Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

  For the houses of the commoners, twelve main zones, spread over an area of ten square miles, were allocated. Each of these mohallas had schools, hospitals, mosques, inns, and gardens— with vegetable and fruit markets at the periphery—in an effort to make every mohalla self-sufficient. Later, during the short period Hyderabad came under Mughal rule, the construction of a protective wall around the city was started. Completed by Asaf Jah in 1740, the wall had twelve gates which closed nightly at eight and opened at the crack of dawn.

  The main roads were lined with fourteen thousand double-storeyed shops, and there were separate areas earmarked for state offices, public buildings, and foreign embassies. The pride of the public buildings were the Jami mosque and the Char Minar (‘four minarets’)—a square edifice with four broad and lofty arches and a minaret, 220 feet high, at each corner—which has come to symbolize old Hyderabad and the faded glory of its Islamic heritage. Located at the centre of the walled city, at the intersection of the two main highways, it was from Char Minar that the imperial power of the Qutub Shahis emanated outwards.

  The French merchant and celebrated traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier came to Hyderabad in April 1641, during the reign of Abdulla Qutub Shah, who succeeded his father Mohammed Quli to the throne of Golconda in 1611 and ruled till 1672. Tavernier describes the city thus:

  A large river bathes the walls of the town on the south-west side, and flows into the Gulf of Bengal close to Masulipatam. You cross it at Bhagnagar by a grand stone bridge [Purana Pul], which is scarcely less beautiful than the Pont Neuf at Paris. The town is nearly the size of Orleans, well built and well opened out, and there are many fine large streets in it, but not being paved—any more than are those of all other towns of Persia and India—they are full of sand and dust; this is very inconvenient in summer....

  When you have crossed the bridge you straightaway enter a wide street which leads to the King’s palace. You see on the right hand the houses of some nobles of the court, and four or five caravan sarais, having two storeys, where there are large halls and chambers, which are cool. At the end of this street you find a large square, near which stands one of the walls of the palace, and in the middle there is a balcony where the King seats himself when he wishes to give audience to the people. The principal door of the palace is not in this square, but in another close by, and you enter at first into a large court surrounded by porticoes under which the King’s guards are stationed. From this court you pass to another of the same construction, around which there are several beautiful apartments, with a terraced roof, upon these, as upon the quarter of the palace where they keep the elephants, there are beautiful gardens, and such large trees, that it is a matter of astonishment how these arches are able to carry such a weight....

  On the other side of the town, from whence one goes to Masulipatam, there are two large tanks, each of them being a coss in circuit, upon which are some decorated boats intended for the pleasure of the King, and along the banks many fine houses which belong to the principal officers of the court.3

  Hyderabad was cast in the mould of other medieval cities of the Islamic world. Imposing public buildings and palaces were to line its main streets. Secondary streets then led to self-contained neighbourhoods or mohallas, with their narrow winding lanes often ending in blind alleys, small open squares, and densely packed low-rise houses with inner courtyards, many of them surprisingly spacious. The city was also Islamic both in population and in its mainstream culture which had roots in Arab, Turkish, and, especially, Persian ways of life. Since the Qutub Shahis were Shias, with strong links with their coreligionists in Iran, a great number of Persians streamed into Hyderabad over the years to seek their fortunes. The most important positions in the administration of the kingdom were held by Persians who had a tremendous impact on the art, architecture, literature, and culture of Hyderabad for nearly 200 years after its foundation. With the establishment of the Asaf Jahi rule, Persian influence declined a little but nevertheless continued to shape the hyderabadi way of life, at least among the upper classes. Tavernier notes the fair countenance and good stature of its Muslim inhabitants as compared to the dark complexion of the surrounding peasantry, presumably Hindu, who had their assigned, mostly humble, places in the feudal order and whose native Telugu culture existed only at the fringes of the dominant Islamic ethos. In the cultural pecking order, the Persians were right at the top, followed by Turks and other central Asian immigrants. Native-born Indian Muslims felt inferior to both and were keen to establish the existence of Persian or Turkish blood in their lineage, a mind-set which has persisted till very recently. The anthropologist S. C. Dube quotes Hindus in the villages of Shamirpet outside Hyderabad in the 1960s saying: ‘A Hindu untouchable of yesterday becomes a Muslim today: and tomorrow he will start proclaiming that his forefathers lived in Arabia!’4 Because of the Brahminical notions of pollution, the few Hindus who aspired to share the dominant cultural ethos could do so only on a limited basis.

