by Sudhir Kakar
Viewing an antagonistic group as dirty, and thus subhuman, whereas one’s own cleanliness is not only humanely civilized but next to godliness, is commonplace in ethnic conflict. ‘Dirty nigger’ and ‘dirty Jew’ are well-known epithets in the United States. The Chinese regard Tibetans as unwashed and perpetually stinking of yak butter, while Jewish children in Israel are brought up to regard Arabs as dirty. In the Rwandan radio broadcasts inciting the Hutus to massacre the Tutsis, the latter were consistently called rats and cockroaches, creatures associated with dirt and underground sewers, vermin needing to be exterminated. Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims, the Turks and Kurds, and so many other groups in conflict are outraged by each other’s dirtiness. Again there may be a grain of reality in some of the accusations because of a particular group’s poverty, food habits, or the climatic conditions of its habitat. If the attribution of dirtiness falters against too great a discrepancy in factual reality, it will no longer be attributed to the opponent’s body but to the soul. In some ways, the dirtiness is now even worse; it is a moral dirtiness which is more than skin deep. A blackness of the heart.
As a poverty-stricken community, the Pardis are not in a position to call Muslims physically dirty, an accusation which is more the province of the higher Hindu castes. One of the jokes I remember from my childhood is of the Muslim saying to the Hindu, ‘You Hindus are so dirty. You have a bath today and then [now speaking in an exaggeratedly slow drawl] you will baathe agaain tomoorow. But we Muslims, we have a bath [in a rapid fire delivery] Friday-to-Friday, Friday-to-Friday!’ ‘The Muslims who work are dirty, others are not. We work hard to survive. So where is the time for us to appear neat and clean?’ asks Badli Pershad plaintively. Muslims, however, are dirty in a more fundamental way; they eat beef.
Beef eating is the most heinous of sins among the Pardis (as it is among most Hindus), a more serious violation of the moral code than marriage to a Muslim or conversion to Islam. ‘Bada gosht (beef) is their favourite dish. If any of us even touches it he must have a bath. All Muslims eat bada gosht. That is why we keep ourselves away from them. We do not even drink water in their homes,’ says Lalita.
‘We pray to the cow because it is our (möther-goddess) Lakshmi. Hindus revere even cow dung, use it for cooking, decorating the house and for many other things. They eat the cow!’ says Badli Pershad, his disgust palpable.
The Muslim eating and the Hindu abomination of beef creates an effective barrier between the two; it is difficult to be close to someone with whom one cannot share a meal and whose eating habits one finds disgusting.
Gandhi, Psychoanalysts and Cows
The Muslim eating of beef and thus the killing of cows has perhaps historically been the most important source of Hindu bitterness toward the Muslim. In Tipu Sultan’s dominions, Abbe Dubois tells us, though Hindus witnessed the slaughter of cows without uttering loud complaint, they were far from insensible to the insult, contenting themselves with complaining in secret and storing up in their hearts all the indignation they felt about this sacrilege.8 Pious Lingayats came up to the Abbe with tears in their eyes, imploring him to use his influence as a priest with the local Europeans to stop them from eating beef Hindus who had been forcibly converted to Islam could not reconvert even if they had eaten beef only under duress. From the 19th century onward, Hindu revivalism has been closely associated with movements against cow slaughter.
