Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

  The cultural group, which brings the ‘primordiality’ related to shared myths, memories, values and symbols to the fore, thus assumes a vital healing function. One of its most important aspects is to replace feelings of loss with those of love. This insight into the way groups work psychologically goes back to Freud, who postulated eros as the vital cohesive force in a group.9 He believed the ties of love among members of a group come into existence through their emotional bond with the leader. In more technical terms, members of a group put the same object, the leader, in place of their ego ideal and consequently identify with each other. This shared idealization gives rise to the love ties which are experienced in the feelings of loyalty, esprit de corps, and in the more intense moments of group life, in feelings of fusion and merger. Experientially, it is a reordering and opening up of the inner world of the individual to include members of the group who, in turn, open up to include the individual in their psychological space, a mutual affirmation which lies at the heart of love. In cultural groups, the shared ego ideal may not be the figure of a single leader but many historical and mythical figures from the group’s tradition, its ideals and values, and even its social and intellectual traditions.

  We are all aware of the profound effect the group can have on the consolidation of a person’s ‘sense of identity’ and in increasing the cohesiveness of the self. Even in individual psychotherapy, we often see that it is not unusual for patients in a state of self-fragmentation to achieve a firmer and more cohesive sense of self upon joining an organized group. The Nazis are not the only group who turned quasi-derelict individuals into efficiently functioning ones by providing them with the framework of a convincing world image and the use of new cultural symbols and group emblems such as shiny brown uniforms. As Ernest Wolf perceptively observes, ‘It seems a social identity can support a crumbling self the way a scaffolding can support a crumbling building.’10

  Psychology Versus Politics?

  Before I look at the construction of the new Hindu identity, I would like to address the objections to a psychological approach to the subject. There are many social scientists and political analysts who would locate the enhancement of ethnicity (cultural identity in my terms) in a particular group not in social-psychological processes but in the competition between elites for political power and economic resources. In fact, this has been the dominant explanation for the occurrence of Hindu–Muslim riots and is best exemplified in the work of Asghar Ali Engineer.11 This ‘instrumentalist’, as contrasted to the ‘primordialist’ view I advocate here, has been succinctly formulated by Paul Brass:

  In the process of transforming cultural forms, values and practices into political symbols, elites in competition with each other for control over the allegiance or territory of the ethnic group in question strive to enhance or break the solidarity of the group. Elites seeking to mobilize the ethnic group against its rivals or against the state strive to promote a congruence of a multiplicity of the group’s symbols, to argue that members of the group are different not in one respect only but in many and that all its cultural elements are reinforcing.12

  Cultural identity according to this view is not a fixed or given dimension of communities but a variable one which takes form in the process of political mobilization by the elite, a mobilization which arises from the broader political and economic environment. Brass questions the import of the primary dimensions of ethnicity in the subjective lives of individuals. Most people, he says, never think about their language at all. Millions, both in traditional and modern societies, have migrated to other countries out of choice (or necessity). And though many may have an emotional attachment to their place of birth or ancestral religion, many others have chosen to assimilate to their new societies and have lost all connection with their origins.

  Brass’s case for the relative insignificance of primordiality appears to be overstated. Cultural identity, like its individual counterpart, is an unconscious human acquirement which becomes consciously salient only when there is a perceived threat to its integrity. Identity, both individual and cultural, lives itself for the most part, unfettered and unworried by obsessive and excessive scrutiny. Everyday living incorporates a zone of indifference with regard to one’s culture, including one’s language, ethnic origin, or religion. It is only when this zone of indifference is breached that the dimensions of ethnicity stand out in sharp relief and the individual becomes painfully or exhilaratingly aware of certain aspects of his cultural identity. The breaches in the zone of indifference, like the one which has taken place in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque, are not only made by momentous external events such as actual or threatened persecution, war, riots, and so on. Inner psychological changes at certain stages of the lifecycle may also cause these fateful incursions. Thus, for instance, youth is regarded as a period of life when issues of personal identity become crucial, when the conscious and unconscious preoccupation with the question ‘Who am I?’ reaches its peak. Many migrants, who have willingly chosen to thoroughly assimilate themselves into their new societies and appear to have lost all traces of their ethnic origins, are surprised to find that the issues of cultural identity have not disappeared. They have only skipped a generation as their sons and daughters, on the verge of adulthood, become preoccupied with their cultural roots as part of their quest for a personal identity.

  I do not mean to imply that the instrumentalist approach is without substance. It is also not a monopoly of professional social scientists but is shared by many people in other walks of life. In Indian towns and cities where there have been riots between Hindus and Muslims, I have normally found that ‘men of goodwill’ from both communities invariably attribute the riots to the machinations and manipulations of politicians pursuing political power or economic advantage rather than to any increase in primordial sentiments, a perspective which is also shared by people who are far removed from the conflict. The instrumentalist theory of ethnic mobilization thus becomes an ‘instigator’ theory of violent conflict among religious groups. In concentrating on the instigators, it underplays or downright denies that there are ‘instigatees’, too, whose participation is essential to transform animosity between religious groups into violence. The picture it holds up of evil politicians and innocent masses is certainly attractive since it permits us a disavowal of our own impulses toward violence and vicious ethnocentrism. We all have different zones of indifference beyond which our own ethnocentrism, in some form or the other, will become a salient part of our identity.

