Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

  The control of sexuality, and anxiety about sexual concerns, is the cornerstone of all conservative moralities, and the wrestler’s ideological universe, with its centrality of celibacy, is very close to the most conservative parts of the Hindu and Muslim religious traditions. Like the so-called fundamentalist, the wrestler, too, is opposed to the modern entertainment forms of cinema and television where sex is so abundantly on display. He disapproves of modern educational institutions where boys and girls come into close and thus dangerous contact. He looks askance at modern fashions in clothes and bodily care which he feels are devoted to the excitement of prurient interest. In general, the wrestler’s conservative morality condemns all manifestations of modernity which arouse the senses instead of calming them, which stoke the sensual fire instead of dousing its flames.

  In the various philosophical and social science discourses on modernity, there is very often an absence of what many twentieth century artists, writers and film-makers—not to speak of psychoanalysts—regard as its central features: the foregrounding of the biographical self and of sexuality (in its widest sense) in human subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, the study of the sexual self, is thus a pre-eminently modern discipline. The protest against the ubiquity, significance and mainifestations of the sexual self is this inevitably basic characteristic of revivalist and fundamental rhetoric.

  There is one element of the wrestling ideology which at first glance appears to run counter to the conservative label given to it. This is egalitarianism. In the akhara there are only bodies, without sectarian, class, and caste hierarchical distinctions. As a commentator on wrestling remarks, ‘In every village everyone from the common labourer to the wealthiest person would enter the pit together. Everyone on everyone else’s back with knees on necks. There was no stigma, no enmity, anger or threats. The akhara was a pilgrimage point of social equality; a temple of brotherly love.’6 Until the very recent past, many akharas in Hyderabad were mixed in the sense that they would have both Hindus and Muslims training under a Hindu or Muslim pehlwan. Majid Khan’s brother’s khalifa, for instance, was Chintamani Pehlwan, a Hindu. In any event, although egalitarianism between men may be missing from some modern Western conservative ideologies, it can very well be a part of Hindu conservative traditions and is, of course, available in the ideology of Islam. Egalitarianism, for instance, is a point of emphasis for the deeply conservative ideologies of the RSS, the organizational vanguard in the current revival of militant Hinduism. The litmus test of revivalism and fundamentalism remains the attitude toward sex rather than power.

  Morally and ideologically, the wrestler, either Hindu or Muslim, thus welcomes and feels a sense of kinship with forces in his community which oppose modernity through the revival of traditional values. The changed political coordinates of his position also make it easier for the wrestler to become an active and, given his calling, militant representative of the community. Before the independence of the country in 1947, wrestlers were traditionally patronized by Indian princes who would have court wrestlers just as they had court painters or court musicians. Akbar pehlwan’s forefathers had been court wrestlers to the Nizam of Hyderabad for four generations. All the physical needs of the wrestler were taken care of by the royal patron. What the wrestler was expected to do was to concentrate on the refinement of his art and the building up of his body. In return for the patronage, the wrestlers would march on ceremonial occasions in royal processions through the streets of the capital, their magnificent physiques testifying to and reflecting on the power of the prince. They would represent the honour of the prince in their competitive bouts with wrestlers from other states—the re-creation of a legendary mode of warfare between kingdoms which has been immortalized in the Persian tale of Rustum and Sohrab.

  Although some politicians did try to replace the princes as patrons of wrestling akharas, using wrestlers for strong-arm methods to achieve political ends, in general the wrestler had lost the morally elevated view of his calling demanded by tradition and ideology. It is in the polarization of Hindus and Muslims and in the context of religious revivalism that the wrestler is again finding a role as an icon of the community’s physical power and martial prowess. Although he may still be used by the politician, by employing religious violence for his own purposes, the wrestler can again hold a cherished moral high ground and be proud of his new role as ‘protector of the Muslim (or Hindu) nation’.

  The traditional wrestling training, although it also graduated religious killers, did have certain advantages in structuring the form of religious violence. Often, the akharas and the teachers had mixed Hindu and Muslim students who would never fight each other in or outside the ring and thus had a dampening influence on the battlefield enthusiasm of the two communities. The training also inculcated a strong ideology that bound the fighting and killing by certain rules of combat; where, for instance, the respect for womankind precluded a woman from being a riot victim. In Hyderabad, even now, rape is not used as a vehicle for the contempt, rage, or hatred that one community feels for the other as it is, for example, in Bosnia. As the pehlwan’s traditional ideology declines and the role of the pehlwan as a channelizer of his community’s violence gives way to a more brutal free-for-all, religious violence too promises to enter an era of unchecked ferocity. There are, of course, other reasons for the relative absence of rape in a Hindu–Muslim riot, including, as we shall see later, the strong moral disapproval of rape as an instrument of religious violence in both communities. Moreover, unlike in the Bosnian conflict, after a riot the Hindus and Muslims still have to live together and carry out a minimal social and considerable economic interaction in their day-to-day lives. As Mangal Singh remarked: ‘A few days after the riot is over, whatever the bitterness in our hearts and however cold our voices are initially, Akbar pehlwan still has to call me and say, “Mangal bhai, what do we do about that disputed land in Begumpet?” And I still have to answer, “Let’s get together on that one, Akbar bhai, and solve the problem peacefully.” ‘ Rape makes such interactions impossible and turns Hindu–Muslim animosity into implacable hatred.

