Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

  Akbar was now leaning forward, his voice swelling with pride.

  ‘Your list of pehlwans has more Muslim than Hindu names because Muslims are stronger than Hindus. The Muslim has God’s strength in him. A Muslim reflects the strength of the nation. Muslims are united and one. The other nation (Hindu) does not have this unity. They are divided. We know our immense strength, given to us by God. A true Muslim is never afraid. The only fear in his heart is of God. The wooden stave of a Muslim or only the cry ‘Allah-u-Akbar’ (God is Great) is more than ten Hindu swords. Whatever is happening today is a test the Muslims have to go through. The Qur’an says very clearly that it is a sin to oppress others but an even greater sin to bear oppression. A good Muslim can never tolerate oppression. Today I am a pehlwan because our society, government, and police have forced me to be one. I have faced a lot of zulm but have never submitted to it. I have always fought it.

  ‘I was myself a policeman once but I quit the service after I witnessed police brutality. I saw the atrocities they commit on innocent people. One day I openly took on the police in public. I beat up a policeman very badly. Later they ransacked my house and destroyed my hotel. I was charged with assault and jailed for one year. It was solitary confinement. In this one year I changed a lot. My sentiment for God and my love for the nation awakened. I also read the Qur’an and prayed regularly. I decided to dedicate my life to the well-being of my community.

  ‘On my return, I received a hero’s welcome. People were so happy to see me back. I did a lot of work for the poor of the community. I am satisfied that I am doing good work—not for myself or for my own good but for others, for my people. A pehlwan does not get his strength from the building of his body but from the blessings of the poor and the grace of Allah to whom he prays. To pray to God in the early hours of the morning when others are sleeping is the best. He is not distracted by the prayers of so many others who are still asleep.’

  There was no trace of banter now, only a deadly seriousness.

  ‘I believe in equality for everyone. There should be no divide between the rich and the poor. I have the communist way of thinking. I am religious and communist at the same time. You might think I am a hypocrite because I own such a big house, a hotel, property. But even in Russia the leaders had everything. I am talking about beliefs and ideas. I hate the rich, their vulgar lifestyle, and the show of wealth. I also hate the whites because they exploit the dark races not only in Africa but all over the world. I also hate the police whose uniform gives them the license to commit such horrible crimes. Today the Muslim’s fight is not only against the other nation but also against the police.

  ‘I feel very happy when young Muslim boys are tortured by the police. They should be beaten up even more. My prayer to God is for the police to commit unlimited atrocities on young Muslims. Whenever I hear about Muslim boys being tortured, I feel like dancing with joy. Unless these boys directly experience oppression on their bodies, they will never be able to stand up against it. When they are victims of police brutality they become tigers who join my army. Today, because of God’s grace there are hundreds of these young disciples who are spread all over the city.’ There was no hysteria as he spoke now, just a cold fanatic dedication.

  ‘The impression is false that in every riot more Muslims than Hindus are killed. I can say with complete confidence that at least in Hyderabad this is not true. Here the Muslims are very strong and completely united. More Hindus than Muslims are killed in every riot.

  ‘In another ten to fifteen years the Hindus will be finished as a political force and not only politically. It is important to remember that many Muslim men marry more than once and have large families with many children. Every other Muslim house has at least five to six children. Imagine only two boys in every family growing up to be tigers and it is these tigers who will take them on without fear. Then the Hindus have the caste system in which poor Hindus are exploited. It has happened many times in the past that lower caste Hindus have converted to Islam or Christianity. This is going to happen in a big way now. There won’t be many Hindus left.’

  His expression was again relaxing, a seductive light coming back into his eyes and in the hint of a smile.

  ‘During the riots or at the time of curfew, I often go away from home. Because whenever there is disturbance this is the first place where the police lands up. I get the work I have to do during the riots done but never out of my own house. For the last many years the police have been unable to nab me. I do my land business the same way. I buy and sell land but I am not a land grabber like others. All my land dealings are done at home. No one ever sees me at a site and my signature is never found on any document.

  ‘When you came to meet me, you must have had a certain image of me as a pehlwan. But I am sure you will go back thinking differently of Akbar pehlwan. I am not like the others.’