  The Perso-Islamic domination of Hyderabad’s cultural and social life does not mean that Hindus were excluded from administrative positions and from a share of political power. Talented Brahmins and later the Kayasths could rise to high positions in the court. Another French traveller François Martin, tells us of the heartburn among the Persian, Pathan, and Deccani nobles at the elevation of the Brahmin Madanna, who had become the most powerful minister of the king at the time of his visit.5 Hindus were to hold high positions in the civil and revenue administration of the state well into the early period of the Asaf Jahi dynasty in the eighteenth century.

  As the construction of the new capital gathered pace and the grand design of the city began to unfold, Mohammed Quli could not have imagined that the lowly Hindus would one day threaten its Islamic cultural suzerainty or that the city’s decline was already presaged by an insignificant event taking place at the outer edges of his dominions. I refer, of course, to the entry of what would later be called the ‘modern West’ through the East India Company, which began setting up a ‘factory’ in the port city of Masulipatam in 1611.

  For almost a hundred years, the city flourished in an approximation of Mohammed Quli’s vision. Even making allowances for travellers’ hyperbole, Hyderabad seems to have deserved the accolades that came its way as not only a great but also a gracious city, with considerable hedonistic charm. Its Islamic ethos was not of the puritan kind but of the more pleasure-loving Persian variety. Martin gives appetizing details of his dinner on the evening of 28 June 1681 with a Persian noble at Hyderabad’s court—in fact, the brother-in-law of the king.6 The number and quality of the dishes served on this memorable occasion far surpassed the fare of court feasts in Turkey. Every quarter of an hour, at the ringing of a bell, fresh glasses of wine were served. Female dancers entertained the guests and were offered as companions for the night as farewell gifts by a generous host.

  Martin’s evening, however pleasant for the participants, is not particularly remarkable. Irrespective of the period of history or region of the world, sensual indulgence has been a hallmark of the wealthy and the powerful, of what soap television today calls ‘the lifestyles of the rich and the famous’. What is more interesting about Hyderabad is the percolation of hedonism into the lower strata of the city’s population and its satisfactory partnership with the ends of commerce as well as the interests of the state. Tavernier, an epicure who loved good food and wine tells us:

  There are so many public women in the town, the suburbs and in the fortress, which is like another town, that it is estimated there are generally more than 20,000 entered in the Darogha’s [the Commissioner of Police] register, without which it is not allowed to any woman to ply this trade. In the cool of the evening you see them before the doors of their houses, which are for the most part small huts, and after the night comes they place at the doors a candle or a lighted lamp for a signal. It is then, also, that the shops where they sell tari [palm toddy] are opened. The king derives from the tax which he places
on this tari a very considerable revenue, and it is principally on this account that they allow so many public women, because they are the cause of the consumption of much tari.7

  Another Frenchman, Thevenot, notes the liberty enjoyed by the women of Hyderabad. Their marriage contracts had a clause that the wife would retain complete freedom of movement and could even drink tari if that was her desire!

  In 1685, Hyderabad was plundered by the Mughals. Two years later, it was annexed to the Mughal empire by Aurangzeb, but the period of its relative obscurity was brief. In 1725, Nizam ul Mulk, the Mughal’s viceroy in the Deccan, made himself virtually independent of his nominal overlord. Hyderabad again became the capital of a dynasty, this time that of the Asaf Jahis (‘equal in dignity to Asaf, the minister of King Solomon’), the title given to Nizam ul Mulk by the hapless emperor of a rapidly unravelling Mughal empire.

  The threat to the fortunes of the walled city (the walls themselves were demolished in the 1920s to relieve traffic congestion), however, did not arise from the quick changes that were taking place on India’s political map during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The impending danger was more from the process of modernization which picked up pace in the wake of the British conquest of India. Although the Nizam’s suzerainty over his dominions was spared—he became a subordinate ally of the British in 1798—the political, economic, and administrative importance of the old city was now fatefully set on a course of slow erosion. With the coming of the railway in 1874 and the establishment of an incipient industrial base through the setting up of railway repair workshops and a textile mill, it was clear, at least in hindsight, that the northern part of the city outside the fortified walls held the key to Hyderabad’s future.

