‘We never used to mingle closely with them. Hindus feared Muslims a lot. They were very aggressive. They eat bada gosht (beef) which kept Hindus away from them. They used to prepare kheer (rice pudding) on their festival days but they cooked it in the same vessels. So we never ate even the vegetarian food they sent to our houses. People only drank tea together.
‘Anyway when the oppression of the Hindus came to the notice of our leaders in Delhi, they wanted to do something about it as the British were not going to help. After Independence all the leaders wanted Hyderabad to become a part of Hindustan but Gandhi was hesitant. So Nehru, Patel, and Rajendra Prasad felt Gandhi needed to be eliminated and had Gandhi killed. Then they could free the Hindus in Hyderabad from Muslim rule.’
Badli Pershad’s account of Hindu–Muslim relations in the pre-Independence era, except for his version of the murder of the Mahatma which not every one agreed with, represents a popular consensus among the Pardis. As the historian Lowenthal has observed, it is only academic versions of the past which are variable, contested and subject to different interpretations; popular history, on the other hand, is a timeless mirror which gives accurate reflections of historical events, beyond questioning or doubt.6
Image of the Muslim
The two chief components of the contemporary Pardi image of Muslims are of the powerful and the animal-like Muslim. Shared alike by men and women, the image of the Muslim’s power seems to be more pronounced in men. The image of the antagonist’s powerfulness is certainly influenced by the Pardis’ direct experience of being an embattled enclave in the walled city, surrounded by a numerically greater Muslim host. It also contains their historical memory of being serfs on the farms and estates of Muslim landlords. This image of Muslim power is in relation to the Hindus’ lack of it. What is repeatedly stressed is the weak Hindus—weak because divided—rapidly losing ground against a united and purposeful nation. ‘Anything happens in a Muslim community, they all become one. We don’t because of our different castes. Every caste has its own customs and lifestyle.’
‘We are not united. Each one is engrossed in himself. The rich try to exploit the poor. This does not happen with the Muslims. Though they have rich and poor at least at the time of prayer they are one and they all do it together at the same time. It develops unity among them. Our system is not like that. Each one goes to the temple to perform puja at his own time and in his own way and then leaves. There is no communication between us. If we could also show togetherness in our prayers, we would definitely become united and stronger than the Muslims.’
‘The problem with the Hindus is that because of the number of castes they are not united. Reddys fight with Kapus, Pardis fight with Komtis, Yadavs fight with Naidus. If only they could unite like the Muslims! Muslims may be small in number but their do’s and don’ts with regard to religion are very strict and they are forced to gather together at least for the Friday prayer. Their leaders use these occasions to forge religious unity. I don’t speak Arabic but I am told many fiery speeches are made in mosques every Friday afternoon where they talk of driving the Hindus away from Hyderabad and making their own independent Pakistan here.’
The Muslim is powerful because he is united, armed, favoured by the state in India and supported, perhaps even armed, by a state outside, Pakistan.
‘Muslims have a constant supply of weapons coming from Pakistan or maybe they are locally made. They are always well-stocked. Even the poorest Muslim house will have at least a butcher’s knife because they all eat meat. Hindus are not so well-equipped. If the government continues to please the Muslims and makes rules against the Hindu majority, these riots will continue forever. If processions are to be banned, both Ganesh and Muharram processions should be banned. Why is only the Ganesh procession banned? It is like blessing and protecting only one community (sir par hath rakhna) and behaving like a stepmother toward the other.’
‘They want to dominate us. Just see how they are planning to make the old city into a Pakistan. In Hyderabad, the mosques always had four minarets. But now they have started building mosques with a single minaret, just like in Pakistan. Hindus are willing to adjust but Muslims are stubborn. Our government also supports them. On Shivratri day, the markets will be closed but during Muharram they will remain open day and night. Why?’
