‘Hindus are also cowards who can fight only when they are in a large group. Muslims are not afraid even if they are few and unarmed and their opponents have swords. Allah gives them courage and they know if they die the death will not be in vain but a martyrdom which Allah will reward in paradise.
‘Hindus also have no control over their impulses and behaviour. There are no fixed times or formats to their prayers nor do their books give them instructions on how to lead a good life like the Qur’an does. They go to the temple any time of the day or night, ring the temple bell, and give their God instructions: “Do this for me, do that for me!” And, of course, having been slaves for thousands of years, they have no experience of governance like the Muslims. They may be more educated but they are illiterate as far as governing is concerned.’
Most of all, the Muslims feel baffled and hurt at the thought of being unwanted in the country of their birth. They seem to be struggling against a growing conviction that, irrespective of its formal constitution, India is a Hindu country and they may be living here on Hindu sufferance. Ghousia says: ‘We hear they are saying all over the country, “Go to Pakistan. Pakistan is your country, Hindustan is ours. Not a single Muslim should be seen here.” They think if they harass us enough, we will leave for Pakistan. They have trains ready for our departure. We feel if we have to die, we will die here; if we have to live, we will live here.’
Babar ki santan, jao Pakistan (children of Babar, go to Pakistan) is today one of the most popular slogans of Hindu mobs during a riot or in the preceding period of rising tension between the two communities. The crudity of the slogan should not blind us to its significance in the shaping of contemporary Hindu–Muslim relations. It reflects the Hindu nationalist’s deep-seated distrust of Muslim loyalty to the Indian state and a doubt regarding Muslim patriotism if the community is faced with a choice between the country of its birth and that of its coreligionists. The slogan contains the accusation that Muslims may prove potential traitors in any conflict between their loyalty to the state and their loyalty to Islam.
Though repressed in elite political discourse, this accusation is perceived to have enough substance to arouse a sense of unease among many other Hindus who are not sympathizers of Hindu nationalism and yet subscribe to the notion of the nation-state as a definer of their political identity. The importance of this accusation as a prime irritant in Hindu–Muslim relations is also recognized by a large section of Muslims, and, as we shall later see, it evokes an emotionally charged response from the community’s religious–political leadership.
Currently fuelled by events in Kashmir where a large section of the Muslim population is demanding independence or accession to Pakistan, the suspicion of Muslim loyalty to the Indian state has two main sources. First, there has been a historical tendency among upper-class Muslims (or those aspiring to higher status in the community) to stress or invent Persian, Arab, or Turkish ancestry rather than rest content with their more humble Indian origins. The tendency, more pronounced among Muslim fundamentalists, is to see themselves as superior beings from outside India who share Indian history only as the country’s erstwhile rulers.
Second, as we shall again see in the next chapter, the specific Muslim history the community’s conservative spokesmen would like to construct and exalt is the one shared with Muslims of the Middle East, especially the sacred history of early Islam and of the Dar al-Islam between the seventh and fifteenth centuries, when Islamic civilization was at its zenith and Muslims had conquered half the world. Hindu nationalists believe that only a minority of Muslims accept the Indian nation-state as a definer of their political identity and container of their loyalty. They are inclined to believe that Bernard Lewis’s thesis on Muslims of the Middle East is equally applicable to the Indian context, namely, that ‘there is a recurring tendency in times of crisis, in times of emergency, when the deeper loyalties take over, for Muslims to find their basic identity in the religious community; that is to say, in an entity defined by Islam rather than by ethnic origin, language, or country of habitation.’3 The nature of the vicious circle is immediately apparent: the anchoring of Muslim identity in Islam spurs Hindu suspicion of Muslim loyalty to the nation, which makes the Muslims draw closer in the religious community for security, which further fuels Hindu distrust of Muslim patriotism, and so on.
