Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  The narrow lane which branches off the main road to lead into Pardiwada meanders through Muslim mohallas where many of the houses show the religious affiliation of the owner by having a window, a door or a whole wall painted green. The access lane in generally crowded with bicycles, goats, buffaloes, and fruit vendors pushing their carts through a stream of pedestrians moving in both directions. The pedestrians are both Hindus from Pardiwada and their Muslim neighbours, and the lack of warmth between the two is palpable. A snapshot sticks in my mind: two middle-aged women, both fat, one a Hindu in a saree, the other a Muslim in an ankle-length black burqa, though with the face unveiled, walking with the same side-to-side waddle of overweight ducks, pass each other. There is no outward sign of acknowledgement as they squeeze past each other although before the riots, I am told, at least polite greetings would have been exchanged.

  The small brick and cement plastered houses of Pardiwada, arranged in uneven rows, were built 30 to 40 years ago. Some of them, especially at the periphery of the basti, are deserted and show obvious signs of the riot: charred doors and windows, broken electric bulbs and ripped-out wires hanging loose above the chipped and pitted floors. Many have crude ‘house for seal [sic]’ signs lettered in English on their walls, as if the complex of feelings evoked in the seller by such an offer could only be dealt with in an emotionally distancing foreign language rather than in the more intimate mother tongue. They remain unsold. The Pardis believe that the prospective buyers, who are Muslim, are waiting for prices to fall further when the owners will be forced into distress sales.

  The street scenes of Pardiwada, though, are cheerful enough. Since the main occupation of the Pardis is the selling of fruits and vegetables, there is a great deal of activity early in the morning when whole families are involved in sorting out and cleaning the fruits and vegetables heaped in front of the houses and loading them onto pushcarts. Many of the women have been up since three in the morning to fetch the fruit from the wholesaler, generally a Muslim, or even from the faraway Muslim-owned orchards at the outskirts of the city. These are traditional business relations which have endured through generations. They are based on trust, where the women take the fruit on credit and make the payment the next day after it has been sold. The riots have disturbed these business—and inevitably, over time, personal—relationships between the Pardis and their Muslim suppliers. The women now feel more apprehensive walking through dark and empty Muslim bazaars or gardens at this time of the morning. In any case, it is a community tradition that the women fetch the goods and the men sell them, a tradition which doubtless persists also because men find it convenient. As one of the women describing the tradition added, ‘Moreover, my husband does not feel like getting up so early in the morning’.

  Later in the day, once the men are gone, the teenage boys have been sent on their bicycles to sell onions, garlic, and ginger, and the older children have trooped off to school next to the Hanuman temple, Pardiwada settles down to a more easygoing pace. Free of morning household chores, the women come out to sit in front of the houses, smoking, chatting and giving baths to babies and young children while old men gather under the shade of trees to gossip or play their interminable games of cards. By one in the afternoon, the working members of the family are back as are the school children. After a lunch of rice and a vegetable curry, this is a time for relaxation and the exchange of the day’s news. Children play around on the streets, generally games of marbles, and there is much casual visiting as people wander in and out of each others’ houses.

  Economically, the Pardis belong to the lower class. Their poverty is reflected in the garbage dump which is clean and uncluttered, with nothing more in it than shards of pottery, small strips of cloth, husks of corn, and a few rotted vegetables. Because the poor use almost everything and throw away very little, their garbage dumps are generally cleaner than those of their richer neighbours. The Pardis may be poor but they are not destitute. They seem to have enough money for simple food, clothes, and even that necessary luxury of the urban poor—a black-and-white television set. The girls and women are dressed in bright colours and wear earrings, bangles, necklaces, and large round bindis rather than small demure dots on the forehead, serenely unaware that this particular accoutrement is now a part of the urban chic of upper-class women in Delhi and Bombay. Since their economic life is critically dependent on the prices at which they buy and sell fruits and vegetables, their incomes fluctuate daily, ranging from zero on the day a Pardi does not go out to work to 100 rupees on an exceptionally good day.

