by Sudhir Kakar
It is also all right to eat with the Hindus. The only reservation is that since the Hindus eat haram foods, a Muslim might inadvertently eat something which is forbidden.
Working with Hindus in a factory does not pose any problem. It is a matter of work, of survival, and beyond the personal control of any single individual or even a community.
Learning Hindu scriptures from a Hindu priest is also not wrong. The Gita, too, is the voice of God in their language so it is not wrong to listen to it, opines one respondent. To do so is to gain knowledge which is pleasing to Allah, says another. It does not matter if one does so, says a third, after all a Muslim will remain a Muslim. The few dissenting voices express the fear that an exposure to unbelief (kufar) may corrode a Muslim’s own faith.
I must confess to a mild surprise at this evidence of tolerance in matters of faith, reminding me one again not to underestimate the impact of the Hindu images from my childhood, of the Muslim as a religious fanatic. This becomes especially true if we look at the dissension on the question of a Muslim who converts and becomes a Hindu, an action I would have expected to be overwhelmingly rejected as wrong and sinful. Even the ones who condemn the conversion are reluctant to punish the offender. Others see such a conversion as a matter of personal choice. Of course, such an action is not a matter of indifference. It is an affront to the Muslim community yet does not call for its interference. Ironically, ‘religious fanaticism’ is less prevalent in the religious domain, in interactions at the level of faith, less than in any other area of social exchange with the Hindus. The otherwise duty-based moral code is suspended here as the individual’s right to freedom of choice takes precedence over duties.
Beating up Hindu boys for whistling at a Muslim girl or for making fun of Allah are retaliations for straightforward insults to the collective honour and earn consensual approval. The qualifications are minor. In the first case, try to explain and then beat, says one man; another man will let the whistling go unpunished if the girl was out without a veil because then she has invited this unwelcome male attention. In the second case, a couple of respondents recommend forbearance in the face of this stupidity. Mostly, though, violent reprisals are fully in order, as in the case of Salman Rushdie, whose example was specifically cited by two respondents.
But during a riot, giving shelter to a Hindu is the only consensually approved action. This is viewed as a religious duty owed to Allah. It is a duty independent of one’s personal feelings about Hindus in general and the individual seeking shelter in particular. It is the expression of the compassion and mercy in the heart of a good Muslim and is enjoined by Islam.
On several significant actions, the sample of 20 Muslims did not establish a consensus. The question of renting a house to a Hindu in normal times produced several reactions. The dissenter’s argument is based on the pollution of the Muslims by a Hindu living among them. Hindus plaster the floors and walls with cow dung, eat pork, will perform puja where ibadat has been done. A few feel more strongly: ‘My mother said if you give alms to a Hindu your hand will burn on Judgement Day.’ It is not a sin but certainly an error to be avoided. The assenters argue that not all Hindus are bad, and there is nothing wrong with renting one’s house to a good Hindu.
Dissensus existed on a number of actions if taken in riot time. Those who see setting fire to a Hindu house as a wrong act do not consider it a major violation. It is a minor offence during a riot, and the offenders should be properly counselled. Others who approve look at it as something that is inevitable during a riot.
Looting of Hindu shops is an action that produced pro and con arguments that are the same as in the case of arson.
The respondents, both men and women, are almost evenly divided on the action of killing a Hindu man during a riot. Those who consider it a sin will still not sanction any punishment by the community. Some will allow it only in retaliation. Others who consider nothing wrong with killing a Hindu in a riot liken the situation to a time of war when killing and being killed is the normal order of things.
Morality and the Hindus
The Hindu sample from Pardiwada consisted of ten men and ten women. The men ranged in age from 22 to 45 with a median age of 30 years, while the age range of women was between 20 and 59, with a median of 35 years. The Hindu women, like their Muslim counterparts, had no schooling, whereas the Hindu men were better educated than the Muslim sample, with an average of seven years of schooling. Economically, too, the Pardis, though poor, were visibly better off than the Muslims from Karwan. Most of the men were fruit vendors while two drove auto-rickshaws for a living.
Before I discuss the Hindu responses to each of the behavioural cases, there is one general observation that needs to be made. As compared to the Muslims, the Hindu respondents were much more relativistic and contextual in judging a behaviour as a transgression and more easygoing in proposing punishments for actions judged as wrong. Irrespective of age and gender, ‘It all depends’ was an almost reflexive response, and the individual had to be persuaded to engage further with the standard interview.
In responding to cases of interaction with the Muslims, both during normal and riot times, which were not clearly labelled as unobjectionable at the outset, the answers were almost always framed in terms of a context, temporal or spatial. The linking of the morality of an interaction with time would be typically expressed thus. ‘It was wrong when times were different but it is not wrong now.’ By ‘different times’, the person is alluding to a past golden era of individual and collective morality as compared to the degenerate Kaliyuga of today. The individual can thus convincingly state that an action is wrong in right times but right in wrong times. Similarly, demographic space seemed to be intimately involved in moral judgements, and I was often told that actions such as the beating up of a Muslim or arson and looting of Muslim shops were wrong if you lived in a Muslim majority area. This appears to have less to do with morality than with prudence and expediency unless, of course, one is willing to consider the case for an expedience-based morality. As a consequence of this contextual stance, it is understandable that the envisaged punishments by the community for wrong actions were nonexistent or weak and evoked far less emotion and righteousness than the corresponding sanctions among the Muslims against the violators of their community’s moral codes.
