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-book review- The Colors of Violence: by Sudhir Kakar (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press,1996
In The Colors of Violence, Sudhir Kakar, visiting professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, focuses on the psychodynamics of religious riots between the Hindus and Muslims in India. Dr. Kakar, a psychiatrist in New Delhi, notes that his study is not grounded in psychoanalytic theory; it is a trained clinician's cold-eyed analysis of a complex, emotionally charged, social problem. As his case study, Kakar took the Hindu-Muslim violence of 1990 in the south Indian city of Hyderabad, where 300 people were killed. Based on his field research and psychological measurements, Kakar argues that beginning in childhood the social identity of every Indian is grounded in his or her religious community, which in times of intercommunity conflict readily erupts into violent communalism. Among the most revealing sections of The Colors of Violence are his analyses of the speeches of two typical demagogues, one from each community. Ubedullah Khan Azmi, a member of Parliament, and secretary of the Muslim Personal Law Conference, said: "...And you [Hindus] raise slogans about Muslim loyalty. Have you ever looked at your own face in the mirror? It was the believers in the Qur'an who taught you the graces of life, taught you how to eat and drink. All you had before us were tomatoes and potatoes. What did you have? We brought jasmine, we brought frangipani. We gave the Taj Mahal, we gave the Red Fort. India was made India by us. We have lived here for eight hundred years and we made India shine.... Our personal law is being proscribed, our community's very way of life is being restricted. Beware, history may repeat itself. Atal Behari Vajpayee may have to read the kalma [i.e., convert to Islam]...." Dr. Kakar accurately diagnoses the major malady as symptomized in Azmi's repeated assertion of Muslims' having come from the outside. "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 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 Muslims draw closer in the religious community for security, which further fuels Hindu distrust of Muslim patriotism, and so on." Kakar quotes an earlier study of Hyderabad Muslims by anthropologist S.C.Dubey: "A Hindu untouchable of yesterday becomes a Muslim today; and tomorrow he will start proclaiming that his forefathers lived in Arabia." Clearly, Azmi's speech exhibits a colonizer complex. It was the hauteur of a full-blown colonizer complex afflicting the Muslims that led to the partition of India and continues to plague South Asia. The two things Azmi concedes the Hindus had before the Muslim invasions, namely tomatoes and potatoes, they ironically they certainly didn't have. A very different view from Azmi's is expressed by Anwar Shaikh in his much-discussed recent book: "Before the entry of Islam, India was not only a free country but also the richest and technically the most advanced in the world. Its inventiveness through steel, cotton, and water technology made a tremendous contribution to the international culture, and its philosophical and religious movements have orientated the human mind in the East and West. But now she is at lower rung of the Third World. ...The Muslims of South Asia prefer Arabia to their own motherlands. They do not realise that the grandeur of Arab nationalism has paralysed their own sense of national honour. This is the height of brain-washing." (Islam: The Arab National Movement , published by the Principality Publishers, P.O. Box 918, Cardiff, CF2 4YP, U.K.) Three decades before the partition of India, Sri Aurobindo raised the question about the fundamental intolerance of Islam: "How is it possible to live peacefully with a religion whose principle is 'I will not tolerate you?' How are you going to have unity with these people?" Sri Aurobindo cited the Koranic injunction (chapter IX, verse 5): "Slay the Idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent [i.e. convert to Islam] and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave them free. Lo! Allah is forgiving, merciful." Kakar also analyzes the speech of a typical Hindu demagogue. Sadhavi Rithambra, a young Punjabi Hindu, is a charismatic speaker for the"Hindutva" cause. In her speech after the Hyderabad riots, she said: "I have come to the Hindus of Bhagyanagar [Hyderabad] with a message...We have never said, 'O. World! Believe in our Upanishads, Believe in our Gita. Otherwise you are an infidel and by cutting off the head of an infidel one gains paradise.' Our sentiments are not so low. They are not narrow-minded. They are not dirty. We see the world as our family.... In Kashmir, the Hindu was a minority and was hounded out of the valley. Slogans of 'long live Pakistan' were carved with red hot iron rods on the thighs of our Hindu daughters. Try to feel the unhappiness and the pain of the Hindu who became a refugee in his own country.... What is this impartiality toward all religions where the mullahs get the moneybags and Hindus the bullets? We also want religious impartiality but not of the kind where only Hindus are oppressed....People say there should be Hindu-Muslim unity. Leave the structure of the Babri mosque undisturbed. I say, 'Then let's have this unity in case of the Jama masjid too. Break half of it and construct a temple. Hindus and Muslims will then come together.' " Sadhavi Rithambra's refusal to articulate the current name of the city points out that one of the Hindutva agendas is to restore the classical Hindu names of cities like Allahabad (Prayag). Her assertion about money bags for the mullahs refers to the Congress party's policy of buying Muslim votes by subsidzing mullahs and at the same time ignoring impoverished Hindu priests. These kind of psuedo-secular policies of the longtime-ruling Congress party have led to its recent steep decline. The action Sadhavi Rithambra suggests about the Jama Masjid is, from her Hindutva point of view, merely a token of equitable treatment because, during the centuries of Islamic imperialism, Muslims demolished numerous Buddhist and Hindu temples in Afghanistan and India and atop their foundations erected mosques. Explaining the methodology of his study, Kakar writes, "I have sought to analyze the fantasies, social representations and modes of moral reasoning about the out-groups -- 'them'-- that motivate and rationalize arson, looting, rape, and killing." The studies' psychological instruments included Erik Erikson's toy-construction method for examining identity development in children; and, with adults, the widely-used Giessen Test statements as well as structured interviews on morality. Kakar is fully aware of a basic problem in studies of such social phenomena: the bias of the observer. Whereas quantum physicists have acknowledged the inseparability of subject and object, most social