Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

  The Story of a Cousin Told by His Elder Brother

  Sohan Lal killed himself on the way to Rohtak. He threw himself in front of a train. I could not stop him. We had made all the arrangements for the escape from Lyallpur. A Muslim truck driver was ready to drive the three hundred miles to the border for six hundred rupees. Sohan Lal had been married for only five months. He had a very pretty wife.

  On the day of our departure we went out to make the final arrangements with the truck driver. The house was attacked in our absence. When we came back we hid on the roof of a Hindu neighbour’s vacant house. We watched five husky Muslims in our courtyard. They had long butcher’s knives stuck in their lungis. They were methodically looting the house. The corpse of our youngest brother—we were three—lay in the courtyard, the head completely severed from the trunk. One of the Muslims sat on a chair in front of the corpse directing the looters. They were bringing out the packed trunks from inside the house and throwing them in front of him on the ground. The ground was cluttered with wedding sarees and coloured silk blouses. I can still see the shining brass pots lying on their side reflecting the rays of the afternoon sun. We could not move. I was transfixed by the sight of the leader’s hairy torso of which every inch was covered by a thick black fur. Then two of the Muslims went inside the house and brought out Sohan Lal’s wife and the leader pulled her to him. She sat on the man’s lap, naked to the waist, her petticoat ripped open, and the Muslim’s hairy hand, like a giant black spider, covered her thigh. After laying her on the ground next to our brother’s corpse, where drops of blood still oozed from the severed neck, they raped her in turn. I was holding Sohan Lal fast, my palm covering his mouth. If he had made the slightest sound the Muslims would have discovered us. But I do not think Sohan Lal would have done anything. His legs were buckling under him and I had to hold him up. After they finished, they ripped open her belly. Sohan Lal never said a word after it was all over and the Muslims had gone. In the days it took us to cross the border he remained mute. I tried my best to make him talk, to make him shed some of his grief in tears but his soul remained far away. He killed himself just before we reached Rohtak.

  The Cousin from Lahore

  We did try to retaliate, at least the younger Sangh [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] members like me. And of course the Sikhs. A police inspector told me of going to a Sikh village where there was a reported massacre of the Muslims. As the police entered the village they passed under a kind of welcoming arch which was a rope strung out between the poles. To this rope, attached with short pieces of string, were the circumcised penises of all the Muslim men who had lived in the village, hanging there as if they were small eels drying in the sun. In our own neighbourhood there were three Muslim houses. Two of the families went away, leaving only Gul Mohammed behind. He was a silversmith, a quiet graying man who kept to himself and did not really have any friend among his Hindu neighbours, although he had lived in the same street for over fifteen years. We knew him and his family—a wife and three young children—cursorily, nodding to him as we passed by his shop located on the ground floor of his house. In his faded, embroidered skull cap, often working late into the night, his head bent down in concentration as he fashioned silver bracelets or ornamental anklets with delicate strokes of a hammer, he was a familiar figure to all of us. The young men from our street who went out during the riots to join Hindu mobs operating in other parts of the city, averted their eyes when they passed by his shop. They had left Gul Mohammed alone, not because of any particular affection for him but because of the established pattern among the rioters, both Hindu and Muslim. A mob always foraged wide from its home base, killing and plundering in other distant parts of the town, leaving people of the other community living in its own area unharmed. It is easier to kill men who are strangers, to obliterate faces which have not smiled on one in recognition. It is easier to burn houses which have never welcomed one as a guest. So we kept inside our houses when a Hindu mob from Anarkali came to our alley for Gul Mohammed. Later, I was told they broke open the door and one by one, Gul Mohammed’s family was dragged out into the alley where they were trussed up with ropes and left lying on the ground. From the open windows of the house, string cots, low wooden stools, and sleeping mattresses were thrown out onto the ground where they were gathered into a pile. The doors and window shutters of the house were chopped into kindling and added to the heap which was set on fire. One by one, the children were picked up and thrown into the burning pyre. Gul Mohammed’s wife was the last one to be burnt alive, having been first forced to watch her husband and children die in the agony of the flames. The shop was then broken into and methodically stripped of the silverware. Within an hour our alley was silent again, only a charred and still smoking heap left to mark the end of Gul Mohammed’s family. Whenever possible, this is the way Hindu mobs preferred to kill Muslims—by burning them alive. A Muslim who is burnt and not buried after death is automatically consigned to hell fire.