This striking difference between Hindus and Muslims can be accounted for in religious terms. The difference in the approaches to morality may be seen as a consequence of the difference between humanist and authoritarian religions (Fromm) or between precept-based and prophetic religions (Obeyesekere).11 In more culturalist terms, as I have discussed elsewhere, in Hindu philosophical and ethical tradition, the rightness or wrongness of a proposed action depends on the individual’s desa, the culture in which one is born; on kala, the historical era in which one lives, on srama, the efforts required of one at different stages of life; and on gunas, the innate psychobiological traits which are the heritage of a person’s previous lives.12 ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ are relative; they can emerge as clear distinctions only out of the total configuration of the four coordinates of action.
The Hindu approach to the making of moral judgements may well be a part of a basic Hindu way of thinking which the poet-scholar A.K. Ramanujan has called ‘context-sensitive.’13 Hindus, Ramanujan believes, idealize context-sensitive rather than context-free rules. Whether it is in medical matters, where the context is vital in diagnosis, prescription, and preparation of herbal medicines, or in music, where the ragas have their prescribed and appropriate times, the context-sensitivity extends even to space and time, the universal contexts, the Kantian imperatives, which in India are not uniform and neutral. Every moral rule thus has a number of exceptions, each of these additions a subtraction from any universal law so that one falls back on the universal only if one fits no context or condition (which is rare). Yet before wholly embracing the religious-culturalist explanations, as I am tempted to do, we must remember that the Pardis ar
e not completely context bound in their moral judgements. The rape and killing of a Muslim woman are unequivocally condemned as sins, unalterable by any contextual considerations. To me, even more significant than the differences between the Hindu and Muslim approaches to morality is their similarity in the condemnation of the rape and killing of the other community’s women; both groups regard these acts unalterably as sins. At an emotionally more neutral level they also share a common disapproval of acts which hurt the religious sentiments of the other community. What is most encouraging is the fact that this disapproval is often couched in terms of empathy. ‘Their feelings are the same as ours and we would not like it if it were done to us.’ The existence of this empathy—even if it is in a restricted sphere—demonstrates that the history of violence between the communities (which can fairly be said to have made enemies of Hindus and Muslims, at least in the poor underbelly of the city) has not yet dehumanized the enemy. There is still empathy on both sides which does not let a Muslim consider a Hindu—and vice versa—less than human and therefore a deserving prey for every imaginable brutality. Empathy with members of the other group, even when considered the enemy, defends the Other from the untrammelled aggression which can so easily be let loose against all those considered subhuman.14
The Hindus, as I have noted above, are far more easygoing than the Muslims in their moral judgements of interactions with members of the other community. In normal times, although a Hindu girl’s elopement with a Muslim boy is consensually disapproved of, it is not considered a sin. Having Muslim friends, eating and working with Muslims, renting your house to a Muslim, learning the Qur’an from a Muslim priest—are all consensually permitted though some may express reservations about this conduct. The dissension is over a Hindu’s conversion to Islam, a Hindu girl marrying a Muslim boy or going out with him to the cinema. The latter action, so violently disapproved of in the Muslim sample, elicits divided opinions. Its opponents would discourage such a practice because it may lead to an interfaith marriage, with all its attendant problems. Those who see nothing objectionable in the girl’s action, most of them women, look at it as something which happens all the time in today’s world and is not something over which one should get unduly exercised. Whether the greater Hindu permissiveness with regard to interactions with the other community is a function of the Pardis’ low status in the caste hierarchy, and whether high-caste Hindus wall themselves off much more from the Muslims, as anecdotal evidence seems to suggest, is a question which can only be answered by future empirical work.
As with the Muslims, rape and killing of women of the other community during a riot, especially the former, elicited consensual condemnation—the only actions the Hindus were prepared to label as such. Similarly, giving shelter to members of the other community during a riot is not considered wrong. There is dissension over the morality of other riot-time actions such as arson, looting, and the killing of men. The riot-time morality of the Hindus is thus strikingly similar to that of the Muslims in its content, though not in the emotional intensity with which this morality is invested. The two communities share in common the commandments ‘Thou shalt not kill… a woman’ and ‘Thou shalt not rape,’ but the outrage associated with the transgression of these commandments is stronger among Muslims than among Hindus. Indeed, as I noted earlier, the emotional reaction of Muslims to any violation of the community’s moral code of conduct is intense and especially violent in cases involving a Muslim woman’s sexualized interaction with a Hindu man. In such situations, I believe, the self-representation of the community becomes identified with the woman’s sexual stance in its more servile aspect, with images of being ‘fucked’—not in a joyful but in a contemptuous sense—by the Hindu. To penetrate the Other, whether a woman or another group, it to be superior, powerful, and masculine; to be penetrated is to be inferior, weak, and feminine. It is a blending of the images of power and sexuality in a phallocentric vision which makes many men all over the world, for example in parts of the Middle East and Latin America, regard only the man who is penetrated by another man as a despised homosexual while the active inserter on the ‘top’ is considered as a ‘normal’ even macho male.
