Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  Sexual violence undoubtedly occurred during the Partition, although far below the level enshrined in collective memory. On a more sociological level, the chief reason for the preponderance of specifically sexual violence in the Partition riots in the north is that, as compared to many other parts of the country, the undivided Punjab was (and continues to be) a rather violent society. Its high murder rate is only one indication of a cultural endorsement of the use of physical force to attain socially approved ends such as the defence of one’s land or of personal and family honour. There is now empirical evidence to suggest that the greater the legitimation of violence in some approved areas of life, the more is the likelihood that force will also be used in other spheres where it may not be approved. In this so-called cultural spillover effect there is a strong association between the level of nonsexual violence and rape, rape being partly a spillover from cultural norms condoning violent behaviour in other areas of life.2 Given this violent tradition and its associated cultural norms, the riot situation further undermined, if it did not completely sweep away, the already weak norms curbing male aggression. It is then quite understandable that sexual violence during the Partition riots could reach levels of brutality which have rarely been approached in subsequent riots in other parts of the country.

  It is only now that I can reflect more composedly, even tranquilly, and give a psychological gloss to the stories of the riots. At the time I heard them, their fearful images coursed unimpeded through my mind which reverberated wildly with their narrators’ flushes of emotion. There was a frantic tone to the stories, an underlying hysteria I felt as a child but could only name as an adult. After all, my uncles, aunts, and cousins had not yet recovered from the trauma of what had befallen them. The Partition horrors stalked their dreams. They were still not free of the fear of losing their lives, a fear that had clutched them for weeks. They had lost their homeland, where they had been born and lived, which constitutes such an important, albeit unconscious, facet of our identity. With the loss of their homes, their sense of personal identity was tottering—had become ‘diffused’ in Eriksonian terms3—while they had yet to begin the process of adapting this fragmenting identity to a new homeland.

  It is sobering to think of hundreds of thousands of children over many parts of the subcontinent, Hindu and Muslim, who have listened to stories from their parents and other family elders during the Partition and other subsequent riots, on the fierceness of an implacable enemy. This is a primary channel through which historical enmity is transmitted from one generation to the next as the child, ignoring the surface interpretations and rationalizations, hears the note of helpless fury and impotence in the accounts of beloved adults and fantasizes scenarios of revenge against those whose have humiliated his family and kin.4 The fantasies, which can later turn from dimly conscious images to concrete actions during communal conflagrations, are not only a vindication of the parents and a repayment of the debt owed them but also a validation of the child-in-the-man’s greater strength and success in overpowering those who had shamed his family in the distant past. Given the strong family and kinship ties all over the country, a Hindu’s enmity towards the Muslim (and vice versa) is often experienced by the individual as a part of the loyalty due to or (in the case of a more conflictful parent-child relationship) imposed by the parents. Later, as the child grows up, the parental message may be amplified by the input of one or more teachers. As Rajesh, one of the subjects of this study whom we will encounter later, remarked: ‘We had a history teacher in school. He was the type who loved his subject. He would keep the text book aside and teach us the lesson extempore—like stories. When he used to tell us about the inhuman atrocities committed by Muslim invaders on the Hindus, I remember I used to get so angry that I felt like walking out of the class and beating up a few Muslim boys.’

  Leaving aside the stories, I am uncertain whether even my direct childhood memories of the riots, with their vivid images which carry such an intense charge of noesis, the certainty of knowing, can be completely trusted to represent reality or are even wholly mine. For instance, I ‘remember’ going with my father to the railway station one night. Was it Rohtak? Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan were camped on the station platform. Many had moaned in their sleep and a couple had woken up screaming (I now imagine) to escape from their persistent nightmares. We had walked through the sea of uneasy sleepers, their faces discoloured by the dim violet glow of the neon tubes hanging high above the platform. Sitting silently among empty canisters and tattered bedrolls, shrinking at our approach, the children did not cry and rarely whimpered, their large dark eyes full of a bewildered hurt and (again I imagine) the memories of stabbed and hacked bodies lying in the streets of towns and villages which now belonged to Pakistan. One particular image has become permanently etched: a four-year-old boy with a running nose, the yellow-green mucous, a thin plaster of salted sweat on the upper lip, dense with buzzing files which the child did not lift his hand to drive away, afraid perhaps of giving offence to even the smallest of living creatures.