  As far as the warriors are concerned, their ability to get over the bitterness of the conflict to again work together further attests to their high level of ego functioning. Unlike many other members of their communities who are either unable to hate or cannot stop hating, the pehlwans have learned both how to hate and how to get over hating.7 Killers in the service of their religious communities, they do not fit easy psychological or philosophical categories. There is no evidence, for instance, that they are psychopaths brutally trained to reject human feeling, are sexually insecure, or were abused as children. Endowed with leadership qualities and standing out from their milieu in certain aspects of character, they are not—as in Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ hypothesis—perfectly ordinary people wih the capacity to behave as monsters.

  Victim and Others: I. The Hindus

  One of the worst hit areas in the riots was Pardiwada (‘settlement of the Pardis’) in Shakkergunj. Two miles from Char Minar, the centre of the walled city, Pardiwada is an enclave of about fifty Hindu houses surrounded by Muslim settlements. Before the last riot, Pardiwada had a population of about fifty families (in a family-centred culture, the population figures, too, are given in number of families rather than individuals) which has now dwindled to fifty.

  The narrow lane which branches off the main road to lead into Pardiwada meanders through Muslim mohallas where many of the houses show the religious affiliation of the owner by having a window, a door or a whole wall painted green. The access lane is generally crowded with bicycles, goats, buffalo, and fruit vendors pushing their carts through a stream of pedestrians moving in both directions. The pedestrians are both Hindus from Pardiwada and their Muslim neighbours, and the lack of warmth between the two is palpable. A snapshot sticks in my mind: two middle-aged women, both fat, one a Hindu in a saree, the other a Muslim in an ankle-length black burqa, though with the face unveiled, wa
lking with the same side-to-side waddle of overweight ducks, pass each other. There is no outward sign of acknowledgement as they squeeze past each other although before the riots, I am told, at least polite greetings would have been exchanged.

  The small brick and cement plastered houses of Pardiwada, arranged in uneven rows, were built thirty to forty years ago. Some of them, especially at the periphery of the basti, are deserted and show obvious signs of the riot: charred doors and windows, broken electric bulbs and ripped-out wires hanging loose above the chipped and pitted floors. Many have crude ‘house for seal [sic]’ signs lettered in English on their walls, as if the complex of feelings evoked in the seller by such an offer could only be dealt with in an emotionally distancing foreign language rather than in the more intimate mother tongue. They remain unsold. The Pardis believe that the prospective buyers, who are Muslim, are waiting for prices to fall further when the owners will be forced into distress sales.

  The street scenes of Pardiwada, though, are cheerful enough. Since the main occupation of the Pardis is the selling of fruits and vegetables, there is a great deal of activity early in the morning when whole families are involved in sorting out and cleaning the fruits and vegetables heaped in front of the houses and loading them onto pushcarts. Many of the women have been up since three in the morning to fetch the fruit from the wholesaler, generally a Muslim, or even from the faraway Muslim-owned orchards at the outskirts of the city. These are traditional business relations which have endured through generations. They are based on trust, where the women take the fruit on credit and make the payment the next day after it has been sold. The riots have disturbed these business—and inevitably, over time, personal—relationships between the Pardis and their Muslim suppliers. The women now feel more apprehensive walking through dark and empty Muslim bazaars or gardens at this time of the morning. In any case, it is a community tradition that the women fetch the goods and the men sell them, a tradition which doubtless persists also because men find it convenient. As one of the women describing the tradition added, ‘Moreover, my husband does not feel like getting up so early in the morning’.

  Later in the day, once the men are gone, the teenage boys have been sent on their bicycles to sell onions, garlic, and ginger, and the older children have trooped off to school next to the Hanuman temple, Pardiwada settles down to a more easygoing pace. Free of morning household chores, the women come out to sit in front of the houses, smoking, chatting and giving baths to babies and young children while old men gather under the shade of trees to gossip or play their interminable games of cards. By one in the afternoon, the working members of the family are back as are the school children. After a lunch of rice and a vegetable curry, this is a time for relaxation and the exchange of the day’s news. Children play around on the streets, generally games of marbles, and there is much casual visiting as people wander in and out of each others’ houses.

  Economically, the Pardis belong to the lower class. Their poverty is reflected in the garbage dump which is clean and uncluttered, with nothing more in it than shards of pottery, small strips of cloth, husks of corn, and a few rotted vegetables. Because the poor use almost everything and throw away very little, their garbage dumps are generally cleaner than those of their richer neighbours. The Pardis may be poor but they are not destitute. They seem to have enough money for simple food, clothes, and even that necessary luxury of the urban poor—a black-and-white television set. The girls and women are dressed in bright colours and wear earrings, bangles, necklaces, and large round bindis rather than small demure dots on the forehead, serenely unaware that this particular accoutrement is now a part of the urban chic of upper-class women in Delhi and Bombay. Since their economic life is critically dependent on the prices at which they buy and sell fruits and vegetables, their incomes fluctuate daily, ranging from zero on the day a Pardi does not go out to work to a hundred rupees on an exceptionally good day.

