Occasionally employed in road construction, as grave diggers, or as kitchen helpers in large weddings, many men have only intermittent work. Others are vegetable sellers and rickshaw drivers while a few lucky ones work in the factories of the new city or at low-paid jobs in government offices. The few signs of affluence are manifested in newly built houses—‘Gulf money’, one is invariably told—and in restaurants on street corners owned by Muslims in city politics or in ‘land business’ (Majid Khan’s restaurant is on one of these street corners). These eateries and the pan shops which stay open late into the night are places where the men like to congregate to talk and catch up with news and friends.
Rashid’s family lives in one of the lanes of Kulsumpura which forms the southern part of Karwan. Rashid’s house is on a lane at the edge of the Muslim quarter, the street at the back of the house separating it from the Hindu majority area. Each lane in Kulsumpura has twenty-five to thirty-five houses on either side, with a meandering ribbon of open space of varying width between them which at its narrowest permits only one bicycle to pass through at a time. The houses are generally one room tenements with thatched or tiled roofs. They are kept scrupulously clean. The mud floor, given a fresh mud coating at least once a month, is covered with faded cotton durries or, among the poorest, with pieces of jute sacking stitched together. The access to the inside of the houses is guarded by flimsy wooden doors, barely supported at the hinges. Worn-out curtains hang at the entrance, their varying heights often permitting glimpses of the dark shapes of women and children moving inside the room. Although nominally in purdah, there are times during the day, especially at mid-morning, when one sees groups of women sitting in the doorways, chatting, chopping betel nuts into small pieces or shaving them into mottled brown slivers while they keep a watchful eye on the children playing outside. Twice a day, in the early mornings and late afternoons, at the public water tap provided by the municipal corporation, the women come to fetch buckets of water for daily use. Unlike women in Hindu areas, the Muslim women in Kulsumpura are not seen bathing their children or washing clothes at the tap, the community norms dictating that they be out in the open for as little time as possible. Yet even as they wait their turns with the bucket, the water tap becomes the women’s counterpart of the restaurant or the pan-stall of men—a meeting place to exchange views, information, and gossip, mostly of a familial kind rather than the more political exchanges favoured by the men.
Rashid’s Family
With eight years of schooling, the fifty-five-year-old Rashid is the most educated person in his family. Nominally headed by his mother who is in her eighties, the family consists of a sixty-five-year-old brother, a forty-eight-year-old younger brother, a widowed sister in her late sixties, and another thirty-eight-year-old sister, all of whom live with their own families in separate households next to each other. With five to six children in each household, the extended family consists of about thirty persons.
Rashid’s occupation is that of an occasional vegetable seller. Both his brothers are unemployed. The elder brother earns a little money by helping out as a cook at weddings. The younger brother runs errands for one of the ‘big men’ of Kulsumpura who owns a restaurant and is active in local politics. The brother-in-law drives a cycle-rickshaw and one of his nephews sells vegetables. Two others, in their early twenties, are unemployed. Unlike the Pardi women, the Muslim women only work from their homes. Rashid’s younger sister sews blouses and petticoats for the neighbours, but most other women chop betel nuts to earn three to four rupees a day, a welcome addition to the family’s perpetually tight budget. Except for Rashid’s younger brother and a nephew, both of whom have had three years of school, all the other adults in the family are illiterate.
This situation is changing in the younger generation, at least as far as the boys are concerned. The girls are still not sent to school, much to the regret of the fourteen-year-old Shakira, Rashid’s niece. Even Shakira, however, gets some kind of education at one of the neighbourhood institutions for young girls, opened all over the city with state support. Here, Shakira learns sewing, embroidery, Urdu, basic English, and is also taught some fundamentals of her faith. After she returns home in the afternoon, Shakira’s day passes in cleaning the cooking utensils, preparing the evening meal, and looking after her younger brother. Shakira’s only other outing is going to the dargah with the other women every Thursday. Like a grown-up woman, Shakira wears the veil when she goes out, a garment that needs some practice to get used to. She is an avid fan of Hindi movies but must satisfy her desire for films through television since going to the cinema with friends is strictly forbidden by the family. The other women, including Shakira’s mother, chafe at the restrictions to their freedom yet accept their necessity. The women’s izzat—their honour, so inextricably intertwined with the honour of the family and the community—is much less safe out on the street after the riots. Yet even at the best of times, women had freedom of movement only after marriage and that too before the arrival of children. Although Rashid’s younger sister-in-law grew up in Hyderabad, she had never seen the city’s architectural glories such as the Char Minar or its main bazaars till she was married. Now, of course, the riots have further curtailed women’s freedom. Some years ago at the public water tap, Shakira’s mother inadvertently broke the pitcher of a Hindu woman. She was beaten by her husband for this mishap which could have raised the tensions between Hindus and Muslims to a dangerous level. After that she was forbidden to fetch the water from the tap, the errand being delegated to another woman in the family.
