Exiled at Home: Comprising At the Edge of Psychology, The Intimate Enemy and Creating a Nationality 9780195641776, 0195641779, 9780195667929, 0195667921

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A sh is N a n d y

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Comprising

At the Edge o f Psychology The Intimate Enemy Creating a Nationality

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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS CALCUTTA

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1998

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Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associates in Berlin Ibadan

© Urna Ashis Nandy 1998 ISBN 019 564177 9

At the Edge of Psychology © Oxford University Press 1980 The Intimate Enemy © Uma Ashis Nandy 1983 Creating a Nationality © United Nations Research Institutefor Social Development 1995

Printed at Rekha Printers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi 110020 and published by Marnar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001

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INTRODUCTION

D R. NAGARAJ

1 hat Ashis Nandy is one of the major critics of modernity from the South is a cliché by now. But that cliché overlies an interesting paradox in the making of his thought. All the arms and ammunition he deploys in attacking the project of modernity are forged in the workshop of his target; after all, political psychology, future studies, cultural studies are specific forms of self-understanding of modernity. Such a relationship of intimate enmity with modernity is both Nandy’s strength and weakness. To improvise on one of his own formulations, if Nandy is Nathuram Godse, modernity is Gandhi— the assassin^ relationship with his victim is both complex and multidimen­ sional. If I may use my fund of anecdotal and personal -knowledge about Nandy, he uses the computer, and the den in which it is placed, like a tantric riveted to the site of his sadhana or someone playing a cosmic game. Particularly, the way he immerses himself in computer games has always baffled me. I can muster enough courage to disturb a yogi in his sadhana but not Nandy when he is playing computer games. Any system takes into account and responds only to those forms of reasoning that are communicative and comprehensible to it. In fact, contemporary modes of conversation between divergent cultures are shaped by a deep obsession with transparent meanings and motifs. In one of his essays on contact between cultures Todorov claims that in such a context, reference to a ‘universal’ is inevitable;1 but he does ‘Tzvetan Todorov, The Morals o f History (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Ptess, 1995), p. 79. Also see, David Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, ‘Prelude to a Conversation of Cultures in International Society: Todorov and Nandy on the Possibility of Dialogue’, Alternatives, Winter 1994,19(1), pp. 23-51.

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not ^iscuss whether the notion of the universal itself is culture-specific and relations of power play a decisive role in determining it. And of course, anthropology, with all its different branches, is always there to mediate any non-negotiable forms of meaning. The only problem in this politics of hermeneutics, when genuine rivals are involved, is that hegemonic systems treat comprehensible opposition as parts of larger conversations. Once in 1994, I did suggest to Nandy that he ought to go beyond the parameters of modernist disciplines and forms of reasoning. I ar­ gued that what had given him significant intellectual presence could also restrict the reaches of his critical imagination. In a moment of intellectual rashness, partly inspired by the generous supply of Scotch whisky at his austere home in a part of Raj Delhi—yet another lovely source of his vulnerability with regard to the west—I even insisted that he should seriously consider the possibility of writing in the mode of parables, drusthantas. It is the only authentic deshi mode of reason­ ing. He closed his eyes for a while and said ‘extremely interesting, interesting’. And then he navigated the conversation in a different direction. Only much later did I leam in his private dictionary the world ‘interesting’ signifies something totally impractical, and, worse, anti-political. Today I agree with his assessment completely. If I had suggested the same idea at a seminar, his satirical answer would have thrown me to the laughing wolves on the floor. Nandy can be as savage in public as he is warm in private. In other words, I wanted Ashis Nandy to offer a critique of the project of modernity from those intellectual, emotional, symbolic, and semiotic structures which exist beyond its reaches. But his sensibility operates differently. I define it as the mode of vaccination—resistance and remedial action are built out of the very body of disease. Nandy is political, precisely because he seeks to create modes of resistance and fighting from within, at the level of the method. In this sense he is closer to Ivan Illich than to Raimundo Panikkar. This also explains Nandy’s influence among some of the leading activist groups and al­ ternative movements in India. Yes, he has difficulties in getting into the symbolic and philosophical universes of Nagarjuna, Shankara, Sarhapada or even pre-Enlightenment Christian thinkers and mystics. Ashis Nandy is not Ananda Coomaraswamy but he is politically more active than those operating from within such civilizational-scholastic modes.

Introduction

ix

Nandy is too committed to historical times of modernity and colonialism to look beyond their horizons but other epochs are present in him as forms of life, which are getting defeated. In this sense, he is more useful and relevant to the civilizational politics of South Asia in particular, and the Third World in general, than many excellent scholars who are steeped in the pre-modem knowledge systems of these areas. What is present in others as profound knowledge of texts is active in Nandy as a passionate political position defending the present-day self-representations of the same texts. To put it differently, Nandy’s civilizational critiques have all the powers and weaknesses of the self critiquing practices of the project of modernity. The representatives of modernist intellectual discourses feel annoyed, irritated and bullied by him. The power of his writing convinces us about the necessity of going beyond the modernist criti­ que of modernity, notwithstanding its persuasive abilities. It is not pos­ sible to better him in this regard from the base of the South Asian material covering the colonial period; he has exhausted the potentiality of the method. To be able to make the same material speak differently it requires a totally new method, and I call it the non-modernist mode of reading history and culture, which can also excavate new material. I will not go into the details of defining the traits of such a method, for it falls outside the framework of the present introduction. Let me be content with sketching its brief outline. The necessity for a new mode to study the geo-cultural material of the South Asian area calls for an organic relationship between the material and the method. I should explain a couple of assumptions that have gone into the making of this proposition. The material of a geo-cultural area, when it involves human processes, not of pure scien­ ces, is better illuminated against the background of the cognitive categories produced internally. Certainly, I am not arguing for a naive ‘indigenist’ or ‘nativist’ position, which posits a simple one-to-one relationship between the material and the method in terms of geo-cultural regions. Indigenism is the exact reverse of universalism, both lack certain forms of selfreflexivity. I am only arguing for a specific space for categories of intrinsic critiques and for the necessity to interface them with extrinsic forms of understanding. The Western knowledge systems have prac­ tised it within their own domains, but the same merging of horizons is denied to other intellectual cultures in the contemporary academe. To be specific, we should be able to analyse violence and social suf­

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fering in South Asia using categories from the Shramana or Sufi tradi­ tions. Even in competent writings on these themes from Indian scholars, such intellectual frames are non-existent. If the methods and philosophical positions of the present times are fit and useful to analyse the formations of several kinds of pre-modem eras, then, the reverse also should be true. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Modernist read­ ings of the past recreate only those structures which they want to see; intellectual projects become guided tours; we see only what we have been trained and told to recognize. An alternative to this modernist method, in the context of India, requires a more informed and intimate, not instrumental, relationship with the world of pre-modem forms of knowledge. More importantly, the prerequisite here is to go beyond the existing dominant forms of modernist understanding of Indian society, in their liberal, Marxist, Hindu-conservative and subaltern incarnations. I am deliberately col­ lapsing all these divergent theoretical methods into a large umbrellalike category of the modernist approach to Indian history. These disciplines try to study India as another variation on the fundamental framework of the European village and agrarian system; radical mass politics and the state policies of social engineering in the area of social justice and entitlement have followed paths advocated by such intel­ lectual and academic projects. Though Ashis Nandy has internalized many assumptions about Indian culture and society manufactured by modernist disciplines, he becomes a dissident by raising fundamental doubts about the nature of History per se as a mode of understanding a civilization. Because of this bold step he becomes an ally of alter­ native intellectual currents represented in India by A.K. Saran, Ramachandra Gandhi, U.R. Anantha Murthy and a whole range of small initiatives like those parts of the Patriotic People’s Science and Technology Group (PPST) that have not developed Hindu chauvinist leanings.

2 Ashis Nandy usually describes himself as a student of Indian middle classes. He also has a second ironical self-defintion: an intellectual street fighter. Both these statements accurately capture the site and target of his intellectual biography. What the Russian aristocracy was to Tolstoy the Indian middle classes are to Nandy; he deconstructs

Introduction

xi

some of the important and cherished intellectual and political practices built by these classes during and after colonial epoch. The real sacrifice and the empty gesture, tragedy and farce, truth and false rhetoric: these are firmly intertwined in the self-representations of westernized, urban middle classes of India, and the former, in each instance, is used to cover the latter giving them a much larger role in Indian public sphere than they are entitled to. Nandy exposes the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde selves of the most powerful classes in India. Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard was certainly right to point out, while dis­ cussing modernity, that it changes its will into reason; but he also argues ‘that there is no class that incarnates and monopolises the in­ finity of the will.’2 We beg to disagree. It was the cultural will of the westernized middle classes to build India in a certain way, a way which has become the vehicle of the civilizational forces of western modernity. The success of these classes lies in the ability to impose their will on an entire society by transforming and presenting it as an inevitable and desirable logic of historical change. The cultural will becomes a terribly attractive, ‘undeniable’ reason. The westernized middle classes have every reason to feel uncom­ fortable with Nandy, for he has seen through them. At one level, he reports and vivisects them in scholarly treatises, elegantly written, and swarming with heavy footnoting, which they hardly care to read. ‘An industrious student, meticulously doing his job, bravo,’ they would love to say. But there is also this street fighter in him, who mocks them, ridicules them and attacks them in the most popular newspapers of the country. Popular English language newspapers are the only great library that the urban middle classes are addicted to, and even here Nandy appears, only to make fun of the sacred cows of the nation. As it happens, the targets of his attack are not harmless, ambling sacred cows; they are the most important ideals of the nation-state. These ideals have already become centres of power; several hawks have been reared to guard them. Let me make a list of these megalo-narratives and show how Nandy tackles them.

2Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard, Political Writings (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 26.

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The four megalo-narratives built by the hegemonic classes in India are: one, a totalistic political organization called the nation-state; two, the knowledge systems of technoscience; three, the ideal form of social life, namely, westernized secularism; four and most powerful—the utopia of linear progress and development. Needless to add, all are representative institutions of the project of modernity. The westernized middle classes and the state apparatus in India are prepared to sacrifice their limbs if even one of these is endangered. Of course, they are also prepared, to judge by past records, to remove the limbs of others who are opposed to any of these. Nandy has shown how all these megalo-narratives were bom in the twin working of civilizational projects of colonialism and moder­ nity in India; how they have reproduced and sustained each other. Though some features of these megalo-narratives became more pronounced only later in post-Independence India, as prototypes they had begun their journey in the phase of colonialism itself. Keeping in view the range of his themes and concerns, let me classify his oeuvre into two broad spheres: the sphere of Kipling and Ramanujan, where his works relating to colonialism and technoscien­ ces can be located. Here the continuum of the colonial and modernist projects come under intense scrutiny. The second sphere can be described as the sphere of Antigone, where the working of the nation­ states and their violations of humanist ethos are predominant concerns; the effort to understand the source of collective violence is at the core of the enterprise.3 3ln the Kipling-Ramanujan mode, I would include the following works of Nandy: Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (1980), 2nd Edition (Delhi, Oxford University Press. 1995); At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1980); The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery o f Self Under Colonialism (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1983); Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1987); The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games (Delhi, Penguin, 1989) and his edited work. Science. Hegemony and Violence (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1988). In the sphere of Antigone, the following are likely to fall: The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of the Self (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994); and the co-authored, Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear of the Self (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 19%) and several of his unpublished papers presented at various seminars.

Introduction

xiii

While delineating the specific features of the sphere of Kipling and Ramanujan, a discussion on the nature of Nandy’s contribution to the theories of colonialism will be in order. It is possible to identify three streams in the existing theories of colonialism: the schools that are defined by the idea of total conquest, the ones that are organized around the idea of a cultural soul, and the ones that stress mutual transformation. The first is represented by the likes of Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Edward Said; the second by the likes of Ananda Coomaraswamy and Seyyed Hossein Nasr; the third by Najidy. Each school can be identified with a symbol that can absorb the major theoretical concerns of its proponents. I call the last school one of multiple interactions; it shows affinity with many Gandhian modes of theorization. The symbol for the theory of total conquest is the relationship be­ tween Prospero and Caliban; whereas the entire corpus of Asian art can be seen as a symbol of the school led by Coomaraswamy. For Nandy, the symbol is of intimate enmity. I am not trying to suggest that Nandy’s model of multiple interactions has grown into the status of an independent intellectual movement; it still constitutes a small battalion but it is powerful enough to take on several armies of the other side. Some powerful essays by writers like Shiv Visvanathan and Gustavo Esteva can be included in the list. Needless to add, it is the school of total conquest that has had the most influence on contemporary studies, for it has enough inner spaces to attract and accommodate categories from Marx, Foucault, and yes, Freud. But in the context of Marxist discourse on colonialism, there comes into play a strained relationship between the deep seated fatalism of its philosophy of historical change and its necessary political optimism about the radical energy of the people in resisting the colonial and imperialist epochs. However, on the whole, the repertory of Marxist theories work favourably and merge with the propositions of the school of total conquest. Victory is seen as the triumph of technologically superior forces, and hence, a definite element of pessimism worms its way into the Marxist philosophies of history. Against this background, a crude summary of the dominant positions of the school of total con­ quest and the cultural soul can be attempted. The mode of the total conquest assumes that all the constructions, cultural and intellectual included, of the phase of colonization work towards the consolidation of the master’s hegemonic grip. Textual

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practices of all kinds are contaminated by the presence of colonial practices and resistances to them. Ironically, the most important ef­ fective responses to colonial trajectories are shaped in the basic politi­ cal language taught by the enemy. In other words, colonialism is an omnipotent presence; both the fixation and affiliation, to use two Sadiron categories, are conditioned by its biological field. It is like fate, no societal process can escape it. The tragedy of colonial an­ nihilation and violence is more real and palpable than the strategies of the politically defeated societies and communities. The pessimism of those taking this position is near-total, which also has given their writings a certain melancholic aura and tone; they acquire a fatalistic finality while describing the process of colonization. Here the battle is between two monoliths: the colonizer and the colonized. There are no hidden cultural spaces in colonized societies, everything is exposed to the policing and transforming gaze of the master. The panoptican of the ruler can control even the psychological lives of the wards. The exaggerated notion of the powers of the master and weaknesses of the subjugated is not the only decisive reason for the emergence of the pessimism in their method; we have to look for its roots in certain ways of theorizing about the relationship between the public sphere and the individual that have become decisive in Western intellectual discourse during the last hundred years. The conception of the public sphere itself so all pervasive that it covers even the inner spaces of the individuals. Nandy’s uniqueness lies in his rejection of the monolithic concep­ tions of the rivals, though he also shares a great many of the motifs and perceptions of the school of total conquest. All these new philosophers of colonialism have one thing in common, compared to old masters like Ananda Coomaraswamy—their lack of an active relationship with pre-colonial forms of knowledge systems on both sides. On the other hand, the school of the cultural soul has a tendency to work with essentialist notions of the civilizational soul. There are several difficulties in describing the major works of thinkers like Coomaraswamy only in terms of theories of colonization; the political, economic and societal experiences of the defeated communities that became central to the theories of later thinkers are not significantly active in Coomaraswamy’s work. His major emphasis is on the undy­ ing or perennially present cultural energies and forms of the temporari­ ly humbled cultures, and this is in stark contrast with the Fanonians,

Introduction

xv

whose specialization is to expose the strategies of the master culture. A deep belief in the spiritual superiority of the Asiatic and traditional European civilizations over the contemporary West is yet another hallmark of the school of the cultural soul. Coomaraswamy does not differentiate between society and civiliza­ tion, a crucial distinction that marked and guided Gandhi’s political action. The struggle against untouchability, to Gandhi, was as impor­ tant as resisting the pernicious growth of the multiplication of wants and machinery, his euphemism for Western consumerism. Due to the inability to make this crucial distinction, Coomaraswamy is dangerous­ ly insensitive to forms of violence in pre-modem India. Nothing could be wrong with a spiritually superior civilization. The school of the cultural soul does not subscribe to the boundaries defined by nation­ states; it endorses only geo-cultural territories. It is in this context that one should evaluate the specificity of Nandy’s contributions to theories of colonialism. The purpose of of­ fering the ‘resumes’ of two other schools was only to show the extent to which he has internalized several elements from them. Nandy’s vishada yoga, which quite often colours his writing, owes its origin to Fanonian constructions of colonialism. Freud, too, enters in a sig­ nificant way; wherever the Viennese psychologist appears, a certain kind of pessimism is inevitable. Freudian ideas, when applied to social and political processes, bring melancholy with them. When he is in the Fanonian or Freudian mode, Nandy is melancholic. But the company of Gandhi makes him cheerful and enables him to see the transformative capacities of both the colonizer and the colonized. The major weakness in Nandy’s critique of colonialism-modemity is that he does not pay enough attention to structures of injustices and violence that existed in the premodem India and their aggravation or continuation in the colonial context. (Nandy also seems to harbour, though never explicitly, the notion of pre-modem India as a unified society.) In other words, the societal violence of the caste system and the role of upper caste social and intellectual genealogies in building the megalo-narratives of colonialism and modernity are not the central concerns of Nandy. But these themes surface in a different way in his essay on the cultural politics of the assassination of Gandhi. In it, Nandy has focused on the failings of the cultural elites, and that can serve as an useful take-off point for building a lower caste critique of the project of modernity.

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Ashis Nandy has explored the process of colonization in the dark comers of culture and the mind: he has reached into the hidden spaces where the colonizer is deeply affected by his involvement with the colonized, where the subjugated and the defeated also have internal strategies sufficient to escape the transformative powers of their masters. In both instances, the emphasis is on the vulnerability of authority and the power and freedom of the human imagination of the defeated. The concept of intimate enmity as developed by Nandy retains the space for such playful interactions. Works on Kipling and Ramanujan serve as the representative works for this mode of political awareness. Judged from within the Saidian mode, the personality of Kipling cannot be different from the usual Orientalist type, but that would take away the complexity of the processes that have gone into the making of the man and the artist. The literary reading of Kipling’s work also reinforces the Orientalist ethos. Nandy uses his tools, a product of a methodological bricolage of several disciplines—political psychology, literary theory, anthropology, even history—to reveal breaches, silences, gaps in the making of the man and brings out the other Kipling who is different from the Orientalist. The politically defeated culture had played a larger role than is acknowledged in shaping one of the major literary representatives of the Raj! Nothing can erase it. Nandy’s heart and mind go to those passive, weak and silent his­ torical moments, which are placed in an adversarial relation with the articulate, powerful, arrogant forces, and the modes in which the former slowly regain their energies and self. Kipling is created by both the victorious West and the defeated India. There is little scope for such mutual transformative processes in the Saidian mode; it has difficulty in accepting and privileging forms of self-escape and transcendence that a culture develops. Said and Fanon are historians who capture moments of clarity, conscious action and explosion, open articulation and direct conflict, Nandy is the artist who captures the speech hidden in enigmatic silence, who sees spurts of activism that take cover under passivity. To put it differently, in the Fanonian and the Saidian modes, there lurk dangers of absolutizing their own methods. Nandy escapes from such dangers because of the emphasis in his method on states of intimate enmity and mutually transformative powers. Similarly, Nandy’s reading of Ramanujan deconstructs the universalist pretensions of the modem techno-sciences; here the flowering

Introduction

xvii

and working of the genius of the Indian mathematician are located in culture-specific forces that had shaped and guided his creativity. The quotidian details of Ramanujan’s life are highlighted to reveal the ex­ traordinary making of the scientist. The way in which Nandy picks up details from everyday life calls for a critique of a larger method: I call it the mode of the metaphor. One can make an eclectic use of both Sanskrit and western definitions of the doctrines of pratibha and imagination to illuminate the working of Nandy’s method. Social scientists hesitate to put together disparate and divergent things and make connections between them; in fact, that hesitation gives the social sciences a certain disciplinarian rigour and restraint. Nandy breaks out of the shackles of restraint and immerses himself in his material from a philosophical conviction that everything is connected to everything’ else. I am not trying to suggest that he is the kind of intellectual who searches for harmony and unity behind the facades of rupture and difference; instead, he connects disparate things and produces a new construction, which Sanskrit theorists called ‘apoorva vastu nirmana kshama'. The quotidian is made to speak a grand truth, the grand truth is connected to normal, everyday processes. Inevitably, such a method leads to the dissolution of disciplines. What is Nandy? I have found quite amusing descriptions of him in the media, and, sometimes, even in learned gatherings—sociologist, psychologist, political theorist, writer, historian. Of course, Nandy also revels in such confusion about defining him; ‘I am that what you think of me,’ he says. He is a model for those feeling frustrated by the severe restrictions of compartmen­ talized disciplines. In the sphere defined by Kipling and Ramanujan, Nandy organizes his material like the writer of a tragedy; I have always wondered why it is that the kind of events and psychological processes we see in Nandy are not explored by South Asian dramatists. Some of the major works of Nandy are bom of an effort to explore major enigmas, hidden traumas and barely noticed yet important doubles of the last one hundred and fifty years; take his readings of Rammohun Roy, Gandhi, the Punjab terrorists—they all have the material that should have drawn a major playwright to them. Particularly, in his analysis of the complex relationship between Roy and his parents and of the deep psychological bonds that tied Godse to Gandhi, Nandy works in the dramatic mode of conflict and resolution.

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While analysing the politics of Gandhi’s assassination, Nandy comes closest to the pre-modemist Indian religious understanding of violence and its manifestations. The victim and the victor are deeply intertwined with each other. Theories which define violence, both its origins and agents, as the site of the irrational, reinforce fear and cowardice. The position that locates violence as yet another manifes­ tation of a particular kind of relationship helps us see the sources of aggression, and we are empowered psychologically to resist it. We understand the making of Godse clearly; the trajectory of his violence becomes comprehensible. In other historical times and spaces of im­ agination, Nandy’s material would have produced great works of art. Is Nandy himself a victim of his deep relationship with the mode of reasoning in the social sciences? I leave the reader to speculate on that. 4 Let me return to the second classification of Nandy’s work: the sphere of Antigone, where, as one would expect, the nation-state is the major site of investigation. The nation-state is one of the most important sources of violence in South Asia. The beauty and the terror of separatist movements of this region also stem from it. Those who are listed as terrorists by the state are worshipped as martyrs by their communities. The whole his­ tory of the second half of the twentieth century can be rewritten as an impassioned search, by old and newly-constructed communities, for a new El Dorado called the nation-state; the entire story has a scandalous analogy with the experience of European capitals waiting for sailor-heroes who were supposed to return with shiploads of gold. The sailor-heroes quite often returned with shiploads of glittering sand; they were scared to disappoint their masters. They concocted stories to begin with, later the difference between fiction and reality disappeared. Ashis Nandy is at his best when he explores the comic, violent, wicked, and absurd relationships that come into play in the lives of communities when they try to represent themselves as nation-states. And he also records the touching moments of a larger unity that lie beyond both the imagination and the control of the nation-states. Hence, Nandy’s emphasis on the self-contradictions and hollowness of

Introduction

xix

the narratives of nationalism. Nandy has revealed that some of the theories of leaders who claimed they were building grand edifices for their nation-state using the blocks of authentic cultural memories and philosophical positions of their homeland, are not at all indigenous. He has demonstrated that the builders were either ignorant or con­ temptuous of some of the crucial elements of the very cultures they were trying to represent in the discourse of militant nationalism. To speak in contemporary terms, the politics of Hindutva is plainly against the very ethos of Hinduism. All their constructions of the votaries Of Hindutva, right from the middle of the nineteenth century, have been decisively shaped by a western understanding of Indian history and society. And that understanding had nothing but contempt for Hin­ duism and the other religious traditions of the geo-cultural region. Against this background, Nandy’s recent work on the identity politics of India and Pakistan, and identity-related violence are impor­ tant, for they show the gap between the working of the machinery of the nation-state and the pluralistic experiences of their member com­ munities. Nandy has emerged as a chronicler of the existential uncon­ scious against the politically conscious, a historian of the quotidian against the metanarratives of socio-political engineering. The theoreti­ cal position his work seems to evolve is that the powers of healing violence lie within communities, and hence any intervention, either by the state or by forces of secularism, is not desirable. There has been an interesting debate between Nandy and the secularists in India on the question of secularism. As usual, he is misunderstood and much maligned in this respect too. It is not that he is opposed to forms of harmony of social life that secularism seem to imply as an ideal; his objection to secularism is that it forms an integral part of a larger political and intellectual mechanism which has no respect for cultural communities. Having in-built opportunistic and in­ strumentalist tendencies towards traditions of religious tolerance, secularists have suddenly discovered the existence of a plural culture. Such motifs, themes, subjects were hardly present in their intellectual and political pursuits earlier; they have to thank the religious chauvinists—such as the Sangh Parivar in India—for bringing to the fore the questions of religious and cultural identity, which the latter have done in an extremely dangerous manner. Again Nandy is back at his job of exposing the double-talk of the cultural elite of the country. However, this polemic has brought Nandy closer to the religious realms of South Asia, though, for the present,

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only on the premise of social sciences reasoning. I consider his recent essay on gods and goddesses the beginning of a third sphere in his intellectual career. He uses them as a medium to understand new tensions that have appeared in South Asia. Gods are supposed to operate beyond history but Nandy makes them reveal forms of his­ torical and societal transformation. If he succeeds in establishing an intimate enmity with gods, they also might change him considerably. In other words, he will move closer to Coomaraswamy where certain forms of religious reasoning play a significant role in theorizing. About Nandy nothing can be said with any finality; he is totally unpredictable.

4Nandy first delivered this as a lecture at a course on cultural studies in 1995 in Heggodu, a small village of Karnataka. A new version is coming out in Manushi: A Journal About Women and Society as ‘A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods and Goddesses in South Asia.’ It was also delivered as a keynote address as the American Academy of Religion, New Orleans, 27-28 November 1996.

AT THE EDGE OF PSYCHOLOGY Essays in Politics and Culture

CONTENTS Preface

v

Sati: A Nineteenth Century Tale of Women, Violence and Protest

1

W oman versus Womanliness in India: An Essay in Cultural and Political Psychology

32

The Making and Unmaking of Political Cultures in India

47

Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of G andhi

70

A dorno in In d ia: Revisiting the Psychology o f Fascism

99

Indira G andhi and the Culture of Indian Politics

112

Index

131

PREFACE This book includes new incarnations o f six essays I wrote during 1972-7. I now disagree with many of the things they say. Many specific interpretations, too, are now a part o f my prehistory. But, on the whole, they mark out a vantage ground from which I began to examine contemporary Indian political consciousness and — I cannot avoid the expression — unconsciousness. Being directly concerned with the relationships between the private and the public in politics, these essays at one plane define the outlines o f a cultural psychology o f Indian politics. However, somewhere along the way, I seem to have ignored the separation between the person and his politics and begun to see the inner self o f the person, too, as a political fact and as a normative state­ ment. Perhaps this was inevitable. N ot only must politics work with — and work out — the contradictions in human subjectivity, that subjectivity in turn concretizes, perhaps better than any action, the state o f politics in a society. Four themes run through the essays. First, all o f them deal with the creation, persistence, remaking, death and rebirth o f political traditions. Now, tradition is a m atter o f the m ind; its embedment in history may be useful but not necessary in a society which re­ fuses to dissociate history from myth. India is one society which has made full use o f its plural culture by interpreting and reinter­ preting its myriad pasts. And this tradition of using traditions continues. T hat is why I shall not grudge it if some enterprising reviewer finds unconvincing history in the following pages, as long as he finds in them convincing myths. In the culture from within which these essays on political culture are written, the past is not always a history which must be worked with o r reversed. It could also be an open allegory which widens human choices and humanizes politics. Second, these essays see politics as participation in, and de­ fiance of, intersecting systems o f authority. All o f them are con­ cerned with the way authority has been defined and redefined in Indian society during the colonial and post-colonial periods, both by individuals and by groups. It is this which accounts for the

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fact that each o f these essays is in a way concerned with the role of femininity in Indian politics and culture. As one of the essays argues, no understanding o f the structures o f Indian authority is possible without understanding the close symbolic links between power, legitimate authority and gender. The magic o f power and the power o f magic converge in the Indian context in the social constructions o f womanhood. This convergence, especially as it involves normative components in social interventions and social goals, has been examined directly or indirectly in these pages. Third, the essays examine the psychological assumptions of some o f the m ajor models o f social change generated in recent Indian history. From Ramm ohun Roy’s articulate theology of social change to Indira G andhi’s confused design o f pure polities» many concepts o f social intervention have been thrown up in India during the last two hundred years which have implicit models o f human nature built into them. These models have often been evaluated in terms o f their social and political content but almost never in terms o f the shared consciousness they represent. Finally, while most o f the essays deal with the sources of de­ mocratic politics and plural political traditions in India, some also indirectly deal with the cultural sources o f authoritarianism in the society. The last two essays, particularly, have this concern as their main focus. Both are indirect products o f the Emergency and the press censorship of 1975-7 and both try to link the culture o f Indian politics to its pathology during the Emergency and to authoritarianism in India in general. The first o f the two was originally written as a review o f a book published twenty-five years earlier. The second is a revised version o f an essay published soon after the Emergency was revoked. That essay, in turn, was based on a few articles published during the Emergency, articles which had successfully slipped past the censors and, I regret to add, many readers, too. I hope readers of this volume will forgive me if they find that I have reacted by making things a little too ‘obvious’ in these revised versions. The second essay also suffers from the naive belief that in political psychology there can be last words. As I write this preface in 1980, the Indian electorate in its wisdom has virtually turned my analysis into an obiter dictum. The onus is now on the subject o f my analysis to keep it so. As I have already said, the past in this society is open-ended; probably more so than the future.

Preface vii Many persons have helped me in different ways in preparing this book. I m ust particularly mention the editors who published earlier versions o f these essays in Rammohun Roy and the Process o f Modernization in India, Psychoanalytic ReviewDaedalus, En­ counter, Indian Journal o f Psychology and The Times o f India. I am also grateful to my colleagues, Giri Deshingkar and D. L. Sheth, for their numerous suggestions. The essay on G andhi would not have been possible but for the translations from M arathi that Ajay Patw ardhan and M ohan M. Trivedi specially did for me. Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

A sh is N a n d y

SATI A Nineteenth-Century Tale of Women, Violence and Protest Authority and Defiance There are superstitions, and superstitions about superstitions. For over 150 years, the legal abolition in 1829 o f sati, the Hindu rite of widows committing suicide after the death o f their husbands, has been considered the first victory o f the modern world over Hindu obscurantism and primitivism. I contend in this essay that the epidemic o f sati in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcenturies was mainly a product o f British colonial intrusion into Indian society; that the popularity o f the rite and its abolition in response to a reform movement were two phases in Indian society’s attempt to cope with large-scale environmental and cultural changes ; and that both these changes involved the invalida­ tion and distortion o f traditional attitudes to woman and femininity. I also contend that Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), who led the movement against the rite and partly on that ground is known as the father o f m odem India, represented society’s attempt to work through its ambivalences towards the rite, towards traditional concepts of womanhood and women, and towards the sexual identities the colonial culture was helping to crystallize. This alternative interpretation of sati assumes that to walk the razor’s edge between makeshift adjustments and total surrender to its changing environment, a civilization constantly needs to generate new concepts, symbols and structures o f authority and to renegotiate terms with its older gods. It is this social need which defines the importance o f the person who evolves new sources of legitimacy and designs alternative controls o f transgression, and yet makes his innovations reflect the unique history and genius o f his people. If society helps such a person to take care of his private conflicts, gives him the chance to relate his world view to the needs of his contemporaries, and appreciates his interpreta­ tion o f traditions as authoritative, a creative anastomosis between man and society is established. Social change then comes

2 A t the Edge o f Psychology to mean not only changes in rites, rituals and practices, but also a changed relationship between cultural symbols and individual motives. Starting from such an assumption I shall explore in this essay the relationship between the reform o f sati and the world of Rammohun Roy to illustrate how a person’s private conflicts with the immediate authorities can get intertwined with aggregate responses to public issues, how older controls o f transgression can become a threat and a challenge to the person, and how a person’s personal ethics and private symbols can become valid tools of social intervention. I shall do so in two stages. First, I shall examine the culture o f sati in historical and psychological terms and show how the ritual became a battleground between the old and the new, the indigenous and the imported, and the Brahmanic and the folk. I shall try to show that these three intersecting conflicts were given meaning by the central conflict between traditional concepts o f womanhood and the emerging m an-nature system, political authority and social organization. In the second stage I shall try to show how Ram m ohun Roy subverted the rite of sati by introducing his society to alternative symbols o f authority which constituted not merely the first serious reinterpretation of Hinduism in modern times, but also carried the intimations o f a new life style and new principles o f masculinity and femininity more compatible with the large-scale industrial, social and econo­ mic changes then taking place in Indian society.1 To sharpen the analysis, I shall avoid details o f the history o f the reform and Ram m ohun’s public and private lives. Instead, I shall emphasise only some lesser known aspects o f Roy’s early inter­ personal experiences which provide im portant clues to his theory of reform and to the ‘inner’ meaning for him o f the crises of his people and his time. It was this meaning which influenced Roy’s private responses to the older symbols o f authority involved in the rite of sati, and his public struggle to introduce new authority symbols more congruent with the emerging psychological and cultural realities in his community. To the extent he succeeded in his historical role, it was again this meaning which cut across numerous levels and sectors of human behaviour, offsetting private history against collective self-definition and personal synthesis against a diffused collective response to environmental change.

Sati

3

The Logic o f a Ritual Sati, literally a virtuous wife, was the practice o f widows burning themselves on the funeral pyres o f their husbands (though some­ times the wives took poison or were buried alive). The rite had been prevalent among upper-caste Indians for at least two thousand years without ever becoming a standard practice. It is not clear when and how the rite first gained a place in Indian culture. A number of studies show that widow remarriage was definitely sanctioned by ancient Hindu laws and the most venerated sacred texts were, if not actually hostile, certainly not well-disposed towards sati. The earlier law-givers, such as M anu and Yajnavalkya, had only recommended a chaste life for widows; others, such as Kautilya, allowed widows to remarry under certain cir­ cumstances. It was in the second or third century a . d . that sati was first recommended in Vishnu Dharma Samhita and it was in medieval India that the rite began to gain a new legitimacy.2 At that time, in some small areas o f the country ruled by Hindu princelings and under military, political and social pressures from the Muslim rulers o f India — sati became frequent and sometimes even broke out as an epidemic. There are many popular stories about how courageous Hindu widows in the middle ages committed jauhar or mass sati after the death of their husbands in battle. However, there is also evidence that it was not entirely a m atter o f courage. Contrary to folklore, even in jauhar there was a strong element o f compulsion. Many reasons for the gradual legitimization of the rite are mentioned: deliberate mistranslation of the sacred texts by the Brahmans; the difficulty of protecting women in times of war, particularly in the middle ages; the decline o f Buddhism and its rationalist-pacifist influence; contact with some tribal and other cognate cultures which believed that the comfort o f a dead man in his after-life could be ensured by burying with him his wives, jewellery, slaves and other favourite possessions.3 Whatever be the reasons, the popularity of sati declined again after the middle ages. We know that by the seventeenth century the practice had become mainly voluntary and took place generally during times of war when it became difficult to protect women. In fact, by the beginning o f the eighteenth century it had become a rare occurrence.

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It was only towards the end of the eighteenth century and in Bengal that the rite suddenly came to acquire the popularity of a legitimate orgy.4 Soon widows were being drugged, tied to the bodies of their dead husbands, and forced down with bamboo sticks on the burning pyres. And, this time, the practice mobilized support from many more areas of social life. For instance, on the cultural plane, the burning was invariably preceded by Kali puja and, otherwise, too, had distinctly Shakta features. 5 Again, on the political plane, the lack of self-confidence o f the British colonial power and its social non-interventionism during the first phase o f the Raj seemed for many a direct endorsement of the practice. In other words, to understand the reform of sati, one must first understand the gestalt o f the cultural and institutional factors which might have helped popularize sati in a given region at a given time. Let me argue the economic historian’s case first. There is no doubt that the rite was partly a primitive Malthusian means of population control in famine-ridden Bengal. Previously, high mortality rates and the prohibition of widow remarriage had helped society to limit the number of mothers to below the level of available fertile women. However, in times of scarcity, these controls became inadequate and, in times o f anomia, widows at certain levels of consciousness seemed useless drags on resources — particularly amongst the upper and middle classes in which women played no direct and manifest economic role. Eighteenth-century Bengal had both the scarcity and the anomia. After about 150 years o f relatively famine-free existence, from 1770 onwards and at short intervals, large-scale scarcities challenged the traditional Bengali concept of benevolent mother deities presiding over a benevolent nature. In 1770 alone about two-fifths o f all Bengalis died in a famine; most of these famines were also accompanied by major epidemics. Anomia too was widespread in the expanding urban world of Greater Calcutta, particularly among the upper caste Bengali gentry, the Bhadralok. The colonial system had generated in them a sense of rudderlessness by forcing them to maintain their traditional social dominance on almost entirely new grounds.6 For example, the new land settlement system was displacing the landed Bhadralok aristocracy with a group of Bhadralok who had defied their caste identity to enter commerce— a profession which in Bengal was typical of the

Sati

5

lower castes. These new landlords were merely investing in land the money they had earned from business in the cities, and they derived social status not from traditional social relations, but from British patronage. As if this was not enough, both groups of Bhadraloks found that the fast pace of monetization, by eroding caste obligations, was depriving them of the historical allegiance of artisans, the service castes and the peasantry. The various caste groups now had to work increasingly within the framework of impersonal, contractual, social relations.7 Finally, though the new system favoured Brahmanic skills for the growing tertiary sector, for the upper castes this became a competitively acquired advantage rather than an inherited asset. So while constituting about 11 per cent of the population of Bengali Hindus, the upper castes accounted for about 55 per cent of the cases of sati, whereas the lower castes, constituting 89 per cent o f Bengali Hindus, contributed about 45 per cent of the victims. This 45 per cent came mainly from the upwardly mobile, Sanskritizing sectors o f the lower castes.8 In other words, the rite was becoming popular not among the rural poor or the small peasantry, but amongst the urban nouveaux riches who had lost part of their allegiance to older norms and had no alternative commitments with which to fill the void. In their simple way some Christian missionaries at the time did relate the growing anomia amongst the elite to the spread of sati. Though they also linked sati to Hindu orthodoxy, the missionaries never lost sight of the class background of sati. Marshman, for instance, felt that ‘the increasing luxury of the high and middling classes, . . . and their expensive imitation of European habits’ made them eager to avoid the cost of maintaining widows.9 Rammohun Roy, too, considered economic gain to be a crucial explanation of the rite.10 Secondly, sati helped manipulate the distribution of property in a society that had rigid property rules. Under the dayabhaga system o f Hindu law operating only in Bengal and some parts of eastern India, the right to property did not arise at the birth of a male co-sharer, but on religious efficacy. Also, a son had the right to separate or dispose o f his property before partition and a widow succeeded to her husband’s property on his death without a male issue even if the family was undivided.11 This relatively liberal attitude to women in Bengal was mainly derived from the

6

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region’s institutional flexibility, its non-Brahmanic (mainly tribal and Buddhist) traditions and the greater emphasis which the regional culture placed on the feminine principle in the godhead.12 All this gave women a legitimate right to property as wives as well as m others who could influence the decision of their childrencopartners. But these were dangerous privileges to have in a culture where survival was not easy and where there was a high chance that a widow would inherit property or use it for bar­ gaining purposes within the family. Inducing her to commit Suicide was an efficient way of checking this.13 Thirdly, in families seduced away from the path of traditional virtue by the new colonial culture, sati became a means of securing social status a n d renown for virtue. We have already noted that the rite enjoyed some popularity among the upwardly mobile sectors o f Bengali society and that they found in sati a new means o f Sanskritization. Im portant parts of urban Bengal accepted this new means as legitimate: even when the family of the suicide was prosecuted, there was no loss of caste, infamy or disgrace; the family in fact gained in social stature and were ‘backed with applause and honour’.14 The duress exerted on the prospective sati was seen as a test of the piety of a family. Taking advantage of this social sanction, the practitioners of the rite were most ruthless with the widow who, after making the fatal decision to comniit sati, later wavered. A part of the status acquired through sati attached to the suicide herself. This was a powerful incentive in a society where humilia­ tion and bullying were generally the widow’s lot. Economic freedom for her was virtually out of the question; it could be bought only through prostitution or other such extra-social ventures. In addition, there were taboos on her attendance at festive and re­ ligious occasions and severe restrictions on food, decorative dress and adornment. Thus, the sheer misery of a widow’s life partly negated the prospective suicide’s fear of death. Such a future seemed even worse because of childhood prejudices and fantasies about the widow being a bad omen and an evil presence. Fourthly, a large number of Bengali Brahmans did claim sacred sanctions for sati; indeed, sati was seen by many observers of Indian society as a conspiracy of Brahmans.13 It went unnoticed by most o f these observers that the Bengali Brahmans, unlike Brahmans in some other parts of India, were not merely religious

Sati 7 leaders and interpreters of texts, traditions and rites but major landholders and financiers who were increasingly co-opted by the colonial system. Also, they were the caste most exposed to Wester­ nization and the growing conflict between the old and the new.16 As already noted, in the new set-up many had to maintain their traditiona 1status on the grounds of a new set of values and not on the grounds of their older, more internally consistent, life style. As a result, material and status gains were often associated with moral anxiety and some free-floating rage at adaptive problems. And they began to see all restrictions on ritualized expression of these feelings as further threats to their life style. The opposition to sati constituted such a threat for them. In their desperate defence of the rite they were also trying to defend their traditional self-esteem and self-definition.17

But underlying these causes of sati were other causes, even less amenable to conscious control and less accessible to contemporary consciousness. It is with these that this analysis is mainly con­ cerned. First, to reword in psychological terms what we have already said, the rite became popular in groups made psychologically marginal by their exposure to Western impact. These groups felt the pressure to demonstrate, to others as well as to themselves, their ritual purity and allegiance to traditional high culture. To many sati became an important proof of conformity to older norms at a time when these norms had become shaky within.18 Nineteenth-century policy-makers, chroniclers and social analysts sensed this. For instance, the first Governor General of British India, Warren Hastings, attributed the increase in sati in 1821 ‘to the fanatic spirit roused by the divided state of feeling among the H indus’.19 And Collet, too, in saying that the rite was prevalent among passive people and not among the ‘bold and manly’ type,20 indirectly draws attention to the difference between the exposed easterners, feeling increasingly impotent ritually, and the unexposed northern and western parts of India, still mainly outside the areas o f direct British rule and yet undisturbed in their traditional life style. Others also noticed that there had been only one instance o f the wife of a dead Indian soldier of the colonial army committing sati,21 and that the incidence of sati was highest in the urban areas,

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among high and upwardly mobile castes, and in areas more exposed to Western impact.22 In other words, sati may have involved Hindu traditions, but it was not a manifestation of hard-core Hindu orthodoxy. Secondly, sati expressed the culture’s deepest fears of — and hatred towards — woman and womanhood. The earliest available myth about sati speaks of a Rajput wife who poisoned her husband. From this ‘crime’, Diodorus Siculus said in 314 B.C., the ‘institution took its rise’.23 One does not know how popular the myth has been in different periods of history and in different parts of India, but it does summarise the intense fears o f aggression and annihila­ tion and deep longings for nurture and benevolent mothering that had always been associated with Indian, and particularly Bengali, concepts of womanhood. As in most peasant cultures, the dominant image of authority in the peasant cosmology of Bengal had always been feminine. It was that of a mother goddess who was the original or basic power, Adyashakti, and the ultimate principle of nature and acti­ vity, Prakriti. The personification of this principle was Chandi, the traditional goddess o f the region. Though apparently asso­ ciated with only the Shakti cult, a cult in turn associated with the elite castes in Bengal, the mother goddess constituted the basic irreducible elements in Bengali cosmology.24 One o f the most striking features of the rise in the popularity of sati was that it coincided with a gradual bifurcation of the Chandi image. Why did this coincidence occur? Why was the bifurcation necessary at that point of time? Perhaps frequent natural calamities and the new colonial culture, which constantly invalidated the older assumptions of living, created the need for a new psycho-ecological balance in which the aggressive aspect of cosmic m otherhood would be better recognized. Perhaps some cruciai sections of Bengali society had lost faith in the sustaining feminine principle in the environment and, in reaction, built a more powerful symbol of womanly betrayal, punishment and rage.25 In any case, by the end of the eighteenth century, the sacred authority image of Bengal came to be clearly defined by two co­ ordinates: Durga, the demon-killing protective mother as well as the giver o f food and nurture, and Kali, the unpredictable, punitive mother, till then the goddess of a few marginal groups like dacoits, thieves, thugs, prostitutes and now — increasingly and revealingly

Sati

9

— of the exposed elites and quasi-elites of greater Calcutta, the babus.26 Durga, an unknown goddess only a few decades earlier, now became the most popular deity and made Durga Puja the most popular religious and social festival of the region. Kali became the new symbol of a treacherous cosmic mother, eager to betray and prone to aggression. She also came to be associated with almost all the other major rituals generally cited as instances of the cultural decadence of the age, and against each of which Rammohun Roy and almost every other reformer of the region fought. It was this new psychological environment which mothered the folk theory of sati, that the husband’s death was due to the wife’s poor ritual performance and was her self-created fate. The theory imputed that the wife brought about the death o f the man under her protection, by her weak ritual potency and by deliberately not using or failing to maintain her latent womanly ability to manipulate natural events and fate.27 An important part of the cultural identity of women in India had always been the mytho­ logical figure of Savitri, the wife who through her tenacious piety brought her husband back from death. It was this identity which widows seemed to defy. All widows consequently seemed to be failures in propitiation and ins.ances of homicidal wishes magi­ cally coming true. This demonology was associated with two major rationalizations of the rite. The first was expressed in the fear that, without the authoritarian control of the husband, the widow would stray from the path of virtue; the second in the imputation that women were virtuous only because of external rewards and punishments and not because they had internalized social norms. The con­ temporary pro-sati literature repeatedly mentions the frailty of women, their ‘subjection to passion’, lack of understanding and quarrelsomeness, and their ’want of virtuous knowledge’. All three allegedly made them untrustworthy and fickle.28 Sati was therefore an enforced penance, a death penalty through which the widow expiated her responsibility for her husband’s death. Simultaneously, it reduced the sense o f guilt in those confronted with their rage against all women. Punishment by authority became, in an infantile morality, a proof of culpability.29 It perpetuated the fantasy of feminine aggression towards the husband, bound anxiety by giving substance to vague fears of

10 A t the Edge o f Psychology women, and contained the fear o f death in a region where death struck suddenly and frequently due to what, by popular consensus, were whimsical, feminine principles in the cosmos. On the other hand, to the extent women shared these fantasies about their ritual role and responsibility for the death of their husbands, sati was also associated with the introjection of the terrorizing maternal aspects of femininity, guilt arising from this self image, and the tendency to use the defence of turning against one’s own self in atonement. Finally, this use of widows as scapegoats and the fear o f woman­ hood were related to the culturally typical myths and early ex­ periences surrounding mothering. As will be argued in a later section, a central feature of the psychological life o f an Indian is his deep ambivalence towards his mother, operating within the Indian family system both as a source of close, individuating authority and as a source of uncertain, almost fickle, nurture.30 Widows reinvoked the infantile rage towards personal mothers who always threatened to fail and towards cosmic mothers who at that point of history tended to confirm the uncertainties and ‘betrayals’ of the former. The ‘vague rage' generated by adaptive impotence — the ‘fanatic spirit roused by divided feeling* which Hastings speaks of — may have underwritten the process further.31

All these forces converged in the culture of the babus. Borrowing from some of the recessive aspects of Bengali folk culture and from particularized Brahmanism,32this babu culture made a sadistic sport out of sati. And to the extent this culture was itself a product of Western and modern encroachments upon the traditional life style, sati was society’s weirdest response to new cultural inputs and institutional innovations. In 1818 one Oakely, an administrator at Hooghly near Calcutta, tried to explain the higher incidence and growth o f sati in greater Calcutta in the following words: It is notorious that the natives o f Calcutta and its vicinity exceed all others in profligacy and immorality o f conduct; and while the depraved worship o f Kali, ‘the idol o f the drunkard and the th ief, is ‘scarcely to be met with in distant provinces’, it abounds in the metropolis. Elsewhere, none but the mosi abandoned will openly confess that he is a follower o f Kali. In Calcutta we And few that are n o t . . . . By such men, a suttee is not regarded as a religious act but as a choice entertainment; and we may conclude that the

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11

vicious propensities of the Hindus in the vicinity of Calcutta are a cause of the comparative prevalence or the custom.33 Charles G rant, seeking clues to Hindu ‘insensibility’ in general and cruelty to women in particular, found them in the cruelty and licentiousness of gods, particularly Kali, the increasingly popular goddess o f the Calcuttans.34 No one noticed that the goddess in her new incarnation was neither intrinsic to the Brahmanic tradi­ tions nor to its Bengali variant; nor did they know that the much maligned Kali puja was not even mentioned in the well-known Tantric texts of the region and was a new institution.35 Did Rammohun Roy accept the equation between sati and the content of Hindu orthodoxy? Apparently he did. It was ‘the peculiar practice of Hindu idolatry which’, hé felt, ‘more than any other pagan worship, destroys the texture o f the society’.36 That is why to him the legal prohibition of sati was not enough. By itself, it did not even seem very attractive.37 According to him, the root of the pathology was that ‘advocates o f idolatry and their misguided followers . . . continue, under the form of religious devotion, to practise a system which . . . prescribes crimes of most heinous nature, which even the most savage nation would blush to commit.’38 So, it was Hindu idolatry which had to be attacked first : The natural inclination o f the ignorant towards the worship o f objects resembling their own nature, and to the external forms o f rites palpable to their grosser senses . . . has rendered the generality o f the Hindoo com­ munity . . . devoted to idol worship, — the source o f prejudice and supersti­ tion and o f the total destruction o f moral principle, as countenancing cri­ minal intercourse, suicide, female murder, and human sacrifices.39

Thus, like his contemporaries, Roy also thought Hinduism to be the culprit. Yet obviously the causal relationship between sati and Hinduism was not so simple and perhaps it would be truer to say that it was a rather small group of exposed, marginalized men who sought in Hinduism a support for their anomic response to structural changes. The new and popular version of sati was their creation, and so was the new concept o f a more terrorizing cosmic motherhood by which they sought to justify it.

