In the meeting with Mangal Singh, the only threat came from his generous but insistent hospitality as he pressed a glass of sugarcane juice on me, delicious but deadly, a prime vehicle for stomach disease and a possible cholera carrier. We were sitting in a room on the first floor of his house where Mangal Singh lives with his two wives. Most of the eleven rooms on this floor are empty. The ground floor has nine rooms, occupied by his widowed mother and his five brothers with their families. The rooms are in the form of a square and open out to a veranda lining a courtyard which has a tulsi (basil) plant growing in the middle. ‘Not tulsi, Mother tulsi,’ Mangal Singh had corrected me while demonstrating his Hindu piety at the same time. Besides a scooter and a motorcycle parked in the veranda, there was a refrigerator and a water cooler as well as some toys. Everything looked neat and tidy and freshly scrubbed. Mangal Singh had introduced us to his first wife, a shy, pretty young woman to whom he was openly affectionate. He had married again because she could not have children. ‘But I actually prefer her,’ he had said to the young woman’s obvious pleasure. ‘She looks after me well. The other one is also nice but since she is educated she doesn’t look after me so well.’ As with his mother, to whom he had introduced us downstairs, Mangal Singh behaved like a spoilt young boy with his wife, cracking jokes, praising her extravagantly, ordering her about, calling out to her often to reassure himself that she was not far away.
There were three other men in the room when we began the interview, the obligatory chamchas to amplify his statements whenever he paused for breath or effect. They provided emphasis to his statements and strove to increase their truth content by a resounding ‘That is right!’ to his rhetorical ‘Isn’t that so?’ Occasionally, when he paused, they sang his praises while he looked on, smiling modestly. ‘He needs good food to keep up his “manpower”,’ said one. ‘Manpower’ is said in English, the man’s rough and ready translation of the Hindi word for strength. ‘If he lifts his hand, all the hands in the city would rise, such is his “manpower”.’ They showed me the externment order served on Mangal Singh by the police and signed by the commissioner sahib himself which banished him from the city for six months in ‘apprehension of inciting violence and breach of peace.’ ‘But I’m back after one and a half months. I got a stay from the High Court,’ Mangal Singh says. The copy of the stay order is also passed on to me by a chamcha for my perusal. A second chamcha brings out a sheaf of photographs. The ones shown to me are of police torture. A subdued-looking Mangal Singh, standing in his loincloth, is pointing to his back which is covered with welts. The face is bruised and the eyes puffed. He points to his left eye where the skin under it is noticeably darker. ‘I have still not completely recovered from that beating,’ he says with indignation, not at the beating itself but at the surrounding circumstances of which Mangal gives two versions. It seemed a few months ago, at the time of tension over the demolition of the Babri mosque, Mangal received a parcel, very probably from his Muslim enemies. It was kept in the room next to the one where we were sitting. His three-year-old son fell on it and it exploded, killing the boy. In the second version, which is also the statement he made to the police, he had stored firecrackers in the room for the children in the family. His son was playing with them and they exploded, killing the boy. ‘My son dies and the motherfuckers arrest me and beat me up, claiming I was manufacturing bombs,’ he says, his indignation quite convincing.
There are other occasional contradictions in Mangal’s monologue which comes tumbling out at a high velocity. For instance, in talking of the wrestler’s ascetic regimen, he had said that he ate exactly at eight every evening and never went out of the house after that. Yet, just before saying goodbye to us, when his wife had come out, he said, ‘The poor woman makes such nice meals for me but I am so busy I never know when I will be home. I eat at all odd hours. How often she has waited up for me before she could have her own dinner!’ Mangal is not exactly a liar in the sense that he wants to deceive his audience. He is an embellisher of facts, some of which may get changed to fit in with what he believes to be true at a certain time. He may also unwittingly bend the truth to project a particular image of himself. After a while, the contradictions become a part of his manic charm as I fascinatedly watch the persona he is constructing as much for himself as for us.
The first time Mangal Singh clashed with the Muslims was in 1979. The Muslims had claimed a piece of land on the specious ground that it was an old community graveyard. The man to whom the land belonged had won his case against the encroachment in the court but could not get the land vacated and came to Mangal Singh. His cause was just and Mangal agreed to help him. Mangal would never help someone who wanted illegal possession of land. He only, so to speak, expedited the notoriously lumbering machinery of the law, helped in implementing court orders which would not otherwise be carried out. Mangal settled on a sum of money for his services. Nowadays his minimum fee is a hundred thousand rupees, but he takes it only after the work is done, not like some other pehlwans who take the money but refuse to do the work, daring the client to do his utmost. Mangal, on the other hand, is a man of principles.
Mangal went to the site with five of his people. They had a few knives and a couple of swords between them. The Muslims were eight in number, all of them with swords and each an expert at wielding the weapon. But they were old—the oldest being almost sixty—and though thorough professionals, they lacked the staying power of Mangal’s much younger men. The Muslims were soon out of breath and Mangal and his men killed six of them. They put four of the corpses in an Ambassador car and threw them in different parts of the city to confuse the police. He was charged with three murders in that particular incident. He cannot tolerate zulm, particularly Muslim zulm.
