The Hindus, as I have noted above, are far more easygoing than the Muslims in their moral judgements of interactions with members of the other community. In normal times, although a Hindu girl’s elopement with a Muslim boy is consensually disapproved of, it is not considered a sin. Having Muslim friends, eating and working with Muslims, renting your house to a Muslim, learning the Qur’an from a Muslim priest—are all consensually permitted though some may express reservations about this conduct. The dissension is over a Hindu’s conversion to Islam, a Hindu girl marrying a Muslim boy or going out with him to the cinema. The latter action, so violently disapproved of in the Muslim sample, elicits divided opinions. Its opponents would discourage such a practice because it may lead to an interfaith marriage, with all its attendant problems. Those who see nothing objectionable in the girl’s action, most of them women, look at it as something which happens all the time in today’s world and is not something over which one should get unduly exercised. Whether the greater Hindu permissiveness with regard to interactions with the other community is a function of the Pardis’ low status in the caste hierarchy, and whether high-caste Hindus wall themselves off much more from the Muslims, as anecdotal evidence seems to suggest, is a question which can only be answered by future empirical work.
As with the Muslims, rape and killing of women of the other community during a riot, especially the former, elicited consensual condemnation—the only actions the Hindus were prepared to label as such. Similarly, giving shelter to members of the other community during a riot is not considered wrong. There is dissension over the morality of other riot-time actions such as arson, looting, and the killing of men. The riot-time morality of the Hindus is thus strikingly similar to that of the Muslims in its content, though not in the emotional intensity with which this morality is invested. The two communities share in common the commandments ‘Thou shalt not kill ... a woman’ and ‘Thou shalt not rape,’ but the outrage associated with the transgression of these commandments is stronger among Muslims than among Hindus. Indeed, as I noted earlier, the emotional reaction of Muslims to any violation of the community’s moral code of conduct is intense and especially violent in cases involving a Muslim woman’s sexualized interaction with a Hindu man. In such situations, I believe, the self-representation of the community becomes identified with the woman’s sexual stance in its more servile aspect, with images of being ‘fucked’—not in a joyful but in a contemptuous sense—by the Hindu. To penetrate the Other, whether a woman or another group, is to be superior, powerful, and masculine; to be penetrated is to be inferior, weak, and feminine. It is a blending of the images of power and sexuality in a phallocentric vision which makes many men all over the world, for example in parts of the Middle East and Latin America, regard only the man who is penetrated by another man as a despised homosexual while the active inserter on the ‘top’ is considered as a ‘normal’ even macho male.
Violence between religious-ethnic groups is then also a struggle over the assignment of gender, a way of locating the desired male and denigrated female communities. As a Hindu patient, echoing the sentiments of a few others, remarked in a session during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi: ‘It serves them right! Every one of these cunts (chutiya) behaves as if his prick is at full mast!’
A New Hindu Identity
Great disorders lead to great devotions.
—Emile Zola
Some fifteen years ago, when what is today called the Nehruvian project of a modernized secular India was still vigorous and fundamentalism was a distant gleam in the eye of an occasional imam or mahant, I tried to peer into the crystal ball of the future. In my conclusion to The Inner World, I wrote that as modernization picks up pace, individuals will increasingly seek membership in groups with absolute value systems and with little tolerance for deviation from their norms. To quote:
Whereas initially the appeal of these groups may be limited to sections of society who are most susceptible to the pressures of social change—for example, youth and urbanized classes—we can expect an ever-widening circle of participation as more and more people are sucked into the wake of modernization.... In short, we can expect an increasing destruction of the nascent, western-style individualism as more and more individuals seek to merge into collectivities that promise a shelter for the hurt, the conflicted and the ship wrecked.’1
If I again take up the theme of those large social formations through which many individuals in India seek a sense of their cultural identity (a term which I prefer to the more sociological ‘ethnicity’), then it is not to derive a melancholy satisfaction from any perceived prescience but to offer some psychological observations on an issue which is normally seen as the domain of political scientists and social commentators. First, to get definitional matters out of the way, by ‘cultural identity’ I mean a group’s basic way of organizing experience through its myths, memories, symbols, rituals, and ideals.2 Socially produced and thus subject to historical change, cultural identity is not a static affair even while it makes a decisive contribution to the enhancement of an individual’s sense of self-sameness and continuity in time and space. This definition is particularly apt for the Hindutva movement—characterized by some as Hindu fundamentalism—through which a large number of Hindus today seem to be seeking a sense of their cultural identity. Let us again remember that ‘fundamental’ does not mean ‘traditional’. As in other parts of the non-Western world, revivalism or fundamentalism in India, be it Hindu or Muslim, is an attempt to reformulate the project of modernity. Like its counterparts elsewhere, the leadership of Hindutva, for instance, has never been traditional but decidedly modern, consisting of individuals who turned their backs on their own Western education.3 Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, (RSS), the core institution and the driving force of Hindu revivalism, had his schooling in English and went on to study medicine in Calcutta. In his youth, he is reported to have felt that orthodox Hindu ritual was rather silly. His successor, Golwalkar, was the son of a civil servant, did his Master’s degree in biology at Benares University and was a lecturer in zoology at the same institution before he joined the RSS.4
Shadows of Mourning
Haunting images of loss and helplessness among large groups of people underlie many literary and scholarly accounts of transnational historical changes. These images constitute the sombre mood with which scholars have often reflected upon the periods and processes of significant transformations in human history. When Max Weber paints the portrait of Western man in the wake of enlightenment, we see a face aglow with the promised triumph of rationality in human affairs, yet also etched with deep shadows of mourning. From Weber’s canvas, we see modern man peering out with hopeful though disenchanted eyes at a future which offers vastly greater control over nature, society and man’s own destiny. Yet the portrait also conveys a palpable grief for the lost spontaneity and immediacy which the social forms and symbols of the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition had built up and guaranteed.