  Their housing, too, is decent although overcrowded, not only because of the smallness of the houses but also because of the extended nature of the Pardi family which seems to spread haphazardly in all directions like the roots of a banyan tree. In fact, in this extremely close-knit community, there is no clear-cut demarcation of one family from another. Intermarriage has been so rampant that everyone is related to everyone else. The community is divided into four clans, each deriving its name from one of the four goddesses—Chowkat Mata, Shakti Mata, Kali Mata, and Naukod Mata. Theoretically, marriages within a clan are forbidden and the marriage partner cannot be outside the other three clans; it is, however, a rule mostly observed in its violation.

  The word pardi appears to be a distorted form of pahadi, ‘the hill man’ and the group traces its original home to the hills of Chittorgarh in distant Rajasthan in the north, inhabited by the Bhil hunting tribes. The language they speak within the community is a mixture of Marwadi and Rajasthani, although all are fluent in the Hyderabadi dialect while some also know Telugu. As skilled hunters of birds like quail and partridge and of small animals such as rabbit and barking deer, the Pardis were nomadic hunters who moved southward to Hyderabad 250 years ago. According to their lore, the Muslim king who ruled Hyderabad at the time was suffering grievously from a festering sore which did not respond to treatment. One of the king’s doctors, a venerable hakim of Unani medicine, suggested that the only possible cure was the application of minced meat of a particular kind of quail which was difficult to ensnare. The king had heard of the group of Pardis who had just entered his kingdom and of their proficiency as hunters. A Pardi was summoned to the court and entrusted with the task of snaring some of these quails. The hunter executed the order and brought back several birds whose meat was minced and applied to the royal sore. The worm that was eating into the king’s flesh turned its attention to the bird’s meat, which was poisonous for it, and it died. The king recovered and in his gratefulness decreed that henceforth the Pardis were welcome to take up residence in the kingdom of Hyderabad. In addition, and more materially, he showed his gratefulness by giving them a large tract of land called Jalpalli, which is about ten miles from this particular Pardiwada. Here, the Pardis dug a well for drinking water, built houses, and settled down for the first time in the history of the community in a place they could call their own.

  Because of the scarcity of good forests near Jalpalli and the reluctance of the younger generation to learn the arduous skills of hunting, the Pardis began to look for other sources of livelihood. From nomadic hunters they turned into daily wage labourers in the fruit orchards and vegetable farms of Muslim landlords, packing and transporting fruits and vegetables from the farms to sell in the city. Gradually, they moved from Jalpalli into Hyderabad where over the last 50 years they have created various settlements, called Pardiwadas. The whole community still assembles together in the ancestral village of Jalpalli to celebrate certain important festivals like Dussehra and Holi.

  Although they are now sellers of vegetables and fruits, the tradition of hunting and the memory of the days when these nomads were considered the scourge of more settled communities are very much alive as a part of Pardi identity and cultural memory. They take a not-so-secret pride in their reputation as a violent and aggressive people. There is little shame in the ‘recollections’ of the men that earlier, in the days of the benefactor king, they were regarded as bandits and thieves a
nd that, whenever a band of Pardis camped near a village for hunting, it had to report daily to the headman and the police. Generally, though, the ‘outlaw hunter’ is now a dark, occasionally longed-for and rarely fantasized part of the Pardi identity. It comes to the forefront only during the hunting rituals when the community assembles to celebrate its festivals in Jalpalli. In a distorted form, however, I believe it also colours their participation in riots and religious violence, which is experienced in terms of the hunter and the hunted.

