Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  Chapter 7 is, so to speak, the Muslim counterpart of the preceding chapter. It analyses the speech transcript of the mullahs, the most conservative spokesmen of the community, to describe the psychological construction of Muslim fundamentalist identity.

  In conclusion, Chapter 8 summarizes the various identity-threats arising from the social-cultural arena that bring the latent group aspect of our identity to the forefront. It traces the development of this aspect of personal identity, the conditions necessary for the release of its potential violence, and the role played by religion in its facilitation.

  1

  The Setting

  The face of the two-year-old girl has come to occupy a permanent corner of my mind. Every now and again it rises to the surface of my consciousness. Some of these occasions are predictable. There is little mystery when the disfigured face flashes across an inner screen while I am reading about, or seeing on television, episodes of violence between racial, religious, or language groups in different parts of the world. I can also understand, even as I resent, the little girl demanding attention whenever people talk of Hyderabad, whenever they are praising its old-world charm and the deliciousness of its cuisine or lamenting its lost feudal glories. The connection of the face with other contexts is more obscure. Why does it suddenly bob up when a man in therapy is telling me of a painful encounter with his boss at work or a female patient weeps as she recalls memories of her humiliation at the hands of an elder sister? I know I will have to go through a long chain of association to lift this veil of obscurity. I am rarely in the mood to make this effort since the girl is not a welcome tenant. She is a squatter.

  I first saw the face in the newspaper photograph accompanying a report on the Hindu-Muslim riots in Hyderabad in December 1990. When I finally began this study in the following year, I encountered this particular photograph again and again in newspaper and magazine clippings. It had become the dominant image of that particular carnage. I do not know whether the girl is a Hindu or a Muslim, although a Telugu paper, championing the Hindu cause, identifies her as a Hindu. What you see in the photograph is the unkempt hair, matted with dust, of a child from the slums and then, shockingly, the deep gash of the scythe across the top of her face. The wound, not yet healed into a scar, starts at the right temple, cleaves the corner of the eyeballs and the bridge of a rather flat nose, to peter out in the sands of the left cheek. The stitches are not the careful job of a well-paid professional. They bespeak a harried resident doctor trying to cope with an overflow of the wounded and the dying in the emergency room of a run-down government hospital. The stitches are uneven crosses across the face, hasty scrawls of someone anxious to get over with a silly game of noughts and crosses. One arm of the girl is around a cushion, seeking comfort without finding it. The right side of the face and and the injured eye rests against the edge of the cushion as she looks out through the left eye at the camera, the world, and, if I am not careful, at me.

  There is an unfathomable numbness in her expression, the aftermath of a cataclysm that has shaken the little body and soul to a depth unimaginable for me. I try to look through the child’s eyes at what must have appeared as a phalanx of giants, with black strips of cloth covering the lower halves of their faces, come crashing through the splintered front door. She sees one of the men raise an axe and club her father down, the sharp edge of the weapon catching him in the back of his neck as he turns and tries to flee. She sees him disappear as he falls, and the men close in with knives, scythes, and wooden clubs. She sees her mother standing transfixed and then hears her make a sound between a sharp cough and a scream as a spear slices through the base of her throat. The girl takes a step toward her mother when the scythe is swung. There is a burning pain beyond all her experience of pain. Blood streams into the eye and, then, oblivion.

  I imagine, in that particular moment when her consciousness began the distinctive spiral which ends in the loss of all accustomed moorings, that the universe revealed its secret to the little girl. She caught a glimpse of the immeasurably vast stretch of indifference surrounding the pinpoint of light we call a human life and from whose odds and ends—birth, death, bodily functions, sexual feelings, relationships with parents, siblings, children—we desperately keep on trying to construct a meaning.

