Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  We must, however, also note that there are always some individuals whose personal identity is not overwhelmed by their religious or cultural group identity even in the worst phase of violent conflict. These are persons capable of acts of compassion and self-sacrifice, such as saving members of the “enemy” group from the fury of a rampaging mob even at considerable danger to their own physical safety. There are yet others—the fanatics—whose behaviour even in times of peace and in the absence of any identity-threat seems to be exclusively dictated by the ‘We are’ group aspect of their identity. What the social and psychological conditions are that make one person wear his or her group identity lightly whereas for another it is an armour which is rarely taken off is a question to which the answers are not only of theoretical interest but also of profound practical importance and moral significance.

  Religious Identities and Violence

  The development of religious identity follows the same lines through which the more global aspects of individual and group identities are also constructed. The individual track, which may be called religious selfhood, is an incommunicable realm of religious feeling which quietly suffuses what D.W. Winnicott termed ‘the isolated core of the true self’ requiring isolation and privacy, a core which ‘never communicates with the world of perceived objects [and] must never be communicated with.’8 In an integrated state, religious selfhood is a quiet self-experience, marked by a calmness of spirit that comes from being alone in the presence of the numinous. With its access to preverbal experience which can link different sensory modalities of image, sound, rhythm, and so on, religious selfhood deepens religious feeling and consolidates religious identity. In a state of fragmentation or threatened disintegration, religious selfhood is prey to a variety of dysphoric moods. For a few, the saints, whose religious identity constitutes the core of their being, .the dysphoria can extend to the state of utter despair, the ‘dark night of the soul.’

  Together with religious selfhood, the “I-ness” of religious identity, we have a second track of “We-ness” which is the experience of being part of a community of believers. Religious community is the interactive aspect of religious identity. In contrast to the quietness of religious selfhood, the individual’s experience of religious community takes place in an alert state. Optimally, this facet of religious identity expands the self and creates feelings of attunement and resonance with other believers. A threat to the community aspect of religious identity, however, gives birth to communalism, intolerance, and the potential for social violence. In the communal phase, the feeling of intimacy and connectedness characterizing the religious community are polluted by an ambience of aggression and persecution. Whereas both the selfhood and community facets of religious identity are only partially conscious, the change from community to communalism is accompanied and, indeed, initiated by a heightened awareness of ‘We-ness’, making the community aspect of religious identity hyperconscious. This awareness can be put in the form of declarations similar to the ones Oscar Patterson suggests take place in the inner discourse of -an individual who, as a consequence of a shared threat, is in the process of self-consciously identifying with his or her ethnic group.9 First, I declare to all who share the crisis with me that I am one with them—a Hindu, a Muslim. Second, from my multiple identities I choose the identity of belonging to my religious community though (paradoxicaly) I have no other choice but to belong. Third, this is my most basic and profound commitment and the one which I am least likely to abandon.

  Communalism as a state of mind, then, is the individual’s assertion of being part of a religious community, preceded by a full awareness of belonging to such a community. The ‘We-ness’ of the community is here replaced by the ‘We are’ of communalism. This ‘We are’ must inevitably lead to intolerance of all those outside the boundaries of the group. The intolerance, though, is not yet religious conflict since it can remain a province of the mind rather than become manifest in the outer, public realm; its inherent violence can range from a mild contempt to obsessive fantasies around the extermination of the enemy-Other rather than find explosive release in arson, rioting, and murder. The psychological ground for violence, however, has now been prepared. In mapping the sequence of religious violence from the inner to the outer terrain, I do not mean to give group psychology primacy but only precedence. Riots do start in the minds of men, minds conditioned by our earliest inner experience of self-affirmation and assertion.

  For the outbreak of violence, the communal identity has to swamp personal identity in a large number of people, reviving the feelings of love connected with early identifications with one’s own group members and the hate toward the out-group whose members are homogenized, depersonalized, and increasingly dehumanized. For social violence to occur, the threat to communal identity has to cross a certain threshold where the persecutory potential becomes fully activated and persecutory anxiety courses unimpeded through and between members of a religious group. Amplified by rumours, stoked by religious demagogues, the persecutory anxiety signals the annihilation of group identity and must be combated by its forceful assertion. Acting demonstratively in terms of this identity as a Hindu or Muslim, though, threatens members of the rival community who too mobilize their religious identity as a defence. The spiral of threats and reactive counterthreats further fuels persecutory anxiety, and only the slightest of sparks in needed for a violent explosion.

  The involvement of religious rather than other social identities does not dampen but, on the contrary, increases the violence of the conflict. Religion brings to conflict between groups a greater emotional intensity and a deeper motivational thrust than language, region, or other markers of ethnic identity. This is at least true of countries where the salience of religion in collective life is very high. Religious identity, for instance, is so crucial in the Islamic world that no Muslim revolutionary has been able or willing to repudiate his religious heritage.10 To live in India is to become aware that the psychological space occupied by religion, the context and inspiration it provides for individual lives, and its role in fostering the cultural identity and survival of different groups—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis—is very different from the situation, say, in the United States. An Indian atheist cannot go along with an American counterpart’s casual dismissal of religion as ‘important, if true’ but must amend it to ‘important, even if not true.’

