Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

  The key passages in the text of her speech are delivered as rhyming verses, in the tradition of bardic narration of stories from the Hindu epics. Perhaps people tend to believe verse more than prose, especially in Hindu India where the transmission of sacred knowledge has traditionally been oral and through the medium of rhymed verse. In any event, implicit in her speech is the claim to be less tainted with the corruption of language, a corruption which is widely Laid at the door of the politician and which has led people to lose faith in what they hear from public platforms. If Rithambra is a politician, hers is the politics of magic that summons forces from the deep, engaging through coded ideas and ideals the deeper fears and wishes of her Hindu audiences whom she and the sangh parivar are determined to make ‘more’ Hindu. As I listened to her I was once again reminded of Milan Kundera’s statement that ‘political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on fantasies, images, words and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.’

  Hail Mother Sita! Hail brave Hanuman! Hail Mother India! Hail the birthplace of Rama! Hail Lord Vishwanath [Shiva] of Kashi [Benares]! Hail Lord Krishna! Hail the eternal religion [dharma]! Hail the religion of the Vedas! Hail Lord Mahavira! Hail Lord Buddha! Hail Banda Bairagi! Hail Guru Gobind Singh! Hail the great sage Dayananda! Hail the great sage Valmiki! Hail the martyred kar-sevaks! Hail Mother India!

  In ringing tones Rithambra invokes the various gods and revered figures from Indian history, ancient and modern. The gods and heroes are not randomly chosen. In their careful selection, they are markers of the boundary of the Hindu community she and the sangh parivar would wish to constitute today and believe existed in the past. Such a commemoration is necessarily selective since it must silence contrary interpretations of the past and seek to conserve only certain of its aspects. The gods and heroes are offered up as ego ideals, to be shared by members of the community in order to bring about and maintain group cohesion. Identity implies definition rather than blurring, solidity rather than flux or fluidity, and therefore the question of boundaries of a group become paramount. Rithambra begins the construction of Hindu identity by demarcating this boundary.

  In the context of the preceding year’s agitation around the construction of the Rama temple, the god Rama occupies the highest watchtower on the border between Hindu and non-Hindu. Rithambra starts by praising Rama’s wife, the goddess Sita, and his greatest devotee, the monkey god Hanuman, who are then linked to contemporary concerns as she hails Rama’s birthplace where the sangh parivar wishes to construct the controversial temple and around which issue it has sought a mobilization of the Hindus.

  The five-thousand-years-old religion, however, with a traditional lack of central authority structures such as a church and with a diffused essence, has over the centuries thrown up a variety of sects with diverse beliefs. It is Rithambra’s purpose to include all the Hinduisms spawned by Hinduism. The presiding deity of the Shaivite sects, Shiva, is hailed, as is Krishna, the most popular god of the Vaishnavas.

  The overarching Hindu community is then sought to be further enlarged by including the followers of other religions whose birthplace is India. These are the Jains, the Buddhists, and the Sikhs, and Rithambra devoutly hails Mahavira, Buddha, and the militant last guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh who, together with Banda Bairagi, has the added distinction of a lifetime of armed struggle against the Mughals. Nineteenth-century reformist movements such as the Arya Samaj are welcomed by including its founder Dayananda Saraswati in the Hindu pantheon. The Harijans or ‘scheduled castes’, the former ‘untouchables’ of Hindu society, are expressly acknowledged as a part of the Hindu community by hailing Valmiki, the legendary author of the Ramayana who has been recently elevated to the position of the patron saint of the Harijans.

  From gods and heroes of the past, a link is established to the collective heroism of the kar-sevaks, men and women who in their bid to build the temple died in the police firing at Ayodhya. The immortal gods and the mortal heroes from past and present are all the children of Mother India, the subject of the final invocation, making the boundaries of the Hindu community coterminous with that of Indian nationalism.

  I have come to the Hindus of Bhagyanagar [Hyderabad] with a message. The saints who met in Allahabad directed Hindu society to either bend the government to its will or to remove it. The government has been removed. On fourth April, more than two and a half million Hindus displayed their power at the lawns of Delhi’s Boat Club. We went to the parliament but it lay empty. The saints said, fill the parliament with the devotees of Rama. This is the next task of Hindu society.

