by Sudhir Kakar
In Hyderabad, more than a thousand miles to the south of Ayodhya, the riots began with the killing of Sardar, a Muslim auto-rickshaw driver, by two Hindus. Although the murder was later linked to a land dispute between two rival gangs, at the time of the killing it was framed in the context of rising Hindu-Muslim tensions in the city. Muslims retaliated by stabbing four Hindus in different parts of the walled city. Then Majid Khan, an influential local leader of Subzimandi who lives and flourishes in the shaded space formed by the intersection of crime and politics, was attacked with a sword by some BJP workers and the rumour spread that he had died. Muslim mobs came out into the alleys and streets of the walled city, to be followed by Hindu mobs in their areas of strength, and the 1990 riot was on. It was to last for ten weeks, claim more than 300 lives and thousands of wounded. One of the wounded was the two-year-old girl in the photograph.
3
The Warriors
….In my heart there are furies and sorrows.
Quevodo
Majid Khan survived the attack. When I met him two-and-a-half years later, he was especially keen to show me the scar from the sword blow which had split his balding head in the middle. The thick ragged scar, many shades darker than the nut-brown scalp it traversed before meandering down into the fringe of wispy black hair at the back of his neck, was displayed as a proud badge of honour, a battlefield decoration from an old war. The murderous assault had made him, as Majid Khan put it, ‘the hero of Hyderabad’. ‘Thousands of people gathered at the hospital when they heard the news about the attack,’ he recollected with pride as he looked in the direction of two young men in the room for their choral confirmation. ‘Thousands every day,’ the men obligingly responded. ‘Nothing united the Muslim nation of this city as much as that cowardly blow,’ said Majid Khan. ‘Absolutely true. Hyderabad has never seen anything like it before,’ both the men confirmed, this time with greater enthusiasm as they warmed up to their roles.
I took the men, in their early 30s, to be his chamchas, the fawning, all-purpose factotums who hang around politicians and film stars, catering to their physical and especially to their narcissistic needs. Majid Khan was not yet a political star of the kind who would be surrounded by a whole group, by what I would call a katori (cup), the modest local version of the coterie which has traditionally built up around prime ministers.
Majid Khan’s political fortunes have nonetheless soared since the riots, and the visiting card he gave me was testimony to his importance in the Majlis. Printed in English, his name in cursive red letters riding many lines of different-sized letters in green, like the miniature flag of a new Islamic nation, the card informed me that Abdul Majid Khan was a council member of the all India Majlis-e-Itehad-ul-Muslimeen, a director of Sarussalam Urban Cooperative Bank, had two telephone numbers and a residential adderess in Karwan Sahu, the part of the city where he owned a house and an eatery (which may be called a restaurant but which is respectfully referred to as a hotel.)
I think we took him by surprise when we walked unannounced into the anteroom of his house around 11 in the morning of a hot, late April day. If he was inconvenienced by our intrusion, his deep-set eyes in a dark round face did not betray annoyance. Interrupting his conversation with the chamchas to greet us warmly, he inquired about Sahba’s health and expressed his great pleasure in seeing her again, before turning to me in courteous regard. A middle-aged, barrel-chested man of medium height, with a short thick neck that took its function of joining the head to the trunk more seriously than of separating the two, Majid Khan, even in his undervest and crumpled green-and-black checked lungi, dominated the room with a miasma of raw power. One of the walls of the room was covered with mounted black-and-white photographs which showed him garlanding state and national politicians and being garlanded in turn by more local ones. As expected, the tall, cadaverous leader of the party, Sultan Owaisi, was a gravely benign presence in most of the photographs. Another wall was fully papered by over by coloured, grainy photographs of a wooden Swiss chalet standing at the edge of an icy cool stream and outlined against an impossibly blue sky, the colour of the sky highlighted by two fluffy light grey clouds. Spring trees cast dark velvet shadows on sun-dappled grass. Plump European cows with silky sheens and pink udders grazed in the gently rolling meadow. Outside, the morning was steadily getting hotter. The temperature had crossed the 100 degree mark, yet the boiling sun had only begun its inexorable ascent.
