Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  In the construction of the exciting scene, boys generally arranged Muslim and Hindu dolls in separate groups engaged in some kind of violent confrontation. The fighting between Hindus and Muslims (presented by ten of the 15 boys) is relatively absent in girls’ constructions, where only three of the 15 girls staged such scenes of conflict. Girls use dolls to construct peaceful scenes from family life, even when they identify the families as Hindu and Muslim, their stories emphasize relationships between the characters, couples watching animals, and, especially, parents watching children play. Hindu and Muslim dolls are often mixed together. The excitement occurs at the periphery of the scene: a fight between the policeman and a robber, animals being chased by a goonda, a man running away from a soldier. A typical scene constructed by a 15-year-old boy has a Hindu wedding taking place at the centre of the stage, the Hindus watching the dancers. They are surrounded by four Muslims, one in each comer, two of whom are identified as goondas. The Hindu dolls move closer together for protection, wondering how to save themselves. The police doll runs away. Rather than be killed by the Muslims, the Hindus commit suicide.

  A scene by a girl, a 13-year-old in this case, has Hindu and Muslim families in semi-circles next to each other, along with the animals who are an integral part of the tableau. The Hindu family is having coffee and bread. The Muslim family is saying its prayers. Small children are playing. The excitement of the scene is in a comer where a goonda is being chased by the policeman after a robbery.

  The Muslim children, nine boys and nine girls from Karwan, the other location of this study, ranged in age from ten to 15 with a median age of 13 years. They did not differ from the Hindu children as far as immediate identification of the dolls as Hindu or Muslim was concerned, the younger children having more difficulty than older ones in identifying the dolls according to their religious rather than gender affiliation or according to age. Like the Hindus, the Muslim girls were shyer than the boys in their approach to the task and used less of the stage space for their constructions. As with the Hindus, less than half the Muslim children constructed scenes of violent confrontation between the communities although the distribution of the scenes between girls and boys was different from the Hindu sample. Whereas somewhat more Muslim than Hindu girls (40 per cent versus 20 per cent) constructed scenes of conflict, Muslim boys showed significantly less interest than Hindu boys in communal violence (20 per cent versus 70 per cent). It is not that violence as the source of excitement was absent from the scenes of Muslim boys. The violence in their story lines was, so to say, more traditional—between policemen and robbers or the hero and the villain, the goonda. The fantasy of Muslim boys is thus more of the Hindi film variety wherein a hero skilled in one of the martial arts such as karate rescues a damsel in distress from the unwelcome attentions of the goonda. Though the pehlwan as a hero occurs in one of the stories, I am afraid that in children’s fantasy, traditional wrestling is being consigned to oblivion and is being replaced with the more modem import of karate. The fantasy of Muslim boys has not yet been overlaid by the real-life events of the riots to the same extent as in the case of the Pardi boys. I can only account for this difference by the children’s actual experience of the riots. The experience of the Muslim boys from Karwan has never been as traumatic as that of the Pardi boys who have seen their homes burned and their close relatives killed by an attacking Muslim mob.

  On the other hand, the dolls of the army soldier and the policeman play a greater role in the constructions of the Muslim children, either as hostile figures (‘The soldier has been helping the Hindus and not Muslims’) or a benign presence (‘The army is telling the Hindus and Muslims not to fight’). This reflects the actual experience of the children in Karwan where police and paramilitary forces have been employed to patrol the area during a riot or to conduct house-to-house searches for hidden arms. Reflecting their experience of the riots, the Muslim children are also much less informed than the Hindu boys about the ‘cause’ of Hindu-Muslim confrontation; the Hindu boys often ascribe the outbreak of communal violence to the Muslims’ throwing of bada gosht into a temple.

  Two examples will give a flavour of the children’s stories:

  A 12-year-old boy, studying in the sixth class, immediately identifies the dolls as Hindu or Muslim. He uses all the toys and the full stage for the construction of his scene where the Hindus and Muslims are not in any kind of confrontational posture, although the Hindu dolls are clustered together on one side. He explains the scene thus: ‘The animals are saying to each other, “Don’t fight among yourselves. It gives other animals a chance to come in your area.” The army man is telling the Hindus that they should think of their country and not trouble the Muslims. The Muslims are saying their Eid prayers. The older Muslim woman is telling other women (including the Hindu women) that a good woman always wears a veil (burqa) and they should all do so.’

  A 13-year-old girl, who studied till the third class and is now a school dropout, also identifies the dolls immediately and uses all the toys for the construction of her scene which takes up half the stage. She explains: ‘Hindus and Muslims are fighting. [She doesn’t know why.] First, the children fight, then the adults. The soldier is saying don’t fight. The Hindus brought in a goonda to attack the Muslims. The Muslims brought in a karate expert who put the goonda to flight.’

