Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  One could say that a group wherein all individual judgement is suspended and reality-testing severely disturbed may legitimately be regarded as pathological. This, however, is an individualistic viewpoint which looks askance at any kind of self-transcendence through immersion in a group. In this view, spiritual uplift in a religious assembly, where the person feels an upsurge of love enveloping the community and the world outside, would be regarded with the same grave suspicion as the murkier purposes of a violent mob. It is cenainly true that transcending individuality by merging into a group can generate heroic self-sacrifice, but it can also generate unimaginable brutality. To get out of one’s skin in a devotional assembly is also at the same time to have less regard for saving that skin when part of a mob. Yet to equate and thus condemn both is to deny the human aspiration toward self-transcendence, a promise held out by our cultural identity and redeemed, if occasionally, by vital participation in the flow of the community’s cultural life.

  It is, however, evident that it is this group pride and narcissism which have made it possible for the Hindutva forces to offer another alternative vision of India’s future as an alternate to those offered by the modernists and the traditionalists. The modernists are, of course, enthusiastic votaries of the modernization project although the Left and Right may argue over which economic form is the most suitable. Both factions, however, are neither interested in nor consider the question of cultural authenticity as important. The traditionalists, on the other hand, including the neo-Gandhians, totally reject modernity solely on the issue of cultural authenticity. The Hindutva forces have tried to offer yet another alternative by reformulating the project of modernity in a way where its instrumentalities are adopted but its norms and values are contested. The pivotal issue for them is not the acceptance of global technoscience or the economic institutions and forms of modernity but their impact on and a salvaging of Hindu culture and identity—as they define it. Cultural nationalism, though, will always have priority whenever it conflicts with economic globalism. It is apparent that such an approach to modernity will have great appeal to the emerging middle classes and sections of the intelligentsia which are committed neither to what I can only call universal modernism nor to a postmodern traditionalism.

  The danger of stoking group narcissism, Hindu garv (pride) in our example, is that when this group grandiosity (expressed in a belief in its unique history and/or destiny, its moral, aesthetic, technological, or any other kind of superiority vis-a-vis other groups) is brought into serious doubt, when the group feels humiliated, when higher forms of grandiosity such as the group’s ambitions are blocked, then there is a regression in the group akin to one in the individual. The negative part of the grandiose self which normally remains hidden, the group’s specific feelings of worthlessness and its singular sense of inferiority, now come to the fore. If all possibilities of self-assertion are closed, there is a feeling of absolute helplessness, a state which must be changed through assertive action. Such a regression, with its accompanying feeling of vulnerability and helplessness, is most clearly manifested in the sphere of group aggression which takes on, overtly and covertly, the flavour of narcissistic rage. As in the individual who seeks to alter such an unbearable self state through acts as extreme as suicide or homicide, the group’s need for undoing the damage to the collective self by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of this aim give it no rest. Narcissistic rage does not vanish when the offending object disappears. The painful memory can linger on, making of the hot rage a chronic, cold resentment till it explodes in all its violet manifestations whenever historical circumstances sanction such eruptions. I am afraid Ayodhya is not an end but only a beginning since the forces buffeting Hindu (or, for that matter, Muslim) grandiosity do not lie within the country but are global in their scope. They are the forces of modernization itself, of the wonderful attractions and the terrible distortions of the mentality of Enlightenment.

  It would also be easy to dismiss Rithambra’s—and the sangh parivar’s—evocation of the Hindu past from a postmodern perspective which considers every past a social construction that is shaped by the concerns of the present. In other words, there is no such thing as the past since the past is transformable and manipulable according to the needs of the present. Yet as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim pointed out long ago, every society displays and even requires a minimal sense of continuity with its past.21 Its memories cannot be relevant to its present unless it secures this continuity. In a society in the throes of modernization, the need for continuity with the past, a sense of heritage, essential for maintaining a sense of individual and cultural identity, becomes even more pressing, sharply reducing the subversive attractions of a viewpoint which emphasizes the plasticity and discontinuities of the past. It is this need for 22a continuity of cultural memory, of a common representation of the past in times of rapid change, even turbulence, which the sangh parivar addresses with considerable social resonance and political success.

