Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  There is a limit to our patience and tolerance. These wicked people should understand that we can sacrifice all we have, including our lives, but not our honour. We cannot compromise the glory of the Qur’an. Today the whole world is in turmoil. Some madmen are disturbing the peace of the world. This is not a challenge to the 220 million Muslims of India but to the over a billion Muslims of the world. That is why I request you to remain alert. Today’s tense atmosphere should make every Muslim who is still living unawares a true Muslim. They are banning the Qur’an. Has the time not come that you become regular in saying your namaz as ordained by it? They are thinking of banning the Qur’an. Has the time not come that you keep your rozas even in the heat of summer? The more they talk of banning the Qur’an, the more you should live according to it. Give your, life a religious cast.

  The secret of Muslim strength does not lie in the sheer number of Muslims all over the world, a millat of which the Indian Muslims are also a part, a notion of a pan-Islamic collectivity which is the stuff of the Hindu nationalist’s nightmares. For the Muslims, the offer of such a collective identity helps to counteract the feeling of being an embattled minority in one particular country. The real secret of Muslim strength, however, lies in the superiority of Islam over the religion of the Hindus. Our religion makes us stronger, their divisive faith makes them weaker. Our religion is of the future, theirs mired in an outdated past. We are stronger than we think, they weaker than what they or we might believe.

  Why do they talk of a ban on the Qur’an? Why are they so afraid of the Qur’an? They are afraid because their religion is one of touchables-untouchables. Qur’an gives a religion of universal equality. They have no place in their hearts for their own people. Let them allow a Harijan to drink water from their wells. These high-caste people who talk of Rama and Sita, let them first permit Harijans to enter their temples. In contrast, look at the Qur’an. It gives every human being a right to equality on the basis of his humanity. That is why 13,000 Harijans, 13,000tribals, converted to Islam in Meenakshipuram in Madras. They did not know what is written in the Qur’an. They only knew that Qur’an gives people of low caste the right to sit together with people of higher castes on terms of equality. So these Harijans who have been given so many benefits by the state are ready to throw them away. We do not want benefits which give us food and clothing but which leave our hearts enslaved. We want freedom of our minds, freedom for our souls. We are prepared to tolerate slavery of every kind but not of the soul. You, enslavers of the soul, Qur’an liberates the soul! That is why we believe in the Qur’an which gives life to the soul, makes a black like Billal the chief of a fair-skinned tribe.d Today, when Muslims are being massacred everywhere, when there is talk of doing away with Muslim personal law, when the honour of our mothers and sisters is being violated, when our children are being martyred, when our very existence is unbearable to others, 13,000 Harijans chose to convert to our religion. Because man wants freedom for the soul. A bird will be unhappy even if confined in a palace of gold. Its soul craves for the freedom of the garden. Islam gives that freedom. The result is that not only in Islamic but also in non-Islamic countries, people are flocking to convert to Islam. No one is asking them or telling them to become Muslims. It is because of its teachings that people are taking refuge in the Qur’an.

  Do you think Qur’an can be finished off by merely banning it? We have lived with the Qur’an for 1400 years. We have passed under arches of swords. We have come through the battlefield of Karbala. We have passed through the valleys of Spain, through the hills of Gibraltar, through the plains of India. We can say with pride that in spite of thousands of ordeals it has undergone, the Muslim nation remains incomparable. The love it has for the Qur’an is unmatched by that of any other community for its religious books. No one loves his religion more than the Muslim loves Islam. We need to maintain relationships with Muslims all over the world. We have tried and succeeded in developing these relationships. We can then deal with any challenge that comes from either inside or outside the country. Our faith grows stronger with each challenger it faces and makes us more powerful. The fox which wakes up a sleeping lion should first look after its own safety. Anyone who dares to challenge the Qur’an should be aware that either he or his father or his offspring will have to become a Muslim.

  It is the voice of Mohammed, the command of God, which can never be altered

  The world may change a thousand times, the Qur’an never.

  In summary, the psychological process involved in Muslim fundamentalist politics, which has as its goal the replacement of political, economic, and social bases of politics with a religious critique, consists essentially of two steps. First, there is an attempt to erase previous cognitive structures, as they relate to political life and issues, through the generation of a strong persecution anxiety in the group. Second, on the now relatively clean slate of the group’s political psyche, the fundamentalist politician proceeds to draw a group self-portrait—offers the Muslims a collective identity—which emphasizes the community’s superiority in relation to the enemy group, the nationalist Hindus. Although this superiority may have many other features, such as the strength to be derived from an identification with a larger, powerful pan-Islamic community, its core is a conviction in the inherent superiority of the group’s religion, Islam, and of all its symbols. To maintain this feeling of superiority and the strength it gives to the members of the community, it is considered essential for the individual to be zealous in the observance of religious duties, accept the priority of religion in all areas of life, and to acknowledge the demands of religion as having the first call on individual loyalty.