  I shake my head to free myself of these fantasies and again turn to the photograph of the child with a stony face and one uncomprehending eye. I am aware that my flight of imagination is a failure rather then a success of empathy. The sheer magnitude of the violence done to her is too oppressive for me to employ that crucial tool of my trade, without which no psychoanalyst can grasp and make sense of what is going on within another person. Perhaps this is so because the child is so patently a victim. She is pathetic because she has been flattened by fate. Empathy requires its addressee to be tragic, someone who has helped to bring fate upon herself and was thus fate’s active even if unwitting collaborator rather its passive victim. Tragedy at least preserves a memory of one’s agency and therefore holds out the hope of its eventual recovery. The unmitigated passivity of pathos, on the other hand, is a dead weight that tugs down at the spirit of everyone who comes in its contact. I cannot empathize with the child because I must defend myself against her pathos. It is far easier for me to pity her. Pity is distant. The girl’s face, then, is not haunting but nagging, like a child beggar or a leper with his insidious whine, evoking an angry guilt that will not let you shout at the wretch, ‘Disappear! Die!’

  At the outset, then, I am apprehensive whether I will be able to bring the essence of psychoanalytic sensibility to bear upon my conversations with the victims of the riots, as well as to my interviews with the agents of violence, the men who stab, bludgeon, and burn. It is not enough for me to take up the clinician’s stance and, for instance, speculate upon the little girl’s eventual fate: namely, if she survives the poverty and the neglect of a disfigured orphan (who is female to boot) and grows up into and adult, she will become fearful of expressing any anger, will be easily startled by any physical surprise, and will have incomprehensible impulses to injure herself. I want to do more but am afraid that I will do much less as I leave my accustomed clinical moorings to enter the world of social violence with nothing more than what is called a psychoanalytic sensibility.

  The core of the analyst’s sensibility does not lie in clinical expertise or in a specific way of observing and interpreting people’s words and actions. It does not even lie in a perhaps easier acceptance of the gulf between people’s ideals and their behaviour, in the analyst’s greater difficulty in summoning up righteous indignation or his reluctance to carry out a lover’s quarrel with the world. The core is empathy. Empathy is the bridge between the serene reserve of the clinician striving for objectivity and the vital, passionate and vulnerable person who inhabits the clinician’s body. Empathy makes me, as an analyst or scholar, step out of the anonymity of an impersonal enterprise and constantly recognize myself in it as a human being of flesh and blood. Without its vital presence I fear that the creative tension between objectivity and impassioned involvement, between the stoic and the emotionally responsive perspectives, will be lost.

  Shifting Perspectives

  I began this study with a description of the reaction evoked in me by the title victim of the Hyderabad riot in the conviction that not only the observer but also his state of consciousness belongs to the description of the phenomenon he seeks to describe and understand. The father, with his new polaroid camera, photographs the child. As he holds up the print, the child is first pleased and then puzzled. “But, Father,” the child asks, “where are you in the picture?” The father could at least have extended a leg to get his foot into a corner of the photograph.

  Whereas quantum physicists realized the importance of the interaction of subject and object in the comprehension of reality—“We cannot describe the world as if we did not belong to it,” was the credo of the poineers1—this recognition has not generally taken place in the socia
l sciences. Most social scientists have continued to exclude their own subjectivity from descriptions of psychological and social reality. They have not felt the need for putting imaginative flesh on academic bones. Subjectivity has been regarded as irrational. At best, it is irrational not in the sense of being against reason or constituting the not-understood but of being outside reason.

  Perhaps the social scientists were unwittingly forced to choose a more convenient strategy when they kept the subject strictly separate from the object, since an attempt to grasp a more holistic world, the “really real”, through the inclusion of their own subjectivity would have led to a degree of complexity which could have bordered on chaos. Psychoanalysts, however, were compelled to abandon this Cartesian stance because of the very nature of their discipline. Whereas in the early years of psychoanalysis, the feelings aroused in the analyst by the patient—countertransference—were thought to contaminate the analyst’s objectivity, to be eliminated through a rigorous self-analysis, it was soon realized that the analyst’s subjectivity was an essential source of information about the patient. In other words, the analyst understands the patient only in so far as he or she understands the disturbance the patient evokes in himself or herself. As the analyst follows the patient’s productions and their effects the analyst must be both an observer and the object of observation. Whether it is the individual patient or large collectivities, we still see with our experiences, hear through our memories, understand with our bodies. In my own account of religious violence, it is these different yet interdependent modes of engaging with the persons and events of this study, the keeping alive of the tension between the immersive and reflective parts of my self, the quest not to let the experiencing self get buried under the agenda of a self that would rather organize and interpret the experience, that I seek to capture in my writing of this book.