  With its historical allusions from sacred rather than profane history, its metaphors and analogies having their source in sacred legends, the religious justification of a conflict involves fundamental values and releases some of our most violent passions. Why this is so is not only because religion is central to the vital, ‘meaning-making’ function of human life, causing deep disturbance if the survival of all that has been made meaningful by our religious beliefs is perceived to be under attack. Religion excites strong emotions also because it incorporates some of our noblest sentiments and aspirations—our most wishful thinking, the sceptic would say—and any threat to a belief in our ‘higher’ nature is an unacceptable denuding of self-esteem. Our wishful construction of human nature—that ‘man is naturally good or at least good-natured; if he occasionally shows himself brutal, violent or cruel, these are only passing disturbances of his emotional life, for the most part provoked, or perhaps only consequences of the inexpedient social regulations he has hitherto imposed on himself,’11—is matched by our equally wishful constructions around religion. Religion, we like to believe, is about love—love of God, love of nature, and love of fellow man. Religion, we feel, is essentially about compassion and strives for peace and justice for the oppressed. Indeed, freedom from violence, an enduring wish of mankind, is reflected in various religious visions of heaven.

  This construction is confronted with the reality that violence is present in all religions as a positive and even necessary force for the realization of religious goals. Religious violence has many forms which have found expression in the practice of animal or
human sacrifice, in righteous and often excruciatingly cruel punishment envisaged for sinners, in the exorcism of spirits and demons, killing of witches or apostates and in ascetic violence against the self.12 The point is, as John Bowker has vividly demonstrated, that every religion has a vision of divinely legitimized violence—under certain circumstances.13 In the Semitic religions, we have the Holy War of the Christians, the Just War of the Jews, and the Jehad of the Muslims where the believers are enjoined to battle and destroy evildoers. In other religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, with their greater reputation for tolerance and nonviolence, violence is elevated to the realm of the sacred as part of the created order. In Hinduism, for instance, there is a cycle of violence and peacefulness as the Kali Age is followed by the Golden Age. Buddhist myths talk of Seven Days of the Sword where men will look on and kill each other as beasts, after which peace will return and no life is taken. Although Islam (especially in its current phase) and medieval Christianity have had most violent reputations, the question as to which religions have unleashed the greatest amount of violence is ultimately an empirical one.14 In any event, fundamentalists can unleash any violence contained in a religion even if the religion is rarely perceived to have a violent potential, as amply demonstrated by our experience of Buddhist violence in Sri Lanka and Hindu violence in India. Moreover, as Natalie Davis has observed of Catholic-Protestant violence in 16th-century France and as we saw in the case of the Hyderabad riots, so long as rioters maintain a given religious commitment they rarely display guilt or shame for their acts of violence.15

  Rhythms of religious ritual, whether in common prayer, processions or other congregational activities, are particularly conducive to breaking down boundaries between members of a group and thus, in times of tension and threat, forging violent mobs. I have called these instruments of the community’s violence ‘physical’ groups since the individual’s experience of group identity here is through unconscious bodily communication and fantasies rather than through the more consciously shared cultural traditions. Physical groups seem to come into existence more effortlessly in religious than in other kinds of conflict.

  Histories and Futures

  In this book, I have attempted to contribute a depth-psychological dimension to the understanding of religious conflict, especially the tension between Hindus and Muslims. I am aware that this may be regarded by some as “psychologizing” an issue which demands social and political activism and which could well do without the introduction of psychological complexities, that ‘pale cast of thought’, which can only sow doubt and sap the will for unself-conscious action. In retrospect, I realize I have gone about this task in consonance with my professional identity as a clinician, though not as a psychonalyst with an individual patient but more akin to the psychotherapist with a family practice who is called upon for assistance in a disintegrating marriage. I looked at the history of the Hindu-Muslim relationship, made a diagnostic assessment of what has gone wrong, and considered the positive forces in the relationship which were still intact. At the end, it is time to weigh the possible courses of action.

  The awareness of belonging to either one community or the other—being a Hindu or Muslim - has increased manifold in recent years. Every time religious violence occurs in India or in some other part of the subcontinent, the reach and spread of modern communications ensure that a vast number of people are soon aware of the incident. Each riot and its afternath raise afresh the issue of the individual’s religious-cultural identity and bring it up to the surface of consciousness. This awareness may be fleeting for some, last over a period of time for others, but the process is almost always accompanied by a preconscious self-interrogation on the significane of the religious-cultural community for the sense of one’s identiy and the intensity of emotion with which this community is invested. For varying periods of time, individuals consciously experience and express their identity through religious group rather than through traditional kinship groups such as those of family and caste. The duration of this period, or even whether there will be a permanent change in the mode of identity experience for some, depends on many factors, not the least on the success of revivalist and fundamentalist political and social groupings in encouraging such a switch. They do this, we saw in our analysis of the speeches by Rithambra and Azmi, by stoking the already existing persecution anxiety—its combination of aggression and fear weakening the individual sense of identity. The needed support to a weakened personal identity is then provided by strengthening its social, group aspect through an invitation to the person to identify with a grandiose representation of his or her community. The shared ‘contemplation’ and growing conviction of the great superiority of Hindu or Muslim culture and ways is then the required tonic for narcissistic enhancement and identity consolidation around the religious-cultural community as a pivot.

