Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

  The thirty-five-year old, plump and cheerful Lalita, Badli Pershad’s eldest daughter-in-law, remembers that particular Saturday evening well. It must have been 7:30, and they were all gathered around the television set listening to the local news which comes on during the intermission of the Saturday movie. (It was Swami Ayappa, a religious-mythological film in the classification of Indian movies.) The riots had started in another part of the walled city that morning and a curfew had been in force since five in the evening. The news announcer informed them that the curfew would be lifted for one hour the next morning so that people could go out and buy essentials such as milk and medicines. Suddenly, they heard a crowd’s deep growl of ‘Allah-o-Akbar!’, ‘Kill! Kill!’ and panicky answering shouts of ‘The Mussulmans have come!’ Lalita knew what to do. It was the third time since her marriage that Pardiwada had been involved in a Hindu–Muslim riot. It always happened at night. The women and older children went downstairs and started collecting stones for the men to throw at the Muslim mob. Children’s school bags were emptied to serve as pouches for the stony ammunition, sarees and bedsheets were taken out and tied around the men’s foreheads to prevent serious head injuries. The women could not see much whenever they looked out into the alley. There were ‘hundreds’ of Muslims with swords and spears, their faces covered with pieces of cloth so that only their eyes were visible. Prema, the thirty-three-year-old daughter-in-law of Laloo Bai, Badli Pershad’s sister, is certain that the attacking Muslims were not outsiders. They knew which houses belonged to the Hindus and in fact would call out the owners’ names. Perhaps there were a few goondas from outside but ‘the whole thing was planned by our Mussulmans here’. Prema’s mother’s brother was killed that evening as was her sister-in-law Kalavati, who had run out in panic to get back her four-year-old son who had slipped out of the house to see all the excitement happening outside. Both the mother and son were chopped down by sword blows before they could get back.

  Kamla Bai, Badli Pershad’s ‘cousin’ (I have given up the effort to chart more precise relationships), who lives some houses away at the outskirts of Pardiwada, had a narrow escape. Her family had just eaten and was rearranging itself before the television set when the Muslims broke into the house. She ran out with her children, pleading with the men to spare their lives. One Hindu was killed in front of her but Kamla Bai was allowed to pass through unharmed. She hid in a neighbour’s house. The ration shop and the vegetable shop next to her house were looted and set on fire. ‘One of my neighbours has four children who are not normal in the head. They killed her with a sword. Her head was literally in two pieces. One of the woman’s relatives came out to help. They caught hold of her and asked her where her husband was. When she refused to tell, they cut off her arms and legs. She died. They broke into Ratnaram’s house and killed him. His young daughter Krishnavati hid herself behind an almirah to save herself. They dragged her outside and killed her. They did not even spare old women.’

  The attack on Pardiwada, which left twenty-four people dead, ended around eleven at night when the police arrived. The Pardis were not sure whether it was the police or a new Muslim mob disguised in police uniforms. ‘Pelt them with stones,’ was the general consensus on the action to be taken. The police would not be scared but the Muslims would run away.’ More men and women now started to come out, and the alleys of Pardiwada, eerily lighted by magenta-tinged smouldering fires, began to fill with the sounds of women wailing and weeping as corpses of close relatives were discovered and mourned.

  Rajesh, Badli Pershad’s youngest son, was standing under a tree next to the Hanuman temple. Because of the curfew he had been playing cards with his friends, Nambre and Anto, the whole afternoon. He had just come out for a pee when he saw a group of Muslims running toward the temple with swords and tins of kerosene. Rajesh hid behind the tree, glad that he was shirtless and only wearing underwear and was thus less easy to spot in the dark. As he watched the Muslims throw lighted kerosene rags into the temple and run by to attack the house that he had just left, his only thought was that he would have died like his friends if he had not come out to ease his bladder.