  7

  The Muslim Fundamentalist Identity

  Even though the appellation ‘fundamentalist’ is often used for stigmatizing particular groups, especially of Muslims, there is no other word which is a satisfactory substitute. This lies in the nature of the phenomenon itself which, with its pious passions, strong beliefs, and inflexible values, will inevitably imbue any neutral and originally descriptive term with negative or positive connotations. As a phenomenon, many hold the opinion that religious fundamentalism is an attempt by a religious community to preserve its identity by a selective retrieval of doctrines, beliefs, and practices from a sacred past.1 Although a nostalgia for the sacred past is a hallmark of fundamentalist rhetoric, the retrieved fundamentals are very often pragmatically refined and modified. Contemporary fundamentalism is both a revival and a construction, both derivative and original.

  Muslim fundamentalism in India shares some of the abiding concerns of Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere in the world but also has some distinct local flavours. As the political scientist M.S. Agwani points out, there are not one but many fundamentalisms in India of which the major varieties are associated with the names of Deoband, Nadwah, Tablighi Jamaiat, and Jamaiat-i-Islami.2 Muslim fundamentalism is thus not monolithic but divided into factions which differ not only over the means of bringing about the desired Islamic revival but sometimes also over the preferred ends. Although they all agree that the precepts of earliest Islam, valid for all times and olimes, must govern a person’s private and collective life, that nationalism, secularism, and materialism are un-Islamic, and that such popular practices as saint worship at darghas (shrines) and devotional music in Muslim social and religious life are undesirable imports from Hindustan, they disagree on the desired relationship between religion and the state, or the extent of totalitarian practice needed to enforce religious orthodoxy.

  For me, fundamentalism is the third Muslim response to the loss of collective self-idealizations and the fracture in self-representation brought on by historical change. If the victim is unable to hate, the fundamentalist cannot stop hating. Whereas in the Andalus syndrome the group cannot stop mourning, one of the components of fundamentalism is the phenomenon of the ‘inability to mourn’,3 an emotional state where the natural process of grieving is blocked by undue anger.

  Meeting the Mullahs

  The men who have traditionally spearheaded the fundamentalist response of Muslim societies and who are widely regarded as representatives of Islamic conservatism are professional men of religion, the ulema, with various degrees of religious learning, who are also known as mullahs in Persia and India. In some ways, my encounter with the mullahs was psychologically the most difficult. The meeting itself was undemanding since besides our animating minds the encounter only involved a disembodied voice on the mullah’s part and ears on mine. The mullahs—Qari Hanif Mohammad Multanwale, Syed Mohammad Hashmi, Maulana Salimuddin Shamshi, Riyaz Effendi, and others—came to me through the
ir sermons recorded live at different times during the last decade at various mosques and reproduced in hundreds of thousands of inexpensive audiocasettes which are widely available in the Muslim neighbourhoods of Indian towns and cities.

  The encounter with the mullah proved difficult on two counts. First, there was the persistence of my Hindu childhood image of the mullah as the wild-eyed man with a flowing beard who sprewed fire and brimstone every Friday afternoon in the mosque with an intent to transform his congregation into a raging mob baying for the blood of the Hindu infidel—mine. Second, the mullah’s rhetoric, based on older models from the heyday of Islam in the Middle East, was unpleasantly foreign to me. Openly emotional, using the full register of the voice from a whisper to the full-throated shout, screaming and on occasion weeping as he is overtaken by religious enthusiasm, the mullah’s style of public speaking (as of the Hindu zealot) was distasteful to me. My adult sensibility, influenced by psychoanalytic rationalism, recoils at the hectoring tone, the imperative voice, and the moral certainty which recognizes only the black of unbelief (kufar) and the white of faith and has neither time nor tolerance for the shades of grey.

