Colours of Violence
Page 3
The chief protagonists of the debate on the past of Hindu–Muslim relations which excites so much contemporary passion are the secularist (both Hindu and Muslim) on the one side and the Hindu nationalist on the other, with the Muslim fundamentalist and the Hindu revivalist on the sidelines, trying to inject their particular brand of venom into the proceedings. The debate has momentous consequences, its winner aiming at nothing less than the capture of India’s political soul and the chance to shape its destiny in the coming decades.
The secularist faction—framer of India’s constitution and politically ascendant since the time of Nehru—comprises most of the Western-educated liberal and leftist intelligentsia and is greatly influential in academia.12 Hindu and Muslim, the secularist avers, are relatively recent categories in Indian history. Before the late nineteenth century, overarching religious entities and identities such as Hindu and Muslim did not exist. Among the Hindus, there were various sects frequently at odds with each other; nor did Indian Muslims constitute a monolithic Islamic collectivity. The secularist goes on to draw a picture of widespread Hindu–Muslim symbiosis of the precolonial and early colonial periods and the development of a syncretic popular religion, especially at the village level, which borrows elements both from Islamic practice and Hindu ritual while it reveres Muslim saints as much as Hindu holy men.
The secularist view makes a clear-cut distinction between the terms ‘religious’ and ‘communal’, the latter is not used in its Anglo-American lexical sense, meaning someone who is altruistic and civic-minded, but in its specifically Indian meaning of one whose exclusive attachment to his or her community is combined with an active hostility against other communities which share its geographical and political space. Whereas religion is seen solely as a matter of personal faith and reverence for a particular set of icons, rituals, and dogmas, communalism is a more collective affair which involves a community’s politics and economics as much as its faith. Communalism not only produces an identification with a religious community but also with its political, economic, social and cultural interests and aspirations. This identification is accompanied by the strong belief that these interests not only diverge from but are in actual conflict with the interests of other communities.
In this view, the precolonial and early colonial period conflicts between Hindus and Muslims were rare. Whenever they occurred, they were essentially religious in nature, that is, the conflicts were over religious symbols such as the route or form taken by a religious procession, issues of control over temples or mosques, and so on. Twentieth-century conflicts, on the other hand, have been initiated by communal ideologies and are basically over clashing economic interests. In the secularist view, even the religious persecution of Hindus by such eighteenth-century monarchs as the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb or, later, by Tipu Sultan in south India, were dictated by reasons of state rather than the communal ideology of any particular ruler. Aurangzeb’s discrimination against Hindus and the destruction of their temples is interpreted as an attempt to reformulate the ideological basis of the late Mughal state, while Tipu’s attacks on Hindu temples and the Hindu culture of the Kerala Nayars was more a deliberate act of policy rather than of religious fanaticism.13
The secularist holds that communalism, and the consequent large-scale violence between Hindus and Muslims, began to spread in the late nineteenth century chiefly because of colonialism.14 To counter a growing Indian nationalism, he argues, the British followed a ‘divide and rule’ policy by deliberately strengthening Muslim communalism. The rapid diffusion of nineteenth-century Hindu revivalism and of pan-Islamism in the following century, again the products of Asia’s colonial encounter with the imperial West, was another reason for the rise of communalism. Yet another factor was the decline of the syncretic warrior of the eighteenth century, who had been forged in the mixed bands of soldiers, Hindu and Muslim, who served various kings, again Hindu or Muslim, or foraged on their own in the anarchic political conditions which prevailed in India as the Mughal empire unravelled.
The basic fabric of India, though, remains syncretic, a commingling of Islamic influences with Hindu traditions. Hindus and Muslims are not divided along any cultural or social-psychological lines except in the narrow area of personal faith.
The Hindu nationalist argues that a fundamental divide between Hindus and Muslims is a basic fact of Indian history which is ignored by the secularist.15 The Hindu nationalist would support the contention of the French anthropologist Marc Gaborieau, that Hindus and Muslims found their identity in the deepest sentiments of opposition between the two, sentiments that are traceable throughout the nine centuries of Indo-Muslim history, from the writings of the Arab traveller Al-Beruni in the eleventh century to Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan in the twentieth.16 The Hindu nationalist is thus in basic agreement with Pakistani historians who too support the ‘two nations’ theory and label Akbar, the syncretic Mughal monarch who is a hero to the secularist, as an apostate to Islam.
In the Hindu nationalist view, the conflict between Hindus and Muslims is squarely religious, indeed theological. Its roots lie in Islam’s exclusive claim to truth and its refusal to grant equal status to Hindu beliefs and doctrines. Islam’s division of people into believers and infidels and the world into arenas of peace—dar-ul-Islam—and of conflict—dar-ul-harb—which led to terrible cruelties against the Hindu infidel’s person and religious shrines over hundreds of years, cannot be erased from the Hindu collective memory. Moreover, the Hindu nationalist maintains, the Muslim continues to persist in intolerance, in the belief that all that is outside the Qur’an is an error if not an abomination. The Hindu nationalist avers that secularists seem to direct their arguments and appeals only toward the Hindus since they are firmly rejected by the Muslims who seek identity in their own religious tradition and personal laws even when those go against the very fundamentals of a secular state. The roots of Hindu–Muslim conflict lie in Muslim religious intolerance, Muslim failure to outgrow a medieval bigotry, and the inability to learn, in the absence of guidelines in the Qur’an, how to live in a state which is not Muslim-controlled.