Majid Khan’s discomfort as we exchanged further courtesies while he inquired about the purpose of my visit, was not due to the heat or the sheen of perspiration on his bald scalp that periodically coalesced into large drops of sweat which then trickled down his forehead. He seemed to be more bothered by the informality of his attire and our meeting place. For someone aspiring to be a political figure of more than local significance, Majid Khan naturally wanted to present himself in more appropriate surroundings and suitably dressed for the role. Excusing himself, he asked one of his men to take us to the party office located about a hundred yards from his house above his restaurant where we were to wait for him.
The office itself was spanking new but looked bare and unused. Along one wall, painted in what I have come to regard as Hyderabad blue, there was a brown rexine-covered sofa. The only other furniture was a table with a formica top and a white plastic cane chair. The sofa, the table, and the chair were covered with a fine layer of dust. There were no cupboard, boxes of files, pens, pencils, paperclips, notepades, or other paraphernalia which bespeak of an office where work is done. We were asked by our companion to step into the adjoining room which was more luxuriously, even garishly appointed, in a lower-class fantasy of aristrocratic splendour as shaped by Hindi cinema. The peach-coloured plush-covered sofa could easily seat six while the divan, with two cylindrical pillows encased in dark pink satin covers and in an exultant floral design, was equally spacious. A gleaming new Mirzapur carpet in loud blue with an intricate dark red Persian motif covered the full area of the floor. Majid’s man politely asked us if we would care to look at the Sahib’s photographs, an offer we accepted with equal politeness. The man came back after a few mintues, carrying two bulging cardboard shoe boxes and followed by a younger man, the chamcha’s chamcha, bearing two bottles of cold lemonade. As we sipped the oversweet lemonade, we were taken on a photographic tour of Majid Khan’s life which highlighted his political career and the social status he had achieved. There was genuine awe and admiration in the chamcha’s voice as he pointed out the burly figure of his patron in various situations: here he is in the welcoming committee receiving the former Chief Minister Sahib, there he is next to Sultan Sahib in the reception for the Governor Sahib, there he is in the front of the group garlanding Sultan Sahib at the opening ceremony of the bank.
As we murmured our involvement with subdued ‘oohs!’, ‘ahs!’ and increasing ‘uh-huhs!’ Majid Khan came into the room followed by one of the young men we had earlier met at his home. Majid Khan was now clad in the politician’s uniform of fresh, lightly starched white kurta-pyjamas and matching white leather sandals. He apologized elaborately for keeping us waiting and then took out a remote control device from his pocket with which he tried to switch on the vertical fan standing next to the divan. The blades completed one full circle before coming to a halt. The remote control button was pressed again and the fan made another effort. This was repeated a couple of times before an almost imperceptible nod to the chamcha galvanized him into switching on the fan manually. During the play with the fan, Majid Khan kept on talking to the young man about how everything was now sorted out with the police and that there was no longer any cause for concern. I had the distinct feeling that this conversation had already taken place earlier in the house and on the way to the office. It seemed to me that the highlights were now being repeated for our benefit; Majid Khan was introducing himself. Without appearing to be overtly boastful, he was conveying through the conversation the extent of his power, the breadth of his concern, and the degr
ee of his importance in the life of his community and the mohalla where he lived. Someone, it seems, had reported to the police that a bomb and a revolver were hidden in a house in the neighbourhood. A police party came to Karwan in the evening, took away everyone in the house to the police station for questioning, and some of the men were roughed up. A young man, who worked in a factory, was the only member of the family who was not at home at the time of the police raid. He came running to Majid Khan for help. Majid went to the police station and arranged for the release of the young man’s family, a task made easier by the fact that the house search had not yielded any weapon. After the young man left, Majid Khan proceeded to deliver a lengthy monologue on the ever increasing zulm, the oppression of the Muslims, by the police. The chamcha took up the narrative by telling us of other incidents where Majid Khan had also starred as the helper and saviour of the oppressed poor, fearlessly confronting police high-handedness, facing down armed policemen who were ready to fire into Muslim crowds during a riot.
