess that when I tried to explain the aims of my study to other pehlwans, I did not quite understand it myself.) He was under the impression that we might eventually want to make a movie on the subject, an impression I did not fully exert myself to correct. In any event, Mangal Singh proved to be most frank about his activities as a scourge of Muslims, perhaps also because he assumed Sahba and I were both Hindus.
The Muslim pehlwans had been open with Sahba but understandably guarded when I was also present. With Sahba they could express their bitterness and contempt for Hindus, show their pride in their role in the protection of the community from the Hindu enemy. In my presence, they became less Muslim and more inclined to express universal humanist sentiments. For instance, there was pious talk, not exactly reassuring, that if I were cut my blood would be exactly the same colour as theirs. By the end of the interviews, though, all the pehlwans were perceptibly warmer. I like to believe that this opening up was because they sensed my genuine interest in them as persons rather than being due to any typical ‘shrink’ ‘hm-ms’, phrases, or inflections. I suspect, though, that their different—although for my purposes, highly complementary—psychic agendas when talking to Sahba and to me were dictated by shifts in their own sense of identity. In other words, with Sahba, a Muslim, their self-representation was more in terms of a shared social identity. With me, a Hindu, once they felt reassured that the situation did not contain any threat, personal identity became more salient, influencing their self-representations accordingly. In any event, when we parted, promises to visit me in Delhi were made, visions of feasting in my house were conjured up, all of which I acknowledged smilingly though not without quaking inwardly at the prospect of the promise ever being kept. There were occasions in meetings with the pehlwans—for instance, when waiting for Akbar in his hotel room—where I caught myself thinking that the scholarly work of making a book out of other books was infinitely preferable to being out in the field, anxious and afraid. Besides being perpetually uncomfortable in the heat, dust, bad smells, and biting mosquitoes, I felt envious at visions of friends reading and writing in quiet air-conditioned libraries.
In the meeting with Mangal Singh, the only threat came from his generous but insistent hospitality as he pressed a glass of sugarcane juice on me, delicious but deadly, a prime vehicle for stomach disease and a possible cholera carrier. We were sitting in a room on the first floor of his house where Mangal Singh lives with his two wives. Most of the 11 rooms on this floor are empty. The ground floor has nine rooms, occupied by his widowed mother and his five brothers with their families. The rooms are in the form of a square and open out to a veranda lining a courtyard which has a tulsi (basil) plant growing in the middle. ‘Not tulsi, Mother tulsi,’ Mangal Singh had corrected me while demonstrating his Hindu piety at the same time. Besides a scooter and a motorcycle parked in the veranda, there was a refrigerator and a water cooler as well as some toys. Everything looked neat and tidy and freshly scrubbed. Mangal Singh had introduced us to his first wife, a shy, pretty young woman to whom he was openly affectionate. He had married again because she could not have children. ‘But I actually prefer her,’ he had said to the young woman’s obvious pleasure. ‘She looks after me well. The other one is also nice but since she is educated she doesn’t look after me so well.’ As with his mother, to whom he had introduced us downstairs, Mangal Singh behaved like a spoilt young boy with his wife, cracking jokes, praising her extravagantly, ordering her about, calling out to her often to reassure himself that she was not far away.
There were three other men in the room when we began the interview, the obligatory chamchas to amplify his statements whenever he paused for breath or effect. They provided emphasis to his statements and strove to increase their truth content by a resounding ‘That is right!’ to his rhetorical ‘Isn’t that so?’ Occasionally, when he paused, they sang his praises while he looked on. smiling modestly. ‘He needs good food to keep up his “manpower”,’ said one. ‘Manpower’ is said in English, the man’s rough and ready translation of the Hindi word for strength. ‘If he lifts his hand, all the hands in the city would rise, such is his “manpower”.’ They showed me the externment order served on Mangal Singh by the police and signed by the commissioner sahib himself which banished him from the city for six months in ‘apprehension of inciting violence and breach of peace.’ ‘But I’m back after one and a half months. I got a stay from the High Court,’ Mangal Singh says. The copy of the stay order is also passed on to me by a chamcha for my perusal. A second chamcha brings out a sheaf of photographs. The ones shown to me are of police torture. A subdued-looking Mangal Singh, standing in his loincloth, is bruised and the eyes puffed. He points to his left eye where the skin under it is noticeably darker. ‘I have still not completely recovered from that beating,’ he says with indignation, not at the beating itself but at the surrounding circumstances of which Mangal gives two versions. It seemed a few months ago, at the time of tension over the demolition of the Babri mosque, Mangal received a parcel, very probably from his Muslim enemies. It was kept in the room next to the one where we were sitting. His three-year-old son fell on it and it exploded, killing the boy. In the second version, which is also the statement he made to the police, he had stored firecrackers in the room for the children in the family. His son was playing with them and they exploded, killing the boy. ‘My son dies and the motherfuckers arrest me and beat me up, claiming I was manufacturing bombs,’ he says, his indignation quite convincing.
