‘These are the real people who serve the Muslim nation. All the others are useless, interested in making money and sticking to the chair. The next time a Majlis leader enters this alley he will be thrown out bodily. Our second slogan will be, kill the police. At least two hundred policemen must be eliminated. They have done so much zulm on the Muslims. In jail we were so thirsty and hungry, but never received any water or food. After leaving the jail, when I went to the Majlis office, the leader said, “Why are you upset? You are not dead—you are still alive.” When Hindus get arrested, a BJP leader immediately arrives and gets them released on bail. We keep rotting in jail. The Majlis is of no use to us. The leaders fight among themselves. They collect money in the name of poor Muslims like me and then eat it up themselves. They have opened a medical college but the number of Muslim students in the college are only five paise to a rupee (5 per cent). Where do they have money for the fees? The college benefits the Hindus more. Actually the biggest school in the world is the mother’s lap. The child will grow up to be as capable as the education given by the mother. My mother was a complete illiterate and look at my sorry state!’
Nissar was married, with four children, and sold vegetables from five to eight in the morning. On a good day he could earn as much as a hundred rupees. He also does land business whenever he is called by a senior pehlwan to go and negotiate a deal. He is usually paid a commission of 5 per cent. He is very proud of his activities as a ‘soldier’ in the service of the Muslim nation. Our work is to serve the nation [the Muslim qaum] and protect our mothers and sisters. We never look at their [Hindu] sisters but their bravery is limited to raping and killing our mothers and sisters. I decided to work for the nation after all I saw during the riots following Rameeza Bi’s case. It is always the Hindus who start the trouble. Earlier, we felt very scared. We were often abused when we walked through their alleys. But today I am proud that when I walk through a Hindu lane, the heads bow down. They know me as Nissar dada,’
Dada (‘elder brother’) is not yet a pehlwan, but someone who may become one, someone who is high enough in the hierarchy of strong men. As a dada, Nissar is not a poverty-stricken vegetable seller, a poor Muslim who needs to defer to the well-off Hindus, but someone who demands and receives respect. Having been trained as a wrestler for many years in different taleemkhanas, he stopped the training after he was married since he felt he could not afford the diet of huge quantities of milk, nuts and meat, required by a wrestler. Now he serves the nation through chaku-bazi, wielding of the knife. ‘If I hear that two of our people have been attacked and killed at the wooden bridge it takes me just five minutes to knife five of them.’ Because of Sahba’s expression of open interest (obviously, he would not have revealed himself in this way if I, a Hindu, had also been present), Nissar elaborated on his professionalism. ‘There is a way to kill with the knife. Once I stab with a knife I do not need to turn and look. I am sure the man is dead even as he is falling. Then, on a street, I never make a mistake between a Hindu and a Muslim. We recognize the religion from the face. If I saw you somewhere else, in a different dress, I would know immediately that you are a Muslim. It is clear from your very face.
‘Most of the time the police are not able to catch us. We move very fast. All they can do is to suspect. Sometimes we dump the bodies under some bridge and they are discovered disfigured after three to four days. Sometimes dogs eat up parts of the body which is then very difficult to identify. We always make sure that if Hindus kill two of our people, we should kill at least four of theirs. This is to scare them away. They must not think we are helpless, frightened or unarmed.
‘Personally, I don’t take a weapon with me when we go out to kill Hindus during a riot. I only have a wooden stave (lathi) but I do have a strategy. I make sure that the first person I confront on the other side is the one with a sword. I disarm him with my lathi and then kill him with his own sword. It is easy.
‘Scared? What an idea! Once the decision to serve the nation is made where is the room for fear? One has to be brave. Cowards die quietly. Instead of dying inside the house it is better to be martyred outside. Allah is with us. He knows that we are doing good work and He protects us.
‘I have told my wife never to worry about me or stop me from my work. I have told her not to wait for me more than three or four days in times of trouble. Where will she look for me? We go everywhere wherever there are disturbances. She should simply break her bangles (the sign of widowhood) and feel proud that I have become a martyr.’
