That these religious dissensions do not set the whole country ablaze, occasion those crimes of all kinds which were for centuries the result of religious fanaticism in Europe and elsewhere, is due no doubt to the naturally mild and timid character of the Hindus, and especially to the fact that the greater number compound with their consciences and pay equal honour to Visnu and Siva. Being thus free from any bias towards either party, the latter serve as arbitrators in these religious combats and often check incipient quarrels.24
The description of this riot reveals a ritualized, gamelike quality which combines passion with restraint. It is a ritualization of antagonisms, what Erik Erikson called ‘a creative formalization’ which helps to avoid both impulsive excess and compulsive self-restrictions.25 The Vaishnavites and the Shaivites engage each other in both interplay and combat, practising ‘a form of war which can occur only among those who are at peace.’ In contrast, the Hindu–Muslim conflicts have no such playlike quality, pervaded as they are by deathly intent, with the burning down of houses, demolition of temples, mosques, and shrines.26 Their vocabulary is of mortal enmity, victory, and defeat, a combat that must lead to humiliation and grievous wounds to the collective self of one group or the other.
I have already mentioned that the Hindu nationalist may well be overestimating (in contrast to the secularist underestimation) the existence and strength of overarching Hindu and Muslim religious identities in India’s precolonial past. The Hindu nationalist is, I believe, also overestimating the role of doctrinal differences between Islam and Hindu beliefs for the difficulties in the relations between the two communities. To me the Hindu–Muslim rift appears as much the consequence of a collision between two collective narcissisms, between two equally grandiose group selves, each convinced of its civilizational superiority, as of differences in matters of faith. Abbé Dubois brings out clearly the injuries to group narcissism, the wounds to collective vanity sustained in the Hindu–Muslim encounter:
The Brahmins in particular cherish an undying hatred against the Mahomedans. The reason for this is that the latter think so lightly of the pretensions of these so-called gods of earth; and, above all, the Mahomedans do not scruple to display hearty contempt for their ceremonies and customs generally. Besides, the haughty Mussulmans can vie with them in pride and insolence. Yet there is this difference: the arrogance of a Mussulman is based only on the political authority with which he is invested, or on the eminence of the rank he occupies; whereas the Brahmin’s superiority is inherent in himself, and it remains intact, no matter what his condition in life may be. Rich or poor, unfortunate or prosperous, he always goes on the principle ingrained in him that he is the most noble, the most excellent, and the most perfect of all created beings, that all the rest of mankind are infinitely beneath him, and that there is nothing in the world so sublime or so admirable as his customs and practices.27
The Hindu nationalist may also be overestimating the depth of the Hindu’s historical aversion to the Muslim which was perhaps more prevalent in the upper castes where Muslim religious intolerance came up against the Brahminical conviction of Hindu superiority. Dubois remarks:
But if Brahmins cannot with any justice be accused of intolerance in the matter of religion, the same can certainly not be said in regard to their civil usage and customs. On these points they are utterly unreasonable.... Though they have had to submit to various conquerors who have proved themselves to be their superiors in courage and bravery, yet in spite of this, they have always considered themselves infinitely their superior in the matter of civilization.
The Mahomedans, who can tolerate no laws, no customs, and no religion but their own, used every advantage which conquest gave them in a vain attempt to force their religion on the people who had succumbed to them almost without resistance. But these same Hindus, who did not dare to complain when they saw their wives, their children, and everything they held most dear carried off by these fierce conquerors, their country devastated by fire and sword, their temples destroyed, their idols demolished, these same Hindus I say, only displayed some sparks of energy when it came to changing their customs for those of their oppressors.28
What excited Hindu hostility was as much the Muslim assault on his lifestyle as on his idols. As we shall see later, the Hindu’s shocked disgust, for example, at the Muslim eating of beef, then as now, is a far more potent factor in Hindu–Muslim relations than Islam’s reputed intolerance.
The Hindu nationalist, I believe, also overemphasizes the impact of ten centuries of Muslim domination. The explanation for the Hindu’s negative sentiments toward the Muslim as lying in a subjugated people’s ‘natural’ resentment is not wholly convincing if we remember that such aversion was negligible in the case of the British. In spite of the fact that the raj was economically exploitative, funneling wealth out of the country, whereas during the Muslim rule wealth stayed within, the latter evokes a hostility not due to the former. Political subjugation and economic exploitation, it seems, played less of a role in determining the Hindu reaction because the Hindu collective identity, however nebulous, was crystallized around shared religious symbols rather than based on political or economic structures. Muslims were perceived to be outragers of Hindu religious sentiment and mockers of their faith whereas the British were, at worst, indifferent. Granted that the British too ate beef—a practice deeply repugnant to most Hindus—but they were too few and carried out their private lives holed up in bungalows and barracks which were shielded from public scrutiny by high walls and thick hedges. In contrast, the Muslim lived cheek by jowl with the Hindu. This proximity created the potential for the emergence of new cultural and social forms but also occasioned simmering resentment and nagging friction. The British beef-eater was remote, almost abstract. The Muslim butcher in his blood-flecked undervest and lungi, wielding a huge carving knife, was a very visible part of a town’s life, a figure of awe and dread for the Hindu child and of a fear-tinged repulsion for the adult. The Englishman remained a stranger, the Muslim became the Other.