  The City: ‘Unparalleled in the World’

  The city of Hyderabad was conceived of as the new capital of the Deccan Kingdom of Golconda after the old fortress city a few miles away became congested and unhygienic due to an acute shortage of water.2 Mohammed Quli Qutub Shah, the founder of the city, named it Bhagnagar after his beloved Hindu mistress, Bhagmati. Officially renamed Hyderabad after her death—Hyder being the title give to her by the king—Bhagnagar continued to retain its popular name. Even a hundred years after its founding in 1589, travellers’ accounts continued to refer to Hyderabad by the name of Mohammed Quli’s beloved Hindu mistress.

  Four hundred and two years old at the time of this writing, Hyderabad was envisaged by its founder to be a city ‘unparalleled anywhere in the world and a replica of heaven on earth’. The benevolent ruler, with artistic sensibilities and literary tastes, who liked to flaunt his sensual excesses in verse, had the good sense to entrust the task of giving his vision a concrete shape to his prime minister, Mir Momin. The minister, who had grown up in the garden city of Isfahan in Persia, planned the new capital on the lines of the city he had loved as a child and brought in architects and builders from Persia to carry out the grand design. Mir Momin’s plan favoured a gridiron pattern with two main intersecting roads, each sixty feet wide, which divided the city into four quarters. The northwestern quarter adjacent to the intersection was reserved for the royal palaces and the eastern quarter for the residences of the prime minister and the nobles of the realm.

  For the houses of the commoners, twelve main zones, spread over an area of ten square miles, were allocated. Each of these mohallas had schools, hospitals, mosques, inns, and gardens—with vegetable and fruit markets at the periphery—in an effort to make every mohalla self-sufficient. Later, during the short period Hyderabad came under Mughal rule, the construction of a protective wall around the city was started. Completed by Asaf Jah in 1740, the wall had twelve gates which closed nightly at eight and opened at the crack of dawn.

  The main roads were lined with 14,000 double-storeyed shops, and there were separate areas earmarked for state offices, public buildings, and foreign embassies. The pride of the public buildings were the Jami mosque and the Char Minar (“four minarets”)—a square edifice with four broad and lofty arches and a minaret, 220 feet high, at each corner—which has come to symbolize old Hyderabad and the faded glory of its Islamic heritage. Located at the centre of the walled city, at the intersection of the two main highways, it was from Char Minar that the imperial power of the Qutub Shahis emanated outwards.

  The French merchant and celebrated traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier came to Hyderabad in April 1641, during the reign of Abdulla Qutub Shah, who succeeded his father Mohammed Quli to the throne of Golconda in 1611 and ruled till 1672. Tavernier describes the city thus:

  A larger river bathes the walls of the town on the south-west side, and flows into the Gulf of Bengal close to Masulipatam. You cross it at Bhagnagar by a grand stone bridge [Purana Pul], which is scarcely less beautiful than the Pont Neuf at Paris. The town is nearly the size of Orleans, well built and well opened out, and there are many fine large streets in it, but not being paved—any more than are those of all other towns of Persia and India—they are full of sand and dust; this is very inconvenient in summer….

  When you have crossed the bridge you straightaway enter a wide street which leads to the King’s palace. You see on the right hand the houses of some nobles of the court, and four or five caravan sarais, having two storeys, where there are large halls and chambers, which are cool. At the end of this street you find a large square, near which stands one of the walls of the palace, and in the middle there is a balcony where the King seats himself when he wishes to give audience to the people. The principal door of the palace is not in this square, but in another close by, and you enter at first into a large court surrounded by porticoes under which the King’s guards are stationed. From this court you pass to another of the same construction, around which there are several beautiful apartments, with a terraced roof, upon these, as upon the quarter of the palace where they keep the elephants, there are beautiful gardens, and such large trees, that it is a matter of astonishment how these arches are able to carry such a weight….