It was strikingly apparent that the Pardis’ self-identification as Hindus occurs only when they talk of the Muslim; otherwise the conversation is of Pardis, Lodhas, Brahmins, Marwadis, and other castes. It seems a Hindu is born only when the Muslim enters. Hindus cannot think of themselves as such without a simultaneous awareness of the Muslim’s presence. This is not so for the Muslim, who does not need the Hindu for self-awareness. The presence of the Hindu may increase the Muslim sense of identity but does not constitute it. Little wonder that Hindutva needs ‘the Muslim question’ for the creation of a united Hindu community and the expansion of its political base and, in fact, will find it difficult to exist without it.
In the bitter complaints directed at the government, the mai-baap (‘mother-father’) of an earlier era, the psychoanalyst cannot help but hear echoes of a collective sibling rivalry, of the group-child’s envy and anger at the favouring of an ambivalently regarded sibling by the parent. This does not mean that there is no factual basis to these accusations, but only that, like many other such perceptions in the emotionally charged area of Hindu–Muslim relations, they are neither merely real nor merely psychological.
The image of Muslim animality is composed of the perceived ferocity, rampant sexuality, and demand for instant gratification of the male, and a dirtiness which is less a matter of bodily cleanliness and more of an inner pollution as a consequence of the consumption of forbidden, tabooed foods. This image is an old one, also found in S. C. Dube’s thirty-year-old anthropological account of a village outside Hyderabad: ‘The Muslims are good only in two things—they eat and copulate like beasts. Who else except a Muslim would even think of going to bed with his uncle’s daughter, who is next only to his real sister?’7
Badli Pershad contrasts Hindu and Muslim sexual natures explicitly: ‘Muslims always had an eye for our women. This habit persists. Good thoughts and thoughts of God come into their minds only when they shout ‘Allah-o-Akbar! ’ Rest of the time they simply forget morality and go on sexually harassing our women. We never took a single woman of theirs. They used to take ours all the time. They were rich and the rulers and did what they wanted. We are moral (dharmic) and would never do such things even if rich. We treat all women as mothers and sisters. They force themselves on women; they are obsessed by women and sex. Look at all the children they produce, dozens, while we are content with two or three.’
Most Pardi women concur with these views and in fact go further in linking the outbreak of violence to the ‘fact’ of the Muslim’s lewd sexual nature. Kamla Bai remarks, ‘Muslim boys are especially prone to harass our girls. Unlike Muslim girls, we leave our women free to walk around and even go out of the basti if they wish to. Many times the girls are victims of very vulgar behaviour on the part of Muslim boys. If it was only kept to the verbal level, it is O.K. But the Muslims often use physical harassment. This makes our boys very angry. Sometimes these fights take on a communal colouring and in the past they have been the main triggers for the outbreak of riots.’
The Muslim animality also lies in a heedless pursuit of pleasure without any regard for the concerns and obligations which make one human. ‘Their children are completely spoilt. They drink a lot. They are used to a carefree, uninhibited life. The young ones are only interested in enjoyment. Everything they do is for enjoyment. Hindus are cowards because they are worried about cultivating the land, education for their children, and so many other things. Muslims don’t worry at all.’
The Pardi image of the Muslim and the arguments employed for its construction are strikingly similar to the ones used by the sangh parivar to attract Hindus to its cultural and political fold. (Whether this convergence
of perceptions is due to the sangh parivar’s articulation of a widespread Hindu sentiment or whether it is the parivar’s creation through a manipulation of Hindu symbols is a question I shall discuss later.) In any event, an understanding of this component of the Hindu image of the Muslim gives us an insight into how people belonging to a vastly superior demographic majority can still psychologically experience themselves as an endangered minority.
Viewing an antagonistic group as dirty, and thus subhuman, whereas one’s own cleanliness is not only humanely civilized but next to godliness, is commonplace in ethnic conflict. ‘Dirty nigger’ and ‘dirty Jew’ are well-known epithets in the United States. The Chinese regard Tibetans as unwashed and perpetually stinking of yak butter, while Jewish children in Israel are brought up to regard Arabs as dirty. In the Rwandan radio broadcasts inciting the Hutus to massacre the Tutsis, the latter were consistently called rats and cockroaches, creatures associated with dirt and underground sewers, vermin needing to be exterminated. Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims, the Turks and Kurds, and so many other groups in conflict are outraged by each other’s dirtiness. Again, there may be a grain of reality in some of the accusations because of a particular group’s poverty, food habits, or the climatic conditions of its habitat. If the attribution of dirtiness falters against too great a discrepancy in factual reality, it will no longer be attributed to the opponent’s body but to the soul. In some ways, the dirtiness is now even worse; it is a moral dirtiness which is more than skin deep, a blackness of the heart.