  Their housing, too, is decent although overcrowded, not only because of the smallness of the houses but also because of the extended nature of the Pardi family which seems to spread haphazardly in all directions like the roots of a banyan tree. In fact, in this extremely close-knit community, there is no clear-cut demarcation of one family from another. Intermarriage has been so rampant that everyone is related to everyone else. The community is divided into four clans, each deriving its name from one of the four goddesses—Chowkat Mata, Shakti Mata, Kali Mata, and Naukod Mata. Theoretically, marriages within a clan are forbidden and the marriage partner cannot be outside the other three clans; it is, however, a rule mostly observed in its violation.

  The word pardi appears to be a distorted form of pahadi, ‘the hill man’ and the group traces its original home to the hills of Chittorgarh in distant Rajasthan in the north, inhabited by the bhil hunting tribes. The language they speak within the community is a mixture of Marwadi and Rajasthani, although all are fluent in the Hyderabadi dialect while some also know Telugu. As skilled hunters of birds like quail and partridge and of small animals such as rabbit and barking deer, the Pardis were nomadic hunters who moved southward to Hyderabad two hundred and fifty years ago. According to their lore, the Muslim king who ruled Hyderabad at the time was suffering grievously from a festering sore which did not respond to treatment. One of the king’s doctors, a venerable hakim of Unani medicine, suggested that the only possible cure was the application of minced meat of a particular kind of quail which was difficult to ensnare. The king had heard of the group of Pardis who had just entered his kingdom and of their proficiency as hunters. A Pardi was summoned to the court and entrusted with the task of snaring some of these quails. The hunter executed the order and brought back several birds whose meat was minced and applied to the royal sore. The worm that was eating into the king’s flesh turned its attention to the bird’s meat, which was poisonous for it, and it died. The king recovered and in his gratefulness decreed that henceforth the Pardis were welcome to take up residence in the kingdom of Hyderabad. In addition, and more materially, he showed his gratefulness by giving them a large tract of land called Jalpalli, which is about ten miles from this particular Pardiwada. Here, the Pardis dug a well for drinking water, built houses, and settled down for the first time in the history of the community in a place they could call their own.

  Because of the scarcity of good forests near Jalpalli and the reluctance of the younger generation to learn the arduous skills of hunting, the Pardis began to look for other sources of livelihood. From nomadic hunters they turned into daily wage labourers in the fruit orchards and vegetable farms of Muslim landlords, packing and transporting fruits and vegetables from the farms to sell in the city. Gradually, they moved from Jalpalli into Hyderabad where over the last fifty years they have created various settlements, called Pardiwadas. The whole community still assembles together in the ancestral village of Jalpalli to celebrate certain important festivals like Dussehra and Holi.

  Although they are now sellers of vegetables and fruits, the tradition of hunting and the memory of the days when these nomads were considered the scourge of more settled communities are very much alive as a part of Pardi identity and cultural memory. They take a not-so-secret pride in their reputation as a violent and aggressive people. There is little shame in the ‘recollections’ of the men that earlier, in the days of the benefactor king, they were regarded as bandits and thieves and that, whenever a band of Pardis camped near a village for hunting, it had to report daily to the headman and the police. Generally, though, the ‘outlaw hunter’ is now a dark, occasionally longed-for and rarely fantasized part of the Pardi identity. It comes to the forefront only during the hunting rituals when the community assembles to celebrate its festivals in Jalpalli. In a distorted form, however, I believe it also colours their participation in riots and religious violence, which is experienced in terms of the hunter and the hunted.

  The ‘identity-kit’ sketch the Pardis would now have others recognize as their own is of a community that is a
ccepted as a respectable part of settled Hindu society. In their origins myth, the Pardis are intimately related to the Marwadis, India’s richest and highly respected business community, which hail from the plains of the same area in Rajasthan where the Pardis roamed the rocky hills. The ancestors of the two communities were brothers; one chose business and the other hunting as his profession. In their further efforts at what the sociologist M.N. Srinivas has called the process of Sanskritization’ the Pardis strive to emulate and adopt the manners and mores of high-caste Hindu communities in an effort to raise their ritual status.1 The erstwhile subsistence hunters now have very strict prohibitions on the eating of beef. Drinking of liquor, too, is frowned upon, although in an earlier generation even women were regular drinkers. Some of the older women still continue to be. Marriages used to be simple affairs, with the families of the bride and the groom sitting down together with some elders of the community under a tree to decide on the arrangements and the sharing of expenses. The head of the community then conducted a simple ceremony. Today, marriages follow the more elaborate pattern of other Hindu castes. The groom’s family demands and receives a dowry from the girl’s side. Brahmin ritual specialists are involved in the matching of horoscopes, in determining the auspicious days, and in presiding over the elaborate wedding ceremonies.