Looking at the Hindu–Muslim encounter as decisively coloured by the facts of dominance and subordination, by aggression and resistance, by the zero-sum game of winners and losers, the Hindu nationalist pays homage to the influential paradigm in contemporary historical, anthropological, and political science writing which considers power as the main axis around which all relations between groups are structured. The impressive work that has resulted through the emphasis on power, especially on the inequality of colonial and imperial relations, has been invaluable. But as Raymond Grew points out, this very emphasis also tends to obscure and often ideologize the processes of assimilation, transformation, reassertion, and recreation, which too are inherent in all cultural encounters.29 The Hindu–Muslim encounter has been no exception.
The gulf between the two opposing views of the Hindu–Muslim encounter is not a matter solely of interest to scholars and political propagandists but is reflected in and vitally influences many facets of contemporary consciousness. Much of the Indian heritage—monuments, art, music, legends, history—which people of an earlier generation were accustomed to regard as noncontroversial has suddenly become hotly contested. As an example, let me take the legend of the founding of Hyderabad. For those subscribing to the syncretic school, this legend is the narrative embodiment of an essential Hindu–Muslim amity in the past. The story itself is a mythos, seeking to convince through the power of aesthetics and symbolism, and is a counterpoint to the logos of formal thought on Hindu–Muslim relations which is routinely employed by the social scientist. The tale goes thus:
Sultan Mohammed Quli Qutub Shah ( 1580–1612 ) was the grandson of Sultan Quli Qutub Shah, founder of the Qutub Shahi dynasty. In 1579, when still a prince and just fourteen years old, he fell in love with Bhagmati, a commoner [and a Hindu], an extraordinarily talented and beautiful dancer. She lived across the river Musi in the village of Chichlam, some distance away from the royal fortress at Golconda. Every evening
when dusk fell, the prince stole away from the palace grounds to meet his beloved across the river. One day a terrible storm broke and the river was in spate. Fearing that his lover might drown, the prince braved the turbulent rising waters and saved Bhagmati. Compelled to accept his son’s choice, the king, Sultan Ibrahim, had a large stone bridge built across the Musi to enable Mohammed Quli to court the dancer. Known today as the Purana Pul [‘old bridge’], it stands mute witness to this story. On his accession to the throne, Mohammed Quli married Bhagmati and in her honour built a splendid new city on the site of the village Chichalam. He called the city ‘Bhagnagar’ or the ‘City of Good Fortune’. Bhagmati later took the name of Hyder Mahal and Mohammed Quli renamed the city as Hyderabad.30
It is not surprising that, whereas history discerns the origins of Hyderabad in the mundane facts of congestion and lack of water in the old fortress capital of Golconda, legend attributes the founding of the city to the sublimity of a prince’s love for a commoner. What is more relevant to our purpose, however, is the way Hindu nationalists interpret the legend today. They see in the tale yet another illustration of the fundamental Hindu–Muslim divide. ‘All the story tells us,’ says a militant Hindu, active in the campaign to have Hyderabad revert back to its original name of Bhagnagar, ‘is that the Mussulman has always fucked our women whenever he has wanted to, as he has fucked us over the centuries. If he deigned to take one of our women into his harem, he could not tolerate her remaining a Hindu but forced her to convert to Islam. Where are the stories of Hindu princes marrying Muslim wives?’ This particular interpretation of the legend is not about how a youth’s erotic obsession for a girl flowered into the deep love of a mature man, or about an era of close Hindu–Muslim relations which permitted, even when they did not encourage, love across religious persuasions. For the Hindu nationalist, the legend is about Hindu defeat and a collective shame wherein the community’s most beautiful and accomplished women had to be ceded to the Muslim conqueror.
Finally, what is the truth? As far as I can see the truth is that there are two overarching histories of Hindu–Muslim relations—with many local variations—which have been used by varying political interests and ideologies and have been jostling for position for many centuries. In times of heightened conflict between the two communities, the Hindu nationalist history that supports the version of conflict between the two assumes preeminence and organizes cultural memory in one particular direction. In times of relative peace, the focus shifts back to the history emphasizing commonalities and shared pieces of the past. Many of the cultural memories which were appropriate during the conflict will retreat, fade, or take on new meaning, while others that incorporate the peaceful coexistence of Hindus and Muslims will resurface. And so it goes, on and on.
The Riot
My first personal experience of Hindu–Muslim violence was at the time of the partition of the country in 1947, when ferocious riots between the two communities engulfed many parts of the subcontinent, especially in the north. I was nine years old at the time and we lived in Rohtak, a small town some fifty miles west of Delhi, where my father was an additional district magistrate, ‘the ADM Sahib’. As the killings and looting raged uncontrolled in the villages and towns of Punjab, more and more members of his extended family poured into Rohtak as refugees from the cities of Lahore, Lyallpur, and Sialkot, where they had lived for many generations and which now lay in the freshly created state of Pakistan. The rooms and verandas of our house became sprawling dormitories, with mats and durries spread close to each other on the floor as uncles, aunts, and cousins of varying degree of kinship lived and slept in what for a child was an excitingly intimate confusion. The kitchen, over which my mother had willingly abdicated all control, hummed the whole day with the purposeful activity of women, and there was not a time of day when a few bodies were not seen huddled in nooks and corners in various stages of sleep.