  As far as the construction of the Rama temple is concerned, some people say Hindus should not fight over a structure of brick and stone. They should not quarrel over a small piece of land. I want to ask these people, ‘If someone burns the national flag will you say “Oh, it doesn’t matter. It is only two metres of cloth which is not a great national loss.” ’ The question is not of two metres of cloth but of an insult to the nation. Rama’s birthplace is not a quarrel about a small piece of land. It is a question of national integrity. The Hindu is not fighting for a temple of brick and stone. He is fighting for the preservation of a civilization, for his Indianness, for national consciousness, for the recognition of his true nature. We shall build the temple!

  It is not the building of the temple but the building of India’s national consciousness. You, the wielders of state power, you do not know that the Rama temple is not a mere building. It is not a construction of brick and stone. It is not only the birthplace of Rama. The Rama temple is our honour. It is our self-esteem. It is the image of Hindu unity. We shall raise its flag. We shall build the temple!

  Hindi is a relatively passionate language. Its brilliant, loud colours are impossible to reproduce in the muted palette of English. As the Rama temple takes shape in Rithambra’s cascading flow of language, as she builds it, phrase by phrase, in the minds of her listeners, it evokes acute feelings of a shared social loss. The Rama temple, then, is a response to the mourning of Hindu society: a mourning for lost honour, lost self-esteem, lost civilization, lost Hinduness. It is the material and social counterpart of the individual experience of mourning. In a more encompassing formulation, the Rama birthplace temple is like other monuments which, as Peter Homans perceptively observes:

  engage the immediate conscious experience of an aggregate of egos by re-presenting and mediating to them the lost cultural experiences of the past; the experiences of individuals, groups, their ideas and ideals, which coalesce into what can be called a collective memory. In this the monument is a symbol of union because it brings together the particular psychological circumstances of many individuals’ life courses and the universals of their otherwise lost historical past within the context of their current or contemporary social processes and structures.18

  The temple is the body in which Hindu identity is sought to be embodied.

  Some people became afraid of Rama’s devotees. They brought up Mandal., a They thought the Hindu will get divided. He will be fragmented by the reservations issue. His attention will be diverted from the temple. But your thought was wrong. Your thought was despicable. We shall build the temple!

  I have come to tell our Hindu youth, do not take the candy of reservations and divide yourself into castes. If Hindus get divided, the sun of Hindu unity will set. How will the sage Valmiki look after Sita? How will Rama eat Shabri’s berries [ber]?b Those who wish that our bonds with the backward castes and the Harijans are cut will bite dust. We shall build the temple!

  Listen, Rama is the representation of mass consciousness. He is the god of the poor and the oppressed. He is the life of fishermen, cobblers, and washermen.c If anyone is not a devotee of such a god, he does not have Hindu blood in his veins. We shall build the temple!

  Marking its boundary, making it aware of a collective cultural loss, giving it a body, is not enough to protect and maintain the emerging Hindu identity. For identi
ty is not an achievement but a process constantly threatened with rupture by forces from within and without.

  Constant vigil is needed to guard it from that evil inside the group which seeks to divide what has been recently united, to disrupt and fragment what has been freshly integrated. Rithambra addresses the feeling of threat and singles out the political forces representing this threat which must be defeated at the coming battle of the ballot box.

  My Hindu brothers! Stop shouting that slogan, ‘Give one more push and break the Babri mosque! The mosque is broken, the mosque is broken!!’ What mosque are you talking about? We are going to build our temple there not break anyone’s mosque. Our civilization has never been one of destruction. Intellectuals and scholars of the world, wherever you find ruins, wherever you come upon broken monuments, you will find the signature of Islam. Wherever you find creation, you discover the signature of the Hindu. We have never believed in breaking but in constructing. We have always been ruled by the maxim, ‘The world is one family’ [vasudhe kuttumbkam]. We are not pulling down a monument, we are building one.

  Scholars, turn the pages of history and tell us whether the Hindu, riding a horse and swinging a bloody sword, has ever trampled on anyone’s human dignity? We cannot respect those who have trod upon humanity. Our civilization has given us great insights. We see god in a stone, we see god in trees and plants. We see god in a dog and run behind him with a cup of butter. Hindus have you forgotten that the saint Namdev had only one piece of bread to eat which was snatched by a dog. Namdev ran after the dog with a cup of butter crying, ‘Lord, don’t eat dry bread. Take some butter too!!’ Can the Hindu who sees god even in a dog ever harbour resentment towards a Muslim?

