Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  Psychologically, then, fundamentalism is a theory of suffering and cure, just as modem individualism is another theory of suffering and its cure. The core of psychological individuality is internalization rather than externalization. I use “internalization” here as a sensing by the person of a psyche in the Greek sense, an animation from within rather than without. Experientially, this internalization is a recognition that one is possessed of a mind in all its complexity. It is the acknowledgement, however vague, unwilling, or conflicted, of a subjectivity that fates one to episodic suffering through some of its ideas and feelings—in psychoanalysis, murderous rage, envy, and possessive desire seeking to destroy those one loves and would keep alive—simultaneously with the knowledge, at some level of awareness, that the mind can help in containing and processing disturbed thoughts. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, identifies the cause of suffering not in the individual mind but in a historical process which, however, is not fatefully deterministic but amenable to human will and eminently reversible. Individual and collective suffering are due to a lapse from an ideal state of religious faith, and the cure lies in an effort to restore faith in one’s inner life to its original state of pristine purity.

  Another striking aspect of fundamentalist religious discourse is not so much its warlike anger against the enemy—the modernization process, the infidels—held responsible for the contemporary sorry state of the Muslims, but the turning of this rage inward in a collective self-recrimination and masochistic self-hate. The loss of Muslim greatness is not grieved for, a process that would pave the way for an eventual acceptance of its loss and thus enable the community to face the future without a debilitating preoccupation with the past. Instead, the loss is experienced as a persisting humiliation, a narcissistic injury to the group self which keeps on generating inchoate anger rather than the sadness of mourning. The instances from history in the mullahs’ sermons are replete with sadomasochistic imagery, betraying an unconscious rage even as they seem to bemoan the lost glories of Islam. Their talk is liberally spattered with blood. Rivers of blood flow in the massacres of Muslims, fountains of the stuff spurt from die chests of children martyred to the faith. The atrocities borne by Muslims, both in modem and medieval periods, are detailed with much relish. It is not the doctors and the officers—the representatives of the modem world—who have sacrificed for the country’s independence, says Quri Mohammad Hanif, but the mullahs. Detailing incidents not recorded in history books, 3000 ulema were laid on the road to Delhi and the British drove road rollers over their chests. Hundreds were sewn into pigskins and burnt alive. Impaling, burning at the stake, being trampled under elephant feet, and the walling in alive of early martyrs is described with an eye for gory detail. The listeners are asked to visualize the plight of the pious woman who had hundreds of nails driven into her palms and feet saying to her infidel torturer, ‘You can drive a hundred nails into my tongue too and I will still take Allah’s name.’

  In addition to the sadomasochistic imagery, another theme in fundamentalist discourse is the inculcation of guilt. The speeches conjure up images of the ancestors regarding today’s generation of Muslims with eyes full of reproach and with a ‘Thou hast forsaken us!’ refrain on dead lips. Skilfully reactivating the guilt vis-a-vis our parents that is our common human legacy from early childhood, fundamentalism stirs anger and guilt in a potent brew.

  To trace psychological themes in Muslim fundamentalist discourse is not to reduce this discourse to psychopathology. Illness to the outsider, fundamentalism is a cure for the insider. For many Muslims with an inchoate sense of oppression and the looming shadow of a menacing future, with fractured self-esteem in the wake of historical change that saw an end to their political role and a virtual disappearance of their language, fundamentalism is an attempt, however flawed, to revive the sacred in social and cultural life, to give politics a spiritual dimension, and to recover in their religious verities a bulwark against collective identity fragmentation.