The Roots o f Dissent A closer examination of Rammohun Roy’s writings and personal

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A t the Edge o f Psychology

history reveals deeper sensitivities, however. He not only linked sati to the community's mode of worship, but challenged its basis by suggesting new sex role norms and sexual stereotypes, and by showing the spurious links the practice had with Hindu tradi­ tions. The word sati is a derivative of the root sat, truth or goodness. The widow by dying with her husband proved that she was true to him and virtuous. Roy shifted the onus of showing fidelity and rectitude to others. While men seemed to him ‘naturally weak' and ‘prone to be led astray by temptations of temporary gratifi­ cations’, women seemed to him to have ‘firmness of mind, resolu­ tion, trustworthiness and virtue’; they were ‘void of duplicity’ and capable of ‘leading the austere life of an ascetic’.40 This challenge to traditional sexual identities was to have im­ portant implications for the history of reform movements in India. During the following hundred years, nearly all such movements centered around the cause of women and the dominant models of social intervention were frequently attempts to work through the peasant society’s historical ambivalence towards women.41 Roy’s reinterpretations of the older concept of womanhood and the older relationship between maleness and femininity were thus aspects of a more durable theory of social reform.42 The reasons for this link between Roy’s model and the reforms of the next generation are not particularly obscure. The various structures introduced into India by British colonialism assumed a new colonial culture which, while being compatible with traditions, would include within it new concepts of public activism and ethics, political power, interpersonal skills and professional participation. All these concepts were deeply associated with definitions of masculinity and femininity in both the greater Sanskritic culture and Bengal’s folk version of Hinduism. It is to Rammohun Roy’s credit that he was the first to sense this and delineate a model of reform in which a new definition of womanhood would be the central plank. This cultural sensitivity and cognitive innovation was ‘his main contribution to the emerging culture of modem India. The connection between the reformer in Rammohun Roy and the reform o f sati brings us to his personal history, as it epitomized his society’s basic problems at that point of time and to the solution which Indian society found for itself in Rammohun Roy’s life and personality. In other words, it brings us to his earliest exposures

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to concepts of power, activism, motherhood and religiosity, his first conflicts around the interlinkages among these concepts, the distinctive sex role images to which his family sensitized him, and the early validations and invalidations in him o f the typical regional myths and fantasies centering around masculinity, femininity, nurture, propitiation and defiance. Rammohun Roy was bom in 1772 in a Vaisnava Kulin Brahman family in a village about 100 miles from Calcutta. The family had been culturally atypical for at least two generations. Contem­ porary revenue records mention that after the death of his grand­ father, his father and uncles ‘did not live together as a joint family, but were divided in food, estate and interests’.43 This complete nuclearity of the family astounds one; in eighteenth-century Bengal the joint family may not have been the norm, but it certainly was the normal ideal. Even though a majority of Hindus stayed in partly-nuclear households, the nuclearization rarely went this far among the prosperous, landed, upper castes.44 Perhaps the Roys, being a family of urban bureaucrats, were more fully exposed to the unsettling effects of the changing political economy of eastern India than is evident on the surface. The impact of this deviation on Rammohun Roy’s early ex­ periences was deep. However, before describing this impact, mention must be made of a few features of a typical joint household in India which, distorted by the process of nuclearization, had a direct bearing on the way Rammohun Roy conceptualized the problems of his society. The first of these features is the tendency in an extended family to expose the growing child to a number o f adult authorities and discourage him from distinguishing between ‘near’ and ‘distant’ relations amongst these authorities. The aim is to deter the growth of ‘emotionally exclusive’ loyalty towards one’s own nuclear unit within the larger family. Within such a pattern of diffused authority and joint responsibility, the father generally plays a distant and non-committal role in relation to his children. He is neutralized as an immediate, intimate authority with a manifest and direct interest in his children. Once again, the aim is to blur the boun­ daries of the nuclear units. However, the emotional restrictiveness of the father-son relation­ ship in the joint family does not apply to mother-child intimacy.45 In fact, the culture takes some care to see that the decisive memory

14 A t the Edge o f Psychology trace for the individual remains the experience o f the primordial intimacy with the only effective figure he has known within the family: his mother. In his relationship with other members, the son is categorized by his sex and age role. He is judged by standards which are impersonal. It is the mother who individualizes him.46 The culture also strengthens this intimacy by ‘idolizing’ woman as a mother (to contain her conjugal role as wife and to stop fissures developing along the margins of nuclear units) and by devaluing wifehood (which induces her to look at her son as one who would give her status). Being necessarily the sole immediate source of power, nurture and wrath in early childhood, it is the mother who becomes the ultimate symbol of authority as well as the ultimate target of defiance. The result is a deep ambivalence which links the concept of maternal authority to that of an undependable nurturant, prone to betray and eager to aggress.47 In personal fantasies and cultural myths it produces a persistent preoccupation with maternal warmth and a persistent anxiety about motherly fickleness, aggression and counter-aggression. It also produces strong counterphobic at­ tempts to glorify constancy in mothering and to rationalize its fluctuations as due to human frailties and aggression towards the mother or her symbols, which could be corrected by suppliance, sacrifice and restitution.48 The impact of these forces on the young Ramm ohun Roy’s personality can only be guessed. For instance, it is probable that the culturally prototypical m other-son relationship might have become a source o f heightened ambivalence within the nuclear household of the Roys. Both the mother and the son may have found themselves face to face in a situation where there were few structural constraints on within-family behaviour and expressive style. Again, the father might have become not merely the sole male authority and male role model within the family, but also an immediate interpersonal reality, stressing the need for a strong, intervening, paternal authority who would delineate, for himself and his sons, a clearer social identity. Strangely, this deduced pattern neatly fits what little we know about Rammohun Roy’s early interpersonal environment. Some­ how both his parents appear to be exaggerated versions o f tradi­ tional Indian parents, with some aspects of their personalities heavily underscored by the demands o f a nuclear family.

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15

The mother, Tarinidevi, whose turbulent relationship with her son is now accepted history, was the fervently religious daughter of a priestly family. She wielded, it is said, ‘considerable influence over her husband’ and was the ‘real power at home’.49 She not only ‘set the general tone of family life’, but directed practical affairs normally outside the prerogative of Indian women.50 However, it is principally a certain ruthless fidelity to a cause which made Tarinidevi the most effective figure within the family. Iqbal Singh comes nearest to the maternal figure I want to invoke. He sums up Tarinidevi thus: . . . a remarkable woman but in quite a different and unconventional sense. She w a s . . . cast in a much stronger mould than the other two wives o f Ramakanta . . . Whatever convictions Tarinidevi held she held strongly and with all the tenacity o f a woman’s will, though it is true that these convictions were not illumined by any deep understanding or moderating charity o f judgement. Equally, she did not lack firmness of purpose, though, again, this firmness was not tempered by any quality o f compassion and perceptive­ ness. . .51

This tenacious fidelity to convictions had a history. Before marriage Tarinidevi had been a devout Shakto and, hence, not exposed to the glorification of passivity and emotional pacifism which has always been an important part of Vaisnavism all over India. After marriage she changed her allegiance — enthusiasti­ cally according to some, and with a vengeance, according to others — to her husband’s denomination, ‘as was expected of a good wife’.52 Whatever be the social and familial pressures behind that apparently innocuous change, by a number of accounts it was this overnight transform ation which encouraged Tarinidevi to make intense overt conformity to the family denomination the keynote o f her self-image. But rejected loyalties die harder than that. The Shakto com­ mitment to forms and rituals, which Tarinidevi brought into the Vaisnava culture of the Roys, only forced her to model her Vaisnava self on her aggressive, ardent, anti-ascetic, Shakto identification. And the constraints of the pacifist asceticism of Vaisnavism only ensured the indirect but ruthless manner in which her persistent Shaktoism was expressed after marriage. To quote Iqbal Singh again, she had . . . a hard core o f intractibility verging on ruthlessness she may have derived from her religious background . . . They owed allegiance . . . to Kali whose

16 A t the Edge o f Psychology beauty is beyond good or evil, and carries with it, inexorably and ever­ lastingly, the intimation of terror no less beyond good or evil.53 The ‘hard core of intractibility verging on ruthlessness’, with which Tarinidevi sought and defended her ideological purity was also reflected in her mothering. The children were drawn into her ‘intricate web of ceremony and form’, her ‘almost neurotic attention to every minute detail of worship and observance’, and her ‘de­ lirium o f pieties’.54 They had little protection in a culture where such traits were often considered aspects o f feminine virtue and in a family where power decisively tested with the m other.55 The correlation between power and fiery purism that the mother demonstrated might have carried other associations too. Many years afterwards the son was to suggest that his m other’s family had shown a certain purity o f avocation and fidelity to faith, which his father’s family had not. My maternal ancestors, being of the sacerdotal order by profession as well as by birth, and of a family than which none holds a higher rank in that profession, have up to the present day uniformly adhered to a life of religious observances and devotion, preferring peace and tranquillity of mind to the excitements of ambition, and all the allurements of wordly grandeur.5* The son may have also sensed early that power did not reside in the apparently patriarchal forms, but in the personalities that gave them substance. And the substance in this case was Tarinidevi’s authoritarian ritualism which made traditions not merely a way o f life but an ideology. The nuclearization o f the Roy family only underwrote this pattern o f dominance, and the asso­ ciations among power, intervention in the real world o f events, feminine identification and feminine cause. Thus Tarinidevi was perhaps destined to become the ultimate target as well as the model o f rebellion for her son. Along one axis, she was bound to generate in him a sweeping hostility towards women, towards the cultural symbols associated with mothering, and a defensive rigidity towards the mother-worshippers o f Bengal. This hostility did not follow his exposure to the patriarchal elements o f Christian, Buddhist and Islamic theologies; it was merely endorsed by these alternative systems.57 At the personal level, top, this hostility hounded modern India’s first theoretician and activist for women’s liberation throughout his life. N o one who reads about Rammohun Roy’s troubled

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relationships with his three wives, his extra-marital peccadilloes, his long and bitter legal battle against his mother, his lonely life in a separate house away from his orthodox wives and orthodox children allegiant to their mothers, can fail to sense the depth o f his rage against women. When he finally left India in 1830 to defend the proscription o f sati in the British Privy Council he began his journey for the cause of Hindu women by ‘forgetting’ to inform his youngest wife of his departure. If one considers this to be the final evidence of Rammohun Roy’s latent disdain for women, there are the questions he wrote to be put to his mother in the Calcutta High Court, after she had filed a false suit against him on behalf of her step-son: . . . have you not instigated and prevailed on your grandson the' Com­ plainant to institute the present suit against the said Defendant, as a measure o f revenge; because the said Defendant hath refused to practise the rites and ceremonies o f the Hindu Religion in the manner in which you wish the same to be practised or performed? Have you n o t . . . estranged yourself. . . from all intercourse with the D efen d ant. . . ? Have you not repeatedly declared . . . that there will not only be no sin but that it will be meritorious to effect the temporal ruin o f the D efendant. . . ? Have you not publicly declared that it will not be sinful to take away the life o f a Hindoo who forsakes the idolatr^ and ceremonies o f worship? . . . Declare solemnly on your oath, whether you do not know and believe that the present suit would not have been instituted if the Defendant had not acted in religious matters contrary to your wishes and entreaties and differently from the practices of his ancestors? D o you not in your conscience believe that you will be justified in your power to effect the ruin o f the Defendant and to enable the complainant to succeed in the present s u i t . . . ?58

Inevitably, this perception of a vindictive, homicidal mother led to a deep sense of hurt and anger and in turn to a haunting sense of guilt. Mdre so because, in the final reckoning, Rammohun Roy defeated his mother decisively on every issue. He defied her religious orthodoxy, defeated her economic and familial powers, won his legal suit against her, and later on virtually denied her motherhood. In other words, the defeat he inflicted on her was total. And Tarinidevi, that proud matriarch, had to end her days humbly sweeping the steps o f a temple at a well-known place of pilgrimage. Total defeats are psychologically dangerous, but so is total victory. It was no different with Rammohun Roy: Whenever he spoke o f his mother, it was with warm affection and a 'glistening

18

A t the Edge o f Psychology

eye'. The glistening eye itself was, perhaps, a screen for something too deep for tears. Behind it a more perceptive observer might well have registered the febrile pulse o f a remorse for which even the most convincing intellectual essays in self justification could offer no effective therapy.59

Such a sense of guilt seeks large-scale rationalizations as well as large-scale reparations. 1 shall describe in a while how Ram m ohun’s reformism did ultimately erect a magnificent structure o f public atonement. All this, however, does not negate the fact that, along a second axis, Tarinidevi was also bound to generate in her son a sharp awareness o f the power, individuality, capacities and rights of women. I have already mentioned that Rammohun tried to reverse the traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity in his culture. These efforts were directly influenced by Roy’s expanded awareness of what women were and could be. To this expansion of awareness Tarinidevi had contributed handsomely. Not merely that. When his contemporaries assess him as ‘shrewd, vigilant, active, ambitious and prepossessing in his manners’,60 one is tempted to relate this image to descriptions of Tarinidevi — pur­ poseful, authoritative and self-confident — managing the affairs of the Roys and fighting a continuous battle against all outer and inner encroachments on her newfound identity. This was a part of his self the reformer could ill afford to waste. In fact, it was on this combination o f rage, guilt and admiration that Rammohun Roy based his perception of an inverse relationship between authority images around which his community’s faith was organized, and the needs o f the contemporary world. Ram­ mohun Roy had to try to topple Bengal’s transcendental symbols of motherliness; and it had to be for the sake of Bengal’s suffering women. Let us now turn to the mother’s lack-lustre consort and the family’s grandest failure: Ram akanta Roy. Occupied with opportunities, nities, profits and possibly profiteering,61 he was in many ways a typical product as well as a representative of the Bhadralok response to new social forces. Or so it might have seemed to his son. There is some vague evidence that Ram kanta’s failures as an authority figure were, for his son, the first adaptive failures of the com­ munity. Ram akanta was, in the mellow and euphemistic language o f an earlier generation, ‘an upright and estimable m an’, and ‘noted

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for his quiet and retiring disposition’.62 This disposition, some say, was an outcome of his unhappy work experiences. He was the son of an urban bureaucrat, and had been a functionary in the Nawab’s court at Murshidabad in north Bengal. It is said he was sacked for inefficiency and dishonesty a short time before Rammohun was born. It has also been suggested by chroniclers belonging to a less generous age, that the occupational failure of Ram akanta was neither singular nor unprecedented. It was ‘one o f a series which ended only with his death’.63 We do not know how far this career demonstrated to him and to his sons his ineffectiveness as an urbanite, as a member of the growing tertiary sector, and as a male authority in the family. But we know his reaction to these failures. He defended himself by an interpersonal withdrawal which was almost pathetic. He ‘was often so disgusted with the treatment he received that he would neglect his affairs for a while, and retire to meditate and tell Harinam beads in a garden of Tulsi plants’.64 Another biographer is more explicit. Ramakanta, he says, ‘did not command any great ability or resourcefulness . . . when things did not go wel l . . . [he] retreated into the brittle shell of his Vaisnava devotionalism . . ,’65 Apparently, both in the family and in the outside world, he re­ mained ‘singularly colourless, almost inchoate and lacking in clear focus, when contrasted with the granite figure of his second wife’.66 In these, the Vaisnava idealization of passive submission and deindividualization provided him with an important con­ sensual validation of his personal life-style and self-concept. Perhaps the young Rammohun Roy was not taken in by this belated return to religion. Perhaps, at a certain level of con­ sciousness, he connected the father’s resignation of power within the family to his losing his Brahmanic potency, traditionally m aintained through spiritual exercises and scholarly skills.67 There is a clue in what, many years afterwards, Rammohun Roy once said about his m other’s consort: M y ancestors were Brahmins o f a high order, and from time immemorial were devoted to the religious duties o f their race, down to my fifth progenitor, w ho about one hundred and forty years ago gave up spiritual exercises for worldly pursuits and aggrandisement. His descendants ever since followed his example.68

W hat he meant by this description is made obvious by what he said about his mother’s side o f the family.

20

At the Edge o f Psychology

Given his retreatist style, Ram akanta did not pay much attention to his children. For them he remained a distant, detached and impersonal symbol of authority.69 Yet the nuclear household he ‘headed' and the exposures to which his family was subject de­ manded an altogether different style o f functioning. The need for a male authority, who would show some competence in handling the contradictions within the Bhadralok life-style, almost certainly must have been felt by his growing sons, sensitized to exactly these needs by the family and subcultural experiences and searching for a more viable male identity. Instead, Ram akanta continued to play the traditional roles of the father as an ‘intruding stranger’ and as a ‘castrated victim of an aggressive mother’.70 The distance between Ram akanta and his son produced less intimate rancour than that produced by the relationship between Tarinidevi and her son, however. Perhaps there was an awareness in both father and son that the father was fighting a battle not unlike the son’s. And indeed, sharing the crisis of values in the Bengali babus, Ramakanta was trying to evolve a viable style of social adaptation, even if with low sensitivity and poor success. Not surprisingly, Rammohun Roy’s spirited adolescent confronta­ tions with his father always carried suggestions of mutual respect and empathy. Certainly they were free from much of the bitterness which his confrontation with the mother generated.71 It is note­ worthy that the two well-known instances of separation between the father and young son both ended with the son being accom­ modated. (The worldly-wise son did not opt for reconciliation in a third instance when reconciliation would have meant economic disaster for him.72) In adulthood too, though Rammohun Roy saw whenever tense, dejected or ill, ‘the frowning features of his father rise unbidden on his imagination’,73 he could recount humor­ ously, and without rancour or disrespect, his differences with his father.74 In sum, Ramakanta and his son found each other more accept­ able antagonists than Tarinidevi and her son. To some extent at least, in spite of all the discouragement which R am akanta’s per­ sonality provided, Rammohun Roy did try to move towards the father, to establish communication with him, and to see in him a possible source of support and a possible model o f social sensitivity.75

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The Design o f Reform How did Rammohun Roy relate these early contradictions to the reform o f sati? A number of suggestions can be made. First, his earliest interpersonal experiences and conflicts had convinced him that religion was the key to the process of social change in India.76 Piety was not Rammohun Roy’s strong point and he himself was perhaps not very intensely a man of religion. If anything, he was a hard-headed man of the world, a materialist who believed religion to be an expression of man’s economic and social conditions, and a hedonist in practice. There are even reasons to suspect that he held, along with what some have called his ‘theistic passion’, attitudes compatible with agnosticism.77 However, Roy had seen the central role religion played in the lives of his parents and his culture. He also knew, from personal exposures, that religion could be a great divider, that it was in religion that authorities could be most intimately faced and successfully defied. And being a practical idealist, he was unwilling to sacrifice this information for the sake of any readymade ideological package. As part of this larger awareness, Rammohun Roy’s first contri­ bution to the nineteenth-century model of reform was the theory that his community’s form of mother worship and the related deeper concerns with mothering and orality — expressed, as he saw it, in ‘the peculiar mode of diet’ that had become ‘the chief part of the theory and practice of Hinduism’ — constituted the crux of traditions in Bengal. In this he was a precursor of a second generation of reformers who were to make heterodoxy in food and the attitude to women the major symbols of defiance in nineteenth-century Bengal, and conformity to commensal and other oral taboos the first criterion of orthodoxy:78 The second theme in Rammohun’s model was the equation which he made between the anomic babu life-style and the new content of Bengali Hinduism. His response to the religious and social situation of Bengal was a new theology and a new projective system incorporating a different set of authority images. Sati, to him, was only part of a wider syndrome. More basic was the obsessive rigidity and the deadly seriousness of rituals organized around the image of a threatening and violent mother deity. Rammohun Roy had to reject these rituals exactly as he had to

22

A t the Edge o f Psychology

reject the Manbhanjan play in late childhood. Both as a psycho­ logical defence and as an ideology, the cultural concept o f sacred motherliness could not maintain its compatibility with the inner life of one who had faced so much maternal hostility and held in store such deep anger against his mother. The image o f a powerful, irascible celestial mother — who was propitiated only when the self-castrated son identified with his ineffective father — was authentic, but had to be vehemently denied. Invalidated by both outer and inner experiences, the Bengali pantheon became for Roy a perversity, a source of magic which did not work. But as in the case of his own mother, this rejection of cosmic mothers, too, was bound to arouse deep moral anxieties. And he had to cope with these anxieties by means of a spirited battle to protect women from men’s aggression, by fighting for their rights in different sectors of life and, trivial though it might seem, by being impersonally, but consistently and even aggressively, polite and courteous to the women he encountered in his daily life.79 Roy’s Brahmoism incorporated both these themes.80 First, it tried to banish the older gods from the lives of all Bengalis. Each god became to the first Brahmo a part of ‘heathen mythology’ and represented ‘the gross errors of a puerile system o f idol worship [not] becoming the dignity of human beings’.81 He rejected Kali because in her worship ‘human sacrifices, the use of wine, criminal intercourse, licentious songs are included’ and ‘because debauchery . . . universally forms the principal part of her followers’ ;82 he rejected Shiva, the submissive consort of Kali, because he was a ‘destroying attribute’ and a family man ;83 and he rejected Krishna because he seemed a ‘debauch’ and had killed his nurse-maid by sucking her blood while being breast-fed.84 In other words, not only the themes o f homicidal mother and acquiescent father, but also those of matricide and ‘infanticide’ had to be eliminated from the Hindu projective system. Instead, for the first time in a modern Hindu sect the concept of the deity was sought to be made patriarchal. Apparently, what Ram kanta could not do for his son, the semiticized Brahmo concept o f godhead could: it projected a paternal authority — firm, reliable, and convincing — that could be offset against the fearsome inner authority of his m other.85 Brahmoism also managed to give to the conjugal role o f Bengali women an importance and dignity it never had before. It attacked

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the matriarchal status of women in the family and religion by emphasizing their role in the world o f public activities, and it sabotaged the sacred symbols and images with which Bengali women identified and sought compensation from in their narrow and constricted lives. Instead o f their magical powers and magical capability o f doing harm, they had in Brahmoism the justification for wielding real and direct power as individuals with the right to live their own lives.86 Both the themes made eminent sense to those exposed to a new set of effective, impersonal, organizational authorities — all un­ responsive to acts of propitiation, sacrifice and ritual conformity. The rewards these authorities controlled were based on criteria irrelevant to anchored values: personal autonomy, achievement and initiative, denial of the fated and the ordained, shrewd com­ petitiveness, and ambitious this-worldliness. All this could not but make apparent the latent need for a new male self-definition at the centre of which would be a new concept of authoritative masculinity. The Brahmo godhead was an attempt to meet this need and to help Rammohun Roy’s private fantasies establish an inverse association with the grand myth of his culture. By toppling the absolute maternal authorities in the sphere of the sacred, he was only coping with his nuclear conflicts and trying to sabotage a tradition’s symbolic core. In this attempt the monism of advaita came in handy. Rammohun Roy gave a new meaning to this monism by ‘misreading’ Shankaracharya’s ultimate objective as the revival of monotheism in India on the basis o f Vedanta.87 This was absurd because Vedanta posited an attributeless Brahman and rejected all forms o f prayer in favour o f pure contemplation of G od.88 Rammohun Roy, on the other hand, actually succeeded in invoking the image of a patriarchal God, ‘the author and governor of the universe’ — ‘He, by whom the birth, existence and annihilation of the world is regulated.’89 A recent observer, who has nothing to do with psychology or the social sciences, correctly identifies the basic imagery involved in this divine sex change: The very word Upasana employed . . . in the sense . . . o f ‘propitiation and worship', implies a dualistic conception o f an individual's soul's longing for the divine objective. . . Rammohun's Brahma, though mentioned as ‘imperceptible and indefinable’ is a very real Brahman, who is ‘the author and governor o f the universe’ and therefore not wholly devoid o f attributes.90

24 A t the Edge o f Psychology What purpose did such a monism serve in Rammohun Roy’s model of reform? The answer could be given in four parts. First, monism has traditionally smoothened the acceptance in India of dissent, new religious cults and alternative interpretations of sacred texts, and justified them as diversities that were part of a larger transcendent unity. By giving salience to Shankara’s system, Rammohun Roy not only opened a new debate amongst his contemporaries on Hinduism as a unified religious system and as a single cultural strain, but also made available for the next generation of reformers a powerful legitimacy of dissent and a tool for social intervention.91 Second, the Vedas and Upanishads were a sufficiently vague and complex authority to stand new interpretations. Like the fluid psychological and cultural system that greater Calcutta had become, here too was a collection of fluid sacred authorities, on which a reformer could impose his personal meaning. In stressing an inter­ pretive system which gave greater scope to dissent, Rammohun Roy therefore also gave centrality to texts which were best suited for plural reinterpretations. Third, the emphasis on monism strengthened the social position o f women by separating the feminine principles of nature and feminine godheads from the social role of women. Unlike in the West, where the concept of a patriarchal god has often legitimized male dominance, in India divine matriarchy burdened women with the task of coping with shared fantasies of womanly responsibility for failures of nature and nurture. Rammohun Roy’s theology was an attempt to liberate Indian women from this responsibility. Fourth, in rejecting his mother and her faith Rammohun Roy also rejected rituals and rites as the central part of Hinduism. This was basically an attack on folk Hinduism and, perhaps, a latent attempt to further Sanskritize the Hindu little cultures. In this respect at least Rammohun Roy had not misunderstood the Upanishads and his hero Shankara. All his life he pleaded for ‘disinterested worship’ and ‘faith in God which leads to absorption’, unconditionally rejecting ‘rites which have future fruition for their object’.92 It was in fact an interested worshipper, trying to sanctify the disinterested worship he himself could not offer the gods, in the hope that he would be forgiven because his own interests were not merely personal. The fact remains, however, that Rammohun Roy’s use of

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advaita was no less instrumental than his use of other religions. Perhaps only Adam, his collaborator and friend, had an inkling of i t : Rammohun Roy, I am persuaded, supports this institution [Brahmo Samaj] not because he believes in the divine authority of the Ved, but solely as an instrument for overthrowing idolatry. To be candid,. . . he uses Unitarian Christianity in the same way.93 We now have a better idea of which ‘goddess’ Roy was trying all along to overthrow and which ‘god’ he wanted to install in her place. To say this is not to flaunt an uncompromising psychologism. It is to recognize the fact that no reform is entirely a public event, By its very nature, it is also a private statement and Rammohun Roy’s was such a statement. It is not incidental that his reform was a last compliment to his father and the final gesture of repara­ tion to his mother. We have seen that his parents were something more than the parameters of a personal history: they also repre­ sented the contradictions of an age and a culture. The incidental fact is that Rammohun Roy’s reform happened to be the only success Ram akanta ever attained and the only victory Tarinidevi ever won.

NOTES 1. In this context, the recent controversy among historians over who was ultimately responsible For the decision to legally proscribe the rite is both misleading and irrelevant. The fact remains that Roy was an embodiment of the anti-sati movement to both anti-sati and pro-sati groups as well as to the British rulers (who in turn were ambivalent towards the rite because of their non-interventionist social policy). And it was only he who provided a con­ sistent explanation of the practice and a theory of reform which could be understood by all these three groups. In fact, one may guess that it was this ability to sum up in his personality not merely the hostilities of the reformers, but also the latent ambivalence of society towards the rite, which makes Ram­ mohun Roy a symbol of 19th century reform movements. To initiate a search for the roots of his reformism in his personal life is also therefore an attempt to locate the major psychological needs behind the social forces which might have powered the rite and then rendered it anachronistic. 2. A.S.Altekar. The Position o f Women in Hindu Civilization (Banaras: Banaras Hindu University, 1938); and K. M. Kapadia, Marriage and Family in India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1958).

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3. Upendra Thakur, The History of Sucide in India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1963). 4. Detailed district-wise statistics on sati are given in Sophia D. Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, edited by D. K. Biswas and P. C. Ganguli (Calcutta: Sadharon Brahmo Samaj, 1962), pp. 83-4,200,250. Cf.M.J.Mehta, ‘The British Rule and the Practice of Sati in Gujarat’, Journal of Indian History (August 1966) Vol. XLIV, Part II, No. 131, pp. 553-60. 5. The word Shakta is the adjective derived from the noun Shakti, which literally means power, but usage-wise also refers to the ultimate principles of sacred maternity and femininity and to the most powerful symbols of sacred authority, the goddesses Durga and Kali. The Shakti sect of Hinduism, with its emphasis on the worship of Durga and Kali, is, in Bengal, mainly a sect of the upper castes. The pacifist Vaisnava sect, which emphasizes the worship of Krishna and his consort Radha is mainly associated with the lower castes. 6. Under the new regime, they continued to own three-fourths of all estates in Bengal, dominated both politics and administration, and controlled most of the trade in the hands of Indians. On famines, their social results and normlessness, some data are available in N. K. Sinha, The Economic History o f Bengal, Vols.I and II (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1965), and R. C. Majumdar, Glimpses of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukho­ padhyay, 1960). 7. N. K. Bose, Culture and Society in India (Bombay: Asia, 1967), pp. 358-68: Sinha, Economic History of Bengal, Vol. II, p. 206. 8. See Rajat K. Roy, ‘Introduction’, in V. C. Joshi (ed.), Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1975), pp. 4-6. On Sanskritization or emulation of greater Sanskrit» or Brahmanic culture as a means of social mobility, see M. N. Srinivas, Social Change in India and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California, 1966). 9. One reason for this could have been that women did not play any direct part in the productive process in these sectors. 10. He perhaps had a personal reason to see economic motives behind the ritual. While neither his father’s surviving wives nor any other widow in his family had committed sati when the family was prosperous, once their fortunes started declining, things changed. Rammohun Roy’s elder brother’s widow burnt herself in 1811 before his eyes, it is said. This fact has been challenged, but if true, it might have established a link in his mind between economic uncertainties and the rite. 11. P. V. Kane, History of Dharmasastra, Vol. Ill (Poona: Oriental Research Institute, 1946), pp. 558-9. 12. S. C. Mitra, ‘On „he Origin and Development of the Bengal School of Hindu Law’, Law Quarterly Review, 1905, 21, pp. 380-92; and 1906, 22, pp. 50-63; quoted and discussed in Kane, Dharmasastra, Vol. Ill, pp. 558-9. 13. Interestingly, Rammohun Roy provides a more or less similar interpretation both in his famous appeal to the Governor-General and in his treatise on women’s property rights in India. See The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy. Vol. I. Kalidas Nag and Debojyoti Burman (ed.) (Calcutta: Sadharon Brahmo Samaj, 1945-8), pp. 1-10; and Roy’s letter to Mrs Woodford, ibid., Vol. IV, pp. 90-1.

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14. Rammohun Roy quoted in P. K. Sen, Biography of a New Faith (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1950), pp. 34-5; R. C. Majumdar, 'Social Reform', in R.C. Majumdar, A. K. Majumdar and D. K. Ghose (ed.), British Paramountcy and the Indian Renaissance, Part II (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1965), p. 270. 15. For example, Thomas Bowrey, A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal. 1669-1679, edited by R. C. Temple (Hakluyt Society and Kraus Reprint Ltd., Neudelul Lekhtenstein, Series 2), Vol. II, pp. 197-205. Rammohun himself in a general way believed in this conspiracy theory; see his English Works. Vol. II, pp. 43^ , 48-9. 16. This was primarily because the colonial system needed the Brahman>c skills of reading, writing and accounting and the legitimacy which only Brahmans when coopted by the system could give to it. 17. A. F. Salahuddin, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal, 1818-1835 (Leyden: E. J. Brill, 1965), p. 126, mentions pride and economic discontent as two possible causes of support for sati. 18. Cf Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Cohn argues that the European witch-hunt in the middle ages was a response to the fear of regression to an earlier belief system which was only partly egoalien. 19. Sen, Biography of a New Faith, pp. 34-5. 20. Dispatch of 15 August 1822, quoted in Collet, p. 198. 21. Ibid., pp. 258-9. 22. See also J. H. Harrington, cited in K. Ingham, Reformers in India. 1793-1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 50. 23. W. H. Carey, The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company, Being Curious Reminiscences During the Rule of the East India Company from 1600 to 1858, 1882 (Calcutta: Quins Books, 1964). 24. Some of these cultural parameters have been identified by S. B. Dasgupta, Bharater Shakti Sadhana o Shakta Sahitya (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1960), J. C. Roy Vidyanidhi, Puja-Parban (Calcutta: Viswa-Bharati, 1951); Chintaharan Chakravarti, Banglar Palparban (Calcutta: Viswa-Bharati, 1953); and Tantrakatha (Calcutta: Viswa-Bharati, 1955). 25. These new maternal archetypes established links with a number of secondorder deities presiding over important aspects of life which were becoming sectors of stress. Annapurna or Annada, another incarnation of Durga, was the protector of crops and the soil and the giver of food. Durga’s daughters, the benevolent Saraswati and the benevolent but fickle Lakshmi, were the god­ desses of learning and wealth respectively. Two irascible goddesses, Olaichandi and Sheetala presided over cholera and small-pox. Shashti ruled over conception, childbirth and child-health — important functions in a community with high birth- and infant-mortality rates. Superstitions were dominated by elderly witches and the goddesses invoked in Tantra — an originally Buddhist but now Shakto ritual and magical technique (for murder, injury or enslavement from a distance) becoming popular at about this time (the first mention of Radhatantra, the major tantric text, was in a list of books prepared in 1777; Chakravarty, Tantrakatha) All these were related to the primal image o f Kali. The traditional strategy of propitiating these goddesses was some form of sacrifice: human or animal, personal or group, actual or symbolic. But the

28

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

A t the Edge o f Psychology most preferred sacrifice was human, as it was human sacrifice which Durga and Kali were believed to relish most (Vidyanidhi, Puja-Parban, pp. 10-23, 77-260). It was as if one could placate the celestial mothers by identifying with their cannibalistic selves and aggressing for the mother's causes. In sum, the Durga and Kali aspects of motherhood were not as orthogonal as they may at first sight appear. On the social and religious life of the babus of the time, see R. C. Majumdar, Nineteenth Century Bengal; and Binoy Ghose, Kalkata Culture (Calcutta: Bihar Sahitya Bhavan, 1953) pp. 91-8. This was evident in the attitude towards widows in general, the various mores they had to conform to, their self-hatred and self-inflicted sufferings. See Collet, Rammohun Roy, pp. 92-5; also Rammohun Roy, Granthabali, Vol. Ill, Brajendranath Bandopadhyay and Sajanikanta Das (ed.) (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, n. d.). On punishment as an infantile proof of guilt and as a stage or aspect of human morality, see J. Piaget, Moral Judgement o f the Child (Glencoe: Free Press, 1948). A well-known brief review of available research on this subject is by L. Kohlberg, 'Development of Moral Character and Moral Ideology’, M. L. and L. W. Hoffman (ed.), Child Development Research (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1964), pp. 383-431. See Section III below. For an extended treatment of the literature on the subject see Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar, ‘Culture and Personality in India’, in Udai Parekh (ed.). Research in Psychology (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, in press). On rage as a response to adaptive impotence, see E. H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 214. This particularization of the greater Sanskritic traditions in Bengal was the other reinterpretation taking place in the community. It is, however, beyond the scope of this paper. Collet, Rammohun Roy, p. 85. The higher incidence of sati in the Calcutta area is borne out by published statistics. See Collet, Rammohan Roy, pp. 83-4. Also Majumdar, Nineteenth Century Bengal, p. 269. Charles Grant, 'Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect of Morals, and on the Means of Improving It’, written in 1792, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1812-1813, 10, Paper 282, pp. 1-112, particularly pp. 60-6. Chakravarty, Tantrakatha. The philosophical practice of Tantra, though Buddhist in origin, had become by this time relatively central to the Shakti cult. Popular belief considered Kali puja an essential part of it. Rammohun Roy, 1816, English Works, Vol. II, p. 60. Collet, Rammohun Roy, p. 75. It is this hesitancy, more than anything else, which has created recent doubts about Rammohun Roy's anti-sati position. Rammohun Roy, 1819, English Works, Vol. II, p. 23, also p. 52. Ibid., p. vii. Ibid., Vol. VI, p. 5; and Vol. Ill, pp. 87-137; and Granthabali, Vol. Ill; Collet, Rammohan Roy, pp. 92-5. See on this subject “Woman Versus Womanliness', Chapter 2. Patricia Uberoi has drawn my attention to the fact that a similar latent theory

Sati

43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

29

of social changes had emerged in China as a part of the May Fourth Movement (1915-20) which fought the traditional Chinese proscription of widow re­ marriage, and the institutional encouragements given to widows to commit suicide, particularly if dishonoured. I. Singh, Rammohun Roy, Vol. 1 (Bombay: Asia, 1958). For a brief discussion of the incidence of joint families in various social strata, see M. S. Gore, The Impact of Industrialization and Urbanization on the Aggarwal Family o f Delhi Area (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1961, Univer­ sity Microfilms, Ann Arbor), Chapter I, pp. 2-59. See P. Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1966). On warm non-demanding intimacy in the mother-son relationship in the early years of growth see also G. M. Carstairs, The Twice-Born (Bloomington: Indiana. 1958) particularly, pp. 157-8; Dhirendra Narayan, ‘Indian National Character in the Twentieth Century’; The Annals o f American Academy of Political and Social Science (March 1967) 370, pp. 124-32; and Gore, The Aggarwal Family, p. 11. Ibid., p. 36. This happens also because, to regulate conjugality, a patrilineal or patrilocal society cannot easily minimize the role of the genitor. It therefore emphasises perforce the role of the mother and underplays the role of the woman (Ibid., p. 11-12). See also Margaret Cormack, The Hindu Woman (New York: Columbia University, 1953), pp. 150-1; Aileen D. Ross, The Hindu Family in its Urban Selling (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1961), pp. 101-3. For other sources and aspects of this ambivalence see studies of the traditional Indian system of childrearing in Carstairs, The Twice Born, particularly pp. 152-69; Leigh Mintern and J. T. Hitchtock, ‘The Rajputs of Khalapur*; Beatrice Whiting (ed.), Six Cultures (New York: Wiley, 1963), pp. 203-361; Leigh Mintern and W. W. Lambert, Mothers o f Six Cultures (New York: Wiley, 1964), pp. 230-9; and Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality. Sudhir Kakar has shown that this ambivalence is significantly deeper in Bengal than other parts of India. See his ‘Aggression in Indian Society: An Analysis of Folk Tales’, Indian Journal o f Psychology, June 1974, 49(2), pp. 119-26. See some instances in Kakar, ‘Aggression in Indian Society’, pp. 226-7, 23-6; Carstairs, The Twice- Born, pp. 156-9. Collet, Rammohun Roy, p. 4; and Singh, Rammohan Roy, pp. 22-3. Singh, Rammohan Roy; R. C. Dutta, Cultural Heritage of Bengal (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1962), p. 91. Singh, Rammohan Roy, p. 19. Ibid., p. 20; Collet, Rammohan Roy, p.4. Singh, Rammohan Roy, p. 20. Ibid., p. 20, 22-3. See a comparable situation in the childhood of a later generation Brahmo in Nandy, ‘Defiance and Conformity in Science: The World of Jagadis Chandra Bose in Alternative Sciences (New Delhi: Allied, in press). Roy’s letter to Gordon, 1832, reprinted from Athenaeum and Literary Gazetteer in S. C. Chakravarti (ed.), The Father o f Modern India (Calcutta: Rammohun Roy Centenary Committee), 1935, Vol. II, p. 119.

30

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57. Even in latency, he was already intolerant of the concept of a weak god sub­ servient to a female deity. He would start crying, it is said, whenever a particular scene of the folk play Manbhanjan was enacted. The scene depicted Krishna, the supreme god of the Vaisnavas, placating Radha, his consort, by weeping and clasping her feet, while his peacock headgear and clothes lay rolling in the dust. Collet. Rammohun Roy, pp. 5-6. 58. Cited in Singh, Rammohan Roy, pp. 80-1. 59. Ibid., pp. 183-4. 60. Missionary Register, Church of England, September 1816; in Singh, Rammohan Roy , p. 161. 61. Ibid.; S. K. De, Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1962), 2nd edition, p. 503. 62. Sivanath Shastri, 1911, quoted in Collet, Rammohan Roy, p. 2. 63. For example, Singh, Rammohan Roy, p. 16. 64. Collet, Rammohun Roy, p. 14. 65. Singh, Rammohan Roy, pp. 21-2. 66. Ibid., p. 19. 67. Both Spratt and Carstairs have suggested that the Brahmanic culture equated cerebral skills with sexual power. 68. Letter to Gordon, in Chakravarty, Tantrakatha, p. 119. 69. Ibid., pp. 21-2. 70. Carstairs, The Twice-Born, p. 159. 71. Rammohun cited in Singh, Rammohan Roy, p. 38, and Collet, Rammohun Roy, p. 6. 72. Collet, Rammohun Roy: Singh, Rammohan Roy. 73. W. J. Fox, A Discourse on the Occasion of the Death o f Raja Rammohun Roy (London, 1833). Quoted in R. Chanda and J. K. Majumdar, Selections from Official Letters and Documents Relating to the Life o f Raja Rammohun Roy, Vol. I (1771-1830) (Calcutta: Oriental Book Agency, 1938), p. xxxiii. 74. Collet, Rammohun Roy, pp. 6-7; Singh, Rammohan Roy, p. 38. 75. This ability of the father to tie his son to himself ‘in such away that overt re­ bellion or hate was impossible’ has been hypothesized to be a source of re­ formism. See Erikson, Insight and Responsibility, pp. 202-3. 76. R.C. Majumdar, Nineteenth Century Bengal, p. 27, describes how in opposition to David Hare's idea of establishing a college, Rammohun pleaded for the estab­ lishment of a Brahma Sabha (see n. 2, p. 39). Though he also took part in the propagation of Western education in India, it was without rejecting the primacy of religious reform. One also remembers that Rammohun founded in 1822 an Anglo-Hindu school, being dissatisfied with the secular education provided by the Hindu College. 77. See for instance Sumit Sarkar, ‘Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past', in Joshi, Rammohan Ray, pp. 46-88. 78. Sivanath Shastri, 1903, Ramtanu Lahiri o Tatkaleen Bangasamaj (Calcutta: New Age, 1957), pp. 85-8, 101-3; Rajnarayan Basu, Atmacharit (Calcutta: Kuntaline, 1908); N. K. Bose, Modern Bengal (Calcutta: Vidyodaya, 1959), p. 48. It should please psychoanalytically-minded readers to know that, as the pioneer of this movement and as Tarini Devi’s son, Roy himself was a great

Sati

79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

31

gourmet. At home he ate Bengali, Mughal and Western food. He drank choice wines with his European friends and to the chagrin of orthodox Calcuttans, employed a Muslim as one of his cooks. Yet such were his oral needs to defy that, when he went to England, he took a Brahman cook with him and, at a dinner given by the directors of the East India Company in his honour in London, he turned a pukka Brahman and stuck to boiled rice and water. One does not have to be a psychologist to sense the uncertainty towards women in one who always got up from his chair when his wives entered his room, particularly when the whole world knew that the wives were on the worst of terms with Rammohun and, being aggressively orthodox, could never appre­ ciate this formal Western gesture. By 1825 Roy's religious propaganda grew into an organized faith based on the Vedas. He established a Vedanta College in that year and, finally, in 1828, the Brahmo Sabha. In 1830, Roy established a Church in Calcutta to worship in a congregational form, 'the One Eternal Unsearchable and Immutable Being who is the Author and Preserver of the Universe'. The Church deed prohibited the entry of any picture or image in the Church. English Works, Vol. U, p. 92. Ibid. Letter to Estlin, 1827; English Works, Vol. IV, p. 90; also Ibid., Vol. II, p. 23. Ibid., p. 92. These imageries, however, dissociated Brahmoism from some of the basic symbols of both the greater Sanskritic culture and Bengal’s folk Hinduism. Later Brahmos tried to remedy this to some extent. Ibid., Vol. I, particularly the tract on property rights of women, pp. 1-10. Rammohun Roy, quoted by R. C. Majumdar in Majumdar, Majumdar and Ghose, British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Vol. II, p. 101. Max Muller says, ‘Rammohun Roy himself, when . . . he fortified himself behind the ramparts of Veda, had no idea what the Veda really was. Vedic learning was at a low ebb in Bengal, and Rammohun Roy had never passed through a regular training in Sanskrit. Biographical Essays, 20, Vol. VIII, in Sen, A New Faith. English Works, Vol. II, p. 174. Dey, Bengali Literature, pp. 516-17. It is not surprising that Rammohun Roy greatly admired Luther who he felt had reinstated monotheism and toppled the idolatry practised by Catholicism. Similarly he aggressively rqected the Baptist and Anglican concepts of Trinity. See on this theme 'The Making and Unmaking of Political Cultures in India’, Chapter 3. Roy, Translation of Kathopanishad, 1818, English Works, Vol. Ill, p. 93, 94. Quoted in Collet, Rammohun Roy, p. 225.