  Influenced emotionally by fantasies from a Hindu past and cognitively by the concepts of a Western-inspired liberalism, my first reaction to the mullah was to label him a ‘fanatic’, the word itself an 18th-century European coinage meant to denounce rather than describe the religious zealot. The temptation to rip open the mullah’s facade of a just man gripped by religious passion to reveal the workings of other, baser motives was overwhelming. Indeed, the speeches of most mullahs, expressing contempt and indifference for everything other than the object of their passion and an unshakeable certitude in the rightness of their beliefs, seem to be venly designed for a psychoanalytically inspired hatchet job. The temptation to pathologize the mullah as an obsessional, if not psychopathic or even paranoid, had to be resisted if I wished to understand Muslim fundamentalism without resort to reductionist psychological cliches.4 The first step in such an understanding was to listen to the mullah.

  Sung in many voices and with varying lyrics, the music of the fundamentalist theme song is easily recognizable from one mullah to another. After a couple of obligatory ayats from the Qur’an in Arabic as a prelude, signifying that both the speaker and the listener are now in the realm of the sacred, the fundamentalist generally begins with a lament for the lost glories of Islam as he compares the sorry plight of Muslims today with their earlier exalted status. There may be a sizeable presence of Muslims in all parts of the globe, says one mullah, and the mosque and the Qur’an found in every country. Yet nowhere does one hear that Muslims are thriving, successful, or on the ascendant. A hundred and sixty million Muslims are being whipped by two-and-a-half million Jews, says another. Look at the sorry fate of Iraq, a land made sacred by the blood of the Prophet’s grandsons. At one time Sultan Salah-al-din Ayubi (Saladin) commanding a force of 13,000 in the battle for Jersualem faced Richard’s army of 700,000 and killed 300,000 Christians on a single day. Once, in the battle for Mecca—and the first battle of Islamic history is every mullah’s preferred illustration—the Prophet with a ragtag force of 313 (a number which along with the word ‘Karbala’ has become the most effective symbol of political mobilization), including women, children, and old men, defeated the 1000 armed warriors of Abu Jahl, many of them on horseback, at the battle of Badr. Today, with all the oil, dollars, and weapons in the world, Muslims are slaves to the dictates of Western Christian powers even in the 36 countries of which they are the putative rulers. Once, when the Muslim saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti died in Ajmer, nine million kafirs (here, the Hindus) began reading the kalma, that is, became Muslims. Once, at the sight of Imam Rahimullah’s funeral cortege, 20,000 Jews converted to Islam. Today, Muslims have trouble keeping their own faith alive.

  The choice of historical illustrations from the early history of Islam, including their legendary elaboration, to bring home the fact of Muslim degeneration and distress in the modern world is a pan-Islamic phenomenon. Few if any civilizations have attached as much importance to history as has Islam in its awareness of itself.5 Recognize your history (tarikh)! is the common fundamentalist exhortation, in contrast to the Hindu revivalist’s implied suggestion, ‘Live your myth!’ From the Prophet’s time to the present, it has been Islam which has distinguished between self and other, between brother and stranger, between the faithful and the alien kafir, the unbeliever. It is therefore not surprising that in fundamentalist discourse it is the wider, Arab-centred history of Islam rather than the history of Indian Muslims through which a collective Muslim identity is sought to be shaped.

  After listing the symptoms of Muslim distress, the mullahs proceed to diagnose the disease. The bad condition of the Muslims, they aver, is not due to any major changes in the outer circumstances of Muslim lives but because of a glaring internal fault: the weakening or loss of religious faith. Muslims have lost everything—political authority, respect, the wealth of both faith (din) and the world (duniya)—because they did not keep their pact with Mohammed. At one time Allah gave Muslims the kingdom of the world only in order to test whether they would continue to remain His slaves. Muslims have failed Allah’s test. It was their religious zeal which made a small, unarmed group of Muslims succeed on the battlefield against overwhelming odds. (Now the mullah begins to address the listener more directly). Today, you do not respect the Qur’an. You do not respect the Prophet who is so pure that not a single fly came near him during his lifetime, a man whose sweat smelt more divine than shiploads of perfume. You may think of yourselves as Muslims but look into the mirror of the Qur’an and you will see you are not.