As a poverty-stricken community, the Pardis are not in a position to call Muslims physically dirty, an accusation which is more the province of the higher Hindu castes. One of the jokes I remember from my childhood is of the Muslim saying to the Hindu, ‘You Hindus are so dirty. You have a bath today and then [now speaking in an exaggeratedly slow drawl] you will baathe agaain tomoorrow. But we Muslims, we have a bath [in a rapid fire delivery] Friday-to-Friday, Friday-to-Friday!’ ‘The Muslims who work are dirty, others are not. We work hard to survive. So where is the time for us to appear neat and clean?’ asks Badli Pershad plaintively. Muslims, however, are dirty in a more fundamental way; they eat beef.
Beef eating is the most heinous of sins among the Pardis (as it is among most Hindus), a more serious violation of the moral code than marriage to a Muslim or conversion to Islam. ‘Bada gosht (beef) is their favourite dish. If any of us even touches it he must have a bath. All Muslims eat bada gosht. That is why we keep ourselves away from them. We do not even drink water in their homes,’ says Lalita.
‘We pray to the cow because it is our (mother-goddess) Lakshmi. Hindus revere even cow dung, use it for cooking, decorating the house and for many other things. They eat the cow!’ says Badli Pershad, his disgust palpable.
The Muslim eating and the Hindu abomination of beef creates an effective barrier between the two; it is difficult to be close to someone with whom one cannot share a meal and whose eating habits one finds disgusting.
Gandhi, Psychoanalysts and Cows
The Muslim eating of beef and thus the killing of cows has perhaps historically been the most important source of Hindu bitterness toward the Muslim. In Tipu Sultan’s dominions, Abbé Dubois tells us, though Hindus witnessed the slaughter of cows without uttering loud complaint, they were far from insensible to the insult, contenting themselves with complaining in secret and storing up in their hearts all the indignation they felt about this sacrilege.8 Pious Lingayats came up to the abbé with tears in their eyes, imploring him to use his influence as a priest with the local Europeans to stop them from eating beef. Hindus who had been forcibly converted to Islam could not reconvert even if they had eaten beef only under duress. From the nineteenth century onward, Hindu revivalism has been closely associated with movements against cow slaughter.
The ferocity of Hindu emotions, chiefly disgust at the eating of beef and rage at the slaughter of cows, would automatically draw attention from psychoanalysts for whom the presence of strong emotions in a relationship implies the operation of unconscious factors. In 1924, the British army psychiatrist Owen Berkeley-Hill wrote a paper on the theme of Hindu–Muslim conflict, a paper which served as a topic for discussion at the meeting of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society in Calcutta to which Gandhi was also invited.9 In this essay, Berkeley-Hill identifies two main hurdles in the way of Hindu–Muslim unity. The first is the Hindu’s ‘motherland complex’ wherein the ancient cults of mother-goddesses have become associated with the ideas of woman, virgin, mother, and motherland—Bharat Mata—which the Muslims violated through their conquest of India. (The colonel does not explain why there is no such Hindu bitterness against the British for a similar ‘violation’.) The second obstacle is the Muslim slaughter of cows which, Berkeley-Hill tries to establish, were once a totem animal for the Hindus (as it still continues to be for certain tribes in central and south India) and thus an object of the ambivalent feelings of cherishing and destruction which are directed against all totems. Following Freud’s ideas in Totem and Taboo, Berkeley-Hill argues that one who violates a taboo, becomes a taboo and thus an object of detestation—more especially in the case of the Muslim because the violation of the taboo, the cow slaughter, often took place to ratify Muslim victories or show contempt for Hindu susceptibilities. The violators of a taboo are contagious and must be avoided for they arouse both envy (why should they be allowed to do what is prohibited to others?) and the forbidden desire to emulate the act. Christians and Jews, who also kill cows, do not provoke the same hostility because they do not kill cows ceremonially as do the Muslims or with a clear intention of offering insult to the Hindu. Berkeley-Hill’s solution,
...in line with the fundamental ideas which underlie totemism [is that] any reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims would demand as a cardinal feature some form of ceremonial in which cows would be killed and eaten, either actually or symbolically, by Hindus and Muslims in conclave. It is quite conceivable that this killing and eating of cows could be so arranged as to fulfil every demand from a psychological standpoint without involving the death of a single animal, although in view of the great issues at stake, namely the formation of a real and permanent pact between Hindus and Muslims, the actual sacrifice of every cow in India would hardly be too big a price to pay.10
We do not know what Mahatma Gandhi, a strict vegetarian who shared the Vaishnava veneration of the cow, thought of this suggestion.