WOMAN VERSUS WOMANLINESS IN INDIA An Essay in Cultural and Political Psychology i At one plane, human civilizations can be seen as a continuous effort at expanding awareness o f the subtler and more institu­ tionalized forms o f inequity and the suffering born of it. Person-toperson aggression and personal sadism have been punished since almost the dawn o f civilization; for survival, every society had to do that. But, as Bertrand Russell was fond o f pointing out, social ethics always lag behind private ethics. So slavery, racism, colonial exploitation, and genocide were not only permitted, but often encouraged. Some controls, it is true, were m aintained; the sacred texts everywhere defined social rights and social wrongs and prescribed limits to group violence. But the observance of such limits was not based on an understanding o f the less obvious forms o f oppression o r o f the social institutions and psycholo­ gical defenses which legitimized such oppression. For instance, civilization had existed in the West for many centuries before men such as Owen, Marx, and K ropotkin formulated ambitious ex­ planations o f intraspecies aggression in terms o f social groupings which till then had been seen as ‘naturally’ different.1 Today the idea o f a continuum between the exploiters and the exploited, between the aggressors and their victims, is commonplace. It was not so only a century ago. There were still other, and subtler, forms of inequity. Sigmund Freud, for instance, was one o f the first to point out the inequities associated with biological strata like age and sex. Though Friedrich Engels had noted earlier the vulnerability o f women in general and Western women in particular, in some ways he merely extended the formal model o f class analysis to the condition of women.2 Freud had less faith in hum an nature and even less willingness to grant that economic institutions were the only means o f oppression human intelligence and nature could devise. He traced the root of inequity to a more fundamental stratificatory system ‘designed’ to

Woman Versus Womanliness in India

33

derive its strength from m an’s evolutionary experience, namely, psychobiological growth. As a pioneer, he understandably directed attention to the biological stratum which was most vulnerable at the time, namely, children. For the first time in human history he systematically analysed how over the centuries man has exploited children, using them to express sadistic and narcissistic impulses. He also showed how man has built enormous defences to deny to himself his cruelty and exploitation. There were times when infanticide and the torture o f children were widespread in the world, yet some o f the most sensitive and humane thinkers o f the age never protested against them. In fact, children were tortured by men such as Milton and Beethoven. Child labour was acceptable till about fifty years ago in reputedly the most civilized parts o f the world. The sexual abuse o f children was comm on: some o f the greatest Greek philosophers enthusiastically supported the homo­ sexual use o f children.3 It would be rash to conclude that they were vicious hypocrites—they were no more hypocrites than the defenders o f the democracy o f Greek city states which rested on slavery. They just did not have a large enough span of moral aware­ ness. Human morality had not yet acquired (or perhaps it had lost) adequate depth at that point o f time. Gregory Zilboorg’s deservedly famous paper suggests something very similar for the m an-w om an relationship.4 Here, too, oppres­ sion results from attem pts to deny one’s deepest anxieties, which are projected to an exploitative relationship institutionalized over centuries. The most socially valued attributes o f the male, Zilboorg argues, are a result o f the natural selection imposed upon him by the female’s original power to instinctively sense which mate was biologically fitter. This primal dominance arouses in man in­ security, jealousy, and hostility towards woman. He has a phylo­ genetic awareness that his primordial role is ‘highly specialized as no more than a temporary and ephemeral appendage to life’, as a ‘parasitic’ fertilizer.5 Till now he has had no civilizational awareness that he has been trying to work through this basic hostility by limiting the full possibilities o f woman through sheer oppression. It is an indicator o f how far man has succeeded in these efforts that in many societies the evolutionary and biological primacy of woman has given way to an institutionally entrenched jealousy of m an on her part. It is this complex psychosocial phenomenon

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which Freud appropriately called penis envy.6 I do not think, as many defenders o f woman do, that Freud was wrong in his analysis; there is enough data from some o f the major Western societies to support him. He merely missed the historical tragedy that was involved in this reversal of roles. All this is by way o f a long digression. The point is th is: the present awareness o f the constricted role o f woman in Indian society and in public affairs is part o f an ongoing process o f civili­ zational change and must be so analysed. This demands that we identify the structure of defences, individual as well as cultural, which has given meaning to the role of woman in Indian society, defences which have been challenged in recent times by new waves of social consciousness. Only then can we hope to isolate and control the long-term processes o f social and psychological changes in this sphere. For example, everybody knows that the survival rate of boys in India is much higher than that of girls. But only scattered individuals and groups feel passionately about it, in spite of the fact that the number of vulnerable young girls in India is larger than that of landless labourers. Even fewer persons are sensitive to the fact that this indirect female infanticide— or, to use Johan G altung’s term, structural violence toward woman — is mainly a function of maternal neglect, a weird expression of woman’s hostility toward womanhood and also, symbolically, tow ard her own self. This classic instance of the psychological defense of turning against self by identifying with the aggressive male draws attention to the way in which some social institutions have made woman herself a participant in her self-repudiation and intra­ aggression. The oppressive reality for woman, one might suggest, is now only partially outside her. A part of that reality has been introjected through a long historical process of social learning, and the learning has been thorough. It has been said that m an’s cruelty toward man is exceeded only by m an’s cruelty tow ard woman. But even m an’s cruelty toward woman is no match for the cruelty of woman toward woman.7 To ignore this aspect of womanhood in India is merely to strike a moral posture congruent with the strident tones of the female liberators of women in the West; it abridges Indian awareness of some of the latent justifications of oppression in this society. Such a statement itself challenges vested interests and arouses

Woman Versus Womanliness in India

35

anxiety, so I shall begin with a consideration of the linkage between the Indian's traditional world image and his means of livelihood. II An agricultural society has its own distinctive symbiotic relation­ ship with nature. Since the time of neolithic agriculture, this distinctiveness has lain in the central role of woman in society and culture. It was she who was primarily involved in ‘gentling and nurturing and breeding’; it was her ‘capacity for tenderness and love’ which gave the earliest agricultural settlements of man their touch of ‘security, receptivity, enclosure, nurture’; and it was she who made fully possible the growth of civilization.8 A number o f studies have found that such a society tends to emphasise the feminine principle in nature, to see nature as a mother who is irascible and unpredictable, propitiable only through a wide variety of rites and rituals.9 Particularly in societies where nature continues to be the dominant partner in the m an-nature dyad, im portant themes in folklore and religious texts are often the fecundity and bounty of nature as well as her frequent denial of sustenance to men who have poor means of controlling the fickle mother and are totally dependent upon her for survival. This is certainly true of India. Though the Brahmanic tradition attempted to limit the dominance of woman in society, the preAryan dominance of woman was retained in many areas of life, particularly in the symbolic system.10 This undeniably is a matrifocal culture in which femininity is inextricably linked with prakritiy or nature, and prakriti with leela, or activity. Similarly, the concept of adya shakti, primal or original power, is entirely feminine in India. It is the male principle in the godhead, purusha, that is reliable but relatively passive, weak, distant, and secondary. That is why the deities that preside over those critical sectors of life which one cannot control — such as the success of crops and the occurrence o f famines (food), protection against cholera and smaPpox (personal survival), and childbirth and child health (perpetuation of race) — are all motherly figures. All the more cruel rituals which are mentioned as indicators of Indian medieva­ lism, have centered on the goddesses: sati, or the enforced ritual suicide of women after the death of their husbands; child sacrifice at Sagra San gam; infanticide to ensure the longevity of dams,

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bunds, and buildings; and human sacrifice of various forms. The thugs, or men who robbed after the quasi-ritual murder of unwary travellers, considered themselves devotees of Kali. For that matter, most of the marginal groups, such as thieves and dacoits, have sought meaning as social beings by being devotees of one ‘black* goddess or another, that is, at another level, by identifying — and identifying with — an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother. In other words, the ultimate authority in the Indian mind has always been feminine. It is this authority that the traditional Indian male propitiates or makes peace with through symbolic or real aggression against his own self and by identifying with what he sees as the passive, weak, masculine principle in the cosmos. Ill There is a congruence between this structure o f authority and the traditional family and socialization systems. Studies of child rearing done in the more orthodox sectors of Indian society have repeatedly shown that in the critical years of life the mother is the only true and close authority to which the child is exposed. In his relationships with others, the Indian child has a wide spectrum of predefined roles and role-specific behaviour. There is distance and fragmentation of self in these interpersonal relationships. It is only with respect to his mother that he is his whole self and recognizable as an individual.11 Associated with this in the son is a deep feeling of ambivalence toward a controlling yet discontinuous mother. He often sees her as a treacherous betrayer, mainly because of her intermittent presence and nurture which are in turn due to the exigencies of her familial role, social obligations, mores, and taboos.12 The Indian’s fantasy life is to a great extent organized around this image of an angry, incorporative, fickle mother, against whom his anger is directed and from whom through a process of projection, counter­ aggression is feared.13 His model o f male identification, too, is the father who is more a m other’s son than a w oman’s husband, and therefore is swayed by the same fantasies and fears. For the Indian mother, on the other hand, the son is the major medium of self-expression. It is her motherhood that the traditional family values and respects; her role as wife and to a lesser extent as daughter are devalued and debased. The woman's self-respect

Woman Versus Womanliness in India

37

in the traditional system is protected not through her father or husband, but through her son. It is also through the son — and for that matter on the son — that she traditionally exercises her authority.14 Here, thus, is a case of psycho-ecological balance. W hat nature and economic systems emphasise, the family and cultural systems underscore. No wonder all major social reforms and attempts at social change after the beginning of British rule have centered on woman and femininity. It is by protesting against or defying the traditional concepts of woman and womanhood that all Indian modernizers have made their point. On the other hand, all forms o f conservatism and protests against m odem Western encroachements on Indian society have taken shelter in and exploited the symbol of motherhood. IV Thus the m other-son relationship is the basic nexus and the ultimate paradigm o f human social relationships in India. To an extent this is true of all cultures, but only in a few cultures have the loneliness and self-abnegation o f woman as a social being found such elaborate justification in her symbolic status as a mother. Since motherhood is a compensatory mechanism, society can manipulate and control a woman by forcing her to take on her maternal identity, and a man by forcing him to take on the son’s role, whenever there is a crisis. The culture tends to shape critical public relations to fit or exploit that symbolic paradigm. Yet simultaneously Indian society inculcates in women self­ doubt, and in men a certain ambivalence toward womanhood. This ambivalence is very different from the ambivalence which the Western man feels toward woman or the universal fear which Zilboorg, Bettelheim, and Salzman diagnose. In Indian society, except for small sectors in which the martial values predominate, the man’s fear is not that he will lapse into womanliness and thus lose his masculinity or potency. In fact, potency in India is not generally something men strive for, protect or protest in the external world. The masculine fear here is that a m an may fall foul of the cosmic feminine principle, that woman will betray, aggress, pollute, or at least fail to protect. There are two major corollaries of such uncertainty about the

38

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cosmic feminine principle. The first of these can be stated in the form of a dialectic but is perhaps a m atter of the various levels at which the Indian man lives his psychological life. On one plane, he is continually afraid that he may become too independent of the maternal principle o f authority, as a son too defiant of the power of cosmic motherhood, and too close to open anger toward his mother. On the other, he is constantly anxious that he will be incorporated by an all-encompassing, powerful mother, lose his autonomy and individuality altogether, and be reduced to the ‘safe’ but ineffective role of the father. Secondly, ‘bisexuality’ in India ha» always been considered an indicator of saintliness and yogic accomplishments. Perhaps it is considered an indicator of having successfully coped with or transcended one’s deepest conflicts about femininity and masculi­ nity. Perhaps it has something to do with the traditional concept of ardhanarishwara, or bisexual god, associated with the deity that combines a god’s grandeur with yogic asceticism, namely Shiva. However it be, one who is close to godliness is expected to show a little less concern with the worldly division between the sexes and a little more ability to transcend the barriers imposed by one’s own sexual self-hood. He is expected to subscribe to values which are unfettered by society’s prevalent sexual identi­ ties.15 In India, unlike in many Western societies, what can be called the softer forms of creativity and the more intuitive and introspective styles of intellectual and social functioning are not strongly identified with femininity. N or is masculinity very closely linked with forceful, potency-driven, ‘hard’, and hardheaded modes of intrusive behavior. Sex-role specific qualities are dif­ ferently distributed; in fact, the concept of potency in Indian high culture has always had a private, introversive quality about it. The Brahm an’s concept o f ritual and intellectual potency has nothing in common with the manifest extroversive concept of potency in the m odem West. Brahmanic potency is ‘derivable’, as it was in medieval Europe’s monastic orders, from displaced sexual potency through abstinence and denial of one’s sexual self. This has another aspect. In the twilight zones of consciousness in which creative minds dwell, there is always a certain emphasis on the ability to turn inward and live in one’s own inner world; a tendency to accept intuition, tenderness and caritas as values;

Woman Versus Womanliness in India

39

a sensitivity to one’s natural environment and to the ‘latent’ com­ munication among men; and the capacity to use media of selfexpression which mobilize feelings, imagery, and fantasies. In the West this has invariably meant becoming more feminine. That is why psychological studies o f creative men in the West frequently show that one of the best predictors of creativity in men is the extent of their psychological femininity. In the Western context Berdyaev has argued that the figure of Christ is androgynous and that ‘all creators must be so if they are to conceive and bear greatly and whole’.16 Understandably too, there are elements of pathos and loneliness associated with such a search for bisexuality in societies where, even at the level of symbols, males dom inate.17 My own studies o f creative men in India roughly corroborate this finding, but with one im portant caveat. The Indian, apparently, is not more creative only when he is more feminine, i.e., when he can better accept his feminine self. His creativity also consists in his being able to identify the cosmic feminine principle with his own internal concept o f authority and then in defying this authority and simultaneously making large-scale symbolic reparations for this defiance. This is a m ajor ingredient o f the relationship between womanliness and creativity in India. The isomorphism between one’s inner controls and the society’s concept of authority sharpens one’s sensitivity to the basic symbolic system of the culture and makes one more rooted in the culture’s style of self-expression. O n the other hand, this defiance of one’s final and most intimate authority gives an edge to one’s defiance of the shared concept o f authority outside. Clearly, this defiance is one of the corner­ stones of creative effort. There is another aspect to this linkage between creativity and womanliness in India. Public defiance rationalizes one’s more guilt-provoking private defiance. If this public defiance of authority is linked to the cause o f woman, either as an exercise in reform geared to her good or as a purely intellectual exercise in under­ standing her problems, the structure of rationalization becomes stronger and more usable. It binds the moral anxiety triggered by defiance of one’s internal authority and, at another level, atones for that defiance. This atonement — through working for the cause of woman or, in its intellectualized version, through understanding woman and femininity — has been perhaps the single most im­ portant theme in the history of social creativity in India.

40

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Many years ago someone pointed out to me how formidable and powerful the women are in the Mahabharata — the epic which perhaps summarizes the Indian ethos better than any work of social science — and how the story revolves round them. It struck me then as an original viewpoint, and over the years I have been convinced that it is correct in more senses than one. When looking at the styles of creative self-expression during the last two hundred years, a period characterized by a fast tempo of social change and the breakdown of many aspects o f the older life style, one cannot but marvel at the crucial role that woman as a symbol and woman­ liness as an aspect o f Indian identity have played. This linkage is clearer in some parts of the country than in others, because some communities, such as in Bengal, have a greater tendency than others to dramatize the psychological problems of society at large.18 Perhaps Bengal’s tribal base, unsure Bra^manization, deep symbiotic links between means of livelihood and cultural products, and strong feudal traditions have something to do with this.19 At least from Rammohun Roy to Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in the area of social reform, from Bankim Chandra Chatteiji through Sarat Chandra Chatteiji to Satyajit Ray in literature and the arts, from Vivekananda to Aurobindo in religion, womanhood as a symbol and womanliness as a subject of study have been the centrepieces o f creative consciousness in diiferent sectors of Bengali life. Whether in Bengal or the country as a whole, certain closely related modes o f symbolic adaptation have dominated India’s distinctive style o f entry into the m odem world. W hat came into flux in the British period was an entire authority system which involved the invalidation at many levels of the traditional equation between femininity and power, the old concept of propitiation through rituals and magic, and the primal mythical personification o f nature as an inviolate cosmic mother. Some, like Rammohun Roy and Ishwar C handra Vidyasagar, tried to redraw the tradi­ tional definition o f womanly identity, trying to introduce into it new elements drawn from reinterpreted traditions and to endogenize certain Western themes. Their own deeper ambivalence toward woman found in these efforts a personal adaptive device. I have shown elsewhere in this volume how true this was of Roy, and some o f the new biographies of Vidyasagar do not leave us in much doubt on this score either.20 Some with mass appeal

Woman Versus Womanliness in India

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like Sarat Chandra Chatteiji and G ovardhanram Tripathi among writers, and Vidyasagar and G andhi among reformers, tried to legitimize woman’s wifely role in particular and public role in general by stressing in them aspects of her motherliness.21 Some others like Ram akrishna Param hansa and Aurobindo found in m otherhood the supreme concept of a new godhead, rooted in tradition on the one hand and capable o f balancing the overem­ phasis on masculinity in the Semitic religions on the other. In fact, the appeal to many Westerners lay in this concept o f a godhead that could be counterpoised against the patriarchal orientations dominating the Western view o f man and nature. Still others like Bankim Chandra Chatteiji and Vivekananda linked this traditional image of sacred m otherhood to the m odem concept o f motherland, hoping thereby to give a new sanctity to the concept o f nation in an essentially apolitical society. Even Gandhi tried to give a new dignity to women by making a new equation between womanliness and political potency, denying in the process the Western association between maleness and control over public affairs and statecraft; rejecting the martial tradition in India, which, like martial traditions in most other societies, debased womanhood; and abrogating the colonial identity which equated femininity with passivity, weakness, dependence, subjugation, and absence of masculinity.22 His conservatism as well as his modernity, his success as well as his failure, rested on this equation. V In sum, the redefinition of womanhood in presentday India has required a redefinition of the concept o f man and o f public func­ tioning. In this ongoing process, the emancipation of woman and her equality with man have been im portant but not the main issues. They may today lead to vicious debates in small groups of already privileged modern women, but the majority in the hinterland have not surprisingly never considered these themes relevant for social analysis and intervention. To make the issues of emanci­ pation o f woman and equality o f sexes primary, one needs a culture in which conjugality is central to male-female relationships. One seeks emancipation from and equality with one’s husband and peers, not with one’s son. If the conjugal relationship itself remains relatively peripheral, the issues of emancipation and equality must remain so too.23

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Thus in conclusion I must confront the profound yet comm on­ place paradox of every social interpretation of the Indian woman: why do some women in India reach the pinnacles o f public power and recognition while women in general have kept out of large areas o f public life?24 According to some, the ascendancy of certain women is proof that Indian culture does not intrinsically discriminate against women. According to others, these women are exceptions that prove nothing. To psychologists, there is always a continuity between the commonplace and the exceptional. I have already said that, in India, competition, aggression, power, activism, and intrusiveness are not so clearly associated with mascu­ linity. In fact, in mythology and folklore, from which norms often come for traditionally undefined social situations, many of these qualities are as frequently associated with women. The fantasy o f a castrating, phallic woman is also always round the corner in the Indian’s inner world. That is why in some areas of life, disjunctive with the traditional life style and not having clearly defined or well-developed norms, women do not start with as great a handicap as they do in many other societies. Obvious examples of such areas are politics and public affairs and some scientific and religious activities.25 Here public success does not seem to detract from private womanliness. In other words, in such instances the Indian woman can more easily integrate within her feminine identity the participation in what by Western standards are manly activities but in India are either not defined in terms of sex roles or are tinged with trans­ sexual or bisexual connotations. In these areas, Indian women do not have to fight the same battle that their Western sisters have to fight, though some o f them do pretend to give battle to existing norms here too.26 That, o f course, is shadow boxing. I am not concerned here with those for whom the search for freedom and dignity as women has become a search for a new neurotic stability which they hope will defend them as successfully against self-awareness as the now crumbling defences once did. For the more sensitive woman, the challenge is nothing less than redefinition of herself. The first task that faces her is to devise means o f de-emphasising some aspects of her role in her family and society and emphasising others, so that she may widen her identity without breaking totally from its cultural definition or becoming disjunctive with its psychobio-

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43

logical distinctiveness. In the West that may mean defying the limits of conjugality and giving a new dignity to the maternal role of woman ; in India it may involve transcending the partial identity imposed by motherhood and winning a new respect for conjugality. Partial identities always extract a price from those who live with them, either as victims or as beneficiaries. Indian women have paid terribly for Indian insensitivity, but they have also extracted a heavy toll from a society which has not yet learned to live with all aspects of womanhood. In that respect theirs is not what Rollo May would call a case of ‘authentic innocence’ but that o f ‘pseudo­ innocence’.27 This innocence leads one to participate in a struc­ turally violent system because of the unawareness o f one’s power to intervene in the real world and because o f the indirect psycho­ logical benefits of being a victim. But then, ultimately this is no different from ancient wisdom. The victims and beneficiaries o f a system, even commonsense admits, are rarely ever exclusive groups. Modern psychology only strengthens one’s belief that no marauder can hope to be a marauder without being a prey and no prey can be a prey without being a marauder.

NOTES 1. Erik H. Erikson has called attention to the manner in which men and societies legitimized these differences with reference to the latent construct of 'pseudo­ species’. See his ‘Race and the Wider Identity’, in Identity, Youth and Crisis, (New York : Norton, 1968), pp. 295-30. 2. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: Inter­ national, 1942). 3. One even gave elaborate instructions on how to perform well in this sphere, though he was kind enough to advise that one should not stimulate the genitals of a child when indulging in buggery because that might lead to premature sexual growth in the child and be bad for his morals. L. de Mause, ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, in de Mause ed.. The History of Childhood (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), provides excellent data on the treatment of children through the ages. See also my ‘Reconstructing Child­ hood’, Paper presented at the meeting on ‘Alternative Visions as Desirable Societies’, Mexico City, May 1979. 4. ‘Masculine and Feminine, Some Biological and Cultural Aspects’, Psychiatry, 1944, 7, 257-96. See also Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (New York: Collier, 1962).

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5. Ontogenetically, too, it is the female sex which is primal, not the male. See a summary statement in Leon Salzman, ‘Feminine Psychology Revisited, Circa 1970’, American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1971, 31, 123-33. 6. A sensitive interpretation of Freud’s view of womanhood and its humanist implications can be found in Erik H. Erikson, inner and Outer Space: Re­ flections on Womanhood’, Daedalus, 1964, 93, 582-606. 7. For an early psychological analysis of woman's identification with the aggressive male and her hostility toward womanhood see Karl Menninger, Love Against Hate (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1942,), Chapter 4. It may seem too superficial to be important, but in a society like ours, a major obstacle to the equal treatment of woman by man in job situations is the pressure exerted by the insecure female relatives of both male and female job-holders. 8. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1961), Chapter 1. 9. Barbara Smoker, making the point that the Judeo-Christian God was ‘the original male chauvinistic pig’, has tried to show how the position of woman in the original peasant culture of the West changed in response to a ‘divine sex change’. Gradually the fertility goddesses gave way to a patriarchal God who was perceived as the creator of man after his own image. See ‘Women and the Patriarchal God’, The Secularist, (33), May-June 1975, 67-8. 10. See on this theme Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India (New York: Meridian, (1956). The Aryan attempt to contain the importance of woman was more successful in the Brahmanic and Brahmanized sectors than in the rest of society where women retained much of their traditional freedom and prerogatives. 11. See for example M.S. Gore, Urbanization and Family Change (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1968), Chapter 1; also Dhirendra Narayan, ‘Growing up m India’, Family Process, 1964, 3, 148-52. 12. An important element in her familial and social roles is the fact that she is expected to be the main socializing agent for her children, responsible for meting out both rewards and punishments. This fosters the child's ambi­ valence towards her. In many societies, the responsibility for administering punishment is mainly the father’s. Here he is on the whole an outsider to the reward-punishment system for the children. There is also the possibility that the wife resents the husband’s social supe­ riority and dominance and, unable to express it, displaces her unconscious destructive impulses toward him to her son. P. E. Slater, The Glory o f Hera (Boston: Beacon, 1968). Paraphrased in Sudhir Kakar, ‘Aggression in Indian Society: An Analysis of Folk Tales’, Indian Journal o f Psychology, 1974, 49. 119-26, particularly 125-6. 13. G. Morris Carstairs, The Twice Bom (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1957); Philip Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1966). See also Beatrice B. Whiting (ed.), Mothers in Six Cultures (New York: Wiley, 1966). 14. As is well-known, the Indian family underemphasises the wife’s role and over­ emphasises the mother's’ to blur the outlines of the nuclear family and deemphasise it as the basic unit o f family life. Though a huge majority of Indians stay in nuclear households, the values associated with the extended family system are a major influence on intra-family relationships.

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15. See a more detailed discussion of this in Ashis Nandy, 'Ramanujan's Passage to England: A Psychohistorical Note on the Public and Private Culture of Science', Psychoanalytic Review, 1979, 66. One would expect this idealization of bisexuality to lead to understanding and tolerance of the other lex (Judith S. Kestenberg, ‘Vicissitudes of Female Sexuality’, Journal o f the American Psychoanalytic Association. 1956, 4, 453-76). One wonders why this has not happened in India's high culture. Perhaps what the culture emphasises is not so much bisexuality as trans-sexuality. It is in India's low cultures that androgyay as a value has had its fullest impact. 16. N. Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, translated by D. A. Laurie, (New York: Harper and Pow, 1954), as reported in Frank Barron, Creative Person and Creative Process (New York: Holt, Rinehart anc Winston, 1969), p. 105. See also Frank Barron, ‘The Psychology of Creativity', in Frank Barron et al., New Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. II (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1965), p.40; D. W. Mackinnon, ‘The Personality Correlates of Creativity: A Study of American Architects, in P.E.Vernon (ed.). Creativity. Penguin, 1970, pp. 289-311, particularly 305-6. 17. On the tragedy which accompanies the search for bisexuality in the West, see the fascinating study of Lawrence (Cubic, 'The Drive to Become Both Sexes', 77ie Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1974, 43, 349-426. 18. How far this helps the society to ‘work through' these problems by providing tentative solutions — and non-solutions — is, however, a different issue. 19. See a brief discussion of this in Ashis Nandy ‘Sati’: a Nineteenth Century Tale of Women, Violence and Protest, Chapter 1. Kakar, in ‘Aggression in Indian Society', provides interesting comparative data on seven Indian subcultures which show Bengal to be exceptional in its concern with the destructive and threatening aspects of the mother, and un­ concern with the Oedipal conflicts between the father and the son. 20. ‘Sati’, Chapter 1; Binay Ghosh, Vidyasagar o Bangali Samaj (Calcutta: Bengal Publishers, 1958, Vols. I— III); and Indra Mitra, Karuna Sagar Vidyasagar, (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1969). 21. In fact, this redefinition through the new norms of sex-role specific behaviour was tried also by Rammohun Roy in the Brahmo ideology and by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in his style of reform and the rationalizations he offered for them. Nirupama Pota's ongoing study of the four most creative writers of twentieth century Hindi literature (Jay Shankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Sumitra Nandan Pant and Mahadevi Verma) suggest something roughly similar. 22. How central this theme was to Gandhi's political programme has been dis­ cussed by Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth (New York: Norton, 1969). Also see Lloyd and Susannc Rudolph, The Modernity o f Tradition (Chicago: Univer­ sity of Chicago, 1966), Part 2. 23. The theme of equality between the sexes has been less dead, because it also relates to equality between the son and the daughter. So from Rammohun Roy to Jawaharlal Nehru, a number of reformers have made it an important plank in their ideologies of social change. 24. Veena Das, ‘Indian Women: Work, Power and Status', in Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976), pp. 129-45 seems to

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argue that men in India are also kept out of large areas of life. If women do not have access to men’s life, men also do not have access to women’s life. 25. I must remind those who may be surprised by my inclusion of some aspects of religious activity in this list that traditional Hinduism is not an organized religion. Some of the highly organized Hindu sects which have sprung up during the last 150 years are thus clearly discontinuous with the older life style. In such sects women often play important roles. 26. I must reluctantly draw attention to the fact that in India the truly creative women in these areas have rarely been feminists, ardent or otherwise, The battle has been fought by men who have presumed that the plight of women in other areas of life extends to these too. 27. On May’s concepts of childlike innocence and unauthentic innocence, see his Power and Innocence (New York: Norton, 1972).

THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF POLITICAL CULTURES IN INDIA

Culture and Political Culture All societies have traditions, but only a few have traditions which are central, overpowering, and vital. These are the traditional societies, the whipping boys for students of political development. Their pasts are supposed to have a stranglehold on their presents and their futures, and the pursuit o f modem statehood is supposed to be outside the scope o f their ancient ideas o f citizenship. Yet, some traditional societies seem to take better advantage of the civilizations they represent. In these societies, the traditions are not merely dominant and living, but they are also sufficiently pliable, sufficiently complex and sufficiently self-confident to accommodate the society's efforts to redesign its major institutions. Unlike other traditional societies these do not allow their traditions to be supplanted by modern inputs: instead, they continuously try to give old meanings to these new experiences. Ostensibly, such societies are impervious to externally induced changes. Their very cultural autonomy forces them to carry alone, even at the nadir o f their strength and dynamism, both the immense burdens and advantages o f their traditions.1 According to some, these societies live by an awareness o f this fact; according to others, they are doomed by it. But all agree that any discussion of the culture o f politics in such a society must take into account not only the indigenous categories o f analysis, but also the society’s own priorities and its struggle to learn from its own history whenever possible and to free itself from that history whenever necessary.2

Political Culture as Choice At different times in their political history, a people choose to re­ member different features of their past and to emphasise different elements of their culture. One characteristic of a protean civiliza­ tion such as India's is that it has many pasts; depending on the needs o f each age, the nation brings a particular past into its conscious­

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ness. There is much variation within a certain tradition — for example, from the intense, earnest pacifism o f Gandhi, with its extremely limited application o f the principle of unavoidable violence, to the apparently sanctimonious pacifism o f Nehru, combining a universalist humanism with national self-interest, to modern self-confident nationalism, which clearly sees pacifism and nonalignment as instruments o f state policy. In this respect, cultural history is a projection: one reads into it o r takes out o f it according to present-day needs. W hat aspects o f its historical civilization has Indian society been forced to emphasise—or de-emphasise—while building a political community in recent times? Which subcultures, with what traditional skills and idioms, have been given salience by the changing political needs o f the community? These two questions m ark a vantage ground from which one may look at the contem­ porary culture o f Indian politics as not simply a sum mation o f the society's self-defined political values, but also as a collection of phase-adequate modalities o f reaching, changing, or rejecting these values. The critical dynamic is the m anner in which the values and the modalities have been structured into tem porary gestalts by the typical problems faced by Indian politics at each phase of its development.2 From such a vantage ground, it also becomes clear that some o f the m ajor concerns o f past ages are fast losing their relevance for contem porary India, while others, which have been ‘recessive’ in earlier phases, are acquiring a new importance. This process o f selection involves the society’s-unique orientation to politiciza­ tion and political participation. We may conceive o f this orientation as including four interrelated features. The first o f these features o f the ‘Indian system’ is the traditional concept o f politics as an amoral, ruthless statecraft, o r a dispas­ sionate pursuit o f self-interest to which many o f the norm s o f the nonpolitical sphere do not apply.4 The memory o f the long period during which high politics in India remained the prerogative of alien rulers confirms the image o f politics as far removed from day-to-day life. Moreover, Indian society is organized more around its culture than around its politics.5 It accepts political changes without being excessively defensive, without feeling that its very existence is being challenged, and with the confidence— often unjustified—that politics touches only its less im portant self.

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Secondly, the concept o f dharma or piety specifies different spheres o f life as different systems o f ethics;6 it is taken for granted that the values governing politics would be largely inconsistent with those governing other areas of life. At critical moments, therefore, the anomic forces released by political changes do not easily percolate into other areas. When the political sector becomes threateningly disjunctive, or begins to negate some o f the major assumptions o f the society, the traditional lifestyle is not dram ati­ cally disoriented. It is this segmentation which allows Indian society to incorporate the new and the original, by containing them within small compartmentalized areas o f behaviour.7 Thirdly, like the Sinic and Islamic, Indian civilization considers other cultures inferior; but unlike the Sinic and Islamic, this attitude does not extend to the political sphere. Learning state­ craft from others is never precluded, and exogenous political ideas never seem diabolical instruments of subversion. Finally, though Indian society is organized around its culture, this culture lacks an authoritative centre; notwithstanding a priestly caste, there is not even an organized religion. At various times, this has allowed politics to have different functional links with: certain primordial groups and elements o f the great tradition. F o r instance, early in the nineteenth century, when politics most needed a new structure of legitimacy to give meaning to the re­ lationship between the native elite and colonial rulers, and a capacity to redefine the concept o f participation in the till then alien culture o f the growing modern sector, certain caste-specific skills (for example, Brahmanic skills) operating within certain institutionally more open regional subcultures (for example, Bengal) became immensely valuable assets. A t a later time, these same skills and subcultural backgrounds became useless, and even liabilities. The sacred texts have also been used selectively by different groups at different tim es: the first generation o f modernist reformers depended heavily on the Vedas and Upanishads; later, G andhi and the nativists mainly drew support from the less universalist Gita. Such readjustments explain why politics in India often seems to underwrite the traditional cultural and social divisions. The point to remember is that the political process has under­ written different, and frequently antipodal, subcultures or strata at various times. It is, perhaps, this particular combination of cultural forces

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which has reversed the relationship between society and politics in India and given the culture of Indian politics its distinctiveness. Dominant models o f political sociology define the ‘culture of politics’ to be a function o f social, cultural, and psychological processes. In a country where, today, a major political goal of the elites is to alter Indian social institutions, cultural life, and shared personality traits, one is forced, at each historical phase, to re­ examine the relationship between politics and society to see which system is the current pace-setter. Recently in India, politics, supported by the state’s authority, has played the role which econo­ mic and scientific changes played in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, and which the information and media system, youth, and university cultures are increasingly playing in many Western polities. It has acted as the society’s m ajor means of self-correction.

Power, Authority and Dissent A society has not only a unique organization o f power, but also a unique concept o f power. Contrary to popular belief, concern with power was never low in traditional India; if anything, themes of power were ubiquitous in the modal life style. The uniqueness of the Indian concept of power lay in its strong ‘private’ con­ notations.8 The most respected form o f power was power over self — self-control, particularly regulation o f one’s instinctual and materialistic self. Moreover, though rulers were recognized as legitimately wielding authority, the concept of this authority was ill defined. There was little philosophical debate on issues such as the limits to political power, its role in society, and the duties and functions o f those engaged in politics.9 Also, not only did different spheres of action have different authority systems, these areas were also divided by counterweighing authorities. The individual was largely free to choose his authority and follow his own beliefs, rather than to try and actualize collective values.10 The idea o f an indigenous, central, public authority exercising political power did not have much currency, because o f Hindu society’s tenuous relationship, since the Middle Ages, with a succession o f alien political orders, and because o f the large-scale Hindu withdrawal from high poli­ tics. These experiences gradually delegitimized ‘external’ powers

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that had to be attained through competition and intervention in the real world; encouraged the tolerance of the authority of those who already held it, and the rejection o f the concept o f challenging authority from outside.11 This concept o f power has two contradictory implications. On the one hand, the absence of any moral sanction for the ambition to rule makes political power a somewhat illegitimate possession. There is always some pressure on the rulers to indulge in the language o f conspicuous asceticism and self-sacrifice, and to vend even the most trivial politics as part o f a grand moral design — as if power over one’s own self, the moral self dominating the selfseeking instinctual self— legitimizes one’s political power.12 On the other hand, politics is also recognized as amoral statecraft, outside the compass o f everyday living; and although political leaders are expected to assume a self-righteous tone, there is also a certain cynicism about their moralism.13 G andhi’s search for an authentic ‘moral politics’, however Indian or Hindu it may look, was actually a rebellion against this tradition o f politics. W hat, then, are the cultural checks against absolutism? What are the main sources of dissent? These are difficult questions to answer in a society where the time-worn response to dissent is to neutralize it by absorbing it into the mainstream, where defiance o f authority aims not to establish an alternative power structure but to shift the locus of consensus within the existing authority system, and where the dominant tradition is ultimately that of ‘dissent through authority’.14 In other words, the tradition in India is to alter the dominant culture from within, by showing dissent to be a part o f orthodoxy or by reinterpreting orthodoxy in terms o f the needs of dissent. This is especially true o f ideological deviations or innovations, the type of challenge the society has repeatedly faced and become experienced in handling. For instance, new political ideas have always been acceptable in India, welcomed as different aspects o f a larger indivisible truth, and incorporated into the polity. Even when certain political polarities were not reconcilable within politics, they could at least be accommodated within the larger cultural framework.15 The creative significance o f this attitude to ideological dissent is obvious, but there are liabilities too. While abstract idea systems are attractive to the Indian mind, their practical applications are

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not. In fact, a slight contempt attaches to ideas that ‘work' or that can be operationalized or tested. As a result, activism and com­ mitment in the public sphere tend to lack prestige and there are few inner pressures to actualize one’s ideas and ideals.16 The traditional relationship between authority and dissent has another aspect. Charismatic leaders are expected to represent not only the majority o f people, but all people. Thus, the anti-estab­ lishment, too, must be reflected by the legitimate wielders of power.17 Nehru and the early Indira Gandhi symbolized some­ thing more than the axial authority; they also represented the opposition in their fight against what they and others saw as the retrograde pillars of the establishment within the government. Such an attitude frequently reduces opposition to a game, albeit a serious one, played by permissible rules. Opposition from outside the consensual system does not seem opposition at all, but an attack on the ‘true dissenters’ : the power-holders them­ selves.

Politics and Intellectuals At one plane, a nation is an idea. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was the intellectual elite — Brahmanic, urban-centered, and pro-British — who made current the idea o f an Indian polity; India as a political community was, in one sense, their discovery. It is not surprising that intellectuals remained the main protagonists in Indian politics until a few decades ago.18 The first generation of intellectuals in politics believed that this idea of India, and of Indianness, must include a new integrated cultural identity. And they spent the first half of the nineteenth century trying to create a new basis for politics by redefining the older concept of Indianness to make it compatible with ‘modern’ citizenship. Perhaps this was a red herring in a society organized around its culture; it might have been easier to align politics, a more peripheral part o f life, with the existing culture. Perhaps in a compartmentalizing society, this search for congruence was un­ necessary. Perhaps such an aggressively ‘modernist’ position was unavoidable in the first phase of colonialism. The fact of the matter was that the impact of the intellectuals was confined to the small, urbanized, Western-educated, upper caste groups to whom the economic and social changes initiated by the Raj offered

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an entirely new life style.19 It is to them that the idea of India as a political community made full sense. This attempt to alter the Indian’s cultural self soon created an inward-looking defensiveness, an effort to protect self-esteem, and a controversy over the extent to which the Indian political identity could be re-defined without full-scale Westernization. Borrowing from the West continued, but it had to be done covertly and only when it could be justified as a resurrection of India’s past. One factor alone remained unchanged: the politics of cultural selfaffirmation continued to underwrite existing modes o f political participation and leadership. Because the debates centered on the revival or reinterpretation o f India’s past, its sacred texts, and its dom inant religious core, the reformers of political culture remained those who were traditionally its best interpreters, who enjoyed an inherited right to be so, and who were equipped by their socializa­ tion and education to be such interpreters, namely, the Brahmanic literati. N ot surprisingly, as soon as the semblance o f participatory politics evolved in India, the culture o f Indian politics became aggressively anti-intellectual. G andhian anti-intellectualism, for example, was basically an attem pt to shift the centre o f political culture from liberal universalism and reinterpretations o f Sanskritic texts to the hitherto-peripheral, non-Brahmanic cultures o f the new participants in politics.20 These little traditions did not require frequent reassessment to be made m odem ; they were intrinsically ‘m odem ’ if not always in content, at least in the flexibility and scepticism with which the content was handled. Making a virtue o f those elements o f Indian culture which had embarrassed the earlier modernizers, the G andhian movement, with its stress on social activism and a pragmatic ethic, made redundant all abiding concerns with metaphysics.21 After independence, N ehru’s half-hearted attempts to find intellectuals a place in politics could not stop the erosion o f the role o f intellectuals in that sphere. Participation in competitive politics was gradually becoming a full-time job and a vocation with a tradition o f its own; it could not but lead, at least in its earlier stages, to a dangerous undervaluation o f all intellectual assessments of policies! ‘educated’ statecraft, political information processing, and ‘informed guesses’.22 A more populist political culture, a growing faith in realpolitik and the persistence of the old

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belief in the separability o f statecraft from intellectual activity continue to sustain this anti-intellectualism. There is still an all­ round unwillingness to recognize that political decision making may involve a new awareness and use o f knowledge, in a world where information and communications systems are already per­ forming the pace-setting role once performed by economic entre­ preneurship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and imperialism in the nineteenth century.

Politics and Social Hierarchy To the extent politics is a means of changing the distribution of power, political competition in India has come to mean the process through which the older hierarchies have been rendered more fluid and the individual been given more chances to alter his position in society, irrespective o f his niche in the traditional order. Al­ though the plural nature o f Indian society has frequently under­ written the primordial collectivities as a basis for mass mobiliza­ tion, these collectivities have been increasingly forced to compete on the basis of equality, not on the basis of their hierarchical status. In this respect, the old social order has been irrevocably damaged.23 But politics involves not only the occupation of hierarchical status; it includes also the extent to which the theme of hierarchy permeates a political culture. Indian culture traditionally applied the concept of hierarchy to more aspects of life than did many other cultures.24 One result of politicization in India has been that, whereas the criteria and incumbents have dramatically changed due to political competition and specially to electoral mobilization, the principle of hierarchy now applies to many more areas of life, including the expanding modern sector. It is as if the cultural tendency to hierarchize has found in politics a new criterion for social status. Thus the new politics and its. bureaucracy have increasingly attracted status-motivated persons and devalued other ‘limited status systems’—traditional, as well as modem. Persons operating within special status hierarchies, which should be at least partially autonom ous from the central hierarchy (such as the professions), tend to undervalue their occupations and try to rise in ‘general’ status. An appointment as an inconsequential political or bureaucratic functionary often

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seems more im portant than recognition among one’s peers in one’s own area o f specialization. The most creative intellectuals are often lost in government departments, frozen at their level of unimportance; influential positions within the educational systems frequently attract gifted scholars away from creative work; and worst of all, the self-esteem o f persons not having political power tends to get badly damaged. It is paradoxical that while politicians have played a creative role by mobilizing the peripheries of society, by partially demolishing an ancient status system and by undermining the earlier social leadership, in the process they have consolidated their power as a group and occupied the apex o f a new hierarchy. Today, any activity which is outside the sphere of power politics is by definition low status. Although there are some checks against this trend in the traditional estimate of politics as amoral and politicians as un­ scrupulous, Indian society at the moment is struggling to take certain sectors out o f the political arena, to decelerate the tendency of all hierarchies to be dom inated by the ‘new class’ of politicians, and to build multiple centres o f power and status. One by-product o f these developments is that India has partly avoided the experience o f many societies where politics struggles for autonom y from other sectors, such as big business and the military. The influence of non-political sectors on politics is relatively limited in India; with the spread o f political knowledge and the destruction of vote banks, it is even less effective. The politician in India now reigns supreme. In fact, the constant emphasis on nonpolitical determination o f politics, popularized by some forms o f radicalism, has merely encouraged political inaction in India by shifting the responsibility away from the holders o f political power. However, its autonomy from other sectors has not released Indian politics from the stranglehold o f its own adjunct: the bureaucracy. If the monistic world-view in India is a means of incorporating the new, the strange and the different, the culture of Indian bureaucracy represents the society’s attempt to ‘hier­ archize away’ the new, the disruptive, and the noxious. The traditional style of containing chaos and fragmentation in India was to fit all contradictions within a new hierarchy compatible with the old order. The nation’s m odem bureaucracy embodies., this style. The most radical and m odem policies, therefore, tend

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to be translated by the bureaucracy into posts, rules, and proce­ dures; even attem pts to reform the bureaucracy merely generate new bureaucratic structures.

Public Ethics More than a shared set o f political norms, it is the continuing effort to forge these norms that has given the culture o f Indian politics its uniqueness. The effort was initiated during the colonial period when many of the political leaders and social reformers sensed the need for a new blueprint o f public ethics which would some day fit the needs of a competitive, open, political system, and a public life increasingly dominated by contractual relation­ ships, large systems and modern ideas of citizenship. Perhaps, in a society where politics had mostly remained outside the tradi­ tional life style, such a search for a common framework of ethics was inevitable. With so few contact points between the majority o f the people and the political structures, there were few oppor­ tunities to participate in sectors that required a clearly defined set o f public norms. The common m an’s subjective orientation to the public sphere, therefore, was dominated by distrust and cynicism.25 His early growth experiences and social exposures equipped him with ethical criteria congruent with efficient functioning in pri­ mordial interpersonal settings — in face-to-face situations, in families and in small systems. And the society’s tendency to stress situation- and time-specific morality — rather than a welldefined set of values cutting across all spheres of life, and deriving sanctity from a well-defined concept o f evil, did not allow him to apply his existing concepts o f the good and the evil to the political sphere. N o wonder that one o f the first tasks which many nineteenthcentury reform movements set for themselves was the creation of a new ethic for public life and for impersonal political relationships. The need was felt even more deeply as the elite politics of small, face-to-face, regional groupings gave way to the politics of mass participation, party building, and large-scale political organiza­ tions. Predictably, these reform movements emphasised neglected aspects of the sacred texts which had become functional in the new social context.26 This involved a large measure of Sanskritization, and also some amount of Westernization based on what was seen

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as the good and ethical aspects o f the Western societies and re­ ligions. Paradoxically, Westernization was true not only o f move­ ments which were ambivalent towards British rule, but also of movements which were systematic protests against the religion, culture, politics, and administrative behaviour o f Westerners. This will be obvious to anyone who cares to examine how the various re­ ligious movements o f the nineteenth century tried to introduce into Hinduism the principles o f organization, proselytization, specialized priestly orders, the concept o f religion as a principle o f political mobilization, a hard sense o f history and even, in some cases, a patriarchal God. Such attempts to set up norms o f public behaviour within the frame o f Sanskritic traditions and Western Utilitarianism ended with Gandhi, who sought to transcend the Brahmanic norms and to find a new set o f values for Indian public life in the folk traditions o f the society. In the process, he partly unshackled Indian politics from both the Brahmanic traditions and from imported Western liberalism, between which there had developed such a fine fit. In searching for norms outside the arena within which the British government, the liberal reformers, and the earlier nationalists were operating, G andhi represented larger historical forces. By the time he entered politics, the reform movements had already become totally dependent on the colonial government for meaning­ ful intervention in social matters. N ot only th a t; such movements in many cases had become a substitute for political action and a m eans o f avoiding confrontation with the colonial government on basic social issues. Mass politics was bound to destroy them.

Politics as Self-Redefinition T he foregoing sections would seem to suggest that changes in Indian political culture have been initiated along four dimensions o r phases; in each o f them certain key men and groups introduced changes into everyday politics, as well as into metaphysics. In the first phase, at the end o f the eighteenth century, the universalist, Western-educated, pro-British, reformist, Brahmanic literati — till then the main beneficiaries o f the Raj — began their direct onslaught on Indian traditions. Their characteristic political style may be summed up as an attempt to incorporate exogenous cul­ tural elements on pragmatic o r intellectual grounds, and then to

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justify this integration by appealing to traditional concepts of goodness. While ihe colonial systems aided this process by under­ writing the social class from which the leaders o f the reform movements came, indirect support also came from the fact that in an apolitical society, the reformist leadership enjoyed a comfortable autonomy from the masses who in their apathy made few direct demands on the political system. The first phase introduced several themes in the culture o f politics: popularization o f the idea o f the state’s relevance to daily life; the introduction o f Hinduism and Indianness as im portant elements in the Indian elite’s self-identity, and the initiation o f a debate on the relationship between Hinduism and politics; the use o f the state as a means o f reform (thus changing the image o f the state from that o f an antagonistic or dispassionate outsider on religious issues);27 and the acceptance o f textual Brahmanism as a political force. When Rammohun Roy (1772-1833) began speaking about Hindus and Indians and Upanishads and Vedas, he was intro­ ducing a concept o f traditions based not on lokachara or folkways but on textual Brahmanism.28 This Brahmanism provided, for the first time, a basis for a collective political identity which was more open to new ideas and less fettered by the primordial alle­ giances and fragmentation o f the myriad folk cultures o f India. Predominantly integrationist and liberal, it was informed by a certain ‘positivist’ universalism that made sense to a majority of the Indians participating in the public sphere, as well as to a large num ber of colonial rulers.