Nissar’s wife, though, is less worried about his heroics or eventual martyrdom. She complains bitterly about her own situation, about Nissar’s attitude toward women that does not allow her to step out of the house. To run their home, she has to depend on her old father to buy groceries, medicines, and other essentials. He never takes her out since he is embarassed to be seen with a dark-skinned wife. ‘If I was fair he would take me out everywhere,’ the killer’s wife sighs in bitter regret. Another man, Aslam, a sullen middle-aged vegetable seller, unemployed for most of the day, who sits across the street wrapped in a mantle of sardonic gloom and has watched our interest in the dadas and pehlwans, gives his own assessment of the young tigers. Pointing to his chapped, dusty feet with grotesque toes and discoloured nails, he says: The police pulled the nails out one by one when they took me to jail during the last riot. I have to keep my feet in water whenever I want to clip the nails. All this tiger business is nonsense, except that they pocket three-fourths of the relief supplies which go through their hands. Otherwise, when the police take them, every tiger turns into a pussy cat.’
Spreading the Wind
Mangal Singh is a well-known Hindu pehlwan. In many ways he is the Hindu counterpart of Akbar although he does not possess any of Akbar’s old-world Muslim graces. He belongs to the Lodha community, economically one of the fastest rising groups in Hyderabad, whose prosperity, observers say, rests on illicit liquor distillation. Brewed in the backyards of houses and stills near the riverbed, the raw liquor is a potent brew which drastically lowers the life expectancy of its hapless consumers. Basically distilled from jaggery and the grey oxide powder used to coat the insides of brass utensils with tin (and which can easily dissolve lead), the liquor is expectedly severe on stomach linings. It is believed that anyone who daily consumes half a bottle of the liquor, the pauwa, will not survive for more than a year. In the poor neighbourhoods of the city where the liquor is mostly consumed, it is not an unfamiliar sight early in the morning to see a corpse or two lying on the street near an adda where the liquor is clandestinely sold.
The reputation of the Lodhas is of a mercurial and violent people who are always in the forefront of a riot from the Hindu side. ‘They will kill as many people in two hours as the rest will in a week,’ says an old Hyderabad resident who has studied the community closely. They claim to be Rajputs, the traditional martial caste and the sword arm of Hindu society although this claim is often disputed by others. In spite of their taking a leading part in religious violence, their economic ties with Muslims are close. Muslims are the main customers of their lethal brew, both as retailers and, together with the dalits, the poverty-stricken Hindu outcastes, as its consumers. Even socially, they have adopted some Muslim customs. Although they regard Muslims as their chief enemy, it does not prevent them, for example, from regularly visiting Muslim shrines, the dargahs, in a spirit of devotion.
Mangal Singh’s house is in one of the crowded localities of Hyderabad where there is a large concentration of Lodhas. The bazaar running through it has shops stocking somewhat more expensive goods but in essence differs visually from other similar bazaars of the city only in one curious particular. This is the occasional sight of two to three men on bicycles wearing very loose clothes, emerging from one of the alleys and, with a look of determined concentration, furiously pedalling away to turn and disappear into another alley. These are the liquor carriers, wearing bicycle tyre tubes full of the illegal stuff tied around their
bodies, on their way to various distribution centres in the city.