  Religious Politics

  To look more closely at the psychological processes involved in the fundmentalist mobilization of Muslims, I have chosen as my exemplary text a speech by Ubedullah Khan Azmi, an influential north Indian Muslim leader. Azmi, who has occupied important positions in Muslim institutions, such as the secretaiyship of the Muslim Personal Law Conference, an organization through which the conservative section of the community has zealously sought to guard its autonomy in the making and interpretation of civil laws applicable to Muslims, is what I would call a ‘moderate fundamentalist’. By this I mean that, like all fundamentalists, he subscribes to the founding myth that a truly Islamic society existed only in the period of the Prophet and the first four Caliphs, and one must go back to those origins to restore the initial vitality of the community. As a moderate, however, he does not go so far as some others who advocate an opting out of or a rejection of the modem Indian political system, a jehad to recover the spirit of Islam’s original enterprise. Informed by fundamentalist beliefs, his politics is yet politics as usual in many ways, requiring a constant adaptation to changing political realities. Like many fundamentalist leaders who must operate within secular democracies, Azmi has negotiated a degree of political influence for himself (he is a Member of Parliament) by entering into a mutually beneficial alliance with secular politicians of a mainstream political party, the Janata Dal. In such alliances, we know, fundamentalist leaders are willing to be carried along on a wave of purely socioeconomic or political resentment while they mobilize votes for their political allies by playing on religious passions and fears of their constituency, saying and doing things which the secular politician will studiously avoid.6

  The rhetoric of fundamentalist politics attempts to seduce its target group with a sense of participation in a collectivity with a transcendent purpose, giving a higher value or meaning to life than could be given by any secular politics. The group addressed by the fundamentalist has the very satisfying feeling of being “chosen” with a sense of mission connected with a sacred purpose, sanctified by God, and superior to the adversary’s mission which is not similarly blessed or is blessed by a lesser god.

  My selection of this particular speech, delivered in 1985, is not because it is remarkable in any way but precisely becuase it is not. It is an ordinary speech which takes as its springboard an insignificant event, the filing of a petition by an obscure Hindu lawyer in a district court in Rajasthan seeking a ban on the Qur’an. Unlike Rithambra’s speaking style which is modelled after Hindu bardic narration Azmi’s rhetoric is in traditional Muslim style, interspersed with Urdu couplets for an audience which likes poetical flourishes in its orators. The speech as reproduced below is necessarily abridged, though not edited to change its essential content, images, or the sequential flow of thoughts.

  [I wish] I did not have to see this day. These are the offspring of Nathuram Godse [Gandhi’s assassin] who are talking of banning the Qur’an. The children of Nathuram Godse dream of occupying the Babri mosque. Ubedullah Khan Azmi declares openly, look at the lineage of all traitors from the time of Mahatma Gandhi to that of Indira Gandhi and then look at the lineage of those who have been loyal to India from 1945 to 1985. What is the crime for which we Muslims are being punished? Our book is being banned, our personal law is being proscribed, our community’s very way of life is being restricted. Beware, history may repeat itself. Balasaheb Deoras may have to read the kalma [i.e., become a Muslim], Atal Behan Vajpayee may have to read the kalma, Mister Rajiv Gandhi may have to read the kalma.a

  Stars sometimes appear in the waves

  Khalid sometimes leads armies

  Every age sees the rise of Yazid

  Every age witnesses the birth of Shabbir.b

  How much have we served this country! What have we not done to get freedom for this country! The equal rights given to Muslims under Indian law were not given as charity but because we earned them. And today they want to ban the Qur’an? Who led the country to independence?
Everyone calls Mahatma Gandhi the father of the nation. Fine, we’ll also call him that. Who killed the “father of the nation”? Nathuram Godse. Who killed Indira Gandhi? Beant Singh and Satwant Singh. Were they Muslims? You eliminated them both.

  Even then you complain of my faithlessness,

  If I am not faithful, you too have not been a caretaker of my heart

  Who did we eliminate? Let me tell you that since you call us ‘Pakistanis’. When Pakistan’s tanks rolled into the country then in the form of Abdul Hamidc we destroyed eight of those tanks. Whenever the country has asked for sacrifice, Muslims have given their blood. We have protected the country at every juncture and today you are questioning our loyalty? You talk of banning the Qur’an which taught us to die for the country’s honour. Qur’an gave discipline to the world. Qur’an gave even the lowest of the low the right to live in dignity. Qur’an was the first to raise its voice against caste distinctions. Qur’an was the first to abolish differences between high and low. Qur’an taught the world that man does not become great on the basis of birth but on the basis of religious virtue, abstinence, and truth. To ban the Qur’an means to ban reality, to ban truth. These bribe-takers want corruption to continue. These libertines want the honour of women to be violated. These drunkards want the looting of India to continue. But when people come to know the Qur’an, when they understand Qur’an laws, then Qur’an will save both the world and the millat [religious community of the Muslims].