Politics as Self-Affirmation During the second half o f the nineteenth century and the first two decades o f the twentieth, there emerged a different style o f coping with political inputs. The style was mostly a reaction to the synthetism o f the first generation o f political thinkers who, being the products o f a more self-confident age, had not taken adequate care about the feelings of national and cultural inferiority which full-blown colonialism invariably creates. First, the internalization o f Western norms had caused a loss of self-esteem in a sizeable section of the new, growing, urban middle classes; it was a m atter o f truly coming to believe that they, as Hindus and as Indians, were backward — economically, politi­

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cally, and, worst of all, morally. The snowballing sense of British racial supremacy fed those feelings. Partly a result o f the faster pace o f the industrial revolution and scientific and technological changes in Britain, the racialism of the colonial rulers was en­ couraged by the growing displacement of the British feudal elements by the British middle classes within ruling circles in India. Justifying their chauvinism by referring to the new utilitarian ideas of progress, these British status-seekers sought in the concept of the white m an’s burden a counter to their still-gnawing feelings of inferiority in the context o f their own society. But an even more im portant development was the discovery of Hinduism as an organized religion. The process began with the establishment by Rammohun Roy o f the Atmya Sabha in 1815 and Brahmo Sabha in 1828; with the publication by him, between 1815 and 1830, of the first modern translations o f the Vedas and the principal Upanishads into Bengali and English; and with the founding, again by Rammohun Roy, o f a Brahmo church in 1830.29 F or the first time, Hindu religious organizations began to function, at least theoretically, for the entire Hindu community; took into account all spheres of life, and tried to cut across the different castes, sects, orders and their regional variants. As soon as Roy established the Brahmo Sabha, others started forming counter-organizations, clearly splitting the political culture into the modernist and the revivalist. In the beginning the moder­ nist idiom dominated, but as time passed and as new groups began to enter politics, the revivalist movements began to gain adherents at the expense of the modernist. They seemed better equipped to cope with the growing inferiority feelings of the Indians and more in touch with the mood of the elite. Although the Brahmo Samaj and its nativist successors, the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission, denied caste, their style was Brahmanic and their leaders blue-blooded. The new idiom o f politics reflected their social origins. It heavily depended on reinterpretations o f sacred texts and the past, and its main stress was on demonstrating that many ‘Western’ features of the m odem world were not Western, but actually in their ‘purer’ form parts o f India’s past. In other words, the revivalists, according to them, were not legitimizing the extraneous, but reviving the indigenous. Who were the main supporters of the revivalist? I do not think

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I would be far wrong if I characterize them as urban elites drawn from those exposed to the colonial political economy and social changes, and from the English-educated gentry. Their savage attack on the Western educated, urban, high-caste gentry should not blind us to their origins. Here is Bankim Chandra Chatteiji, India’s politically most influential novelist, one o f the first to introduce the nativist idiom into nineteenth-century India’s political consciousness, and author o f the anthem ‘Bande M ataram ’ — the war cry o f both aggressive nationalism and fervent restorationism — writing o f the Westernized urban gentlemen, the b a b u s: The babus will be indefatigible in talk, experts in a particular foreign language, and hostile to their mother tongue---- Some highly intelligent babus will be bom who will be unable to converse in their mother tongue. [Their]. . . emaciated bony legs will be skilled in escape, their weak hands will be capable of holding pens and receiving salaries, their soft skins will be able to with­ stand imported boots.. . . Like Vishnu they will have ten incarnations, namely clerk, teacher, Brahmo, accountant, doctor, lawyer, magistrate, landlord, editor and unemployed.. . . They will be Christians to missio­ naries, Brahmos to the Brahmo leaders, Hindus to their fathers, and atheists to the begging Brahmins. Babus will consume water at home, alcohol at friends’, abuses at the prostitute’s and humiliation at the employer’s.30 W ho would suspect from this savage attack that the author himself was a district magistrate in the Raj, and an English educated, proBritish, member o f the Calcutta gentry? Bankim Chandra’s self-criticism reveals somewhat more than an individual’s social consciousness. It shows that men like him were something more than mere revivalists; they were trying to lay the foundation o f an Indian self-image that would not humiliate the country’s majority o f H indu inhabitants. On the one hand, they were deciding which aspects o f Westernization could be included within India’s image o f itself without destroying the basic self-regard with which most Indians had lived; on the other, they were rejecting the earlier mode o f identifying with the aggressive, victorious British and seeking modern referents within the tradi­ tional culture itself.31 In other words, they were seeking parity, without breaking away from their own historical roots and without accepting the Utilitarian theory of progress.

Politics as Autonomy Seeking The first two phases o f India’s politicization were clearly elitist.

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Changes in economic and political institutions and in public consciousness only seemed to confirm the historical role o f the Brahmanic elites as inventors o f laws, interpreters o f traditions, and ‘sanctifiers’ o f new means o f livelihood. But gradually, this new Brahmanism became scholastic and rigidly ideological — a depot of Hindu chauvinism on the one hand, and o f doctrinaire modernism on the other. Those articulating the idiom had deve­ loped a vested interest in colonial politics, which understandably coloured their perception o f the political needs o f the community. The modernists paid their homage to the alien authorities by identi­ fication and im itation; the nativists by compulsive and coun­ terphobic rejection. It was G andhi in the 1920’s who began to organize the fragments o f a new style into the dominant language o f Indian politics. This new style, while continuing to borrow from the Sanskritic world view, emphasized a more pragmatic, businesslike approach to politics which had been latent in the Indian folk cultures. Like many self-confident, partially ‘closed* peasant cultures, this attitude toward political change was less self-conscious and more autonomous. G andhi himself, for instance, always claimed to be a sanatani or traditionalist; he never made a secret o f his contempt for those who, like Ramm ohun Roy, had tried to reform Hinduism, because he felt that they were wrongly trying to redefine the Indian way o f life.32 The perversion o f the original Indian way of life, G andhi believed, accounted for the miseries o f India. When he initiated new concepts o f time, pacifism, or consensualism — and demanded ruthless conformity to them — he was convinced that he was not importing Western ideas to improve traditional values; he was only using authentic Indian concepts. Gandhism also brought to the centre o f the political culture traits that had come to be associated with femininity, primitivism, passivity and cowardice. Elements which were considered by the earlier moder­ nizers a weakness of the society seemed to G andhi the strengths o f an older, more compassionate order.33 The success o f G andhi lay not so much in his pacifism and nationalism, nor even in his mobilizational or organizational skiHs, but in his ability to bring to the centre o f political activity the hardy, non-ideological, albeit ‘dull’ and low-key, masses for whom reformers and revolutionaries had long fought, but rarely ‘represented’. Even before the later versions o f radicalism made

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such ideas fashionable, the sleepy conformist peasants and the ‘idiocy of village life’ were for him, the revolutionary stuff out of which a new society had to be built. And he sought the roots o f his approach — strange though it may seem to associate this with Gandhi — in the native shrewdness, this-wordly individualism, and efficacy o f peasant communities that had for centuries toiled against nature and fought a ruthless battle for survival. The G andhian phase also established, for the first time in Indian history, the primacy of politics in the life o f the Indian. Its ending marked the termination of the period o f grace, which the earlier leadership has been given, to introduce political changes without disturbing the Indian masses, to work out the implications o f the new political institutions with which the society was experimenting, and to make political decisions based on visions o f a desirable society with which the majority was not concerned. By the end of this period, India had also acquired a large body o f discontinuous political traditions: a fact which may be said to m ark the beginnings o f post-traditionality in a society. It is from these elements o f Gandhism, rather than from G andhi’s saintliness, that one must trace many o f the features o f contem­ porary politics in India. Nevertheless, the latter also had a role to play. If G andhi’s pragmatism and organizational skills cornered the liberals and the nativists, his saintliness attracted former dissenters from the mainstream nationalist ideology to a new nationalist consensus, negated the older idea o f politics as amoral, and underwrote a concept of humane politics which may mean little to the social scientists, but which does make a difference to the quality o f life in a polity.34

Politics as Banality The politics of autonomy-seeking may have laid the basis for the primacy o f politics in society, but its growth as a vocation is pri­ marily a post-Gandhian phenomenon. Naturally so; the colonial rule involved pliancy and collaboration, and defiance and high drama, but it was only after independence that politics could hope to become a dull, everyday affair. National freedom, however, does not automatically reinstate the authentic self-hood of a culture. By reinforcing the elements which suit it best, colonialism activates some features of the

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traditional self-concept which later become dysfunctional, but nonetheless continue to survive as im portant traditions. India’s colonial past, too, is a part o f its living history. Neither the spirit of nationalism nor the vicissitudes of post-independence politics can wipe it away. Particularly, the meaning the society gave to subjection, according to indigenous theories o f living, has itself ensured certain continuities. These continuities have arisen from the efforts to integrate external cultural challenges, while seeking autonom y to deal with the society’s problems in its own way. One aspect o f the colonial political culture which survives is the conscious use of politics as a channel o f group mobility and econo­ mic gain. This tradition assumes a perfect fit between economic rationality and political expediency and a broad congruence between a group’s self-interest and the society’s good. Three processes have strengthened this tradition. First, the political culture of the districts is reaching out towards the national centre as a function o f mass politics.35 As this taming o f national politics proceeds, politics increasingly becomes non­ heroic, self-interest based, realpolitik. It continues to have an idiom, but becomes in essence, a non-ideological, non-synergic game. U nderstandably, to the carriers o f the liberal-intellectual traditions and the inheritors o f the Gandhian style, this politics seems a betrayal o f the values o f the earlier modernisers and a sure sign o f the failure o f moral politics in India. Second, there has grown a close link between politics and the other subsystems o f the society. Today in India not only is politics spilling over its boundaries, it is paying for its primacy by carrying an enormous load o f expectations. Because it has usurped some of the control functions o f other subsystems, because it has assumed a role in setting social priorities, and because it has begun to ‘introject’ demands and tension generated within other subsystems, many problems which were once non-political have now become the responsibility o f politics. Apparently, the society is yet to devise the means by which certain problems and sectors could be excluded from politics for the sake o f the survival o f democratic politics itself. Third, with the politics o f the centre reasserting its supremacy in the national scene again, the task o f the lower level leadership has been changing from aggregation o f interests to accountability to the political centre. Although this accountability has enor­

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mously increased the centre's power, it has also made it more vulnerable. All grievances now travel up to the centre and all non-performance and all political failures seem to be the respon­ sibility o f the top-most rung o f leaders. The lower levels of politics in India now increasingly seem to be the preserve o f those who carry to the bottom the messages emanating from the top.

The Order o f Change Even though the four ‘phases’ in the relationship between politics and culture have not produced exclusive styles, they do survive as four identifiable emphases in the culture o f Indian politics. Those very forces which once determined the sequence of the phases also seem to regulate the present interplay and the relative influence o f each style. Take, for instance, the m anner in which the leadership in the first phase tried to ascribe meaning, in terms o f native symbols, to the disruptive inputs o f a newly established colonial system. Colonial policies were not a m atter o f choice for the Indian leaders th en ; what the latter could deal with were the psychological reac­ tions to these inputs, the fears and anxieties associated with cultural shock and structural change. They handled these fears and an­ xieties by finding sacred sanctions for cultural self-criticisms and for a certain cultural catholicity or inclusiveness. Take also the fact that the efforts by this reformist leadership to alter Indian cultural identity provoked im portant sectors o f the same elite to organize in protest, to redefine the nature o f the external challenge, and to devise adaptive strategies more congruent with the self respect o f the community. In contem porary India, too, the politics o f self-redefinition survives in some universalist forms o f liberalism and radicalism. Even in defeat, this style contributes to national life by its greater ability to borrow from outside, by building the intellectual basis for this borrowing, and by cushioning the intellectuals — especially the scientists and technologists — from too many local and pro­ vincial pressures. Similarly, the politics o f self-affirmation checks the tendency in the political elites to stray too far from their task of searching for a political identity relatively free of external referents, and underlines the society’s freedom to pursue its inde­ pendent path to its own utopia. Roughly in the same way that the

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phase o f self-affirmation corrected the excesses o f the politics o f self-redefinition, the present interaction o f the two styles acts as a cultural radar for the self-corrections o f the society. Only the earlier styles must now operate within a context dominated by a less heroic style. In this respect, they have become recessive, confined to small sections o f the population, and have come to reflect those levels o f the nation’s distinctiveness that are less frequently triggered by the contem porary needs o f society. Such possibilities o f self-correction suggest that the days of dram atic crises and drastic shifts in India’s political culture — which once led to vociferous and strident debates on the role and nature o f political traditions — are now more or less over and the society is moving into a phase in which it may be possible to take for granted the cultural param eters o f the polity. If the foregoing analysis suggests that the evolution o f Indian political culture has, today, been completed, it is obviously the result o f my attem pts to retrospectively identify trends and impose a schema. Certainly the present culture o f Indian politics cannot pre-empt fundam ental alterations in the future. On the other hand, as the norms o f a political order are institutionalized and become a part o f everyday life, it also becomes increasingly difficult to change a nation’s political culture. Stability has a cost. Such hardening o f arteries may be a necessary feature o f the continuous tradition-building and institutionalization which goes in each state system, but nothing eliminates the possibility th at a society may begin to perceive as a threat what it once did not even define as a challenge; that social concerns and goals, which once seemed only marginally im portant, may acquire a new centrality, and that what a society once took for granted may again become open to controversy. In this sense, the death w arrant o f every political culture is written on its birth certificate. T hat unmaking o f a political culture, in response to changes in a society’s unique definition o f the hum an predicament and human destiny, is, of course, another story.

NOTES 1. Historical societies are not necessarily societies with a sense of linear history. Indian society, for instance, seems almost ahistorical to many because of its distinctive concept of time.

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2. This position is compatible with the new neo-Freudian concept o f culture as a collective defence. See a review of the latter position in B. J. Bergen and S. D. Rosenberg, ‘The New Neo-Freudians, Psychoanalytic Dimensions of Social Change’, Psychiatry, 1971, 34, 19-39. A similar conceptualization of culture at the level of small groups is in W. R. Bion, Experience in Groups (London: Tavistock, 1961). The present approach however, imputes greater maoeuverability, self-correction, and information-seeking to the society. Such processes can be seen as analogous to what at the individual level is ‘insight’. 3. There is an enormous literature on the role of themes, traditions, and world views in politics. None the less, these theme-by-theme analyses have given confusing and incomplete results. To begin with, any theme associated with politically developed statehood was considered ‘modern’ and was sought in less fortunate nation-states with the zeal of a trained sleuth. Now the emphasis has shifted to the particular ‘mixes’ of tradition and modernity which charac­ terize politics at different developmental stages. Probably it is time to give more attention to the social modes or methods of coping with traditions or themes, with reference to issues such as the extent of sanctity attaching to norms, the totalism of the traditional system, the importance and sanctity given to artificial or recreated history in addition to actual history, the society’s ability to add new traditions to its original mass of traditions and its ability to particularize or sanctify new elements and detraditionalize dysfunctional elements, the extent to which the society can draw upon different subtraditions within it or play one subculture against another, the tolerance of contradictory or unrelated norms coexisting in the polity, and the tolerance of normative ambiguity and chaos. Emphasis on these processes may make societies seem more like selfcorrecting systems and less like reactive, programmed organisms. 4. The best illustration of this is certainly the epic Mahabharata. See M. N. Dutta, A Prose English Translation of the Mahabharata (Calcutta: Das, 1905); also R. Shamasastry trans., Kautilya's Arthasastra (Mysore: Wesleyan Mission, 1923). 5. Rajni Kothari, Politics in India (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), Chap. 7. 6. On the concept of dharma, see P. V. Kane, History of Dharmashastra, Vol. Ill (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1946). 7. See a brief discussion of compartmentalization in M. Singer, ‘The Moderni­ zation of Religious Beliefs’, in M. Weiner ed., Modernization (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 55-67. 8. The private symbolic associations of power at different levels of personality, expressed particularly as the fear of loss of potency and virility, are described in G. M. Carstairs, The Twice Bom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957); and P. Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1966). 9. A. L. Basham, ‘Some Fundamental Political Ideas of Ancient India’, Studies in Indian History and Culture (Calcutta: Sambodhi, 1964), pp. 57-71. 10. Hinduism, when it comes to social ethics, is particularly individualistic. Re­ ligious values, as opposed to sacred rituals, are a matter of lonely pursuit. It lacks in this respect the collectivist orientation of Christianity and Islam. 11. It has been said that Indian cultural products are remarkably free from any

Political Cultures in India

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

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expression o f the oepidal hostility toward paternal authority. See Dhirendra Narayan, Hindu Character (Bombay: Bombay University Press, 1957). I leave it to the psychologically-minded reader to decide if this orientation could have been generalized to the political authorities — if they were also seen, at some level, as distant powers with whom one did not compete or quarrel, but tried to establish a modus vivendi. See an interesting discussion of this in the context of Gandhi in Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity o f Traditions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), part 2. In Politics in India, Kothari considers this tolerance of hypocrisy to provide an important clue to the contemporary culture of Indian politics. This can also be explained in terms of the cultural tendency to pitch ideals too high for realization by lesser mortals. See Rudolph and Rudolph, The Modernity of Traditions, Part 2; K. P. Gupta, aA Theoretical Approach to Hinduism and Modernization of India’, and ‘A Rejoinder’, Indian Journal of Sociology, 1971, 2, 59-91, 213-16. The most interesting attempt to work out the implications of consensualism in institutional terms is J. P. Narayan, Swarajfor the People (Varanasi: A.B.S.S., 1961). The first attempt of the kind was M. N. Roy’s. See his The Humanist Manifesto (Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers, 1949). The metaphysical position from which this drew strength was advaita or monism. See a brief discussion of the political implications of this theme, in ‘Sati or A Nineteenth Century Tale of Woman, Violence and Protest’, in this book. On the traditional concept of activism as inter alia, a characteristic of the feminine component of the godhead and of one’s feminine self, see ‘Woman vs Womanliness: An Essay in Political and Social Psychology’, in this book. See also Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (New Delhi: Allied, 1980). Also suggestive is the ease with which 'progressive' legislation is passed in India (proscription of child marriage, the constitutional provisions for the untouchables, the Hindu code bill, radical economic measures, etc.) and the difficulty with which they are implemented, a difficulty which over the decades has generated a virtual ‘implementation crisis’ in the society. This apparently is comparable with some aspects of the Chinese political culture as analysed by L. W. Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968), and R. J. Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969). On the role of intellectuals in the Indian polity, see E. Shils, ‘Influence and Withdrawal: The Intellectual in Indian Political Development’, in D. Marwick ed., Political Decision-Makers (Glencoe: Free Press, 1961), pp. 25-9. See also S. Tangri, ‘Intellectuals and Society in the Nineteenth Century’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1961, 3, 368-94. Whatever its end result, it was perhaps necessary for a few men to break away more or less entirely from the existing modes of living and thinking to look more dispassionately at their own society. And these men did provide an in­ tellectual basis for the integration of new cultural elements, for defining the challenge facing the society in intelligible terms, and for the alteration and reinterpretation of the indigenous culture. Most important of all, their very

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20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

A t the Edge o f Psychology activism was a living protest against the shared identity of the literati, who conceived of intellectual activity as an instrument of self-knowledge and per­ sonal salvation only. A case study of the way in which the Gandhian style of political mobilization not only undercut the earlier liberal universalism, but also ultimately forced the latter to reveal its clay feet is in J. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth Century Bengal (Bombay : Oxford University Press, 1968). See a discussion of this in Final Encounter, in this book. The political isolation of intellectuals is not, however, an indicator of low social status. If anything, with the spread of Brahmanic norms, the intellectual has perhaps improved his social standing. See a discussion of this in E. R. Leach, 'What Should We Mean by Caste', in E. R. Leach ed.. Aspects oj Caste in South India. Ceylon and North- W'est Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 1960): André Béteille, ‘The Politics of NonAntagonistic Strata', Contributions to Indian Sociology, New Series, no.3. 1969; A systematic review of the caste-politics relationship is made by D. L. Sheth, 'Caste and Politics’, in Gopal Krishna ed.. Annals of South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979). One result of this new relationship between politics and social hierarchy has been the rise of certain traditional groupings in social status. The anti-elitist bias brought into politics by these groups has been discussed in a later section. To continue with the example of caste, there were caste systems of celestial bodies, gods, soils, temples, and gems, in addition to that of men. N. K. Bose, Culture and Society in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1967), p. 237. This distrust and cynicism perhaps had support in some aspects of the modal personality system. See Carstairs, The Twice Born, particularly pp. 40-5. Examples of such attempts are Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), English Works and Bengali Works (Calcutta: Sadharon Brahmo Samaj, 1947); Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-1891), Rachanabali (Calcutta: Mandai Book, 1966); Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838-1894), Rachanabali (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1958); Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), Complete Works (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1964); and an account o f such an attempt by Dayananda Saraswati (1824-83), in Lajpat Rai, Arya Samaj (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, 1967). The British, who were then yet to recover from the shock of discovering them­ selves the rulers of a continental land mass, tended to leave the social and re­ ligious systems untouched, to alter only the economic system, to recognize the Indian elites as legitimate participants in the polity and — to the limited extent a ruling group can think so — as their equals. In fact, in the case of each reform, the British consolidated through legal measures, often after decades, the gains of the reformers only after their movements had acquired substantial momentum. This ambivalence ensured some support to the reformers, while containing the anxiety of the traditionalists. At first it may seem paradoxical that it was the so-called core of the Hindu society, religion, which faced the first attack of men who themselves were supposedly the core carriers of Hindu traditions. Perhaps it was the sheer salience of religion in the society; perhaps it was the unorganized nature of Hinduism which made it look vulnerable and amenable to reform; perhaps it was the well-known institutional rigidity and ideological pliability of Brah­ manism.

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28. These were not always functional. The folkways were, after all, in some re­ spects more responsive to changes in environment; the texts, from which these values mostly came, were less so. Rudolph and Rudolph, in The Modernity of Traditions, Part 3, for instance, describe how the wholesale acceptance of such Brahmanic norms did freeze the legal system around a stagnant concept of indigenous law. 29. The growth of newspapers, in which again Roy and the Christian missionaries played important roles, also made religious issues live for a large number of of elites. Brajendra Nath Banerji, Sanghud Patre Sekaler Katha, Vols. I and II (Calcutta: Bangya Sahitya Parishad. 1949) and Binoy Ghose, Samayik Patre Banglar Samaj Chitra, Vols. I—IV (Calcutta: Bengal Publishers, 1962-6). 30. Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Babu (1873), Rachanahali, Vol. II, pp. 10-12. I have taken slight liberties with the translation, to eliminate the more abstruse allusions and the involved nineteenth-century Bengali sentences. 31. A fascinating attempt at self-esteem building on these lines was by SWami Vivekananda: see his Prachya o Piischatva (1900-02) (Almora: Advaita Ashram, n. d.). The complex meaning of Hinduization of politics which began in this phase has been analyzed by Gupta, 'A Theoretical Approach to Hinduism' and 'A Rejoinder’. 32. Stephen Hay, ‘Introduction’, in Rammohun Roy, Dialogue Between a Theist and an Idolator (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963). 33. Rudolph and Rudolph discuss this in The Modernity o f Traditions. Part 2. 34. I have not dealt with Gandhi's saintly politics in detail because a number of excellent analyses have become available in recent years. The most ambitious of these is Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). On the remnants of the saintly style in contemporary India see p . Ostergaard and M. Currell, The Gentle Anarchists (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). 35. See a detailed analysis of this in M. Weiner, ‘India: Two Political Cultures’, L. W. Pye and S. Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 199-244.

FINAL ENCOUNTER The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi Even in his death there was a magnificence and complete artistry. It was from every point of view a fitting climax to the man and to the life he had lived . . . Jawaharlal Nehru1 Godse was to Gandhi what Kamsa was to Krishna. Indivisible, even if incompatible. Aijuna never understood Krishna the way Kamsa did . . . hate is infinitely more symbiotic than love. Love dulls one’s vision, hate sharpens it. T. K. Mahadevan2 I Every political assassination is a joint communiqué. It is a state* ment which the assassin and his victim jointly work on and co­ author. Sometimes the collaboration takes time to mature, some­ times it is instantaneous and totally spontaneous. But no political assassination is ever a single-handed job. Even when the killer is mentally ill and acts alone, he in his illness represents larger historical and psychological forces which connect him to his victim.3 Robert Payne’s biography o f M ahatma Gandhi, perhaps more than any other writing on the subject, brings out this element of collaboration in the assassination o f Gandhi.4 It was an assassina­ tion, Payne seems to suggest, in which apart from Gandhi and a motley group o f dedicated but clumsy assassins, crucial indirect roles were played by G andhi’s protectors in the Indian police and its intelligence branch, by the bureaucracy, and by im portant parts o f India’s political leadership including some o f G andhi’s most dedicated followers. But why was there this joint endeavour? Where did the minds and interests o f so many people converge? To answer this question I shall first define the quintessence of G andhi’s political style and then describe the psychological and social environment in India at the time of his death in January 1948.

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 71 Gandhi was neither a conservative nor a progressive. And though he had internal contradictions, he was not a fragmented, self-alienated man driven by the need to compulsively conserve the past or protect the new. Effortlessly transcending the dichotomy of orthodoxy and iconoclasm, he forged a mode o f self-expression which by its apparently non-threatening simplicity reconciled the common essence o f the old and the new.5 However, in spite o f his synthesising skills, the content o f the social changes he suggested, and the political activism he demanded from the Indian people, were highly subversive o f the main strain of Indian, particularly Hindu, culture. Even though few intellectuals in his time thought so,6 many conservatives who had a real stake in the old and the established sensed this subversion. As his conservative assassin was to later complain, ‘All his experiments were at the expenses [sic] of the Hindus’.7 Particularly dangerous to the traditional authority system in India were two elements o f the Gandhian political philosophy. The first was his continuous attem pt to change the definitions of centre and periphery in Indian society ; the second was his negation o f the concepts o f masculinity and femininity implicit in some Indian traditions and in the colonial situation. Both these at­ tempted changes had im portant psychological components and the dram a of G andhi’s death cannot be told without reference to them. The first element can be crudely called a distinctive Gandhian theory o f social justice. The theory rejected the role o f the moder­ nist, westernized, middle-class intelligentsia as a vanguard o f the proletariat. Till the advent o f Gandhi, it was this gentlemanly class which dominated Indian politics and was the main voice of Indian nationalism. G andhi, however, was always afraid that in the name o f the poor and the exploited, the ‘advanced-thinking’, ideologically guided, middle-class intellectuals would only per­ petuate their own dominance. So the first thing he tried to do was to de-intellectualize Indian politics. I should not be misunderstood : Gandhi was not against intellectuals qua intellectuals. He was against giving importance to intellectual activities and ideologies in a culture which believed intellection to be ritually purer and more Brahmanic,’and where the primacy o f idea over action had a sacred sanction behind it. Therefore, anticipating Mao Tse-Tung who faced a somewhat similar literati tradition, G andhi would not

72 A t the Edge o f Psychology even grant the existence Of progressive elements within the tradi­ tionally privileged sectors o f India. As a part o f the process of de-Brahmanization through deintellectualization, Gandhi was constantly trying to pass off many aspects of the low-status, non-Brahmanic, commercial and peasant cultures in India as genuine Hinduism. While stressing the ‘syntheticism’ o f G andhi, one must not ignore his attem pt to make certain peripheral aspects of the Hindu culture its central core, exactly the way he tried to do with Christianity in a more limited way. To effect this cultural restructuring Gandhi evolved what for his society was a new political technology. He began emphasising the centrality of politics and public life in an apolitical society and mobilizing the periphery o f the Hindu society, apparently for the nationalist cause so dear to the urban middle classes, but actually to remould the entire cultural stratarchy within Hinduism. It is thus that Gandhi bridged the pre-Gandhian hiatus that had arisen between mass politics and social reform movements in India.8 This new political technology also incidentally challenged the basis o f the colonial system which rested on the assumption that the British were ruling India with the consent o f the majority of Indians in the countryside, her ‘martial races' and their 'natural leaders’ in the Kshatriya princelings, the rajas and maharajas who owed allegiance to the British crown. G andhi’s mobilizational technique o f social and political change challenged this assumption and threatened to cut the support-base o f the British-Indian government. British colonialism also predicated that the only vociferous dissenters in the colonial system were the urban middle-class babus, alienated from the real India and from the society’s ‘natural’ leadership, and that colonial subjugation established the cultural inferiority o f the Indians whose burden it was the white m an’s Christian duty willingly to carry. Having an acute sense of power, Gandhi accepted the first proposition as valid and took his fight against the Raj to India’s villages. Concerned with the loss of self esteem in Indians, he refused to accept that it was the Indians’ responsibility to model themselves on their rulers, to be selfdeprecating or defensive about their society. What at first sight seems G andhi’s obscurantism was actually his attem pt to disprove the civilizing role attributed to colonialism (which at the time was

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 73 closely associated with modern science, industrialism, high techno­ logy and intellectually dominant theories of progress), so that colonialism could openly become a name for racism and exploita­ tion. The second major element in G andhi’s philosophy was his rediscovery of womanhood as a civilizing force in human society. Gandhi tried to give a new meaning to womanhood in a peasant culture which had lived through centuries with deep-seated con­ flicts and ambivalence about femininity.9 All his life Gandhi had wanted to live down, within himself, his identification with his own outwardly powerful but essentially weak, hedonistic, semimodernized father and to build his self-image upon his identifica­ tion with his apparently weak, deeply religious, traditional but self-confident and powerful mother. Apparently his mother was the first satyagrahi he knew who used fasting and other forms o f self-penalization to acquire and wield womanly power within the constraints o f a patriarchal family. Thanks to a number of sensitive psychological studies o f Gandhi, these are now reasonably well-known facts.10 I restate them only to stress what has been always recognized in such analyses, namely, G andhi’s deep need to come to psychological terms with his mother by incorporating aspects of her femininity in his own personality.11 Gandhi’s ambivalence towards his father was overt and his respect for his mother was total. But underlying this respect, the various studies of G andhi’s personality themselves suggest, there was—as one would expect in the case of such imputation of total goodness — a great deal of latent ambivalence towards her. And, not unpredictably, the aggressive elements of this ambivalence were associated with some degree o f guilt and search for valid personal and social models o f atonement. This personal search fitted the needs of some aspects o f the Indian personality too. The Indian had always feared woman as the traditional s>mbol of uncertain nature and unpredictable nurture, of activity, power and aggression. In consequence, he had always feared womanhood and either abnegated femininity or defensively glorified it out of all proportion.12 As in many such cases, here too an internal psychological problem had its counterpart in cultural divisions within the Indian society. The greater Sanskritic culture tended to give less importance to woman and to value her less in comparison to the little cultures of India. Simultaneously, the

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colonial culture too derived its psychological strength from the identification o f rulership with male dominance and subjecthood with feminine submissiveness. It would therefore seem that G andhi’s innovations in this area also tended to simultaneously subvert Brahmanic and Kshatriya orthodoxy and the British colonial system. He challenged the former so far as it depended upon the Indian m an’s fears of being polluted by woman and contaminated by her femininity; he challenged the latter in so far as it exploited man’s insecurity about his masculinity and his consequent continuous potency drive. In other words, G andhi attacked the structure o f sexual do­ minance as a homologue of both the colonial situation and the traditional social stratification. He rejected the British as well as the Brahmanic-Kshatriya equation between m anhood and do­ minance, between masculinity and legitimate violence, and between femininity and passive submissiveness.13 He wanted to extend to the male identity — in both the rulers and the ruled — the revalued, partly non-Brahmanic, equation between womanhood and nonintrusive, nurturant, non-manipulative, non-violent, self-deemphasising ‘merger’ with natural and social environments. That is, G andhi was trying to fight colonialism by fighting the psychological equation which a patriarchy makes between masculi­ nity and aggressive social dominance and between femininity and subjugation. To fight this battle he ingeniously combined aspects o f folk Hinduism and recessive elements o f Christianity to mark out a new domain of public intervention. In this domain the rulers and the ruled o f India could share a new moral awareness, an awareness that the meek would not only inherit the earth but could make femininity a valued aspect o f man, congruent with his overall masculinity. In other words, defiant subjecthood and passive resistance to violence — militant non-violence, as Erik Erikson calls it — became in the G andhian worldview an indicator o f moral accomplishment and superiority, in the subjects as well as in the more sensitive rulers who yielded to non-violence. Gandhi not only wanted to be a trans-sexual mahatma or saint in the Indian sense; he also wanted to be a bride of Christ—a St Francis o f Assissi — in the Christian sense. His goal was to become an alter ego for his potency-seeking rulers and to align with their superegos too. Honour, he asserted, universally lay with the victims, not the aggressors.14 It is evidence o f how much he was

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 75 in tune with some o f the emerging though marginal strands of consciousness in the European intellectuals that at the same time that he was establishing his primacy in Indian politics, Romain Rolland was writing to his admirer Sigmund Freud, ‘Victory is always more catastrophic for the vanquishers than for the van­ quished.’15 These two basic constructions — centrality o f the periphery of Indian culture and acceptance o f femininity — Gandhi pronounced not through written o r spoken words, a form o f dissent for which there was legitimacy in the Brahmanic culture. His means were large-scale mobilization, organizational activism and constant demands on the Indian for conformity to an internally consistent public ethic. These means were largely alien to the Brahmanic culture which was tolerant of—and self-confident vis a vis— ideological dissent but became insecure when ideological dissent was supported by such lowstatus, non-Brahmanic means as active social intervention and mass politics. In spite o f erecting this elaborate and magnificent structure of dissent, Gandhi never claimed he was a revolutionary or a reformer, someone consciously reinterpreting traditional texts to justify new modes of life, as many social reformers in India had previously done. He was convinced that he was a sanatani Hindu, a genuine, orthodox, full-blooded Indian, not a social reformer out to alter Hinduism and Indian culture. He was, he seemed to argue, a counter-reformist, a revivalist, and a committed traditionalist.16 According to him, he represented continuity and the Brahmanic, educated, Westernized middle classes represented change. He was, he claimed, the insider; the upper echelons of the Hindu society, the Brahmanic cognoscenti, were the interlopers. And again, not only did G andhi indulge in this ‘inner speech’, he went on to give it institutional forms. He mobilized the numerically preponderant non-Brahmanic sectors o f the Hindus, the lower strata o f society, and the politically passive peripheries: the low castes and un­ touchables, the peasants and villagers. Taking advantage of numbers, he began legitimizing a new collective ethic that threatened to challenge the traditional Indian concepts o f individual salvation, responsibility, and action geared to the value o f self-awareness; the concepts of private knowledge and self-knowledge; political non-participation and the belief that the political authorities were not central to life.

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It was a remarkable achievement o f Gandhi that so many sen­ sitive intellectuals took him at his word. W hat the M ahatm a was doing did not seem very revolutionary to them at first sight, and in fact, they were not entirely wrong. G andhi’s political innova­ tions overtly did seem compatible with Hindu orthodoxy and tnere was nothing intrinsically non-Indian about his social and political theories. However, it must be remembered that like all major civilizations, the Indie included a plethora o f cultural strains. The distinctive identifier o f a m ajor civilization is always the com­ posite whole that it makes o f its diverse, contradictory constituents, by giving different emphases o r weights to the various norms and subcultures within it. The danger that G andhi posed to the greater Sanskritic tradition was exactly this. He introduced a different system o f weightages and threatened to alter the basic characteristics o f Indian society by making its cultural periphery its centre. I II It is surely not accidental that G andhi’s assassin, N athuram Vinayak Godse (1912-49), was a representative of the centre o f the society that Gandhi was trying to turn into the periphery. I want to concentrate on Godse among the conspirators who planned the assassination because, first o f all, it was his finger which ultimately pulled the trigger on 30 January 1948. By his own choice and partly against the wishes of his collaborators, he killed G andhi single-handed because he felt 'history showed that such revolutionary plots in which several persons were concerned had always been foiled, and it was only the effort o f a single indi­ vidual that succeeded.’17 Godse with N arayan Apte also constituted the core o f the band o f conspirators. The other actors in the group were minor and ‘arrived late on the scene and were unknown to each other until a few weeks before the murder. There was something strangely anonymous about them, as though they had been picked up in random.’18 It was as if two dedicated opponents o f G andhi had mobilized the larger faceless society to eliminate G andhi from the Indian scene. But why Godse? I shall try to give my answer as simply as possible.

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Firstly, Godse and all his associates except one came from M aharashtra, a region where Brahmanic dominance was particu­ larly strong. He also happened to be from Poona, the unofficial capital o f traditional M aharashtra and a city renowned for its old-style scholarship and for the rich, complex culture which the high-status Chitpavan o r Konkanasth Brahmans had built there. Godse, himself a Chitpavan Brahman like the other figure in the inner core o f conspiracy, was by his cultural inheritance a potential opponent o f Gandhi. (There had been three known unsuccessful attempts to kill Gandhi — all in M aharashtra. The first was in Poona in 1934 when G andhi was engaged in an anti-untouchability campaign there. The second, a half-hearted one, took place in Sevagram and involved members o f the Hindu Mahasabha. That was in 1944. In 1946, once again near Poona, some unknown persons tried to derail the train in which Gandhi was travelling.)19 The Chitpavans, traditionally belonging to the western coast of India, were one o f the rare Brahman communities in India which had a long history of valour on the battlefield. This fact gave them, in their own eyes, a certain historical superiority over the Deshasth Brahmans belonging to the plains o f M aharashtra. In the absence o f m artial castes like Rajputs in the region, the Chitpavans could thus combine the traditional prerogatives o f the priestly Brahmans and the kingly Kshatriyas. Though a few other communities, mainly the M arathas, did claim a share o f the Rajput glory in the state, the social gap between the Brahmans and the non-Brahmans was one o f the widest in the region, and nowhere more so than in Poona. The M aharashtrian Brahmanic elites also had a long history of struggle against the Muslim rulers o f India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is true that they were associated with powers that were essentially marauders and large parts o f Hindu India too were victims o f their aggressiveness. But by the beginning o f the twentieth century, the M aharashtrian Brahmans had reinter­ preted their history in terms o f the needs o f Hindu nationalism. They saw themselves as the upholders o f a tradition o f Hindu resistance against the Muslim occupation of India. It was on this reconstructed and self-created tradition that a part o f the M aha­ rashtrian elite built up their anti-British nationalism. Like the Bengali nationalists — simultaneously, their sympathizers, egoideals and admirers — they did not see themselves as morally

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superior individuals, nonviolently—and, therefore, ethically— trying to free themselves and their British rulers from a morally inferior colonial system, as Gandhi wanted them to do. They saw themselves as the previously powerful, now weakened, competitors Of the British. So terrorism directed against the Raj came naturally to them. Their aim was the redemption o f their lost glory.20 N aturally, much o f G andhi’s charisma did not extend to the Chitpavans. To the extent Gandhi rejected the Kshatriya identity by his constant emphasis on pacifism and self-control, he posed a threat to the warrior cultures of India. In addition, by constantly stressing the feminine, nurturing, nonviolent aspects of men’s per­ sonality, he challenged the Kshatriya identity built on fear of woman and of the cosmic feminine principles in nature, and the no less acute fears of becoming a woman and of being polluted by woman. (In other words, he posed more or less the same kind of threat to India’s m artial cultures as to her priestly cultures.) Thus, given the absence o f Kshatriya competition, the M aharashtrian Brahmans not only enjoyed greater status than they would have otherwise done, they incorporated — as traditional rulers, landowners and warriors — elements o f the Kshatriya identity and lived with many of the Kshatriya fears and anxieties relating to womanhood. N athuram Godse came from this background. So did most of his co-conspirators including his younger brother G opal.21 G andhi’s assassin was born in 1910, in a small village in the margin o f the Bombay-Poona conurbation. He was the eldest son and the second child in a family of four sons and two daughters. His father was Vinayak R. Godse, a petty government official who worked in the postal department and had a transferable job which took him to small urban settlements over the years. Three sons had been born to him before N athuram and all three had died in infancy. Both Vinayak and his wife were devoted and orthodox Brahmans and, understandably, they sought a religious solution to the problem o f the survival o f their new-born son. The result was the use o f a time-honoured technique: N athuram was brought up as a girl. His nose was pierced and he was made to wear a nath or nose ring. It is thus that he came to acquire the .name N athuram , even though his original name was Ramachandra. Such experiences often go with a heightened religiosity and a sense o f being chosen. In this instance, too, the child soon enough became a devotee o f the family gods. He sang bhajans before the

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 79 deities and, according to his family, acquired the ability to occasion­ ally go into a trance and speak as an oracle. Neither thè burden o f living a bisexual role nor the oracular religiosity, however, stood in the way of N athuram becoming a ‘strapping young man’, given to physical culture and other ‘mas­ culine’ pursuits. Perhaps in his culture such early experiences o f socially imposed bisexuality had a clear-cut meaning and instru­ mentality, and it was not specially difficult to contain the diffusion o f one’s gender-specific self-image. Perhaps it was given in the situation that N athuram would try to regain the lost clarity o f his sexual role by becoming a model o f masculinity. W hatever the inner tensions, they did not show. By all accounts, N athuram was a well-mannered, quiet, humble young man (unlike his flamboyant, elegant, well-placed collaborator Apte whose father was a reputed classics scholar and uncle a popular novelist; Apte himself was a science graduate with a good academic record and, in spite o f his Hindu nationalism, an erstwhile holder o f a King’s commission in the Royal Indian A ir Force and a teacher at an American mission school). N athuram ’s quiet interpersonal style was associated with an early interest in public affairs and good works. Biographical accounts mention the help he often gave to his neighbours and the interest he took in informal social work. However, as the span o f his social interests widened, his oracular abilities declined. According to his brother, by the age o f sixteen he had lost his concentration and ceased to be the medium between the family deity and the family. None the less, a certain natural intellectual brightness persisted in spite o f the absence o f formal higher education, and so did — as a biographer puts it — a certain natural dignity. In a religious family, even a lapsed oracle cannot fail to acquire a sense o f being chosen. There is some evidence that some o f these qualities became more noticeable in N athuram after he killed G andhi. Some who saw him in his pre-assassination days thought him poor in verbal and social skills. They were genuinely surprised by his competence and serene composure after the m urder o f G andhi and the legal skill and self-confidence with which he argued his own case in English, a language he supposedly did not know well.22 It was as if the assassination gave meaning and drive to a life which otherwise was becoming increasingly prosaic. This was perhaps the reason why Godse was eager to play out his full role as the assassin of

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G andhi.23 Until he went to the gallows, his one fear was that the Government o f India, goaded by Gandhi's family and many Gandhians, might have ‘pity' on him and he might have to live the rest o f his life with the shame o f it. He did not want an anticlimax of that kind. As he put it, T h e question of mercy is against my conscience. I have shown no mercy to the person I have killed and therefore I expect no mercy.’24 Others who knew him in jail authenticate this attitude. ‘The common feeling was that even if he were thrown out of jail and given a chance to flee, he would not have taken advantage of it.’25 However, there was one Brahmanic trait in him which predated his encounter with Gandhi. Though he had failed to matriculate, Godse was a self-educated man with first-hand knowledge of the traditional religious texts. He knew for instance the entire Bhagavad G ita by heart and had read texts such as Patanjali Yogasutra, Gnyaneshwari and Tukaram Gatha.26 In addition he had a good command over written and spoken Marathi and Hindi and was widely read in history, politics, sociology and particularly in G andhi’s writings. He was also well-acquainted with the works of some of the major figures o f nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, including Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Tilak and Gokhale. Conforming to the psychologist’s concept o f the authoritarian man, Godse was highly respectful towards his parents, attached to conventional ideas of social status and afraid o f losing this status. While facing death, his one fear was that his execution as Gandhi's murderer might lower the social status of his parents and, in his letters to them, he sought elaborate justifications from sacred texts and the Puranas to legitimize his action. He was not worried about his parents’ reaction to the loss of a son. Well-built, soft-spoken and like most Chitpavans fair-complexioned, N athuram thus projected the image of a typical member o f the traditional social elite. But there was a clear discrepancy between this image and his life story till the day of the assassination. The Godses may not actually have been poor, but they were haunted with the fear o f it throughout N athuram 's younger days. So much so that at the early age of sixteen he had to open a cloth shop to earn his livelihood. This is less innocuous than it may at first seem : business was not merely considered highly demeaning for a Brahman; in lower middle-class Brahman families entry into business was an almost sure indicator of academic failure. To make

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 81 things worse, N athuram ’s shop failed and he had to turn to tailoring, traditionally an even more lowly caste profession than business. In sum, there was an enormous gap between N athuram 's mem­ bership o f a traditionally privileged sector of the Indian society on the one hand and his actual socio-economic status and ex­ periences in adolescence on the other. It is from this kind of background that the cadres of violent, extremist and revivalist political groups often come.27 Not sur­ prisingly, after a brief period in G andhi’s civil disobedience move­ ment in 1929-30, N athuram became at about the age of twenty an active and ardent member o f the Hindu Mahasabha, a small political party, and o f the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, at that time virtually a paramilitary wing of the Mahasabha with all its key posts occupied by M aharashtrian Brahmans. Overtly both groups supported the cause of Hindu revivalism and tried to articulate the Hindu search for self-esteem. Covertly however, for the M aharashtrian Brahmans who constituted their main support base, both groups had aspects of a millenial movement which promised to reinstate the hegemony o f the traditional social leadership or at least contain its humiliation. The idiom of these political groups suited N athuram ’s world view in other ways foo. He was extremely religious, and he read into the sacred texts what one would expect a man from a traditional martial back­ ground to read into them. For instance in the case of the Gita, ‘Unlike Gandhi he was convinced that Krishna was talking to Arjuna about real battles and not battles which take place in the soul.’ Predictably, in the ardent politics o f the Mahasabha he found a more legitimate expression of the Hindu search for political potency. Predictably too, he did well in the party, becoming within a few years the secretary of its Poona branch. However, he did not find the RSS militant enough, so, within a year or so, severing his links with the RSS, Godse formed a new organization, the Hindu Rashtra Dal. In 1944, Godse purchased the newspaper Agrani, with the help of donations given by sympathizers, to propagate his political views. But soon the government proscribed the paper because of its fiery tone. Godse revived the paper under a new name, Hindu Rashtra. This time he took financial help from Narayan Apte, who became the paper’s managing editor. Hindu Rashtra was even more violently anti-Gandhi than its predecessor and it arti­

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culated the belief popular among some sections of Indians, particu­ larly among the Bengali and M aharashtrian middle-income upper caste elements, that Gandhism was ‘emasculating’ the Hindus. However, notwithstanding its shrillness, the newspaper did not give its editor any money and he continued to be a tailor. In fact, he had to start a coaching class in tailoring to supplement his income. W hatever else Hindu Rashtra did or did not, it helped crystallize some o f Godse’s main differences with Gandhi at the level of manifest political style. However, it is impossible to speak about these differences without stating the many manifest similarities between the two men. Both were committed and courageous nationalists; both felt that the problem o f India was basically the problem of the Hindus because they constituted the majority o f Indians; and both were allegiant to the idea o f an undivided free India. Both felt austerity was a necessary part of political activity. Gandhi’s asceticism is well-known, but Godse too lived like a hermit. He slept on a wooden plank, using occasionally a blanket and even in the severest winter wore only a shirt. Contrary to the idea fostered by a popular Hollywood film on him, Nine Hours to Rama, Godse neither smoked nor drank. In fact, he took G andhi's re­ jection o f sexuality even further; he never married and remained a strict celibate. Like Gandhi, Godse considered himself a sanatani and, in deference to his own wishes, he was cremated according to sanatani rights. Yet, and in this respect too he resembled Gandhi, he said he believed in a casteless Hindu society and in a democratic polity. He was even in favour o f G andhi’s attempts to mobilize the Indian Muslims for the nationalist cause by making some concessions to the Muslim leadership. Perhaps it was not an ac­ cident that Godse began his political career as a participant in a civil disobedience movement started by G andhi and ended his political life with a speech from the witness stand which, in spite of being an attack on Gandhi, none the less revealed a grudging respect for what G andhi had done for the country. But the differences between the two men were basic. Godse was in the tradition o f the Westernized upper-caste elements in the tertiary sector o f the Indian society who had dominated the Indian political scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.28 He was particularly impressed by the terrorist traditions of urban