Empirically, there is some evidence in a twenty-five-year-old study that a situation of actual conflict between India and Pakistan is a stressful affair for Indian Muslims which makes them emotionally close ranks. Yet, in spite of increased Hindu hostility toward Muslims during the actual period of warfare, Indian Muslims do not feel any closer to their Pakistani coreligionists but in fact feel more distant toward them than in the period preceding the outbreak of hostilities.4
The Victim Response
Among the poorer Muslims, I was acutely aware of a weary resignation in their dislike of the Hindus. Their diatribes were often mechanical, lacking energy and that fire in the belly which leaves some hope for the transformation of various states of withdrawal into an active advocacy on one’s own behalf. I wondered if there was not a repression of anger, even hate, operating here—the maintenance of repression imposing a drain on energy and depleting the aggression available for assertive action. The psychological portrait I repeatedly drew when the talk shifted from the private to the public, from the familial to collective realms, with respect to the current situation of Indian Muslims, was of the Muslim as a helpless victim of changed historical circumstances and the demands of the modern world. One of the main refrains was that since the hukumat—used in the sense of rule, political authority, regime—was now of the Hindus, discrimination against the Muslims was to be expected. However galling to the individual and collective sensibility of the Muslims, this was a fact of life with which one had to come to terms. A few women even took a melancholy (and I thought, masochistic) satisfaction from this turn of the historical wheel which had reversed the position of subjects and rulers and of the accustomed directions of inequality and injustice. Most, though, bemoaned the discrimination against Muslims without expressing much hope for a foreseeable change in the situation.
‘The Hindu likes the Hindu and not the Mussulman,’ says one woman. ‘The hukumat is Hindu. They can now oppress us, take revenge for the thousand years of our hukumat.’
‘They are doing hukumat since forty years and will try their best to make the Mussulman weak and insignificant,’ says another woman.
‘Jinnah was right,’ says a man who works part time for the Majlis. ‘Living in a Muslim nation is the only protection from oppression by the Hindus.’
Another woman, echoing the old mai-baap attitude toward the state, is more plaintive: ‘The hukumat should treat both Hindus and Muslims equally. When a mother has borne more than one child she looks at each child with equal favour.’
Rashid tries to make the abstraction of ‘discrimination’ more concrete by describing his own experiences. ‘For fifteen years I worked in the vegetable market. Then I applied for a job in the Road Transport Corporation. When I went in with my application, the clerk said, “Don’t even bother to register your name. Muslims can’t get a job here.” I applied to at least ten other government departments but the moment they heard my name they told me to go away. I finally got a job in the railways by hiding my identity and changing my name to Babu Rao. After two years when the time for promotion came they found out Babu Rao was not my real name and that I was a Muslim. I gave up after that and started working with the Majlis. I said to myself, “How can you work with the Hindus when even your name is unacceptable to them!"
‘It is difficult for the Muslims to be self-employed. The Hindus control most businesses. If we ask for credit, they refuse and extend it only to members of their community. If I buy goods from them I have to pay ten rupees, but a Hindu pays only eight. Because of our poverty we cannot send our children to school. If there is only one man who earns twenty-five to thirty rupees a day and ha
s eight mouths to feed, where is the money for the extra expense of school to come from?’ Rashid, however, does not completely blame the modern external world for the Muslim’s plight. ‘Hindus are better off not only because they are favoured by the hukumat but also because their mothers, sisters, daughters, all work. We do not educate our women or make them work because of purdah,’ he says, not in a spirit of criticism of the tenets of his faith but as a pure statement of fact. Indeed, it is the loss of faith which he holds ultimately responsible for what has happened to the Indian Muslim: ‘If we had unshakeable faith, then our hukumat would not have gone. When faith went, everything went.’
This, then, is the striking difference between the Hindu and Muslim poor: the former feel less like victims and have a greater sense of agency and mastery over the circumstances of their lives than the latter. In the victim response of the Muslims, the loss of collective self-idealization which sharply reduces self-esteem is perceived as the result of overwhelming outside forces of which they are hapless victims. The Muslim poor convey an impression of following a purposeless course, buffeted by the impact of others in a kind of social Brownian motion.5 There seems to be a kind of institutionalized fatalism at work which makes them act as ready victims of circumstances and leaves them little ability to defend themselves against exploitation. This is not to maintain that the victim response of the Muslims is only ‘in the head’, without a basis in reality. Like the notion of the ‘enemy’, discrimination too is neither merely real nor merely psychological but a blend of the two.