  Sahba’s account of her meeting with Akbar had whetted my curiosity. She had been impressed with the dignity with which he carried himself, his elegance and his chaste idiomatic Urdu, liberally sprinkled with couplets from well-known poets. His courtly ways, coupled with the air of menace around him because of his reputation, made him an intriguing figure. Akbar was like the soft paw of a big cat, the talons retracted and almost invisible in the silken fur, a Damascus-steel sword sheathed in a velvet scabbard. I thus went to our meeting with Akbar, which was to take place in his hotel in the late afternoon, with much anticipation.

  The rickshaw driver who took us to the meeting place did not need an address more elaborate than our simple instructions to take us to ‘Akbar pehlwan’s hotel’. The hotel was located near a bus terminal where buses from all over Andhra Pradesh as well as the neighbouring states disgorge pilgrims bound for the temple of Tirupathi, one of the holiest of Hindu shrines. Families from far-flung villages, often led by wizened women, bent with age yet shuffling along, sprightly with faith, stream out of the buses to stretch their legs, use the toilets, and perhaps eat before they take the connecting buses for Tirupathi. I found it ironical that Akbar’s hotel advertised itself as serving special vegetarian meals for Hindu pilgrims. This time, though, ‘hotel’ was not a misnomer since on one side of the restaurant, there was a flight of stairs leading up to the first floor which had six rooms lined along a narrow corridor. At the end of the corridor, recessed into a wall, there was a sort of, well, reception desk. Behind it, barely visible in the shadows, were three strapping young men. We asked for Akbar and one of the youths, disengaging himself from his companions, told us we were expected. Akbar would be with us in twenty minutes and in the meanwhile to please follow him.

  He led us through the corridor to the last room, motioned us inside, and went away. All the other rooms seemed empty and the corridor was silent, with only the subdued late afternoon street noises filtering through its closed windows barred with iron grills. The room was stuffy and dingy, without a single window, the weak whirring of the fan churning the same stale air over and over again. There were two chairs, a twin bed, a television set on a low stool and a red telephone on a table. Otherwise the room was bare without even a poster or a print to mar the uniformity of its ugliness. Above the bed, there was a red bulb sticking out of the wall, baffling as to its purpose. I could feel the stream of perspiration thickening all over my back and my chest as molecules of sweat sought each other to form drops which trickled down to enter the pyjamas at the waist. The fan wheezed slowly, dispensing its miserly breeze only to someone who sat right under it, a space both Sahba and I were too polite to occupy by moving our chairs. The sheets on the bed were washed though they still looked soiled, covered with a profusion of patches, a cheap detergent having changed the colour of the original stains to various shades of grey. There were oil stains on the pillows from the heads of guests who believed a daily smearing of coconut oil not only kept the hair thick and healthy but acted as a coolant for the head and tonic for the body. I could not help wondering what the hotel was used for and how many customers rented
its rooms for periods shorter than a night’s stay.

  Half an hour went by but there was no sign of Akbar or, for that matter, anyone else. There was a palpable sense of unease, even fear, as we waited in the room, with the only exit out of the empty hotel leading through a narrow corridor which was blocked at the end by the three young toughs who, like his other disciples, Akbar had told us, were ready even to kill at the merest nod of the master’s head. We tried to keep our fearful fantasies at bay through an exchange of light banter, punctuated by loud nervous laughter.

  ‘How much do you think a room in this hotel costs?’

  ‘Oh, you think they rent it by the night ?’

  ‘If they try to rape you,’ I tell Sahba, ‘keep your protests down to a minimum. I don’t want them to get enraged and kill both of us. On the other hand, if they do have their way with you, I doubt whether any of us will be left alive to bear witness.’

  ‘They throw the bodies under the bridge, remember?’ says Sahba.

  The red telephone rings. For a few moments we sit rooted to our chairs, staring, before Sahba picks up the receiver. ‘He will be here in another fifteen minutes,’ she says.

  The minutes pass, very slowly. We have lapsed into silence, alone with our disquieting thoughts. I think of the room as a set from a movie with Ajit, the villain of old Hindi films whose drawl has spawned a whole industry of Ajit jokes.

  ‘Raabert,’ says Ajit.

