Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  Mangal Singh freely admits his political links but has a sense of outrage that he was put behind bars in the explosives case. ‘I was with the Congress party for so many years. I did so much of their work. I also did the personal work of a couple of MLAs in getting their houses vacated from tenants. But then I changed over to the BJP since that is the only party defending the Hindus. And what happens? The Congress puts me in jail! No gratitude at all!’

  During a riot, ‘strong men’ representing different localities, not all of them pehlwans, meet on almost a daily basis and decide where ‘the wind is to be spread’ (hawa phailana), a euphemism for where the killings have to take place and where they need to be stopped. For instance, it would be decided at the meeting to stop the violence in Dhulpet but start it in the old city. Mangal Singh likes to maintain a tight discipline in his own area. Once, during the riots, a mob collected spontaneously in his locality. He immediately sent a few of his boys who came back in two minutes after doing satrol (creating chaos). He then called in the leaders of the mob and told them, ‘Never do that again without my permission.’

  Although Mangal Singh enjoys recounting his violent exploits in the land business or in the political field—for instance, when he and his boys did satrol to the procession of a newly appointed minister at the behest of his cabinet colleague—what he is really proud of are his clashes with the Muslims in defence of the Hindus. These allow him to identify with and place himself in a long line of heroes such as Shivaji and Rana Pratap, whom he admires greatly for their armed resistance against the Muslim emperors. He tells us of the incident of a Hindu marriage procession when it was stopped in front of a mosque because it was time for the Friday afternoon prayers. An altercation took place and the bridegroom, who belonged to the Lodha community, was pushed off his horse. The incident was reported to Mangal Singh who reached the spot with a few of his men. ‘Within two minutes,’ he boasts, ‘four of their men lay on the ground, two dead even as they fell. The others fled and the marriage procession passed the mosque.’

  Mangal Singh’s psychological profile shows a great resemblance to that of Akbar; the difference is that his responses are much more extreme. He believes he tries to dominate others, is very self-willed and competitive. He, too, is often sad, worries a great deal about personal problems, tends to suppress anger, and always blames himself when things go wrong. Even his choice of favourite songs reflects a preference for the sad and the sentimental. The first is a Mukesh song with the opening lyrics:

  Life’s road is full of tears

  Someone should tell her

  I have a long way to travel

  The other’s an old hit from a 1950s movie:

  Do not forget these days of childhood

  Today I am laughing

  Do not make me cry tomorrow.

  In spite of the dysphoric mood, Mangal feels personally potent and socially gratified. Taking into account the interview and the responses to the statements on the Giessen Test, I would surmise that the outstanding feature of Mangal’s personality is a hyperactivity defending against depression, compared to Akbar’s more compulsive defences. And since I am already in the comparison business, let me go further and look at the psychological profiles of all the four pehlwans. Although too small a sample for any definitive statements on the larger universe of ‘strong men’ who carry out the actual acts of violence in a riot, my tentative collective portrait may still be a source of hypotheses for any future psychological studies.

  My first observation is that these men are not abnormal in a clinical sense. That is, they are neither psychopaths, highly neurotic, nor delinquent; their control over their violent impulses is not even greatly impaired. All of them, however, are unusually dominant and of a marked authoritarian bent. There is also a notable depressive tendency in their underlying mood, a threatened depression against which various defences are employed. Surprisingly, the depressive tendency persists in spite of the pehlwans feeling that they evoke a positive social response; that is, they are narcissistically gratified rather than frustrated by their environment

  Perhaps the need to defend against an emptying and fragmenting self, the inner experience of depression, contributes to the building up of a defensive hyperactivity wherein the cohesiveness of the self is restored and most immediately experienced through an explosion in violent action. The excitement of violence becomes the biggest confirmation that one is psychically still alive, a confirmation of one’s very existence.

  Psyche and Wrestling

  Until now we have looked at the warriors of communal violence, the men who orchestrate the violence and who, in their younger days (and current youthful versions) were directly engaged in it, as moved by specific aspects of their religious and personal identities. Yet in Hyderabad, as well as in many other cities, where the pehlwans take a leading role in communal violence, we also need to look at their socialization as pehlwans. In other words, for a greater understanding of these warriors of religious violence, we need a close look at the culture of Indian wrestling. It may well be the development of the pehlwan’s professional identity which, working in tandem with his personal and religious identities, provides us with a more complete picture of the workings of his mind. This is exemplified by an apocryphal story about Sufi Pehlwan, an old peshawar (‘professional’) who retired from the killing business after the 1979 riots. He is reported to have felt that, like everything else in India, riots too were not what they once used to be. Since each one of us interprets the world from the limited view we have of it, Sufi Pehlwan too saw the deterioration of the country through his particular professional lens. The quality of food and thus the toughness of the men’s bodies had been steadily degenerating over the years. Bones had become brittle so that when one stabbed a person there was hardly any resistance to the knife blade which sliced through muscle, cartilage, and bone as if they were wet clay. Simply put, there was no longer any professional satisfaction to be obtained from a riot, and Sufi Pehlwan had turned to other, more challenging, if perhaps less exciting pursuits.