  To conclude: The reasons for the attraction of the fundamentalist identity for many Muslims are not difficult to fathom. Apart from providing a forum for resistance to perceived domination and repression, fundamentalism offers a narcissistic enhancement for a sense of self-esteem fractured by the workings of a historical fate. Besides giving a sacred meaning and transcendent purpose to the lives of the hurt, the dislocated, and the shipwrecked, fundamentalism also makes a masochistic reparation for guilt feelings possible. In defining an Other as a competitor with a deadly intent toward one’s own group, fundamentalism provides a focus for undue anger and unresolved hate. Little wonder that many are willing to pay the costs of a fundamentalist identity—a considerable denial of reality, the closing of one’s eyes and mind to the structures of the contemporary world, and the renunciation of a pleasure-seeking attitude in favour of a religiously disciplined life.

  8

  Religious Conflict in the Modern World

  Our times are witness to a worldwide wave of religious revival. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, the new religions in Japan, born-again Christians in the United States, and the Protestant sects in Latin America are undergoing a resurgence which is regarded with deep distrust by all the modem heirs to the Enlightenment. Although a secular humanist might find most manifestations of the current religious zeal personally distasteful, he or she is nonetheless aware that the revitalization of religion at the end of the 20th century constitutes a complex attempt at the resacralization of cultures beset with the many ills of modernity. As Andrew Samuels reminds us, this fragmented and fractured attempt at resacralization to combat the sense of oppression and a future utterly bereft of any vision of transcendent purpose is not only a part of the new religious fundmentalisms but also integral to the so-called left-leaning, progressive political movements.1 One can discern the search for transcendence even in concerns around ecological issues and environmental protection where at least some of the discourse is comprised of elements of nature mysticism.

  However, if we look closely at individual cases around the world, we will find that the much-touted revival is less of religiosity than of cultural identities based on religious affiliation. In other words, there may not be any great ferment taking place in the world of religious ideas, rituals, or any marked increase in the sum of human spirituality. Where th
e resurgence is most visible is in the organization of collective identities around religion, in the formation and strengthening of communities of believers: What we are witnessing today is less the resurgence of religion than (in the felicitous Indian usage) of communalism where a community of believers not only has religious affiliation but also social, economic, and political interests in common which may conflict with the corresponding interests of another community of believers sharing the same geographical space. Indeed, most secular analysts and progressive commentators have traditionally sought to uncover factors other than religion as the root cause of an ostensibly religious conflict. This has been as true of the anti-Semitic pogroms in Spain in the 14th century, of 16th-century Catholic-Protestant violence in France, of anti-Catholic riots in 18th-century London, as of 20th-centuiy Hindu-Muslim riots in India.2 The “real” cause of conflict between groups in all these instances has been generally identified as a clash of economic interests; the explanation embraces some version of a class struggle between the poor and the rich.

  The danger to the material existence of an individual can indeed be experienced as an identity threat which brings a latent group identity to the forefront This heightened sense of identity with the group provides the basis for a social cohesiveness which is necessary to safeguard the individual’s economic interests. But there are other threats besides the economic one which too amplify the group aspect of personal identity. In an earlier chapter, I described the identity-threat which is being posed by the forces of modernization and globalization to peoples in many parts of the world. Feelings of loss and helplessness accompany dislocation and migration from rural areas to the shanty towns of urban megalopolises, the disappearance of craft skills which underlay traditional work identities, and the humilation caused by the homogenizing and hegemonizing impact of the modem world which pronounces ancestral, cultural ideals and values as outmoded and irrelevant. These, too are conducive to heightening the group aspects of identity as the affected (and the afflicted) look to cultural-religious groups to combat their feelings of helplessness and loss and to serve as vehicles for the redress of injuries to self-esteem.

  The identity-threat may also arise due to a perccived discrimination by the state, that is, a disregard by the political authorities of a group’s interests or disrespect for its cultural symbols. It can also arise as a consequence of changing political constellations such as those which accompany the end of empires. If Hindu-Muslim relations were in better shape in the past, with much less overt violence, it was perhaps also because of the kind of polity in which the two peoples lived. This polity was that of empire, the Mughal empire followed by the British one. An empire, the political scientist Michael Walzer observes, is characterized by a mixure of repression for any strivings for independence and tolerance for different cultures, religions and ways of life.3 The tolerance is not a consequence of any great premodern wisdom but because of the indifference, sometimes bordering on brutal incomprehension, of the imperial bureaucrats to local conflicts of the peoples they rule. Distant from local life, they do not generally interfere with everyday life as long as things remain peaceful, though there may be intermittent cruelty to remind the subject peoples of the basis of the empire—conquest through force of arms. It is only with self-government, when distance disappears, that the political questions—‘Who among us shall have power here, in these villages, these towns?’ ‘Will the majority group dominate?’ ‘What will be the new ranking order?’—lead to a heightened awareness of religious-cultural differences. In countries with multireligious populations, independence coincides with tension and conflict—such as we observe today in the wake of the unravelling of the Soviet empire.4