A young-looking forty, Mangal Singh is a handsome man who laughs easily and has a kind of manic charm about him. He walks with the compact, swaggering gait of a wrestler, with shoulders swinging like a young woman’s hip, as he proudly shows us around his house and his vyamshala, the gymnasium, both of which are situated in a large compound just off the road and very near the river. The gymnasium, which trains more than a hundred boys and young men, consists of two rectangular halls adjacent to each other. The first hall is used for weight training. There are wooden dumbbells, iron tyres to be put around the neck to strengthen the neck muscles, parallel bars, ropes hanging down from iron rings in the ceiling, and many other contraptions for the pulling, pushing and lifting of weights. The whitewashed walls are lined with coloured lithographs and posters. There is the lithograph of the reclining god Vishnu, his face shaded by the hoods of the hydra-headed snake, Sheshnag. There is a poster of one of his incarnations, the god Rama in his heroic pose with a long bow and a quiver of arrows visible above his shoulders. There is the protrait of the goddess Durga in her ferocious form, in the act of killing the buffalo demon, Mahisasura. There are portraits of the Hindu heroes Shivaji and Rana Pratap, who have come to epitomize Hindu resistance to the Mughals; there is also the reproduction of a popular painting of Nehru looking down from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort, the Indian national flag flying proudly behind him as he pensively faces a large crowd, the faces of the leaders of India’s independence movement—Patel, Rajagopalachari, Kripalani, Maulana Azad—clearly recognizable in the forefront.
The other wall, too, is covered with pictures. There are three large portraits of wrestlers, one of them Mangal’s own guru. The other two are famous wrestlers from the thirties and forties, each in a loincloth and standing with his feet and arms a little apart, in the pose where they are ready for grappling. Pointing to one of the pehlwans, who has very close-cropped hair and a thick moustache, Mangal Singh informs me that this man was the prime accused in Hyderabad’s first major riot between the Hindus and the Muslims in 1938, when the state was ruled by the Nizam. This pehlwan, I forget his name, had killed one of the leading members of the Razakars, the Nizam’s unofficial Muslim militia, and then disappeared. He is still believed to be alive and living in a remote area of Nepal where he now practises the austerities of a holy man.
There are many coloured lithographs of scenes from the independence movement—Gandhi leading a long line of volunteers on his march to the sea, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre where British soldiers are shown firing into the trapped crowd, men caught in the act of falling down, clutching at their chests from which blood is spurting out, open mouthed in silent screams. Then there are lithographs depicting scenes from earlier periods of history: small Hindu children being thrown up and impaled on the spears of the Razakars, Indian soldiers being blown up from the mouths of cannons by the British after the failure of India’s first war of independence, the Sepoy Mutiny as British historians called it. Pointing to the Razakar picture, Mangal Singh informs me, ‘This is what used to happen all the time in those days in Hyderabad. Hindu girls were picked up from the streets or the fields at any time at the will of Muslim nobles and raped. That is why our girls started marrying so early. If a girl had a mangalsutra around her neck and payais around the ankles (the signs of marraige), she was not kidnapped.’
There is a further series of pictures depicting Muslim atrocities from the long period of Islamic rule: Banda Bairagi and his followers being beheaded by Muslim soldiers, the martyrdom of the Sikh Gurus, Mahmud of Ghazni destroying the famous temple of Somnath as shaven-headed Brahmin priests look up with bulging eyes and mouths open in incomprehensible horror. Next we come to a photograph of Subhash Chandra Bose, the stormy rebel of the national movement who sought an alliance with Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan during the war to violently overthrow the British empire in India. Next to it is a full-sized wooden statue of Gandhi which is overturned and lies on its side, facing the wall. ‘There was a high wind a few days ago and Gandhiji toppled over. He has his back to us because he cannot bear to see the present condition of this country,’ Mangal Singh jokes.
‘How is it that you have Gandhiji, the apostle of non-violence, together with the violent Hindu heroes next to each other?’ I venture to ask.
‘First, I talk like Gandhiji,’ he replies with a smile. Only when talk fails, I use force like Shivaji or Bose.’