  As for the future, there is more than one scenario for the likely evolution of Hindu-Muslim relations. The Hindu nationalist, who views the conflict as a product of Hindu and Muslim cultural and institutional traditions, believes the only way of avoiding future large-scale violence is a change in the Muslim view of the community’s role, traditions, and institutions so that the Muslim can “adapt”—the word meaning anything from adjustment to assimilation—to the Hindu majority’s “national” culture. To ask the Muslims to recognize themselves in the Hindu nationalist history of India, to expect them to feel their culture confirmed in Hindu symbols, rituals, and celebrations is asking them to renounce their cultural identity and to erase their collective memory so that they become indistinguishable from their Hindu neighbours. To be swamped by the surrounding Hindu culture has been historically the greatest fear of thè Indian Muslim, articulated even by some medieval. Sufis who are commonly regarded as having been closest to the Hindu ethos. Such an assimilation is feared precisely because it is so tempting, holding the promise of a freedom from fear of violence and an active and full participation in the majority culture and life, especially now when the majority is also politically dominant. The Hindu nationalist’s dilemma is that the Muslims continue to decline an offer the nationalist believes they cannot refuse. The nationalist finds that the Muslim was willing to undertake the exercise in assimilation voluntarily, a highly improbable scenario, the task would involve the immensely difficult understanding of how religious-cultural traditions are transmitted and internalized and how those processes can be effectively interfered with and halted.

  The secularist, who views the conflict as rooted in social-structural considerations, especially economic, is more sanguine on the future of Hindu-Muslim relations. In the long run, the secularist believes, the inevitable economic development of the country will alter social-structural conditions and thus assign the conflict, as the cliche would have it, ‘to the dust heap of history’ as religious identities fade and play less and less of a role in private and public life. A scepitcal note on the belief in the primacy of political and economic structures in the shaping of consciousness, however, needs to be sounded. Cultural traditions—including the ideology of the Other—transmitted through the family can and do have a line of development separate from the political and economic systems of a society. This is strikingly apparent if one takes the case of Germany where recent studies indicate that, after living for 40 years under a radically different political and economic system, the political orientation and values of the young in relation to the family in eastern Germany are no different from those of their counterparts in the western part of the country; cultural socialization patterns within the family have survived the change in political systems relatively untouched and are stronger than the logic of the political superstructure.16

  The optimistic realist, a breed with which I identify, believes that we are moving towards an era of recognition of Hindu-Muslim differences rather than pursuing their chimerical commonalities. We are moving toward a multiculturalism, with majority and minority cultures, rather than the emergence of a ‘composite culture’.
Such a multiculturalism is neither harmful nor dangerous but necessary, since it enables different religious groups to deal with the modernizing process in an active way rather than making them withdraw in lamentation at the inequities of modernization or endure it as passive victims. The problem is to ensure that one identity, Hindutva, does not dominate or assimilate other religious-cultural identities which are also embarked on the same quest as the Hindus. 1 can understand the validity of the nationalist call to the Hindus to find new meaning in customs, practices, and symbols of Hindu culture. But by the same logic why should this be denied to the Muslims who, too, are engaged in the same struggle to find meaning in the modem world? The realist would say that the solution is to build a state which protects the equal rights of Hindus and Muslims to be different. He believes that we must work toward building a polity which respects the beliefs of both Hindus and Muslims however odd or perverse they may seem to each other and however scornful they may be of the other community in private. Being a sceptic, he is also aware that the creation of such a public realm may be a long drawn-out affair accompanied by much tension and open conflict between the communities which will strain the social and political fabric of the country.

  This realist agrees with the Hindu nationalist that clouds of violence loom over the immediate future of Hindu-Muslim relations. He is convinced, though, that achieving the desired goal of a truly multicultural policy will ultimately generate much less tension than the permanent discord which is the probable consequence of the nationalist vision. I can only hope that the violence is shortlived and that it will hasten the creation of a common, tolerant public realm. Our experience of needless suffering and cruelty can sometimes have the effect of jolting us out of accustomed ways of interpreting the world and making us more receptive to fresh ideals and new social-political arrangements. When stress and anxiety are at their greatest there is perhaps enough survival need in humans to suddenly make them reasonable. I hope the poet Theodore Roethke is right that ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see.’17 This realist is not a cynic since unlike the latter, he still.has hope And even if the hope turns out to be illusory, he knows that, in the words of the Mahabharata, ‘Hope is the sheet anchor of every man, When hope is destroyed, great grief follows, which is almost equal to death itself.’ This applies not only to individuals but also to communities and nations.