  I never personally witnessed the kinds of violence described in the family stories during the few days of rioting in Rohtak. For we lived at the outskirts of the town, in Civil Lines, where the spacious bungalows of the sahibs of the Raj and a few elite non-officials were located. The Civil Lines families rarely went into town, preferring the company of each other. Our social life was focused on the Rohtak Club and was carried out in its high-ceilinged rooms with their covered padded chairs, the wooden dance floor, and books on big game hunting and mores of obscure Indian tribes lying unread on the shelves of teak bookcases. Sometimes in the evening, when children were not allowed in, I had watched my father and his friends sitting outside on the lawn from behind the cactus hedge surrounding the club. In their white drill trousers and their cotton bush shirts, they looked fresh and cool, radiating an aura of peace and quiet authority which made me feel safe and quietly sleepy. A part of this effect was achieved through the sensory background of their setting—the settling dusk, the smell of freshly watered grass, the low murmurs of waiters gliding between the clubhouse and the widely spaced bridge tables bearing iced lemon and orange squashes. And as they sat there, the upright garden lamps transforming the lawn into a dull yellow island surrounded by the brilliant Indian darkness from which only moths and fireflies ventured in as intruders, the silence disturbed only by the occasional dream cry of a peacock, they had looked remote from the dust, the colour, and the noise of the town they administered. I remember well the night the riot started. From the terrace, where most of the family gathered on hearing a continuous, muffled roar break the stillness of the night, I counted at least 20 separate fires within the span of an hour as Muslim homes and shops were burnt on that first night. By midnight, the night had the shimmering glow of a slow-burning coal fire, the overcast sky beginning to have the ragged crimson edge of an uneven and unnatural dawn. Although on the following days the sounds of the riot coming from the town were blended into a low-pitched buzzing, not unlike the one near a beehive, I sometimes imagined I could distinguish the distant shouts of the mobs roaming the bazaars from the panic-filled screams of their victims.

  We had enough company that night. The roof terraces of our neighbouring bungalows were crowded with whole families come up to watch the distant fires. Angry cries of babies awoken from sleep mingled with excited shouts of discovery as fresh fires were sighted. There were animated exchanges across the roofs as to the exact location of a new fire and the possible reactions of the Muslims. On the whole, the onlookers were in a gay mood; there was a feeling of respite from the petty concerns of daily life, a kind of relaxation which comes from the release of long pent-up tensions. ‘This is a lesson the Muslims needed to be taught! We should have put them in their places long ago!’ was the general consensus.

  Although the night air began to be permeated by the acrid smell of smoke, the fires were far away and the possibility of any danger to our own homes and
lives remote. At the most, the distant threat gave all of us a tingling sense of excitement which heightened the gaiety of what was fast turning into a festive occasion.

  For the children, and perhaps for the adults too, that first night of the riot thus had a quality akin to the day of the kite-flying festival at the onset of spring, when people throng the roofs and the clear blue of the sky is profusely dotted with kites in all their bright colours; the town resounds to the battle cries of children as the men compete against each other, trying to cut the string holding a rival kite entangled with their own. The duels taking place in the town that night did not use paper kites as weapons, and the battle cries we heard so faintly were no mere expressions of childish exuberance but declarations of deadly intent. Yet, in the safety of our house and surrounded by the family, an uncanny impression of the riot as macabre festival persisted throughout the hours I spent on the roof.

