by Sudhir Kakar
It was my strong impression that the mental processing of the events of the riot is different in women. It is not only that women’s memories of the riot tend to be circumscribed by what happened inside the house rather than outside and that their anxieties are centred around the danger to their children. With women, anger at Muslims is not the baffled rage I encountered among men. Women also find it easier to think and plan of moving away from their endangered homes, to leave it all behind and get on with their lives. Men seem to find it more difficult to free themselves from the impact of recent violent events, they agonize over leaving Pardiwada and the implications such a move may have for their own self-respect and the community’s sense of honour. The men brood over the events of the riot more. They take the betrayal by their Muslim neighbours, who they believe helped the violent mob by identifying the Hindu houses (if they themselves were not a part of the mob), much more personally. Their sense of betrayal and perfidy is perhaps due to the fact that the men’s relationships with their Muslim neighbours were more personal, some were even friends. Women’s friendships were (and are) firmly within the Hindu community. With their Muslim women neighbours, the relationship was limited to the exchange of polite greetings. Women do not have to deal with the trauma of the neighbour suddenly being revealed as a deadly enemy to quite the same extent as do the men.
Although the riots have had an impact on the friendships between Hindus and Muslims, not all of these friendships, especially those that go back to childhood, have snapped completely because of the heightened conflict and violence between the communities. As an outsider, it is difficult to judge the depth of a friendship, and it may be, as studies across the borders of the other antagonistic groups such as the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and the French and the English in Quebec have suggested, that such friendships are more illusory than real or are qualitatively different from one’s friendships within one’s own in-group.5 This particular social-psychological theory predicts that such friendships can be maintained when individuals dwell upon their similarities rather than differences, avoid the divisive issue of religious affiliation, and shape their interactions so that the salience of their group membership—of one friend being a Hindu and the other a Muslim—is lowered. It appears from my observations, however, that the salience of one’s religious group membership is not lowered by avoiding the issue, at least as far as deep friendship is concerned. Such an avoidance may smooth the course of fleeting Hindu-Muslim encounters that are temporary from the very outset. The maintenance of lasting Hindu-Muslim friendships, on the other hand, seems to demand (and never more so than after a riot) that the fact of friends belonging to antagonistic groups be squarely confronted before being negated as of little consequence. Rajesh, for instance, in the days following the riot, openly berated his Muslim friends for what their coreligionists had done to the Pardis. In more normal circumstances, friends seek to periodically dissipate the tension which arises from antagonistic religious affiliations by jokingly addressing each other deliberately in negative stereotypical terms such as, ‘Come here, O you Hindu idolator,’ ‘O you Muslim violator of four wives’ and so on. Such a joking relationship between friends strives to reduce the antagonism which has its source in the conflict of their religious group by acknowledging the differences while at the same time downplaying it.
Many Pardi families, including that of Satish, Badli Pershad’s eldest son, moved out of Pardiwada to safer areas after the riot. Some of them have come back for reasons of both economics and sentiment. It goes without saying that they missed the homes they had grown up in. They missed the nutrients for the soul provided by the closely knit community life they had left behind to settle among strangers. They have also been unable to sell their Pardiwada houses at reasonable prices. The only interested buyers are Muslims and, though Pardis would reluctantly reconcile themselves to the idea of selling an ancestral home to a Muslim, the prices quoted are very low—the Muslim buyers content to wait till the Pardis’ fear of staying on becomes greater than the wish.
The disruption in their lives caused by the riot has been considerable. ‘When we all sit together to talk, certain things bring back the memories of that day, especially the sight of broken and empty houses,’ says Satish. ‘Even after so many months, we are very scared that it may happen again. Before we plan to celebrate any of our religious festivals on a community-wide basis, we think ten times about the likely consequences. The experience was terrifying! These days we feel a little more confident about staying here because a police picket has been permanently posted in Pardiwada. But you know the police are not very reliable. Where were they that evening? They arrived three hours after all the damage was done.
‘Our business has been badly hurt. We also used to sell our stuff in Muslim areas and most of the time we went in alone. Now we are afraid to go there even in small groups. I keep on thinking about going back to the place we moved out to after the riot. But our business runs on various personal contacts which I developed over the years. To start such a business in a new locality where you neither know the people nor the place becomes difficult.’
Badli Pershad, who is resisting the family pressure to move out of the home he built 40 years ago, is naturally more sanguine about the future. ‘The next riot,’ he feels, ‘will not occur for another five to ten years because the last riot was very severe. Both the Hindus and Muslims suffered great losses and are fully involved in repairing and trying to restart their lives. Therefore they will have neither the time nor the inclination to trouble the other community.’ His children wish they could share his optimism about the force of human rationality.
For the women, the riot has had the consequence of drastically reducing their freedom of movement. ‘We used to come out at night and play in small groups,’ says Lalita. ‘Now we can’t even sit out. The policemen shoo us back.’ The number of women who go out.to buy fruits and vegetables from the Muslim wholesalers early in the morning has also declined. The women do not let the children venture far from their homes and have become especially watchful of the movements of young girls. ‘What if Muslim boys harass one of our daughters and another riot starts?’ asks Prema.