Early marriages, repeated pregnancies, and unremitting economic hardship have not broken the women’s spirit nor exhausted their zest for life which, I suspect, is continuously renewed by a vibrant community life, especially with other women of the family. There are the many weddings and festive occasions such as the circumcision of a boy or the piercing of the nose and ears of a girl. There are the religious festivals, especially Eid, which are celebrated without regard for expense. If there is no money, it will be borrowed to buy new clothes and the goat for the festive meal. This is an extravagance needed by the poor to transcend limits imposed by the outer reality of their lives and thus regain the vitally important feeling of agency and freedom, something which those influenced solely by notions of economic rationality deplore but rarely understand. The women often offer their namaz together and after finishing the household chores sometimes chat and sing together till late into the night.
Another source of the women’s strength lies in their religious faith. They freely admit their ignorance of Islamic tenets and traditions. None of them knows what is exactly contained in the Qur’an although a few younger ones have been taught to recite from it in Arabic without understanding the import of the words they are repeating. Their faith consists of following a simple moral code which makes them feel pious: cleanliness of body and purity of mind, respect for the aged, remembering Allah often, saying your namaz when the call comes from the mosque, keeping the ritual fast of the rozas. From a modern individualist viewpoint which stresses the woman’s rights as a person rather than the duties and obligations prescribed by faith, her religious belief may contribute to the woman’s feelings of integration with the community and to a personal well-being which comes from an approving conscience, and yet keep the woman imprisoned in a ‘false consciousness’. The faith makes women accept their inferior status in relation to men who are deemed to be physically, mentally, and spiritually superior. It makes them only tenants rather than owners of their minds and bodies which have a more transpersonal rather than individual cast. For instance, when asked whether after giving birth to six children why she had not got her tubes tied, Rashid’s younger sister replies:’ If you undergo such an operation your namaz is no longer legitmate. It is said in the Qur’an that Allah does not forgive you for this sin even on Judgement Day. On that day you will find that your face has turned black in colour. Allah does not accept your namaz, even the one on Eid, i
f you have prevented the birth of a child. My sister-in-law who had her tubes tied has stopped offering her namaz and is becoming unhappier by the day. All I can do is pray to Allah that He stop giving me children and bless someone else.’
Days and Nights of the Riot
To continue in the woman’s voice, here of Kubra Begum, Rashid’s wife: ‘It was Friday. I was buying vegetables around ten in the morning when the children came running and told me that a fight had started between Hindus and Muslims. Why? I asked. They said a Muslim woman was buying vegetables when the bhoi (a Hindu vegetable seller) pulled at her arm and her veil and shouted at her. Perhaps she had not paid the right amount. Twenty to twenty-five of their men and a similar number from our side rushed to the site of the quarrel. When I saw that the men were armed with sticks and swords I hurried home and told everyone to get ready for trouble. Things were already bad with that quarrel about the Babri masjid where many people died and which made the Hindus so angry. Then there was the attack on Majid bhai. One knows a riot is about to start when one sees the Hindus sending away their women and their belongings.
‘We did not even have lathis in our house. The women started collecting stones and stacking them in piles near the men who took up positions at the two ends of our alley. First, the Hindus started throwing stones from their side of the road. The men retaliated from our side. The police arrived. They tried to disperse the Hindus but could do so only after firing tear gas shells. At night there was again a barrage of stones from the Hindu side. We did not go out. Then there were shouts of “Allah-o-Akbar” and screams of “Help! Help!” None of the men went out because we all know this trick. A truckload of young Hindus dressed all in black comes to a Muslim area, gives the Muslim rallying cry and there are screams for help. Anyone who ventures out to investigate is killed and the truck drives off into the darkness of the night.
‘Everything was quiet the next morning. The men went about their work. On Sunday night again there was heavy stone throwing by the Hindus. Two of my nephews received serious head injuries. I started crying, “Allah, how long must the Muslims bear this oppression!” The curfew was in force but when it was relaxed for a couple of hours more people were killed. An old woman and her grandson went out to buy vegetables. The bhois stabbed the boy. His name was Amjad. A rickshaw driver was killed in front of my eyes. They pulled him out of the rickshaw and knifed him repeatedly. The dust on which his body lay turned into mud from his blood.
‘The curfew is the worst. If a man earns twenty-five rupees a day and has to feed six children, then what will the children eat if he cannot work for four days? And a curfew can go on for weeks! Last time I had enough flour for four days and we ate rotis with chillies. After that, boiled rice was all we could get for days. In the beginning people try to share but later it is every family for itself—a man is no longer a brother, nor a woman a sister.’
For women who have lost a family member in the riot, their faith and its traditions of mourning give both succour and structure to their grief. The journalist Anees Jung gives us a sensitive description of one such woman, Mehdi Begum, whose daughter was sick for ten days while the curfew was on. Mehdi Begum could not get medicines or milk for the daughter because the husband was unable to go to work. She blames no one for her daughter’s death and attributes it to the will of Allah. ‘As my child was dying I was chanting the elegy my grandfather wrote about the death of the young daughter of Imam Husain, Sakeena, who after her father’s death was dragged to a prison and left alone to languish and die. My daughter’s death pales in comparison.’ ‘Azadari, mourning in the memory of martyred imams,’ Jung comments, ‘for generations has provided women like Mehdi Begum a release and lent their grief a focus.’1 Indeed, I generally have found that women, both Hindu and Muslim, with their better-established traditions and rituals of mourning, are less bitter and more reconciled to the violent deaths of their loved ones; those who weep and mourn their losses are no longer filled with warlike anger.