  Even as I retell the stories of my relatives from memory, I know I cannot trust that they adhere strictly to facts. I am, of course, aware of the small embellishments I have made for the purposes of making the narratives more aesthetically compelling. I wonder if in the original stories there were details from other accounts of riots, incorporated by the teller to increase the emotional impact of his or her own story. In their first versions, some of the more gruesome details were prefaced by ‘I am told’, a qualification which disappeared in the retellings. My later, adult experience of riot accounts has taught me that the talk of atrocities which one was told about (and then even personally witnessed) is much more than their actual occurrence. The importance of the rhetorics of violence, as the British psychologist Peter Marsh has observed, is not necessarily that they illuminate actual action but that they substitute for it.1

  I am also unsure how much I can trust my own memory not to make additions from its store of images, picked up from narratives of riots, even as I tell the tale. The truth of these stories, then, lies in the archetypal material they contain rather than in the factual veracity of particular details. The riots brought to the surface (as they continue to do every time they occur in a fresh edition), both at the level of action and of imagination, certain primitive fantasies of bodily violence which are our heritage from infancy and childhood. Prominent among these fantasies are those relating to sexual mutilation—the cutting off of male genitals, and the sadistic fury directed against female breasts which are hit repeatedly by iron rods, stabbed with knives, and lopped off by scythes and swords. At one level, the castration of males and the cutting off of female breasts incorporate the more or less conscious wish to wipe the hated enemy off the face of the earth by eliminating the means of its reproduction and the nurturing of its infants. At another, more unconscious level, in the deep regression and the breakdown of many normal defences occasioned by the widespread violence and the fear of one’s own imminent death, the castration of the enemy may be viewed as a counterphobic acting out of what psychoanalysis considers one of the chief male anxieties, that is, it is a doing unto others—castration—what one fears may be done to one’s self. The mutilation of the breast may be similarly derived from the upsurge of a pervasive infantile fantasy—the fantasy of violent revenge on a bad, withholding breast, a part of the mother whose absence gives rise to feelings of disintegration and murderous rage.

  Sexual violence undoubtedly occurred during the Partition, although far below the level enshrined in collective memory. On a more sociological level, the chief reason for the preponderance of specifically sexual violence in the Partition riots in the north is that, as compared to many other parts of the country, the undivided Punjab was (and continues to be) a rather violent society. Its high murder rate is only one indication of a cultural endorsement of the use of physical force to attain socially approved ends such as the defence of one’s land or of personal and family honour. There is now empirical evidence to suggest that the greater the legitimation of vi
olence in some approved areas of life, the more is the likelihood that force will also be used in other spheres where it may not be approved. In this so-called cultural spillover effect there is a strong association between the level of nonsexual violence and rape, rape being partly a spillover from cultural norms condoning violent behaviour in other areas of life.2 Given this violent tradition and its associated cultural norms, the riot situation further undermined, if it did not completely sweep away, the already weak norms curbing male aggression. It is then quite understandable that sexual violence during the Partition riots could reach levels of brutality which have rarely been approached in subsequent riots in other parts of the country.

  It is only now that I can reflect more composedly, even tranquilly, and give a psychological gloss to the stories of the riots. At the time I heard them, their fearful images coursed unimpeded through my mind which reverberated wildly with their narrators’ flushes of emotion. There was a frantic tone to the stories, an underlying hysteria I felt as a child but could only name as an adult. After all, my uncles, aunts, and cousins had not yet recovered from the trauma of what had befallen them. The Partition horrors stalked their dreams. They were still not free of the fear of losing their lives, a fear that had clutched them for weeks. They had lost their homeland, where they had been born and lived, which constitutes such an important, albeit unconscious, facet of our identity. With the loss of their homes, their sense of personal identity was tottering—had become ‘diffused’ in Eriksonian terms3—while they had yet to begin the process of adapting this fragmenting identity to a new homeland.

  It is sobering to think of hundreds of thousands of children over many parts of the subcontinent, Hindu and Muslim, who have listened to stories from their parents and other family elders during the Partition and other subsequent riots, on the fierceness of an implacable enemy. This is a primary channel through which historical enmity is transmitted from one generation to the next as the child, ignoring the surface interpretations and rationalizations, hears the note of helpless fury and impotence in the accounts of beloved adults and fantasizes scenarios of revenge against those who have humiliated his family and kin.4 The fantasies, which can later turn from dimly conscious images to concrete actions during communal conflagrations, are not only a vindication of the parents and a repayment of the debt owed them but also a validation of the child-in-the-man’s greater strength and success in overpowering those who had shamed his family in the distant past. Given the strong family and kinship ties all over the country, a Hindu’s enmity towards the Muslim (and vice versa) is often experienced by the individual as a part of the loyalty due to or (in the case of a more conflictful parent-child relationship) imposed by the parents. Later, as the child grows up, the parental message may be amplified by the input of one or more teachers. As Rajesh, one of the subjects of this study whom we will encounter later, remarked: ‘We had a history teacher in school. He was the type who loved his subject. He would keep the text book aside and teach us the lesson extempore—like stories. When he used to tell us about the inhuman atrocities committed by Muslim invaders on the Hindus, I remember I used to get so angry that I felt like walking out of the class and beating up a few Muslim boys.’

  Leaving aside the stories, I am uncertain whether even my direct childhood memories of the riots, with their vivid images which carry such an intense charge of noesis, the certainty of knowing, can be completely trusted to represent reality or are even wholly mine. For instance, I ‘remember’ going with my father to the railway station one night. Was it Rohtak? Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan were camped on the station platform. Many had moaned in their sleep and a couple had woken up screaming (I now imagine) to escape from their persistent nightmares. We had walked through the sea of uneasy sleepers, their faces discoloured by the dim violet glow of the neon tubes hanging high above the platform. Sitting silently among empty canisters and tattered bedrolls, shrinking at our approach, the children did not cry and rarely whimpered, their large dark eyes full of a bewildered hurt and (again I imagine) the memories of stabbed and hacked bodies lying in the streets of towns and villages which now belonged to Pakistan. One particular image has become permanently etched: a four-year-old boy with a running nose, the yellow-green mucous, a thin plaster of salted sweat on the upper lip, dense with buzzing flies which the child did not lift his hand to drive away, afraid perhaps of giving offence to even the smallest of living creatures.