  The ‘identity-kit’ sketch the Pardis would now have others recognize as their own is of a community that is accepted as a respectable part of settled Hindu society. In their origins myth, the Pardis are intimately related to the Marwadis, India’s richest and highly respected business community, who hail from the plains of the same area in Rajasthan where the Pardis roamed the rocky hills. The ancestors of the two communities were brothers; one chose business and the other hunting as his profession. In their further efforts at what the sociologist M.N. Srinivas has called the process of ‘Sanskritization’ the Pardis strive to emulate and adopt the manners and mores of high-caste Hindu communities in an effort to raise their ritual status.1 The erstwhile subsistence hunters now have very strict prohibitions on the eating of beef. Drinking of liquor, too, is frowned upon, although in an earlier generation even women were regular drinkers. Some of the older women still continue to be. Marriages used to be simple affairs, with the families of the bride and the groom sitting down together with some elders of the community under a tree to decide on the arrangements and the sharing of expenses. The head of the community then conducted a simple ceremony. Today, marriages follow the more elaborate pattern of other Hindu castes. The groom’s family demands and receives a dowry from the girl’s side. Brahmin ritual specialists are involved in the matching of horoscopes, in determining the auspicious days, and in presiding over the elaborate wedding ceremonies.

  The Pardis’ Sanskritizing effort to raise their ritual status in Hindu society is paradoxically accompanied by what can only be called attempts at de-Sanskritization in the socioeconomic sphere. This is because of the reservation policy of the Indian state which seeks to benefit the historically backward and deprived sections of society through preferential quotas in school admissions and government jobs. The Pardis, who were once classified as a ‘scheduled tribe’ and were thus on the lowest rung of the socioeconomic totem pole (thereby having first claims on the state quotas in education and employment), have been recently reclassified as a mere ‘backward caste’. The elevation has brought with it the loss of many economic benefits, ‘and the Pardis are currently engaged in a battle with the bureaucracy to prove that their backwardness is greater than that of a backward caste and thus to recover their earlier, lower status.

  With very few exceptions, anthropologists have generally not described the many reasons why a community reveals itself to an outsider. Perhaps this reserve is because many anthropologists believe that the information they receive is primarily due to their personal qualities, such as a special gift for establishing rapport with strangers, fluency in the community’s spoken language, evident sympathy with its ways, or other markers of an irresistible personal attractiveness which it would be immodest to talk about in public. The community’s expectations of the researcher, which both encourage and skew a community’s self-revelations in a particular direction, are rarely discussed. These expectations may be frankly material, as in the case of Napoleon Cagnon’s Yanomono Indians of Venezuela who expected a constant stream of presents in exchange for their cooperation in furthering the anthropologist’s academic career.2 There, the community operated according to the principle of the goose that laid the golden egg: ‘If you want more eggs, be nice to the goose.’ In other communities, the expectations may be linked to more nonmaterial benefits: the prestige of associating with a white sahib if the anthropologist is European or North American, or (in a more literate community) help with admission and scholarships for a relative to the sahib’s university. As far as the Pardis were concerned, it was evident that their initial ambivalence toward me, the motivation both to hold back and to talk, was coloured by their preoccupation with getting themselves reclassified as a scheduled tribe. Their suspicion was of strangers who might be agents of the government, gathering data which would harm their cause, like the researcher who had come 20 years ago and on whose report the government had acted: ‘For his own career, he ground a whole community into dust.’ The hope, which finally triumphed over the doubt, was of my being a potential helper in their dealings with the state, given my obvious high status. The motivation of the Muslims in talking to me—or, rather of their leaders in sanctioning our conversations—was of a different kind which can be expressed in words thus: ‘You want to write about us and we would like to be written about in a way which suits our political purpose of appearing as victims.’ In contrast to the Pardi leaders’ faintly whining, complaining tone, the leaders of the Karwan Muslim community were firmly courteous, barely betraying their slight contempt of a Hindu liberal and do-gooder whose guilt about the Muslim minority they hoped to manipulate. I was thus aware that the accounts I heard were not only self-representations of individuals and the community but were also designed to accomplish particular pragmatic actions. Thus their conversational context needed to be kept constantly in mind.