  The tradition of Indian wrestling, the malla-yuddha of the epics, is not equally widespread. Strongest in the north Indian states of Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and western Bihar, it is encountered less in the rest of the country. Although absent in most of south and central India, wrestling is quite robust in parts of Bengal and Maharashtra as well as in some erstwhile princely states such as Hyderabad where the rulers patronized the art. Wrestling in the Indian context is not just a sport but a whole way of life; it is not only a physical regimen but a moral tradition with changing political coordinates. In the felicitous phrase of the anthropologist Joseph Alter, wrestling is a ‘meeting of muscles and morals’.3

  As far as the physical regimen is concerned, there is little difference in forms and techniques of wrestling between the various parts of the country or even between Hindu and Muslim wrestlers. Waking up at dawn, the aspiring wrestler runs a few miles to build up his stamina. Ideally, he should then spend some time in contemplation (or in actual prayer in the case of the Muslim) before he makes his way to the akhara, dangal or taleem—the different names given to the wrestling gymnasium. Here he begins with a bath before donning the wrestler’s habit, the langot or the loincloth. This is followed by the anointing of the body with oil and a collective preparation of the actual akhara, the approximately ten-metre-square pit. In a Hindu akhara there is collective invocation of Hanuman, the celibate god of wrestlers and the symbol of deepest devotion to Rama.

  Wrestlers are then paired off by the guru (the ustad or khalifa in the case of Muslims) to grapple and practice moves and countermoves under the guru’s close supervision and frequent instruction. After two or three hours of this jor (literally, ‘strength’), the wrestler rolls in the earth of the pit to partake of its cooling, reinvigorating, and healing qualities and then finishes with a bath. A large hearty meal consisting of the wrestler’s staple foods of clarified butter, litres of milk, and ground almonds
(or chickpeas) if Hindu, meat with pistachios and almonds if Muslim (in the days when pistachios and almonds were still affordable) follows. The wrestler then has a short nap and rests for a couple of hours during the afternoon. Then it is back to the akhara in the early evening for another two to three hours of individual exercises to build up strength, stamina, and flexibility of joints. Besides various kinds of weight training, the core exercises are hundreds of deep knee-bends and jackknifing pushups. A bath and again a specialized meal later, the wrestler is generally supposed to be asleep by 8 or 9 p.m. so as to get up fresh and energetic at the crack of dawn to repeat the regimen the next day.

  The physical regimen is part of a moral and ideological complex, and this is where Indian wrestling is similar to traditional East Asian martial arts, where physicality was inseparable from morality and skills were not independent of ethics. Here, too, traditional wrestling differs from the teaching and learning of judo, karate, or wrestling in the modern context as recreational sports, physical exercises or fighting skills. The wrestler, though very much a part of society, both looks and experiences himself as a man apart. First, there is the contrast of the bulky but muscled body to the underfed and emaciated bodies of other men in the lower-class neighbourhoods from which most wrestlers come. Besides exhibiting the outer signs of apartness, the honesty, internal and external cleanliness, simplicity, and contemplation of God which, as Alter points out, he shares with the ascetic—the sanyasin or the sadhu—who too stresses his liminality to the normal social order.4 Of course, where the wrestler differs most strikingly from the normal man is in his advocation (like that of the ascetic) of absolute celibacy. Sexuality and, in particular, the loss of semen are concerns of high anxiety. The image of the wrestler in popular Hindi moves is generally of a strong but simple-minded rustic who goes to absurd lengths to avoid the company of women and thus any occasion for sexual excitement. As Alter tells us, for the wrestler semen is the locus of all of his strength and character. Milk, clarified butter (ghee) and almonds, the primary ingredients of a wrestler’s diet, are believed to build up a store of high energy semen. Milk and ghee are also supposed to lower the body heat so that the semen is not inadvertently spilt in sleep but can perform its desired function of building bodily strength.5

  The control of sexuality, and anxiety about sexual concerns, is the cornerstone of all conservative moralities, and the wrestler’s ideological universe, with its centrality of celibacy, is very close to the most conservative parts of the Hindu and Muslim religious traditions. Like the so-called fundamentalist, the wrestler, too, is opposed to the modern entertainment forms of cinema and television where sex is so abundantly on display. He disapproves of modern educational institutions where boys and girls come into close and thus dangerous contact. He looks askance at modern fashions in clothes and bodily care which he feels are devoted to the excitement of prurient interest. In general, the wrestler’s conservative morality condemns all manifestations of modernity which arouse the senses instead of calming them, which stoke the sensual fire instead of dousing its flames.

  In the various philosophical and social science discourses on modernity, there is very often an absence of what many 20th century artists, writers and filmmakers—not to speak of psychoanalysts—regard as its central features: the foregrounding of the biographical self and of sexuality (in its widest sense) in human subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, the study of the sexual self, is thus a preeminently modern discipline. The protest against the ubiquity, significance and manifestations of the sexual self is thus inevitably a basic characteristic of revivalist and fundamental rhetoric.

