Sudhir Kakar
The Colours of Violence
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Preface
Dedication
The Setting
The Riot
The Warriors
Victims and Others: I. The Hindus
Victims and Others: II. The Muslims
A New Hindu Identity
The Muslim Fundamentalist Identity
Conclusion: Religious Conflict in the Modern World
Footnotes
A New Hindu Identity
The Muslim Fundamentalist Identity
Appendix I
Appendix II
References
Acknowledgements
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Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE COLOURS OF VIOLENCE
One of the most widely translated Indian writers, Sudhir Kakar is a psychoanalyst and scholar who lives in New Delhi. His many books include The Inner World, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, Intimate Relations and The Analyst and the Mystic, all of which have been translated into several languages around the world.
For Shveta, also because she asked.
Preface
This book is a psychoanalyst’s exploration of what is commonly known as religious conflict. The hesitations— ‘psychoanalyst’s’ instead of ‘psychoanalytic’, the qualifier ‘commonly known as’—are due to an awareness that such conflicts are complex phenomena, involving the interaction of political, economic, cultural and psychological forces. To reduce their complexity exclusively to psychoanalytic notions is to engage in a psychological imperialism which has been deeply offensive to practitioners of other disciplines—history, political science, and sociology among others—who have traditionally engaged in the study of social conflict.
My own aspirations in this book are modest. They are to provide a way of looking at conflict—the psychoanalyst’s way— so as to deepen the understanding provided by other disciplines. To their insights, I wish to add my own discipline’s characteristic way of reflecting on issues involved in religious conflict. Taking the Hindu–Muslim violence of 1990 in the south-Indian city of Hyderabad as my case-study, I have tried to bring out the subjective, experiential aspects of conflict between religious groups, to capture the psychological experience of being a Hindu or a Muslim when one’s community seems to be ranged against the other in a deadly confrontation. This means working with a notion of the group aspect of identity which is constituted of a person’s feelings and attitudes toward the self as a member of an ethnic/religious/cultural collectivity. This particular self-image is transmitted from one generation to the next through the group’s mythology, history, ideals and values, and shared cultural symbols. Group identity is an extended part of individual self-experience, although the intensity of this experience varies across individuals and with time. It can range from feelings of nominal affiliation with the group to a deep identification or even to feelings of fusion, where any perceived harm to the group’s interests or threats to its ‘honour’ are reacted to as strongly as damage to one’s own self. I have then tried to describe the ways in which social-psychological forces in a particular period of history bring out latent group identities and turn them to violent ends. With evidence drawn from interviews with men, women, and children, psychological tests and speech transcripts of Hindu and Muslim ‘fundamentalists’, I have sought to analyse the fantasies, social representations, and modes of moral reasoning about the out-groups—‘them’—that motivate and rationalize arson, looting, rape, and killing.
Chapter 1 describes the context of Hindu–Muslim violence: personal, social, and historical. After trying to understand the emotional reverberations of the Hyderabad riot of 1990, the central event of my study, I give a brief account of its setting—a social and historical portrait of the city of Hyderabad—before going on to trace the contested and contentious history of Hindu–Muslim relations.
Chapter 2 begins with my own memories of the violence between Hindus and Muslims on the eve of the partition of the country in 1947. It examines the nature of such memories and the ways they are transmitted from one generation to another. It discusses the morphology of religious group violence, the sequence of steps leading to the formation of riotous mobs, the psychology of such mobs, and then briefly summarizes events leading to the 1990 riot.
Chapter 3 turns our attention to the ‘activists’ of violence. These are the ‘strong men’, the pehlwans and the dadas who take over the direction and organization of violence once the riot begins. The chapter views religious violence through their eyes and tries to identify some common themes in their psychological make-up and professional socialization.
Chapter 4 looks closely at one set of victims of the riot—the Pardis of Shakkergunj, a small Hindu community in an old part of the city who have been repeated victims of religious violence. Through interviews with members of one extended Pardi family, we see the different ways in which men and women experience this violence and understand how the Hindu image of Muslims is constructed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of children’s representations of Hindu–Muslim violence.
Chapter 5 describes Hindu–Muslim relations and violence from the viewpoint of a poor Muslim family from Karwan in the old part of the city. The chapter analyses the different ‘victim’ responses of Indian Muslims and concludes with a discussion of the morality of violence, that is, with the ways Muslims and Hindus evaluate their various interactions with members of the other community, including such riot-time ‘interactions’ as arson, rape, and murder.
Chapter 6 discusses the social–cultural impact of modernization and globalization in fostering fundamentalist and revivalist group identities. Its centrepiece consists of the analysis of a speech by a Hindu demagogue which shows the psychological steps through which such an identity is sought to be constructed.
Chapter 7 is, so to speak, the Muslim counterpart of the preceding chapter. It analyses the speech transcripts of the mullahs, the most conservative spokesmen of the community, to describe the psychological construction of Muslim fundamentalist identity.
