An out-group is a target for hostility if it is a source of frustration in its own right, as Hindus have perceived Muslims to be over centuries.
An out-group with the most disparaging images of the in-group, as Muslims have of the Hindus, and whose ethnocentrism the in-group is in a position to ‘overhear,’ will be the most hated.
The out-group which is seen as the most ethnocentric, in terms of unwarranted self-esteem—the Hindu view of Muslims—will be the most hated.
The most hated out-group will be the one which is used most as a bad example in child training. In other words, groups indoctrinate their young as to against which targets to vent their hostility.
The existence of the image of the Muslim I have described above, with all its unconscious reverberations, does not mean that a coexistence of the communities, at least in the public arena, is impossible. The hope for such a coexistence comes from many directions. First, there are many instances of Muslims and Hindus protecting each other during a riot. Badli Pershad’s own daughter and her family escaped certain death by taking shelter with their Muslim neighbour who, at some risk to his own safety, did not betray their presence to the marauding mob. Second, often enough there are acknowledgements of their common ancestry and the recognition that the two communities have to share the same physical space. ‘We love our jaat,’ says Badli Pershad, using jaat more in the sense of a way of life than a physical group. ‘They love theirs. We should live together because we have the same blood.’
The Pardis would be willing to go even further in seeking this coexistence by accepting intermarriage with the Muslims, but they believe that here they come up against a Muslim inflexibility about matters of faith, even bigotry. Badli Pershad elaborates: ‘Actually I feel marriage between Hindus and Muslims would be one method of building communal harmony. But in my opinion Hindus should never make the mistake of marrying Muslims because the Hindu is not allowed to retain his or her religion at any cost. So many of our women have got married to Muslims, either because they were in love or by force because these women were working as servants in Muslim households. None of them has been allowed to remain a Hindu or practice Hindu religion. All of them have been converted whereas the same cannot be said of the Hindus. They are more tolerant and allow the other person to follow whatever religion he or she wants.
‘We used to have a young Muslim girl coming to our house a few years ago. She was my daughter’s friend. She used to spend long hours in our house. Although her family did not like her visiting us she continued to do so. She would discuss many things about Islam and the Hindu dharma with me, and one day she stated that if she marries at all she will marry a Hindu only and not a Muslim, because the Hindu religion is more humanitarian and tolerant and not as violent as Islam. She married one of our men and to this day she practices both Islam and Hinduism. She not only observes rozas (a month of ritual fasting), Muharram, celebrates Bakr-Id but also installs Ganesha idols in her house, celebrates Diwali and Dussehra and participates in the Holi festival along with all of us. Her children have both Hindu and Muslim names. They were living happily as a family when the mother of the girl started telling her Hindu son-in-law that he should convert to Islam. When the boy did not agree, they started threatening him. ‘This is the problem with Muslims. They are so particular about their religion. Even the suggestion of conversion or practising the Hindu religion can spark off another riot.
‘Unfortunately, it is more frequent for Hindu girls to marry Muslim boys. This is partly because Hindu girls are not kept in purdah like the Muslim girls and therefore come into contact with Muslim boys. We do not get even a chance to see a Muslim girl once she attains puberty. And love is such a thing that, once bitten by it, our girls seem to forget everything about their community or religion or family. They are willing to do whatever their husbands want. They get converted, their children carry Muslim names, go to madarsas, learn the Qur’an but nothing about any other religion. The tragedy is that some of the women who married Muslims twenty-five, thirty years ago are now old and deserted by their husbands. This woman sitting here was married to a Muslim and had four children. Her husband has left her and refuses to pay a minimum maintenance. She used to earn something when she was healthier and younger. Now she is ill and goes from house to house begging for her daily food. She has no home, sleeps wherever she can, and no one treats her well. Our people don’t accept her because they think it was wrong for her to marry a Muslim. That is why I think it is important to hold on to the religion of our ancestors under all circumstances. Otherwise, you not only lose the respect of your community but the other community also looks down upon you.’