  A Pardi Family

  The two-storeyed house of Badli Pershad, of the Naukod Mata clan, is smack in the heart of Pardiwada. On top of the doorway, which opens into a courtyard, are two painted baked clay idols, each about a foot high. The monkey god Hanuman, with a golden mace resting on his powerful shoulder, stands on the left side, guarding with his legendary strength the inhabitants of the house from the evil forces that surround human beings. The idol of god Rama stands on the right side, with a smaller Hanuman kneeling in front of the god in his equally legendary devotion. Badli Pershad, who is about 70 years old and blind for the last five years, is usually to be found in the room to the right of the courtyard. Except for a cot, the room is empty and scrupulously clean. Its floor, made of grey paving stone, is swept and washed every morning.

  Badli Pershad has four grown children, two sons and two daughters, of which his youngest son Rajesh and his family live with him. The others live separately in different parts of the city. Both his sons are college graduates who reluctantly took up the traditional family occupation of vending fruit from pushcarts because they could not find other jobs. Their feelings of bitterness and humiliation are very close to the surface. Besides his son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren; Badli Pershad’s 90-year-old mother also lives with him. His sister, Laloo Bai, stays in a separate part of the house, occupying most of the second story, with her eldest son and his family. The kitchens are separate but on many evenings, especially in the summer when it gets very hot, the sister and her family come down to the courtyard with the food they have cooked, and both the families eat together.

  This is a snapshot of the family at one particular instant in the winter of 1991, since a major feature of a Pardiwada family is its fluidity. Family members come and go and stay for varying lengths of time depending upon the impact of external events on their lives and the ebb and flow of internal family life and relationships. Badli Pershad’s eldest son, Satish, lived in the same house with his family till a few months ago and moved out to a safer area after the December riot of the previous year. If his economic situation worsens, he may soon be back again. In this kind of shifting family, expanding and contracting like a giant membrane with an irregular rhythm, the only constant presence for young children is their parents (and, to some extent, their grandparents), especially the mother. Although it is both exciting and reassuring to have many caretakers who can compensate for parental shortcomings and mitigate the strong emotions aroused in a small, nuclear family, the frequent comings and goings of other adults in an extended family can also make children cling to their own parents, especially the mother, with a marked intensity
as they seek to establish an intimate, enduring and trusting relationship in their inner, representational worlds—to establish ‘object constancy’, in psychoanalytic language. In one of my earlier writings, I had attributed the intense bond between mother and son in Hindu India solely to the vicissitudes of a woman’s identity—to become a mother of a son is to finally become a woman in the eyes of the patriarchy—with all the radical improvement in her status in the family that such a transition implies.3 I increasingly realize that the son, with his need for at least one figure to stand out clearly from a labyrinthian flux of relationships, actively furthers the mutual emotional investment of mother and son.

  The experience of fluidity is not only from within the family, which constantly constitutes and reconstitutes itself, but also in relation to the wider community which, in fact, is an extended family. Badli Pershad’s eldest son is married to his sister’s daughter and his youngest daughter is married to one of his sister’s sons. There are so many such interconnections by marriage in the Pardi community that Badli Pershad would not be surprised to discover that he was the nephew of his daughter! One of the consequences of their being such a closely knit community is the great similarity in their views and opinions on different issues and in the way they think and follow a shared logic. This can be helpful in the sense that one can be reasonably sure that even a small sample would be accurately representative of the larger community. On the other hand, it can get boring to listen to very similar responses and a shared, common discourse unenlivened by individual quirkiness.

  Badli Pershad’s wife, one of the economic mainstays of the family, who earned 50 to 60 rupees a day selling fruit, died in 1988. He misses her terribly. ‘Her absence is unbearable at times. She used to look after all my needs. Since I cannot see, she brought me my food and medicine, took me to the bathroom. I have been a diabetic for 35 years and can only eat a restricted diet of wheat rotis and vegetables. I am not allowed to eat rice or meat. She understood that these restrictions upset me and sometimes added meat gravy to my food.