‘The relations with the Muslims of our own basti have become more formal. The older ones still address us as ‘daughters’ and claim they did not recognize our attackers in the dark. We cannot believe them. Earlier, the Muslims used to come when we invited them for any of our community celebrations and we went whenever they invited us for theirs. When Jafar’s daughter got married in Secunderabad, all of us went and helped in making the wedding arrangements. Now there are no more invitations, either from us or them.’ The riots have hastened the process of Pardi differentiation and separation from their Muslim neighbours. They have given another push toward making the Pardis more Hindu, contributed to a sharper etching of Hindu and Muslim identities.
Pardis and Muslims: The Past
The Pardis recollect their shared past with the Muslims with a measure of ambivalence. They are aware that their ancestors served the Muslims as farm labourers during the latter’s long rule and that they have been influenced in many ways by their erstwhile masters. The influence is evident in the way they dispose of their dead, in the many Urdu words which have crept into their dialect, for example, valid for father, mazhab for religious faith; and, till recently, in the not too seldom use of Muslim names for their children. Rajesh’s wife Sakila, for instance, has a Muslim name, a fact of which he is deeply ashamed and for which he blames his illiterate in-laws who had no idea of the meaning and importance of names.
In the more recent past, Satish recalls playing football, cricket, and kabaddi as a child with Muslim boys of the neighbourhood. He visited their homes freely, as they did his, and was even friendly with their womenfolk who did not observe any purdah in front of him. Accompanying his mother on her rounds through the Muslim areas, he would carry the fruits and vegetables right inside the houses and was never made to feel unwe
lcome. The understanding that existed between Hindus and Muslims of the previous generation, Satish says, has disappeared in the younger one which is a hot-blooded lot. Whereas the older Muslims were tolerant, the young ones are aggressive and are provoked to violence at the slightest of pretexts. Kamla Bai agrees with the assessment, as do others, that it was easy to live together with the older generation of Muslims but it is impossible to do so with the younger who are all turning into goondas.
The-easier coexistence in an earlier era does not mean that the Pardis ever liked the Muslims or did not feel resentful toward them. The Pardi version of the history of Hindu-Muslim conflict articulated by Badli Pershad as an elder of the cortimunity, goes thus: ‘The clashes between Hindus and Muslims started long ago in the period of the Nizam and his razakars (a marauding, unofficial army) who were very cruel to the Hindus. They used to harass our girls, rape them. This happened not only in villages but even in Hyderabad. We feared the Muslims. The rule was theirs, the king was theirs, the police were theirs, so it was hard for the Hindus to resist. We were also poor and no one supports the poor. Some Marwadis may havè been well-off but the majority of Hindus was poor. The Muslims were close to the king. They were moneylenders, charging high rates of interest. Thus they were rich and the Hindus poor and though we lived together Muslims dominated the Hindus.
‘We never used to mingle closely with them. Hindus feared Muslims a lot. They were very aggressive. They eat bada gosht (beef) which kept Hindus away from them. They used to prepare kheer (rice pudding) on their festival days but they cooked it in the same vessels. So we never ate even the vegetarian food they sent to our houses. People only drank tea together.
‘Anyway, when the oppression of the Hindus came to the notice of our leaders in Delhi, they wanted to do something about it as the British were not going to help. After Independence all the leaders wanted Hyderabad to become a part of Hindustan but Gandhi was hesitant. So Nehru, Patel, and Rajendra Prasad felt Gandhi needed to be eliminated and had Gandhi killed. Then they could free the Hindus in Hyderabad from Muslim rule.’
Badli Pershad’s account of Hindu-Muslim relations in the pre-Independence era, except for his version of the murder of the Mahatma which not every one agreed with, represents a popular consensus among the Pardis. As the historian Lowenthal has observed, it is only academic versions of the past which are variable, contested and subject to different interpretations; popular history, on the other hand, is a timeless mirror which gives accurate reflections of historical events, beyond questioning or doubt.6
Image of the Muslim
The two chief components of the contemporary Pardi image of Muslims are of the powerful and the animal-like Muslim. Shared alike by men and women, the image of the Muslim’s power seems to be more pronounced in men. The image of the antagonist’s powerfulness is certainly influenced by the Pardis’ direct experience of being an embattled enclave in the walled city, surrounded by a numerically greater Muslim host. It also contains their historical memory of being serfs on the farms and estates of Muslim landlords. This image of Muslim power is in relation to the Hindus’ lack of it. What is repeatedly stressed is the weak Hindus—weak because divided—rapidly losing ground against a united and purposeful nation.’ Anything happens in a Muslim community, they all become one. We don’t because of our different castes. Every caste has its own customs and lifestyle.’
‘We are not united. Each one is engrossed in himself. The rich try to exploit the poor. This does not happen with the Muslims. Though they have rich and poor at least at the time of prayer they are one and they all do it together at the same time. It develops unity among them. Our system is not like that. Each one goes to the temple to perform puja at his own time and in his own way and then leaves. There is no communication between us. If we could also show togetherness in our prayers, we would definitely become united and stronger than the Muslims.’