It is difficult to say to what extent the Pardi attitudes toward Muslims are shared by other Hindus in Hyderabad or are generalizable to Hindus in the rest of the country. On the one hand, as victims of recent riots one may expect the Pardis to be especially bitter. On the other, they are a lower, ‘scheduled’ caste, and we know from other studies that higher-caste Hindus evaluate Muslims much more unfavourably than the lower castes.13
Children’s Tales
To get some impressions of the way children view and experience Hindu–Muslim conflict, I adapted the ‘toy construction’ method used by Erik Erikson in his research on the identity development of Californian boys and girls in the 1940s.14 Using toys such as a family, some uniformed figures, wild and domestic animals, furniture, automobiles, and wooden blocks, Erikson asked the ten- to twelve-year-olds to imagine that the table was a movie studio; the toys, actors and props; and they themselves, movie directors. They were to arrange on the table an exciting scene from an imaginary movie. My own toys consisted of two families of dolls, each with a set of grandparents, parents, and four young children divided equally between the sexes. The dolls were identifiable as Hindu or Muslim from their dress or other markers of religious group identity: long black burqas for Muslim women, sarees and bindis for the Hindus; pyjamas, sherwanis, round caps and beards for Muslim men, dhotis, kurtas and turbans for the Hindus. In addition to the Hindu and Muslim dolls, there were the dolls of a man in a uniform with a gun slung over one shoulder, of two sinister-looking masked men in undershirts and jeans, and of a few domestic animals such as a cow, a sheep, and a dog. The dolls were placed on a stool next to a large wooden table which was used as the stage. The instructions to the child were to imagine himself or herself as a film director—the children are avid fans of popular Hindi cinema—and to construct an exciting scene for the shooting of a film, using as many or as few dolls as desired. The child was then asked to identify the dolls and after the mise-en-scène was over, the young director was asked to describe what was happening in the scene and why. The test, conducted in the one-room school next to the temple, aroused great excitement, and it was not easy to keep hordes of enthusiastic volunteers of all ages from pushing and shoving their way into the room to get into the action, or to stop them from shouting comments through the window which had to be kept open because of the heat. Hyderabad not being San Francisco and Pardiwada not being Berkeley, it was impossible to conduct the proceedings as a ‘standardized test under controlled conditions’ and therefore I will dispense with reporting my results in the proper scientific format in favour of more informal observations.
The sample consisted of fifteen boys and fifteen girls, ranging in age from ten to fifteen, with a median age of thirteen for both boys and girls. The lower age limit of ten was determined by trial and error since we found that the task was not comprehensible to a child below that age—not that I had much confidence in the reported ages.
Both boys (twelve out of fifteen) and girls (eleven out of fifteen) made an immediate identification of the dolls as Hindu or Muslim. The three boys and two of the four girls who first identified the dolls in terms of age or gender and had to be prodded to make the religious identification, were younger children of eleven or less, confirming the findings of other studies that awareness of one’s own religious affiliation and the prejudice
against religious out-groups increases with age.15 Boys typically used a large part or the whole of the stage and were generally more confident in the construction of the exciting scene than girls, who tended to start from a corner of the table and then gingerly spread out to use a bigger part of the stage, though rarely as much as the boys. The different approaches by boys and girls to the task and the use of stage space is intriguing, and some speculations accounting for gender difference are certainly in order. One could hypothesize that the different use of a public, even an exhibitionistic space, simply reflects the relative positions of boys and girls in a Pardi family where, in spite of the women’s relative social freedom and economic importance, the boy is still at the centre of the stage while the girl hugs the corner. I could also speculate that the imaginative activity required by the task has an object of identification (film director) and a content (exciting theatre) that are closer to a boy’s than a girl’s imagination in this particular social group. Another line of argument, complementary to the other two, would hold that these particular uses of space are expressions of a broader male–female difference in patriarchal societies. The work of Luce Irigaray on women’s language, especially with regard to syntax, suggests that women do not put themselves in the centre of the space they open by their utterance.16 Their subject is hesitant, open to interaction, asking questions rather than asserting. The male subject, on the other hand, is easily dominant, at the centre of the stage, operating in terms of an expanded ‘we’.