Whereas the loss of collective self-idealization due to changed historical and socioeconomic circumstances evokes a depressive response among the Muslim poor, for many sensitive members of the community—including some of its writers, scholars, and artists—this loss of Muslim power and glory is explicitly mourned. The despair at the moral decay and political decline of Muslim societies, the historian Mushirul Hasan tells us, is a recurrent theme in Urdu poetry, literature, and journalism.6 Ideally, such a mourning should clear the decks for the birth of new ideals and a more confident encounter with the future. For many, though, the mourning is never completed; its stock of narratives of loss and their elegiac mood become a part of the family heritage that is passed from one generation to the other. For these men and women, the poet Iqbal’s line, ‘Lightning only strikes the hapless Muslims’ (Barq girti hai to bechare Musulmanon par) has acquired a personal significance which has been incorporated into the social aspect of their identity. In other words, whenever a person feels, thinks, and acts as a Muslim rather than as an individual, there is a perceptible undertone of grief, a miasma of mourning in what has been called ‘the Andalus syndrome.’7 The syndrome, of course, refers to the great Muslim civilization on the Iberian peninsula that ended abruptly in the sixteenth century, plunging the Islamic world into gloom and leaving a yearning for its lost glory in Muslim societies on the rim of the Mediterranean. In the Indian situation, the Andalus response, I believe, is more the province of the upper and middle classes rather than of the vast number of Muslim poor. Of course, in Hyderabad, with its history bearing a striking similarity to the fate of Andalusia, especially in the abrupt ending of Muslim rule, the heartbreak is more widespread than in most other parts of the country.
Gilani Bano, a novelist from Hyderabad, is one of the more eminent Urdu writers who has tried to capture the elusive spirit of the Andalus response in her fiction. In her novel Aiwan-e-ghazal, she takes as her subject a slice of Muslim life just before and after 1948, the year in which Hyderabad abruptly ceased being an independent state with its own administration, ruler, and ethos, and became part of India—a country which was geographically contiguous with Hyderabad but was emotionally distant for many of its inhabitants. The title of the novel is from the name of the family mansion of an old aristocratic (nawabi) family. Literally, it also means ‘the palace of the ghazal,’ the ghazal more often than not being an elegy of unhappy love where the lover bemoans the loss, the inaccessibility, or the turning away of the beloved.
One of the main characters in the novel through whose eyes the events of those years are viewed is Nawab Wahid Hussain, a man in his early fifties, steeped in the ethos of a vanishing world, who is fearful and contemptuous of the change that is poised to destroy the old civilization. Wahid Hussain looks down at what he considers the crass commercialism of the modern era and deems the writing of poetry and the play of love with a favoured mistress—normally an accomplished courtesan—as the only worthwhile occupations of a civilized man. He admires his grandfather whose dead body was discovered one morning surrounded by sheets of paper covered with Urdu calligraphy while the flame in his bedroom lamp burnt low. The family had thought that the papers pertained to the affairs of the family home which the British Resident, acting on complaints of debauchery and the kidnapping of girls, had demanded for his inquiry. The papers, however, turned out to be the final drafts of fifteen ghazals which the old nawab had composed throughout the night in a burst of feverish activity. With the threat of the inquiry and eventual disgrace looming over him, they were still some of the best ghazals his grandfather had ever written. Wahid Hussain ruminates on Hyderabad’s fate:
[He] opened his eyes and saw the portrait of Quli Qutub Shah on the wall opposite the portrait of the last ruler, Osman Ali. Wahid Hussain saw Quli Qutub Shah’s eyes brimming with contentment as if he was searching for a ghazal or, standing on the ramparts of Golconda, lost in the dream of a beautiful city springing up on the forested land around the fort. The city he founded for Bhagmati to live in was like a garden, its magnificent buildings like lotus flowers lit with the lamps of civility and culture. He looks as if he is saying to one of his lovers, ‘Prepare the festivities. The tender shoots of Urdu are coming out but we do not have much time left. Behind the hills of a few centuries, the caravans of time are moving in our direction. Soon the plunderers will fall upon us. Under the rubble of Golconda people will search for our stories. The dust particles of our fallen glory will become a diamond glittering in the crown of a queen in a distant land.’8
The diamond, of course, was the Kohinoor, the queen, Victoria of Great Britain.