  For Rajesh, the Muslim attack on Pardiwada was not entirely unexpected. His Muslim friends, a couple of whom he had known since childhood, had been warning him of just such an eventuality. ‘We are very worried about you,’ they would say as they drank tea in a hotel. ‘You are staying there, your wife and children are there. You should leave.’ One day before the attack, a Muslim friend told Rajesh to go away for a few days. ‘Why are you after my life?’ Rajesh replied in some irritation. ‘Whatever happens, will happen.’ Rajesh had reported the Muslim warnings to the community elders such as Dalyan Singh, the unofficial leader of the Shakkergunj Pardis. The police have made all arrangements for their safety, Rajesh was told, and Dalyan Singh pointed to the three policemen who had been assigned to Pardiwada and with whom he was playing cards.

  Running back from the temple, Rajesh met a distraught Dalyan Singh on the way. ‘The Muslims have attacked from all sides,’ Dalyan Singh said. ‘I am trying to find the policemen.’ Many Pardi men had come out. They tried to stop the attackers from entering the heart of Pardiwada by directing a barrage of stones at whichever corner a Muslim breakthrough seemed imminent. ‘The men of our community are brave. We were unarmed and still did not run away from their swords and spears.’ Later at night, as soon as Muslims began withdrawing from the heart of Pardiwada, Rajesh rushed to his sister’s house located at the outskirts. The door was closed from inside. Rajesh banged on the door, shouted and screamed, but there was no response. “It is all over,” I thought. “They are all dead. Everyone has been killed.” I went up to the police inspector. They were picking up a corpse. “My sister, and her family are dead,” I said. Then I saw them coming out of a neighbour’s house who is a Muslim. “We are here,” they said. The Muslim family had given them shelter, saved their lives.’

  When the police finally arrived, Rajesh was active in helping them identify the dead bodies and gather together the injured for further transport to the hospital. This was when he saw two men bring in a seriously wounded Dalyan Singh. He had been stabbed by Jafar, the men said. Jafar was the leader of the area’s Muslims and a friend of Dalyan Singh. The two had worked closely in the past, liaising with the city administration in keeping the relations between the Hindus and Muslims peaceful whenever there was communal tension in the city. (Later, it was discovered that the assassin was not Jafar but another man accompanying him.) At this time someone informed Rajesh that his ‘uncle’ had been killed and the body taken to Osmania hospital.

  The police jeep took a long time in coming, and Rajesh offered to take some of the seriously wounded to the hospital in his auto-rickshaw. He could then also claim his uncle’s body and bring it back. As he drove out of Pardiwada around one in the morning, his adrenaline-fuelled courage evaporated. He had to pass through Muslim areas where groups of men roamed the dark streets in shadowy, menacing packs. ‘I will surely die tonight,’ Rajesh thought, or rather felt, in his terror. But as the headlight of the rickshaw bore down on the men, they scattered into the bylanes. They had taken it to be a police motorcycle, and Rajesh, soon cottoning on, heightened the impression by driving at full throtle while roaring threats and abuse like a real police inspector.

  Osmania hospital, named after the last Nizam of Hyderabad, famed for both his wealth and his reluctance to spend it, was in total chaos. The harried doctors and staff were unable to cope with the stream of injured and dead descending on them from all over the city. Rajesh unloaded his grisly cargo on the floor of the admissions hall and hurried from one corridor to another searching for his uncle’s body in the piles of corpses that were haphazardly stacked outside the wards. He did not find his uncle’s body but became instrumental in saving the life of his niece, Pushpa. In one of the mounds of corpses, he saw a hand moving. As he tugged at the hand and pulled out the body, he saw it was Pushpa, who was still alive although uncons
cious with a severe head injury. A passing doctor was successfully importuned and cajoled into arranging for surgery, and Pushpa was saved.

  Rajesh returned to Pardiwada to find the Pardis preparing to move out of their homes. ‘I was against such a step and vehemently protested. To evacuate is to run away. It was a question of our self-respect. It would always stand as a shameful black mark against our community. But rumours were going around, “The Muslims have attacked here; they have attacked there.” People were getting very frightened. Then Jaggu and Suraj pehlwans appeared on the scene. “We have brought trucks,” they said. “The basti must be vacated immediately.” I was still unhappy but followed their instructions. My brother refused to leave. I was very angry. If everyone else was leaving what was the need for him to stay? I asked the police to help and they forced him to come with us. The trucks brought us to Gandhi Bhawan.’