For me, it was difficult to reconcile the image of this courteous, confident man whose zeal in the service of his community could not be a total pretence, with the one projected by Hyderabad’s English language newspapers and the police for whom Majid Khan was a well-known goonda. Most of the urban elite know the goonda in his caricatured form from Hindi movies as the villainous, dark-skinned, usually unshaven, solidly muscled tough in tight sweatshirts and jeans (or in a checked lungi, if Muslim), with a knotted scarf around the neck and a gold chain nestling in the chest fur. The Hyderabad police have a special name for them. In their records such men are listed as ‘rowdies’; a rowdy, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, is a ‘rough, disorderly person; one addicted to quarrelling, fighting or disturbing the peace’. Although the word itself is of American origin, today a rowdy conjures up more the image of a British soccer fan wreaking mayhem in a European football stadium than a knife-wielding tough in the back alleys of Hyderabad. The police also call them ‘history sheeters’, which refers to the sheets of paper in police files where, year after year, a history of their unlawful activities is carefully recorded from the surveillance and surmise of plainclothes officers, together with the noting of arrest records and any subsequent trial verdicts.
In the mohallas where Majid Khan and others of his kind live, there are not too many who would go along with their characterization as goondas by the police and upper middleclass sentiment. Unsurprisingly, the men do not have a name for themselves, although they would prefer a descriptive phrase such as ‘friend of the poor’ or ‘protector of the oppressed’. A name would categorize them, separate them from the rest of the community, take them out of the ocean in which they swim as big fish but nonetheless constitute a vital part of the ocean’s ecology. The only name they are not reluctant to accept and which is also acceptable to others, including the police, is pehlwan. Specifically, pehlwan is a wrestler, but generally it may also mean a ‘strong man’; the purpose for which the strength is employed is left ambiguous and open to the interpretation of different groups. So let me call them pehlwans (rather than goondas, hooligans, rowdies, history sheeters), whether or not they have actually trained as wrestlers or bodybuilders, although a surprisingly large number have done so. Indeed, it is the culture of traditional Indian wrestling, which I will discuss later, which has had a profound influence in the formation of their personalities and which constitutes the most distinctive marker of their identities.
Strictly speaking, then, Majid Khan is not a pehlwan although he went through a few years of training as a wrestler, the taleem, as a boy. His younger brother is the well-known Mumtaz pehlwan and many of the young men who hang around him, his men, are aspiring pehlwans who follow the wrestler’s daily regimen. He is, though, a great admirer of the whole wrestling ethos which he feels builds character and prevents young men from going astray. He feels distressed that traditional wrestling is coming to an end in Hyderabad, and young men are drawn more to such imports as judo and karate. The Japanese martial arts are just that, arts to be picked up without the necessity of being steeped in and internalizing the culture which underlies them. The reasons for the decline of wrestling are many. Primarily, economic deterioration makes it difficult for a family to let one of their sons turn into a pehlwan, since he would then need an expensive diet of pistachios, almonds, choice cuts of meat, and litres of milk every day. Then the Hindu-Muslim tensions have led the police to ban wrestling matches in the city, since a bout between a Hindu and a Muslim wrestler can easily ignite a riot between the two commmunities. ‘Only ten per cent of the pehlwans are involved in violence,’ Majid said. ‘In fact, becoming a pehlwan improves the character and disposition of many young men who are otherwise inclined to be violent and intemperate. When four people respectfully salute you as pehlwan as you walk down the street, you would hold your head high and wouldn’t do anything to lose that respect.’