Morality of Violence
Although they live in separate bastis, the inevitably close contact between Hindus and Muslims in the crowded inner city leads to interactions between the two which span the full emotional range from friendship to deadly hatred during the time of a riot. The exchanges with members of the other community which are considered to be transgressions of the group’s code governing such transactions were of particular interest and invited a more systematic exploration.
In this exploration, my focus was not on questions close to the hearts of moral philosophers such as whether it was reason, reason dependent upon individual desire, religious prescription, role obligation, or a convention that was being violated by a particular action. Nor was I concerned with the religious foundations of the morality governing Hindu–Muslim relations; with what, for instance, the Qur’an has to say on a Muslim’s various interactions with those who are outside the faith. My aim was more to understand the way people experienced these interactions and the psychological processes underlying the experiences.
It was evident from the preliminary interviews that these interactions had to be divided into two parts: those which pertain to normal, peace-time life and others which take place during a riot. In both Hindus and Muslims, riot-time interactions deviated substantially from the code that governs their actions during normal times. There are, however, as we shall see later, still a few acts that invite universal moral condemnation from both sides, independent of their temporal context—normalcy versus riot. These obligations are considered universally binding. Even within context-dependent obligations, there are interactions which are perceived as binding on one’s own group and not on others; they are viewed as distinctive expressions of the community’s moral qualities, uniqueness, and traditions. These obligations are perceived as objective and moral an
d yet not universally binding. Their violation is usually remarked upon by the phrase, ‘A good Muslim (or Hindu) does not do that,’ implying that the bad Other may indeed do so.
Using the method developed by the anthropologist Richard Shweder who, in a series of studies, has explored the moral ideas of children and adults in India and the United States, I have attempted to examine adult Muslim and Hindu interpretations of nineteen behavioural cases of Hindu–Muslim interaction in the ‘Morality Interview’ (Appendix 2).9 The first twelve cases represent different kinds of interactions in normal times while the last seven cases are descriptive of certain interactions during a riot. Examples of normal interactions are: ‘A Muslim rents his house to a Hindu’; ‘A Muslim girl marries a Hindu boy.’ Examples of riot-time interactions are: ‘Some Muslims rape a Hindu girl’; ‘Some Muslims loot Hindu shops’. Further interview questions seek to elicit the respondent’s view of the seriousness of the violation and the kind of sanctions it should invite.
Before discussing the results of the interviews, I need to sound a note of caution. The interactions between Hindus and Muslims had also come up during the more freewheeling conversations with some of the same respondents. I had the impression that people became ‘more moral’ in the situation of a structured interview using a questionnaire than they were in the unstructured setting where they were more uninhibited in the expression of violent sentiments. The ‘questionnaire morality’ is perhaps inclined to be more conservative than the actually lived one.
It seems, and this may be of methodological importance in the collection of psychological data, that the expression of an individual’s views on subjects close to his heart becomes more and more controlled as the setting changes from an informal conversation to a formal interview to the filling in of a questionnaire, to writing for wider dissemination, and, finally, to the most controlled expression of all, the enactment of views in the public arena. Differently but tentatively stated, it is perhaps less the nature of the medium in which self-disclosure is made than the imagined intimacy with the presumed recipients of our views which is important. Our openness and honesty in revealing ourselves decreases in tandem with the degree of intimacy we believe we share with our ultimate listeners (although on rare occasions, such as an encounter on a train, we may for a time imagine sharing great intimacy with a total stranger). Writing a book for an impersonal audience is less intimate than talking to long-standing disciples; filling a questionnaire is less intimate than a friendly conversation which, in turn, is less intimate than responding to someone even closer than a friend.
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