  The appeal of the instrumentalist or instigator theory, however, is not only that it allows us a projection of the unacceptable parts of ourselves onto ‘bad’ politicians. Its allure is also due to a particular historical legacy of the literary elite in all major civilizations. This legacy devalues nonrational processes—what psychoanalysts call ‘fantasy’—which form the basis of the primordial approach. As has been pointed out by others in a different context, the culture of fantasy lacks all meaningful status in the realm of serious public discourse which is comprised of the discussion of ideas, not of shared fantasies.13 Fantasy is regarded as primitive, primordial, before reason; it is unconscious as compared to conscious, mythic as compared to scientific, marked by the pleasures of connotation rather than the rigours of denotation. A sensitive, introspective discussion of socially shared fantasies (rather than ideas) as the moving force behind the ideals and ambitions of large groups and communities is generally not possible. Steeped in a long tradition of respect for the culture of ideas and their own professional role in its production and propagation, the scholarly elite of a society are not easily receptive to the culture of fantasy.

  I do not mean to imply that the political and psychological, the instrumental and the primordial, approaches should be viewed in either/or terms. Both the approaches are complementary to each other. Whether it be the history of Hindu–Muslim relations, or the analysis of the causes of the riots between the two communities (economic–polit
ical versus social–psychological), or the explanation for the basis of emerging religious group identities (‘instrumental’ interests versus ‘primordial’ attachments), the arguments are invariably couched in a dualistic either/or mode. This, of course, is a testimony to the stronghold of the Aristotelian and Cartesian ways of thinking on modern minds. Like most shared habits, we do not recognize this kind of thinking as mere habit but take it as an unquestioned verity, as the way things ‘naturally’ are. Complementary thinking does not mean that ‘anything goes’, in a vulgar postmodernist sense. It has its own definitional constraints and boundaries; for instance, the more incompatible (not outlandish) the explanations for a phenomenon, the more complementary they will be. Complementarity is the belonging-together of various possibilities of experiencing the same object differently. The wave and particle theories of light in physics, the primary and secondary processes in psychoanalysis, mythos and logos as modes of knowledge, are a few of the many examples of complementarity. Forms of complementary knowledge belong together in so far as they pertain to the same object; they exclude each other in that they cannot occur simultaneously. Complementarity is the acceptance of different possibilities and not their splitting and the exclusion of some. To describe a phenomenon complementarily is to reveal its wholeness, to understand its different aspects.14 None of these aspects is more true than others; each is irreplaceable. In brief, the logic underlying complementary thought is not of an either/or kind but of an ‘as well as’ variety. Thus, without the psychological perspective to complement the political–economic one, we will have only a partial and thus dangerously inadequate understanding of the reasons for the success of political formations based on religious mobilization.

  Search for Hinduness

  The instrumentalist approach to ethnic identity, however, makes an important contribution by pointing out that these identities are not fixed and immutable but more or less variable. The self-consciousness of being a Hindu today is not of the same order as at other times in India’s history. What is today called ‘Hinduism’ has emerged through many encounters between dissenting sects professing diverse beliefs and with other, more self-conscious religions, such as Islam and Christianity.

  Today, there is a new Hindu identity under construction in many parts of India, especially the northern and central states. It is a process which is undoubtedly propelled by the fact that this identity is also the basis of political mobilization by the main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Created out of a preexisting though ill-defined and amorphous ‘Hinduism’, the new identity bears only a faint family resemblance to its progenitors. Indeed, as we saw in the first chapter, some scholars argue that the sharply differentiated cultural identities of Hindus and Muslims which we encounter today, with their heightened self-consciousness, the kind of commitment they command, and the intensity with which these identities are pursued politically, are a creation of the British colonial period. They are not only a product of the colonial ‘divide and rule’ policies which led to the emergence of ‘identity polities’ but are also a consequence of the imposition of alien modes of thought on native Indian categories. The political scientist Don Miller remarks:

  By their education, legislation, administration, judicial codes and procedures and even by that apparently simple operation of ‘objective’ classification, the census, the British unwittingly imposed dualistic ‘either-or’ oppositions as the ‘natural’ normative order of thought. In a multitude of ways, Indians learned that one is either this or that; that one cannot be both or neither or indifferent. The significance of identity thus became a new, paramount concern ... an orthodoxy of being was gradually replacing a heterodoxy of beings.15