Nearer to our own times, as we study the anthropological, psychological, and, above all, fictional accounts of another transcultural historical process, the process of modernization in the non-Western world, we again encounter the ghost of depression seated at a banquet table Lald out for eagerly awaited dishes of economic development and the fruits of industrialization. Let me, then, first outline the social-psychological processes which are a consequence of modernization and which I believe are the foundation on which the edifices of the new Hindu and Muslim as well as other cultural identities in India are being constructed. These processes are, of course, not particular to India but common to most of the non-Western world.
First, population movements which take place during the modernizing process involve the separation of families and the loss of familiar neighbourhoods and ecological niches. Psychologists report and novelists describe the feelings of bereavement and states of withdrawal among those mourning for old attachments and suspicious
of creating new ones. These tendencies are not only harmful for individuals but also hinder the birth of new social structures and forms while they rob community life of much of its vitality and therefore its capacity for counteracting the sense of helplessness.5
With increasing globalization, migrations are no longer confined by national boundaries. Globalization, too, encroaches upon traditional group solidarities and the established relationships between different groups, whether in Cochin or Moradabad. The shifting demands of global markets for particular kinds of goods and labour make for rapid and bewildering changes in the relative status of many groups in a particular society. Whereas some groups dramatically increase their earning power (and thus claims to a higher social status) through their access to international markets in goods, services, and labour, others are as dramatically impoverished, with many forced to migrate from their traditional geographical and cultural niches.
The vast internal migrations also give rise to overcrowded living conditions in urban conglomerations, especially in the sprawling shanty towns and slums with their permanent air of transience. On the one hand, it is undeniable that urban slums, however awful they seem to middle-class sensibilities, represent to the poor a hope of escaping from deadening economic deprivation and the relatively rigid, caste-based discrimination and inequities of rural society. On the other, there is the lack of cultural norms in dealing with relative strangers whose behavioural clues cannot be easily deciphered, so different from the ritualized predictability of interactions in the communities left behind in villages or small towns, which compel the person to be constantly on guard. One is in a state of permanent psychic mobilization and heightened nervous arousal.
In addition, the rapid obsolescence of traditional roles and skills as modernization picks up pace seriously dents the self-esteem—when it does not shatter it completely—of those who are confronted with simultaneous loss of earning power, social status, and identity as particular kinds of workers. For the affected and their families, especially children, there is a collapse of confidence in the stability of the established order and of the world. What looms instead is the spectre of a future which is not only opaque but represents an overwhelming threat to any sense of purpose.
The feelings of loss are not limited to the migration from geographical regions and cultural homes or to the disappearance of traditional work identities. They also extend to the loss of ancestral ideals and values. For instance, compared to what many believe was a traditionally healthy eroticism, modernity, with its popular cinema, television, fashions, the commingling of sexes in schools, colleges, and at work, is sexually decadent. ‘People have lost their brahmacharya (celibacy), their character is destroyed and everyone has become an addict of bad habits. If you cannot control your libido, you cannot be pure.’6 Once the enlightenment values of universal equality, liberty, and fraternity, of the pre-eminence of reason and moral autonomy of the individual were formulated through the political revolutions in the non-Western world, they became a universal heritage, inevitably triumphant when in conflict with the norms and values of the local culture. In spite of the disillusionment of some postmodern Western intellectuals with the enlightenment mentality, its values continue to constitute what has been generally regarded as the most dynamic and transformative ideology in human history, closing any option of going back to pre-modern conceptions.7 Yet the enlightenment has a dark side, too. The modernization project is riddled with its own inequities, repressions, and unfraternal conflicts. There is thus bound to be a palpable grief for the values of a lost—and retrospectively idealized—world, when in the brave new one progress often turns out to be glaring inequality, rationality becomes selfishness and the pursuit of self-interest and individualism comes to mean unbridled greed.