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 83 middle-class Bengal, Punjab and M aharashtra which, sharing the values o f India’s imperial rulers, conceptualized politics as a ruthlessly rational zero-sum game in which the losses o f the op­ ponents must constantly be actively maximized. Like a ‘norm al’ hum an being anywhere in the world, he considered totally irra­ tional G andhi’s emphasis on political ethics, soul force and the moral supremacy o f the oppressed over the oppressor. Godse’s Hinduism too was essentially different from G andhi’s. To G andhi Hinduism was a life style and an open-ended system of universal ethics which could continuously integrate new inputs. He wanted to organize the Hindus as part o f a geographically defined larger political community, not as a religious group. To semi-Westemized Godse, unknowingly impressed by organized Western Christianity and Islam and by the aggressive self-affirma­ tion of the church and the ulema, the salvation o f Hindus lay in giving up their synthetism and ideological openness and in being religious in the fashion o f politically successful societies. He wanted Hindus to constantly organize, compete and ‘self defend’, to become a single community and a nation. Finally, Godse looked at history as a chronological sequence of ‘real’ events. So he saw the one thousand years o f domination of India by rulers who were Muslims or Christians as a humiliation o f the H indus which had to be redressed. Gandhi, in tune with mainstream Hinduism, never cared for chronologies o f past events. History to him was a contemporary myth which had to be inter­ preted and reinterpreted in terms o f contemporary needs. The long Muslim domination o f India meant nothing to him; in any case defeat for him was a problem for the victor, not for the defeated. These differences account for Godse’s saying: Gandhiji failed in his duty as the Father of the Nation. He has proved to be the Father of Pakistan. It was for this reason alone that I as a dutiful son of Mother India thought it my duty to put an end to the life of the so-called Father of the Nation who had played a very prominent part in bringing about vivisection of the country — our Motherland.29 But there were other historical reasons for Godse’s antipathy towards Gandhi behind these fantasies of a mother who becomes a victim o f rapacious intruders, a weak emasculated father who fails in his paternal duty and collaborates with the aggressors, and an allegiant m other’s son who tries to redeem his masculinity by

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protecting the mother, by defeating the aggressors in their own game and by patricide. Let us now turn to them. Godse’s humble personal history was endorsed for him by the history of his community, particularly the encroachment which the British colonial culture was making upon the traditional self­ definitions o f the Chitpavans. Even before he was bom , the Chitpavan — and for that m atter Brahmanic — dom ination of the M aharashtrian society had ceased to be automatic. First, they had forfeited their prerogatives as a ruling caste and they had to use their traditional Brahmanic skills to compete in the alien world o f colonialism to earn a part o f their social status.30 Secondly, the burgeoning commercial culture o f metropolitan Bombay, the capital o f the state, was gradually rendering peripheral the ■culture o f Poona, opening up the stronghold o f Chitpavans to a wider world and simultaneously forcing the Chitpavans all over M aharashtra to gradually become mainly a group o f lower middleclass professionals and petty government officials. Third, the Chitpavans had increasingly begun to feel the growing presence and power o f the upwardly mobile sectors o f the M aharashtrian H indus such as the M arathas and M ahars, the commercial success o f non-M aharashtrians like the G ujarati Banias (they included the H indu commercial castes, to one of which Gandhi belonged, and Muslim merchant communities) and Parsees.31 In fact the language o f commerce in Bombay was G ujarati and the language o f admi­ nistration under the Raj was, naturally, English. Marathi, in spite its highly developed literary and scholarly traditions, was nowhere in the picture. Even more galling must have been the growing professional dominance in Bombay o f the Gujaratis and Parsees, communities largely identified in the minds o f the M aharashtrian with commerce. So the ambivalence o f the Chitpavans towards the changing social environment was deep and deeply anxiety-provoking. And the community was clearly split. A few did very well under the new dispensation; they saw the cultural advantages o f the Chitpavans in the tertiary sector. Others saw British colonialism as an unmiti­ gated evil which was eroding the Chitpavan’s traditional self­ definition. This ambivalence, too, was a part o f Godse’s heritage. G andhi, who started his political career in India in Godse’s formative years in the 1920s, was a threat to his last antagonist in two ways. First, Gandhi was trying to make the social periphery

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 85 (which, as we have seen, was a periphery first o f all to the Chitpavans) a part o f the political centre (which was a centre first o f all to the Chitpavans). Second, while Godse was one o f those who competed with the British within the same frame o f discourse, Gandhi never offered political competition to either the traditional system or the 'm odern’ colonial establishment. Truly speaking, he competed with nobody; he was always seeking complementari­ ties.32 Those who speak o f Gandhi either as a totally atypical Indian or as a genuine son o f the soil tend to miss that What he basically offered was an alternative language o f public life and an alternative set of political and social values, and he tried to actualize them as if that was the most natural thing to do. This also must have been a threat to those who wanted to offer clear resistance to the colonial system on unmixed nationalist grounds. To come to the other m ajor theme in G andhi's dissent which bonded him and his assassin. Consciously or not, a recent best­ seller tries simple-mindedly to provide a clue to this psychological link between N athuram Vinayak Godse and G andhi.33 The book claims, on the basis of the authors’ interviews with Gopal Godse, that N athuram and his political m entor and father’s namesake, Vinayak D am odar Savarkar, had had a homosexual experience. The book also seems to hint that by the time he participated in the assassination, N athuram had become an ascetic misogynist. Finally, it adds that Apte, the ‘brains’ behind the assassination, was a womanizer. All this may or may not be true. Gopal Godse has denied that he had ever mentioned his brother’s homosexuality while being interviewed by the authors. Savarkar, some others claim, was a known womanizer. We know he had spent long stretches o f time inside jails, often in solitary confinement, for his political activi­ ties.34 His sexuality may have been distorted and found an outlet either in homosexuality or in promiscuity. But in either case he would have represented a heightened sensitivity to man-woman relationships and problems centering around masculinity and femininity. And whether he was involved in the conspiracy or not — the existing evidence tends to be in his favour legally, not morally35 — he did serve as the assassins’ ego ideal.36 For many o f them the mighty elder revolutionary was the male prototype, vigorously protesting the reduction o f the Hindus to a passive, quasi-feminine role, constantly fearing the further encroachment

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of femininity on their masculine self due to the ‘rapaciousness’ of the Muslims and the British. The same thing applies to N athuram Godse. W hether he had willingly joined Savarkar in a political and sexual bond or not, he articulated concerns about his sexuality, often by aggressive denial o f it and by his conspicuous asceticism, often by his conflicts centering around his sexual identification and an acute sensitivity to the definitions o f masculinity and femininity. If Collins and Lapierre have built a myth, they have mythologized what there was in reality. Godse’s political speeches and conversations were studded with imagery which constantly reminded the sensitive listener o f the equation which Godse made between Indian or Hindu subjugation and passive femininity. His writings were punc­ tuated by references to the British and Muslims as ‘rapists’, and Hindus as their raped, castrated, deflowered victims.37 Apte, the alleged womanizer who planned the logistics o f the assassination, only strengthens this interpretation. At one plane, the womanizer and the homosexual both articulate, through diametrically opposite kinds o f sexuality, the same sensitivities. One tries to constantly reaffirm his masculine self and prove to himself and to others that he is a m an ; the other fears woman as a sex object and is uncertain about his masculinity. The main point is this: Godse belonged to a group which was deeply conflicted about sexual identity and had learnt to politicize some o f these conflicts. In sum, Godse not only represented the traditional Indian stratarchy which Gandhi was trying to break, he was sensitized by his background to this process o f elite displacement. Similarly, he also sensed the other coordinate o f the Gandhian ‘revolution’: the gradual legitimacy given to femininity as a valued aspect of Indian self-definition. This revaluation o f femininity, too, threaten­ ed to deprive the traditional elite like Godse o f two o f their major scapegoats: the Muslims and the British, who had defeated and emasculated the Hindus and made them nirveerya or sterile and napungsak or impotent. The theory o f action associated with such scapegoating was that the Hindus would have to redeem their masculinity by fighting and defeating the Muslims and the British. Now the new Gandhian culture o f politics had made this theory irrelevant. This culture placed on the victims of aggression the responsibility of becoming authentic innocents, wise as the serpent

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 87 to the exploitative situation, rather than pseudo-innocents colluding with the aggressors for secondary gains from the exploitative situation.38 This self-redefinition, G andhi seemed to argue, could not be attained by reaffirming one’s masculine self— he was shrewd enough to know the might o f the British empire and violence invariably associated with such reaffirmation o f masculinity — but by militant nonviolence, which totally refuses to recognize the defeat in violent confrontation to be defeat. N o victory is com­ plete unless the defeated accepts his defeat. The Godses had lost to the British, G andhi seemed to argue, because they conformed to the martial values o f the victors. He promised to win because he could draw upon the non-martial self o f the apparent victors and create doubts about their victory in them. So Godse was not a demented killer. Jawaharlal Nehru, soon after G andhi’s death, claimed that Godse did not know what he was doing. I contend that more than any other person Godse did know. He sensed with his entire being the threat Gandhi was to the traditional lifestyle and world view of India. K.P. Karunakaran, a political scientist who has worked on Gandhi for a number o f years, once lamented that only two persons in India had cor­ rectly assessed the power o f Gandhi : Godse, who killed him, and G. D. Birla, India’s biggest business tycoon, who gave him un­ conditional financial support in pre-independence India and reaped its benefits in post-independence India. I am afraid, at least in this one instance, the political scientist is more right than the political functionary. N ehru was wrong. Godse did reveal a surprisingly acute sensitivity to the changing political-psychological climate in India, by killing Gandhi. I can only add that the height­ ened sensitivity o f Godse reflected the latent awareness o f dominant sections o f the Indian society o f what G andhi was doing to them. In that sense, Godse’s hand was forced by the real killers of Gandhi : the anxiety-ridden, insecure, traditional elite concentrated in the urbanized, educated, partly Westernized, tertiary sector whose meaning o f life G andhian politics was taking away. Gandhi often talked about the heartlessness o f the Indian literati. He paid with his life for that awareness. Ten days before his assassination, on 20 January 1948, Madanlal Pahwa, one o f Godse’s co-conspirators, threw a bomb in a prayer meeting Gandhi was holding, and was apprehended. His intended victim pleaded with the police and the audience to

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have mercy on M adanlal and instead o f harassing the young man, to search their own hearts.39 Ill One final question needs to be raised: how far did Gandhi and his political heirs in the Indian government collude with the assassins ? We know G andhi was depressed in his last days in Delhi and was fast losing interest in living.40 The partition o f India was hard on a person who had once said: I can never be willing party to the vivisection. I would employ non-violent means to prevent it... My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such doctrine is for me denial of G od... If the Congress wishes to accept partition, it will be over my dead body.41 The primitive sadism o f the pre-and post-partition Hindu-M uslim riots too had destroyed G andhi's earlier publicly-expressed wish to live for 125 years.42 He could see the dwindling interest and attendance at his daily prayer meetings and must have also noticed that many o f those who did attend the meetings did so as a daily ritual.43 Somehow G andhi, as if anticipating and agreeing with the accusations Godse would later make, held himself responsible for what was happening to India and felt that G od after deliberately blinding him had awakened him to his mistake.44 He now openly yearned for a violent death while preaching pacifism. As he became fond o f telling M anuben, his grandniece and constant companion o f his last days, he now only wanted to die bravely; he felt that could turn out to be his final victory. Another time he said to her that if he were to die of an illness, he would prove himself a false M ahatm a.45 But if he was felled by an assassin and could die with R am a's name on his lips, he would prove himself a true M ahatma. Thus, it is not surprising that Gandhi's last fast at Delhi, though ostensibly directed against communal violence, was by his own admission directed against everybody.46 His death wish found other expressions too. He now began to have forebodings o f his end. He even specified, correctly as it later turned out, the religion o f his future assassin and his own last words after being struck by an assassin’s bullet.47 His health,

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 89 too, was fast deteriorating. In addition to ailments such as an almost chronic cough, he showed psychosomatic symptoms such as recurring giddiness and nightmares.48 He also became totally careless about his physical security. All his life he ‘had been reckless o f his own safety, and in Delhi he found abundant opportunities to place his life in danger.’49 He was accustomed to hearing the slogan ‘Death to G andhi’.50 Now, he seemed to be daring his detractors to act out their wish. There had been, as I have mentioned, a bom b explosion only a few days before his assassination at one o f his prayer meetings, the handiwork o f the same group o f men who ultimately killed him. But G andhi explicitly rejected all offers o f police protection. Those in charge o f his safety too, strangely enough, did little, and this in spite o f the fact that bomb-thrower Pahwa was immediately caught and was ‘willing’ to talk. But there was little communica­ tion between the Delhi, Bombay and Poona police. Deliberately o r not, each o f these police forces sabotaged the investigation. Twenty years later, the K apur Commission o f Enquiry unearthed largescale bureaucratic inefficiency and sheer lethargy in the police who had failed to pursue the clear clues they had to the existence o f a dedicated band o f conspirators.51 To pass off the inefficiency and lethargy as the characteristics o f individuals will not do.52 One m ust consider these im portant and inherent characteristics o f the culture o f the modern sector o f India which, in effect, colluded with the conspirators. The police officers o f Delhi who later cheated and forged documents, as the K apur Commission esta­ blished, to show that the police had tried to protect G andhi— or the police officers at Bombay and Poona, who failed to break up the conspiracy even when supplied with the names and occupations o f some o f the conspirators — were a part o f the environment which felt menaced by Gandhi. They had worked too long for the Raj as antagonists o f Gandhi, and had not been touched by his vision o f a different kind o f society. The H indu-M uslim riots which had destroyed G andhi’s will to live and turned him into a self-destructive depressive, also coloured the psychology o f the investigating police, constantly exposed to the slogan o f ‘Let G andhi die’ during G andhi’s last ‘fast unto death’ to establish communal peace in Delhi. Anti-Muslim feeling was high in the predominantly H indu police assigned to protect Gandhi. Most o f them were drawn from the various Kshatriya

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subtraditions o r upwardly mobile social groups claiming Kshatriya status and saw G andhi not merely as pro-Muslim but as a stereoty­ pical model o f passive Hindu submission to non-H indu aggression. Moreover, the Indian police had already resigned from their role as secular arbiters of law. In the communal riots, the police on the subcontinent had shown itself to be particularly vulnerable to communal passions. M ost policemen had supported their respec­ tive communities, and their officers had openly tolerated and colluded with the killing o f people o f other communities. Belonging to castes and communities which had traditionally either lived by the sword or had culturally built-in acceptance of Dionysian rules of interpersonal and public conduct, these officers must have seen in Gandhi, in the charged atmosphere o f the post-partition riots, a person identifying with a part o f their feared superego which had been overtaken by primal impulses o f violence, retribution and fear.53 Finally, though to his political heirs he remained a father figure, the successful completion o f India’s freedom struggle ending in independence had taken its toll. Statecraft and new responsibilities took up much o f the time o f the leaders. The chaos and nearanarchic situation in post-independence India kept them busy. If anything, they found G andhi’s style slightly anachronistic and Gandhi somewhat unmanageable.54 F or instance, Susanne Rudolph feels ‘P a te l. . . often wished that the M ahatma would leave him alone, especially in matters where they differed greatly — as in Hindu-M uslim relations and Patel’s cold-eyed Realpolitik orienta­ tion’.55 But leaving him alone was the one thing Gandhi would not do. Did Home Minister Patels’s failure to protect G andhi express his unconscious rejection o f the relevance o f Gandhi and his interfering style, as an im portant first-hand witness and a m ajor political figure of the period, Abul Kalam Azad, seems to imply?56 One does not know, but it is not perhaps a coincidence that the last fast of G andhi was directed as much against violent communalism as against Nehru and Patel refusing to a hostile Pakistan its share o f the funds o f undivided India on grounds of realpolitik. Let us not forget that G andhi’s inability to conform to the principles of realpolitik was one o f the main reasons Godse gave for killing Gandhi. G andhian politics, Godse said in his last speech, ‘was supported by old superstitious beliefs such as the

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 91 power o f the soul, the inner voice, the fast, the prayer and the purity of mind.’57 I felt that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with the armed forces.. . . People may even call me and dub me as devoid of any sense or foolish, but the nation would be free to follow the course founded on reason which I consider to be necessary for sound nation-building.58 In the course o f the same speech Godse also said that G andhi’s non-violence consisted in enduring ‘the blows of the aggressor without showing any resistance either by weapon or by physical fo rc e .. . . I firmly believed and believe that the non-violence o f the type described above will lead the nation towards ruin.’ He had an example to give, too: the ‘problem of the state of Hyderabad which had been unnecessarily delayed and postponed has been rightly solved by our government by the use of armed force — after the demise o f Gandhi. The present government of remaining India is seen taking the course o f practical politics.’59 It is an indication o f how much latent support there was for this line of thinking in the country that the government of India prevented the publica­ tion of this speech lest it arouse widespread sympathy for the killer o f Gandhi. Perhaps the same thread of consciousness or, if you like, un­ consciousness, ran through the inaction of B. G. Kher and M oraiji Desai, Chief and Home Ministers respectively of the state of Bombay, where the conspiracy to kill Gandhi was hatched. They did not follow up vigorously enough the first-hand information given to them ten days before the assassination by Jagadish Chandra Jain, a professor in a college at Bombay and father-confessor of M adanlal Pahwa. Anyone reading the tragicomic exchanges between Jain on the one hand and Kher and Desai on the other cannot but be impressed by the callous, self-righteous and yet guilt-ridden ineptitude o f the two politicians in this m atter.60 Obviously the living Gandhi had already ceased to be a relevant figure for a large number o f Indians. To some o f them he had already begun to seem a threat to Hindu survival, a fanatical supporter o f Muslims and, worse, one who rejected the principle o f zero-sum game in politics. If not their conscious minds, their primitive selves were demanding his blood. Godse reflected this desire. He was confident that millions in

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India (particularly Hindu women, subject to Muslim atrocities) would shed tears for his sacrifice; and he lived the months before his execution with the serene conviction that posterity would vindicate him. In his last letter to his parents he wrote that he had killed Gandhi for the same reasons for which Krishna had killed the evil King Sishupal.61 He was not wholly wrong in his estimate of public reactions. This is how, according to Justice Khosla, the public reacted to the killer o f Gandhi after N athuram had made his final plea as a defendant: The audience was visibly and audibly moved. There was a deep silence when he ceased speaking. Many women were in tears and men were coughing and searching for their handkerchiefs. The silence was accentuated and made deeper by the sound of an occasional subdued sniff or a muffled cough.. . . I have . . . no doubt that had the audience of that day been constituted into a jury and entrusted with the task of deciding Godse’s appeal, they would have brought in a verdict of ‘not guilty’ by an overwhelming majority.62 IV On 30 January 1948 N athuram Godse fired four shots at pointblank range as G andhi was going to his evening prayer-meeting in Delhi. Before firing the shots he bowed down to Gandhi to show his respect for the services the M ahatm a had rendered the country. The killer made no attem pt to run away and himself shouted for the police, even though in the stunned silence following the killing he had enough time at least to attem pt an escape. As he later said, he had done his duty like A rjuna in the Afahabharata whom Krishna advised to kill his own relatives because they were evil.63 So Gandhi died, according to his own scenario, at the hands of one who was apparently a zealot, a religious fanatic, a typical assassin with a typical assassin’s background: educated and intelligent, but an under-achiever; relatively young; coming from the middle class and yet from a group which was a displaced elite; and with a long record o f failures. Here was a man fighting a diffused sense of self-definition with the help of a false sense of mission and trying to give through political assassination some meaning to his life.64 One might even note, for psychologists, that there was also in Godse the authoritarian m an’s fear of sexuality, status seeking, idealization of parents, ideological

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 93 rigidity, constriction o f emotions and even some amount of what Erich Fromm would diagnose as love of death.63 In other ways, too, it was an archetypal assassination. Not only the background o f the assassin, but everything else too fell into place. There was the hero who became the victim; the villain, motivated by values larger than him but also, at one plane, driven by fate and maniacal; and a Greek cast of characters who invited the tragedy. There were even eloquent mourners in the Nehrus, Einsteins and Shaws. Finally, like many assassinations, this one too had as its immediate provocation something history had already passed by, namely, the partition of India in 1947. To both Gandhi and Godse partition was the greatest personal tragedy. Both blamed Gandhi for it; one sought retribution, the other expiation. Partition however was irreversible and, politically, the assassination — and the martyrdom the two antagonists sought through it — was pointless. In this sense Mahadevan is right; in the confrontation between Godse and G andhi there could be no loser and no winner; it was like two batsmen walking into the field after the stumps had been drawn.66 Is this, then, the whole story? At another level, was it not also a case of the dominant traditions within a society trying to contain a force which, in the name o f orthodoxy, threatened to demolish its centre, to erect instead a freer society and a new authority system using the rubble o f the old? Did not Godse promise to facilitate his fellowmen’s escape from this freedom that Gandhi promised? If Gandhi in his depression connived at it, he also perhaps felt — being the shrewd, practical idealist he was — that he had become somewhat o f an anachronism in post-partition, independent India; and in violent death he might be more relevant to the living than he could be in life. As not a few have sensed, like Socrates and Christ before him, Gandhi knew how to use m an’s sense of guilt creatively.

NOTES 1. Quoted in Tapan Ghose, The Gandhi Murder Trial (New York: Asia), 1973, pp. 316-17. 2. T. K. Mahadevan, ‘Godse Versus Gandhi’, Times of India, 12 March 1978,

94 A t the Edge o f Psychology Sunday Magazine, p. 1. 3. See on this theme Ashis Nandy, invitation to a Beheading: A Psychologist's Guide to Assassinations in the Third World’, Quest, November-December 1975, pp. ‘69-72. 4. The Life and Death o f Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Dutton, 1968). 5. To effect this reconciliation, Gandhi frequently used his own contradictions and derived strength from his own inner battles against authoritarianism, his own masculine self and aggression. This also was, in the context of the do­ minant ethos of the Indian civilization, a major deviance. The tradition here was to use social experiences for purposes of self-enrichment, not to act out personal experience in social intervention. 6. It is an indicator of the strength of the subliminal revolution of Gandhi that as late as in 1972, while reviewing Payne’s and Erikson’s books on Gandhi, a psychoanalyst mentioned as instances of Gandhi's irrationality, Gandhi’s hostility to modem technology, mass education, industrialization and science. H. Robert Black, ‘Review of The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi by Robert Payne and Gandhi's Truth by Erik H. Erikson’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1972, 41, 122-9. In about 1977, in an ecologically sensitive world discussing zero growth rates and intermediate technologies, the fundamental criticisms of formal education ventured by educationists like Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire, and the deglamourization of much of modem science, Gandhi seems less backdated on these issues than the reviewer. 7. Ghose, Gandhi Murder Trial, p. 218. 8. In pre-Gandhian colonial India, as is well-known, one group of modernizers pleaded for the primacy of social reform, over political freedom; another insisted that the nationalist movement should have priority over reform move­ ments. The first group, dominating the Indian political scene in the nineteenth century, gradually gave way to the second at the beginning of this century. 9. See ‘Woman Versus Womanliness’, in this book. 10. On the frequently discussed psychological dynamics of Gandhi's childhood, particularly the identification models available to him, see Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition (University of Chicago, 1967), Part 2; E. V. Wolfenstein, The Revolutionary Personality (Princeton University, 1967), pp. 73-88; and Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth (New York: Norton, 1969). 11. In a recent paper Rowland Lorimer has explicitly recognized the centrality of this aspect of Gandhi. See ‘A Reconsideration of the Psychological Roots of Gandhi’s Truth’, Psychoanalytic Review, 1976, 63, 191-207. An unsophisti­ cated but touching interpretation of Gandhi from this point of view is by his grandniece and the constant companion of his last years, Manuben. See her Bapu— My Mother (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1962). 12. See a discussion of this in ‘Woman Versus Womanliness'; and ‘Sati: a Nineteenth Century Tale of Women, Violence and Protest’, in this book. 13. See on this subject the sensitive writings of Rudolph and Rudolph, The Moder­ nity of Tradition', and Erikson, Gandhi's Truth. 14. It was this assumption of the universality of his political ethics which prompted Gandhi to give his notorious advice to the European Jews to offer non-violent, passive resistance to Hitler. But of course Gandhi was concerned with human normalities, not abnormalities. When he felt that satyagraha would work in the

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 95

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

Europe of the thirties and forties, he was showing greater respect for European civilization than those who have since correctly doubted his political acumen on this point. If the Nazis did not deserve Gandhi, Gandhi also did not deserve the Nazis. It is interesting that the political groups which produced the assassin of Gandhi were open admirers of the Nazis and, at least in the early thirties, wanted to treat the Muslims the way Hitler treated the Jews. In turn, Gandhi had for this very reason rejected these groups as totalitarian and attacked even their courage, nationalism and diligence as fascist. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi — The Last Phase, 2 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan), p. 440. Evidently Gandhi’s technique failed with some varieties of Indian fascism too. D. J. Fisher, ‘Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland: The Terrestrial Animal and His Great Oceanic Friend’, American Imago, 1976, 33, 1-59, quote on p. 4. This is probably the explanation for his hostile comment on modem India’s first social reformer, Rammohun Roy. See Stephen Hay, ‘Introduction to Rammohun Roy’s A Tract Against Idolatry'{Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1963). Statement of co-conspirator Vishnu R. Karkare, quoted in G. D. Khosla, ‘The Crime of Nathuram Godse’, in The Murder of the Mahatma (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), pp. 201-45. Quote on p. 230. Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 612. J. C. Jain, The Murder of Mahatma Gandhi: Prelude and Aftermath (Bombay: Chetana, 1961), p. 45; Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 750-1. There was in the Maharashtrian Brahmanic elites an emphasis on cynical hardheaded pure politics which was antagonistic to the essence of Gandhism. Yet Gandhi was patently beating them at their own game. He was winning over and politically organizing the numerically preponderant non-Brahmanic sectors of Maharashtra itself. No wonder the cornered Brahmanic elites began to regard ‘Gandhi’s political leadership and movement of nonviolence with a strong concentrated feeling of antipathy and frustration which found expression in a sustained campaign of calumny against Gandhiji for over a quarter of a century.’ Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, 2, p. 750. There were three exceptions. One was Madanlal Pahwa, a Punjabi Hindu belonging to the Khatri or business community. He had failed the entrance examination for the Royal Indian Navy and, as a victim of the partition riots, had held a number of odd jobs and moved from place to place. He however obviously played second fiddle in the conspiracy. Other exceptions were the South Indian servant of one of the conspirators, Shankar Kistayya, ultimately acquitted as only a marginal member of the group and Digambar Badge, who turned government approver. The conspirators included a doctor, a bookshopowner, a small-time restauranteur cum municipal councillor, an army store­ keeper cum illegal arms-merchant. That is, except for Pahwa and Kistayya all the conspirators were middle class, educated, semi-Westernized professionals and job-holders. The facts of Nathuram’s early life are borrowed mainly from Manohar Malgaonkar’s The Men who Killed Gandhi (Delhi: Macmillan, 1978), Chapter 2. Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 616. V. G. Deshpande in Ghose, Gandhi Murder Trial, pp. 280-1; also Gopal Godse,

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Panchavanna Kotinche Bali (Poona: Vitasta, 1971), Chapter 6. 24. Gopal Godse, Gandhihatya ani Mee (Poona: Asmita, 1967), p. 221; and Ghose, Gandhi Murder, p. 280. One of Nathuram's avowed purposes in killing Gandhi was to help the rulers of India break the Mahatma's spell and conduct statecraft on the basis of ruthless realpolitik. He thought the government's mercilessness towards him a good beginning of this. See also Nathuram's letter to G. T. Madholkar, ‘Why I Shot Gandhi’, Onlooker, November 16-30, 1978, pp. 22-4. 25. Godse, Gandhihatya, p. 306. 26. Ibid., p. 221. 27. Harold D. Laswell and Daniel Lerner eds,. World Revolutionary Elites (Cam­ bridge: MIT, 1965); and I. L. Horowitz, ‘Political Terrorism and State Power’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 1973, I, 147-57. 28. Probably the best indicator of this was Godse’s intention virtually to the end of his days, to appeal to the Privy Council, which in 1948 was still the final court of appeal for Indians. He felt that if he could somehow take this case to England he would get an international hearing. 29. Godse, Gandhihatya, p. 228. 30. This was a situation analogous to that of the Bengali babus. Understandably, Maharashtrian Brahmans and Bengali babus were the two subcultures t o . which Gandhi’s charisma never fully extended. 31. The Parsees in fact had gone one better. Increasingly concentrated in metro­ politan Bombay, they had begun to compete successfully with the Chitpavans in exactly those areas where the Chitpavans specialized: in the professions and in government servicc. In fact, they had already taken fantastic strides ex­ ploiting their faster pace of Westernization, their marginality to the Indian society, and their almost total identification with the British rulers. E. Kulke, The Parsees o f India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1975). 32. That is why his declared gurus included liberals like B. G. Gokhale and Rabindranath Tagore. Even his declared political heir was the Westernized Nehru, who differed perhaps the most from Gandhi in life-style and world­ view, and not Patel who had a social background similar to Gandhi and was more at home in the Indian village. 33. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New Delhi: Vikas, 1976), Chapter 16. 34. In fact, sixty-five at the time of assassination, he had already spent nearly half his life in British jails and in the penal colony in the Andamans. Notwith­ standing his religious fanaticism, Savarkar was a courageous self-sacrificing nationalist. He was one of the main builders of the anti-British terrorist move­ ment in Maharashtra and, as such, no stranger to physical violence and con­ spiratorial politics. He was also the mainstay of the Hindu Mahasabha, the rump of a party openly propagating a Hindu polity for India. See Dhananjay Keer, Veer Savarkar (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1966). - 35. A good impartial summary is in Payne, Mahatma Gandhi. For the opposite point of view see Ghose, Gandhi Murder Trial; also Khosla, ‘Nathuram Godse’. Justice Khosla was one of the judges who tried the assassins. 36. It may be of interest to the more psychologically minded that three out of half-a-dozen or so aliases used by the conspirators involved the first name of

The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 97 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

Savarkar. See Godse, Gandhihatya, Chapter 12, to get some idea of Nathuram’s idiom; also his letter to Madholkar. The concepts of authentic innocence and pseudo-innocence are Rollo May’s. See his Power and Innocence (New York: Norton, 1972). The secondary gains were of two types. Those who submitted partook of the crumbs from the colonial table. Their incentives were firstly material and secondly the psychological returns of passivity and security. Those who defied the Raj through terrorism also made secondary gains. Even in defeat they got their masculinity endorsed. They were men, it seemed to them, in a society of eunuchs. Jain, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 64. Brijkrishna Chandiwalla, At the Feet of Bapu (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1954), quoted in Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 573. Jain, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 52. Manuben, Bapu — My Mother, p. 49; Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi— The Last Phase, 2 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan), p. 460. N. K. Bose, My Days with Gandhi (Bombay: Orient Longman), p.250. Manuben, Last Glimpses of Bapu (Delhi: S. L. Agarwala, 1962), p.81. Ibid., pp. 81, 234, 252, 297-8. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., pp. 297-8. Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 550, 552. Ibid., p. 549. For example, Jain, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 62-3, Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, 2, p. 101. J. L. Kapur, Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Conspiracy to Murder Mahatma Gandhi, Vols. 1-6 (New Delhi: Government of India, 1970). There is a double-bind in most antipsychologism in the arena of socialinter­ pretation. Psychological interpretation in terms of shared motives is countered by the argument that the behaviour of key individuals in a historical episode is random. Psychological interpretation in terms of individual psychodynamics is countered by the argument that the characteristics of aggregates determine all of individual behaviour. No wonder that Gandhi himself was suspicious of some of the police officers in charge of communal peace. See for example his comment on I.G.P. Randhawa of Delhi in Manuben, Last Glimpses of Bapu, pp. 170-1. To some extent, Nehru does not fit the mould. Himself never fully given to realpolitik, he also was never much impressed by the search for political ma­ chismo. ‘Gandhi’s Lieutenants — Varieties of Followership’, in P. F. Power ed„ The Meanings of Gandhi (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1971), pp. 41-58, see p. 55. A. K. Azad, India Wins Freedom (Bombay: Orient Longman’s, 1955). It has been suggested that Patel never recovered from his sense of guilt over the whole episode and died a broken man soon afterwards. If so, he was only epitomising the moral crisis that Gandhi wanted to precipitate in all Indians by his death. In the case of Patel the crisis might have been further sharpened

98

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

A t the Edge o f Psychology by his own alleged softness towards some of those associated with the assassi­ nation. See on this theme Gopal Godse, Gandhihatya, p. 229, 237-8. Quoted in Ghose, Gandhi Murder Trial, p. 229. Quoted in Khosla, Nathuram Godse, p. 242. Quoted in Ghose, Gandhi Murder Trial, p. 228, 229. Jain, Mahatma Gandhi, Part 2, Chapters I and 5. Further details of such acts of carelessness all around could be found in Kapur Commission Report. Godse, Gandhihatya ani Mee, pp. 221-3. Khosla, Nathuram Godse, p. 243. Godse, Gandhihatya ani Mee, pp. 46, 221. See Horowitz, Politicai Terrorism and State Power; and Ashis Nandy, ‘Invita­ tion to a Beheading'. See Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973). I have not dealt with them in this paper, but on Godse's search for self-esteem and meaning in death, see Godse, Gandhihatya, pp. 222. Mahadevan. ‘Godse Versus Gandhi’.

ADORNO IN INDIA Revisiting the Psychology of Fascism1 i Twenty-five years is a long time in the history o f a social science. Generally, the sciences o f man in society are characterized by masses of noncumulative data and a multiplicity o f theoretical paradigms. Ideas in these sciences are constantly in flux, and books, authors and schools are quickly outdated. It is to the credit o f T. W. Adorno and his associates that nearly three decades after their study o f the authoritarian personality, it still serves as a baseline for all new theoretical and methodological attacks on the problem.1 True, subsequent empirical studies have revealed major lacunae in the work, and most references to it are now accompanied by some critical comments. But it continues to represent analytic and normative concerns which have not been overtaken by the progress o f the social sciences. At least till now, no psychologist has come up with an alternative model o f the mind of the fascist which is as comprehensive, complex and philosophi­ cally sensitive. It is to the credit o f the community o f psychologists too that, unable to produce comprehensive as well as sensitive alternative approaches to problems such as this, they have in the meanwhile made it slightly unfashionable to be either comprehensive or sensi­ tive. Unfortunately for them, in spite o f Michael Polanyi’s pas­ sionate defence o f the intrinsic needs o f science, sometimes the works which survive in psychology are not those which respond to purely professional challenges, but those which respond to history, show a sensitivity to the problem o f human destiny, and contribute to the growth o f a new human consciousness. Perhaps it cannot be otherwise. History may not repeat itself, but it often has a way o f holding us up. The problems o f which the psychologist gets professionally tired are not always the problems which are dead, either in society o r in the life of the psychologist himself. It is with this consideration in mind that I attem pt a review of the work by Adorno et al in the context o f the ongoing debate on the sources and supports o f fascism in the Indian society.

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il W hat is the authoritarian person like? Adorno and his co-authors, operating from Marxist and Freudian vantage-grounds, give the answer at various planes. At the plane o f manifest behaviour, the full-blown fascist subscribes to racial and ethnocentric ideology and to conventional political and economic values dominating his society and identified with authorities. He idealizes his parents and himself; he has a rigid conception o f sex roles and a deep Concern for status. Some of these social and political attitudes are time-bound and spatially limited. In the course o f the last twenty-five years scholars have criticized the authors’ over-emphasis on anti-semiticism in particular and racialism in general, their neglect o f the more apolitical forms o f fascism (for instance, authoritarianism in the class room or the workshop), their bias against the authoritarianism o f the right as opposed to that o f the left, their sampling errors and their over-dependence on the Frankfurt school o f Marxism and Freudian psychology.2 Even their measure o f authoritarianism, the famous F scale, has been criticized for its neglect of important methodological issues, particularly acquiescent response set, though recent studies, by attacking the older concept o f response style, have vindicated it to some extent on this score.3 The analysis o f the deeper dynamics o f the authoritarian m an has withstood the ravages o f time better. (To some extent, because subsequent works in this a re a — such as those by Rokeach4— are concerned with manifest, behavioural-attitudinal dimensions o f personality and do not venture an overall alternative theory of the authoritarian man.) The authoritarian person, the study shows, is psychologically compartmentalized. The relations between the various levels o f his mind are less fluid, their boundaries less permeable. His underlying traits in the areas o f aggression, sex and dependency are also more ego-alien. There is less sublimation o r socially creative modes o f impulse expression. Thus the fascist is likely to be moralistic, rigid, unable to express or release his own impulses. On the one hand, this leads to a constricted fantasy lii'e, intolerance o f ambiguities, and high extraception (meaning, roughly, the rejection o f imagination, emotions and — this may seem the psychologists’ conspiracy against their detractors — psychological sensitivities). O n the other, it promotes valuation

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o f efficiency, constructiveness and pragmatism above creativity, self-expression, richness o f inner life and understanding. Naturally, the authoritarian person depends heavily on scape­ goating and stereotypical thinking, which remain his major techni­ ques of canalizing his libidinous and aggressive drives under a strict superego system. Particularly, all stereotypy becomes highly libidinized in him and acquires a compulsive character. The au­ thority for the authoritarian person is a punitive but poorly inter­ nalized superego. He therefore has to seek indirect gratification o f his instinctual drives by conforming to conventional values. He specially fears his own aggressive needs and often tries to satisfy them through ethnocentrism o r destructive nationalism or by espousing violent ideological positions. Yet when his aggression breaks out, it takes a primitive chaotic form. Similarly with his dependency needs. They are ego-alien because they violate his self-image as a rugged, masculine person. He therefore values hard work, seeks power directly o r vicariously by submitting to powerful figures, and lives in constant fear of being duped. These non-assimilated impulses force the authoritarian person to use the mechanism o f projection extensively. He sees in others what he hates in himself. Consequently there is an exaggerated condemnation o f real or imaginary weaknesses in out-groups. Correlated with this is a lesser acceptance o f ‘passive* pleasures such as companionship, affection, the creative arts and softminded intellectual pursuits. In terms of the basic organization o f his personality, the authorita­ rian person has what Erich Fromm calls a sadomasochistic charac­ ter.5 He is simultaneously a sadist with regard to the targets of his primitive destructiveness and a masochist vis-à-vis the authorities. This is because he resolves his Oedipal problems by displacing his anger against his father, seen as a castrating rival claimant to his m other's love, to all kinds o f outgroups and to various pseudo­ legitimate targets of social violence. This permits him to identify with his feared father and arrive at a homosexual solution to his Oedipal crisis. What social forces breed such a m an? The principal factor seems to be early socialization. The fascist comes from a family of repressive, disciplinarian parents. Forced into manifest submission as a child, he learns to exclude from consciousness his negative feeling against his parents. This process o f exclusion contributes

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to his rigid defences and cognitive narrowness. At one place in the book the authors quote Max Horkheimer to make the now wellknown point that in the authoritarian person external social repression gets transformed into internal repression o f impulses. A repressive family system is the main link in the chain. The repression by the parents is internalized, becomes repression o f certain aspects o f one’s own self which is again projected outwards as authoritarian repression in society.6 The parents o f potential fascists are status conscious; they nurture a feeling in their children that whatever is helpful in climbing the social ladder is good. Frequently they themselves are marginal men, economically as well as socially, and they hope to fulfil some o f their social ambitions through their children. In the West, they generally belong to the lower and middle classes. Love in such a family is not unconditional. It is given as a reward for approved behaviour and performance. It is heavily influenced by relationships within the family which are all relationships o f dom­ inance and submission. They stress duties and obligations rather than warmth and affection. Forced into manifest submission to his parents, the child re­ presses his aggression and learns to project it to outgroups. The negative feelings against the parents have to be excluded from consciousness, and the process o f exclusion contributes to the absence of insight, the rigidity o f defences and the constriction o f ego that characterize the incipient fascist. Following his parents, the child also comes to believe that the conventional social norms are absolute. Anybody deviating from them represents for him not merely an external threat but also an internal one. According to the authors, there are variations on this typical authoritarian syndrome (consisting o f an identifiable dynamic of attitudes, beliefs, motives, early experiences, and social back­ ground). For instance, instead o f identifying with parental au­ thorities, the fascist may rebel against them and generalize the rebellion to all authority, rational or irrational, democratic or anti-democratic. Thus, he may become a ‘religious disobeyer’ of norm s and a permanently ‘disinherited, betrayed antagonist’ of society. But underlying these traits, there may be strong destructive urges and a latent tendency to submit and join hands with the authority he fears. The extreme representative of the rebel is the psychopath with his repressive and infantile conscience. He often

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becomes a ‘hatchetman’ o r a thug in an authoritarian regime. There are other authoritarians in whom stereotyped thinking takes an extreme form. F o r them, ‘rigid notions become ends rather than means and the whole world is divided into empty, schematic administrative fields.’ There is an almost complete lack of warmth or emotionalities. Often found in business and manage­ ment, these men have a ‘compulsive over-realism’ which induces them to treat everything and everyone as objects to be mani­ pulated. Doing things and getting things done are their prime concerns. Ill This is the portrait o f the fascist which Adorno and his associates draw. It is o f course a well-known portrait and every psychologist knows its broad outlines. I have described it again merely to ask a crucial question: W hat is the relevance of this old study in a changing society like ours? The answer to this must take into account not merely the psychodynamics o f authoritarianism but also its cul­ tural context. In the West, the roots o f fascism — that is authoritarianism as we have known it in this century — extend to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution which freed man from many o f his social chains and cultural illusions. This freedom took its own toll. The earlier history o f psychological bondage had left its mark on Western man. He panicked at his own new-found freedom and loss of old-style faith, and reacted with what Fromm has so aptly called a large-scale escape from freedom, seeking a new security in authoritarian systems.7 It is this secondary return to authority, and the concomitant search for authoritativeness, which has given Western authorita­ rianism its drive, and not the primary — and primordial — au­ thoritarianism o f the monarchies and ancient and medieval patriarchies. That is why the Nazi storm-trooper still remains the basic model o f the authoritarian person in the West, and not the colonial empire-builder or the impulse-denying Catholic ‘father’. The crucial difference is not, as is often supposed, between tradi­ tional laissez-faire or genuine conservatism and the destructive, irrational ‘pseudo conservatism’ o f fascism. The difference is between integrated, institutionally embedded traditions o f paterna­

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lism and the reactive, rootless search for meaning in total control, order and predictability. W hat technology and science did to the West, political and social change is now doing to India. It has severed a large number of people from their social roots and shaken their faith in the tradi­ tional system without offering them new values which may help contain their economic, social and psychological marginality. This psychologically uprooted, floating population is looking for inner and outer authorities with whom it could identify to negate its sense of insignificance and anomie. Simultaneously, many persons, families and groups among these uprooted people have mounted a reactive search for total ideologies and value-systems which would ruthlessly cut out anything that even vaguely resembles normless behaviour or can be construed as an ideological com­ promise. It is this psychological state which partly accounts for what A.F.K. Organski calls the heart of fascism, namely, ‘the repression of newly mobilized sectors’ .8 On the one hand there is the expanding sector of those who are incompletely socialized to the norms of public life and to the established means of conflict resolution (and thus constituting a moral as well as a structural threat to the established way of life), on the other, there are those searching for order, security, and meaning at any cost. Fascism is often another name for the intolerance of such threats in the second group of people. It is in this sense that the Indian fascist is the very antithesis of the Indian world-view. He certainly cannot be called a conservative or a traditionalist in a society which stresses — in fact, survives on the combination of — ideological flexibility and structural rigidity. Traditionalism in a complex federal culture has to predi­ cate some skill in the management of subcultural differences and some tolerance of asymmetry, ambiguity and inconsistency. But this skill and this tolerance have been the first victims of the root­ lessness produced by the processes o f modernization and Westerni­ zation in India. As a result the Indian fascist, searching for a certainty and clarity which can never be his own, not merely believes that he should have a monopoly cf the interpretations of religious, social and political ideologies — be they Hindu, Marxist or G andhian; he has the conviction that an internally consistent, unambiguous, ethical system is necessary for social progress and moral growth.9 The literature o f the ultra-Hindu

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nationalist groups, for instance, is replete with exhortations to improve the Hindus socially, morally, and psychologically. This improvement is invariably defined according to the values thrown up by the experience o f the ‘Hindu defeat’ in the hands o f the nonHindus: hard discipline, masculinity, impulse control, power and nationalism geared to realpolitik. Even when the authoritarian Indian takes a revivalist position, thereby trying to return to the uterine warmth o f an idealized past and an idealized mother­ land, what he projects into the past and into the concept o f the nation are nothing other than conventional Western middleclass values. This is the context in which the psychology o f secondary authori­ tarianism or fascism grows. It derives strength from the unsettling exposure to a modem world which, in the name o f individualism and liberalism, reifies hum an relationships at various levels. However, in spite o f being a culturally discontinuous psychological process, it does draw upon the traditions o f primary authoritari­ anism which persist at various levels o f the society. F or example, the glorification o f affectlessness and emotional withdrawal in the greater Sanskritic culture may tinge the authoritarian Indian’s concepts of duty and performance. And the dispassionate ruthless­ ness o f Mahabharata and Arthashastra may become his ultimate paradigm o f action. He may also draw upon the traditions o f a highly hierarchical society where everything from the gods to the seed-corns is stratified and has elaborate, predefined relationships with others above and below. Thus, like the incipient fascist in the West, the authoritarian Indian too can divide his world into ‘empty, schematic, administrative fields’10. However, compared to his Western counterpart, the Indian fascist is a relatively lonely man. He does not easily find his salva­ tion in a collectivity. In other words, all kinds o f authoritarianism in the Western world have been shown to have some association with a low faith in people and a poor sense o f competence in inter­ personal m atters.11 It would appear that it is to counter such feelings that the Western fascist seeks companionship and validation in collectivities like parties, movements and armies. The search for such companionship and validation might have a sadomaso­ chistic source or aim (in the sense that the hierarchy o f an army or a militant party always gives one a chance to be sadistic to some and masochistic to others), but it is also a search for security in an

106 A t the Edge o f Psychology aggregate which represents o r espouses particular types o f beliefs and values. The Indian fascist handles his loneliness in a different way. Using the dominant Brahmanic world-view, he idealizes his lone­ liness and isolation as indicators o f his moral superiority and piety. Also, not driven by his culture to seek consistency in belief and practice,12 he, if he happens to get into a group, can be quite comfortable with anti-authoritarian ideologies and with people propagating human brotherhood, pacifism, democratic socialism, G andhian politics, or equality o f men. In this respect, he ap­ parently approximates Rokeach’s conception o f the dogmatic m an.13 A t one plane, the main contribution o f Rokeach is that he has made us aware, through his critique o f Adorno and his asso­ ciates, that the relationship between the personality o f the fascist and fascist ideology is not one-to-one and that any ideology can be translated into something else in the inner mind o f the fascist and in the outer world o f social institutions. The dogmatic man can convert the most egalitarian creeds into instruments o f authorita­ rianism in real life. However, the overlap cannot be stretched very far. Unlike Rokeach’s dogmatic man, the Indian fascist sees his ideology purely as a reified political idiom and as an instrument he is not concerned with the empirical referents o f his ideology or with the problem of finding men in groups to share his views or emotions and convert his ideas into reality. It is.not surprising that the dozens o f studies done in India, mostly with shabbily or mechanically-adapted F scales, reveal no striking differences among the major political parties in the country or, for that matter, among the im portant organized groups in the society. Significant differences which have been found can be explained away mainly as a function o f the scales' insensitivity to authoritarianism 14 or to their insensitivity to the Indian syndrome o f the authoritarianism of manifest anti-authoritarianism. Though the homespun fascist too may overstress duties and obligations, it is not so much to establish communion with a larger group or to get things done for a collectivity, as he might claim, as to give meaning to his unreal world where neither the aggressor nor the victim is real and where suffering does not have the concreteness o f a real-life event. So sufferings inflicted on others for a cause or a principle could have, under certain circumstances, even greater legitimacy here than in the West. This is the real meaning o f the

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Brahmanic belief in the primacy o f idea over behaviour and the Brahmanic over-concern with the purity o f ideas. In terms o f the organization o f personality, a number o f studies suggest that the Indian lives in his inner world less with a feared father than with a powerful, aggressive and unreliable mother. Manifestly, he idealizes her and sees her as the final repository of all nurture and motherliness. Underneath this are deep doubts about the stability o f her nurture and the way she might use her power to aggress. Contrarily, the father is seen as non-interfering, inefficacious, distant, and as a co-victim o f a castrating mother.13 N ot surprisingly, in most cases, it is his m other who serves the Indian as his ultimate model o f authority, to be defied, admired or obeyed. In fact, his identification with her equips him with a certain ‘feminine’ passive-aggressiveness as his major psychological weapon and his latent fear o f her underwrites his frequent use of femininity as a m ajor symbol of violence, retribution and evil. The Indian fascist defends himself against the awareness o f his ambivalence towards his mother in various ways. He might, in atonement and as a réaction-formation, develop something akin to the ideology o f ‘mother, motherland and mother-tongue’. He may try to isolate affect from cognition and play up the cultural sanctions for affectlessness and interpersonal withdrawal. And the concept o f the unreality o f the outer world may become his ra­ tionalization o f his own cynicism, heartlessness and withdrawal, all developed in response to his basic distrust of the first source of nurture and uncertainties about the first representative o f the outer world o f people. He may, in true sanyasi or ascetic tradition, refuse to make emotional investments in the material world, considering it transient, and continually search for the constants or essentials o f life. In the ultimate analysis, this is the obverse of the much vaunted Indian spiritualism. Contemporary Indian society authenticates the authoritarian man in two ways. First, there is the popular image o f the Indian society as intrinsically tolerant and anti-authoritarian. There is obviously some truth in this in so far as ideological dissent within the federal aggregating culture o f India has clear religious sanction. But this shared image o f the society also allows the fascist the liberties he cannot otherwise get. He often passes as a legitimate dissenter within the system because o f the manifest content o f his stated ideology. His overt nationalism or radicalism hides his

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authoritarianism as a part of his ‘misguided’ dedication or ear­ nestness. Apparently, modem social sciences too have endorsed this aspect of the self-image of the society. They have nurtured the illusion that authoritarianism is not a ‘relevant’ concept in this culture. Consequently, while there are a few studies by psycho­ logists, there has been no attempt to develop a sociology or political economy of authoritarianism in India. Even the studies of psycho­ logists have concentrated upon communalism as the major expression o f authoritarianism in India. This is their way of paying homage to the Western psychological tradition which, shaken by the Nazi experience, sometimes equates authoritarianism with anti-semiticism. (The Western fascist tradition, being pre­ dominantly Latin, knows better; in both Portugal and Spain, nonracialist fascism survived the Third Reich by about thirty years. It is not an accident o f history that many Nazi war criminals had to take refuge in some o f the ‘softer’ fascist states o f Latin America. The latter’s sense of survival was stronger.)16 Second, sanctity attaches in this society to total rejection of impulses, particularly if they relate to aggression. The slow training and controlled expression o f one’s aggressive drives are not em­ phasised in our traditional systems of child rearing.17 So when aggression breaks out, it breaks out in a primitive, chaotic fashion.18 This too is compatible with the authoritarian syndrome. It allows the fascist to use the ideology of asceticism itself as a vehicle of his authoritarianism. He seeks self-expression in aggressive pacifism, compulsive austerity and conspicuous asceticism. However, the culture also stresses a certain primitive indivi­ dualism and intra-punitiveness. So that scapegoats and targets of aggression have to be ultimately found within, not outside. Other safety valves are the traditional emphasis on ruthless selfexamination, as the ultimate in knowledge and as a path to salva­ tion, and the living belief in man’s symbiotic bonds with his human and non-human environment. Indian culture, in both its classical and folk versions, refuses to draw a sharp distinction between ‘me’ and ‘not-me,’ ‘us’ and ‘they’ and the historical past (in which are often located the idea of national or cultural distinctiveness and the sense o f being chosen as a group) and the open-ended present (in which are often located the sense of cultural and moral collapse as well as the threatening liminality against which authori­ tarianism is sometimes a protest). This refusal makes it difficult to

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find sanctity for the idea of hard state and for the closed ideologies required by authoritarian structures. Though I have already described how the authoritarian individual circumvents this ‘pro­ blem’, it none the less inhibits the growth o f organized authorita­ rianism in the society. Also, to the extent authoritarianism is the pathology of instru­ mental rationality or a reaction to it, it cannot be inconsistent with a culture which has not been fully subverted by the ideology of modernity and which, because it does not live by the difference between the sacred and the profane, has some built-in protection against rootlessness and anomie. The experiences which would appear totally discontinuous in another culture often seem another, previously unnoticed, aspect of the commonplace in Indian society. It should however be obvious that some o f these safety valves are more effective against the extremes o f primary authoritarianism than against the loss of selfhood in a fast-changing society facing the onslaught o f the modem world on a number of fronts. The benevolent primary authoritarianism of a peasant society is m tune with an underdeveloped technology, inadequate control over nature, a relatively stable feudal economy and a certain benign gerontocracy. In other words, such an authoritarianism assumes the presence o f a certain patriarchal mutuality in social relation­ ships. The mutuality may not be our contemporary idea o f m utua­ lity but it is authentic in its own way. On the other hand, the secondary authoritarianism triggered by the anxieties and insecurities of a post-traditional society accords with the normlessness o f sectors alienated by the processes o f social change. The sense o f mutuality and solidarity this authoritari­ anism gives to man is not genuine. As Hannah Arendt once pointed out in a casual observation, this solidarity ‘glues’ the person to others instead of helping him to communicate with them. Such gluing is actually an inefficient defence against the loneliness and atom ization o f individuals brought about by rapid social change, particularly technological growth, and by the highly competitive, contractual relationships within a mass society.19 The growth of this kind o f authoritarianism can only be checked by a society which has built up new institutions on the basis o f its living tradi­ tions, to m onitor and modulate the processes o f change in ways which do not destroy the basic dignity and self-esteem of its citizens in the name o f speedier development or for the sake o f a manifestly

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conflictless polity.20 This presupposes social institutions which can help the citizens to actualize their creative potèntialities by allowing them to experiment with different modes o f self-expression and by openly debating social choices, and institutions which can promote a political leadership that refuses to take advantage o f the tendency towards passive obedience and mindless aggression that is latent in every citizenry. Such a society does not have to turn psychotherapeutic. It has continuously to try to be humane. Strange though it may seem to many, there is not much difference between the two.