‘The problem with the Hindus is that because of the number of castes they are not united. Reddys fight with Kapus, Pardis fight with Komtis, Yadavs fight with Naidus. If only they could unite like the Muslims! Muslims may be small in number but their dos and don’t with regard to religion are very strict and they are forced together at least for the Friday prayer. Their leaders use these occasions to forge religious unity. I don’t speak Arabic but I am told many fiery speeches are made in mosques every Friday afternoon where they talk of driving the Hindus away from Hyderabad and making their own independent Pakistan here.’
The Muslim is powerful because he is united, armed, favoured by the state in India and supported, perhaps even armed, by a state outside, Pakistan.
‘Muslims have a constant supply of weapons coming from Pakistan or maybe they are locally made. They are always well-stocked. Even the poorest Muslim house will have at least a butcher’s knife because they all eat meat. Hindus are not so well-equipped. If the government continues to please the Muslims and makes rules against the Hindu majority, these riots will continue forever. If processions are to be banned, both Ganesh and Muharram processions should be banned. Why is only the Ganesh procession banned? It is like blessing and protecting only one community (sir par hath rakhnd) and behaving like a stepmother toward the other.’
‘They want to dominate us. Just see how they are planning to make the old city into a Pakistan. In Hyderabad the mosques always had four minarets. But now they have started building mosques with a single minaret, just like in Pakistan. Hindus are willing to adjust but Muslims are stubborn. Our government also supports them. On Shivratri day, the markets will be closed but during Muharram they will remain open day and night. Why?’
It was strikingly apparent that the Pardis’ self-identification as Hindus occurs only when they talk of the Muslim; otherwise the conversation is of Pardis, Lodhas, Brahmins, Marwadis, and oher castes. It seems a Hindu is born only when the Muslim enters. Hindus cannot think of themselves as such without a simultaneous awareness of the Muslim’s presence. This is not so for the Muslim, who does not need the Hindu for self-awareness. The presence of the Hindu may increase the Muslim sense of identity but does not constitute it. Little wonder that Hindutva needs ‘the Muslim question’ for the creation of a united Hindu community and the expansion of its political base and, in fact, will find it difficult to exist without it.
In the bitter complaints directed at the government, the mai-baap (‘mother-father’) of an earlier era, the psychoanalyst cannot help but hear echoes of a collective sibling rivalry, of the group-child’s envy and anger at the favouring of an ambivalently regarded sibling by the parent. This does not mean that there is no factual basis to these accusations, but only that, like many other such preceptions in the emotionally charged area of Hindu-Muslim relations, they are neither merely real nor merely psychological.
The image of Muslim animality is composed of the perceived ferocity, rampant sexuality, and demand for instant gratification of the male, and a dirtiness which is less a matter of bodily cleanliness and more of an inner pollution as a consequence of the consumption of forbidden, tabooed foods. This image is an old one, also found in S.C. Dube’s 30-year-old anthropological account of a village outside Hyderabad: ‘The Muslims are good only in two things—they eat and copulate like beasts. Who else except a Muslim would even think of going to bed with his uncle’s daughter, who is next only to his real sister?’7
Badli Pershad contrasts Hindu and Muslim sexual natures explicitly: ‘Muslims always had an eye for our women. This habit persists. Good thoughts and thoughts of God come into their minds only when they shout ‘Allah-u-Akbar!’ Rest of the time they simply forget morality and go on sexually harassing our women. We never took a single woman of theirs. They used to take ours all the time. They were rich and the rulers and did what they wanted. We are moral (dharmic) and would never do such things even if rich. We treat all women as mothers and sisters. They force themselves on women; they are obsessed by women and sex. Look at all the children they produce, dozens, while we are content wi
th two or three.’
Most Pardi women concur with these views and in fact go further in linking the outbreak of violence to the ‘fact’ of the Muslim’s lewd sexual nature. Kamla Bai remarks, ‘Muslim boys are especially prone to harass our girls. Unlike Muslim girls, we leave our women free to walk around and even go out of the basti if they wish to. Many times the girls are victims of very vulgar behaviour on the part of Muslim boys. If it was only kept to the verbal level, it is O.K. But the Muslims often use physical harassment. This makes our boys very angry. Sometimes these fights take on a communal colouring and in the past they have been the main triggers for the outbreak of riots.’
The Muslim animality also lies in a heedless pursuit of pleasure without any regard for the concerns and obligations which make one human. ‘Their children are completely spoilt. They drink a lot. They are used to a carefree, uninhibited life. The young ones are only interested in enjoyment. Everything they do is for enjoyment. Hindus are cowards because they are worried about cultivating the land, education for their children, and so many other things. Muslims don’t worry at all.’
The Pardi image of the Muslim and the arguments employed for its construction are strikingly similar to the ones used by the sangh parivar to attract Hindus to its cultural and political fold. (Whether this convergence of perceptions is due to the sangh parivar’s articulation of a widespread Hindu sentiment or whether it is the parivar’s creation through a manipulation of Hindu symbols is a question I shall discuss later.) In any event, an understanding of this component of the Hindu image of the Muslim gives us an insight into how people belonging to a vastly superior demographic majority can still psychologically experience themselves as an endangered minority.