  The political culture of fundamentalism, perhaps more than secular political cultures, is fundamentally a politics of imagery. The image Azmi first conjures up is of a besieged Muslim community, under attack from a vile, treacherous enemy, the Hindu nationalist. Azmi’s specific technique is to project the image of a relentless attack against the central symbol of Muslim religious identity, the Qur ‘an. This citadel of the community’s identity, idealized as the all-good, the all-just, the all-pure, and the source of all beneficience, is surrounded by a sea of Hindu corruption and debauchery. In contrast to a Hindu revivalist like Rithambra, who must first define and then draw up the boundaries of a Hindu community, Azmi does not need to engage in any such boundary-setting exercise. The religious-cultural identity of the Muslim qaum and its sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ has been traditionally clear-cut and relatively enduring. What Azmi attempts to do is to trigger and stoke a persecutory anxiety in his audience.

  In psychoanalytic thought, persecution is an internal event, a subjective, irrational experience often equated with the pathology of paranoia. Melanie Klein has related the anxiety it generates—the feelings of disintegration—to the earliest stages of life, to the baby’s experience of a depriving, frustrating breast-mother. But as Meira Likierman has pointed out, the feeling of persecution is also a normal part of the response to destructive and obstructive forces which we encounter in the course of everyday life.7 Connecting to the individual’s primitive persecution anxiety from infancy, damage, loss, deprivation, frustration are a range of events which constitute a destructive attack on our sense of identity and represent partial death. Persecution anxiety signals a situation of great danger and carries with it the fear of the group’s symbolic death, an annihilation of its collective identity. It is only when this particular anxiety courses through and between members of a group, making individuals feel helpless, frightened, and paralyzed, that people become loosened from their traditional cognitive moorings and are prepared to give up previously held social, political, or economic explanations for their sense of aggrievement and become receptive to the religious critique Azmi has to offer. Persecutory anxiety is one of those strong emotions which can take people away from ‘knowing’ back to the realm of ‘unknowing’—from a ‘knowledge’ of the cause of their distress to a state where they do not know what it is that gives them suffering and pain though they do know that they are suffering and in pain. One antidote to this paralyzing anxiety is anger, preferably in a violent assertion that is psychically mobilizing, as Azmi continues:

  Even the talk of banning the holy Qur’an shows what dangerous conspiracies are being hatched to damage our faith.

  Awake O Indian Muslims before you disappear completely

  Even your story will not find a mention in other stories.

  What steps should we take under these conditions? The Muslim will not come to the court to prove the truth of the Qur’an. The Muslim will come out with the shroud tied to his head to protect the Qur’an. We will cut off tongues that speak against the Qur’an. We will tear off the skin of those who look askance at the Qur’an.

  After having tried to erase previous cognitive structures through a heightening of persection anxiety and having dealt with the paralyzing fear engendered by this anxiety through fantasized violence, what the fundamentalist has before him is a newly born group without memory and with but inchoate desires. Azmi proceeds to shape the identity of this freshly minted group by offering it a series of narcissistically enhancing self-images ‘This is who you are!’—particularly in relation to the elder sibling, the Hindu.

  After 35 years of oppression the Indian Muslim has remained loyal to the country. If there is anyone loyal from Hindustan to kabristan (graveyard), then it is the Muslim. You [the Hindus] die, we die. What happens after death? You are cremated. Next, your ashes are thrown into the Ganges. Where does the river flow to? You flow from here and reach Pakistan. Ashes scattered by the wind can land anywhere. When we die, the motherland says, ‘My dear son, you will not leave me to go anywhere else. If you have lived on top of me, after death you will sleep in my lap.’