  ‘Yes, baas,’ answers the henchman.

  ‘In the room there is a red bulb.’

  ‘Yes, baas.’

  ‘There is also a red telephone which will ring.’

  ‘Yes, baas.’

  ‘Pick up the phone. I will be at the other end of the line.’

  ‘How will I know it is you baas?’

  Akbar entered the room, leaving my creation of an Ajit joke unfinished. (Frankly, although successful in dealing with my anxiety, I don’t think the joke was really going anywhere.) A powerfully built man of less than medium height, he wore a white kurta pyjama, the kurta having a faint pink and yellow floral design, so subdued that it was barely noticeable from a distance of ten feet. He was wearing white sandals, the front of the sandals narrowing down to thin strips which curved up like the ends of a proud warrior’s moustache. His own moustache was a thin line on an otherwise clean-shaven face. His hair dyed a jet black, it was apparent that Akbar took great care of his grooming and appearance.

  After the exchange of obligatory courtesies, Akbar turned his attention to me, his eyes bright and sharp. He asked me about the study, what exactly I wanted to achieve through it, what exactly I did for a living, where I lived in Delhi and so on. My answers were frequently followed by a witty comment from him which had the intention of mocking my earnestness and exposing my ignorance of the really real life. I complied with the direction in which he wanted to take our meeting, exaggerated my naïveté, pretended to greater stupidity than I feel I am naturally endowed with. My weak laughter at his sallies, a tribute to his easy victories, began to relax him as he often turned to Sahba to receive her appreciative smiles which further sealed his triumph.

  He continued in this vein with the Giessen Test. Instead of answering a question, he would toy with me, ask me how I thought he would answer a particular question. With mock humility, he would turn to Sahba, sometimes discoursing on the subject of the question—on patience or strong feelings in love, for instance—with quotes from Urdu poetry, while I waited on the sidelines for an answer I could use for the purpose of the test. There was a coquettishness about him, especially in the way he played with his eyes. He would be looking normally at her while talking and then suddenly the look would become bold, charged with sexual complicity, the boldness further underlined by the briefest flash of a smile before both the look and the smile vanished.

  I felt I could sense Akbar’s dilemma in relation to me. Clearly, he was far superior in bodily strength, physical courage, and fighting skills. And as for matters of the heart, or soul, was he not a better man here too? After all, he was a poet. Was nor a man all about strength and sentiment, both of which he possessed in abundance? Yet he could not dismiss me lightly. this ‘doctor’ from Delhi, who could come to his city for a ‘study’ with a modern Muslim woman as his assistant, a woman who boldly walked in the city’s mohallas with her face unveiled and talked to men on equal terms. I had better access to the modern world, to its systems of knowledge, and to its new relationships between the generations and the sexes. In terms of his own civilization, Akbar was far above me; yet he could not be easily dismissive of the modern world whose values I understood better and whose symbols I could perhaps manipulate more easily. At that particular moment, it seemed to me, Akbar and I were more than just two men warily circling each other, jousting for advantage; in our individual frames, we also incorporated the collective fates of the Indian Muslim and the Hindu at the end of the twentieth century.

  Once I had given up, closed the questionnaire in apparent bafflement and given Akbar the opportunity to remark to Sahba that he had succeeded in making the psychiatrist mentally confused, Akbar became magnanimous in his victory. He was now ready to go through the statements in the Giessen Test with more sincerity.

  As I expected, Akbar, unlike Majid Khan, did not give many extreme responses to the statements, further underlining the image of cautiousness which I had formed of him. The only exception was on statements relating to social response scale where Akbar believed that he evoked a very positive response. He felt people were very satisfied with his work. He was easily liked, found it easy to attract others, and was confident that people thought highly of him. Akbar’s uncharacteristic emphasis on his social attractiveness made me wonder about his narcissistic vulnerability, whether there was not a strong need for continuous narcissistic gratification which sought to counteract a depressive tendency revealed by his responses to some other statements. Akbar stated that he consistently suppressed his anger and was often depressed. He felt very strongly in love, yet gave away little of himself, found it hard to come out of his shell or to trust others. The cautious and controlled impression he gave also seemed to be an aspect of a tendency toward compulsiveness, manifested in his dealings with money, tidiness, and concentration ability. I wondered whether the control he sought over his inner world and the domination of others exercised in the outer were not aspects of the same defence which guarded against the fragmentation of a self threatened by strong sexual and aggressive impulses; a self in danger of losing its cohesiveness and thus to the outbreak of a full-scale depression.