  The shift northward, across the Musi river, was accelerated by the floods of 1908 and the plague of 1911 which led the Nizam to move his residence and administrative offices out of the walled city to the north of the river. The ruler’s example was soon followed by most of his nobility. The final blow to old Hyderabad was, of course, the integration of the state with the republic of India after the country’s independence from British rule. This meant not only the dismantling of the Nizam’s administrative machinery but also the disappearance of the feudal economic base on which most of the old city’s population had subsisted. In addition, many of the Muslim elite fled out of Hyderabad, mostly to Pakistan. The old city was well on its way to becoming a ghetto. As Ratna Naidu in her sociological study of Hyderabad has observed, ‘Deprived of economic opportunities with the dismantling of the feudal structure, and deprived of its elite, who are usually the powerful spokesmen for the enhancement of civic amenities, the walled city as an area languishes in multiple deprivation.’8 The deprivation is not only material but also psychological and cultural.

  Culturally, the history of Hyderabad is witness to a process of ever increasing heterogenization. Although the Hindus were always a part of what was essentially a Muslim city, their native Telugu culture was clearly a subordinate, ‘low’ culture in the preeminently Islamic scheme of things. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many cultural groups migrated to Hyderabad from other parts of the country and even, as in the case of the Arabs, from as far away as the Middle East. The Arabs, like the Marathas, came to Hyderabad to soldier in the Nizam’s army. The trading communities of the Muslim Bohras from Gujarat and the Hindu Marwaris from Rajasthan became prominent in the city’s commercial life. Then there were the Kayasths and the Khatris from north India, traditionally the backbone of many an Indian state’s administration, who played a similar role in the Nizam’s affairs of state. These groups tended to cluster together in separate enclaves where they could follow their own ways of religious and community life. This is not to say that individuals did not leaven their traditional lifestyles with the dominant Perso-Islamic culture. Many (especially the Kayasths, who are well known for their identification with the masters they have so ably served, whether the ruler be British or Muslim) would cultivate an appreciation of Urdu poetry or adopt the sartorial style of sherwani, the long buttoned-up coat with a high round collar and gumi topi, a cousin of the Turkish fez. They would prefer Hyderabad’s distinctive cuisine and its gracious modes of public address and speech. Yet, on the whole, the lifestyles of the various groups in the rest of the population—their customs, mores, architectural styles, food habits—remained distinctive. In the seventeenth century, for instance, in the inns set up by the Qutub Shahis for poor travellers, Muslims received a dole of bread, rice, or vegetables already cooked whereas ‘the idolaters, who eat nothing which has been prepared by others, are given flour to make bread and a little butter and as soon as their bread is baked they cover it on both sides with melted butter.’9 As in the rest of the country, in the medieval period, Hindus and Muslims shared activities and experiences in the public realm ‘even though in private they were completely segregated, almost opposed to each other.’10 In short, it was a multicultural coexistence rather than any merger into a single, composite culture; Hindus and Muslims lived together separately. They were more than strangers, not often enemies, but less than friends.

  After Hyderabad’s integration with independent India, the heterogenization percolated even into the mohallas as Hindus began to replace the Muslims who had left for Pakistan. Thus from 1951 to 1961, the Muslim population of the old city declined from 69 per cent to 55 per cent while the Hindu population increased from 21 per cent to 40 per cent, a trend which began to be reversed only after the violence between the two communities became endemic. The recurrent bloodletting in the past fifteen years has had the demographic consequence that Muslims from the outlying areas began to flee to the old city as if to a fortress while the Hindu exodus was in the reverse direction. Currently, the Muslim population of the old city is estimated at around 70 per cent.