scientists continue to pretend a dualistic or Cartesian separation. Psychoanalysts, however, because of the very nature of their discipline, do regard their subjectivity as an important source of their observations -- countertransference is regarded as highly significant. Accordingly, Kakar devotes an entire chapter in recalling his childhood memories of the Partition riots in the Punjab. He writes about these recollections with the narrative skills of a consummate novelist and describes his own current religious persuasion as a liberal-rationalist Hinduism with a "streak of agnostic mysticism." Kakar criticizes several prominent contemporary Indian historians, such as the Marxist historians Romila Thapar and Gyanendra Pandey, for having "underestimated the extent of the historical rift between Hindus and Muslims and have thus invited a backlash to their Panglossian view of the past." An example of just such a "Panglossian view of the past" is a statement at a recent public lecture I attended at the University of California, Berkeley. Ashis Nandy, director of Delhi's Center for the Study of Developing Societies, said: "The history of communalism in India goes back only a hundred years." It is precisely to repudiate this sort of wishful, self-deluding reconstruction of history that Koenraad Elst, the Belgian scholar, recently published Negationism in India: Concealing the Record of Islam (published by the Voice of India, 2 / 18 Ansari Road, New Delhi, http://www.voi.org). To be sure, other Western historians have written of this record before. In The Histoire d l'Inde, French historian Alain Danielou wrote: "From the time Muslims started arriving in 632 A.D., the history of India becomes a long monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is as usual in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations." In the words of the well-known American historian,Will Durant, "the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident lesson is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate balance can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without..." From my own perspective as a secular humanist, I believe that reconstruction of history to suit any ideology is counterproductive. Fabricating history for the sake of a current cause, no matter how lofty its ideals, tempts the fates. To forget history will always be fateful; to forgive some of its frightful facts can be redemptive. Forgive -- but never forget -- history. An excellent example of making sure that history is not forgotten is the contemporary German state's stipulation making it illegal to publish a reconstructed World War II history that attempts to negate or conceal the holocaust the Nazis perpetrated on the Jews, Gypsies, and Poles. The historical record of Islamic ideology practised in India is heavily tainted.(To cite two sources: The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India by Sita Ram Goel, published by Voice of India; The Koran and the Kafir: All That An Infidel Needs to Know About the Koran But Is Embarrassed to Ask by Arvind Ghosh. See Endnotes.) As a secular humanist, however, I make a distinction between an ideology and its adhering victims, especially those born into it. And, nonetheless, from my own experience, I regard a typical liberal Indian Muslim to be as good a human being as any other Indian. Kakar sharply questions another historical reconstruction, the so-called composite culture of the Hindus and Muslims: "Even the Sufis had serious limits to their tolerance. In the question of faith they were unequivocal about the superiority of Islam and the hellish fate in store for the Hindu infidels on judgment day." Kakar quotes Muzaffar Alam, a contemporary Muslim scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University: "Indeed in relation to Hindus, it is difficult to distinguish between an orthodox theologian and a liberal mystic [Sufi].... An average literate Muslim believed that Islam and Hinduism belonged to two radically diverse traditions and that the twain would never meet." A glaring omission in Kakar's critique of the composite culture is a historical review of the Sikh religion. This omission is all the more puzzling because of the author's deep Punjabi roots. The Sikh religion, from its very founding by Guru Nanak in the late fifteenth century, aimed to create just such a composite culture of the Hindus and Muslims. Guru Nanak, himself a high-caste Hindu, chose as his constant companion a low-caste Muslim, Bhai Mardana. The fifth guru, Arjun Dev, invited the Sufi Mian Mir to lay the foundation stone of the Hari-mandir Sahib (The Golden Temple), and included the hymns of Muslims like Mardana, the Sufi Farid, Kabir, Satta, Balwand, and others in the religion's holy book, The Granth Sahib. Despite these sustained attempts at creating a composite culture, Guru Arjun Dev, upon his refusal to convert to Islam, was publicly tortured to death by the tyrant Jehangir in 1605. This barbarity was inflicted at the instigation of Sufi Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi, head of the Sufi community of the Naqshbandi order. (Jehangir mentions in his autobiography the order he gave for the execution of the Sikh guru. The venomous letter sent by the leader of the Sufis is also a historical document.) In 1675, upon their refusal to convert to Islam, the ninth guru, Tegh Bahadur and three of his accompanying disciples were publicly tortured to death on the orders of Aurangzeb. To intimidate Tegh Bahadur into conversion to Islam, the executioners made him watch the gruesome execution of his disciples: Bhai Sati Das was made to climb a pyre and burnt alive; Bhai Mati Das was slowly sawed in two, starting from the top of his skull; Bhai Dayala was made to sit in a cauldron and boiled alive. These barbarities were perpetrated in the main market center, Chandani Chowk, across from the Red Fort in Delhi. So, what is Dr. Kakar's prognosis? "I am afraid Ayodhya is not an end but only a beginning.... The optimist realist, a breed with which I identify, believes that we are moving toward an era of recognition of Hindu-Muslim differences rather than pursuing their chimerical commonalities. We are moving toward a multiculturalism, with majority and minority cultures, rather than the emergence of a 'composite culture.' '' However, Kakar predicts that this will not happen very soon and hopes that "the violence will be short-lived." I am afraid Kakar's prognosis is right. I would like to add that multiculturalism in India will finally emerge from genuine secularism and the Hindus' forgiveness of Islamic history in India, not from the pseudo-secularists' self-deluding denials and glossy, yes Panglossian, cover-ups tacked onto the documented facts of that history. ======================================= EndNotes 1. For books by Ghosh and Anwar Shaikh, see
2. For an interview with Anwar Shaikh, see http://www.hindutva.org/anwar.html |