NOTES 1. T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950). 2. See for instance the papers in R. Christie and Marie Jahoda, Studies in the Scope and Method of 'The Authoritarian Personality (Glenco, Illinois: Free Press, 1954). For a more recent stock-taking, see Nevitt Sanford, ‘Authoritarian Personality in Comparative Perspective’, in Jeanne N. Knutson (ed.). Handbook o f Political Psychology (San Francisco : Jossey-Bass, 1973), pp. 139-70. 3. For example J. P. Kirscht and R. C. Dillehay, Dimensions of Authoritarianism: A Review of Research and Theory (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1967); and L. Rorer, ‘The Great Response Style Myth’, Psychological Bulletin, 1965, 63, 129-56. 4. For example, Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1960). 5. Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart, 1941). More recently Fromm has argued that certain forms of necrophilia underlie extreme authoritarianism. See his The Anatomy o f Human Destructiveness (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Crest, 1975). 6. This point has been developed in great detail by Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (London: Sphere Books, 1969); and One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). See a brief but sharp criticism of Marcuse in Erich Fromm, The Crisis o f Psychoanalysis (Penguin, 1973), Chapter 1. 7. Fromm, Escape from Freedom. 8. A. F. K. Organski, quoted in Anthony James Jones, ‘Fascism: The Past and the Future', Comparative Political Studies, 1974, 7, 107-33. 9. It is not surprising that in the Indian context too the F scale has shown unam­ biguous negative relationship with intolerance of ambiguity in various kinds of groups; e.g., G. C. Gupta, ‘A Study of Authoritarianism and its Relation with Tolerance of Ambiguity and Tolerance of Frustration in Four Groups’, Journal o f Psychological Researches, 1963, 7, 21-7.

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10. See on this theme ‘The Making and Unmaking of Political Cultures in India’, in this book. 11. A broad picture is available in Charles Hampden-Turner, Radical Man (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1971). 12. See a discussion of the use of compartmentalization as an adaptive device in Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes (New York: Praeger, 1972). 13. Rokeach, Open and Closed Mind. 14. For example L. I. Bhushan gives such an explanation in ‘A Comparison of Four Indian Political Groups on a Measure of Authoritarianism’, Journal of Social Psychology, 1969, 79, 141-2. 15. P. Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1963); and G. Morris Carstairs, The Twice Born (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1957). For a recent analysis of this aspect of the Indian culture, see Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). An interesting clue to the association among motherhood, power and authoritarianism in India is provided by Qamar Hasan and M. W. Khan,.‘Connotative Meaning of Certain Critical Concepts for Authoritarians’, Psychologia, 1975, 18, 238-41. 16. On some of the possible psychological differences between fascism and Nazism see a brief indirect discussion in Renzo de Felice (interviewed by Michael Ledeem), ‘Fascism and the Italian Malaise’, Society, 1976, 13, 53-9. 17. For example, Leigh Mintern and J. T. Hitchcock, ‘The Rajputs of Khalapur’, in Beatrice B. Whiting ed., Six Cultures (New York: Wiley, 1963), pp. 203-362. 18. This was noticed as early as 1953 by Gardner Murphy in the context of a study of social tensions and communal violence. See his In the Minds o f Men (New York: Basic, 1953). 19. Interview with Roger Errera, The New York Review of Books, 26 October 1978, p. 18. 20. A sensitive treatment of this issue is in E. Nolte, Three Faces o f Facism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). 21. The belief that open social and political conflicts would tear apart the fabric of a society in which political institutions are weak and that, therefore, such conflicts should be resolved by a leader and a party playing mediating roles has been an important element in fascism in this country. The idea can find easy acceptance in a society in which aggression and competitiveness are mostly ego-alien. The other important aspect of fascism is the latent development strategy implied in it, which makes camouflaged and glorified versions of fascism very attractive to many third world societies. See on this subject A.F.K. Organski, The Stages of Political Development (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); and Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966).

INDIRA GANDHI AND THE CULTURE OF INDIAN POLITICS Societies prefer to learn from their failures rather than from successes. As the rise and fall o f Indira Gandhi recedes into India's past, the true lessons of her rule are apt to be forgotten and people are likely to discover in her the various aspects o f their own rejected selves, thus mythologizing the entire experience o f her rule as a battle between the good and the evil, the progressive and the regressive, and the hard and the soft. It is my contention that politically Indira Gandhi represents a type o f person open polities must leam to cope with and contain: persons who are genuinely convinced of their own democratic and pluralist allegiances and, yet are authoritarian in their mode of thinking and style of politics. It is also my contention that psychologically Indira Gandhi re­ presents important aspects o f contemporary Indian consciousness blown up to grotesqueness and her failures and successes are in some ways the failures and successes o f India’s civic consciousness too. I The political institution called Indira Gandhi could be considered a product of four intellectual currents which became important in Indian public life a little more than a decade ago. The first of these was a defensive neo-nationalism which began to win new adherents during the mid-sixties in response to the humiliating military encounter with China in 1962, the military stalemate with Pakistan in 1965, the slow rate of economic growth and the de­ pendence on large-scale foreign aid. Paradoxically, it was the Maoist — and to a lesser extent Western neo-M arxian— world view which provided an ideological rationalization for the national selfconsciousness and defensive self-affirmation which became common among many sections o f Indian intellectuals. As they became more aware o f the stratarchy of nations, in addition to that of classes, castes, and individuals, they mounted a spirited search for the authentically Indian and — this for many Westernized

Indira Gandhi and Indian P olitici' 113 Indian intellectuals was the same thing — the authentically nonWestem. F or many of.them, the West was inside and they brought to their neo-nationalism all the ardour which only persons fighting their own unacceptable selves could marshal. Yet, one o f the central characteristics o f the Indie civilization has always been the under-valuation o f the differences between ‘us’ and ‘they’ and between the indigenous and the exogenous. Here is a civilization which has consistently fought for self-aware­ ness but against self-consciousness, a nation with an awareness of national separateness only two hundred years old, and a culture dom inated by a religious consciousness that has not competed for the minds o f men but offered itself as a lifestyle within which other lifestyles can be accommodated. Prim a facie in such a civilization nothing could be more antiIndian than attempts to make an ideology out o f Indianness and to fight, instead of incorporating or bypassing, non-Indianness. There is indirect evidence for this in the way the more strident voices o f Hinduism and Indianism in this century have invariably modelled themselves on the cultures they feared and rejected. Simultaneously, they have appealed to groups which have moved away from mainstream Hinduism and cultural orthodoxy. The RSS, the Hindu M ahasabha and the Jan Sangh have always drawn support from those marginal to mainstream Hinduism: the urban, Westernized, semi-modern middle classes, anxious about their rootlessness an d constantly doubting their own authenticity as Indians and H indus.1 Indira G andhi for the first time legitimized these anxieties and doubts by integrating them within the dom inant culture o f Indian politics. Under her dispensation, the main elements o f the country’s political identity became: aggressive affirmation o f Indianness to contain fears o f one’s own rootlessness, tough-minded pursuit of national interest which rejects nothing as ethically taboo, ideologi­ cal acceptance of absolute cultural relatiyism to explain away all failings of the society as characteristic of its culture and, simul­ taneously and paradoxically, parity-seeking o f a kind which induces the citizen to see the achievements o f the nation only in terms o f the attitudes o f other polities. To actualize such a percept o f politics one must have what the earlier visionary politicians like M ahatm a G andhi and Jawaharlal Nehru could never provide, a total commitment to ruthless real-

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politik. This is the second demand Indira Gandhi promised to meet. She made no secret that her search was for a pure politics, a politics characterized by constant political-cost calculations, assumption o f non-synergy and a single-minded pursuit of selfinterest by all actors in the system. ‘My father was a saint who strayed into politics,’ she once said, ‘I am a tough politician.’2 The idea of pure politics may seem un-Indian. There still persists a widespread belief that Indian political traditions are mainly compatible with a saintly style of politics. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Within the dominant literati traditions of India, the idea of statecraft has always been associated with the ideas of pure politics and strategies. Sanctified by the amoral dispassionate politics preached in the Arthashastra and reflected in the political idiom and strategies o f some o f the characters in the Mahabharata, the Brahmanic concept of politics has always been that of a zero-sum game.3 (The Gandhian tradition in this sense is an aberration. The search for total rationality, Gandhi always insisted, was neither rational nor moral. That is why he had to be finally killed by an ultra-Hindu nationalist Brahman who explicitly wanted to free Indian politics of Gandhian ‘superstitions’ such as soul force, power of satyagraha and political fasts. N a­ thuram Godse, as I have already pointed out in an earlier essay, wanted Indian politics to be ‘rational’, ‘power-oriented’, ‘normal’ politics. He felt that the elimination of Gandhi from the Indian scene would remove the Gandhian constraints on mature state­ craft and hard realpolitik. And he had clear support among large sections of his countrymen. The average Indian citizen respects the Gandhis of the world, but he also appreciates the Godses as more relevant to day-to-day politics.)4 Regrettably for its votaries, pure politics is unavoidably flawed in terms of its own principles. Pure politics, being de-ideologized, amoral and uninformed by any compassion, invariably helps to build a political culture in which no holds are barred and the rule of the jungle prevails. If in politics everything is acceptable, as many fondly believe, not only can the leader o f the system con­ stantly play a game of permutation and combination, toppling and defection, replacement and induction, each subordinate and each functionary can play the same game with the leader. In other words, pure politics creates a situation where every political activist constantly seeks to undo the others and the one whose

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sense o f timing and political bargaining is better, survives. U n­ fortunately, nobody’s sense o f politics remains perfect for all time. Others then do to one what one would have done to others had one’s political sense not failed. So ovations greeted each political success o f Mrs Gandhi, and the more vocal sections o f the Indian society, including its intelligentsia, applauded as she politically finished her opponents one by one and, because pure politicians can never stop at that, began eliminating her more powerful supporters too. It was ignored by the admiring throngs that gradually she was being left with only those who could present no political threat to her: her family and their hangers-on, a handful o f unscrupulous bureau­ crats and small-time politicians without any political base, and, unbelievable though it may seem in retrospect, a few politically ambitious personal assistants and stenographers. It was also ignored that the new court could not provide the political feedback on which depended her once famous sense o f timing. The pliant second tier o f leadership could provide short-term political security but it could not deepen her political experience or expand her information base. N or could the journalists and academic analysts o f Indian politics. Her sense o f insecurity prom pted her to expose herself only to those political analysts who would readily legitimize whatever the regime did, but they could hardly serve as the antennae to the temper of a continental polity. Like her new set of political ‘heavyweights’, deriving strength only from patronage, they too derived strength from the fact that they were heard by authorities, not from the fact they had to be heard by the authorities. Indira G andhi felt she needed these people because she not only saw information gathering, but the content o f information too, as a part of political strategics. Pure politics had brought her far and she thought it could take her farther. And finally, like Richard Nixon, she slipped. Thirdly, the politically articulate Indian middle-classes have always had a deepseated fear o f chaos and disorder. Alienated from a society which has lived for centuries in a near-anarchic state, they project into their political leaders the search for a more cohesive, well-defined, ‘hard’ and purposeful politics. They choose to ignore the possibility that in a heterogenous fragmented polity the search for order may easily degenerate into a search for a leader who would freeze the society and impose on it a stability

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which would destroy the spirit o f the civilization.5 In India the choice can never be between chaos and stability; it is always between manageable and unmanageable chaos, between humane and in­ human anarchy, and between tolerable and intolerable disorder. The fear o f the Indian middle classes in the early seventies that the Centre might not hold, that the political culture o f the country was becoming an expression o f political normlessness and amoral familism, was not psychogenic. The society at the beginning o f the seventies was moving towards the threshold o f intolerable chaos, a matsyanyaya. Since the inflation in 1972—4, every part of India’s modern sector, specially the public services, had imposed its own levy on the common man, from the policeman and the Village Level W orker to the clerks manning government offices, and the lower-level functionaries running the public transport systems. Amorality in public life had become so pervasive, blatant and acceptable, that any organized effort to contain corruption or nepotism itself led to an increase in it. Any organization set up to monitor public servants quickly became a new opportunity for the distribution and marketing of patronage. In such a situation many in the country, feeling that the total elimination of corruption was not possible, wanted it to be centralized. They hoped that the ‘nationalization’ of corruption would at least reduce its arbitrariness and unpredictability. If by recompensing a political functionary or by a not-so-secret donation to a party one could avoid other petty harassments and exploitation, the suffering seemed less arbitrary; if the growth of political monopoly allowed only one kind of shark to operate and eliminated the others, public life became more predictable. These were the latent demands Indira G andhi’s individual style of politics promised to meet. She not only overtly promised law and order, her idiom and the activities o f her son and lieutenants seemed to imply that she would also permit a monopolization of the sector of corruption by those close to her. To the upper and middle classes, everything in society, in any case, was pervaded by corruption; to the former it was a matter of making the corruption rule-bound and predictable; for the latter it was a matter of limiting the sphere of corruption and containing it within the political sector where by common consensus the law of the jungle applied. Both groups agreed that politicians were amoral vulgarians, and if by placating the ultra-elite among them one could avoid the

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other smaller sharks in society, it would be a net gain. Finally, Indira Gandhi throve in an atmosphere where the idea o f a plural society was increasingly losing its appeal. While the right attacked it as an excuse for all kinds o f political softheaded­ ness, the left found it, if not irrelevant, secondary to the goals of economic equity and distributive justice. Indian businessmen hankered for a businessman’s utopia where collective bargaining would be banned and the clumsy chaotic politics o f economic policy would be substituted by no-nonsense pure-economic con­ siderations; Indian bureaucrats dreamt of a regime which would completely liberate them from the contrary pulls of myriad political centres and give them, instead, complete autonomy at the cost of allegiance to a powerful central authority; the political opposition, absolutely corrupted by the .absolute deprivation of power for thirty years and looking for readymade scapegoats and readymade solutions, made an ideology out o f extra-constitutional protests; the intelligentsia o f all hues looked for a model of ‘tough’ politics which would give them either some self-esteem as Indians or reduce their sense o f rootlessness; and the dominant political party sought a supreme leader who by her individual popularity and allIndia image would perpetuate the dominance o f the party. One wonders which critical organized sector in the Indian society was not looking for Indira Gandhi towards the beginning o f the nineteen-seventies. Particularly disastrous to the political process in India was the devaluation o f the concept o f democratic freedom; increasingly for the intellectuals and politicians the concept became either a keepsake o f fuddy-duddy nineteenth century liberalism or a re­ actionary ploy to subvert the values o f equity and distributive justice. It has been rightly pointed out that when the civil rights of the Indian Maoists were flouted there was no vocal protest from the liberals. One can add to this the silence o f most Indians when over the years elections in Kashmir and West Bengal were systematically rigged. But no group contributed more handsomely to the devaluation o f democratic rights than the Indian left which, still caught in the psychology of cold-war radicalism and speaking the idiom o f Soviet Marxism, doggedly ignored the issues o f the open society and civil liberties. Their favourite arguments, which one heard repeatedly until late into the seventies, were that (1) Indian democracy had ensured the freedom o f only the privileged; thus,

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the curtailment o f such freedom would not hit the poor and the exploited but their oppressors; and (2) Indian capitalism was institutionally more violent than any revolutionary violence could ever be and, therefore, some am ount o f coercion to speed up social change must be welcomed. The first argument ignores the possibility that the Indian poor, as opposed to their ‘liberators’, might themselves value political freedom independently o f economic justice and might be unwilling to sacrifice either o f the values for the sake o f the other. Coming from the tertiary sector and concentrated in the urban areas among the Brahmanic sectors, most Indian radicals had never recognized that political freedom for the Indian masses was something more than a palliative for poverty; it was a vital addition to the armoury o f the cynical, shrewd villager constantly seeking protection from his well-wishers who pushed him around purportedly for the sake o f his own welfare. The second argument is as specious as the first. Institutional or — as some would describe it — structural violence may account for most o f the suffering of the world, but to create through state power a specific instrument o f violence in an unorganized society where ideologies are often so many instruments o f political and social mobility, is to substitute one kind of violence by another in the name o f a millenial revolution. In a culture dominated by a literati tradition which has always affirmed the primacy o f ideas over actions, nothing can be more reactionary than inflicting suffering on ideological grounds — however progressive or re­ volutionary such ideas may be — and to ignore the political preferences and freedoms o f the majority o f society — however conservative or anti-heroic they might seem. And these preferences, as the 1977 elections showed, are not what professional Indian radicals have often wanted to believe. If to the radicals Indian democracy was a hoax, to the liberals it was a farce. Poverty and civil liberties, the liberals repeatedly stressed, could not mix. They found intellectual support for their position in the dom inant schools o f contemporary political socio­ logy and comparative politics which had peddled this incompati­ bility as one of their major thesis. Much of the empirical work on the social and economic basis o f politics, building their causal models but o f the correlation between socioeconomics and politics, saw the future o f democracy in the building o f Westem-style

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social and economic institutions in India.6 If this was not possible, they argued with the admiration which Western academic ethnocentrism always manifests for its counterplayers, India should opt for a Chinese-style political economy. In other words, almost no one granted the authenticity o f the Indian experiment; everyone wanted India to be some other country. And, lacking the political self-confidence o f her father and ruling the country at a time when its self image was poor, Indira Gandhi felt herself pressured by the intellectual atmosphere in the country and in the world to put economic attainments above civil liberties. That is why she underestimated the impact o f her censorship laws and attacks on the press. She thought she only held an im portant section o f the Indian intelligentsia accountable for its beliefs, not knowing that the country’s-Brahmanic radicals and modernists had an altogether different concept o f self-consistency. They faithfully echoed the idiom o f their mentors among Western social analysts who were in turn only providing consultancy services to the Third W orld to assuage their own feelings o f political impotency in the West. Professor G unnar Myrdal should have been able to get the meaning when Indira Gandhi once in effect said, ‘We are accused o f being soft but when we become hard we are accused o f being hard.’ Thus, towards the end of Indira G andhi’s rule, every small economic gain or institutional change became a justification for all the humiliations and sufferings imposed on a large number o f people — in a reductio ad absurdum of conservative Marxism. Only when such indignities became the lot o f the Indian intelli­ gentsia as a whole, only when she began to see them as comprador intellectuals o f the First World, did it become obvious to many that the tables had been neatly turned. And gradually the ambi­ valent admiration o f small sections o f Indian and non-Indian intellectuals towards Indira Gandhi turned sour and became its flip-side: a torn, ambivalent hostility towards her. And perhaps this ambivalence had its extensions within Indira Gandhi too. II This brings me back to what I said at the beginning about the political conflicts o f the Indian society telescoped in her. Many political analysts feel that any emphasis on an individual necessarily

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detracts from the importance o f larger social forces. Yet, the fact remains that these so-called larger forces are often only the theoreti­ cal constructions o f the social scientist; however earnestly one anthropomorphizes them, they do not exist separately in reality. Over-emphasis on them only reifies social reality and contributes to the exploitation and abuse o f human beings in the name o f social and historical forces which come to attain a certain sanctity inde­ pendent o f the reality o f the persons involved in suffering. An individual on the other hand concretizes a specific configuration o f social, political and historical forces without either reifying them or detracting from the basic humanness o f the main actors involved in policies and decisions. N o emphasis on him can ever be an over-emphasis. Notwithstanding this rationale, I shall for the moment ignore — im portant though they are — the personality traits and the early growth experiences Indira G andhi brought to bear upon her public life. Instead I shall briefly describe some elements o f her political style and their relationship with the continuing themes in the culture o f Indian politics. First o f all, lacking the subtler and more self-confident political touch o f her father and being a ‘pure politician’, quite early in her career Indira Gandhi began to centralize power in the person o f the prime minister, so that ultimately all credit as well as all discredit attached to her. Unlike Jawaharlal N ehru who was simultaneously the official leader o f the ruling party and the covert leader o f the Opposition, Mrs Gandhi, long before she imposed her Emergency rule, had managed to affirm convincingly that she was the sole depository o f power in the country. As long as the polity moved along the orbit o f ‘norm al’ politics, this monopolization o f charisma was exhilarating; she was praised for all the good things that happened to the country and all the lucky breaks for her party. But in a complex heterogeneous society, living with myriad problems and always moving from one crisis to another, this situation was too good to last. One day all the ills o f the country were going to be blamed on her! and when that day arrived, she had no readymade protection such as Nehru had carefully nurtured: the so-called disobedient right reactionaries in the cabinet, recalcitrant chief ministers in the states and overzealous or unwilling bureau­ crats everywhere. When towards the end o f the election campaign in 1977 Indira Gandhi began apologizing for the excesses o f her

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subordinates during the Emergency, it had a particularly hollow ring because everyone knew the extent o f her power and few believed that anyone could do anything under her dispensation without clearance from her. Cornered and bitter, she had no one, except perhaps her son, to share the blame for what had happened under the Emergency. She had monopolized charisma and paid the price for it. Secondly, Indira G andhi never noticed that beyond a small fringe, her support came as much from the hard demands o f politics as from the less tangible psychological demands o f the culture of Indian politics. A feature o f political leaders who unknowingly derive im portant support from the intangibles o f political culture is the magicality they often begin to impute to themselves. Unable to analyse the content o f the civic consciousness which gives them part o f their political pull, such leaders try to get their magicality endorsed by wearing the straitjacket o f total charisma and by adopting a ‘heroic’ style. W hat these leaders fear most o f all is démythification o f their leadership or the emergence o f alternative centres of charisma. Populism is one way o f coping with such fear; the other is to locate subsidiary centres o f power in loyal but powerless individuals rather than in institutions or organizations. One o f the most remarkable features o f the second half o f Indira G andhi’s rule was the way she nearly destroyed the institutional and organizational interfaces between the highest seats o f power in the country and the ordinary citizen. The difficulty the Indian society has always faced in managing large-scale organizations is an offshoot o f the Brahmanic world view and its strong emphasis on unconditional anarchic individualism. This is one strain o f the culture which every Indian reformer of contemporary times — from Raja Ramm ohun Roy to M ahatm a G andhi — has had to fight. Disowning this tradition o f institution building, Indira Gandhi tried to take advantage o f the Indian’s deep-seated scep­ ticism about the organized modern sector o f the society and to make some o f the m ajor institutions o f the country subservient to a small coterie o f political power-holders. If this was not pos­ sible, she preferred to break the institutions and organization. So gradually all the im portant new institutions which stood between the rulers and the ruled — the judiciary, the trade unions, the press, the political parties including her own party, and parliament — were one by one weakened or wrecked.

122 A t the Edge o f Psychology This was yet another difference between her and her father. Many o f the institutions she accused o f standing in the way of the country’s progress were much more amorphous, unpredictable and irresponsible in the time o f Nehru. But he treated them as if they were powerful and responsible and as if he had to respect them for his own political survival. In the process he helped strengthen these institutions and make a place for them in the minds o f people. For instance, the legitimacy which the opposition parties acquired in India depended to a great extent on the treatment N ehru meted out to them and their leaders. To him his battle with the opposition was never the zero-sum game it was to become to his daughter. Thirdly, Indira G andhi introduced into India’s consensual polity a sharp awareness and fear o f disloyalty, of the kind traditionally associated with — I use the word descriptively — witch-hunting. T hat she did not make full use o f her potentials in this respect was probably a function o f her acute sense o f politics. Pure politicians, like Clausewitz’s nations, have no permanent enemies; they have only permanent interests. None the less, as N ayantara Sahgal has argued, Indira Gandhi brought into Indian politics a new awareness o f ‘us’ and ‘they’, the ‘us’ being in essence only an extension o f her own personal political interests legitimized as impersonal national interests. She tried hard to modify the language o f Indian politic» so that those who criticized her, by definition, became attackers o f the institution o f the prime minister and those who opposed her became irresponsible o r frustrated conspirators operating from outside the boundaries o f legitimate politics.7 N orm an Cohn says about the European experience o f witchhunting in the middle ages that the demons the witches represented were actually inside the minds o f the hunters.8 Fighting against their own rejected pre-Christian pagan selves and unassimilated passions, the witch-hunters— and the Europeans as a com m unity— concretized their inner fears o f what they were tempted to become in the form o f an enemy outside. It is this psychological dynamic which produced the demonology that accompanied the great European which-hunt. It allowed witches to be seen not only as a personal or localized threat, but as threats to a valued social system and as co-conspirators with the larger forces of evil. This in turn gave the hunters their inner drive and sense of righteousness. Cohn also argues against the popular misconception that a

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witch-hunt is a conscious effort to eliminate opponents. Folk rationalism presumes that some people try to destroy individuals or groups by accusing them o f witchery for merely personal or social gains. But to believe this is also to assume that once these personal or social ends are met, the witch-hunters will be satisfied and give up their hunt. In reality, this never happens. A witch-hunt feeds upon itself. Once the hunter has finished with the more ‘obvious’ cases he turns to the marginal ones. Something very similar happened in India during the last few years o f Indira G andhi’s rule. As she found it more and more difficult to cope with her inner insecurities at the plane of day-to-day politics, she systematically promoted the concept o f a dedicated gang o f conspirators, in league with the ubiquitous CIA and aggrieved by her socialist ‘strong India’ policies, as the final ex­ planation o f the plight o f the nation and, later on, as an invitation to muzzle half the world’s free press and suspend the civil liberties o f half the people in the world who live in open societies. It is to the credit o f Indian citizens that they were not taken in by this demonology. N urtured on a tradition o f ideological tolerance that partly compensates for the society’s institutional rigidities, the ordinary Indian had no reason to voluntarily sacrifice the plural structure of power under which he had been living for three decades. He had begun to see this pluralism as a new, albeit weak, in­ surance against arbitrary authority. I also like to believe that the cynical Indian voter had a latent awareness that the threat to democracy Indira Gandhi said the opposition posed was a pro­ jection o f her own m ind; he knew that her image of the opposition reflected mainly her fears of what she wanted to do to India’s plural politics. Fourthly, there was Indira G andhi’s unending search for total security and — at one plane it comes to the same thing — total acceptance. It was not enough even if most newspapers supported h e r; she felt threatened by the few which were critical. She was not content if most intellectuals sang her praises; she wondered why all of them did not. She was always better informed about her critics than her unorganized demoralized critics themselves. After 1975, a number of political analyses have sought and found the roots o f the Emergency to lie in India’s socioeconomic condition and the problems it created for a beleaguered prime minister.9 Such sociologism or economism meets the needs of

124 A t the Edge o f Psychology the radical orthodoxy but it discourages a critical awareness o f the long-term political and psychological problems o f the society that were reflected in the personality o f an individual who was, by popular consent, the leader of the society for at least eight o f her eleven years of power. Moreover, there is the fact that Indira Gandhi imposed her Emergency when the movement being led by Jayaprakash N arayan was already fizzling o u t; when the econo­ my was expected by experts of all hues to be in excellent shape for at least a year; and when her hegemony in the Congress party, in spite of some unorganized challenge, was intact. Others might not have known these facts; she did. But the knowledge did not give her a sense o f security and self-confidence. Behind all her charm, extroversion and apparent self-acceptance, she remained the lonely, withdrawn, cornered girl whose afiectless two-dimen­ sional approach to her interpersonal world her father had already noticed in the nineteen thirties.10 Indira G andhi’s reaction to the Allahabad High Court judge­ ment which invalidated her election to parliament revealed another facet o f this interpersonal insecurity: her inability to trust and the consequent heavy reliance on the strategy o f pre-emption. She could neither trust any o f her colleagues sufficiently to hand over charge temporarily nor could she avoid planning and working out new means o f pre-empting her opponents and competitors. That was how she had come to power and had held on to it, and that was how she thought she could continue to be in power. She knew, even if others had forgotten, that her victory over the dominant faction within the Congress Party in 1969 was not based on numbers but good timing, imaginative public relations and inspired management o f the various communications media. (Others, particularly journalists, who were looking for some change from the politics o f the organization men to what they hoped would be the politics o f vision, connived at her victory by accepting and publicizing her false claims about her support base within the Congress Parliamentary Party. Part o f her undying fear o f the press grew out o f her knowledge o f what could be done in politics with the help of the press, and quite early in her tenure she began her battle against the press by successfully scalping a cartoonist critical o f her.) She could not forget the elaborate ploys through which she had consolidated her power within the Congress party and she always feared the possibility that others would do to her

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what she, given a chance, had always done to others. It is this fear which had made her a lonely aloof imperious leader and induced her to discourage the emergence o f even subsidiary centres of power within her party o r to nurture young leaders o f promise who could be expected to take over from her in the future. Finally, wften the campaign began for the 1977 general elections, she found that she alone among the Congress leaders could attract sizeable crowds for election meetings and thus had to bear the m ajor responsibility o f running the campaign for her party, even at the cost o f ignoring her own constituency. In politics as well, the search for total security is invariably associated with the search for total loyalty. Indira G andhi too wanted to build a political system based on absolute personal loyalty to her; she refused to acknowledge that a system which rewards loyalty at the expense o f other virtues promotes mainly the manifestly loyal, whose latent political aim is to reduce the options o f their leader through sélf-ingratiation. In such a system, thé leader’s susceptibility to such loyalty could be costly; he or she may have to pay for it by restricting choices for the sake o f the loyal. F or Indira G andhi, who herself could not beyond a point be loyal to others, any attem pt to build a system based on loyalty was an open invitation to those who spoke the idiom o f loyalty but neither gave nor expected reciprocation from her. They only hoped to profit from their tem porary access to power through the use o f a particular idiom.11 Once again, this was not merely the private psychological problem o f Indira G andhi. The language o f loyalty has a special role to play in a closed or partially closed political system which is by definition non-synergic in Abraham Maslow’s sense o f the term. In such a system one person’s political loss is another person’s gain and, naturally, all loyalty comes to be ultimately informed by disloyalty and all obedience by disobedience. In such a system, the leader may demand total loyalty but expects disloyalty o r pseudo­ loyalty, and constantly suspects the followers to be conspirators o r traitors. Living m an inner world peopled by untrustworthy persons, the leader too can give only a very tenuous form o f loyalty to the followers. It takes but a short time for the trusted followers to become untrustw orthy lieutenants; they either perceive their interests differently or are seen to do so. It is interesting thus to see who gave Indira Gandhi his total

126 A t the Edge o f Psychology allegiance or pretended to do so during the last days o f her rule. At first, the catchment area looked large. In the twenty-one m onths o f the Emergency, not only did small-time political functionaries come close to the centre o f power in India, people owing direct personal allegiance to her came into prominence in a wide variety o f fields: in the bureaucracy, the academia, the press and, eveh, in the creative arts. Efforts are sometimes made to explain this phenomenon in terms of the political naivety of some sections of the tertiary sector in India, particularly the natural scientists and the creative artists. Naivety apart, there was also some clear-cut cost calculation on each side. Mrs G andhi, often anti-intellectual but always deeply sensitive to the opinion o f intellectuals, wanted the support o f respected scientists and artists as an indicator o f the support o f the intelligentsia as a whole. N atural scientists and artists, not hampered in their professional w ork either by censorship o r by the systematic efforts to penetrate the academe and the press, willingly gave Indira G andhi their support in exchange for patronage. In contrast, the social scientists and those in the humanities-interested in political and social issues were directly affected in their work by her high-handedness; they could not produce for her a single first-rate mind willing to collaborate. Only the mediocre in these fields were tempted to obtain through their political connection what they could never hope to get through academic performance. It was not so much Indira G andhi’s search for an heir-apparent as her search for total loyalty which produced the political pheno­ m enon called Sanjay Gandhi. Many have suggested that Sanjay G andhi was his m other’s one weakness, the one area o f humanness in an otherwise cold-eyed political animal. Certainly Indira G andhi’s complex relationship with her lonely, insecure, achievement-frustrated second son is compatible with such an interpreta­ tion. However, this interpretation misses the instrumental use Indira G andhi made o f her son, particularly the way she went to him in search o f true loyalty in what to her was an untrustworthy world. The logic o f Indira G andhi’s vision o f politics was bound to lead her to the perception that only a son could be fully trusted; in a political culture dominated by such a person, only a son could give unconditional, selfless loyalty to the ultimate leader. In this respect, Indira G andhi was only one o f the many Third W orld rulers who, increasingly distrustful o f their followers,

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fall back upon their relatives to create a second tier o f political leadership. Obvious examples among her contemporaries were Shaikh Mujibur Rahman in Bangladesh, Sirimavo Bandamaike in Sri Lanka and the more resilient Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. However, as some o f these very rulers had found out before her, this dependence on the members o f one’s family could be both costly and self-defeating. Promoting a family member in a polity that has ceased to be open does not solve the problems of loyalty and trust; it merely creates a second centre o f power and an alternative channel o f political mobility for those who want to gatecrash into the ruling court but are kept in check by whatever survives of the representationa1 process. The result is a subsidiary culture o f politics, which duplicates the culture o f mainstream politics in every way except one; it is even less responsive to the larger society and even less capable of using the surviving links with democratic mass politics. It perforce must use coercion if it enters the area of political action, even when dealing with matters which mainstream politics can handle without the use of force. Ill Thus, judging by her actions, Indira G andhi was an authoritarian ruler who tried to consolidate a culture o f politics which was in essence authoritarian. Certainly her political decisions and choices were congruent with such a formulation. But is it the whole story? I think our understanding o f Indira G andhi’s political self will remain incomplete unless we also acknowledge that her values were democratic. I have no doubt that she sincerely believed herself to be the saviour o f Indian democracy and the best hope for her country.12 It should also be clear by this time that she sincerely thought that her Emergency rule was a transient phase dictated by the need to consolidate her position within the Congress party and the requirements o f self-defence in the face of a mindless opposition. Finally, she was convinced that she enjoyed widespread public support in the country and it was the opposition — out of touch with the common people, sectarian, unprincipled, and frustrated by the lack o f electoral support — which was trying to unseat her through extraconstitutional means. (This insecure

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self-certainty is what m ade her so dangerous and yet, fortunately for her country, so vulnerable. If she had been slightly less selfconfident, she would never have called for elections in March 1977). In other words, at one plane, Indira G andhi's actions were all based on an internally consistent self-perception. She saw herself as a true radical trying to extend democracy to the peripheries of the society while tem porarily limiting the freedom o f the privileged. She imagined she was a true democrat in touch with the common people unlike her enemies who opposed her because they resisted progress, accepted im ported Western o r Marxist ideas too readily, and lacked the special relationship she had with her country. To her, they were by definition undemocratic, anti-national, dishonest and unpopular. Put simply, Indira G andhi pursued democracy equipped with her cognitive and motivational components o f authoritarianism. Her values were democratic, her instincts authoritarian. This is where her ultimate historical significance lies. She represents, it now seems, a new generation of internally split autocrats whose strength lies in their belief in their own democratic faith and in their ability to operate in an open competitive polity. As the more obvious forms o f authoritarianism become taboo, it is her kind o f indirect intemally-inconsistent expression o f authoritarianism which constitutes the greatest challenge to open societies in the future. Like her contem porary Richard Nixon, who represented a similar psychological dynamic, she finally showed her conformity to democratic norm s by leaving her seat o f power gracefully, if not willingly.' Like him she was convinced that she had lost out to anti-people anti-dem ocratic forces operating conspiratorially. Like him, she too represented the reductio o f the reification and deper­ sonalization promoted by the media-based, competitive mass politics in our times. Since both of them are out o f power, it is obvious that neither was made o f the stuff o f blood-thirsty dictators. They were psychologically crippled individuals who held a grudge against their societies and wanted to beat an unkind world at its own game, rejecting the softer virtues like compassion, understanding and trust as inappropriate for th e public sphere. But unlike Richard N ixon to whom the presidency was merely the top o f the social ladder, not requiring any adjustment o f style, to Indira G andhi political power gave a new self-esteem

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and meaning to life that her earlier history could not provide. As N ayantara Sehgal has so sensitively pointed out, Indira G andhi’s political identity as the maximum leader marked a break not merely with the earlier culture o f Indian politics, but also with her own previous modes o f self-expression.13 But neither the self-esteem nor the meaning she acquired through absolutism was authentic: the ruthless imperiousness o f her political style could not hide her loneliness, fears and insecurities. They persisted in spite of her acclamatory success in the Bangladesh W ar and her tremendous electoral victory in 1971; they persisted in her everyday politics and found expression in her self-pity, feelings o f being encircled by enemies and her fear of interpersonal warmth. Perhaps as India tries to find itself once again, without her at the helm o f affairs, she too will begin to discover herself and regain her authenticity.

NOTES 1. Sec ‘Final Encounter’, in this book. Also ‘The Psychology of Communalism’, The Times of India, 19 February 1978. 2. Nayantara Sahgal, ‘The Making of Mrs Gandhi’, South Asian Review, 8 April 1975, pp. 189-210; quotation on p. 205. 3. A more detailed discussion of the possible cultural sources of authoritarianism as well as the possible checks against it in India is in my ‘Adorno in India: Revisiting the Psychology of Fascism’, in this book. 4. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see ‘Final Encounter’, Chapter 2 in this book. 5. Such a search for order could also — the first generation of empirical studies of authoritarianism has also made us aware— serve as an important component of fascist ideology sanctifying controls on political competition and democratic participation. 6. For a brief discussion of this issue and a tentative alternative interpretation of some aspects of democratic allegiances in India, see my ‘The Acceptance and Rejection of Democratic Norms in India’, Indian Journal o f Psychology, 1976, pp. 265-78. 7. Sahgal, ‘Making of Mrs Gandhi’. 8. Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (New York: Basic, 1975). 9. The best-known of the genre is David Selboume, An Eye to India (Penguin, 1977). 10. Letter of Jawaharlal Nehru reproduced in Nayantara Sahgal, Indira Gandhi: Emergence and Style (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978).

130 A t the Edge o f Psychology 11. In this respect they were like the eunuchs in Chinese history. The eunuchs’ only qualification in wielding or being close to power was their personal loyalty to the Emperor. But loyalty was no guarantee against the Emperor’s dis­ pleasure for any reason. Moreover, some could demonstrate loyalty better than others. So the eunuchs always lived in fear of losing their position of power and they sought to make the maximum profits within the minimum possible time. Also being loyal only to a person (the Emperor) and not to the system (Confucianism), there were no internal checks on the eunuchs’ use of power; they enthusiastically carried out all illegal orders. 12. See Zareer Masani, Indira Gandhi (New York; Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), particularly Chapter 12. 13. Sahgal, ‘The Making or Mrs Gandhi’.