In the construction of the exciting scene, boys generally arranged Muslim and Hindu dolls in separate groups engaged in some kind of violent confrontation. The fighting between Hindus and Muslims (presented by ten of the fifteen boys) is relatively absent in girls’ constructions, where only three of the fifteen girls staged such scenes of conflict. Girls use dolls to construct peaceful scenes from family life, even when they identify the families as Hindu and Muslim. Their stories emphasize relationships between the characters, couples watching animals, and, especially, parents watching children play. Hindu and Muslim dolls are often mixed together. The excitement occurs at the periphery of the scene: a fight between the policeman and a robber, animals being chased by a goonda, a man running away from a soldier. A typical scene constructed by a fifteen-year-old boy has a Hindu wedding taking place at the centre of the stage, the Hindus watching the dancers. They are surrounded by four Muslims, one in each corner, two of whom are identified as goondas. The Hindu dolls move closer together for protection, wondering how to save themselves. The police doll runs away. Rather than be killed by the Muslims, the Hindus commit suicide.
A scene by a girl, a thirteen-year-old in this case, has Hindu and Muslim families in semi-circles next to each other, along with the animals who are an integral part of the tableau. The Hindu family is having coffee and bread. The Muslim family is saying its prayers. Small children are playing. The excitement of the scene is in a corner where a goonda is being chased by the policeman after a robbery.
The Muslim children, nine boys and nine girls from Karwan, the other location of this study, ranged in age from ten to fifteen with a median age of thirteen years. They did not differ from the Hindu children as far as immediate identification of the dolls as Hindu or Muslim was concerned the younger children having more difficulty than older ones in identifying the dolls according to their religious rather than gender affiliation or according to age. Like the Hindus, the Muslim girls were shyer than the boys in their approach to the task and used less of the stage space for their constructions. As with the Hindus, less than half the Muslim children constructed scenes of violent confrontation between the communities although the distribution of the scenes between girls and boys was different from the Hindu sample. Whereas somewhat more Muslim than Hindu girls (40 per cent versus 20 per cent) constructed scenes of conflict, Muslim boys showed significantly less interest than Hindu boys in communal violence (20 per cent versus 70 per cent). It is not that violence as the source of excitement was absent from the scenes of Muslim boys. The violence in their story lines was, so to say, more traditional—between policemen and robbers or the hero and the villaln, the goonda. The fantasy of Muslim boys is thus more of the Hindi film variety wherein a hero skilled in one of the martial arts such as karate rescues a damsel in distress from the unwelcome attentions of the goonda. Though the pehlwan as a hero occurs in one of the stories, I am afraid that in children’s fantasy traditional wrestling is being consigned to oblivion and is being replaced with the more modern import of karate. The fantasy of Muslim boys has not yet been overlaid by the real-life events of the riots to the same extent as in the case of the Pardi boys. I can only account for this difference by the children’s actual experience of the riots. The experience of the Muslim boys from Karwan has never been as traumatic as that of the Pardi boys who have seen their homes burned and their close relatives killed by an attacking Muslim mob.
On the other hand, the dolls of the army soldier and the policeman play a greater role in the constructions of the Muslim children, either as hostile figures (‘The soldier has been helping the Hindus and not Muslims’) or a benign presence (‘The army is telling the Hindus and Muslims not to fight’). This reflects the actual experience of the children in Karwan where police and paramilitary forces have often been employed to patrol the area during a riot or to conduct house-to-house searches for hidden arms. Reflecting their experience of the riots, the Muslim children are also much less informed than the Hindu boys about the ‘causes’ of Hindu–Muslim confrontation; the Hindu boys often ascribe the outbreak of communal violence to the Muslims’ throwing of bada gosht into a temple.