  To summarize: In spite of the endemic Hindu-Muslim violence in the old city of Hyderabad, less than half the children constructed scenes of this violence in their play constructions. This number may be seen as too large or too small depending on one’s own inclination to view the glass of Hindu-Muslim relations as half empty or half full. In any event, a communal orientation is present in a significant number of children between the ages of ten and 15. This orientation, however, varies with age—older children being more communal in their imagination than younger ones—and with gender—girls, especially Hindu girls, prefer to construct scenes from family life rather than from communal conflict. Scenes of Hindu-Muslim violence, when they are created, seem to express the child’s unresolved anxiety in relation to his or her personal experience of the riot—for instance, the fear of imminent death at the hands of an attacking Muslim mob in the case of the Pardi boys. Unsurprisingly, the direct, personal experience of a riot as a victim is the strongest impetus to the development of religious hatred and communal imagination in a child.

  In conclusion, let me note that both Hindus and Muslims do not perceive their conflict in terms of local issues but as one involving the ‘essential’ nature of a Hindu or Muslim which does not change over history. Such an essentialization, found in many other ethnic conflicts (such as the one between the Jews and the Blacks in New York, where local issues get linked to the perceived global nature of the ‘Jew’ or the ‘Negro’), will always make a conflict more intractable.

  5

  Victims and Others: II. The muslims

  Karwan or, to give it back its original name, Karwane-Sahu (‘Caravan of merchants’), was planned as a camp for traders when Hyderabad was being built. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was a thriving commercial area with many inns, mosques, and storehouses for the convenience of merchants from all over India and abroad who camped here on their trading visits to Hyderabad. During the Qutub Shahi period, most of the Gujarati and Marwadi merchants lived here. Today, Karwan is one of the most economically backward sections of the city.

  Dotted with mosques, graveyards, and dargahs, the Muslim character of Karwan is unmistakable. The shops in the cobbled streets sell cheap goods requiring low financial investment: spices, bangles, metal scrap, a small assortment of Indian sweets and savouries. There are the inevitable ‘general stores’ which stock most of the items needed by a poor neighbourhood from pencils for children to hair oil, packets of inferior brands of tea, and cheap detergents for the household. Some of the streets have Hindu women vegetable sellers squatting at the edges along with their young daughters. With their oiled black hair rolled into buns and their mout
hs stained a brick red from chewing tobacco or betel nut, the women sit behind heaps of fresh vegetables which are kept moistly glistening by frequent sprinklings of water. Cars—except for old, beat-up Ambassadors—are rare, yet the streets still manage to be clogged with pedestrians, auto-and cycle-rickshaws, bicyclcs, and the rattling buses of Hyderabad’s road transport system.

  Occasionally employed in road construction, as grave-diggers, or as kitchen helpers in large weddings, many men have only intermittent work. Others are vegetable sellers and rickshaw drivers while a few lucky ones work in the factories of the new city or at low-paid jobs in government offices. The few signs of affluence are manifested in newly built houses—‘Gulf money’, one is invariably told—and in restaurants on street comers owned by Muslims in city politics or in ‘land business’ (Majid Khan’s restaurant is on one of these street comers). These eateries and the pan shops which stay open late into the night are places where the men like to congregate to talk and catch up with news and friends.

  Rashid’s family lives in one of the lanes of Kulsumpura which forms the southern part of Karwan. Rashid’s house is on a lane at the edge of the Muslim quarter, the street at the back of the house separating it from the Hindu majority area. Each lane in Kulsumpura has 25 to 35 houses on either side, with a meandering ribbon of open space of varying width between them which at its narrowest permits only one bicycle to pass through at a time. The houses are generally one-room tenements with thatched or tiled roofs. They are kept scrupulously clean. The mud floor, given a fresh mud coating at least once a month, is covered with faded cotton durries or, among the poorest, with pieces of jute sacking stitched together. The access to the inside of the houses is guarded by flimsy wooden doors, barely supported at the hinges. Worn-out curtains hang at the entrance, their varying heights often permitting glimpses of the dark shapes of women and children moving inside the room. Although nominally in purdah, there are times during the day, especially at mid-morning, when one sees groups of women sitting in the doorways, chatting, chopping betel nuts into small pieces or shaving them into mottled brown slivers while they keep a watchful eye on the children playing outside. Twice a day, in the early mornings and late afternoons, at the public water tap provided by the municipal corporation, the women come to fetch buckets of water for daily use. Unlike women in Hindu areas, the Muslim women in Kulsumpura are not seen bathing their children or washing clothes at the tap, the community norms dictating that they be out in the open for as little time as possible. Yet even as they wait their turns with the bucket, the water tap becomes the women’s counterpart of the restaurant or the pan-stall of men—a meeting place to exchange views, information, and gossip, mostly of a familial kind rather than the more political exchanges favoured by the men.

  Rashid’s Family

  With eight years of schooling, the 55-year-old Rashid is the most educated person in his family. Nominally headed by his mother who is in her 80s, the family consists of a 65-year-old brother, a 48-year-old younger brother, a widowed sister in her late 60s, and another 38-year-old sister, all of whom live with their own families in separate households next to each other. With five to six children in each household, the extended family consists of about 30 persons.