  On the other side of the town, from whence one goes to Masulipatam, there are two large tanks, each of them being a coss in circuit, upon which are some decorated boats intended for the pleasure of the King, and along the banks many fine houses which belong to the principal officers of the court.3

  Hyderabad was cast in the mould of other medieval cities of the Islamic world. Imposing public buildings and palaces were to line its main streets. Secondary streets then led to self contained neighbourhoods or mohallas, with their narrow winding lanes often ending in blind alleys, small open squares, and densely packed low-rise houses with inner courtyards, many of them surprisingly spacious. The city was also Islamic both in population and in its mainstream culture which had roots in Arab, Turkish, and, especially, Persian ways of life. Since the Qutub Shahis were Shias, with strong links with their coreligionists in Iran, a great number of Persians streamed into Hyderabad over the years to seek their fortunes. The most important positions in the administration of the kingdom were held by Persians who had a tremendous impact on the art, architecture, literature, and culture of Hyderabad for nearly 200 years after its foundation. With the establishment of the Asaf Jahi rule, Persian influence declined a little but nevertheless continued to shape the Hyderabadi way of life, at least among the upper classes. Tavernier notes the fair countenance and good stature of its Muslim inhabitants as compared to the dark complexion of the surrounding peasantry, presumably Hindu, who had their assigned, mostly humble, places in the feudal order and whose native Telugu culture existed only at the fringes of the dominant Islamic ethos. In the cultural pecking order, the Persians were right at the top, followed by Turks and other central Asian immigrants. Native-born Indian Muslims felt inferior to both and were keen to establish the existence of Persian or Turkish blood in their lineage, a mind-set which has persisted till very recently. The anthropologist S.C. Dube quot
es Hindus in the villages of Shamirpet outside Hyderabad in the 1960s saying: ‘A Hindu untouchable of yesterday becomes a Muslim today: and tomorrow he will start proclaiming that his forefathers lived in Arabia!’4 Because of the Brahminical notions of pollution, the few Hindus who aspired to share the dominant cultural ethos could do so only on a limited basis.

  The Perso-Islamic domination of Hyderabad’s cultural and social life does not mean that Hindus were excluded from administrative positions and from a share of political power. Talented Brahmins and later the Kayasths could rise to high positions in the court. Another French traveller, Francois Martin, tells us of the heartburn among the Persian, Pathan, and Deccani nobles at the elevation of the Brahmin Madanna, who had become the most powerful minister of the king at the time of his visit.5 Hindus were to hold high positions in the civil and revenue administration of the state well into the early period of the Asaf Jahi dynasty in the 18th century.

  As the construction of the new capital gathered pace and the grand design of the city began to unfold, Mohammed Quli could not have imagined that the lowly Hindus would one day threaten its Islamic cultural suzerainty or that the city’s decline was already presaged by an insignificant event taking place at the outer edges of his dominions. I refer, of course, to the entry of what would later be called the ‘modern West’ through the East India Company, which began setting up a ‘factory’ in the port city of Masulipatam in 1611.

  For almost a hundred years, the city flourished in an approximation of Mohammed Quli’s vision. Even making allowances for travellers’ hyperbole, Hyderabad seems to have deserved the accolades that come its way as not only a great but also a gracious city, with considerable hedonistic charm. Its Islamic ethos was not of the puritan kind but of the more pleasure-loving Persian variety. Martin gives appetizing details of his dinner on the evening of 28 June 1681 with a persian noble at Hyderabad’s court—in fact, the brother-in-law of the king.6 The number and quality of the dishes served on this memorable occasion far surpassed the fare of the court feasts in Turkey. Every quarter of an hour, at the ringing of the bell, fresh glasses of wine were served. Female dancers entertained the guests and were offered as companions for the night as farewell gifts by a generous host.