  There is one element of the wrestling ideology which at first glance appears to run counter to the conservative label given to it. This is egalitarianism. In the akhara there are only bodies, without sectarian, class, and caste hierarchical distinctions. As a commentator on wrestling remarks, ‘In every village everyone from the common labourer to the wealthiest person would enter the pit together. Everyone on everyone else’s back with knees on necks. There was no stigma, no enmity, anger or threats. The akhara was a pilgrimage point of social equality; a temple of brotherly love.’6 Until the very recent past, many akharas in Hyderabad were mixed in the sense that they would have both Hindus and Muslims training under a Hindu or Muslim pehlwan. Majid Khan’s brother’s khalifa, for instance, was Chintamani Pehlwan, a Hindu. In any event, although egalitarianism between men may be missing from some modern Western conservative ideologies, it can very well be a part of Hindu conservative traditions and is, of course, available in the ideology of Islam. Egalitarianism, for instance, is a point of emphasis for the deeply conservative ideologies of the RSS, the organizational vanguard in the current revival of militant Hinduism. The litmus test of revivalism and fundamentalism remains the attitude toward sex rather than power.

  Morally and ideologically, the wrestler, either Hindu or Muslim, thus welcomes and feels a sense of kinship with forces in his community which oppose modernity through the revival of traditional values. The changed political coordinates of his position also make it easier for the wrestler to become an active and, given his calling, militant representative of the community. Before the independence of the country in 1947, wrestlers were traditionally patronized by Indian princes who would have court wrestlers just as they had court painters or court musicians. Akbar pehlwan’s forefathers had been court wrestlers to the Nizam of Hyderabad for four generations. All the physical needs of the wrestler were taken care of by the royal patron. What the wrestler was expected to do was to concentrate on the refinement of his art and the building up of his body. In return for the patronage, the wrestlers would march on ceremonial occasions in royal processions through the streets of the capital, their magnificent physiques testifying to and reflecting on the power of the prince. They would represent the honour of the prince in their competitive bouts with wrestlers from other states—the recreation of a legendary mode of warfare between kingdoms which has been immortalized in the Persian tale of Rustam and Sohrab.

  Although some politicians did try to replace the princes as patrons of wrestling akharas, using wrestlers for strong-arm methods to achieve political ends, in general the wrestler had lost the morally elevated view of his calling demanded by tradition and ideology. It is in the polarization of Hindus and Muslims and in the context of religious revivalism that the wrestler is again finding a role as an icon of the community’s physical power and martial prowess. Although he may still be used by the politician, by employing religious violence for his own purposes, the wrestler can again hold a cherished moral high ground and be proud of his new role as ‘protector of the Muslim (or Hindu) nation’.

  The traditional wrestling training, although it also graduated religious killers, did have certain advantages in structing the form of religious violence. Often, the akharas and the teachers had mixed Hindu and Muslim students who would never fight each other in or outside the ring and thus had a dampening influence on the battlefield enthusiasm of the two communities. The training also inculcated a strong ideology that bound the fighting and killing by certain rules of combat; where, for instance, the respect for womankind precluded a woman from being a riot victim. In Hyderabad, even now, rape is not used as a vehicle for the contempt, rage, or hatred that one community feels for the other as it is, for example, in Bosnia. As the pehlwan’s traditional ideology declines and the role of the pehlwan as a channelizer of his community’s violence gives way to a more brutal free-for-all, religious violence too promises to enter an era of unchecked ferocity. There are, of course, other reasons for the relative absence of rape in a Hindu-Muslim riot, including, as we shall see later, the strong moral disapproval of rape as an instrument of religious violence in both communities. Moreover, unlike in the Bosnian conflict, after a riot the Hindus and Muslims still have to live together and carry out a minimal social and considerable economic interaction in their day-to-day lives. As Mangal Singh remarked. ‘A few days after the riot is over, whatever
the bitterness in our hearts and however cold our voices are intially, Akbar pehlwan still has to call me and say, “Mangal bhai, what do we do about that disputed land in Begumpet?” And I still have to answer, “Let’s get together on that one, Akbar bhai, and solve the problem peacefully.’” Rape makes such interactions impossible and turns Hindu-Muslim animosity into implacable hatred.

  As far as the warriors are concerned, their ability to get over the bitterness of the conflict to again work together further attests to their high level of ego functioning. Unlike many other members of their communities who are either unable to hate or cannot stop hating, the pehlwans have learned both how to hate and how to get over hating.7 Killers in the service of their religious communities, they do not fit easy psychological or philosophical categories. There is no evidence, for instance, that they are psychopaths brutally trained to reject human feeling, are sexually insecure, or were abused as children. Endowed with leadership qualities and standing out from their milieu in certain aspects of character, they are not—as in Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ hypothesis—perfectly ordinary people with the capacity to behave as monsters.

  4

  Victims and Others: I. The hindus

  One of the worst hit areas in the riots was Pardiwada (‘settlement of the Pardis’) in Shakkergunj. Two miles from Char Minar, the centre of the walled city, Pardiwada is an enclave of about 50 Hindu houses surrounded by Muslim settlements. Before the last riot, Pardiwada had a population of about 150 families (in a family-centred culture, the population figures, too, are given in numbers of families rather than individuals) which has now dwindled to 50.