Index Absolutism 51 Adorno, T.W. 99,103 Adyashakti 8, 33 Agranl 81 Anti-semiticism 100 Apte, Narayan 76 Arthashastra 105, 114 Arya Samaj 59 Aurobindo 40 Authoritarian personality 100— 3 Azad, Abul Kalam 90 Babus 60 Bandamaike. Srimavo 127 Bengal 4-25 crisis of values in 20 dayabhaga system of law in 5 18th-century history of 4 joint family system in 13 women of 24 Berdyaev 39 Bettelheim 37 Bhadralok aristocracy 4,18 Brahman {see also Chitpavans) as an -ism 58 potency of 38,40 Brahma Samaj 25, 59 Brahmoism 22 British colonialism 72 Bureaucracy 55' Chandi image 8, 27 Chatteijee, Bankim Chandra 40-1, 50 Chatterjee, Sarat Chandra 40-1 Child aggression 102 exploitation 33 Chitpavans 77 Cohn, Norman 122-3 Collet 7 Culture a* choice 47

Hindu 71 political 47-50 Westernization of 53 De-Biahmanization 72 Desai, Morarji 91 Dharma 49 Dissent 50 and orthodoxy 51 ideological 51 of Gandhi 85 versus authority 102 Durga Puja 9 Elections, 1977 (see Gandhi, Indira) Emergency, roots of 123-4 Engels, Friedrich 32 Erikson, Erik 74 Ethics, public 56 F scales 100,106 Fascism 103-4 in India 104, 105-7 Nazi experience in 106 pseudo-conservatism of 103 Fromm, Erich 101, 103 Galtung, Johann 34 Gandhi, Indira 112-29 and bureaucracy 117 and censorship laws 119 and 1977 elections 118 and Soviet Marxism 118 India during the time of 117 political base of 113,114 psychology of 125-7,129 style of politics of 116 Gandhi, Mahatma 39, 61, 70-98 anti-intellectualism of 53, 62 assassination of 76, 86,92, 93 civil disobedience of 81 death of 92 (also see Godae)

132 Index dissent of 85 last days of 88-9 political philosophy of 70, 71, 73, 88,90 satyagraha of 71 superstitions of 114 traditionalism of 114 Gopal Godse 85 Godse, Nathuram Vinayak 70-91 ascetism of 82-3 cultural evaluation of 86 confessions of 91,114 education of 79-80 on Gandhi 81, 83 sexuality of 85-6 Gokhale 80 Grant, Chari« 11 Hastings, Warren 7 Hierarchy, social 54 Hindu chauvinism 57, 61 idolatory 11 Rashtra Dal 81-2 versus Christians 74 Hinduism versus Islam 88 Hindu-Muslim riots sadism of 88-9 Horkheimer, Max 102 Indian mother 36 system 48,113 woman 41-2 Jauhar 3 Justice Khosla 92 Kautilya 3 Kher, B.G. 91 Kropotkin 32 Mahabharata 40, 92,105, 114 Manu 3 Man venus woman 33

Marx, Kail 32 Marcos, Ferdinand 127 Masculinity 42 Monism 23-4 Mother and son 37 in Indian philosophy 36, 39, 42 Myrdal, Gunnar 119 Narayan, Jayaprakash J24 Nehru, Jawaharlal 87, 113, 120 Nineteenth century elitism 52 Hindu organization 57 Oakley 10 Order of change 64 Organski, A.F.K. 104 Owen 32 Pahwa, Madanlal 87, 88, 91 Patel. Vallabh Bhai 90 Realpolitik of 90 Payne, Robert 70 Politics as autonomy 60 as banality 62 as self-affirmation 58, 64 as self-redefinition 57 Polanyi, Michael 81 Power 50 Prakriti 8, 35 Psychology Freudian 100 of Indira Gandhi 125-8 of Gandhi, Mahatma 114 of Godse, Nathuram V. 79-86 of Hinduism 49, 74, 81, 83, 113 of political movements 57-64 Pumsha 35 Rahman, Mujibur 127 RSS81,113 Ray, Satyajit 40 Redefinition of politics 57

Index Rokeach 100,106 Roy, Ramakanta 18-21 Roy, Rammohun 1, 2, 9, 11, 15-19, 30-1. 58, 61, 121 Brahmoism of 22 interpretations of 12 reform of 21, 24 Russell, Bertrand 32 Sadomasochism 101 Salzman 37 Sati 1-25 causes of 6-12 as enforced penance 9 folk base of 9 mass base of 3 practice of 3 reform of 21 Satyagraha 7 (see also pp. 70-98) Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 85 Savitri 9 Schgal, Nayantara 122 Siculus, Diodorus 8 Shaktd 26-7 Singh, Iqbal 15-16

Tarinidevi 15,16 Upanishads 49 Upasana 23 Vedanta, monism in 23-4 Vidyasagar, Ishwar Chandra 40 Vishnu Dharma Samhita 3 Vivekananda 40-1 Woman 32-43,48 of Bengal 40-1 creativity of 39 dominance of 34, 38 and man 33,41-2 as mother 36, 37 paradox of 42 redefinition of 41 and womanliness 33, 39 Yajnavalkya 3 Zilboorg, Gregory 33, 37

THE INTIMATE ENEMY Loss and Recovery o f Self Under Colonialism

Contents P reface

One

T H E P S Y C H O L O G Y O F C O L O N IA L IS M : Sex, Age an d Ideology in British In d ia

Two

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i

T H E U N C O L O N IZ E D M IN D : A Post-C olonial V iew o f In d ia a n d th e W est I ndex

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” 5

Preface ‘T hrough a curious transposition peculiar to our tim es’, A lbert Camus once w rote, ‘it is innocence th a t is called u p o n to justify itself.’ T h e two essays here justify an d defend the in ­ nocence w hich confronted m odem W estern colonialism an d its various psychological offshoots in India. M odern colonialism w on its g reat victories n o t so m uch through its m ilitary an d technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incom patible w ith the traditional order. These hierarchies opened u p new vistas for m any, p articularly for those exploited or cornered w ithin the traditional order. T o them th e new order looked like— an d here lay its psychological pull— the first step tow ards a m ore ju st and equal w orld. T h a t was w hy some o f th e finest critical m inds in E urope— and in the East— were to feel th a t colonial­ ism, by introducing m odem structures into th e b arb aric world, w ould open u p the non-W est to the m o d em critic a lanalytic spirit. Like the ‘hideous heathen god w ho refused to drink nectar except from the skulls o f m urdered m en’, K a rl M arx felt, history w ould produce o u t of oppression, violence and cultural dislocation n o t m erely new technological an d social forces b u t also a new social consciousness in Asia and Africa. I t w ould be critical in the sense in w hich the W estern tradition o f social criticism —from Vico to M arx— h ad been critical an d it w ould be ratio n al in the sense in w hich postC artesian E urope h ad been rational. I t is thus th a t the ahistorical prim itives w ould one day, the expectation w ent, learn to see themselves as m asters o f n atu re and, hence, as m asters o f their own fate. M any m any decades later, in the afterm ath o f th a t m arvel o f m odem technology called the Second W orld W ar an d perhaps th a t m odem encounter o f cultures called V ietnam , it has be-

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com e obvious th a t the drive for m astery over m en is n o t m erely a by-product o f a faulty political econom y b u t also o f a w orld view w hich believes in the absolute superiority o f the h u m an over the nonhum an an d the subhum an, the m asculine over the fem inine, th e ad u lt over th e child, th e historical over the ahistorical, an d the m odem o r progressive over th e trad itio n al o r the savage. I t has becom e m ore an d m ore a p p a re n t th a t genocides, ecodisasters an d ethnocides are b u t the underside o f co rru p t sciences an d psychopathic technologies w edded to new secular hierarchies, w hich have reduced m ajor civilizations to the status o f a set o f em pty rituals. T h e ancient forces o f h u m an greed an d violence, one recognizes, have m erely found a new legitim acy in anthropocentric doctrines o f secular salvation, in th e ideologies o f progress, norm ality an d hyper-m asculinity,, an d in theories o f cum ulative grow th o f science an d technology. T his awareness has n o t m ad e everyone give u p his theory o f progress b u t it has given confidence to a few to look askance a t th e old universalism w ithin w hich the earlier critiques o f colo­ nialism were offered. I t is now possible for some to com bine fundam ental social criticism w ith a defence o f non-m odem cultures an d traditions. I t is possible to speak o f the plurality o f critical traditions an d o f h u m an rationality. A t long last we seem to have recognized th a t neither is D escartes th e last w ord on reason no r is M arx th a t on th e critical spirit. T h e awareness has com e a t a tim e w hen the attack on the non-m odem cultures has becom e a th re a t to th eir survival. As this century w ith its bloodstained record draw s to a close, the nineteenth century dream o f one w orld has re-em erged, this tim e as a nightm are. I t h au n ts us w ith the prospect o f a fully hom ogenized, technologically controlled, absolutely h ierar­ chized w orld, defined by polarities like the m odem a n d the prim itive, the secular an d th e non-secular, th e scientific and th e unscientific, the expert an d the laym an, the norm al and the abnorm al, th e developed a n d the underdeveloped, th e van­ g u ard an d the led, the lib erated a n d the savable. T his idea o f a brave new w orld was first tried o u t in the colonies. Its carriers w ere people who, unlike the rapacious

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first generation o f bandit-kings w ho conquered the colonies, sought to be helpful. T h ey w ere w ell-m eaning, hard-w orking, middle-class missionaries, liberals, m odernists, an d believers in science, equality a n d progress. T h e bandit-kings, presum ably like bandit-kings everyw here, robbed, m aim ed an d killed; b u t sometimes they did so w ith o u t a civilizing mission an d mostly w ith only crude concepts o f racism an d untermensch. T h ey faced — an d expected to face— other civilizations w ith th eir versions of m iddle kingdom s a n d b arb arian s; the p u re an d the im p u re; th e kafirs an d th e moshreks; a n d th e yavanas an d th e mUcchas. H ow ever vulgar, cruel o r stupid it m ight have once been, th a t racism now faces defeat. I t is now tim e to tu rn to th e second form o f colonization, th e one w hich a t least six generations o f th e T h ird W orld have le a rn t to view as a prerequisite for their liberation. T his colonialism colonizes m inds in ad dition to bodies an d it releases forces w ithin th e colonized societies to alter their cu ltu ral priorities once for all. In the process, it helps generalize th e concept o f the m odem W est from a geographical an d tem poral entity to a psychological category. T h e W est is now everywhere, w ithin the W est an d o u tsid e; in structures a n d in minds. T his is prim arily th e story o f the second colonization a n d resistances to it. T h a t is w hy these essays are also forays into contem porary politics; after all, we are concerned w ith a colo­ nialism w hich survives th e demise o f empires. A t one tim e, the second colonization legitim ized the first. Now, it is in d ep en d en t o f its roots. Even those w ho b attle the first colonialism often guiltily em brace the second. H ence the read er should read the following pages n o t as history b u t as a cautionary tale. T hey caution us th a t conventional anti-colonialism , too, could be an apologia for the colonization o f minds. I f the following account displays a ‘distorted’ view o f some o f the E nlightenm ent figures an d o f radical social critics in E urope, it is a p a rt o f the sam e story. T h ey do n o t often look th e sam e w^ien the view point is the im m ediacy o f the new oppression an d the possibility o f cu ltu ral defeat. N or have I, for the sam e reason, m anaged to m ake some well-known reactionaries look as villainous as m any

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w ould have liked. T im e has rendered them either toothless or u n w ittin g allies o f the victim s. T his book takes the id ea o f psychological resistance to colo­ nialism seriously. B ut th a t im plies some new responsibilities, too. T oday, w hen ‘W esternization* has becom e a pejorative w ord, there have reappeared on the stage subtler a n d m ore sophisticated m eans o f acculturation. T h ey produce n o t m erely m odels o f conform ity b u t also models o f ‘official’ dissent. I t is possible today to be anti-colonial in a w ay w hich is specified an d prom oted by the m odern w orld view as ‘p ro p er’, ‘sane’ an d ‘ratio n al’. Even w hen in opposition, th a t dissent rem ains predictable an d controlled. I t is also possible today to o p t for a non-W est w hich itself is a construction o f the W est. O n e can th en choose betw een being th e O rientalist’s despot, to com bine K a rl W ittfogel w ith E dw ard Said, an d th e revolutionary’s loving subject, to com bine C am us w ith G eorge O rw ell. A nd for those who do n o t like the choice, there is, o f course, Cecil R hodes’ a n d R u d y ard K ipling’s noble, half-savage half-child, com pared to w hom th e m uch-hated Brown S ahib seems m ore brow n th a n sahib. Even in enm ity these choices rem ain forms o f hom age to the victors. L et us n o t forget th a t the m ost violent denunciation o f the W est produced by F ran tz F an o n is w ritten in th e elegant style o f a Je a n -P au l Sartre. T h e W est has n o t m erely produced m o d em colonialism , it informs m ost in te r­ pretations o f colonialism . I t colours even this in terp retatio n o f in terp retatio n . I have said a t th e beginning th a t these pages j ustify innocence. T his statem en t should be am plified in a w orld w here the rhetoric o f progress uses the fact o f in tern al coloniaESl^-to subvert the cultures o£ societies s u l ^ c i f o ^ t ^ r n al colonialism a n d w here th e in tern al colonialism in tu rn uses the fact o f external th re a tto le g itim iz e an d p erp etu ate itself7(It is However alscTiTWUild wlieie "the awareness has grow n th a t n eith er form o f oppression can be elim inated w ithout elim inating the other.) In the following pages I have in m ind som ething like the ‘authentic innocence’ psychoanalyst R ollo M ay speaks about,

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the innocence w hich includes th e vulnerability o f a child b u t w hich has n o t lost the realism o f its perception o f evil o r th a t o f its ow n ‘complicity* w ith th a t evil. I t was th a t innocence w hich finally defeated colonialism , how ever m uch th e m odern m ind m ight like to give the cred it to w orld historical forces, in tern al contradictions o f capitalism an d to the political horsesense o r V oluntary self-liquidation’ o f th e rulers. B ut th e m eek in h erit th e earth n o t by meekness alone. T h ey have to have categories, concepts an d , even, defences o f m ind w ith w hich to tu rn the W est in to a reasonably m anageable vector w ithin the trad itio n al w orld views still outside th e span o f m odern ideas o f universalism . T h e first concept in such a set has to b e th e victims* construction o f th e W est, a W est w hich w ould m ake sense to the non-W est in term s o f th e non-W est’s experience o f suffering. H ow ever jeju n e such a concept m ay seem to the sophisticated scholar, it is a reality for th e millions w ho have le a rn t the h a rd w ay to live w ith the W est d u rin g th e last tw o centuries. A nd, everything said, th a t altern ativ e construction o f the W est is n o t so unsophisticated after all. I f there is the non-W est w hich constantly invites one to be W estern an d to defeat th e W est o n th e strength o f one’s acquired W estem ness— there is the non-W est’s construction o f the W est w hich invites one to be tru e to th e W est’s o th er self an d to th e non-W est w hich is in ! alliance w ith th a t o th er self. I f b eating th e W est a t its ow n gam e is th e preferred m eans o f h andling the feelings o f self-hatred in the m odernized non-W est, there is also th e W est constructed by the savage outsider w ho is neith er w illing to be a player no r a counterplayer. T hose o th er W ests, too. I have tried to cap tu re in these pages. In this connection if, w hile translating an d com m enting on their Wests, these outsiders have sm uggled in their ow n im ageries, m yths an d fantasies, I have connived a t it ; th a t is th e w ay translations an d com m entaries are tra d i­ tionally m ade in some societies. Fidelity to one’s in n er self, as one translates, an d to one’s in n er voice, w hen one com m ents, m ay n o t m ean adherence to reality in some cultures b u t in som e others they do. A t least th a t is the sole defence I have for

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m y tendency to speak o f the W est as a single political cnjrity, o f H induism as Indianness, o r o f history a n d C hristianity as W estern. N one o f them is tru e b u t all o f them are realities. I likc-io believe th a t each such concept in this w ork is a (cfouble \enttndrjr'\ on th e one han d , it is a p a rt o f an oppressive stru c tu re ; pit t h e o th er, it is in 4 « affue. w ifT uP vir.rimsr^ThirsTTTurW^t is n o t m e r e iy a p a r t o f an im perial w orld view ; its classical tra d i­ tions an d its critical self are som etimes a protest against th e m odern W est. Sim ilarly, H induism is Indianness th e w ay V . S. N aip au l speaks o f it; an d H induism could be Indianness the w ay R a b in d ra n a th T agore actualized it. A t one tim e these could be ignored as trivialities. T oday, these differences have becom e clues to survival. Especially so w hen th e m o d em W est has produced n o t only its servile im itators an d adm irers b u t also its circus-tam ed opponents a n d its tragic counterplayers perform ing th eir last gladiator-like acts o f courage in fro n t o f appreciative Caesars. T h e essays in this book are a p a e a n to the non-players, who construct a W est w hich allows th em to live w ith th e alternative W est, while resisting the loving -em­ brace o f th e W est’s d o m in an t self. T hus, th e colonized In d ian s do n o t rem ain in these pages sim ple-hearted victim s o f colonialism ; they becom e p articip an ts in a m oral a n d cognitive venture against oppression. T h e y m ake choices. A n d to th e extent they have chosen th eir altern ativ e w ithin the W est, they have also evaluated the evidence, ju d g e d , an d sentenced some while acq u ittin g others. F or all we know , the O ccid en t m ay survive as a civilization p artly as a result o f this ongoing revaluation, perhaps to an extent even outside th e geographical perim eters o f the W est. O n the o th er h a n d , th e stan d ard opponents o f the W est, th e counterplayers, a re not, in spite o f th e ir vicious rhetoric, outside th e d o m in an t m odel o f universalism . T h ey have been in teg rated w ithin the d o m in an t consciousness— type-cast, if you like— as ornam ental dissenters. I suspect th a t th e universalism o f those ‘sim ple’ outsiders, th e non-players w ho have been the victim s o f m odernity— th e arm ed version o f w hich is som etimes called colonialism — is a

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higher-order universalism th a n the ones p opularized d u rin g the last tw o centuries. I do n o t therefore hesitate to declare these essays to be an alternative m ythography o f history w hich denies an d defies the values o fh isto ry . I hope th e essayscap tu re in th e process someThlng o f TKe ordina^y-indiaq^s psychology o f c o lo n ia lls rh ^ , reject th e m odel o f the gulIible,^hopeless victim o f colonialism ^ 'c a u g h T ^ I f f i ^ M n g e s ^ f ^ ^ o ^ I see h im as fighting his own b attle for survival in his own way, som etimes consciously, some­ tim es b y default. I have only sought to clarify his assum ptions an d his w orld view in all their self-co n tra dictory richness. T h a t w ay m ay n o t be o u r idea o f w hat a p ro p er b attle against colonialism ou g h t to be like. B ut I d o u b t if h e cares. T his is w hy in the second essay even the b ab u has been grudgingly recognized as an interface w ho processes the W est on b e h a lf o f his society an d reduces it to a digestible bolus. B oth his com ical and dangerous selves pro tect his society against the W hite Sahib. A nd even th a t W h ite Sahih m ^y Mir™ o u t to b e defined, n o t by skin colour, b u t by social an d political choices. C ertainly TuTturns out^to~be7Th these pages,~noTthe conspiratorial dedicated oppressor th a t h e is m ade o u t to be, b u t a self-destructive co-victim w ith a reified life style and a p a rochiaTcultuxc^caught in the hinges o f history he swears by. " in the age o f A dolf E ichm ann, one m ight ad d , a R u d y ard K ipling can only hope to be an unheroic foot soldier an d supply cannon fodder. All theories o f salvation, secular o r non­ secular, w hich fail to understand this d egradation o f th e colo­ nizer a re theories w hich indirectly ad m it the superiority o f the oppressors an d collaborate w ith them . T h e essential reasoning is simple. Between the m odern m aster an d th e non-m odem slave, one m ust choose th e slave n o t be­ cause one should choose voluntary poverty o r ad m it the superiority o f suffering, n o t only because the slave is oppressed, n o t even because he works (which, M arx said, m ade him less alienated th a n the m aster). O ne m ust choose the slave also because he represents a higher-order cognition w hich perforce

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includes the m aster as a h u m an , w hereas the m aster's cognition has to exclude the slave except as a ‘thing*. U ltim ately, m odern oppression, as opposed to the trad itio n al oppression, is n o t an encounter betw een the self a n d th e enem y, th e rulers an d the ruled, o r the gods an d the dem ons. I t is a b attle betw een de­ hum anized self an d the objectified enem y, the technologized b u reau crat an d his reified victim , pseudo-rulers a n d th eir fear­ some o th er selves projected on to th eir ‘subjects’. T h a t is th e difference betw een the C rusades a n d Auschwitz, betw een H in d u -M u slim riots an d m odern w arfare. T h a t is w hy the following pages speak only o f victim s; w hen they speak o f victors, th e victors are ultim ately shown to be cam ou­ flaged victim s, a t an advanced stage o f psychosocial decay. T his w ork is prim arily an enquiry in to the psychological struc­ tures an d cu ltu ral forces w hich supported o r resisted the culture o f colonialism in British In d ia. B ut it also is, by im plication, a study o f post-colonial consciousness. I t deals w ith elem ents o f In d ia n traditions w hich have em erged less innocent from the colonial experience and it deals w ith cu ltu ral an d psycho­ logical strategies which have helped the society to survive the experience w ith a m inim al defensive redefinition o f its selfhood. F o r parts o f th e book, therefore, colonialism in In d ia began in I 757> w hen the b attle o f Plassey was lost by the Indians, an d it ended in 1947, w hen the British form ally w ithdrew from the country; for oth er parts o f the book, colonialism began in the late 1820s w hen policies congruent w ith a colonial theory o f culture were first im plem ented an d it ended in the 1930s w hen G andhi broke the back o f th e theory; for still o th er parts o f the book colonialism began in 1947, w hen the o u ter supports to th e colonial culture ended, a n d resistance to it is still continuing. I t goes w ithout saying th a t I have n o t tried to give a com plete p icture o f th e In d ia n m ind u n d er colonialism. I have selected m y exam ples a n d chosen m y inform ants, to m ake some ra th e r specific points. These points are political. T h e ir referents lie in the realm o f public politics as well as in the politics o f cultures and cu ltu ral knowledge. A nd a t both planes, they get involved

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in th e politics o f the m o d em categories usually em ployed to analyse m an-m ade suffering. T h e unstated assum ption is th a t an ethically sensitive an d culturally rooted alternative social know ledge is already p artly available outside th e m odern social sciences— in those who have been the ‘subjects’, consumers o r experim entees o f these sciences. T h ere are two colonialisms in these pages, an d subjecthood to one is exam ined w ith an awareness o f th e subjecthood to the other. T his fram ew ork explains the p artial, alm ost cavalier, use o f the biographical d a ta an d the deliberate misuse o f some con­ cepts borrow ed from m odem psychology an d sociology. T h e aim is n o t to adjust, alter or refurbish In d ia n experiences to fit the existing psychological an d social theories— to m ake a b etter case for cu ltu ral relativism o r for a m ore relativist crosscultural psychology. T h e aim is to m ake sense o f some o f the relevant categories o f contem porary knowledge in In d ia n term s an d p u t them in a com peting theory o f universalism . W h at the subjects o f W estern colonialism d id unselfconsciously, I am trying to do consciously an d w ithout being able to fully shed m y professional baggage. T h e colonized Indians d id n o t always try to correct or extend the O rientalists; in their ow n diffused way, they tried to create an alternative language o f discourse. This was their anti-colonialism ; it is possible to m ake it ours, too. A t one place in this book I use the exam ple o f Isw ar C h an d ra V idyasagar ( 1820- 9 1) who, though deeply im pressed by W estern rationalist th ought an d though him self an agnostic, lived like a n orthodox p a n d it an d form ulated his dissent in indigenous term s. H e 'did n o t counterpoise J o h n Locke o r D avid H u m e against Manusamhita; he counterpoised the Paraiara Sutra. T his was his w ay o f handling n o t only In d ia n social problem s b u t also the exogenous idea o f rationalism . (I believe, perhaps wrongly, th a t rationalism too could learn som ething from this odd version o f it.) I t is the second p a rt o f the story— an unheroic b u t critical traditionalism w hich develops a sen­ sitivity to new experiences o f evil— w hich I have stressed. Even if this sounds hopelessly like another case o f unresolved ‘countertransference’, I hope this book contributes to th a t stream o f

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critical consciousness: th e trad itio n o f rein terp retatio n o f tra d i­ tions to create new traditions. A dm ittedly I have, in the following pages, picked up clues from — an d quarrels w ith— contem porary social sciences. B ut m y dialogue o r d eb ate is m ainly w ith those w ho have shaped an d are shaping th e In d ian consciousness, n o t so m uch w ith the w orld o f professional social sciences. M o d em colonialism is too serious a m a tte r to b e left entirely to th e la tte r. F o r those w ho are n o t h ap p y unless they know th e elem ent o f self-interest in an y m ethodology— I c o u n t m yself am ong them — this ap p ro ach does give m e a distinct a n d ra th e r unfair advantage. I suspect th a t a purely professional critique o f this book will n o t do. I f you do n o t like it, you w ill have to fight it the w ay one fights m y th s: by build in g o r resurrecting m ore convincing m yths. V_J H ow ever, even m yths have th e ir biases. L et m e state some o f those associated w ith m ine. I n th e follow ing p ag es,J^ h av e deliberately focused on th e living traditions, em phasizing th e dialectic betw een th e claisiralpfeeT JiIfF arid th e high-status o n th e orieTiand, a n d th e folksy, h y b rid an d th e low -hrow on th e other. A sT h av e already said, it is th e unheroic In d ia n coping w ith th e m ight o f th e W est I w a n t to p o rtray . T o him , th e classical a n d th e folk, th e pure a n d th e h ybrid, are all parts o f a larger repertoire. H e uses them im p artially in th e b attle o f m inds in post-colonial In d ia. Secondly, a com m ent ab o u t th e m ore academ ic concerns called p g y r h n lr tjn r a l a n t h m p n i n g y a n d F reu d ian social psycho­ logy w ith w hich I have m ain tain ed a close relationship for tw o decades a n d from w hich this book, if w ritten even five years ago, w ould have borrow ed m uch o f its theoretical fram e. T h ere is a clear trad itio n in works o f this kin d an d one m ust state in w h at w ay this book deviates from th a t trad itio n . I have not tried to in te rp re t here In d ia n personality o r cu ltu re a n d to show th eir fate u n d e r colonial rule according to an y fixed con­ cept o f health, native o r exogenous. Instead, I have presum ed certain continuities betw een personality a n d culture and seen in them political a n d ethical possibilities. T hese possibilities are

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som etimes accepted an d sometimes not. In o th er w ords, I h ave tried to r etain the criticaLedge-of d e p th psychology b u t shifted th e locus o f criticism from th e purely psychological to the psycKo^political. T h ere is I n these pages a n a tt e m p f to d e­ mystify conventional psychological techniques o f dem ystifica­ tion, too. This how ever m eans th a t th e bro ad em pirical ou tlin e o f In d ia n personality has b e e n 'la k e n Tor g ran ted by meTTn the lasttw eiity -iiv ey ears7 a g a la x y o f psycK afnsts^ psychoanalysts, anthropologists, philosophers an d even political economists have studied the various dim ensions o f the In d ia n m ind. T his knowledge is now a p a rt o f th e In d ia n self-image. O n e should be able to build upon it. T hus, I have n o t discussed m any aspects o f In d ia n selfhood w hich w ould have given a to u ch o f com pleteness to the following analysis. N or have I done full justice to th e individual witnesses I have called from th e past to argue m y case o r to the textual traditions I have invoked. In this respect, I am guilty o f leaving a n u m b er o f loose ends w hich will have to~l5£Tieci u p by th e fastI3ious reader, either w ith the help o f his superior know ledge o f the In d ia n m ind a n d cu ltu re o r by his intuitive understanding o f them . I hope nevertheless to have provided clues to one possible m eaning o f living in this civilization today. T o the extent I have succeeded in freeing th a t m eaning from th e shackles o f cu ltu ral relativism an d m anaged to restore to it its claim to an alternative universality, th e following in terp retatio n o f In d ia n traditions will n o t have been in vain an d it will have some relevance for other cultures un d er attack. A fter all, this w ork is based on the assum ption th a t all m an-m ade suffering is one an d everyone has a re­ sponsibility. Finally, a w ord on the possible/‘sexism’ o f m y language. T his issue has dogged m y steps for a while an d I w an t to state m y position on it once for all. English is n o t m y language. T h o u g h I have developed a taste for it, it was once forced u p o n m e. Even now I often form m y thoughts in m y native Bengali an d th en translate w hen I have to p u t them dow n on p ap er. N ow th a t after th irty years o f toil I have acquired reasonable com -

Preface petence in the language, I am told by th e progeny o f thoce w ho first im posed it on m e th a t I have been ta u g h t the w rong English by th eir forefathers; th a t I m ust now relearn th e language. Frankly, I am too old to do so. T hose w ho are offended by m y language m ay console themselves by rem em ­ b ering th a t the language in w hich I th in k has traditionally looked a t the m ale an d the fem ale differently.

P arts o f an earlier version o f ‘T h e Psychology o f Colonialism ' w ere published in Psychiatry, 1982, 45(3). I t was w ritten in response to an invitation from the In d ia n C ouncil o f Social Science R esearch w hich provided some financial support too. T h e p a p e r has benefited from the detailed criticism s an d sug­ gestions given by A ndré Béteille, M an o ran jan M ah an ty , S um it a n d T a n ik a Sarkar, K enichi N akam ura, W . H . M orris-Jones an d V een a Das. T h e ‘U ncolonized Mind* has grow n o u t o f a presentation I m ade a t a m eeting on C ulture, Pow er an d T ransform ation, organized by th e W orld O rd er M odels Project a t Poona in J u ly 1978. P arts o f an earlier version o f i t were published in th e Times o f India, O cto b er 1978 and in Alternatives, 1982, 8( 1). T h e present version has gained m uch from com m ents an d suggestions from M . P. Sinha, G iri D eshingkar, G ird h ar R a th i an d R . A. P. Shastri. T h e preface draw s upon an article p u b ­ lished in the Times o f India, F eb ru ary 1983. M . K . R iyal an d B huvan C h an d ra have prep ared the m anu­ script, Sujit D eb an d T a ru n S harm a have given bibliographic help. W ith o u t m y wife U m a an d m y d au g h ter A diti I w ould have finished the w ork earlier b u t it w ould n o t have been th e sam e.

O n e

The Psychology of Colonialism: Sex, Age and Ideology in British India

i Imperialism was a sentiment rather than a policy; its foundations were moral rather than intellectual. . . D. C. Somervell1 I t is becom ing increasingly obvious th a t colonialism— as we have come to know it during the last two h u n d red years— cannot be identified w ith only econom ic gain an d political power. In M anchuria, J a p a n consistently lost m oney, and for m any years colonial Indochina, A lgeria an d A ngola, instead of increasing the political pow er o f F rance and P ortugal, sapped it. This did not m ake M anchuria, Indochina, A lgeria o r A ngola less of a colony. N or did it disprove th a t economic gain an d political pow er are im p o rtan t motives for creating a colonial situation. I t only showed th a t colonialism could be ch aracter­ ized by the search for economic an d political advantage w ithout concom itant real economic or political gains, and sometimes even w ith economic or political losses.2 This essay argues th a t the first differentia o f colonialism is^ a state o f m ind in the colonizers an d the colonized, a colonial consciousness w hich includes the sometimes unrealizable wish to m ake econom ic and political profits from the colonies, b u t 1 English Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Longman Green, 1929), p. 186. * I am for the moment ignoring the fact that the colonial societies in our times lost out in the game of political and economic power in the First World itself.

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The Intim ate Enemy

/

o th er elem ents too. T he political econom y o f colonization is o f course im p o rtan t, b u t the crudity an d in an ity o f colonialism are principally expressed in the sphere o f psychology and, to th e extent the variables used to describe the states o f m ind u n d er colonialism have themselves becom e politicized since the entry o f m odern colonialism on the w orld scene, in the sphere o f political psychology. T h e following pages w ill explore some o f these psychological contours o f colonialism in the rulers an d the ruled a n d try to define colonialism as a shared cu ltu re w hich m ay n o t always begin w ith the establishm ent o f alien rule in a society an d end w ith the d ep artu re o f the alien rulers from th e colony. T h e exam ple I shall use w ill be th a t o f In d ia,' w here a colonial political econom y began to operate seVenfyfive years before the full-blown ideology o f British im perialism becam e dom inant, an d w here thirty-five years after the form al ending o f the R aj, the ideology o f colonialism is still triu m p h an t in m any sectors o f life. Such disjunctions betw een politics an d culture becam e pos­ sible because it is only p artly tru e th a t a colonial situation pro­ duces a theory o f im perialism to justify itself. Colonialism is also a psychological state rooted in earlier forms o f social conC sciousness u4 b o th the colonizers an d the colonized. I t represents a certain cu ltu ral continuity an d carries a certain cultural baggags.— - .... First, it include^ codes w hich b o th the rulers and the ruled can share. T h e m a ii^ fu n c tio ifp f these codes is to alter the original cu ltu ral priorities orTboth sides an d bring to the centre of the colonial culture subcultures previously recessive or sub­ ordinate^ in the two confronting cultures. C oncurrently, the ) coctés rem ove from the centre o f each o f the cultures stfiTcultures [ previously salient in them . I t is these fresh prioritiesW hicK E x­ plain w hy some o f the m ost impressive colonial systems have been built by societies ideologically com m itted to open polit­ ical systems, liberalism an d intellectual pluralism . T h a t this split parallels a basic contradiction w ithin the m odern scientificratio n al w orld view w hich, while trying to rem ain ratio n al w ithin its confines, has consistently refused to be ratio n al vis-

The Psychology o f Colonialism

3

à-vis o th er traditions o f know ledge after acquiring w orld dom i­ nance, is only the oth er side o f the sam e explanation.* I t also explains w hy colonialism never seems to end w ith form al poli­ tical freedom._As_a sta te o f m ind, colonialism Is an in digenous process released by externaH orces. Its sources lie d eep in the m inds o f the rulers an d the ruled. P erhaps th a t whirTi begins in j the m inds o f m en m ust also end in the m inds o f m en. Second, the culture o f colonialism presum es a p a rtic u la r ^ s tvle o f ftfahaginff dissentTT)bviouslv. a colonial system p er­ petuates rtself ~t>y inducing the colonized, thro u g h socio­ economic a n d psychological rew ards an d punishm ents, to ac­ c e p t new socialjnorms an d cognitive_categories. B ut these outer incentives arçd dis-incentives are invariably noticed a n d chal­ lenged; they becom e the overt indicators o f oppression_and dom inance, M ore dangerous and p erm an en t are th ^ inneyy (^rewards an d punishm ents, the secondary psychological gains ^ ancTloSses from suffering an d submission u n d er colonialism . T h ey are alm ost always unconscious an d a lm ost always ignored^ „ P articu larly strong is ^ h e in n er resistance to recognizing the ultim ate violence w hichjcolonialism does to its victim s, nam ely th a t it creates a cultu re in w hich th e ruled are constantly tem pted to jfightJiieir .rulers w ithin the^psychological limitsj set by the latter. I t is n o t an accident th a t 4he specific variants o f the concepts w ith w hich m any anti-colonial m ovem ents in ou r tim es have w orked have often been the products o f th e im perial culture itself and, even in opposition, these m ovem ents have p aid hom age to th eir respective cu ltu ral origins. I have in m ind n o t only the overt A pollonian codes o f W estern liberalism th a t have often m otivated the élites o f the colonized societies b u t also th eir covert D ionysian cou n terp arts in the concepts o f * On this other contradiction see Paul Fey erabend, Science in a Fret Society (London: NLB, 1978). In the context of India and China this point emerges clearly from Claude Alvares’ Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West, 1500- 197s (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1979). See also Ashis Nandy, ‘Science, Authoritarianism and Culture: On the Scope and Limits of Isolation outside the Clinic’, M. N. Roy Memorial Lecture, 1980, Seminar, May 1981 (261) ; and Shiv Viswanathan, ‘Science and the Sense of Other’, paper written for the colloquium on New Ideologies for Science and Technology, Lokayan Project 1987, Delhi, mimeographed.

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The Intim ate Enemy

statecraft, everyday politics, effective political m «thods an d utopias w hich have guided revolutionary m ovem ents against colonialism . T h e rest of this essay exam ines, in the context o f these two processes and as illustrations, how the colonial ideology in B ritish Jijd ia w as b u ilt o n the cu ltu ral m eanings o f two funda­ m ental categories o f institutional discrim ination in B ritain, sex ! an d age, and how these m eanings confronted th eir tra d itional 1 In d ia n counterparts a n d their new incarnations in G andhi.

II T h e homology betw een sexual an d political dominance» which W esienrColonialism invariably used—in Asia, A frica an d L atin A m erica— was n o t an acrid e n ta lh y -p ro d ijrt o f colonial history. I t h ad its correlates in o th er situations o f oppression w ith which the W est was involved, the A m erican experience w ith slavery being the best docum ented o f them . T h e hom ology, draw ing su p p o rt from the r m a l o f psychological bisexuality in men)in large areas of W estern culture^ beautifully legitim ized ^Europe’s post-mecIIevariTiodels o f dom inance, exploitation jin d cruelty, as n a tu ra l and valid. Colonialism , too, was congruent w ith the existing W estern sexual stereotypes an d the philosophy of life w hich they represented. I t produced a cu ltu ral consensus in \ w hich political an d socio-economic dom inance symbolized the I d o m in a n c e ofm en aruT m asculinity over w om en an d fem ininity. D uring tEe^earlyiy ears o f BrTtish ru le ^ n In d ia, roughly~HetweenCi 257 and i 8$q, w hen the B ritish middleLclasses-were not d o m in an t in the ruling culture an d the rulers cam e m ainly from a feudal background, the hom ology betw een sexual and jpolitical dom inance was n o t central to the coloniaT culture.4 M ost * Frantz Fanon was one of the first to point out the psychological dominance of the European middle-class culture in the colonies. See his Black Skin, Whitt Masks translated by C. L. Markman (New York: Grove, 1967); also Gustav Jahoda, White Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 102, 123. Quoted in Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), p. 45n. James Morris (Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress, Lon­ don: Faber and Faber, 1973, p. 38) says, in the context of India: ‘By 1835 one

The Psychology o f Colonialism

5

rulers an d subjects h a d n o t y et internalized the id ea o f colonial ru le as a m anly o r husbandly or lordly prerogative. I a m n o t ^ p e a jd n g jh e re o f the m icro-politics o f colonialism b u t o f its m acro -p o litic^ Ind iv id u al racialists a n d sadists w ere there a p le n ty am ong th e British in In d ia . B ut w hile British rule had^ alread y been established, B ritish culture in In d ia was still no t p o litic ally dom in a n t, a n d race-based evolutionism waHsiill in- n/ r ^ s p i r n o i i ^ j n j j i r m fm g fyjTtuc^ M ost Britons in In d ia livedj like I n d ia n s a t hom e a n d in th e office, w ore In d ia n dress, an d observed In d ia n customs an d religious practices. A large n u m ­ ber o f them m arried In d ia n w om en, offered puja to In d ia n gods a n d goddesses, an d lived in fear an d aw e o f the m agical powers o f th e B rahm ans. T h e first tw o governor-generals, renow ned for th eir rapaciousness, were also know n for their com m itm ent to things In d ia n . U n d er them , the trad itio n al In d ia n life style d o m in ated the culture o f B ritish In d ia n politics. E ven the B ritish In d ia n A rm y occasionally h ad to pay respect to In d ia n gods an d goddesses an d there was a t least one instance w hen the arm y m ade m oney from th e revenues o f a tem ple. Finally, m issionary activity in British In d ia was banned, In d ia n laws d om inated the courts an d the system o f education was In d ia n .5 I n B ritain, too, the id ea o f em pire was suspect till as la te as the 1830s. V isitors to colonies like In d ia often found the British au th o rity there ‘faintly com ical’.* T h e gentlem en o f th e E ast detects a certain smugness among the islanders, and this superior tone of voice came not as it would later come, from an arrogant Right, but from a highly moralistic Left. The middle classes, newly enfranchised, were emerging into power: and it was the middle classes who would eventually prove, later in Victoria’s reign, the most passionate imperialists of all.’ It is in the context of this correlation between middle class culture and the spirit of imperialism that one must make sense of psychologist J. D. Unwin’s re­ ported proposition: ‘only a sexually restrained society . . . would continue to ex­ pand’ (Heaven's Command, p. 30). The political culture of British India was however a product of the dialectic between British feudalism and British middle class culture. I have avoided the details of this dialectic here. * E.g., Harihar Sheth, Pracin Kalikatar Paricay (Calcutta: Orient Book, 1982), new ed; Binoy Ghose, Kalkata Culture (Calcutta: Bihar Sahitya Bhavan, 1953); Morris, Heaven's Command, pp. 75- 6 . * Morris, Heaven's Command, pp. so, 24. Morris sums up as follows: 'All in all the British were not thinking in imperial terms. They were rich. They were victorious.

6

The Intimate Enemy

In d ia C om pany h a d n o t actually intended to govern In d ia b u t to m ake m oney th ere,7 w hich o f course they did w ith predict­ able ruthlessness. B ut once the two sides in the B ritish -In d ian culture o f politics, following the flowering o f the middle-class British evangelical spirit, beg^aritoj.scribe-c.ultu raLmeanings to the British dom ination r colonial jsm proper can.be said to h ave b e g u n ? Particularly, once the British rulers and the exposed sections o f Indians internalized the colonial role definitions and began to speak, w ith reform ist fervour, the language of th e hom ology betw een sexual an d political stratarchies, th e b attle They were admired. They were not yet short of markets for their industries. They were strategically invulnerable, and they were preoccupied with domestic issues. When the queen was crowned,. . . we may be sure she thought little of her possessions beyond the seas. She was the island queen.. . . Even the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish were unfamiliar to her then, when the world called her kingdom simply “England”. . . . No, in 1837 England seemed to need no empire, and the British people as a whole were not much interested in the colonies. How can one be expected to show an interest in a country like Canada, demanded Lord Mel­ bourne the Prime Minister, where a salmon would not rise to a fly’ (pp. 25- 6, 30.) 7 Morris, Heaven's Command, pp. 71- 2. • After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, however, the ‘universalism’ which had powered the early British reformers of Indian society had to give way to a second phase of ‘tolerance’ of Indian culture due to the fears of a second mutiny. But this new cultural relativism clearly drew a line between Indian culture seen as infantile and immoral and the culture of the British public school products: austere, courageous, self-controlled, ‘adult men’. Lewis D. Wurgaft, ‘Another Look at Prospero and Caliban: Magic and Magical Thinking in British India’, mimeo­ graphed, pp. 5- 6. Wurgaft bases his analysis partly on Francis Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence, British Imperialism in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). This shift to tolerance however did not change the basic relationship between the colonized. As in Albert Memmi’s Africa, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ colonizers were but two different cogs performing equally important functions in the same machine. See Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, translated by Howard Greenfeld (New York: Beacon, 1967); also Wurgaft, ‘Another Look at Prospero and Caliban’, pp. 12- 13. C. Northcote Parkinson in his East and West (New York: Mentor, 1965), p. 216, sums it up neatly: ‘It was the knowledgeable, efficient, and polite Europeans who did the serious damage.’ The whole process was part of a larger picture, which involyed the rejection of Europe's pre-modem conceptualization of the East and reincorporation of the East into European consciousness according to the needs of colonialism. See Part Two below. It is interesting that for European philosophers of the eighteenth century, to men like Voltaire for example, China, perhaps, was the most advanced culture of the world. By the nineteenth century the Chinese had become, for the European literati, primitives.

The Psychology o f Colonialism

7

for the m inds o f m en was to a g reat extent won by the R aj. C rucial to this- cu ltu ral co-optation was the process psycho~fs analysis callus identification w ith the aggressor,^n an oppressive ^ situation, the process becam e th e flip side o f the theory o f progress, an ontogenetic legitim acy for an ego defence often used by a norm al child in an environm ent o f childhood de­ pendency to confront inescapable dom inance by physically m ore powerful adults enjoying total legitim acy. In the colonial culture, identification w ith the aggressor bound the rulers and th e ruled in an unbreakable dyadic relationship. T 'h e'K aj saw In3B ans^a^crypto-barbarians w ho needed to further civilize themselves. I t saw British rule as an agent o f progress and as a mission. M any Indians in tu rn saw th eir salvation in besom ing m ore like th e B ritishr in friendship o r in enm ity. T h ey m ay not have Tully shared the British idea o f the m artial races— the hyper-m asculine, m anifestly courageous, superbly loyal In d ian castes and subcultures m irroring the British middle-class sexual stereotypes— b u t they d id r esurrect th e ideology o f the m artial races laten t in the trad itio n al In d ian concept o f statecraft and g av e_ th e id ea a new centrality. M any nineteenth-century In d ia n m ovem ents o f social, religious and political reform — and m any literary an d a rt m ovem ents as well— tried to m ake K satriyahood the ‘tru e ’ interface betw een the rulers an d ruled as a new, nearly exclusivev^ndicator o f au th en tic Indianness. \ T h e origins an d functions o f this new stress on K satriyahood is best evidenced by the fact th a t, contrary to the beliefs o f those carrying the psychological baggage o f colonialism , the search for m artial Indianness underw rote one o f th e m ost powerful collaborationist strands w ithin the In d ian society, represented by a m ajority o f the feudal princelings in In d ia an d some o f the m ost im potent forms o f protest against colonialism (such as the im m ensely courageous b u t ineffective terrorism o f Bengal, M ah arash tra an d P an jab led by sem i-W esternized, m iddleclass, u rb an y o u th ). T h e change in consciousness th a t took place can be briefly stated in term s o f three concepts w hich becam e central to colonial In d ia : purusatva (the essence of m asculinity), naritva

8

The Intim ate Enemy

(the essence of fem ininity) a n d klibatva (the essence o f h erm ap h ­ roditism ). T h e polarity defined by the antonym ous purusatva a n d naritoa was gradually supplanted, in th e colonial culture o f politics, by the antonym s o{purusatva an d klibatva ; fem irunityin-m asculiruiy was now perceived as th e final negation o f a ricaifs political identity, a p a thology m ore dangerous th a n fem­ in in ity itself. Like some o th er cultures, including some strands o fp re-m o d ern C hristianity, In d ia too h a d its m yths ab o u t good a n d b ad androgynes an d its ideas ab o u t valuable and despicable androgyny. Now therc-j^as an attem p t to lum p together all form s o f androgyny an d counterpoise them against undifferenT l^af^m ascatintT yT ^labindranatE T agore’s (786r-T 95 r)~ novel Car Adhyay brilliantly captures thqfpafri w hich was involved in this change. T h e in n er conflicts o iftne hero o f the novel are m odelled on the m oral a n d political dilem m as o f an actual revolutionary nationalist, w ho also happened to be a C atholic theologian an d a V edantist, B rahm abandhav U p adhyay ( 18611907). T ag o re’s m oving preface to the first edition o f th e novel, rem oved from subsequent editions because it affronted m any Indians, sensed the personal tragedy o f a revolutionary friend w ho, to fight the suffering o f his people, h ad to move aw ay from his ow n ideas o f svabhava a n d svadharma. I t is rem arkable th a t tw enty-seven years before Car Adhyay, T agore h ad d ealt w ith th e sam e process o f cultural change in his novel Gora', probably m odelled on the sam e real-life figure an d w ith a com patible political message.9 M any pre-G andhian protest movem ents w ere co-opted by 'Rabindranath Tagore, ‘CSr Adhyay’, Racanavali (Calcutta: West Bengal Government, 1961), pp. 875- 923; ‘GorS’, Racanavali, pp. 1- 350. On Brahma­ bandhav Upadhyay see the brief article by Smaran Acharya, ‘Upadhyay Brahma­ bandhav: Rabindra-Upanyaser Vitarkita Nayak’, Desh, 49(20), 20 March 1982, pp. 27- 32. On Tagore’s response to the criticisms of his position on extremist politics in Car Adhyay, see his ‘Kaifyat’ ( 1935), reproduced in Shuddhasatva Bosu, Rabindrandther Car Adhyay (Calcutta: Bharati Prakasani, 1979), pp. 7- 10. Bosu also provides an interesting, politically relevant, analysis of the novel. I am grateful to Ram Chandra Gandhi for pointing out to me that even Vivekananda, whose masculine Hinduism was a clear denial of the androgyny of his guru Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, himself became painfully aware of the cultural changes his Hinduism represented towards the end of his brief life. On Indian traditions of androgyny and myths about androgynes, see Wendy D. O’Flaherty, Sexual Metaphors and Animal Symbols in Indian Mythology (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,

The Psychology o f Colonialism

9

this cultural change. T h ey sought to redeem the Indians’ m asculinity by defeating the British, often fighting against hopeless odds, to free the form er once a n d for all from th e historical m em ory o f th eir own hum iliating defeat in violent pow er-play and ‘tough politics’. T his gave a14 Colonizers, as we have know n them) in th e last two centuries, cam e from com plex societies w ith\ heterogeneous cu ltu ral an d ethical traditions. As already noted, \ i r i s ByTu^erpTziying sorhe^ aspects o f their cu ltu re an d over- \ playing others th a t they b u ilt the legitim acy for colonialism .16 ' F or instance, it is im possible to bu ild a h ard , this-w orldly sense o f mission on the trad itio n to w hich St Francis o f Assisi belonged: one perforce has to go back to S t A ugustine an d Ig n atiu s Loyola to do so. I t is n o t possible to find legitim acy for the colonial theory o f progress in the trad itio n o f Jo h an n es E ck h art, J o h n R uskin an d Leo Tolstoy, based as it is on the rejection o f the ideas o f an o m n ip o ten t high technology, o f hyper-com petitive, achievem ent-oriented, over-organized p ri­ v ate enterprise, an d o f aggressively proselytizing religious creeds o p erating on the basis o f w hat E rik Erikson calls pseudo­ species. O ne m ust find th a t legitim acy in utilitarians sucli as Je re m y; B entham an d Jam es M ill, in th e socialist tfilnkers con­ ceptualizing^ colonialism as a necessary step to progress an d j is a rem edy for feudalism,, an d in those generally trying to fit th e colofnaTexperienr.p the; m ould o f a d o cM ne~ofprogress. (C hildhood innocence serving as the prototype o f prim itive com m unism was one o f c ^ la r x ^ m ain contributions to th e theory o f progress, w hich frT conceptualized as a m ovem ent from prehistory to history an d from infantile o r low-level com ­ m unism to ad u lt communismi^Jn^lia to him always rem ained a 14 My over-all theoretical understanding of this homology is in ‘Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood’, in The Politics of Awareness: Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias (forthcoming). A briefer version in Resurgence, May 1982, and in The Times of India, 2, 3 and 4 February 1982. In the context of India, see a discussion of such a relationship in Bruce Mazlish, James and John M ill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1975), particularly Chapter 6, pp. 116- 45. For a briefintroduction to the over-all picture of the assimila­ tion of new worlds by the West (which set the context for the homology among childhood, primitiyism and colonial subjugation to emerge) see Michael T. Ryan, ‘Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1981, 23(4), pp. 519- 38. Ryan mentions ‘the tendency to compare—if not confuse—ancients with exotics’, as also its relationship with the existing body of demonological theory in Europe. u Memmi, in The Colonizer and the Colonized, has graphically described the process through which the new entrant is broken into the ruling culture of the colonizer.