Two examples will give a flavour of the children’s stories:
A twelve-year-old boy, studying in the sixth class, immediately identifies the dolls as Hindu or Muslim. He uses all the toys and the full stage for the construction of his scene where the Hindus and Muslims are not in any kind of confrontational posture, although the Hindu dolls are clustered together on one side. He explains the scene thus: ‘The animals are saying to each other, “Don’t fight among yourselves. It gives other animals a chance to come in your area.” The army man is telling the Hindus that they should think of their country and not trouble the Muslims. The Muslims are saying their Eid prayers. The older Muslim woman is telling other women (including the Hindu women) that a good woman always wears a veil (burqa) and they should all do so.’
A thirteen-year-old girl, who studied till the third class and is now a school dropout, also identifies the dolls immediately and uses all the toys for the construction of her scene which takes up half the stage. She explains: ‘Hindus and Muslims are fighting. [She doesn’t know why.] First, the children fight then the adults. The soldier is saying don’t fight. The Hindus brought in a goonda to attack the Muslims. The Muslims brought in a karate expert who put the goonda to flight.’
To summarize: In spite of the endemic Hindu–Muslim violence in the old city of Hyderabad, less than half the children constructed scenes of this violence in their play constructions. This number may be seen as too large or too small depending on one’s own inclination to view the glass of Hindu–Muslim relations as half empty or half full. In any event, a communal orientation is present in a significant number of children between the ages of ten and fifteen. This orientation, however, varies with age—older children being more communal in their imagination than younger ones—and with gender—girls, especially Hindu girls, prefer to construct scenes from family life rather than from communal conflict. Scenes of Hindu–Muslim violence, when they are created, seem to express the child’s unresolved anxiety in relation to his or her personal experience of the riot—for instance, the fear of imminent death at the hands of an attacking Muslim mob in the case of the Pardi boys. Unsurprisingly, the direct, personal experience of a riot as a victim is the strongest impetus to the development of religious hatred and communal imagination in a child.
In conclusion, let me note that both Hindus and Muslims do not
perceive their conflict in terms of local issues but as one involving the ‘essential’ nature of a Hindu or Muslim which does not change over history. Such an essentialization, found in many other ethnic conflicts (such as the one between the Jews and the Blacks in New York, where local issues get linked to the perceived global nature of the ‘Jew’ or the ‘Negro’), will always make a conflict more intractable.
Victims and Others: II. The Muslims
Karwan or, to give it back its original name, Karwane-Sahu (‘caravan of merchants’), was planned as a camp for traders when Hyderabad was being built. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was a thriving commercial area with many inns, mosques, and storehouses for the convenience of merchants from all over India and abroad who camped here on their trading visits to Hyderabad. During the Qutub Shahi period most of the Gujarati and Marwadi merchants lived here. Today, Karwan is one of the most economically backward sections of the city.
Dotted with mosques, graveyards, and dargahs, the Muslim character of Karwan is unmistakable. The shops in the cobbled streets sell cheap goods requiring low financial investment: spices, bangles, metal scrap, a small assortment of Indian sweets and savouries. There are the inevitable ‘general stores’ which stock most of the items needed by a poor neighbourhood from pencils for children to hair oil, packets of inferior brands of tea, and cheap detergents for the household. Some of the streets have Hindu women vegetable sellers squatting at the edges along with their young daughters. With their oiled black hair rolled into buns and their mouths stained a brick red from chewing tobacco or betel nut, the women sit behind heaps of fresh vegetables which are kept moistly glistening by frequent sprinklings of water. Cars—except for old, beat-up Ambassadors—are rare, yet the streets still manage to be clogged with pedestrians, auto- and cycle-rickshaws, bicycles, and the rattling buses of Hyderabad’s road transport system.
Colours of Violence Page 17