  Contemporary Hyderabad is certainly not a city for those with a partiality for nostalgia. The Musi river is now a stinking sewer without the sewer’s saving grace of flowing water which at least keeps the garbage moving. It is but a marshy tract between the old and the new cities, with slime-covered puddles and a sewage-borne creeping, crawling, and buzzing life which, to me, makes Hyderabad the mosquito capital of India. Like the river, there is no longer an old city’ of medieval Islam. Leprous beggars asking for alms in the name of Allah are still to be found but the nobles, taking the evening air dressed in flowing muslin robes, are long gone. There are no carriages clattering on the unpaved streets or groups of veiled women, hinting at suppressed laughter and whispered assignations, gliding through the brightly lit bazaars redolent with strong flowery perfumes and the smell of fresh horse droppings, the shops stocked with choice wares from Persia, Arabia, and the rest of Hindostan.

  Today, the old city is barely one step ahead of being a vast ghetto of over a million people, living in settlements, bastís and mohallas, that are homogeneous in their religious and caste compositions. Small houses stacked side by side line winding alleys which are negotiable only by foot or bicycle. Goats, dogs, and chickens, coexisting in the harmony of the chronically hungry, rummage through the refuse littering the open spaces. Unemployed young men stride purposefully through the lanes, even if the purpose is only to buy a cigarette from a corner shop or to impress any hidden female watcher with their purposeful mien. Children play the staple games of the poor—hopscotch for the girls while the boys run after an old bicycle tyre, kept rolling in a wobbly motion as much by their excitement as by the strokes of the stick propelling it forward.

  The economic picture of the walled city, described by Naidu, is dismal.11 The working population is around 30 per cent of the total number of inhabitants. The largest number, about a third, are skilled and semiskilled artisans engaged in the traditional occupations of weaving, pottery, sandal making, and food preparation. About a quarter of the working population earns its livelihood from casual daily wage work, as pushcart vendors of vegetables and fruits, hawkers of trinkets, pullers of rickshaws, scavengers, and other
low-prestige occupations such as watchmen and messenger boys in government offices. The fabled earnings of the Muslims who went to work in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf have brought only minor changes into the lives and the living standards of their families. They have provided only a temporary respite from pervasive economic hardship. The Gulf connection of the Muslims has had more social and cultural rather than economic consequences; for instance, it has resulted in the greater pan-Islamic pride which is visible in the sleek new mosques that have recently been built in the Muslim-dominated areas of the walled city.

  The city is poor, but its poverty is more a general unkemptness and disorder than drabness. Economic deprivation has not smothered Hyderabad’s vitality or dulled its desire for vivid definition. Even in destitute mohallas there are startling splashes of colour. Here, only the front door has been painted; there, the wooden shutters of a small window. Green, the colour of the faithful, is the most preferred. It ranges in hue from a bilious green to the freshly planted paddy green of those gleaming new mosques of the last two decades. Occasionally, there is a swathe of sunflower yellow across a house front, but another universal favourite of both the Hindus and the Muslims appears to be a cheap metallic blue, the colour of the sky on glossy religious posters. Hyderabad’s bazaars and the houses of its well-to-do citizens favour ornamental wrought iron grills for the shutters of their shops and gates. The work is intricate and distinctive, giving the impression of swirling curlicues and scimitars, of Persian calligraphy cast in iron.

  Hindus and Muslims: Versions of the Past

  My aim here is not to write a history of Hindu–Muslim relations in Hyderabad during the preceding 300 years. It is both more modest and in some ways more ambitious. It is modest in that I would like to get for myself and convey to the readers a general impression of the way Hindus and Muslims have felt about each other, whenever they have felt as Hindus and Muslims or, in other, more psychological words, whenever overarching religious identities have become salient and dwarfed other group identities through which individuals also experience themselves. It is difficult because historians are of little help in an enterprise which is so contentious and where the interpretation of historical data is so inseparable from the historian’s own political aims, ideological commitments, and the strong emotions these commitments often generate. Yet some sense of this past is utterly necessary for my enterprise, considering the myriad reflections in which I was to encounter it in the present. In an ancient country like India, where collective memories reach back thousands of years, cultural psychology can never be as ahistorical as it may be in a young country like the United States. Cultural psychology in India must necessarily include the study of the psychic representations of collective pasts, the way collective memories are transmitted through generations, and the ways the past is used as a receptacle for projections from the present.