  The Arabs lose to the Jews in Palestine because they are fighting for land, even if it is their own land. They are not fighting for Islam, for the Prophet. Sultan Salah-al-din fought for Islam and won Palestine. On the eve of the battle against Richard, he said to his soldiers: ‘Paradise is near, Egypt is far.’ He did not defend Islam by the sword but by his character as a Muslim. The Christians, as is their wont, used to send beautiful young women to seduce and corrupt Muslim generals, their priests assuring the girls forgiveness for all sins incurred in the service of Christianity. Saladin rejected 13 of the most beautiful Christian girls sent to his palace, in fact, the Christian women, impressed by the Sultan’s steadfastness, read the kalma. On the other hand the Muslims lost India, not to the British, but because the last Mughal emperors like Mohammad Shah Rangile and Bahadur Shah Zafar were sunk in the quagmire of wine, women, and poetry.

  After the diagnosis the physicians proceed to pathogenesis. The disease is caused by the process of modernity which the Muslim body has not resisted There is no difference today between the home of a Muslim and that of a Hindu, Jew, or Christian. The sickness of television has entered Muslim homes where families fritter away whole evenings in ungodly entertainment rather than in reading from or discussing the Qur’an. Some of them say, ‘We watch television only for the news.’ I ask, ‘What news? Of murders and accidents? Is there any news to gladden the heart of the faithful? Where is the news that a Muslim country has conquered an infidel land?’ People walk about the streets singing songs from movies, prostitute’s songs, rather than with the kalma on their lips. They follow educated people who are the thieves of religion, who teach the separation of religion from life and from politics.

  Muslims have now taken to these deeply offensive modem fashions. They no longer give a revered name such as Fatima, that of the Prophet’s daughter, to their own daughters but prefer instead to name the little girl after some movie actress, a prostitute. Look at the Westem-style trousers that men wear, with pockets in indecent places. You see man bending forward and taking out money from the hip pocket, next to the buttocks. In winter you can see them sliding their hands into the side pockets and taking out peanuts or cashews from these disgusting places and putting them in the mouth.

  In olden days a ruler would never permit the presence of a woman in o
fficial rooms or at public functions. A mullah would not perform the wedding ceremony where women were present. Now some of the rulers cannot even go to the toilet without a woman. Instead of only bowing before Allah, Muslims now bow before graves of various pirs (holy men) who are three feet underground. No wonder Islam is bending under the assault of kufr, Arabs are bowing before Jews and Christians, you before the Hindus. What is this preoccupation with worldly wealth and success? Allah says, I did not bring you into the world to make two shops out of one, four out of two, two factories out of one, four out of two. Does the Qur’an want you to do that? Does the Prophet? No! They want you to dedicate yourself to the faith, give your life for the glory of Islam.

  The remedy suggested by the mullahs is a return to the fundamentals of the faith as contained in the Qur’an. The Qur’an is Allah’s book, the light given by God to lift the darkness of mankind. Nothing can be added to or subtracted from the book. No arguments, no discussion, no objections, no asking for proof. It is etemal and unchanging. It is not like the clothes you wear which are different for summer and winter. Follow every rule of the faith, not just the ones which are convenient. It is not what you want or wish but Allah’s wish that has to be complied with. It is not your likes but what is liked by the Prophet that must be done. All that is needed to live your life is contained in the examples from the life of the Prophet. All you need is faith—in Allah, the Prophet, the Book, angels, Judgement Day, paradise, and hell—and effort. If you cannot get wordly wealth without putting in an effort, how can you obtain paradise without it? Tell your daughter to offer namaz daily in the house; you won’t be able to tell them once they are burning in hell.