  It was my strong impression that the mental processing of the events of the riot is different in women. It is not only that women’s memories of the riot tend to be circumscribed by what happened inside the house rather than outside and that their anxieties are centred around the danger to their children. With women, anger at Muslims is not the baffled rage I encountered among men. Women also find it easier to think and plan of moving away from their endangered homes, to leave it all behind and get on with their lives. Men seem to find it more difficult to free themselves from the impact of recent violent events. They agonize over leaving Pardiwada and the implications such a move may have for their own self-respect and the community’s sense of honour. The men brood over the events of the riot more. They take the betrayal by their Muslim neighbours, who they believe helped the violent mob by identifying the Hindu houses (if they themselves were not a part of the mob), much more personally. Their sense of betrayal and perfidy is perhaps due to the fact that the men’s relationships with their Muslim neighbours were more personal; some were even friends. Women’s friendships were (and are) firmly within the Hindu community. With their Muslim women neighbours, the relationship was limited to the exchange of polite greetings. Women do not have to deal with the trauma of the neighbour suddenly being revealed as a deadly enemy to quite the same extent as do the men.

  Although the riots have had an impact on the friendships between Hindus and Muslims, not all of these friendships, especially those that go back to childhood, have snapped completely because of the heightened conflict and violence between the communities. As an outsider, it is difficult to judge the depth of a friendship, and it may be, as studies across the borders of other antagonistic groups such as the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland and the French and the English in Quebec have suggested, that such friendships are more illusory than real or are qualitatively different from one’s friendships within one’s own in-group.5 This particular social-psychological theory predicts that such friendships can be maintained when individuals dwell upon their similarities rather than differences, avoid the divisive issue of religious affiliation, and shape their interactions so that the salience of their group membership—of one friend being a Hindu and the other a Muslim—is lowered. It appears from my observations, however, that the salience of one’s religious group membership is not lowered by avoiding the issue, at least as far as deep friendship is concerned. Such an avoidance may smooth the course of fleeting Hindu–Muslim encounters that are temporary from the very outset. The maintenance of lasting Hindu–Muslim friendships, on the other hand, seems to demand (and never more so than after a riot) that the fact of friends belonging to antagonistic groups be squarely confronted before being negated as of little consequence. Rajesh, for instance, in the days following the riot, openly berated his Muslim friends for what their coreligionists had done to the Pardis. In more normal circumstances, friends seek to periodically dissipate the tension which arises from antagonistic religious affiliations by jokingly addressing each other deliberately in negative stereotypical terms such as, ‘Come here, O you Hindu idolator,’ ‘you Muslim violator of four wives,’ and so on. Such a joking relationship between friends strives to reduce the antagonism which has its source in the conflict of their religious groups by acknowledging the difference while at the same time downplaying it.

  Many Pardi families, including that of Satish, Badli Pershad’s eldest son, moved out of Pardiwada to safer areas after the riot. Some of them have come back for reasons of both economics and sentiment. It goes without saying that they missed the homes they had grown up in. They missed the nutrients for the soul provided by the closely knit community life they had left behind to settle among strangers. They have also been unable to sell their Pardiwada houses at reasonable prices. The only interested buyers are Muslims and, though Pardis would reluctantly reconcile themselves to the idea of selling an ancestral home to a Muslim, the prices quoted are very low—the Muslim buyers content to wait till the Pardis’ fear of staying on becomes greater than the wish.

  The disruption in their lives caused by the riot has been considerable. ‘When we all sit together to talk, certain things bring back the memories of that day, especially the sight of broken and empty houses,’ says Satish. ‘Even after so many months, we are very scared that it may happen again. Before we plan to celebrate any of our religious festivals on a community-wide basis, we think ten times about the likely consequences. The experience was terrifying! These days we feel a little more confident about staying here because a police picket has been permanently posted in Pardiwada. But you know the police are not very reliable. Where were they that evening? They arrived three hours after all the damage was done.