  I never personally witnessed the kinds of violence described in the family stories during the few days of rioting in Rohtak. For we lived at the outskirts of the town, in Civil Lines, where the spacious bungalows of the sahibs of the Raj and a few elite non-officials were located. The Civil Lines families rarely went into town, preferring the company of each other. Our social life was focused on the Rohtak Club and was carried out in its high-ceilinged rooms with their covered padded chairs, the wooden dance floor, and books on big game hunting and mores of obscure Indian tribes lying unread on the shelves of teak bookcases. Sometimes in the evening, when children were not allowed in, I had watched my father and his friends sitting outside on the lawn from behind the cactus hedge surrounding the club. In their white drill trousers and their cotton bush shirts, they looked fresh and cool, radiating an aura of peace and quiet authority which made me feel safe and quietly sleepy. A part of this effect was achieved through the sensory background of their setting—the settling dusk, the smell of freshly watered grass, the low murmurs of waiters gliding between the clubhouse and the widely spaced bridge tables bearing iced lemon and orange squashes. And as they sat there, the upright garden lamps transforming the lawn into a dull yellow island surrounded by the brilliant Indian darkness from which only moths and fireflies ventured in as intruders, the silence disturbed only by the occasional dream cry of a peacock, they had looked remote from the dust, the colour, and the noise of the town they administered.

  I remember well the night the riot started. From the terrace, where most of the family gathered on hearing a continuous, muffled roar break the stillness of the night, I counted at least twenty separate fires within the span of an hour as Muslim homes and shops were burnt on that first night. By midnight, the night had the shimmering glow of a slow-burning coal fire, the overcast sky beginning to have the ragged crimson edge of an uneven and unnatural dawn. Although on the following days the sounds of the riot coming from the town were blended into a low-pitched buzzing, not unlike the one near a beehive, I sometimes imagined I could distinguish the distant shouts of the mobs roaming the bazaars from the panic-filled screams of their victims.

  We had enough company that night. The roof terraces of our neighbouring bungalows were crowded with whole families come up to watch the distant fires. Angry cries of babies awoken from sleep mingled with excited shouts of discovery as fresh fires were sighted. There were animated exchanges across the roofs as to the exact location of a new fire and the possible reactions of the Muslims. On the whole, the onlookers were in a gay mood; there was a feeling of respite from the petty concerns of daily life, a kind of relaxation which comes from the release of long pent-up tensions. ‘This is a lesson the Muslims needed to be taught! We should have put them in their places long ago!’ was the general consensus.

  Although the night air began to be permeated by the acrid smell of smoke, the fires were far away and the possibility of any danger to our own homes and lives remote. At the most, the distant threat gave all of us a tingling sense of excitement which heightened the gaiety of what was fast turning into a festive occasion.

  For the children, and perhaps for the adults too, that first night of the riot thus had a quality akin to the day of the kite flying festival at the onset of spring, when people throng the roofs and the clear blue of the sky is profusely dotted with kites in all their bright colours; the town resounds to the battle cries of children as the men compete against each other, trying to cut the string holding a rival kite entangled with their own. The duels taking place in the town
that night did not use paper kites as weapons, and the battle cries we heard so faintly were no mere expressions of childish exuberance but declarations of deadly intent. Yet, in the safety of our house and surrounded by the family, an uncanny impression of the riot as macabre festival persisted throughout the hours I spent on the roof.

  When the riots were brought under control after three days, I remember that my father gave in to my persistence and promised to take me into the town the next morning to see the aftermath. I remember waking up early that day and looking out at the speckled dawn as the sun struggled with the first clouds of the season. The monsoon was a few days away and, my elbows resting on the window-sill of my parents’ bedroom, I watched its forerunners, dark fluffy clouds racing across the sky as imperious heralds. The morning had been different from others, smelling not only of the sun’s warmth but also of budding grass shoots and the dark, far away thunder. The walk through Rohtak’s bazaars with my father was disappointing. I had expected to find images from the stories I had heard take concrete form. I expected to see smouldering heaps, amputated limbs, cut-off breasts—which I pictured as pale fleshy balls without a trace of blood. The reality was oddly disappointing. Except for an occasional house with charred doors, missing windows, and smoke scars on its front, the bazaars presented the unchanging vista of a provincial town awakening to another day. There were the men vigorously (and loudly) chewing on marigossa twigs to clean their teeth and clearing their throats with much hawking and spitting. Others murmured their prayers as they bathed under the cool streams of water from public hydrants. The women hissed encouragement over naked babies held up above the gutter. Older children squatted by themselves, with that faraway look which bespeaks of an inward absorption in the working of one’s bowels, a trance occasionally broken as they bent down to contemplate their own dirt.