  The identity-threats I have outlined above do not create a group identity but merely bring it to the fore. The group aspect of personal identity is not a late creation in individual development but exists from the beginning of the human lifecycle. Although Freud had no hesitation in maintaining that from the very first individual psychology is a social psychology as well, psychoanalysts, with their traditional emphasis on the ‘body-in-the-mind’, have tended to downplay the existence of the ‘community-in-the-mind’.5 They have continued to regard the social (polis) aspects of man’s being as an overlay which compromises the wishes and needs of the self or, in the case of the crowd is destructive of individual self and identity. Erikson has been one of the rare psychoanalysts who has called for a revision of this model that differentiates so starkly betwen an individual-individual and the individual-in-mass who has no individuality at all: ‘Yet that a man could ever be psychologically alone; that a man “alone” is essentially different from the same man in a group; that a man in a temporary solitary condition or when closeted with his analyst has ceased to be a “political” animal and has disengaged himself from social action (or inaction) on whatever class level—these and similar stereotypes demand careful revision.’6

  Such revisions would begin with the idea that the inner space occupied by what is commonly called the “self”—which I have been using synonymously with “identity”—not only contains mental representations of one’s bodily life and of primary relationships within the family but also holds mental representations of one’s group and its culture, that is, the group’s configuration of beliefs about man, nature, and social relations (including the view of the Other). These cultural propositions, transmitted and internalized through symbols have a strong emotional impact on those who grow up as members of a particular cultural group. The self, then, is a system of reverberating representational worlds, each enriching, constraining, and shaping the others, as they jointly evolve through the lifecycle. A revision of psychoanalytic notions of the self, identity, and subjectivity would also acknowledge that none of these constituent inner worlds is “primary” or “deeper”, that is, there is no necessity of identity or an “archaeological” layering of the various inner worlds, although at different times the self may be predominantly experienced in one or other representational mode. It is not only the brain that is bicameral.

  At some point of time in early life, like the child’s ‘I am!’ which heralds the birth of individuality, there is also a complementary ‘We are!’ which announces the birth of a sense of community. ‘I am’ differentiates me from other individuals. ‘We are’ makes me aware of the other dominant group (or groups) sharing the physical and cognitive space of my community. The self-assertion of ‘We are’ with its potential for confrontation with the ‘We are’ of other groups, is inherently a carrier of aggression, together with the consequent fears of persecution, and is thus always attended by a sense of risk and potential for violence. (The psychological processes initiated by an awareness of ‘We are’, I suggest, also provide an explanation for the experimental findings of cognitive psychologists that the mere perception of two different groups is sufficient to trigger a positive evaluation of one’s own group and a negative stereotyping of the other).

  The further development of the social-representational world or the group aspect of identity has some specific characteristics which I have discussed in detail at various places in this book in the context of Hindu-Muslim relations. To abstract briefly: this aspect of identity is powerfully formed by the processes of introjection, identification, idealization, and projection during childhood. On the one hand, the growing child assimilates within itself the images of the family and group members. He or she identifies with their emotional investment in the group’s symbols and traditions and incorportes their idealizations of the group which have served them so well—as they will serve the child—in the enhancement of self-esteem for belonging to such an exalted and blessed entity. On the other hand, because of early difficulties in integrating contradictory representaions of the self and the parents—the “good” loving child and the “bad” raging one; the good, caretaking parent and the hateful, frustrating one—the child tries to disown the bad representations through projection. First projected to inanimate objects and animals a
nd later to people and other groups—the latter often available to the child as. a preselection by the group—the disavowed bad representations need such “reservoirs”, as Vamik Volkan calls them. These reservoirs—Muslims for Hindus, Arabs for Jews, Tibetans for the Chinese, and vice versa—are also convenient repositories for subsequent rages and hateful feelings for which no clear-cut addressee is available. Since most of the “bad” representations arise froma social disapproval of the child’s “animality”, as expressed in its aggressivity, dirtiness, and unruly sexuality, it is preeminently this animality which a civilized, moral self must disavow and place in the reservoir group. We saw this happening in the Hindu image of the dirty, aggressive, and sexually licentious Muslim, and we encounter it again and again in both modem and historical accounts of other group conflicts. Thus in 16th-century France, Catholics ‘knew’ that the Protestants were not only dirty and diabolic but that their Holy Supper was disordered and drunken, a bacchanalia, and that they snuffed out the candles and had indiscriminate sexual intercourse after voluptuous psalm singing. Protestants, on their part, “knew” that Catholic clergy had an organization of hundreds of women at the disposal of priests and canons who, for the most part, were sodomites as well.7

  The psychological processes involved in the development of ‘We are’ not only take recourse to the group’s cultural traditions—its myths, history, rituals, and symbols—to make the community a firm part of personal identity but also employ bodily fantasies as well as family metaphors to anchor this aspect of identity in the deepest layers of individual imagination. The “pure” us versus a “dirty” them, the association of a rival group with denigrated, often anal, bodily parts and functions, representations of one’s group in metaphors of a body under attack or as a “good” son of the mother (land) while the rival group is a “bad” son, are some of the examples from Hindu and Muslim discourse which I have discussed in earlier chapters.