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, beliefs, rituals, or any marked increase in the sum of human spirituality. Where the 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 fourteenth century, of sixteenth-century Catholic–Protestant violence in France, of anti-Catholic riots in eighteenth-century London, as of twentieth-century 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 humiliation caused by the homogenizing and hegemonizing impact of the modern 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 perceived 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 mixture 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) aspect of man’s being as an overlay which compromises the wishes and needs of the self or, in 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 between 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 assuming some kind of hierarchical ordering of aspects 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 incorporates their idealizations of the group which have served them so we
ll—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 representations 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 and 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 from a 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 modern and historical accounts of other group conflicts. Thus in sixteenth-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.
We must, however, also note that there are always some individuals whose personal identity is not overwhelmed by their religious or cultural group identity even in the worst phases of violent conflict. These are persons capable of acts of compassion and self-sacrifice, such as saving members of the ‘enemy’ group from the fury of a rampaging mob even at considerable danger to their own physical safety. There are yet others—the fanatics—whose behaviour even in times of peace and in the absence of any identity-threat seems to be exclusively dictated by the ‘We are’, group aspect of their identity. What the social and psychological conditions are that make one person wear his or her group identity lightly whereas for another it is an armour which is rarely taken off is a question to which the answers are not only of theoretical interest but also of profound practical importance and moral significance.
Religious Identities and Violence
The development of religious identity follows the same lines through which the more global aspects of individual and group identities are also constructed. The individual track, which may be called religious selfhood, is an incommunicable realm of religious feeling which quietly suffuses what D.W. Winnicott termed ‘the isolated core of the true self’ requiring isolation and privacy, a core which ‘never communicates with the world of perceived objects [and] must never be communicated with.’8 In an integrated state, religious selfhood is a quiet self-experience, marked by a calmness of spirit that comes from being alone in the presence of the numinous. With its access to preveibal experience which can link different sensory modalities of image, sound, rhythm, and so on, religious selfhood deepens religious feeling and consolidates religious identity. In a state of fragmentation or threatened disintegration, religious selfhood is prey to a variety of dysphoric moods. For a few, the saints, whose religious identity constitutes the core of their being, the dysphoria can extend to the state of utter despair, the ‘dark night of the soul.’
Together with religious selfhood, the ‘I-ness’ of religious identity, we have a second track of ‘We-ness’ which is the experience of being part of a community of believers. Religious community is the interactive aspect of religious identity. In contrast to the quietness of religious selfhood, the individual’s experience of religious community takes place in an alert state. Optimally, this facet of religious identity expands the self and creates feelings of attunement and resonance with other believers. A threat to the community aspect of religious identity, however, gives birth to communalism, intolerance, and the potential for social violence. In the communal phase, the feelings of intimacy and connectedness characterizing the religious community are polluted by an ambience of aggression and persecution. Whereas both the selfhood and community facets of religious identity are only partially conscious, the change from community to communalism is accompanied and, indeed, initiated by a heightened awareness of ‘We-ness’, making the community aspect of religious identity hyperconscious. This awareness can be put in the form of declarations similar to the ones Oscar Patterson suggests take place in the inner discourse of an individual who, as a consequence of a shared threat, is in the process of self-consciously identifying with his or her ethnic group.9 First, I declare to all who share the crisis with me that I am one with them—a Hindu, a Muslim. Second, from my multiple identities I choose the identity of belonging to my religious community though (paradoxically) I have no other choice but to belong. Third, this is my most basic and profound commitment and the one which I am least likely to abandon.
Communalism as a state of mind, then, is the individual’s assertion of being part of a religious community, preceded by a full awareness of belonging to such a community. The ‘We-ness’ of the community is here replaced by the ‘We are’ of communalism. This ‘We are’ must inevitably lead to intolerance of all those outside the boundaries of the group. The intolerance, though, is not yet religious conflict since it can remain a province of the mind rather than become manifest in the outer, public realm; its inherent violence can range from a mild contempt to obsessive fantasies around the extermination of the enemy-Other rather than find explosive release in arson, rioting, and murder. The psychological ground for violence, however, has now been prepared. In mapping the sequence of religious violence from the inner to the outer terrain, I do not mean to give group psychology primacy but only precedence. Riots do start in the minds of men, minds conditioned by our earliest inner experience of self-affirmation and assertion.
For the outbreak of violence, the communal identity has to swamp personal identity in a large number of people, reviving the feelings of love connected with early identifications with one’s own group members and the hate toward the out-group whose members are homogenized, depersonalized, and increasingly dehumanized. For social violence to occur, the threat to communal identity has to cross a certain threshold where the persecutory potential becomes fully activated and persecutory anxiety courses unimpeded through and between members of a religious group. Amplified by rumours, stoked by religious demagogues, the persecutory anxiety signals the annihilation of group identity and must be combated by its forceful assertion. Acting demonstratively in terms of this identity as a Hindu or Muslim, though, threatens members of the rival community who too mobilize their religious identity as a defence. The spiral of threats and reactive counterthreats further fuels persecutory anxiety, and only the slightest of sparks is needed for a violent explosion.
The involvement of religious rather than other social identities does not dampen but, on the contrary, increases the violence of the conflict. Religion brings to conflict between groups a greater emotional intensity and a deeper mo
tivational thrust than language, region, or other markers of ethnic identity. This is at least true of countries where the salience of religion in collective life is very high. Religious identity, for instance, is so crucial in the Islamic world that no Muslim revolutionary has been able or willing to repudiate his religious heritage.10 To live in India is to become aware that the psychological space occupied by religion, the context and inspiration it provides for individual lives, and its role in fostering the cultural identity and survival of different groups—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs. Christians, Parsis—is very different from the situation, say, in the United States. An Indian atheist cannot go along with an American counterpart’s casual dismissal of religion as ‘important, if true’ but must amend it to ‘important, even if not true.’
With its historical allusions from sacred rather than profane history, its metaphors and analogies having their source in sacred legends, the religious justification of a conflict involves fundamental values and releases some of our most violent passions. Why this is so is not only because religion is central to the vital, ‘meaning-making’ function of human life, causing deep disturbance if the survival of all that has been made meaningful by our religious beliefs is perceived to be under attack. Religion excites strong emotions also because it incorporates some of our noblest sentiments and aspirations—our most wishful thinking, the sceptic would say—and any threat to a belief in our ‘higher’ nature is an unacceptable denuding of self-esteem. Our wishful construction of human nature that ‘man is naturally good or at least good natured. If he occasionally shows himself brutal, violent or cruel, these are only passing disturbances of his emotional life, for the most part provoked, or perhaps only consequences of the inexpedient social regulations he has hitherto imposed on himself,’11 is matched by our equally wishful constructions around religion. Religion, we like to believe, is about love—love of God, love of nature, and love of fellowman. Religion, we feel, is essentially about compassion and strives for peace and justice for the oppressed. Indeed, freedom from violence, an enduring wish of mankind, is reflected in various religious visions of heaven.
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