The ferocity of Hindu emotions, chiefly disgust at the eating of beef and rage at the slaughter of cows, would automatically draw attention from psychoanalysts for whom the presence of strong emotions in a relationships implies the operation of unconscious factors. In 1924, the British army psychiatrist Owen Berkeley-Hill wrote a paper on the theme of Hindu-Muslim conflict, a paper which served as a topic for discussion at the meeting of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society in Calcutta to which Gandhi was also invited.9 In this essay, Berkeley-Hill identifies two main hurdles in the way of Hindu-Muslim unity. The first is the Hindu’s ‘motherland complex’ wherein the ancient cults of mother-goddesses have become associated with the ideas of woman, virgin, mother, and motherland—Bharat Mata—which the Muslims violated through their conquest of India. (The colonel does not explain why there is not such Hindu bitterness against the British for a similar ‘violence’.) The second obstacle is the Muslim slaughter of cows which, Berkeley-Hill tries to establish, were once a totem animal for the Hindus (as it still continues to be for certain tribes in central and south India) and thus an object of the ambivalent feelings of cherishing and destruction which are directed against all totems. Following Freud’s ideas in Totem and Taboo, Berkeley-Hill argues that one who violates a taboo, becomes a taboo and thus an object of detestation—more especially in the case of the Muslim because the violation of the taboo, the cow slaughter, often took place to ratify’ Muslim victories or show contempt for Hindu susceptibilities. The violators of a taboo are contagious and must be avoided for they arouse both envy (why should they be allowed to do what is prohibited to others?) and the forbidden desire to emulate the act. Christians and Jews, who also kill cows, do not provoke the same hostility because they do not kill cows ceremonially as do the Muslims or with a clear intention of offering insult to the Hindu. Berkeley-Hill’s solution,
…. in line with the fundamental ideas which underlie totemism [is that] any reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims would demand as a cardinal feature some form of ceremonial in which cows would be killed and eaten, either actually or symbolically, by Hindus and Muslims in conclave. It is quite conceivable that this killing and eating of cows could be so arranged as to fulfil every demand from a psychological standpoint without involving the death of a single animal, although in view of the great issues at stake, namely the formation of a real and permanent pact between Hindus and Muslims, the actual sacrifice of every covy in India would hardly be too big a price to pay.10
We do not know what Mahatma Gandhi, a strict vegetarian who shared the Vaishnava veneration of the cow, thought of this suggestion.
Even at a distance of 70 years, Berkeley-Hill’s paper remains intriguing, although Freud’s ideas on totemism have fallen into oblivion. I am surprised that, given the wealth of evidence and the ubiquity of Hindu worship and references to the cow as mother, Berkeley-Hill did not simply include the cow in the Hindu’s ‘motherland complex’ but sought a separate explanation in terms of totem and taboo. Any unconscious Hindu ambivalence toward the eating of beef, which he might have observed underlying a conscious abhorrence, could then be traced back to the infant’s ambivalence toward the maternal body and the breast it cherishes and would keep alive but also tears at and would destroy. But, of course, Melanie Klein had not yet formulated her theories of infant love and violence, guilt and reparation, and Berkeley-Hill, who was in charge of the Ranchi psychiatric hospital, used the theories he had available to explain his observations, though they now seem forced.
Muslim ‘animality,’ as expressed in dirtiness and the male’s perceived aggressivity and sexual licentiousness are of course a part of human ‘instinctuality’ which a civilized, moral self must renounce. The animality not only belongs to an individual past—to infancy and early childhood—which needs to be transcended by the institution of a constantly endangered adult moral self, but also to the Pardis’ collective past which is still a part of their folk memory. Visions from the past of themselveses aggressive hunters, killing and eating whatever animals are available (perhaps also the cow?), drinking and lazing around in the village without a thought for the future, are too dangerous to the cultural identity the Pardis are now trying to construct for themselves and others. The Muslim must be kept at a distance because that animality is too near, even within, the Pardi self.
Here, the Pardis are not different from Hindus in many other parts of India. Some years ago, while studying the phenomenon of possession by spirits in rural north India, I was struck by the fact that in a very large number of cases, 15 out of 28, the malignat spirit possessing Hindu men a
nd women turned out to be a Muslim.11 When, during the healing ritual the patient went into a trance and the spirit started expressing its wishes, these wishes—for forbidden sexuality and prohibited foods—invariably turned out to be those which would have been horrifying to the patient’s conscious self. Possession by a Muslim spirit, then, seemed to reflect afflicted persons’ desperate efforts to convince themselves and others that their imagined transgressions and sins of the heart belonged to the Muslim destroyer of taboos and were farthest away from their ‘good’ Hindu selves. In that Muslim spirit were universally considered to be the strongest, vilest, the most malignant and the most stubborn of the evil spirits, the Muslim seemed to symbolize the alien in the more unconscious parts of the Hindu mind.