  Leaving the issue of pinpointing the time and place of birth of the new Hindu identity in the late twentieth century to historians—an identity which its critics have decried as Hindu nationalism, Hindu militancy, or Hindu fundamentalism—we can only observe that this identity selects many of its symbols, myths, and images from traditional stock. The cultural values and forms it endorses have a recognizable ancestry. In its strong links with the past, this Hindu identity is neither wholly new nor completely old. It is constructed, yet also revived; it is a combination of the made and the given. The social and political forces which are self-consciously active in its constructed revival, the sangh parivar, have some truth on their side when they maintain that the elements of this new Hindu identity were always there; it is just that people did not see them before. The question of whether those propagating the new Hindu identity are embarked on its construction or merely on its articulation for others does not have a simple answer. The answer depends upon whether the vantage point is of an outside observer or of the insider directly engaged in the process. In any event, the political countering of this Hindu identity will involve the offer of a different Hindutva with other images, symbols, and myths of the Hindu ethos rather than any abstract concept of secularism, which for most Hindus is empty of all psychological meaning.

  The Virtuous Virago

  To look more closely at the constructed revival of Hindu identity, I have chosen as my text a speech by sadhavi Rithambra, one of the star speakers for the sangh parivar, the prefix sadhavi being the female counterpart of sadhu, a man who has renounced the world in search of personal salvation and universal welfare within the Hindu religious worldview. It is reported that Rithambra was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in Khanna, a village in the Punjab, when she had a strong spiritual experience while listening to a discourse by Swami Parmananda, one of the many ‘saints’ in the forefront of Hindu revivalism.16 Rithambra abandoned her studies and home and joined Parmananda’s ashram. Soon she began travelling with her guru to religious meetings in the Hindi heartland and after a while addressed a few herself. Her oratorical talents were noticed by the political leadership of the sangh parivar and, after being given some training in voice modulation, she was well on her way to become the leading firebrand in the Hindu cause.

  The speech I have chosen was given at Hyderabad in April 1991, a few weeks after the general elections for the national parliament and many state assemblies were announced. The speech is a standard one which Rithambra has given all over India to the enthusiastic response of hundreds of thousands of people. The political context of the speech is the bid by the BJP, the political arm of the sangh family, to capture power in some north Indian states in the coming elections and to emerge as the single largest party in the national parliament. In the preceding months, the BJP had determined the country’s political agenda by its mobilization of Hindus on the issue of constructing a temple to the god Rama at Ayodhya, his reputed birthplace. The construction of this temple had become an explosive and divisive issue since the designated site was already occupied by the Babri masjid, a mosque built by Babar, the Muslim invader from Central Asia who was the founder of the Mughal dynasty that ruled over large parts of India for over four hundred years. There had been much bloodshed five months earlier as many Hindus, the kar-sevaks, lost their lives in police firing when they attempted to defy legal orders and begin the temple construction, a step which required demolition or at least relocation of the existing mosque. The killings of unarmed Rama bhaktas—devotees of Rama—in Ayodhya led to a spate of riots between Hindus and Muslims in other parts of the country, including Hyderabad, a city with an almost equal proportion of the two communities and where the tension between them over the years had regularly erupted in communal violence.

  The political context of the speech, the theme of temple versus mosque, the abundance of imagery and allusions in its text to the narratives of the epics Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the persons of the speaker herself are all replete with symbolic resonances, evocations, and associations. They virtually reek with a surfeit of meaning that burrows deep into the psychic recesses of the audience, going well beyond the words used as its carriers. Listening to her speak, the earlier question is once again raised: Is she an elite manipulator of Hindu cultural
symbols (instrumental theory) or is she an articulator of what many Hindus feel but cannot express (primordialist viewpoint)? The answer is again not in terms of either/or but of the simultaneity of both processes. Rithambra appeals to a group identity while creating it. She both mirrors her listeners’ sentiments and gives them birth. My impression is that the images, metaphors, and mythological allusions of her speech have a resonance for the audience because they also have a resonance for her. This does not imply that the speech is a spontaneous pouring out of her heart. Like an actor she has honed this particular speech through successive deliveries and knows what ‘works’. It is not raw feeling but carefully crafted emotion; an epic poem rather than a scream or a shout. Rithambra’s power lies less in her persuasiveness on an intellectual, cognitive plane than on the poetic (Greek poiesis—a making, shaping) that permeates her speech. It is this poetic which gives a first form to what are for her audience only vaguely or partially ordered feelings and perceptions, makes a shared sense out of already shared circumstances.17

  As a renouncer of worldly life, a sanyasin, Rithambra conjures up the image of selflessness. Associatively, she is not a politician stirred by narrow electoral considerations or identified with partisan interest groups but someone who is moved by the plight of the whole country, even concerned with the welfare of all mankind. As an ascetic who has renounced all sexual activity, she evokes the image of the virgin goddess, powerful because virgin, a power which is of another, ‘purer’ world. There is also a subtle sexual challenge to the men in her audience to prove their virility (vis-à-vis the Muslim) in order to deserve her.