In conclusion, chapter 8 summarizes the various identity-threats arising from the social-cultural arena that bring the latent group aspect of our identity to the forefront. It traces the development of this aspect of personal identity, the conditions necessary for the release of its potential violence, and the role played by religion in its facilitation.
The Setting
The face of the two-year-old girl has come to occupy a permanent corner of my mind. Every now and again it rises to the surface of my consciousness. Some of these occasions are predictable. There is little mystery when the disfigured face flashes across an inner screen while I am reading about, or seeing on television, episodes of violence between racial, religious, or language groups in different parts of the world. I can also understand, even as I resent, the little girl demanding attention whenever people talk of Hyderabad, whether they are praising its old-world charm and the deliciousness of its cuisine or lamenting its lost feudal glories. The connection of the face with other contexts is more obscure. Why does it suddenly bob up when a man in therapy is telling me of a painful encounter with his boss at work or a female patient weeps as she recalls memories of her humiliation at the hands of an elder sister? I know I will have to go through a long chain of associations to lift this veil of obscurity. I am rarely in the mood to make this effort since the girl is not a welcome tenant. She is a squatter.
I first saw the face in a newspaper photograph accompanying a repor
t on the Hindu–Muslim riots in Hyderabad in December 1990. When I finally began this study in the following year, I encountered this particular photograph again and again in newspaper and magazine clippings. It had become the dominant image of that particular carnage. I do not know whether the girl is a Hindu or a Muslim, although a Telugu paper, championing the Hindu cause, identifies her as a Hindu. What you see in the photograph is the unkempt hair, matted with dust, of a child from the slums and then, shockingly, the deep gash of the scythe across the top of her face. The wound, not yet healed into a scar, starts at the right temple, cleaves the corner of the eyeballs and the bridge of a rather flat nose, to peter out in the sands of the left cheek. The stitches are not the careful job of a well-paid professional. They bespeak a harried resident doctor trying to cope with an overflow of the wounded and the dying in the emergency room of a run-down government hospital. The stitches are uneven crosses across the face, hasty scrawls of someone anxious to get over with a silly game of noughts and crosses. One arm of the girl is around a cushion, seeking comfort without finding it. The right side of the face and the injured eye rests against the edge of the cushion as she looks out through the left eye at the camera, the world, and, if I am not careful, at me.
There is an unfathomable numbness in her expression, the aftermath of a cataclysm that has shaken the little body and soul to a depth unimaginable for me. I try to look through the child’s eyes at what must have appeared as a phalanx of giants, with black strips of cloth covering the lower halves of their faces, come crashing through the splintered front door. She sees one of the men raise an axe and club her father down, the sharp edge of the weapon catching him in the back of his neck as he turns and tries to flee. She sees him disappear as he falls, and the men close in with knives, scythes, and wooden clubs. She sees her mother standing transfixed and then hears her make a sound between a sharp cough and a scream as a spear slices through the base of her throat. The girl takes a step toward her mother when the scythe is swung. There is a burning pain beyond all her experience of pain. Blood streams into the eye and, then, oblivion.
I imagine, in that particular moment when her consciousness began the distinctive spiral which ends in the loss of all accustomed moorings, that the universe revealed its secret to the little girl. She caught a glimpse of the immeasurably vast stretch of indifference surrounding the pinpoint of light we call a human life and from whose odds and ends—birth, death, bodily functions, sexual feelings, relationships with parents, siblings, children—we desperately keep on trying to construct a meaning.
I shake my head to free myself of these fantasies and again turn to the photograph of the child with a stony face and one uncomprehending eye. I am aware that my flight of imagination is a failure rather than a success of empathy. The sheer magnitude of the violence done to her is too oppressive for me to employ that crucial tool of my trade, without which no psychoanalyst can grasp and make sense of what is going on within another person. Perhaps this is so because the child is so patently a victim. She is pathetic because she has been flattened by fate. Empathy requires its addressee to be tragic, someone who has helped to bring fate upon herself and was thus fate’s active even if unwitting collaborator rather than its passive victim. Tragedy at least preserves a memory of one’s agency and therefore holds out the hope of its eventual recovery. The unmitigated passivity of pathos, on the other hand, is a dead weight that tugs down at the spirit of everyone who comes in its contact. I cannot empathize with the child because I must defend myself against her pathos. It is far easier for me to pity her. Pity is distant. The girl’s face, then, is not haunting but nagging, like a child beggar or a leper with his insidious whine, evoking an angry guilt that will not let you shout at the wretch, ‘Disappear! Die!’