The reasons why Muslims are the hated out-group for the Hindus (and vice versa)—rather than the Sikhs, Parsis, or Christians in India, or the ‘modern West’ outside the country—have not only to do with the sheer size of the Muslim minority which can thus withstand the absorptive and disintegrative pressure of the Hindu majority. They lie also in certain social-psychological axioms on scapegoating and displacement of aggression which have been systematically listed by Robert LeVine and Donald Campbell and that seem to fit the case of Hindus and Muslims to a tee:12
An out-group is a target for hostility if it is a source of frustration in its own right, as Hindus have perceived Muslims to be over centuries.
An out-group with the most disparaging images of the in-group, as Muslims have of the Hindus, and whose ethnocentrism the in-group is in a position to ‘overhear,’ will be the most hated.
The out-group which is seen as the most ethnocentric, in terms of unwarranted self-esteem—the Hindu view of Muslims—will be the most hated.
The most hated out-group will be the one which is used most as a bad example in child training. In other words, groups indoctrinate their young as to against which targets to vent their hostility.
The existence of the image of the Muslim I have described above, with all its unconscious reverberations, does not mean that a coexistence of the communities, at least in the public arena, is impossible. The hope for such a coexistence comes from many directions. First, there are many instances of Muslims and Hindus protecting each other during a riot. Bedli Pershad’s own daughter and her family escaped certain death by taking shelter with their Muslim neighbour who, at some risk to his own safety, did not betray their presence to the marauding mob. Second, often enough there are acknowledgements of their common ancestry and the recognition that the two communities have to share the same physical space. ‘We love our jaat,’ says Badli Pershad, using jaat more in the sense of a way of life than a physical group. ‘They love theirs. We should live together because we have the same blood.’
The Pardis would be willing to go even further in seeking this coexistence by accepting intermarriage with the Muslims, but they believe that here they come up against a Muslim inflexibility about matters of faith, even bigotry. Badli Pershad elaborates: ‘Actually I feel marriage between Hindus and Muslims would be one method of building communal harmony. But in my opinion Hindus should never make the mistake of marrying Muslims because the Hindu is not allowed to retain his or her religion at any cost. So many of our women have got married to Muslims, either because they were in love or by force because these women were working as servants in Muslim households. None of them has been allowed to remain a Hindu or practise the Hindu religion. All of them have been converted whereas the same cannot be said of the Hindus. They are more tolerant and allow the other person to follow whatever religion he or she wants.
‘We used to have a young Muslim girl coming to our house a few years ago. She was my daughter’s friend. She used to spend long hours in our house. Although her family did not like her visiting us she continued to do so. She would discuss many things about Islam and the Hindu dharma with me, and one day she stated that if she marries at all she will many a Hindu only and not a Muslim, because the Hindu religion is more humanitarian and tolerant and not as violent as Islam. She married one of our men and to this day she practises both Islam and Hinduism. She not only observes rozas (a month of ritual fasting), Muharram, celebrates Bakr-Id but also installs Ganesha idols in her house, celebrates Diwali and Dussehra and participates in the Holi festival along with all of us. Her children have both Hindu and Muslim names. They were living happily as a family when the mother of the girl started telling her Hindu son-in-law that he should convert to Islam. When the boy did not agree, they started threatening him. ‘This is the problem with Muslims. They are so particular about their religion. Even the suggestion of conversion or practising the Hindu religion can spark off another riot.
‘Unfortunately, it is more frequent for Hindu girls to marry Muslim boys. This is partly because Hindu girls are not kept in purdah like the Muslim girls and therefore come into contact with Muslim boys. We do not get even a chance to see a Muslim girl once she attains puberty. And love is such a thing that, once bitten by it, our girls seem to forget everything about their community or religion or family. They are willing to do whatever their husbands want. They get converted, their children carry Muslim names, go to madarsas, learn the Qur’an but nothing about any other religion. The tragedy is that some of the women who married Muslims 25, 30 years ago are now old and deserted by their husbands. This woman sitting here was married to a Muslim and had four children. Her husband has left her and refuses to pay a minimum maintenance. She used to earn something when she was healthier and younger. Now she is ill and goes from house to house begging for her daily food. She has no home, sleeps wherever she can, and no one treats her well. Our people don’t accept her because they think it was wrong for her to marry a Muslim. That is why I think it is important to hold on to the religion of our ancestors under all circumstances. Otherwise, you not only lose the respect of your community but the other community also looks down upon you.’