The police report of the incident credits him with only one murder, of which he was acquitted because of lack of evidence. A month later, the history sheet continues, ‘along with others, he assaulted Imtiaz and his parents with sticks and caused bleeding injuries to them.’ Two months later, in December 1979, when riots had begun after the Rameeza Bi incident, Mangal Singh is noted to have led an armed group of twenty people who set fire to Muslim shops, attacked Muslims with sticks and knives, and pelted stones at the police. There is a succession of other brief notings over the years: assault, unlawful assembly, rioting. For a few months he was ordered to report to the police every day at eight in the morning and nine at night. But he was never convicted in the court in spite of over forty cases registered against him by the police. Because of the intimidation of witnesses, the police say. Because the people love me and will not let me go to jail, says Mangal. The police record summarizes: ‘Young and energetic. Very close to the BJP MLA (Member Legislative Assembly). Has good contacts with the RSS. Also close to the local Telugu Desam Party MLA. Tries to be close to Congress also. He is a communal element. Very active during communal disturbances and has very good following. Has become very intelligent and never exposes himself personally in crimes but uses his henchmen for creating disturbances. People of the locality very frightened and do not want to complain or become witnesses. Earns a lot of money by settling land disputes.’
Mangal Singh freely admits his political links but has a sense of outrage that he was put behind bars in the explosives case. ‘I was with the Congress party for so many years. I did so much of their work. I also did the personal work of a couple of MLAs in getting their houses vacated from tenants. But then I change over to the BJP since that is the only party defending the Hindus. And what happens? The Congress puts me in jail! No gratitude at all!’
During a riot, ‘strong men’ representing different localities, not all of them pehlwans, meet on almost a daily basis and decide where ‘the wind is to be spread’ (hawa phailana), a euphemism for where the killings have to take place and where they need to be stopped. For instance, it would be decided at the meeting to stop the violence in Dhulpet but start it in the old city. Mangal Singh likes to maintain a tight discipline in his own are
a. Once, during the riots, a mob collected spontaneously in his locality. He immediately sent a few of his boys who came back in two minutes after doing satrol (creating chaos). He then called in the leaders of the mob and told them, ‘Never do that again without my permission.’
Although Mangal Singh enjoys recounting his violent exploits in the land business or in the political field—for instance, when he and his boys did satrol to the procession of a newly appointed minister at the behest of his cabinet colleague—what he is really proud of are his clashes with the Muslims in defence of the Hindus. These allow him to identify with and place himself in a long line of heroes such as Shivaji and Rana Pratap, whom he admires greatly for their armed resistance against the Muslim emperors. He tells us of the incident of a Hindu marriage procession when it was stopped in front of a mosque because it was time for the Friday afternoon prayers. An altercation took place and the bridegroom, who belonged to the Lodha community, was pushed off his horse. The incident was reported to Mangal Singh who reached the spot with a few of his men. ‘Within two minutes,’ he boasts, ‘four of their men lay on the ground, two dead even as they fell. The others fled and the marriage procession passed the mosque.’
Mangal Singh’s psychological profile shows a great resemblance to that of Akbar; the difference is that his responses are much more extreme. He believes he tries to dominate others, is very self-willed and competitive. He, too, is often sad, worries a great deal about personal problems, tends to suppress anger, and always blames himself when things go wrong. Even his choice of favourite songs reflects a preference for the sad and the sentimental. The first is a Mukesh song with the opening lyrics:
Life’s road is full of tears
Someone should tell her
I have a long way to travel.
The other’s an old hit from a 1950s movie:
Do not forget these days of childhood
Today I am laughing
Do not make me cry tomorrow.
In spite of the dysphoric mood, Mangal feels personally potent and socially gratified. Taking into account the interview and the responses to the statements on the Giessen Test, I would surmise that the outstanding feature of Mangal’s personality is a hyperactivity defending against depression, compared to Akbar’s more compulsive defences. And since I am already in the comparison business, let me go further and look at the psychological profiles of all the four pehlwans. Although too small a sample for any definitive statements on the larger universe of ‘strong men’ who carry out the actual acts of violence in a riot, my tentative collective portrait may still be a source of hypotheses for any future psychological studies.
My first observation is that these men are not abnormal in a clinical sense. That is, they are neither psychopaths, highly neurotic, nor delinquent; their control over their violent impulses is not even greatly impaired. All of them, however, are unusually dominant and of a marked authoritarian bent. There is also a notable depressive tendency in their underlying mood, a threatened depression against which various defences are employed. Surprisingly, the depressive tendency persists in spite of the pehlwans feeling that they evoke a positive social response; that is, they are narcissistically gratified rather than frustrated by their environment.
Perhaps the need to defend against an emptying and fragmenting self, the inner experience of depression, contributes to the building up of a defensive hyperactivity wherein the cohesiveness of the self is restored and most immediately experienced through an explosion in violent action. The excitement of violence becomes the biggest confirmation that one is psychically still alive, a confirmation of one’s very existence.