To summarize: the story of Hindu–Muslim relations takes on different hues depending upon the colour of the ideological lenses through which it is viewed. For the liberal historian or one with leftist leanings, the story is bathed in a roseate glow of the precolonial golden age of Hindu–Muslim amity. For these storytellers, the tale is of a commingling and flowering of a composite cultural tradition, especially in art, music, and architecture.17 It is the story of a gradual drawing closer of Hindus and Muslims in the forms of their daily lives and of an enthusiastic participation in each other’s festivals. In this vision, there is little room for conflict between the communities. Sporadic outbreaks of violence needing some explanation are almost never religious in their origin but dictated by local economic interests and political compulsions. To the conservative Hindu nationalist, on the other hand, for whom the Hindu saffron and the Muslim green do not mix to create a pale pink, the rift between the two communities is a fundamental fact of Indian history. They see Hindu–Muslim relations framed by a thousand-year-old ‘civilizational’ conflict in which the Muslims, militarily victorious and politically ascendant for centuries, tried to impose Islamic civilization on their Hindu subjects through all means, from coercion to bribery and cajolery, and yet had only limited success. The composite civilization, according to this view, was limited to small sections of the population around the Muslim courts and to court-patronized arts like music and architecture. It also included some Hindus who adopted the Persian-inspired language and ways of life of their rulers. The vast majority of Hindus kept their civilizational core intact while they resentfully tolerated the Muslim onslaught. In this view, the outbreaks of violence between the two communities were inevitable whenever Muslim dominance was threatened; the rage of the denigrated Hindu, stored up over long periods of time, had to explode once historical circumstances sanctioned such eruptions.
To look critically at any aspect of Hindu–Muslim relations today is a task fraught less with difficulty than with trepidation. As political passions run high, a commitment to either the secularist or the Hindu nationalist view is considered almost mandatory. Any critique which is seen as deviating from the one or the other easily invites the epithets of ‘cryptofascist’ from one side and ‘pseudosecularist’ from the other. Both ‘crypto-’ and ‘pseudo-’ are angry words, the former connoting a base veiling of real intent, the latter alluding to a fake or malicious deception. Yet, as important as it is to stand up and be counted, there is still a place for standing aside and counting, something I intend to do when examining the two different views of the Hindu–Muslim past. For, ideally, the psychoanalyst is essentially an onlooker and commentator on the worlds of love and hate. Still somewhat starry-eyed after so many years in the profession, I see the psychoanalyst standing outside the fray, unmoved by the violent passions that swirl all around: his only intellectual commitment to a questioning that does not seek answers but encourages reflection, his suspicion evoked by ideals excessively noble and ideas particularly en vogue, his interest aroused by all that is tabooed. It is comforting for me to remember—to counteract my guilt at not being able to live up to the ideal—that an analyst is also compassionate toward ideals which one falls short of, including his own, since I know my own emotional involvement in the issue will not always allow me the neutrality I may strive for.
Let me begin with the fallacies of the secularist position which, I believe, has underestimated the extent of the historical rift between Hindus and Muslims and has thus invited a backlash to its Panglossian view of the past. In other words, the secularist has tended to downplay the dark side of Hindu–Muslim relations in India. Scholars sympathetic to this viewpoint have pointed out that Hindu–Muslim conflicts are not only a product of the colonial period but also occurred in precolonial times and were often also communal—in the secular understanding of the term—rather than religious.18
In the medieval period, even the Sufis, the Islamic mystics who are so often held up as examples of ‘composite culture’, the syncretic Muslims par excellence, had serious limits to their tolerance. In the question of faith they were unequivocal about the superiority of Islam and the hellish fate in store for the Hindu infidels on judgement day. As Muzaffar Alam puts it: ‘Indeed, in relation to Hindus, often it is difficult to distinguish between an orthodox theologian [the obstreperous mullah of Hindu imagination] and a liberal mystic.’19 Many a Sufi was openly hostile to the religion and social practices of the Hindus, paranoid—even at the zenith of Muslim power—that the Hindus would obliterate Islamic laws, Islam, and the Muslim community if they ever captured political power. Alam summarizes the Muslim side of the Hindu–Muslim equation thus: ‘An average literate Muslim believed that Islam and Hinduism belonged to two radically diverse traditions and that the twain would never meet.’20 To emphasize the sense of separate identities, of the distance between the two communities, even common social practices came to be known as Hinduwani and Musalmani.21 Thus although Hindu and Muslim identities were not as fixed and continuous over time as the Hindu nationalist believes, neither were these identities absent as claimed by the secularist. In the medieval period, for large sections of people, Hindu and Muslim identities were intermittent rather than continuous, occasionally flowering rather than perpetually in full bloom, evoked whenever religious symbols and sentiments moved to the forefront of conscious concern, which was mostly when they were perceived to be threatened or under actual attack.