It is difficult to say to what extent the Pardi attitudes toward Muslims are shared by other Hindus in Hyderabad or are generalizable to Hindus in the rest of the country. On the one hand, as victims of recent riots one may expect the Pardis to be especially bitter. On the other, they are a lower, “scheduled” caste, and we know from other studies that higher-caste Hindus evaluate Muslims much more unfavourably than the lower castes.13
Children’s Tales
To get some impressions of the way children view and experience Hindu-Muslim confict, I adapted the ‘toy construction’ method used by Erik Erikson in his research on the identity development of Californian boys and girls in the 1940s.14 Using toys such as a family, some uniformed figures, wild and domestic animals, furniture, automobiles, and wooden blocks, Erikson asked the ten-to-twelve-year-olds to imagine that the table was a movie studio; the toys, actors and props; and they themselves, movie directors. They were to arrange on the table an exciting scene from an imaginary movie. My own toys consisted of two families of dolls, each with a set of grandparents, parents, and four young children divided equally between the sexes. The dolls were identifiable as Hindu or Muslim from their dress or other markers of religious group identity: long black burqas for Muslim women, sarees and bindis for the Hindus; pyjamas, sherwanis, round caps and beards for Muslim men, dhotis, kurtas and turbans for the Hindus. In addition to the Hindu and Muslim dolls, there were the dolls of a man in a uniform with a gun slung over one shoulder, of two sinister-looking masked men in undershirts and jeans, and of a few domestic animals such as a cow, a sheep, and a dog. The dolls were placed on a stool next to a large wooden table which was used as the stage. The instructions to the child were to imagine himself or herself as a film director—the children are avid fans of popular Hindi cinema—and to construct an exciting scene for the shooting of a film, using as many or as few dolls as desired. The child was then asked to identify the dolls and after the mise-en-scene was over, the young director was asked to describe what was happening in the scene and why. The test, conducted in the one-room school next to th
e temple, aroused great excitement, and it was not easy to keep hordes of enthusiastic volunteers of all ages from pushing and shoving their way into the room to get into the action, or to stop them from shouting comments through the window which had to be kept open because of the heat. Hyderabad not being San Francisco and Pardiwada not being Berkeley, it was impossible to conduct the proceedings as a ‘standardized test under controlled conditions’ and therefore I will dispense with reporting my results in the proper scientific format in favour of more informal observations.
The sample consisted of 15 boys and 15 girls, ranging in age from ten to 15, with a median age of 13 for both boys and girls. The lower age limit of ten was determined by trial and error since we found that the task was not comprehensible to a child below that age—not that I had much confidence in the reported ages.
Both boys (12 out of 15) and girls (11 out of 15) made an immediate identification of the dolls as Hindu or Muslim. The three boys and two of the four girls who first identified the dolls in terms of age or gender and had to be prodded to make the religious identification, were younger children of 11 or less, confirming the findings of other studies that awareness of one’s own religious affiliation and the prejudice against religious out-groups increases with age.15 Boys typically used a large part or the whole of the stage and were generally more confident in the construction of the exciting scene than girls, who tended to start from a comer of the table and then gingerly spread out to use a bigger part of the stage, though rarely as much as the boys. The different approaches by boys and girls to the task and the use of stage space is intriguing, and some speculations accounting for gender difference are certainly in order. One could hypothesize that the different use of a public, even an exhibitionistic space, simply reflects the relative positions of boys and girls in a Pardi family where, in spite of the women’s relative social freedom and economic importance, the boy is still at the centre of the stage while the girl hugs the comer. I could also speculate that the imaginative activity required by the task has an object of identification (film director) and a content (exciting theatre) that are closer to a boy’s than a girl’s imagination in this particular social group. Another line of argument, complementary to the other two, would hold that these particular uses of space are expressions of a broader male-female difference in patriarchal societies. The work of Luce Irigaray on women’s language, especially with regard to syntax, suggests that women do not put themselves in the centre of the space they open by their utterance.16 Their subject is hesitant, open to interaction, asking questions rather than asserting. The male subject, on the other hand, is easily dominant, at the centre of the stage, operating in ternis of an expanded ‘we’.