At the outset, then, I am apprehensive whether I will be able to bring the essence of psychoanalytic sensibility to bear upon my conversations with the victims of the riots, as well as to my interviews with the agents of violence, the men who stab, bludgeon, and burn. It is not enough for me to take up the clinician’s stance and, for instance, speculate upon the little girl’s eventual fate: namely, if she survives the poverty and the neglect of a disfigured orphan (who is a female to boot) and grows up into an adult, she will become fearful of expressing any anger, will be easily startled by any physical surprise, and will have incomprehensible impulses to injure herself. I want to do more but am afraid that I will do much less as I leave my accustomed clinical moorings to enter the world of social violence with nothing more than what is called a psychoanalytic sensibility.
The core of the analyst’s sensibility does not lie in clinical expertise or in a specific way of observing and interpreting people’s words and actions. It does not even lie in a perhaps easier acceptance of the gulf between people’s ideals and their behaviour, in the analyst’s greater difficulty in summoning up righteous indignation or his reluctance to carry out a lover’s quarrel with the world. The core is empathy. Empathy is the bridge between the serene reserve of the clinician striving for objectivity and the vital, passionate and vulnerable person who inhabits the clinician’s body. Empathy makes me, as an analyst or scholar, step out of the anonymity of an impersonal enterprise and constantly recognize myself in it as a human being of flesh and blood. Without its vital presence, I fear that the creative tension between objectivity and impassioned involvement, between the stoic and the emotionally responsive perspectives, will be lost.
Shifting Perspectives
I began this study with a description of the reactions evoked in me by the little victim of the Hyderabad riot in the conviction that not only the observer but also his state of consciousness belongs to the description of the phenomenon he seeks to describe and understand. The father, with his new Polaroid camera, photographs the child. As he holds up the print, the child is first pleased and then puzzled.‘But, Father,’ the child asks, ‘where are you in the picture?’ The father could at least have extended a leg to get his foot into a corner of the photograph.
Whereas quantum physicists realized the importance of the interaction of subject and object in the comprehension of reality—‘We cannot describe the world as if we did not belong to it,’ was the credo of the pioneers1—this recognition has not generally taken place in the social sciences. Most social scientists have continued to exclude their own subjectivity from descriptions of psychological and social reality. They have not felt the need for putting imaginative flesh on academic bones. Subjectivity has been regarded as irrational. At best, it is irrational not in the sense of being against reason or constituting the not-understood but of being outside reason.
Perhaps the social scientists were unwittingly forced to choose a more convenient strategy when they kept the subject strictly separate from the object, since an attempt to grasp a more holistic world, the ‘really real’, through the inclusion of their own subjectivity would have led to a degree of complexity which could have bordered on chaos. Psychoanalysts, however, were compelled to abandon this Cartesian stance because of the very nature of their discipline. Whereas in the early years of psychoanalysis, the feelings aroused in the analyst by the patient—countertransference—were thought to contaminate the analyst’s objectivity, to be eliminated through a rigorous self-analysis, it was soon realized that the analyst’s subjectivity was an essential source of information about the patient. In other words, the analyst understands the patient only in so far as he or she understands the disturbance the patient evokes in himself or herself. As the analyst follows the patient’s productions and their effects the analyst must be both an observer and the object of observation. Whether it is the individual patient or large collectivities, we still see with our experiences, hear through our memories, understand with our bodies. In my own account of religious violence, it is these different yet interdependent modes of engaging with the persons and events of this study, the keeping alive of the tension between the immersive and reflective parts of my self, the quest not to let the experienc
ing self get buried under the agenda of a self that would rather organize and interpret the experience, that I seek to capture in my writing of this book.
The City: ‘Unparalleled in the World’
The city of Hyderabad was conceived of as the new capital of the Deccan kingdom of Golconda after the old fortress city a few miles away became congested and unhygienic due to an acute shortage of water.2 Mohammed Quli Qutub Shah, the founder of the city, named it Bhagnagar after his beloved Hindu mistress, Bhagmati. Officially renamed Hyderabad after her death—Hyder being the title given to her by the king— Bhagnagar continued to retain its popular name. Even a hundred years after its founding in 1589, travellers’ accounts continued to refer to Hyderabad by the name of Mohammed Quli’s beloved Hindu mistress.
Four hundred and two years old at the time of this writing, Hyderabad was envisaged by its founder to be a city ‘unparalleled anywhere in the world and a replica of heaven on earth’. The benevolent ruler, with artistic sensibilities and literary tastes, who liked to flaunt his sensual excesses in verse, had the good sense to entrust the task of giving his vision a concrete shape to his prime minister, Mir Momin. The minister, who had grown up in the garden city of Isfahan in Persia, planned the new capital on the lines of the city he had loved as a child and brought in architects and builders from Persia to carry out the grand design. Mir Momin’s plan favoured a gridiron pattern with two main intersecting roads, each sixty feet wide, which divided the city into four quarters. The northwestern quarter adjacent to the intersection was reserved for the royal palaces and the eastern quarter for the residences of the prime minister and the nobles of the realm.
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