The men’s accounts differ from the women’s in that the riot is placed in a more historical perspective and conveys less immediacy. Although so far the worst in terms of the number of lost lives and damage to property, this riot is described as part of a series—sixteen in the last twenty years. When the city’s wholesale vegetable market was located here, Karwan was especially riot-prone as Muslims and Hindus jostled for a larger share of the business. Many Hyderabad riots began here before spreading to other parts of the city. The market has since been shifted and Karwan no longer takes the lead in communal rioting but is content to go along with the general ebb and flow of violence in the rest of the city.
The men’s reports emphasize tales of masculine heroics and martial prowess in contrast to the women’s anxiety about the safety of their families. With men, we hear much talk about how a small group of Muslims triumphed over a vastly superior force of attacking Hindus. Their riot stories resonate with echoes of Badr, the first battle of Islamic history, where heavily outnumbered Muslims trusting Allah and armed only with their faith succeeded against a vastly superior foe.
Another characteristic of the men’s narratives is the space given to the encounters with the police. After the start of a riot, the police may descend on Kulsumpura at any time of day or night in search of hidden weapons or to recover goods reported to have been looted from their homes by the Hindus. Men of all ages, from fifteen to fifty, are routinely taken away for questioning so that many of them do not sleep at home at night while the curfew is on. When the police arrive, there are tense confrontations, say between a young Hindu policeman intent on entering and searching a house and a Muslim youth defending what he believes is the honour of his family. Indeed, in many towns and cities of north India, such as Meerut, the confrontation between the police and the Muslims have led to violent explosions.
Psychologically, what occurs between Hindu policemen and young Muslims is marked by the same dynamics as the encounter between white cops and black kids in the United States described by the psychoanalyst Rollo May.2 As they come face to face, the young policeman and the Muslim youth are very much alike in their pride and their fear, in their need to prove themselves and their demand for respect. For the Hindu policeman, who additionally incorporates the state’s authority and power, which he identifies with his own masculinity and self-esteem, it is essential he insist that the Muslim respect this authority. Laying hands on the other man’s body, violating its intactness by rough handling without retaliation or protest, is one way of having the power over the other person acknowledged. Another way is to enter his home without invitation or permission. The Muslim youth, on the other hand, equally impelled to protect his own masculinity and honour, must resist any violation of both his body and home. It becomes imperative that even when he must bow to the policeman’s superior might and tolerate the incursion into his most private space, he remain defiant. His submission should not be perceived as voluntary and under no circumstances be reflected in his eyes. This, of course, is the only kind of submission which will satisfy the Hindu policeman as the two young men proceed to become prisoners of an escalating conflict.
Babar’s Children
Both men and women agree that Hindu–Muslim relations have greatly deteriorated over the last two decades, especially after the Rameeza Bi incident in 1975. The earlier participation of Hindus and Muslims in each other’s festivals has all but disappeared, and ties of friendship reaching across the communities have snapped. Old Hindu friends are now only acquaintances, to be politely greeted when one passes them on the street, but one no longer stops to exchange further courtesies. The women, who meet at the public tap, are not yet as distant from each other as the men, perhaps also because they were never especially close earlier. Ghousia, Rashid’s younger sister, reports Hindu women telling her: ‘If you are cut the same amount of blood will come out as when we are cut. All religions are not the same but all human beings are. We wear the same clothes and it is difficult to make out who is a Hind
u or Muslim if we did not wear a bindi.’ The killers often ask the name of their victim before they strike because they need this additional information to make sure of the victim’s religious affiliation. When there is no chance of making a certain identification by asking the man to strip and show his penis (Muslim if circumcised, Hindu if not), the marauding mobs have found other, bizarre ways of making sure of the victim’s identity. A man may be first hit on the head with a lathi. If while falling he takes the name of a Hindu god or goddess, he is then stabbed if the attackers are Muslim; if the involuntary cry is ‘Ya Allah!’ he is spared.
The Muslims are concerned about the children who, unlike their own generation, do not even have memories of good relations with the Hindus. Whereas their own parents used to forbid them to talk in terms of, ‘He is a Hindu; he is a Muslim’, and instead stressed their shared humanity, today’s children are acutely aware of being either one or the other from an early age.
My general impression is that Hindus are disliked and looked down upon but not passionately hated, even after so many riots. In contrast to the self-image of the Muslim who is compassionate, the Hindu is seen as cruel and without a trace of pity. ‘If a Hindu woman or child walks through a Muslim street, the Muslim will let them go, thinking the fight is between men and should not involve women, children and the aged. A Hindu does not think like that. It is enough for him to see the other person is a Muslim before he strikes without regard for age or gender.
Colours of Violence Page 18