  In brief, Akbar’s presentation of the self was of the ‘strong, silent man’ with unsuspected pools of deep feelings which are guarded and bounded by high fences and almost never revealed to a casual emotional visitor or even to those who would like to be close to him. By the time the long interview was over, Akbar was regarding me with a certain distant friendliness. He wanted to give me one of his poems, he said, and I should please write it down.

  Do not trouble to test me

  I am always in the forefront

  When it comes to bearing

  The burden of grief

  When they talked of constancy in her mehfil

  I turned out to be the one

  Who was faithless

  In an otherwise constant world.

  In these times

  Both of us have achieved fame

  I, in creating her

  She, in destroying me.

  A broken mosque

  Can be rebuilt in four days

  It takes a lifetime, though,

  To knit sundered hearts together.

  The wines of yore are there no longer

  The drinkers too are gone

  In the wine houses

  They drink blood now.

  Akbar, guard the mirror

  Of your heart with care

  It will break

  If you show it around everywhere.

  ‘You will put me in a book,’ he said r
esignedly after I had expressed an appreciation of his poetic talent. The final victory will not be his but mine, he meant, for it will be my version of him that will be taken as his reality by the larger world outside Hyderabad. The line in his poem on handling the mirror of the heart with care was also directed at me, a plea which he was too proud to be aware of and would never have dreamt of making openly.

  Young Tigers and Pussy Cats

  Nissar is one of the soldiers, a twenty-eight-year-old man, a young tiger, who reveres Akbar and other famous Muslim pehlwans. He is a handsome young man with broad tapering shoulders, a narrow waist, shoulder-length hair, and a pleasant face with high cheekbones. He wears a thin moustache fashionable among Muslim youth who do not like to sport the beards favoured by their elders. Nissar is dressed flamboyantly in a blue shirt of some satiny material, printed with large red flowers and is wearing tight, lemon green trousers. There is a certain reserve in his demeanour, a combination of hauteur and shyness which sometimes cracks when he is youthfully boastful about importing whole bales of cloth from the United States for his shirts or when he coyly asks us to guess the number of people he has killed. It is not eight, the number of murder cases registered against him by the police. Some of them are false, he says, but then with a modest but obvious delight adds that, of course, there are other killings of which the police are unaware. Nissar likes to tell war stories; tales of Muslim throats being cut by the Hindu enemy in underground blood sacrifices to its obscene gods and goddesses, of corpses thrown into the river under the bridges at the dead of the night. Akbar and the other pehlwans are the protectors of Muslim lives, yes, but also the guardians of a boy’s sleep and tranquillity in the face of such fearful fantasies.

  His admiration for the old tigers is proportionate to the number of Hindus they are reputed to have killed. For Nissar they are the fighter pilots whose fame in serving the nation depends on the number of enemy planes each one has shot down. Indeed, it is the military analogy which is most useful in understanding the tigers, young and old. A riot is a battle, an outbreak of hostilities in a long simmering war where the killings do not involve moral qualms or compunctions. On the contrary, to kill under such circumstances is a moral duty higher than the patriotism of a soldier serving a modern nation-state since the killing of Hindus in a riot is in service of the nation of one’s faith. Indeed, an outbreak of violence in Hindu–Muslim conflict should no longer be called a riot, with the anarchical connotations of the word. Less planned than a battle yet more organized than a riot, communal violence lies somewhere between the two. The analogies used by Majid Khan, Akbar, Nissar (and as we shall see later, Mangal Singh) which highlight the warrior aspect of their religious identity should not be surprising. It would be an error to discern in them mere rationalizations for their killings and other acts of violence. As Samuel Klausner has pointed out, riot, assassination, massacre, and terrorism are victim-defined spheres of violence.2 From the viewpoint of the instigator and the perpetrator, they are in the defence of faith, crusade, just war, act of purification.