  When the riots were brought under control after three days, I remember that my father gave in to my persistence and promised to take me into the town the next morning to see the aftermath. I remember waking up early that day and looking out at the speckled dawn as the sun struggled with the first clouds of the season. The monsoon was a few days away and, my elbows resting on the window-sill of my parents’s bedroom, I watched its foreunners, dark fluffy clouds racing across the sky as imperious heralds. The morning had been different from others, smelling not only of the sun’s warmth but also of budding grass shoots and the dark, far away thunder. The walk through Rohtak’s bazaars with my father was disappointing. I had expected to see smouldering heaps, amputated limbs, cut-off breasts—which I pictured as pale fleshy balls without a trace of blood. The reality was oddly disappointing. Except for an occasional house with charred doors, missing windows, and smoke scars on its front, the bazaars presented the unchanging vista of a provincial town awakening to another day. There were the men vigorously (and loudy) chewing on marigossa twigs to clean their teeth and clearing their throats with much hawking and spitting. Others murmured their prayers as they bathed under the cool streams of water from public hydrants. The women hissed encouragement over naked babies held up above the gutter. Older children squatted by themselves, with that faraway look which be speaks of an inward absorption in the working of one’s bowels, a trance occasionally broken as they bent down to contemplate their own dirt.

  Almost 20 years later, in 1969, when I was again a witness to another Hindu-Muslim riot, this time in Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat, I was surprised to hear essentially the same rumours I had heard as a child in Rohtak. Thus we heard (and in Rohtak believed) that milk vendors had been bribed by the Muslims to poison the milk in the morning. Four children were said to be lying unconscious and two dogs had died after having drunk of the poisoned milk. Apparently, most of the servants in Civil Lines who went into the town frequently, had personally seen the dogs in the throes of death. Women had hurried to empty out the pails of milk; sticky patches of white soon spread to plaster the cobbed stones of the streets. We heard that Muslims had broken into grocery shops in the night and mixed powdered glass with the salt. A police van with a loudspeaker was said to be driving around the town, warning people not to buy salt. Both in Rohtak and Ahmedabad there was talk of large stocks of weapons, acid and other materials needed for manufacturing bombs, put in a cache in the underground cellars of mosques; of prior Muslim preparations for a slaughter of the Hindus being forestalled by the riot. In Ahmedabad there was the additional rumour of armed Pakistani agents seen parachuting into the city at night. Its Rohtak counterpart was the imminent attack by thousands of armed Meo tribesmen making a detour to the town on their way to Pakistan.

  The fact that rumours during a riot take such dramatic and fanciful turns is not surprising. In a study of the ratio of rumours to actual events such as killing, rape, beating, harassment, property violation, and inconvenience among the Asians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, the relationship was strikingly linear.5 That is, the more threatening and dramatic the experience, the more likely it was to be a wellspring of rumour. At the high point of a riot, the content of the rumours is at its most threatening and the speed at which they circulate at its highest. For it is at this particular time when three of the four conditions for the generation and transmission of rumours—personal anxiety, general uncertainty, and topical importance—are at their highest level. The fourth condition, credulity, is no longer in operation since at high levels of anxiety, disbelief in rumour is suspended, that is, rumours will be believed regardless how far-fetched.6

  Rumours, of course, also serve some less conscious purposes. Deriving from and reinforcing the paranoid potential which lies buried in all of us, they were the conversational food which helped in the growth of a collective Hindu body. They sharpened our awareness of our own kind and many, who though they lived in the same bazaar were relative strangers earlier, became brothers overnight. They made misers discover a forgotten generosity as they offered to share food with those who had none, neighbours who had little use for each other now enquired daily about each other’s well-being. There is little doubt that rumours are the fuel and riots the fire in which a heightened sense of community is also forged. If I remember the Rohtak riots so vividly it is not only because I was an impressionable child but also because of the deep sense of communion I felt with my family and the wider, although vague, entity of ‘the Hindus’. The riots generated emotions which expanded my boundaries. They gave rise to exhilarating feelings of closeness and belonging to something beyond myself which I desperately wanted to keep. My memory of the Rohtak riots, I recognize, is not free from a shame-faced nostalgia for a shining flower which sprang from the mean soil of decaying corpses and ashes left behind by arsonists’ fires.