  Wherever I go, I say, ‘Muslims, live and prosper among us. Live like milk and sugar. If two kilos of sugar are dissolved in a quintal of milk, the milk becomes sweet!’ But what can be done if our Muslim brother is not behaving like sugar in the milk? Is it our fault if he seems bent upon being a lemon in the milk? He wants the milk to curdle. He is behaving like a lemon in the milk by following people like Shahabuddin and Abdullah Bukhari.d I say to him, Come to your senses. The value of the milk increases after it becomes sour. It becomes cheese. But the world knows the fate of the lemon. It is cut, squeezed dry and then thrown on the garbage heap. Now you have to decide whether you will act like sugar or like a lemon in the milk. Live among us like the son of a human being and we will respectfully call you ‘uncle’. But if you want to behave like the son of Babar then the Hindu youth will deal with you as Rana Pratap and Chatrapati Shivajie dealt with your forefathers. Those who say we are against the Muslims, lie. We are talking of the birthplace of Rama, not constructing at Mecca or Medina. It is our birthright to build a temple to our Lord at the spot he was born.

  We have religious tolerance in our very bones. Together with our three hundred and thirty million gods, we have worshipped the dead lying in their graves. Along with Rama and Krishna, we have saluted Mohammed and Jesus. With vasudhe kuttumbkam as our motto, we pray for the salvation of the world and for an increase in fellow feeling in all human beings. We have never said, ‘O World! Believe in our Upanishads. Believe in our Gita. Otherwise you are an infidel and by cutting off the head of an infidel one gains paradise.’ Our sentiments are not so low. They are not narrow-minded. They are not dirty. We see the world as our family.

  Here, in the construction of the Hindu identity, we see the necessary splitting that enhances group cohesion. The process involves idealizing on the one hand and scapegoating and persecutory processes on the other. What is being idealized is the Hindu tolerance, compassion, depth of insight and width of social concern. These are the contents of a grandios Hindu group self which makes the individual member feel righteous and pure. It raises each member’s sense of worth for belonging to this group.

  The increase in self-esteem can be maintained only by projecting the bad, the dirty, and the impure to another group, the Muslim, with which one’s own group is then constantly compared. This process is at the root of scapegoating and, as Rafael Moses reminds us, this indeed is how the original scapegoat was conceived of in religion: the animal was driven away with all the community’s badness inside it so that the community of believers could remain pure and clean (like milk, I am tempted to add).19 Of course, as a good vegetarian Hindu, sadhavi Rithambra conceives the Muslim scapegoat not as an animal but as a lemon. As we shall see below, the Muslim is not only the object of scapegoating but also the subject of persecutory fantasies in the collective Hindu imagination.

  Today, the Hindu is being insulted in his own home. The Hindu is not sectarian. How could he be if he worships trees and plants! Once [the Mughal emperor] Akbar and [his Hindu minister] Birbal were going somewhere. On the way they saw a plant. Birbal dismounted and prostrated himself before the plant saying, ‘Hail mother tulsi!’ Akbar said, ‘Birbal, you Hindus are out of your minds, making parents out of trees and plants. Let’s see how strong your mother is!’ He got off his horse, pulled the tulsi plant out by its roots and threw it on the road. Birbal swallowed this humiliation and kept quiet. What could he do? It was the reign of the Mughals. They rode farther and saw another plant. Birbal again prostrated himself saying, ‘Hail, father! Hail, honoured father!’ Akbar said, ‘Birbal I have dealt with your mother. Now, let me deal with your father too.’ He again pulled out the plant and threw it away. The plant was a nettle. Akbar’s hands started itching and soon the painful itch spread all over his body. He began rolling on the ground like a donkey, with tears in his eyes and his nose watering. All the while he was scratching himself like a dog. When Birbal saw the condition of the king, he said, ‘O Protector of the World, pardon my saying that our Hindu mothers may be innocent but our fathers are hard-bitten.’ Akbar asked, ‘Birbal, how do I get rid of your father?’ Birbal said, ‘Go and ask forgiveness of my mother tulsi. Then rub the paste made out of her leaves on your body and my father will pardon you.’