With the loss of their homes and places of work, with the snapping of long-standing friendships and other social ties, there was little for the refugees to do in our house except seek comfort from the sharing of each other’s riot experiences. This they did in groups which continuously changed in their membership as they shifted from one room of the house to another. As a small boy, yet privileged as the son of a father who gave them food and shelter, I could sit in on any group of adults, though at its edge, without being shooed away and told to go and play with other children. I became aware of their bitterness about the leaders of a newly independent India, Nehru and especially Gandhi by whom they felt most betrayed. Gandhi was the pet object of my grandmother’s aversion, and many of my uncles and aunts shamelessly encouraged her as she held forth in her toothless, gummy voice, surprisingly similar to the Mahatma’s own, on Gandhi’s many affronts to Hindu sentiment and advanced salacious speculations on the reasons for his love of the ‘Mussulman’.
It was also the first time I became aware of the Hindu hate of the Mussulman—the destroyer of temples, devourer of cow flesh, defiler of Hindu womanhood, rapers and killers all! Mussulmans were little better than animals, dirty and without self-control, who indulged all the demands of the senses, especially the violence of the body and pleasures of the flesh. Up to this time I had known Muslims as occasional colleagues of my father, some boys in school and, especially, as indulgent servants. In Sargodha, where my father was posted before he was transferred to Rohtak, I was particularly fond of Imtiaz, his Muslim orderly, who took me on forbidden bicycle rides to the bazaar. Once, seeing him get his forearm covered with an elaborate tattoo, I too had insisted on one—to the subsequent shocked disapproval of my parents. Then there was Fatima, a teenage girl who looked after me from the ages of four to seven, and who was almost on par with my mother as the object of my first desires and longings. Fatima was a patient and very often a willing participant in the games I invented for both of us. She was a valiant liar on my behalf whenever one of my undertakings ended disastrously. Half girl, half woman, Fatima delightfully forgot to be consistently one or the other when she was with me. Hitching up her salwar, she would scamper up a guava tree to pluck the best fruit from the top branches. Her maternal persona taking over once she was back on ground, she would clean the guavas for me and hold the salt in the open palm of her hand while I ate. Fatima was an indispensable assistant on our fishing expeditions to the small pond that lay in the grounds of the house. She helped me make the fishing rod from a twig, a piece of string and a bent pin. She kneaded the dough we brought and made it into small pellets which were used as bait. In spite of my never catching any fish she did not destroy my illusion that there were indeed some lurking under the scummy green film that covered the pond.
It is not as if I were unaware that the Muslims were somehow different, although I do not recollect ever hearing the statement, ‘He [or she] is a Mussulman,’ as a marker of a person’s identity in our home. I knew Imtiaz and Fatima could not enter the kitchen where Chet Ram, the Brahmin cook, held sway, because they were Muslims. The Muslim parts of Sargodha were subtly different from the Hindu mohallas concentrated around the bazaar. In the early evening, the cooking smells wafting out into the alleys were more pungent—the odour of mutton fried with onion, garlic, and ginger paste, with coriander and cumin, seemed embedded in the very walls of the houses. Old men with henna-dyed beards sat out on stringed cots, smoking their hookahs and murmuring their incessant gossip. The women, covered from head to toe in flowing white and black veils, glided silently through the alleys, followed by small children scurrying to keep up. There were also fewer stray dogs in the alleys, the ritually unclean animal being far less tolerated by the Muslim than by the indifferent Hindu.
As a little child, I had registered the differences but never felt the need to either evaluate or explain them to myself. It was only now, in Rohtak, that the family’s ‘war stories’ from the riot-torn towns of Pakistan began to retrospectively shape my early observations in the direction of prejudice. Two of these I recount below. For a ti
me these stories threatened to become the core of my memory of ‘the Muslim’ although, in the end, I like to believe, they did not overlay the child’s love for Imtiaz and Fatima, did not replace it with fear, anger, and aversion. When I was carrying out this study in a Muslim locality in Hyderabad and engaging groups of Muslims in conversation, I became aware that within myself ‘the Muslim’ was still somewhat of a stranger. The strangeness was not due to my ignorance of him but due to my being singularly affected by someone I did not know. The ambivalence of fear and fascination from my past with which I had regarded Muslims had not vanished; I was not indifferent to the subjects of my study. I became aware that my first impulse was to defend myself against the threat the Muslims posed to my boundaries by strengthening and fortifying them as a Hindu. Then, in a kind of reaction formation, my tendency was to move in the opposite direction by consistently placing a more positive, ‘humane’ gloss on Muslim statements and actions than on Hindu ones. Ambivalence, however, also has a positive aspect. It prevents the crystallization of ideological convictions and an approach to the study with preconceived notions firmly in place. Convictions, as Nietzsche remarked, are more damaging to truth than lies.
Colours of Violence Page 4