Even at a distance of seventy years, Berkeley-Hill’s paper remains intriguing, although Freud’s ideas on totemism have fallen into oblivion. I am surprised that, given the wealth of evidence and the ubiquity of Hindu worship and references to the cow as mother, Berkeley-Hill did not simply include the cow in the Hindu’s ‘motherland complex’ but sought a separate explanation in terms of totem and taboo. Any unconscious Hindu ambivalence toward the eating of beef, which he might have observed underlying a conscious abhorrence, could then be traced back to the infant’s ambivalence toward the maternal body and the breast it cherishes and would keep alive but also tears at and would destroy. But, of course, Melanie Klein had not yet formulated her theories of infant love and violence, guilt and reparation, and Berkeley-Hill, who was in charge of the Ranchi psychiatric hospital, used the theories he had available to explain his observations, though they now seem forced.
Muslim ‘animality,’ as expressed in dirtiness and the male’s perceived aggressivity and sexual licentiousness are of course a part of human ‘instinctuality’ which a civilized, moral self must renounce. The animality not only belongs to an individual past—to infancy and early childhood—which needs to be transcended by the institution of a constantly endangered adult moral self, but also to the Pardis’ collective past which is still a part of their folk memory. Visions from the past of themselves as aggressive hunters, killing and eating whatever animals are available (perhaps also the cow?), drinking and lazing around in the village without a thought for the future, are too dangerous to the cultural identity the Par
dis are now trying to construct for themselves and others. The Muslim must be kept at a distance because that animality is too near, even within, the Pardi self.
Here, the Pardis are not different from Hindus in many other parts of India. Some years ago, while studying the phenomenon of possession by spirits in rural north India, I was struck by the fact that in a very large number of cases, fifeen out of twenty-eight, the malignant spirit possessing Hindu men and women turned out to be a Muslim.11 When, during the healing ritual, the patient went into a trance and the spirit started expressing its wishes, these wishes—for forbidden sexuality and prohibited foods—invariably turned out to be those which would have been horrifying to the patient’s conscious self. Possession by a Muslim spirit, then, seemed to reflect afflicted persons’ desperate efforts to convince themselves and others that their imagined transgressions and sins of the heart belonged to the Muslim destroyer of taboos and were farthest away from their ‘good’ Hindu selves. In that Muslim spirits were universally considered to be the strongest, vilest, the most malignant and the most stubborn of the evil spirits, the Muslim seemed to symbolize the alien in the more unconscious parts of the Hindu mind.
The reasons why Muslims are the hated out-group for the Hindus (and vice versa)—rather than the Sikhs, Parsis, or Christians in India, or the ‘modern West’ outside the country—have not only to do with the sheer size of the Muslim minority which can thus withstand the absorptive and disintegrative pressure of the Hindu majority. They lie also in certain social–psychological axioms on scapegoating and displacement of aggression which have been systematically listed by Robert Le Vine and Donald Campbell and that seem to fit the case of Hindus and Muslims to a tee:12
Colours of Violence Page 16