Psyche and Wrestling
Until now we have looked at the warriors of communal violence, the men who orchestrate the violence and who, in their younger days (and current youthful versions) were directly engaged in it, as moved by specific aspects of their religious and personal identities. Yet in Hyderabad, as well as in many other cities, where the pehlwans take a leading role in communal violence, we also need to look at their socialization as pehlwans. In other words, for a greater understanding of these warriors of religious violence, we need a close look at the culture of Indian wrestling. It may well be the development of the pehlwan’s professional identity which, working in tandem with his personal and religious identities, provides us with a more complete picture of the workings of his mind. This is exemplified by an apocryphal story about Sufi Pehlwan, an old peshawar (‘professional’) who retired from the killing business after the 1979 riots. He is reported to have felt that, like everything else in India, riots too were not what they onee used to be. Since each one of us interprets the world from the limited view we have of it, Sufi Pehlwan too saw the deterioration of the country through his particular professional lens. The quality of food and thus the toughness of the men’s bodies had been steadily degenerating over the years. Bones had become brittle so that when one stabbed a person there was hardly any resistance to the knife blade which sliced through muscle, cartilage, and bone as if they were wet clay. Simply put, there was no longer any professional satisfaction to be obtained from a riot, and Sufi Pehlwan had turned to other, more challenging, if perhaps less exciting pursuits.
The tradition of Indian wrestling, the malla-yuddha of the epics, is not equally widespread. Strongest in the north Indian states of Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and western Bihar, it is encountered less in the rest of the country. Although absent in most of south and central India, wrestling is quite robust in parts of Bengal and Maharashtra as well as in some erstwhile princely states such as Hyderabad where the rulers patronized the art. Wrestling in the Indian context is not just a sport but a whole way of life; it is not only a physical regimen but a moral tradition with changing political coordinates. In the felicitous phrase of the anthropologist Joseph Alter, wrestling is a ‘meeting of muscles and morals’.3
As far as the physical regimen is concerned, there is little difference in forms and techniques of wrestling between the various parts of the country or even between Hindu and Muslim wrestlers. Waking up at dawn, the aspiring wrestler runs a few miles to build up his stamina. Ideally, he should then spend some time in contemplation (or in actual prayer in the case of the Muslim) before he makes his way to the akhara, dangal or taleem—the different names given to the wrestling gymnasium. Here he begins with a bath before donning the wrestler’s habit, the langot or the loincloth. This is followed by the anointing of the body with oil and a collective preparation of the actual akhara, the approximately ten-metre-square pit. In a Hindu akhara there is collective invocation of Hanuman, the celibate god of wrestlers and the symbol of deepest devotion to Rama.
Wrestlers are then paired off by the gum (the ustad or khalifa in case of Muslims) to grapple and practice moves and countermoves under the guru’s close supervision and frequent instruction. After two or three hours of this jor (literally, ‘strength’), the wrestler rolls in the earth of the pit to partake of its cooling, reinvigorating, and healing qualities and then finishes with a bath. A large hearty meal consisting of the wrestler’s staple foods of clarified butter, litres of milk, and ground almonds (or chickpeas) if Hindu, meat with pistachios and almonds if Muslim (in the days when pistachios and almonds were still affordable) follows. The wrestler then has a short nap and rests for a couple of hours during the afternoon. Then it is back to the akhara in the early evening for another two to three hours of individual exercises to build up strength, stamina, and flexibility of joints. Besides various kinds of weight training, the core exercises are hundreds of deep knee bends and jackknifmg pushups. A bath and again a specialized meal later, the wrestler is generally supposed to be asleep by 8 or 9 p.m. so as to get up fresh and energetic at the crack of dawn to repeat the regimen the next day.
The physical regimen is part of a moral and ideological complex, and this is where Indian wrestling is similar to traditional East Asian martial arts, where physicality was inseparable from morality and skills were not indep
endent of ethics. Here, too, traditional wrestling differs from the teaching and learning of judo, karate, or wrestling in the modern context as recreational sports, physical exercises or fighting skills. The wrestler, though very much a part of society, both looks and experiences himself as a man apart. First, there is the contrast of the bulky but muscled body to the underfed and emaciated bodies of other men in the lower-class neighbourhoods from which most wrestlers come. Besides exhibiting the outer signs of apartness, the wrestler adheres strictly to the moral principles of continence, honesty, internal and external cleanliness, simplicity, and contemplation of God which, as Alter points out, he shares with the ascetic—the sanyasin or the sadhu—who too stresses his liminality to the normal social order.4 Of course, where the wrestler differs most strikingly from the normal man is in his advocation (like that of the ascetic) of absolute celibacy. Sexuality and, in particular, the loss of semen are concerns of high anxiety. The image of the wrestler in popular Hindi movies is generally of a strong but simple-minded rustic who goes to absurd lengths to avoid the company of women and thus any occasion for sexual excitement. As Alter tells us, for the wrestler semen is the locus of all of his strength and character. Milk, clarified butter (ghee) and almonds, the primary ingredients of a wrestler’s diet, are believed to build up a store of high energy semen. Milk and ghee are also supposed to lower the body heat so that the semen is not inadvertently spilt in sleep but can perform its desired function of building bodily strength.5
Colours of Violence Page 12