The second hall is dominated by the akhara where the actual wrestling takes place. About four feet under the floor level, the akhara is a flat smooth rectangle of reddish coloured mud mixed with oil and finely threshed stalks of wheat, covering about half the area of the hall. Presiding over it is a Shiva lingam; a garland of fresh white jasmine flowers and sticks of burning incense bear witness to its daily morning worship. On the other side of the room, next to the wall, there is a small temple of Hanuman, the ascetic patron god of Hindu wrestlers. The idol is smeared with red paste, flowers are strewn around its feet, and incense sticks burn from between the toes. On the wall itself there are photographs of famous wrestlers—I recognize Guru Hanuman from Delhi among them—as well as photographs clipped from Western bodybuilding magazines and pasted to the walls. The slightly fading photographs show off the oily sheen of bulging biceps, thundering thighs, and sculpted pectorals. One entire side of the hall is without a wall and opens out to the river and a peaceful scene of dark-skinned women with sarees tied above their knees, whirling wet clothes above their shoulders and bringing them down with rhythmic thuds on flat stones to clean them of dirt. Mangal Singh draws my attention back to the gym when he points to the corner next to the temple where some loincloths are hanging on a wooden post. ‘Earlier we used to have spears and swords. Nowadays, of course, they put you in jail if you have even a knife for your self-protection. Many young men prefer to learn karate these days,’ he continues to enlighten me. ‘Karate makes the sides of your hands into killing instruments by deadening sensation in that part. They burn the side of the hand and dip elbows in boiling salt water till all sensation is lost. But Indian-style wrestling is still superior where you can kill a man once you grapple with him. Karate is only good for long-distance fighting. Once you get in close to the opponent as in Indian-style wrestling, karate is useless.’
The Muslim taleemkhana does not differ substantially from the Hindu akhara. There will be fewer photographs and, of course, no idol of a Hindu god. It might have an ayat from the Qur’an on a wall or a coloured print of the kaaba, Islam’s holiest shrine. Comparatively speaking, with its greater profusion of religious icons, the Hindu gymnasium appears more Hindu than the more neutral taleemkhana appears Muslim. The Muslim training regimen is the same as the Hindu one except that the wrestlers will say the prescribed dawn prayers at home before coming to the taleem. They too will drink crushed nuts and crystal sugar mixed in water or milk after the training is over for the morning but, in contrast to the Hindu, eat great quantities of mutton.
It had not been easy to meet Mangal Singh. We had to go through friends of friends of friends before the meeting finally took place. Once it happened, though, Mangal Singh talked so freely and without any apparent suspiciousness or guile that I wondered why it had been so difficult in the first place. He did not quite understand what my psychological study of Hindu–Muslim violence was all about. (I confess that when I tried to explain the aims of my study to other pehlwans, I did not quite understand it myself.) He was under the impression that we might eventually want to make a movie on the subject, an impression I did not fully exert myself to correct. In any event, Mangal Singh proved to be most frank about his activities as a scourge of Muslims, perhaps also because he assumed Sahba and I were both Hindus.
The Muslim pehlwans had been open with Sahba but understandably guarded when I was also present. With Sahba they could express their bitterness and contempt for Hindus, show their pride in their role in the protection of the communit
y from the Hindu enemy. In my presence, they became less Muslim and more inclined to express universal humanist sentiments. For instance, there was pious talk, not exactly reassuring, that if I were cut my blood would be exactly the same colour as theirs. By the end of the interviews, though, all the pehlwans were perceptibly warmer. I like to believe that this opening up was because they sensed my genuine interest in them as persons rather than being due to any typical ‘shrink’ ‘hm-ms’, phrases, or inflections. I suspect, though, that their different—although for my purposes, highly complementary—psychic agendas when talking to Sahba and to me were dictated by shifts in their own sense of identity. In other words, with Sahba, a Muslim, their self-representation was more in terms of a shared social identity. With me, a Hindu, once they felt reassured that the situation did not contain any threat, personal identity became more salient, influencing their self-representations accordingly. In any event, when we parted, promises to visit me in Delhi were made, visions of feasting in my house were conjured up, all of which I acknowledged smilingly though not without quaking inwardly at the prospect of the promise ever being kept. There were occasions in meetings with the pehlwans—for instance, when waiting for Akbar in his hotel room—where I caught myself thinking that the scholarly work of making a book out of other books was infinitely preferable to being out in the field, anxious and afraid. Besides being perpetually uncomfortable in the heat, dust, bad smells, and biting mosquitoes, I felt envious at visions of friends reading and writing in quiet air-conditioned libraries.
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