There are other occasional contradictions in Mangal’s monologue which comes tumbling out at a high velocity. For instance, in talking of the wrestler’s ascetic regimen, he had said that he ate exactly at eight every evening and never went out of the house after that. Yet, just before saying goodbye to us, when his wife had come out, he said, ‘The poor woman makes such nice meals for me but I am so busy I never know when I will be home. I eat at all odd hours. How often she has waited up for me before she could have her own dinner!’ Mangal is not exactly a liar in the sense that he wants to deceive his audience. He is an embellisher of facts, some of which may get changed to fit in with what he believes to be true at a certain time. He may also unwittingly bend the truth to project a particular image of himself. After a while, the contraditions become a part of his manic charm as I fascinatedly watch the persona he is constructing as much for himself as for us.
The first time Mangal Singh clashed with the Muslims was in 1979. The Muslims had claimed a piece of land on the specious ground that it was an old community graveyard. The man to whom the land belonged had won his case against the encroachment in the court but could not get the land vacated and came to Mangal Singh. His cause was just and Mangal agreed to help him. Mangal would never help someone who wanted illegal possession of land. He only, so to speak, expedited the notoriously lumbering machinery of the law, helped in implementing court orders which would not otherwise be carried out. Mangal settled on a sum of money for his services. Nowadays his minimum fee is a 100,000 rupees, but he takes it only after the work is done, not like some other pehlwans who take the money but refuse to do the work, daring the client to do his utmost. Mangal, on the other hand, is a man of principles.
Mangal went to the site with five of his peopl
e. They had a few knives and a couple of swords between them. The Muslims were light in number, all of them with swords and each an expert at wielding the weapon. But they were old—the oldest being almost 60—and though thorough professionals, they lacked the staying power of Mangal’s much younger men. The Muslims were soon out of breath and Mangal and his men killed six of them. They put four of the corpses in an Ambassador car and threw them in different parts of the city to confuse the police. He was charged with three murders in that particular incident. He cannot tolerate zulm, particularly Muslim zulm.
The police report of the incident credits him with only one murder, of which he was acquitted because of lack of evidence. A month later, the history sheet continues, ‘along with others, he assaulted Imtiaz and his parents with sticks and caused bleeding injuries to them.’ Two months later, in December 1979, when riots had begun after the Rameeza Bi incident, Mangal Singh is noted to have led an armed group of 20 people who set fire to Muslim shops, attacked Muslims with sticks and knives, and pelted stones at the police. There is a succession of other brief notings over the years: assault, unlawful assembly, rioting. For a few months he was ordered to report to the police every day at eight in the morning and nine at night. But he was never convicted in the court in spite of over 40 cases registered against him by the police. Because of the intimidation of witnesses, the police say. ‘Because the people love me and will not let me go to jail,’ says Mangal. The police record summarizes: ‘Young and energetic. Very close to the BJP MLA (Member Legislative Assembly). Has good contacts with the RSS. Also closed to the local Telugu Desam Party MLA. Tries to be close to Congress also. He is a communal element. Very active during communal disturbances and has very good following. Has become very intelligent and never exposes himself personally in crimes but uses his henchmen for creating disturbances. People of the locality very frightened and do not want to complain or become witnesses. Earns a lot of money by settling land disputes.’