Majid describes his own role in the riots primarily in terms of a peacemaker, an older mentor with some influence on young hotheads of the Muslim community, especially in Karwan. He is generally successful in calming violent passions and excited crowds. ‘It is not so easy to control these boys,’ he says in mock sorrow as he indulgently smiles at the adoring young chamcha. ‘Without any provocation, these young men are taken in by the police during a riot, who register murder cases against them. Released on bail, they come out swaggering, as if they really are killers and have become equal to the pehlwans. The police have notarized them as killers and what better credentials can they have?’ Majid Khan believes a major part of his role during the riot lies in curbing young ‘killers’ who want to show off their killing prowess; he prevents the consolidation of a killer identity, as the psychologist would say in the discipline’s language. Personally, Majid Khan said, he has never experienced any kind of blood lust even during the worst course of religious violence. This does not mean that he is some kind of a believer in nonviolence when there are riots between the Hindus and the Muslims. He is not a fanatic either way as far as violence is concerned. He has a ‘healthy’ attitude toward the mutual slaughter, an outlook he states as the following: ‘Riots are like one-day cricket matches where the killings are the runs. You have to score at least one more than the opposing team. The whole honour of your nation (qaum) depends on not scoring less than the opponent.’
The other part of his role during a riot consists in liaising with the police and the administration on behalf of the community and in organizing and distributing relief supplies on behalf of his party, the Majlis. Although some accuse him of pilferage (‘of ten bags of rice he keeps seven’) and thus of enriching himself on the misery of others, Majid Khan is sincerely eloquent on the great human suffering caused by every riot and about his own modest efforts at its relief. I have the impression that Majid Khan feels much more comfortable talking about human suffering than violence, about the fellowship of misery than the divisions of murderous ethnocentrism. Losing loved ones, seeing one’s house and meagre belongings go up in flames, the whimpering of children in hunger and fear, is a shared experience of Muslims and Hindus alike and, after all, he is talking to me, a Hindu. Talk of suffering during the riots brings the two of us closer in mutual human sympathy whereas an elaboration on the violence will divide, will keep reminding us of our potential as deadly enemies.
In an earlier meeting with Sahba, who is a Muslim, there had been an absence of constraints imposed by my alien Hindu presence, and Majid Khan had talked freely about his more Muslim sentiments. The Muslims never initiated any attacks; they only defended themselves. They are discriminated against in every field and the police oppresion is making the whole community mutinous (baghi). One day they will rise up to fight, even against the modern weapons of the police. After all, there are only four fighting communities in India: Sikhs, Marathas, Rajputs, and Muslims. Even badly outnumbered Muslims can hold their own against a far superior Hindu host as long as the police do not turn their guns against them. But this si
tuation too will change. There is nothing like a riot to unite the community and strengthen its collective will for the fight ahead of it.
Testing the Tigers
The Giessen Test (Appendix I) is one of the most widespread test instruments in clinical use in Germany today.1 Constructed on psychoanalytic and psychosocial considerations, its 40 statements are divided into six scales: social response, dominance, self-control, underlying mood, permeability, and social potence. Using it to systematically tap the self-image of the pehlwans, the characteristics each ascribed to himself, I found the test to be a particularly useful interview tool which helped me gain a more comprehensive view of the ‘warriors’ in a relatively short period of time. The pehlwans often did not restrict themselves to just marking off an alternative on a statement but would generally elaborate, offering anecdotes from their lives as illustrations. Thus, for instance, in response to a statement, Majid Khan did not simply say, ‘I am very patient’ but went on to add: ‘I had to learn patience, the hard way,’ and then narrated an incident from his life where he had suffered because he could not control his temper.
In the first area, social response, which has to do with the person’s effect on his environment—whether one is narcissistically gratified or frustrated in social interactions—Majid Khan sees himself as evoking positive responses on the social stage. He finds it easy to attract others and believes people are highly satisfied with his work. He cares greatly about looking nice and feels he has been successful in achieving his aims in life.
In the area of dominance, which on one side has to do with aggressiveness, impulsiveness, stubbornness, and authoritarian tendencies, and the other with an incapacity for aggression, patience, willingness to conform and the tendency to submit, Majid Khan comes across as particularly dominant and self-willed although he tries hard to control his impatience in public life.