  There are three kinds of sons. One son, who according to the law of the land and in the light of his faith fulfils his obligations toward his parents is called put [son]. Another is called suput (good son) who not only fulfils his obligations but sacrifices his all for the happiness of the parents. The son who shoots his mother, cuts her throat, kills both his father and mother—he is called kuput [bad son]. Now look at the sons of this motherland and decide who is the good and who is the bad son. The Muslim who believes in Qur’an and calls India his own country is the suput. When after the formation of Pakistan there was trouble in Kashmir then it was Brigadier Usman Ali from my town of Azamgarh who was one of the first to fall to Pakistani bullets. When his twitching corpse fell to earth at the border the motherland said, This is my son who sacrificed himself to protect my honour.’

  When Abdul Hamid stopped the Pakistani tanks which would have rolled on to Demi and had his flesh tom to ribbons then the Indian earth said, ‘This is my suput.’ And they who killed Mahatma Gandhi, the liberator of the country, killed Indira Gandhi who sacrificed so much for the honour of the nation—what will you call them, put, suput, or kuput? You decide.’

  While on the surface the whole tenor of the speech is concerned with distancing the Muslim from the Hindu enemy, on the more unconscious level it betrays the existence of an unwanted relationship with the same foe—an intimacy held at bay by disdain, even hate, but an intimacy nonetheless. Viewing oneself as the ‘good son’ of the mother, as opposed to the Hindu ‘bad son’, is an unconscious acknowledgement of their connectedness, even when this connection exists only in an unending and obsessive competition. After exorcizing doubt—including self-doubt—about Muslim loyalty to the country (vis-a-vis loyalty to the religious community outside the borders of the nation), the self-images offered to the group in the following passages are of a grandiose variety, of an exhilarating Muslim superiority. The enhancement of collective self-esteem then serves to increase the security of the group self by countering the deathly threat to its survival.

  Like spokepersons of all ethnic groups in conflict around the world, Azmi’s vision of Muslims and Hindus is of two groups in eternal competition to answer the question which is more civilized, stronger, and generally, better.8 As his evidence for Muslim superiority, he offers Muslim virtues in comparison with Hindu vices. First, this superiority consists of a heightened Muslim apperception of the aesthet
ics of life, in the Muslim’s greater resonance for sensory and sensuous experience and in greater artistic giftedness.

  And you who raise slogans about Muslim loyalty, who talk of a ban on the Qur’an, have you ever looked at your own face in the mirror? It was the believers in the Qur’an who taught you the graces of life, taught you how to eat and drink. All you had before us were tomatoes and potatoes. What did you have? We brought jasmine, we brought frangipani. We gave the Taj Mahal, we gave the Red Fort. India was made India by us. We lived here for 800 years and we made India shine. In 35 years you have dimmed its light and ruined the country. A beggar will not be grateful if made an emperor. Lay out a feast for him and he will not like it. Throw him a piece of bread in the dust and he will get his appetite back. Do not force us to speak out. Do not force us to come in front of you as an enemy.

  God, look at their ignorance to believe we have no words when out of pity we gave them the power of speech.

  Azmi’s attempt to sharply differentiate the Hindus from the Muslims, suggesting that the Muslims consider themselves as having come to India from outside the country 800 years ago (and from a superior racial stock), is partly a consequence of the current antagonism between the two communities. In such a hostile situation, the fundamentalist exhorts the Muslims to shun contamination by any of the Hindu symbols and strive to keep their shared Islamic identity intact and pure. The fundamentalist is loath to acknowledge any Muslim similarity to the Hindu and focuses only on the differences which, he seeks to persuade those yet unconvinced, are of stubborn emotional importance.

  From the relative level of sophistication of the two civilizations, the battle for superiority now shifts to the arena of power as Azmi offers up the image of a powerful Muslim nation, much stronger than the Hindu enemy.