Violence between religious-ethic groups is then also a struggle over the assignment of gender, a way of locating the desired male and denigrated female communities. As a Hindu patient, echoing the sentiments of a few others, remarked in a session during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi: ‘It serves them right! Every one of these cunts (chutiya) behaves as if his prick is at full mast!’
6
A New Hindu Identity
Great disorders lead to great devotions.
—Emile Zola
Some 15 years ago, when what is today called the Nehruvian project of a modernized secular India was still vigorous and fundamentalism was a distant gleam in the eye of an occasional imam or mahant, I tried to peer into the crystal ball of the future. In my conclusion to The Inner World, I wrote that as modernization picks up pace, individuals will increasingly seek membership in groups with absolute value systems and with little tolerance for deviation from their norms. To quote:
‘Whereas initially the appeal of these groups may be limited to sections of society who are most susceptible to the pressures of social change—for example, youth and urbanized classes—we can expect an ever widening circle of participation as more and more people are sucked into the wake of modernization…. In short, we can expect an increasing destruction of the nascent, Western-style individualism as more and more individuals seek to merge into collectivities that promise a shelter for the hurt, the conflicted and the shipwrecked.’1
If I again take up the theme of those large social formations through which many individuals in India seek a sense of their cultural identity (a term which I prefer to the more sociological ‘ethnicity’), then it is not to derive a melancholy satisfaction from any perceived prescience but to offer some psychological observations on an issue which is normally seen as the domain of political scientists and social commentators. First, to get definitional matters out of the way, by ‘cultural identity’ I mean a group’s basic way of organizing experience through its myths, memories, symbols, rituals, and ideals.2 Socially produced and thus subject to historical change, cultural identity is not a static affair even while it makes a decisive contribution to the enhancement of an individual’s sense of self-sameness and continuity in time and space. This definition is particularly apt for the Hindutva movement—characterized by some as Hindu fundamentalism—through which a large number of Hindus today seem to be seeking a sense of their cultural identity. Let us again remember that ‘fundamental’ does not mean ‘traditional’. As in other parts of the non-Western world, revivalism or fundamentalism in India, be it Hindu or Muslim, is an attempt to reformulate the project of modernity. Like its counterparts elsewhere, the leadership of Hindutva, for instance, has never been traditional but decidedly modern, consisting of individuals who turned their backs on their own Western education.3 Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, (RSS), the core institution and the driving force of Hindu revivalism, had his schooling in English and went on to study medicine in Calcutta. In his youth, he is reported to have felt that orthodox Hindu ritual was rather silly. His successor, Golwalkar, was the son of a civil servant, did his Master’s degree in biology at Benares University and was a lecturer in zoology at the same institution before he joined the RSS.4
Shadows of Mourning
Haunting images of loss and helplessness among large groups of people underlie many literary and scholarly accounts of transnational historical changes. These images constitute the sombre mood with which scholars have often reflected upon the periods and processes of significant transformations in human history. When Max Weber paints the portrait of Western man in the wake of Enlightenment, we see a face aglow with the promised triumph of rationality in human affairs, yet also etched with deep shadows of mourning. From Weber’s canvas, we see modern man
peering out with hopeful though disenchanted eyes at a future which offers vastly greater control over nature, society and man’s own destiny. Yet the portrait also conveys a palpable grief for the lost spontaneity and immediacy which the social forms and symbols of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition had built up and guaranteed.
Nearer to our own times, as we study the anthropological, psychological, and, above all, fictional accounts of another transcultural historical process, the process of modernization in the non-Western world, we again encounter the ghost of depression seated at a banquet table laid out for eagerly awaited dishes of economic development and the fruits of industrialization. Let me, then, first outline the social-psychological processes which are a consequence of modernization and which I believe are the foundation on which the edifices of the new Hindu and Muslim as well as other cultural identities in India are being constructed. These processes are, of course, not particular to India but common to most of the non-Western world.
First, population movements which take place during the modernizing process involve the separation 5of families and the loss of familiar neighbourhoods and ecological niches. Psychologists report and novelists describe the feelings of bereavement and states of withdrawal among those mourning for old attachments and suspicious of creating new ones. These tendencies are not only harmful for individuals but also hinder the birth of new social structures and forms while they rob community life of much of its vitality and therefore its capacity for counteracting the sense of helplessness.
With increasing globalization, migrations are no longer confined by national boundaries. Globalization, too, encroaches upon traditional group solidarities and the established relationships between different groups, whether in Cochin or Moradabad. The shifting demands of global markets for particular kinds of goods and labour make for rapid and bewildering changes in the relative status of many groups in a particular society. Whereas some groups dramatically increase their earning power (and thus claims to a higher social status) through their access to international markets in goods, services, and labour, others are as dramatically impoverished, with many forced to migrate from their traditional geographical and cultural niches.