The secularist underestimation of the aversion between Hindus and Muslims and the denial of the existence of any kind of collective, cultural identities in the past derives, I believe, from the reliance of many historians and political scientists on objective rather than subjective experiential data, which is more often mined by the anthropologist. To illustrate this, let me take the earlier example of Tipu Sultan, whose destruction of some Hindu temples and persecution of certain Hindu groups are objectively considered as motivated by his suspicion of the loyalty of these groups and of the temple priests’ close ties to the Hindu house of Wodiyar which Tipu and his father had replaced. Tipu did not go on any general anti-Hindu rampage and in fact even supported some temples with donations from the state coffers.
There is another, unwritten version of these incidents which has gone into the making of what I would call the ‘cultural memory’ (a term I prefer to ‘collective memory’) of many Hindus. Cultural memory is the imaginative basis for a sense of cultural identity. For isn’t imagination not a memory of vital moments of life freed from their actual, historical context? Cultural memory, too, is a group’s history freed from rootedness in time—it is as much imagination as the actual events that go into its construction. The cultural memory of Tipu’s actions (as of Aurangzeb’s) has a markedly different flavour from that which one reads in history texts. A very different realm of experience and distinctive emotion is evoked in a believing Hindu who reads or hears about Tipu forcibly circumcising Brahmins and compelling them afterwards to eat cow’s flesh as an unequivocal token of their loss of caste. That Hindu shares the indignation of his seventeenth-century compatriots at Tipu’s destruction of the temple and their relief when they are finally rid of ‘the yoke of this tyrant’.22 Indeed, it would be odd to expect, as the secularist sometimes seems to do, that such a deeply religious people as the Hindus would have understood the mysterious workings of Tipu’s raison d’état and not reacted with disgust and horror to what clearly seemed to be a brazen attack on their religious sentiments and cherished symbols of faith.
The ethnographers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, who were also the cultural psychologists of their eras, are preeminently the European travellers. Generally looking down upon India and its peoples from the heights of European superiority, the travellers are especially contemptuous of the Hindus, who are mostly referred to as idolators or Gentiles, whereas the Muslims, clearly identified as such, are more familiar to the Christian and thus less an object of mystery or scorn. Lacking in any knowledge of the country’s religious traditions, the travellers’ interest is excited by what appear to them as strange Hindu ceremonies, rituals, and customs—with an emphasis on the temple courtesans, burning of widows, and orgiastic religiosity.
From the travellers, then, we can only get pointers to Hindu–Muslim relations by paying attention to casual observations and throw-away remarks that are adjunct to the European’s main interest in describing to countrymen at home the political and economic situation of India and the unfamiliar manners and mores of its inhabitants. Thus, for instance, we get the following observation from the French traveller, François Bernier, who travelled in the Mughal empire between 1656 and 1668:
The tenth incarnation (of Vishnu), say the Gentiles will have for its object the emancipation of mankind from the tyranny of the Mahometan, and it will take place at a time when according to our calculation, Anti-Christ is to appear; this is however but a popular tradition, not to be found in their sacred books.23
Such scattered remarks, lacking the necessary context, cannot be taken as an accurate description of Hindu–Muslim relations. They do, however, make us doubt the picture of widespread amity, while pointing to the existence of many sullen Hindus resentful of Muslim rule, if not of the ‘Mahometans’.
The exception to most other travellers is Abbé Dubois, a French missionary who spent thirty years (1792–1823) in the south of India. As a man of the cloth, the Abbé is naturally convinced of the superiority of his faith over the religions of India. Yet he also displays a compassionate understanding for the customs of the people he observed so closely for so long. Most of the time he is remarkably fair. Abbé Dubois is a natural ethnographer, with a stance toward his ‘fieldwork’ which would meet the approval of any graduate school of anthropology.
At first glance, Dubois’s work seems to support the secular
ist contention that the conflict between the Hindu and Muslim was not communal but religious, no different from the quarrels between various Hindu sects. And indeed it is true that religious strife is as Indian as mango pickle. Yet when we compare the internecine strife of Hindu sects with the violence between Hindus and Muslims, the difference between the two is obvious. Here, for instance, is the Abbé’s description of a ‘riot’ he observed between the followers of Vishnu and those of Shiva:
According to Vishnavites it is the height of all abomination to wear the lingam [the sign of Shiva]. According to their antagonists whoever is decorated with the namam [the sign of Vishnu] will be tormented in hell by a sort of fork similar in form to this emblem. These mutual recriminations often end in violent altercations and riots. The numerous bands of religious mendicants of both sects are specially apt to provoke strife. One may sometimes see these fanatics collected together in crowds to support their opinion of the super-excellence of their respective doctrines. They will overwhelm each other with torrents of abuse and obscene insults, and pour forth blasphemies and imprecations, on one side against Shiva, on the other Vishnu; and finally they will come to blows. Fortunately blood is seldom shed on these battle fields. They content themselves with dealing each other buffets with their fists, knocking off each other’s turbans, and much tearing of garments. Having thus given vent to their feelings, the combatants separate by mutual consent.