  In undermining our familiar controls over mental life, a riot is often experienced as a midwife for unfamiliar, disturbing fantasies and complex emotions, such as both disgust and overwhelming sexual attraction for a member of the enemy community. The overcharged atmosphere of violence breathed day in and day out by a person lifts the lid on the cauldron of instinctual drives as civilized sensibility threatens to collapse before the press of instinctuality in both its sexual and violent aspects. Accounts of sexual violence during a riot, for instance, not only evoke the publicly acceptable reaction of horror but may also release the more hidden emotion of a shameful excitement which bespeaks instinctual desire in its rawer form. Besides the expression of moral outrage, riot violence can be subjectively used for an unwanted but wished for vicarious satisfaction of sadistic impulses, for the fulfilment of one’s urge to utterly subjugate another human being, to reduce his or her consciousness to a reactivity of the flesh alone.

  In fiction, this complex flow of subjectivity during a riot has been brilliantly captured by the Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid in his novel Guzra Hua Zamana (A Bygone Era). Biru, the teenaged hero of the novel, together with his parents, his sister Devi, and Kumari, the young wife of a neighbour, whom Biru has always lusted after with the innocence and ancient knowledge of a boy on the verge of manhood, have been given shelter by a Muslim friend, Bakka, during the Partition riots in a small town in Punjab. As the marauding Muslim mob, consisting of many men Biru knows well, including Bakka himself, roams the streets at night in an orgy of looting, killing and rape, the Hindu family cowers in the small dark room and a terrified Biru’s thoughts flow in a full, barely controllable stream.

  Even if I survive it will be as a cripple. Before pushing us out, Bakka will first cut an ear off everyone. Devi and Kumari will also have a breast chopped off. Perhaps he will also break one of my legs. What if all the others are killed and I survive! I will commit suicide. I know how to. Somewhere here there must be a rope. What if I am killed and the others live? Mother will surely kill herself. Or she will become mad. She will go around asking, have you seen my Biru? My innocent, naive Biru? What will probably happen is that we will all die and only Kumari will be left alive. Bakka will take her as his wife.
Or as his slave. He will change her name. Sakina or Hafiza. I like Muslim names and Muslim women. When Bakka comes to kill me I will say, don’t kill me I like Muslim names and Muslim women. He will be so surprised by my courage that his uplifted hand will remain suspended in air. I’ll say, I am half a Muslim. When I hear the call for prayers from the mosque I shiver all over. He will think I am making fun of Islam but I am really telling the truth….

  The killer will agree that I am a Muslim at heart. But this will not stop him from striking. If I was in love with a Muslim girl would I have converted for her sake? I certainly would have become a Muslim if she had asked. Lovers have faith not religion….

  The accounting will start once it is morning. The counting of corpses. How many Hindus, how many Sikhs. There must be a few Muslims too. The intention of killing ten of us for every one of them. On the other side (the Muslims would say) so many of ours were killed, why so few of them here? There they took out processions of our naked women, why has that not happened here? Strip off the clothes of their women! Tear apart their bodies too. In front of their men. And then parade them in the bazaar! In front of their impotent men! At least they will learn to fear God! There, we hear, they cut off the breasts of our women, their hair too. We also will not let them get away intact. Chop one off everyone! Shave their heads! And then kick them in the arse! These are the ones who would not let us touch them, they would not eat from our hands. Now force them to eat everything. Stuff it into their mouths! And say, go to your Hindustan! Why are so few orphans here? Why are the heaps of rubble so small? Do not rest till all these accounts are settled. Avenge blood with blood! For a hurled brick, retaliate with a stone! Take vengeance on the son for the deeds of the father!….