  ‘Our business has been badly hurt. We also used to sell our stuff in Muslim areas and most of the time we went in alone. Now we are afraid to go there even in small groups. I keep on thinking about going back to the place we moved out to after the riot. But our business runs on various personal contacts which I developed over the years. To start such a business in a new locality where you neither know the people nor the place becomes difficult.’

  Badli Pershad, who is resisting the family pressure to move out of the home he built forty years ago, is naturally more sanguine about the future. The next riot,’ he feels, ‘will not occur for another five to ten years because the last riot was very severe. Both the Hindus and Muslims suffered great losses and are fully involved in repairing and trying to restart their lives. Therefore they will have neither the time nor the inclination to trouble the other community.’ His children wish they could share his optimism about the force of human rationality.

  For the women, the riot has had the consequence of drastically reducing their freedom of movement. ‘We used to come out at night and play in small groups,’ says Lalita. ‘Now we can’t even sit out. The policemen shoo us back.’ The number of women who go out to buy fruits and vegetables from the Muslim wholesalers early in the morning has also declined. The women do not let the children venture far from their homes and have become especially watchful of the movements of young girls. ‘What if Muslim boys harass one of our daughters and another riot starts?’ asks Prema.

  ‘The relations with the Muslims of our own basti have become more formal. The older ones still address us as ‘daughters’ and claim they did not recognize our attackers in the dark. We cannot believe them. Earlier, the Muslims used to come when we invited them for any of our community celebrations and we went whenever they invited us for theirs. When Jafar’s daughter got married in Secunderabad, all of us went and helped in making the wedding arrangements. Now there are no more invitations, either from us or them.’ The riots have hastened the process of Pardi differentiation and separation from their Muslim neighbours. They have given another push toward making the Paradis more Hindu, contributed to a sharper etching of Hindu and Muslim identities.

  Pardis and Muslims: The Past

  The Pardis recollect their shared past with the Muslims with a measure of ambivalence. They are aware that their ancestors served the Muslims as farm labourers during the latter’s long rule and that
they have been influenced in many ways by their erstwhile masters. The influence is evident in the way they dispose of their dead, in the many Urdu words which have crept into their dialect, for example, valid for father, mazhab for religious faith; and, till recently, in the not too seldom use of Muslim names for their children. Rajesh’s wife Sakila, for instance, has a Muslim name, a fact of which he is deeply ashamed and for which he blames his illiterate in-laws who had no idea of the meaning and importance of names.

  In the more recent past, Satish recalls playing football, cricket, and kabaddi as a child with Muslim boys of the neighbourhood. He visited their homes freely, as they did his, and was even friendly with their womenfolk who did not observe any purdah in front of him. Accompanying his mother on her rounds through the Muslim areas, he would carry the fruits and vegetables right inside the houses and was never made to feel unwelcome. The understanding that existed between Hindus and Muslims of the previous generation, Satish says, has disappeared in the younger one which is a hot-blooded lot. Whereas the older Muslims were tolerant, the young ones are aggressive and are provoked to violence at the slightest of pretexts. Kamla Bai agrees with the assessment, as do others, that it was easy to live together with the older generation of Muslims but it is impossible to do so with the younger who are all turning into goondas.

  The easier coexistence in an earlier era does not mean that the Pardis ever liked the Muslims or did not feel resentful toward them. The Pardi version of the history of Hindu–Muslim conflict, articulated by Badli Pershad as an elder of the community, goes thus: ‘The clashes between Hindus and Muslims started long ago in the period of the Nizam and his razakars (a marauding, unofficial army) who were very cruel to the Hindus. They used to harass our girls, rape them. This happened not only in villages but even in Hyderabad. We feared the Muslims. The rule was theirs, the king was theirs, the police were theirs, so it was hard for the Hindus to resist. We were also poor and no one supports the poor. Some marwadis may have been well-off but the majority of Hindus was poor. The Muslims were close to the king. They were moneylenders, charging high rates of interest. Thus they were rich and the Hindus poor and though we lived together Muslims dominated the Hindus.