Secret Wounds
Whereas loss and helplessness constitute one stream of feelings accompanying the modernization process, another stream consists of feelings of humiliation and radically lowered self-worth. One source of humiliation lies in the homogenizing and hegemonizing impact of modernization and globalization, both of which are no respecters of cultural pluralities and diversities. The imperatives of economic development, which see many local cultural values and attitudes as outmoded or just plain irrelevant, are a source of humiliation to all those who have not embraced or identified with the modernization project in its totality.
For the masses, there are other occasions for blows to their self-esteem such as the increase in the complexity and incidence of bureaucratic structures, with their attendant dehumanization, which has been a corollary of development. The cumulative effect of daily blows to an individual’s feelings of self-worth, received in a succession of bureaucratic and other impersonal encounters, cannot be underestimated.
For the elites of the non-Western world, there is an additional humiliation in their greater consciousness of the defeat of their civilizations in the colonial encounter with the West. This defeat is not merely an abstraction or a historical memory but one which is confirmed by the peripheral role of their countries in the international economic and political order of the postcolonial world. Their consciousness of being second-class citizens in the global order is reinforced by their many encounters with their more self-confident Western colleagues in the various international forums. An example of the role played by loss and sensed humiliation is seen in the case of those Indians, economically an elite group, who have migrated to the United States and are frequently exposed to indifference or condescension toward their cultural tradition. When they have not abjured their cultural identity altogether in what I would consider an ‘identification with the aggressor’, they have turned back to embrace their ethnic identity as Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs with a revivalist fervour which is far in excess of their counterparts in the home country. Of course, migration itself plays a significant role in the revival of ethnic identity. Global migrations, tourism, and communications confront people in a society with a foreignness of others which is unprecedented in their experience. All over the world our encounters with strangers are on a larger scale, over longer periods of time, with the strangers possessing a higher degree of strangeness, than has ever been the case before. Observations such as ‘They think like that’, ‘They believe this’, ‘Their customs are like that’, inevitably lead to questions which may not have been self-consciously addressed before; ‘What do we [however that “we” is defined] think?’, ‘What do we believe?’ ‘What are our customs?’ In bringing together people in closer proximity, the processes of globalization paradoxically increase the self-consciousness which separates and differentiates.
The portraits of loss and helplessness may sometimes seem to be overdrawn. Human beings have a remarkable capacity for adaptation, for creating new communities when old ones must be abandoned, for planting new gardens of love around them where old ones have withered. Yet before fresh psychological and social structures can emerge, there is a period—permanent for some—of apathy, chronic discontent, or rebellious rage at those who are held responsible for the loss of old social forms and ideals. Historical and social changes, working through the psychological mechanisms of loss and humiliation, thus lead to the widespread feeling of being a victim rather than an active agent of events which are buffeting the individual and his or her group. Millions of people become patients in a broad sense, even if temporarily, patienthood being essentially a condition of inactivation. After all, patiens, as Erik Erikson has pointed out, denotes a state of being exposed to superior forces from within and without which cannot be overcome without energetic and redeeming help.8
Cultural Identity and Cure
The required energy and redemption to restore agens, that inner state of being which sanctions initiative and encourages purposeful activity in the outer world, is most often sought through increasing, restoring, or constructing a sense of cultural identity. Cultural groups are not only a shelter for those mourning lost attachments but also vehicles for redressing narcissistic injuries,
for righting what are perceived as contemporary or historical wrongs. The question of why such ‘primordial’ group identities as ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ are generally preferred to identities based on class, profession, or other criteria cannot be discussed here. Perhaps the latter lack an encompassing worldview, are impoverished in their symbolic riches and devoid of that essential corpus of myths in which people have traditionally sought meaning, especially at a time when their world appears to have become meaningless.
A core attraction and vital therapeutic action of self consciously belonging to a cultural community lies in its claim to the possession of a future which, in a state of patiens, is felt to be irretrievably lost. To outsiders, this future may appear to be a simplistic perspective on the world such as a promise of restoration of the perfect civil society of the ancestors, what the Hindus, for instance, call Ram Rajya. It may be the reproduction on earth of a paradise envisaged only in sacred texts. It may be the hedonistic enjoyment of more and more goods and services in a heaven presided over by a benign, supply-side God. The promise is of a future, not seen, but which ‘works’.
Colours of Violence Page 21