  Rashid’s occupation is that of an occasional vegetable seller. Both his brothers are unemployed. The elder brother earns a little money by helping out as a cook at weddings. The younger brother runs errands for one of the ‘big men’ of Kulsumpura who owns a restaurant and is active in local politics. The brother-in-law drives a cycle-rickshaw and one of his nephews sells vegetables. Two others, in their early 20s, are unemployed. Unlike the Pardi women, the Muslim women only work from their homes. Rashid’s younger sister sews blouses and petticoats for the neighbours, but most other women chop betel nuts to earn three to four rupees a day, a welcome addition to the family’s perpetually tight budget. Except for Rashid’s younger brother and a nephew, both of whom have had three years of school, all the other adults in the family are illiterate.

  This situation is changing in the younger generation, at least as far as the boys are concerned. The girls are still not sent to school, much to the regret of the 14-year-old Shakira, Rashid’s niece. Even Shakira, however, gets some kind of education at one of the neighbourhood institutions for young girls, opened all over the city with state support. Here, Shakira learns sewing, embroidery, Urdu, basic English, and is also taught some fundamentals of her faith. After she returns home in the afternoon, Shakira’s day passes in cleaning the cooking utensils, preparing the evening meal, and looking after her younger brother. Shakira’s only other outing is going to the dargah with the other women every Thursday. Like a grown-up woman, Shakira wears the veil when she goes out, a garment that needs some practice to get used to. She is an avid fan of Hindi movies but must satisfy her desire for films through television since going to the cinema with friends is strictly forbidden by the family. The other women, including Shakira’s mother, chafe at the restrictions to their freedom yet accept their necessity. The women’s izzat—their honour, so inextricably interwined with the honour of the family and the community—is much less safe out on the street after the riots. Yet even at the best of times, women had freedom of movement only after marriage and that too before the arrival of children. Although Rashid’s younger sister-in-law grew up in Hyderabad, she had never seen the city’s architectural glories such as the Char Minar or its main bazaars till she was married. Now, of course, the riots have further curtailed women’s freedom. Some years ago at the public water tap, Shakira’s mother inadvertently broke the pitcher of a Hindu woman. She was beaten by her husband for this mishap which could have raised the tensions between Hindus and Muslims to a dangerous level. After that she was forbidden to fetch the water from the tap, the errand being delegated to another woman in the family.

  Early marriages, repeated pregnancies, and unremitting economic hardship have not broken the women’s spirit nor exhausted their zest for life which, I suspect, is continuously renewed by a vibrant community life, especially with other women of the family. There are the many weddings and festive occasions such as the circumcision of a boy or the piercing of the nose and ears of a girl. There are the religious festivals, especially Eid, which are celebrated without regard for expense. If there is no money, it will be borrowed to buy new clothes and the goat for the festive meal. This is an extravagance needed by the poor to transcend limits imposed by the outer reality of their lives and thus regain the vitally important feeling of agency and freedom, something which those influenced solely by notions of economic rationality deplore but rarely understand. The women often offer their namaz together and after finishing the household chores sometimes chat and sing together till late into the night.

  Another source of the women’s strength lies in their religious faith. They freely admit their ignorance of Islamic tenets and traditions. None of them knows what is exactly contained in the Qur’an although a few younger ones have been taught to recite from it in Arabic without understanding the import of the words they are repeating. Their faith consists of following a simple moral code which makes them feel pious: cleanliness of body and purity of mind, respect for the aged, remembering Allah often, saying your namaz when the call comes from the mosque, keeping the ritual fast of the rozas. From a modern individualist viewpoint which stresses the woman’s rights as a person rather than the duties and obligations prescribed by faith, her religious belief may contribute to the woman’s feelings of integration with the community and to a personal well-being which comes from an approving conscience, and yet keep the woman imprisoned in a ‘false consciousness’. The faith makes women accept their inferior status in relation to men who are deemed to be physically, mentally, and spiritually superior. It makes them only tenants rather than owners of their minds and bodies which have a more transpersonal rather than individual cast. For instance, when asked whether after giving birth to six children why she had not got her tubes tied, Rashid’s younger
sister replies: ‘If you undergo such an operation your namaz is no longer legitimate. It is said in the Qur’an that Allah does not forgive you for this sin even on Judgement Day. On that day you will find that your face has turned black in colour. Allah does not accept your namaz, even the one on Eid, if you have prevented the birth of a child. My sister-in-law who had her tubes tied has stopped offering her namaz and is becoming unhappier by the day. All I can do is pray to Allah that He stop giving me children and bless someone else.’

  Days and Nights of the Riot

  To continue in the woman’s voice, here of Kubra Begum, Rashid’s wife: ‘It was Friday. I was buying vegetables around ten in the morning when the children came running and told me that a fight had started between Hindus and Muslims. Why? I asked. They said a Muslim woman was buying vegetables when the bhoi (a Hindu vegetable seller) pulled at her arm and her veil and shouted at her. Perhaps she had not paid the right amount. Twenty to 25 of their men and a similar number from our side rushed to the site of the quarrel. When I saw that the men where armed with sticks and swords I hurried home and told everyone to get ready for trouble. Things were already bad with that quarrel about the Babri Masjid where many people died and which made the Hindus so angry. Then there was the attack on Majid Bhai. One knows a riot is about to start when one sees the Hindus sending away their women and their belongings.