  I mean to say that the long-suffering Hindu is being called a religious zealot today only because he wants to build the temple. The Muslims got their Pakistan. Even in a mutilated India, they have special rights. They have no use for family planning. They have their own religious schools. What do we have? An India with its arms cut off.f An India where restrictions are placed on our festivals, where our processions are always in danger of attack, where the expression of our opinion is prohibited, where our religious beliefs are cruelly derided. We cannot speak of our pain, express our hurt. I say to the politician, ‘Do not go on trampling upon our deepest feelings as you have been doing for so long.’

  In Kashmir, the Hindu was a minority and was hounded out of the valley. Slogans of ‘Long live Pakistan’ were carved with red hot iron rods on the thighs of our Hindu daughters. Try to feel the unhappiness and the pain of the Hindu who became a refugee in his own country. The Hindu was dishonoured in Kashmir because he was in a minority. But there is a conspiracy to make him a minority in the whole country. The state tells us Hindus to have only two or three children. After a while, they will say do not have even one. But what about those who have six wives, have thirty or thirty-five children and breed like mosquitoes and flies?

  Why should there be two sets of laws in this country? Why should we be treated like stepchildren? I submit to you that when the Hindu of Kashmir became a minority he came to Jammu. From Jammu he came to Delhi. But if you Hindus are on the run all over India, where will you go? Drown in the Indian Ocean or jump from the peaks of the Himalayas?

  What is this impartiality toward all religions where the mullahs get the moneybags and Hindus the bullets? We also want religious impartiality but not of the kind where only Hindus are oppressed. People say there should be Hindu–Muslim unity. Leave the structure of the Babri mosque undisturbed. I say, ‘Then let’s have this unity in case of the Jama masjidg too. Break half of it and construct a temple. Hindus and Muslims will then come together.’

  You know the doctors who carry out their medical exp
eriments by cutting open frogs, rabbits, cats? All these experiments in Hindu–Muslim unity are being carried out on the Hindu chest as if he is a frog, rabbit or cat. No one has ever heard of a lion’s chest being cut open for a medical experiment. They teach the lesson of religious unity and amity only to the Hindus.

  In Lucknow there was a Muslim procession which suddenly stopped when passing a temple where a saffron flag was flying. The mullahs said, This is the flag of infidels. We cannot pass even under its shadow. Take down the flag!’ Some of your liberal Hindu leaders and followers of Gandhi started persuading the Hindus, ’ Your ancestors have endured a great deal. You also tolerate a little. You have been born to suffer. Take down the flag.’ Luckily, I was also there. I said to the leader who was trying to cajole the Hindus into taking down the flag, ‘If I took off your cap, gave four blows to your head with my shoe and then replaced the cap, would you protest?’ This is not just our flag, it is our honour, our pride. Religious impartiality does not mean that to appease one you insult the other. Hindu children were riddled with bullets in the alleys of Ayodhya to please the Muslims. The Saryu river became red with the blood of slaughtered kar-sevaks. We shall not forget.

  It is true that for the strengthening of cultural identity, belief of the group members in an existing or anticipated oppression is helpful, if not necessary. Yet for the eight hundred million Hindus who are relatively more advanced on almost every economic and social criteria, to feel oppressed by Muslims who are one-eighth their number demands an explanation other than one given by the theory of relative deprivation. This theory, as we know, argues that a group feels oppressed if it perceives inequality in the distribution of resources and believes it is entitled to more than the share it receives. There is a considerable denial of reality involved in maintaining that the Hindus are relatively deprived or in danger of oppression by the Muslims. Such a denial of reality is only possible through the activation of the group’s persecutory fantasy in which the Muslim changes from a stereotype to an archetype; he becomes the ‘arch’ tyrant. As in individuals, where persecution anxiety often manifests itself in threats to the integrity of the body, especially during psychotic episodes, Rithambra’s speech becomes rich in the imagery of a mutilated body. Eloquently, she conjures up an India—the motherland—with its arms cut off, Hindu chests cut open like those of frogs, rabbits, and cats, the thighs of young Hindu women burnt with red-hot iron rods; in short, the body amputated, slashed, raped. It is the use of metaphors of the body—one’s own and of one’s mother (India)—under assault that makes an actual majority feel a besieged minority in imagination, anchors the dubious logos of a particular political argument deeply in fantasy through the power of mythos.