The Psychology o f Colonialism

i

country o f ‘sm all sem i-barbarian, sem i-civilized com m unities’^) w hich 'restricted the h u m an m ind w ithin the sm allest possible compass, m aking it th e unresisting tool o f superstition’ an d w here the peasants lived th eir ‘undignified, sta g n a n t an d vege­ tative life’. 'T hese little com m unities5, M arx argued, . ' . . . b rought ab o u t a brutalising w orship o f n a tu re exhibiting its d egrad atio n in the fact th a t m an, th e sovereign o f n atu re, fell dow n on his knees in th e ad o ratio n o f Kanuman [sic], m onkey,^ an d Sabbalay th e cow .’ I t followed, according to M arx, th a t \ ‘w hatever m ay have been th e crim e o f E ngland she was th e \ unconscious tool o f history’ .18 Such a view was bound to con- \ trib u te handsom ely— even if inad vertently— to the ra cist, w orld view and ethnocentrism th a t underlay colonialism .17 A sim ilar, thoughtless Influential, cu Itu raF ro Ie ^w asplayed by some o f F reu d ’s early disciples w ho w ent o u t to ‘prim itive’ societies to pursue the hom ology betw een prim itivism an d infantility .18 T hey, too, w ere w orking o u t the cu ltu ral an d psychological im ­ plications o f the biological principle ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’, a n d th a t o f the ideology o f ‘n orm al’, fully socialized, m ale adulthood. O nly, unlike the u tilitarian s an d the M arxists, they d id n o t clearly identify prim itivism and infantility w ith disvalues like stru ctu ral sim plicity a n d ‘static history’.18) T h ere was blood-curdling shadow -boxing am ong the com-

J

^K arl Marx, ‘The BritishRule in India’ ( 1853), in Karl Marx and F. Engels, ] ArtuUs d^Britain iM o»covf: Progress Publishers, 1971), pp. 166- 72; see especially j pp. 171- 2. I 11These imageries provided the psychological basis of the theory of the Asiatic mode of production. I am grateful to Giri Deshingkar for pointing out to me that the Communist Party of China tried to escape this Marxian double-bind by passing an official resolution in 1927 that China was not an Asiatic society. Such are the pulls of scientific social sciences. 11 That another view of primitivism is possible, more or less within the same framework, is shown by the political use of Freud’s concept of the polymorphous perverse infant in a contemporary Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, in Eros and Civiliza­ tion (London: Sphere, 1969). Before him Wilhelm Reich in psychoanalysis, D. H. Lawrence in literature and Salvador Dali in art had explored the creative possibili­ ties of primitivism within a meta-Freudian framework. l* See on this theme O. Mannoni, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Decolonization of Mankind’, in J. Miller (ed.),, Freud (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972), pp. 86-95.

14

The Intim ate Enemy

peting W estern schools o f social philosophy, including, the various versions o f W estern C hristianity. B ut th ere can be no d o u b t ab o u t w hich sub-tr adition in E urope w as the s«mngf»r T here was an alm ost com plete consensus am ong th e sensitive E uropean in tellectuals th a t colonialism was a n evilj alb eit a necessary o n e T lt w a s lh e age o f Optimism in liu r o p e . N oTonly the'SPrfr-cbnservatives an d th e apologists o f colonialism were convinced th a t one d ay th eir cu ltu ral mission w ould be com ­ plete a n d th e b arb arian s w ould becom e civilized; even the radical critics o f W estern society w ere convinced th a t colo­ nialism was a necessary staple p f m atu ratio n for Some societies. They^differed from the im perialists, o n ly irT tF a t tLey~flTFTn o t expect the coloaiged to love, o r be grateful to th e colonizers for in tro d u cin g th eir subjects to the m o d em w o rld .20 T hus, in the eyes o f th e E uropean civilization th e colonizers were n o t a group o f self-seeking, rapacious, ethnocentric v andals an d self­ chosen carriers o f a cu ltu ral pathology, b u t ill-intentioned, ’ flawed instrum ents o f history, w ho unconsciously w orked for the upliftm ent o f the underprivileged o f the w orld. T h e grow th o f this ideology paralleled a m ajor cu ltu ral re­ construction th a t took place in the W est d u rin g the first phase o f colonialism , th e phase in w hich colonialism was becom ing consolidated as a n im p o rtan t cu ltu ral process an d a w ay o f life for the Spanish an d the Portuguese. P hilippe Aries argues th a t the m odern concept o f ^ |l d h o o ^ S a p ro d u ct o f seventeenthcentury E u ro p e.21 Before then m e child was seen as a sm aller version o f th e a d u lt; now the child becam e— this Aries does n o t fully recognize— an in ferior version o f th e a d u lt and had to be edu cated througlTtHe new ly-expanded period o f childhood. *• On the seme of betrayal which British colonialists had because of the 'un­ gratefulness’ of Indians, seen as a cultural feature, see Wurgaft, ‘Another Look at Prospero and Caliban’. Wurgaft obviously borrows from O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, tram. Pamela Powes (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), 2nd edition. u Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Lift, tram. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962). For a different point of view, see Lloyd deMause ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, in deMause (ed.), The History of Childhood (New York: The Ptychohistory Press, 1974), pp. 1- 73.

The Psychology o f Colonialism

15

(A parallel an d contem porary developm ent in E urope was the em ergence o f the m odern concept of w om anhood) underw ritten by the changing concept o f C hristian godhead w hich, under th e influence o f Protestantism , becam e m ore m asculine.” ) T he new concept o f childhood bore a direct relationship to the doctrine o f progress now reg n an t in th e W est. C hildhood now n q -lo n ger seemed-jonly a h appy»- blissful prototype, of beatific angels, as it h ad in th e peasant cultures o f E u rope only a century earlier. I t increasingly looked like a l^ an k slate^on w hich adults m ust w rite th eir m oral codes— an inferior version n fj^ a tn rity , ]pss prftH nriivf and ethical, andHSadly contam i­ nated by the playful, irresponsible an d spontaneous aspects o f h u m a iw ia tu re ^ C oncurrently, probably- propelled by w iiat m any W eberians have identified as the prim e m over behind th e m odernization o f W est E urope, the< ^rotesta n t E thic^ it becam e the responsibility ofcthp..ad n lt-to rc&enicd a differen t concep t o f trag ed y . N o t only w ere th e good a n d the evil clcarTy separated in th e epic, according to w ell-defined ethical criteria^ b u t evil finally trium phed.. T rad itio n ally th e rakfasas represented a d em o n ic version o f m asculinity w hich was u nfettered by d o m in an t norm s a n d traditions. N ow aspects o f this dem onic m asculinity were endorsed, for th e Indians, by th e new cu ltu re o f colonialism a n d th e v ariatio n on th e m y th o f th e P ro m eth ean m an it popularized. By m aking Meghnddvadh a tragedy, by inducing • f his readers to identify w ith his heroes, M ad h u su d an legitim ized th e personality type portrayed by his heroes an d underw rote th e em erging ideology of m odernity as well as com patible con­ cepts o f m asculinity and adulthood in his com m unity’s w orld view. W h a t was recessive a n d in fetters in trad itio n al In d ia n m asculinity was now m ade salient w ith th e help o f existing c u ltu ral im agery an d myths. T his is how M adhusudan u p d a te d the early cu ltu ral c rit­ icisms o f R am m o h u n R oy ( 1772- 1833).30 R am m o h u n h ad in tro d u ced in to the culture o f In d ia ’s expanding u rb a n m iddle classes— for the sake o f those alienated from the older life style an d values by the colonial intrusion into eastern In d ia— the ideas o f organized religion, a sacred text, m onotheism and, above all, a p atriarch al godhead. Sim ultaneously he h ad ‘mis­ re a d ’ th e nondualism of S ankaracarya to suggest a hew defini­ tio n o f m asculinity, based on th e dem ystification o f w om anhood ** See Nandy, ‘Sad: A Nineteenth Century Tale of Women, Violence and Protest’, in A t tht Edge of Psychology, pp. 1- 31, for a discussion of the psycho­ logical dimensions of Rammohun Roy’s response to colonialism. The paper also discusses the personal and cultural ambivalence which powered Rammohun Roy’s philosophy of social change.

22

The Intim ate Enemy

an d on the shifting o f th e locus o f m agicality from everyday fem ininity to a transcendent m ale principle. H e h ad sought to lib erate w om an from the responsibility she bore in the shared consciousness— or unconsciousness— for failures o f n u rtu re in n atu re, politics and social life.. M adhusud an . on the o th er h an d , in n o cen t o f the questions R am m o h u n h ad raised in his philo­ sophy o f reform , tried to contain w ithin the In d ian w orld view W estern concepts o f the m ale a nd th e female71m5~Hie~~adult : an d the infantile, an d thus to m ake theJVVestern presence in ^ n d ia seem n a tu ral in a conTexTwKere~the W est h ad seemingly come~T5Tepfesent7for m a n ^ Indians, th e jn o re -v a to g j'^ s p ects of In d ia n cu ltu re. T h e previously rejected hyper-m asculine raksasa qualities o f R av an a becam e now the heroic qualities o f a dem on-king representing tru e, a d u lt m asculinity; an d the m any-faceted, open personality o f R am a, on w hom successive generations o f Indians h ad projected th eir com plex concepts o f goodness, becam e a non-m asculine, im m ature, effete godhead, representing a lower— perhaps even false— concept o f goodness. T his is n o t the place to discuss the O edipal passions w hich pushed M adhusudan tow ards a new definition o f m asculinity an d norm ality. T he p o in t to rem em ber is th a t his efforts, on b e h a lf o f his culture, to ^ ta m e ^ th ^ W estern concepts of man* h ^ ^ a jid ^ j^ o rrra ritlb o d were m ade w hen the full pow er and glory of British im perialism were n o t y et ap parent. As a result, .there w a s^ tT e T d ^ n siv e n e ss in Tum TH is aggressive criticism o f In d ia n traditions was in the style o f the m ajor reform m ove­ m ents o f I n d ia : it was n o t m erely an a tte m p t to explain In d ia n cu ltu re in In d ian term s, or even in W estern term s, b u t was an A ttem pt to explain the W est in In d ian term s an d to jnsorpSrat'» ijt in the In d ia n culture as an unavoid ab le^x p en en ce. I now tu rn to the second stream of cu ltu ral criticism in response to colonialism , once again grounded in rein terp reted sacred texts b u t in reality dependent on core values borrow ed from the colonial w orld view an d then legitim ized according to existing concepts o f sacredness. Probably--th«-nriost~ereative representative o f this stream w a ^ a n k im c h a n d r a Chatterjir©-.

The Psychology o f Colonialism

23

( 1838- 94) whose novels an d essays w ere a n a tte m p t t o j n a r ginalize th e earlier m odel of critical H induism a n d suggest a new fram ew ork o f political cu ltu re w hich projected m to th e H in d u past, in to a lost golden age o f H induism , the_quaHtie&.of C hristianity whichiuu»»4»gly-gaye C hristians th eir stre n g th . ^nandamath, a novel w hich becam e th e Bible o f th e first generation o f In d ia n nationalists, p articu larly the B engali te r­ rorists, was a d irect a tte m p t to w ork o u t th e im plications o f such a concept o f religion.*1 T h e o rd er o f th e sannydsis in th e novel was obviously the H in d u c o u n te rp a rt o f the priesthood in some versions o f W estern C hristianity. I n fact, th eir W estern­ ness gave them th eir sense o f history, th eir stress on a n organized religion, an d above all, th eir acceptance o f th e R aj as a tran sien t b u t historically inevitable a n d legitim ate phenom enon in H in d u term s. B u t it was B ankim chandra’s elegant essay on K rs^ a w hich provided th e missing link— a rein terp reted trad itio n al godhead — to the new m odel o f H induism .*2 W h a t M ad h u su d an sought to do in th e context o f the R am ay an a, B ankim chandra sought to do in th e context o f the M a h a b h a ra ta a n d th e five Pura^ tas dealing w ith K rsna. H e tried to build a historical an d a histori­ cally conscious K rsn a— self-consistent, self-conscious a n d m oral according to m odern norm s. H e scanned all th e an cien t texts o f K rsna, n o t only to locate K rsn a in history, b u t to argue aw ay all references to K rsn a’s ch aracter traits unacceptable to the new norm s relatin g to sexuality, politics a n d social relation­ ships. H is K rsn a was n o t the soft, childlike, self-contradictory, som etim es im m oral being— a god w ho could blend w ith the everyday life o f his hum ble devotees an d w ho was only oc­ casionally a successful, activist, productive a n d chastising god o p eratin g in the com pany o f the great. B ankim chandra d id n ot adore K rsn a as a child-god o r as a playful— som etim es sexually playful— adolescent w ho was sim ultaneously an androgynous, 11 Bankimchandra Chatterji, Racemdvali, with an introduction by Jogesh Bagal (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 715- 88. ** Bankimchandra Chatteiji, ‘Kr?nacaritra’, 1886, in Racanaoali, vol. a, pp. 407-

583-

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The Intimate Enemy

philosophically sensitive, p ractical idealist. H is K r$na was a respectable, righteous, didactic, ‘h a rd ’ god, protecting th e glories o f H induism as a proper religion a n d preserving it as a n in tern ally consistent m oral a n d cu ltu ral system. Bankim ch a n d ra rejected as latter-d ay interpolations— a n d hence unau th en tic— every tra it o f K rsn a th a t d id n o t m eet the first requirem ent for a C hristian a n d Islam ic god, nam ely all~ perfection.88 H is goal was to m ake K rsn a a norm al, non-pagan m ale god w ho w ould n o t hum iliate his devotees in front o f the progressive W esterners. I t was this consciousness w hich Sw am i D ay an an d Sarasw ati ( 1824- 83) a n d Sw am i V ivekananda ( 1863- 1902) shared an d developed fu rth er. T h e two Swam is en tered th e scene w hen the colonial cu ltu re h a d m ade deep er inroads in to In d ia n society. I t was no longer possible to give p rio rity to cu ltu ral reform over mass politics w ithout ignoring th e fact th a t a psychological invasion from th e W est h ad begun, w ith the w idespread in tern alization of W estern values. by m any: Indians, and a n over-em phasis on the reform o f th e In d ia n personality could only open u p new , invidious m odes o f W esternization. Y et, this is exactly w h at the tw o red o u b tab le Swamis did. T hey borrow ed th eir fundam ental values from th e W estern w orld view an d , in spite o f th eir im age as orthodox revivalists, w ere ruthlessly critical o f the H indus. T h ey also took the posi­ tion th a t th e H indus h a d been g reat— w hich m ean t, in their term s, virile a n d a d u lt— in ancient tim es a n d h ad fallen on b ad days because o f th eir loss o f co n tact w ith tex tu al B rahm inism an d tru e K satriyahood. Obviously, if ksatratej or m artial valour was th e first differentia o f a ru ler, th e ru ler w ho h a d g reater hdtratej deserved to rule. T his was h ard ly a com plim ent to the living H in d u s; if anything, it perfectly fitted th e dom inant structure o f colonial th o u g h t,84 as well as th e ideology of some W estern O rientalists. T hus, V iv ek an an d a a n d D ay an an d , too, tried to C hristianize “ This itself was modem. In an ahistorical or epic culture, temporality cannot be allowed to determine authenticity. See Section VII of the essay. MKieman, The Lords of Human Kind.

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H induism , particularly the d o m in an t H in d u concept o f the desirable person. I n doing so, they identified the W est w ith pow er a n d hegem ony, w hich in tu rn they identified w ith a superior civilization. T h e n they tried to ‘list’ the differences betw een the W est an d In d ia a n d a ttrib u te d the form er’s superiority to these differences. T h e rest o f th eir lives they spent exhorting the hapless H indus to pursue these cu ltu ral differentiae of the W est. A nd p redictably they found out— In d ia n culture being the com plex, open-ended system it is— th a t traditions sup­ porting some o f the valued W estern traits were there in H in d u ­ ism b u t were lost on the ‘u n w orthy’ contem porary H indus. P redictably, too, the m ain elem ents o f th eir H induism were, again : an a tte m p t to tu rn H induism in to an organized religion w ith a n organized priesthood, church a n d m issionaries; ac­ ceptance o f the id ea o f proselytization an d religious ‘conscientizatio n i^Juddhti the bête noire o f the In d ia n C hristians an d M uslim s, wafr-a Sem itic elem ent introduced in to nineteenthcentury H induism u n d er th e influences o f W estern Chris­ tianity) ; a n a tte m p t to in tro d u ce th e concept o f T h e Book following the Sem itic creeds (the V edas a n d th e G ita i n t E e j case o f th e two Swamis) ; the acceptance o f th e id ea o f linear, objective and causal history; acceptance o f ideas akin to m ono­ theism (V ivekananda even m anaged to produce th a t ra re I v a ria n t o f it : a quasi-m onotheistic creed w ith a fem inine god- j h ead as its central plank) ; a n d a certain puritanism an d thisw orldly asceticism borrow ed p a rtly from th e C atholic church a n d p artly from Calvinism . Such a m odel was bound to lead to the perception th a t th e loss o f m asculinity a n d cu ltu ral regression o f th e H indus was due to th e loss o f the original A ryan qualities w hich they shared w ith th e W esterners. T h ere was a political m eaning in D ayan a n d ’s decision to call his ch u rch A rya Sam aj. I t was also / bound to lead to an em phasis on basic psychological and in - j stitu tio n al changes in H induism an d to the rejection o f o th er j forms o f critical H induism , w hich stressed the prim acy o f polit- ! ical changes an d sought to give b a ttle to B ritish colonialism by I accepting the contem porary H indus as they were. (For instance,

26

The Intim ate Enemy

G andhi la te r on organized th e H indus as Indians, n o t as H indus, an d g ran ted H induism th e rig h t to m ain tain its character as an unorganized, anarchic, open-ended faith.) N ot ; surprisingly, th e second m odel g radually b ecam ein co m p atib le w ith the needs o f anti-colonialism and, by over-stressing exoI genous categories o f self-criticism, indirectly collaborationist. T here was y et another PP- 91- 100. See also his Burmese Days (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).

The Psychology o f Colonialism

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a tyrannical school th a t was close to being a ‘to ta l’ institution. H is biographer B ernard C rick how ever argues th a t, objectively speaking, O rw ell’s childhood was not re a lly oppressive after all, th a t O rw ell ‘rew rote’ his m em ories to m ake them com patible w ith his later concerns.60 But a t the sam e tim e, C rick’s account itself underscores th ree them es-in-O rw ell’s-garly life w hich are lin k e tfw ith th e ad u lt O rw ell’s u nderstanding ofoppression and ^ rd e fia n c e ^ ftH e ^ o Ip n t^ c u Iiu re ^ in B ritain^ First, O rw ell grew u p in a n essen tiali^w o m an ’s w orld w ith im ageries o f m en as dirty, vio len t an d inferfoK U k e K ipling he showed an early predilection for a life o f the m in d ; like K ipling, he felt handicapped in a school organized aro u n d conflicting ~l J ideas o f asceticism, sexual (especially homosexual) puritanism , \ h a rd work, sportsm anship a n d hyper-m asculinity.81 Like K ip ­ ling again, O rw ell was a sensitive, seclusive boy an d for th a tH very reason u n p o p u lar in his school an d subject to bullying. B ut the end-results o f these experiences w ere very different for O rw ell. T h e am bivalence tow ards maleness in his early en­ vironm ent deterred him from opting for the reigning cu ltu re o f hyper-m asculinity. H e rem ained in essence an opponent o f the 1 , p atriarch al w orld view. " _J Secondly, young~O rw ell, according to O rw ell the au to ­ biographer, learn t early in his life th a t he was ‘in a w orld w here , it was not possible for him to be good’; th a t is, ‘in a w orld . . . .w here the rules w ere such th a t it was actually n o t possible . . . p keep th em .’62 T his p robably included th e specific lesson th a t theT nability to be good applied especially to th e weak. A ll this can be explained aw ay as a ‘screen m em ory’, as Crick seems to do, b u t it could be also read as a belief rooted in experience. O rw ell was a bed-w etter, and h ad to learn to live w ith h um ilia­ tio n an d corporal punishm ent in school for his ‘crim e’. V ictorian m orality tau g h t him to recognize bed-w etting as wicked, b u t *° Bernard Crick, George Orwell, A Life (Boston: LitUe, Brown, 1980), especially Chapters i and a. It is not clear why Crick stresses this point because Orwell does admit it (pp. 344, 347). 11 George Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, in Collected Essays, vol. 4, pp. 33069, see particularly pp. 351- 3, 359.

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the wickedness was outside his control. ‘Sin was n o t necessarily som ething th a t you d id ; it m ight be som ething th a t h appened to you.’68 T h ird , it was in school th a t O rw ell h ad th e first in tim atio n of a principle w hich took him , by his ow n adm ission, an o th er tw enty years to realize: ‘the w eak in a w orld governed by the strong’ m ust ‘break th e rules, or perish.’ T h e w eak, he was to claim , h ad ‘the rig h t to m ake a different set o f rules for th em ­ selves.’64 Unless they h ad the ‘instinct to survive’, they h ad to accept the w orld in w hich ‘there w ere the strong, who deserved to win, an d there w ere the w eak w ho deserved to lose an d always did lose, everlastingly.’66 Strange though it m ay sound, O rw ell _could_have b een, given the /right* values^ one o fjC ip lin g ’s h e r o e s . H p h ad the rig h t a p p ro ack -ie-ih e ‘«atiyes’ as well as to the English low er classes^ deep em p ath y w ithout to tal identificationT'a sense o f m oral responsibility^ arid an unencum bered spirit o f the kind w hich enabled one to do th e d irty w ork o f one’s tim e. B ut O rw ell p u t this app ro ach to a different use. H e becam e a critic o f the dom inant, m iddle-plass-r.nttn r e o f mmfcrn Rritnjn had found in im perialism its final fulfilm ent. T h e th ird form o f in tern al response to colonialism protected the m ore fem inine aspects o f the British self through ‘psychopathological’— a n d ‘crim inal’— modes o f self-expression in a few confined geographical an d psychological spaces such as O xbridge and Bloom sbury a n d in persons in conflict ab o u t their sexual identities an d seeking to m ake an in d irect icTeological issue o ut o f the conflicts. A lm ost all these persons were unaw are th a t th eir in n er drives were a jo in t political statem ent as well as the elem ents o f a com m on priv ate conflict. N everthe­ less, their personal lives an d the am bience o f their interpersonal relationships set a p a rt such non-political figures as O scar W ilde ( 1854- 1900), G. E. M oore ( 1873- 1958), J o h n M ay n ard K eynes ( 1883- 1946), L ytton Strachey ( 1880- 1932), V irginia W oolf ( 1882- 1941), Som erset M au g h am ( 1874- 1965), E. M . Forste? “ Ibid., p. 334.

M Ibid., pp. 362- 3.

•* Ibid., pp. 359, 361.

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( 1879- 1970) an d W . H . ^ u d e n ( 1907- 73) as living protests against the w orld view assocjatecbwith colonialism. Psychoanalyst L aw rence \tCubj&4ias explored in some d etail th e search for bisexuality th a t characterized gifted individuals like V irg in ia W oolf an d the an guish th a t was associated w ith _ th a ts e a rc h .68 T his anguish was sharpened in a cu ltu ral context th a t was trying to disown its ow n recessive traditions o f an ­ drogyny an d the psychological correlates o f the biological fact o f h u m an bisexuality.67 ‘T he ideology o f higher sodom y’, aestheticism an d neo-H ellenism to w hich m any creative p er­ sons subscribed in nineteenth an d tw entieth century B ritain can n o t be explained w ithout reference to the w ay British society h a d devalued fem ininity as low-status, contam inating an d an ti- 1 social, an d rejected the presence o f fem ininity in m an as virtually the negation o f all hum anness. W h at the c o lo n ia l cu ltu re was doing in In d ia by stressing the antonym y betw een purusatva an d klibatva h ad its collateral in th e struggle to fu rth er consolidate th e dom inance o f the principle o f hyper-m asculinity in B ritain. C olonialism only helped m arginalize, using the p o p u lar British sexual stereotypes, the strands o f consciousness in'B ritain protesting against this a n tonym y. L et me give the exam ple o f a rem arkably creative person who was ap p aren tly far rem oved from the w orld o f B ritish-Indian politics, O scar W ilde. R ich ard E llm ann’s recent essay on W ilde’s life a t once reveals the extent to w hich W ilde’s sexuality was a cu ltu ral phenom enon an d a statem ent o f p rotest.*8 T h e M arquess o f Q ueensberry, the vindictive father o f W ilde’s lover •• Lawrence Kubie, ‘The Drive to Become Both Sexes’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1974. 43(3). PP- 349-426. 47 See also the autobiography of Noel Coward, Future Indefinite (London: Heinemann, 1954), for a flavour of how wit and pleasantness was often used to hide the pain and loneliness of sexual deviation within the mould of social acceptability and popularity. For a discussion of ‘the structure of feeling’ which interlinked critiques of existing man-woman relationship, attempts to relate to lower classes, and* imperialism and anti-militarism, see Raymond Williams, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’, Problems in Materialism and Culture, pp. 148- 69. Williams also provides a vague clue to the nature of the relationship between depth psychology and the Bloomsbury syndrome. •• Richard Ellmann, ‘A Late Victorian Love Affair’, New York Review of Books, »977» ^ ( ^ » P P - 6- 10.

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Bossie (L ord A lfred Douglas) was n o t m erely a flat-footed con­ servative, b u t a culturally typical counterplayer to W ilde’s atypical sexual identity. Both W ilde a n d his lover saw them ­ selves as the negation o f the staid M arquess w ho sought co n stan t endorsem ent o f n o t only his b u t his cu ltu re’s m asculine self. As the inventor o f the Q ueensberry rules o f com petitive boxing, it is this endorsem ent w hich th e M arquess sym bolically sought by defining an d dem anding rule-bound violence an d conform ity to th a t u ltim ate virtue o f aggressive British m as­ culinity, sportsm anship.*9 A nd this is th e endorsem ent W ilde tried to deny him . W ilde’s younger son, V yvyan H olland, was to la te r w rite th a t W ilde h a d a ‘h o rro r o f conventionality’ an d th a t this con trib u ted to his destruction by his society.70 H e failed to recognize th a t im perialism was based on the pathology o f existing conventionality an d com m onsense; it sought its legitim acy by selling the id ea o f a m oral civilization based on »these two elem ents o f British folk culture. By defying conven­ tionality— p articularly stereotyped definitions o f sexual norm s — W ilde threatened, how ever indirectly, a basic postulate o f the colonial a ttitu d e in B ritain. I t is well know n th a t W ilde’s hom osexuality w ould have beén ‘forgiven’ h a d he been m ore d iscreet a b o u t it; h a d he, for ' instance, n o t in stitu ted crim inal proceedings against the M a r­ quess. V ictorian E ngland was w illing to tolerate W ilde’s sexual id en tity as long as it was accepted as a p a rt o f th e life style o f a m arginal sect a n d n o t openly flaunted. B ut by dem onstratively using his hom osexuality as a cultural "Ideology, W ilde th reaten ed to sabotage his com m unity’s dom i­ n a n t self-image as a com m unity o f well-defined m en, w ith - clear-cut m an -w o m an relationships. W h a t the élite culture o f E ngland could n o t tolerate was his b la ta n t deviation from rigidly defined sexual roles in a society w hich, unknow n to th e hyper-aesthete W ilde, was w orking o u t th e political •• Geoffrey Gorer, ‘The British National Character in the Twentieth Century’, The ArmaUof the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, no. 370, March 1967, pp. 74- 81, see especially pp. 77- 8 . 79 Quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 136.

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m eanings o f these definitions in a colony thousands o f miles aw ay. O scar W ilde ‘childishly* defied respectability in y et an o th er sphere. By stressing this p a rt o f W ilde’s ideology, EUm ann, an literary critic, allows m e to conceptualize th e essentially ap o li-/ tical W ilde as a n unself-aw are, b u t m ore o r less com plete, critic o f th e political cu ltu re w hich sired colonialism .71 W ilde^ rejected M atth ew A rnold’s d ictu m : ‘T h e aim o f criticism is to see th e object as in itself it really is.’ T o him th e aim o f criticism was to see the object as i t really was not. T his m ay be seen as th e oth er side o f th e old m axim , a r t for a rt’s sake, b u t it could also be read , as E llm ann him self says, as a n earlier version o f Picasso’s fa ith : a r t is ‘w h a t n a tu re is n o t’. I n th a t form it bernm#* an ear|y rritirp ir n f nvpr-snrialiy^ j thinking, o f th e k in c b ^ la te r ventured by T h eo d o r A dorno a n d H e rb e rt M arcuse. Th** qflLw hich d e fies th e e xiste n t is th e a r t w hich is subversivej it ‘underm ines things as they are~’-T hus, W ilde’s ad m iratio n for historians w ho defy history: He celebrates those historians who impose dominion upon fact instead of surrendering to it. Later he was to say much more boldly, ‘The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.’ It is part of his larger con­ ception that the one duty (or better, whim) we owe nature, reality, or the world, is to reconstruct it.71 W ilde, everything said, was a m arginal m an. H is philosophy o f life, too, was p erip h eral to his society. N eith er his sexual deviance nor his critiques o f everyday life a n d history m ade sense to th e m ainstream cu ltu re o f B ritain. A ppropriately, the characters he created for his plays a n d stories w ere parentless.7* T h ey were n o t b u rd en ed by close au th o rity an d thus by any passionate conflict w ith such authority. T h e h u m o u r these characters produced arose o u t o f d istan t defiance ra th e r th a n proxim ate rebellion. P erh aps i t is now tim e for us to tu rn -to / criticism s o f W estern cu ltu re w hich defied conventional mgs- ! CTilinity a n d n o rm al h isto ry as p arts of a m ore articulate,! '' " “" Richard Ellmann, 'The Critic as Artist as Wilde', Encounter, July 1967, PP- 39-37Tt Ibid., pp. 30- 1. w Ibid., p. 30.

5

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The Intim ate Enemy

culturally legitim ate, ideology. I n o th e r w ords, I shall now discuss a m ode o f dissent w hich h a d parents. Qh arles F reer A ndrew s^ revered in In d ia a n d forgotten in E ngland, was born in to a n in h eritan ce o f religion a n d n o n ­ conform ity.74 Like O rw ell, he was his m o th er’s favourite and, like both K ip lin g and O rw ell, his relationship w ith his father, a m inister o f the C atholic A postolic C hurch, was distant. A ndrew s’ childhood was deeply influenced by religious m yths a n d im ageries, and he was also exposed to m ore th a n th e norm al q u o ta o f classical literatu re. H e was later to describe his early hom e life as ‘a kind o f backw ater into w hich th e c u rre n t o f m odern th o u g h t has n o t been allow ed to e n te r.’76 A gain like K ipling and O rw ell, he was m iserable in his school, p a rtly because o f the b u rd en o f his studies, b u t m ore so because, as a delicate, over-protected boy he was surrounded by older, bigger a n d ‘coarser’ boys whose object o f hom osexual atten tio n he becam e. A ndrew s’ response to th em was n o t perhaps entirely passive an d , throughout his life, he was to rem em ber these experiences as ‘an evil form o f im p u rity ’ in him . H u g h T in k er, certainly n o t a n overly psychological biographer, describes the consequences as follows: Charlie was never to have a girl friend, and the enormity of this ‘im­ purity’ was to be buried deep in his psyche. Perhaps it was at school that he subconsciously turned, or was turned away from the possibility of the physical love of a woman. For some years there was an emo­ tional struggle at school, and though as he grew older he mastered the situation, the sense of guilt remained.76 I

A ndrew s m ay not have been easy w ith conventional hetero­ sexuality b u t in spite o f all his neurasthenia an d nervous activism , he was always easy w ith children. W h eth er it was this com bination th a t helped him see through the colonial ideology or not, he was to becom e th e one person who, to m any o f his friends, ‘was an In d ia n a t h eart, a t the sam e tim e 74 Hugh Tinker, The Ordeal of Love: C. F. Andrews and India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 1. 7* Ibid., p. 5. 7» Ibid., p. 4.

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a true E nglishm an.’ 77 I t is thus th a t he bridged the classical universajigra_j3f R a b in d ra n a th -T a g o re -a n d the folk-based, critical traditionalism o f G andhi. H e saw b o th as valid a lte m a tivw to the m udcrfiism'whicH Inform ed colonial ideology and, tho u g h he p robably found T agore easier to u n d erstan d , he based his critique o f British colonialism , following G andhi, on critical C hristian ethics. (H e w ould have certainly rejected the apolitical, non-critical traditionalism o f som e contem porary C h ristian missionaries, as he w ould have rejected its m ore im ­ pressive an d touching version in som eone like M other T eresa today. H e w ould have considered such anti-politics unaccept­ ab le.78) Predictably, w hen in In d ia , A ndrew s adopted m any In d ia n a n d specifically H in d u social custom s— in dress, food a n d social relations— b u t he also took care to see th a t nobody mistook h im for a lapsed C hristian. H e even took pains d u rin g his last years to ensure a proper C hristian b u rial for himself. E vidently, he owed his social an d political activism n o t m erely to his In d ian ized self, b u t also to his non-m odem W estern trad itio n s. I t is a com m ent on m odern theories o f dissent th a t th e W esterner w ho perhaps cam e closest to the In d ia n cause in tw o h u n d red years o f B ritish colonial history o perated on the basis o f religious traditions, n o t o n th a t o f a secular ideology. I n a m om ent o f terrible defeatism V ivekananda h a d said th a t the salvation o f th e H indus lay in th ree Bs: beef, biceps a n d B hagvad-G ita. T h e nationalist-chem ist P. C. R ay, too, allegedly expressed sim ilar sentim ents once. A ndrews, if he h a d com e across such proposals, w ould have found them painful. H e recognized the nexus betw een capitalism , im perialism an d C hristianity, in spite o f his lim ited in tellectual repertoire an d his sim ple theology.7* N evertheless, his C hristianity dem anded 77 M. K. Gandhi, quoted in Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phan (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1958), vol. 3 , p. 100. 7* This I say in spite of his liking for Albert Schweitzer (Tinker, The Ordeal of Love, p. 206) whose subtle moral and cultural arrogance the simple Andrews was unlikely to notice. T* G. F. Andrews, Christ and Labour (London: Student Christian Movement, 1923); and What I Owe to Christ (London: Hodder Stoughton, 1932).

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from th e H in d u s n o t a m asculine C hristianity m asquerading as H in d u nationalism . H is C hristianity sought to au th en ticate G an d h i’s faith, en u m erated in his sixteen-point th e m , th a t the E ast a n d W est could— an d d id— m eet outside th e bounds o f m o d ern ity .80 I t was m o d em B ritain A ndrew s disow ned, n o t the tra d itio n a l W est. W heh 'G andhi d escrib ed him as a n In d ia n aT h e a rt a n d a tru e E nglishm an, it rem ained u n stated th a t it was V ' - b y being a tru e E nglishm an th a t A ndrew s becam e an In d ia n . M y acco u n t Of th e responses to c o lo n i a li s m in B r i t a i n — I find a fte rh a v in g w ritten it—-differs from m y account o f th c In d ia n responses in one respect. In~tKe c a s e o f t h e l n d i a n s l seem to have stressed texts an d m y th s: for th e W esterners, p ersons. I s r r tre n ta l ? Q r ic thia_an unw illing acknow ledgem ent o f th e jjffie re n t ways in w hich cultures can b e described? A rc some cultures p rim arily organized a ro u n d historical tim e in tersecting w ith life-histories, a n d others aro u n d the timeless tim e o f m yths a n d texts? O n e o f the following sections m ay provide a p a rtia l answ er to these questions. 1

VI T h e m ost creative response to th e perversion o f W estern cul­ t ure, how ever, ~ cam ep 35~~it~ m ust, fro m its victim s. It~ w as co lo n iarT n d ia, still preserving som ething o f its androgynous cosm ology a n d style, w hich ultim ately produced a tran scu ltu ral protest against th e hyper-m asculine w orld view o f colonialism , in th e form of(GanciRl> G a n d h i’s au th en ticity as a n In d ia n should n o t blind usT o'the w ay his idiom c u t across th e cu ltu ral barriers betw een B ritain a n d In d ia, a n d C h ristian ity a n d H induism . A lbeit a non-W estem er, G an d h i alw ays tried to be a living sym bol o f th ? o th er W est. N o t only d id he sense a n d *use’ th e fu n d am en tal pred icam en t o f British cu ltu re c au g h t in th e hinges o f im perial responsibility a n d subjecthood in victory, b u t he im plicitly defined his u ltim ate goal as th e liberatipn-ef*

Gandhi, quoted in T. K. M iludevtn, Dvija (New Delhi: Eut-West Affiliated Pro*. *977 )» PP- 1x8-19.

The Psychology o f Colonialism

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the British from th e history an d psychology o f B ritish colonialisnT T h e m oral and cu ltu ral superiority ~oT~ihe opftrcsscd w a s n o t a n em pty slogan4o4um .__ T h a t is w hy G an d h i’s spirited search for th e o th er cu ltu re o f Britain, a n d o f th e W est, was a n essential p a rt o f his th eo ry , o f salvation for In d ia. I t is tru e th a t ‘G andhi was a living antithesis set-up-against th e thesis o f the English*,81 b u t t h a t ) (antithesis was laten t in m e fTn^Iish^looNAll th ro u g h his a d u lt­ hood, G andhi’s closest friend was an English cleric devoted n o t only to the cause o f In d ia n freedom b u t also to a softer version o f C hristianity. C. F. A ndrew s was to G andhi w h at T hom as M an n had been to Sigm und F re u d : an affirm ation o f th e m arginalized reflective strain th a t m ust underlie— or, to pro­ tect one’s ow n sanity a n d h u m anity, m ust be presum ed to underlie— every ‘homogeneous* cu ltu re th a t goes rab id . (T h a t this m ay n o t be reduced to a m erely m oral posture in cir­ cumstances in w hich shared m adness establishes its dom ination over history is best show n by G ene S harpe’s description o f a successful peaceful resistance against the N azi state in w artim e Berlin.8*) Sim ilarly, G an d h i’s p artiality for some o f th e C hris­ tian hymns an d Biblical texts was m ore th a n th e sym bolic gesture of a H in d u tow ards a m inority religion in In d ia . I t was also an affirm ation th a t, a t one plane, some o f th e „recessive elements o f C hristianity w ere p erfectly congruent w ith elem ents o f H indu an d B uddhist w orld views a nd th a t the b a ttle he was fighting lor th e m inds ot m en was actually a universal b a ttle to \ rediscover th e softer side o f h u m an n ature, the so-called non­ masculine self o f m an relegated .to th e forgotten zones o f the W estern self-concept. W hat was th e constituency he was appealing to ? W as it only a lunatic fringe o r a n ineffective m inority? I suspect th a t th ere was in G andhi n o t only a sophisticated ethical sensitivity b u t also political a n d psychological shrewdness. H ere is, for in" Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (New York: Delta, 197a), p. 112. u Gene Sharpe, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, vol. 1 (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973), PP. 87- 90.

5°

The Intim ate Enemy

stance, a description o f an aspect o f British n atio n al c h aracter w hich the reader, if b ro u g h t u p o n ideas o f In d ia n a n d p a rti­ cularly G an d h ian pacifism an d W estern aggressiveness, m ight find interesting: W ith the exception of the anomalous members of the lower working class (who never came to the colonies in large numbers), the English are preoccupied with the control nLtktur-^wn aggression^the avoid­ ance of aggression from others, and the prevention of the emergence of aggressive behaviour in th e jrc h ild re n . . . In the English middle anH'upper’cIasses this control o f aggression would appear to have been a major component in their character for several centuries. In the context of games thjs control of aggression is callfttr^portsmansKiy»». a concept which the English introduced into much of the rest of the world. One aspect o f‘sportsmanship’ is controlling physical aggression by ru les.. . . The other jispect of ‘sportsmanship’ is the acceptance-of the outcome unaggressively, neither taunting the vanquished nor showing resenfmenFa^ainsrTKe victor. This concept of ‘sportsman­ ship* has long been metaphorically extended from games to almost al^situations of rivalry or competition; the reputation of being ^gboch) v sport’ls one that is very highly valued by the majority of the Englislr®^ A gainst this observation I w a n t to offset the view o f N ira d G. C hau d h u ri, a n in tern al critic o f th e In d ie civilization, even though he w ould be rejected out-of-hand by m any as hope­ lessly an ti-In d ia n an d as a lobbyist for th e W est in the East. The current belief is that the Hindus are a peace-loving and non­ violent people, and this belief has been fortified by Gandhism. In reality few communities have been more warlike and fond of blood­ shed. . . . About twenty-five words in an inscription of Asoka have succeeded in almost wholly suppressing the thousands in the rest of the epigraphy and the whole of Sanskrit literature which bear testimony to the incorrigible militarism of the Hindus. Their political history is made up of bloodstained pages.. . . Between this unneces­ sary proclamation of non-violence in the third century B .C . and its reassertion, largely futile, in the twentieth century by M ahatm a Gandhi, there is not one word of non-violence in the theory and practice of statecraft by the Hindus.84 “ Goref, ‘The British National Character, p. 77. “ Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), pp. 98- 9. A number of social scientists, too, have noticed that the aggressive needs repeatedly top the list among needs projected in projective, particularly thematic, tests and many of them have identified aggression as the

The Psychology o f Colonialism

51

M ine is n o t an a tte m p t to substitute the existing stereotypes o f the British ru ler an d In d ian su b ie c tw ith the help o f two p artisan observers. W h at I am saying ls^tha t G an d h i’s n o n ­ violence was p robably n o t a a n fcsided m o rality p ]ay was it. purely a m a tte r o f h u m an e H indus versus th e in h u m an Britons. T h e shrew d B ania, a p ractical idealist, h ad correctly seen th a t, a t some levels o f n atio n al consciousness in B ritain, there was near-perfect legitim acy for the political m ethodology he was forging. O n the o th er hand, he knew well th a t he w ould have to fight h a rd in In d ia to establish His version o f n o n ­ violence as ‘tru e ’ H induism or as the central core o f H induism . A fter all, G an d h i him self said th a t he h ad borrow ed his id e a o f non-violence n o t from the sacred texts o f In d ia b u t from th e Serm on on th e M ount. In the 150 years o f British rule p riorto G andhi, no significant social reform er o r political leader h a d tried to give centrality to non-violence as a m ajor H in d u o r In d ia n virtu e. T h e closest anyone cam e to it was R am m o h u n R oy w ith his concept o f daya o r m ercy. M any years before G andhi, Sw am i V ivekananda h a d sarcastically said th a t th e British had,- following th e ‘real’ injunctions o f the classical In d ian texts, excelled in th eir this-worldly, hedonic, m anly p u r­ suits, while th e Indians, foolishly following the ‘tru e’ injunctions o f C hristianity, h a d becom e their passive, life-denying, fem inine subjects.86 I t is n o t relevant w hether V ivekananda’s read in g o f C hristianity a n d H induism was right. T h e im p o rtan t p o in t is t h a t G andhi m ade a different use o f th e sam e aw areness. I t was in this sense t h a t G an d h i w anted to liberate th e ^ British as m uch as he w an ted to liberate Indians. T h e p a n ic k y ,^ self-im posed~captivity”ol th e d o m inant o r ruling groups in their~setfmiade^oppressive systems, for th e sake o f v a lu e sw hich C haim S h atan has recently caTlecTbogus honour a nd Indian’s major conflict area. For details see Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar, ‘Culture and Personality’, in Udai Pareekh (ed.), Research in Psychology (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1980), pp. 136-67. ** Vivekananda, PrStya 0 P&icitya (Almora: Advaita Ashrama, 1898).This aspect of Vivekananda comes out also from Sudhir Kakar’s interpretation of Vivekananda in The Inner World: Childhood and Society in India (New Delhi: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1977), pp. 160-81.

52

The Intim ate Enemy

m anliness, is som ething w hich he never failed to notice or A s ? ------------------------T o p u t this aw areness to political use, he challenged first the ideology o f biological stratification acting as a hom ologue of — an d legitim acy for— political in equality an d injustice. As already noted, the colonial cu ltu re’s ordering o f sexual id en ti­ ties assum ed th a t

Purusatva > Naritva > Klibatva T h a t is, m anliness is superior to w om anliness, an d womanliness in tu rn to fem ininity in m an. I have also pointed o ut th a t the first In d ia n response to this was to accept the o rdering by giving a new salience to K satriyahood as tru e Indianness. T o b eat the colonizers a t th eir ow n gam e an d to regain self-esteem as Indians an d as H indus, m any sensitive m inds in In d ia did w hat the adolescent G an d h i a t the ontogenetic level h ad tried to do sym bolically w ith the help o f a M uslim frie n d :87 they_sought a hyper-m asculinity o r hyper-K satriyahood_jhat w ould m ake sense J o their feliow -eountrym enTspecially to those exposed to L- the m ajesty o f the R aj) a n d to th e colonizers. B ut in an unorganized plural society, w ith a trad itio n o f only parochial, n o t absolute, legitim acy for w arriorhood, such D i­ onysian gam es w ith th e colonizers w ere doom ed. T his is w h at the Bengali, P an jab i an d M ah arash trian terrorists found o u t to their ow n cost d u rin g the early p a rt o f this century. T hey h ad isolated themselves from the society even m ore th a n the British w hen J ja n d h i entered In d ia n politics in the nineteen-tw enties. G a n d h i’s solution was different. H e used two orderings, each of w hich could be-invoked according to th e needs o f th e situatio n . T h e first, borrow ed in tact from the g reat and little tra d i­ tions o f saintliness in In d ia , a n d also probably from the doctrine •• Chaim F. Shatan, ‘Bogus Manhood and Bogus Honor: Surrender and Transfiguration in the United States Marine Corps’, Psychoanalytic Review, 1977, 64(4). PP- 585- 610. •7 On the young Gandhi’s attempt to work out or pursue at the personal level the macho model to its logical absurdity see the sensitive account of Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins 0/ Militant Non-Violence (New York: Norton,

1969)-

The Psychology o f Colonialism

53

o f pow er th ro u g h divine bi-unity in some of th e vdmdchdri or left-handed sects, was as follows: . . Purusatva A ndrogyny > T h a t is^m anliness an d w om anliness are /¿qual, b u t th e ability to transcend the m an -w o m an dichotom y is superior to b o th, being an in d icato r o f godly an d saintly qualities. T o do this G an d h i h ad to ignore the trad itio n al devaluation o f some forms o f androgyny in his culture. G an d h i’s second ordering was invoked specifically as a m e­ thodological justification for the anti-im perialist m ovem ent, first in South A frica an d th en in In d ia. I t w ent as follows:

Ndritva > Purusatva > Kapurusatva That, is, th e essence o f fem ininity is superior to thaL ofjnasculinity. w hich in tu rn is b e tte r th a n cow ardice or. as th e-Sanskrit ex p ressio n w o u ld Have it, failure o f m asculinity. T hough the o rd e rin g ls not inconsistent w ith some Interpretations o f In d ian traditions, w hen stated in such a fashion it acquires a new play. T his is because the first relationship (ndritva > purusatva) often applies m ore directly to the transcendental an d the m agical, w hereas the second relationship (purusatva > kapurusatva) is a m ore general, everyday principle. Perhaps the conjunction of th e tw o sets makes available the m agical pow er o f the fem inine principle o f the cosmos to the m an who chooses to defy his cow ardice by ow ning to his fem inine self. T h ere are a few im plied m eanings in these relationships. T hese m eanings were culturally defined and, therefore, ‘as­ su m ed ’ by G andhi, b u t could be missed by an outside observer. First, the concept o f ndritva, so repeatedly stressed by G andhi nearly fifty years before the w om an’s liberation m ovem ent began, represented m ore th a n the dom inant W estern definition o f w om anhooctr T t included some traditional meanings of womanhood m In d ia, such as the belief in a closer conjunction between gow erT activism a n d femininity than^Between p O W e r , ^ a c t i v i s m and m asculinity. I t also implied the belief that the fem inine principle is a m ore pow erful, dangerous a n d uncontrol-

52

The Intim ate Enemy

manliness, is som ething w hich he never failed to notice o r "T o p u t this awareness to political use, he challenged first the ideology o f biological stratification actin g as a hom ologue o f — a n d legitim acy for— political in eq u ality an d injustice. As alread y noted, the colonial cu ltu re’s ordering o f sexual id en ti­ ties assum ed th a t

Purusatva > Ndritva

>

Klibatva

T h a t is, manliness is superior to w om anliness, and womanliness in tu rn to fem ininity in m an. I have also pointed o u t th a t the first In d ia n response to this was to accept the ordering by giving a new salience to K satriyahood as tru e Indianness. T o b eat the colonizers a t their own gam e an d to regain self-esteem as In d ian s an d as H indus, m any sensitive m inds in In d ia did w hat th e adolescent G andhi a t the ontogenetic level h ad tried to do sym bolically w ith the help o f a M uslim friend :87 th ey sought a hyper-m asculinity o r hyper-K satrivahood th a t-w o u ld m ake sense to th e ir fellow-countrymen (specially to those exposed to L th e m ajesty of the R a il a n d to th e colonizers. B ut in an unorganized p lural society, w ith a trad itio n o f only parochial, n o t absolute, legitim acy for w arriorhood, such D i­ onysian gam es w ith the colonizers w ere doom ed. T his is w hat the B engali,T anjabi a n d M a h a ra s h tria n terrorists found o u t to th e ir ow n cost during the early p a rt o f this century. T hey had isolated themselves from the society even m ore th a n the British w henjG andhi entered In d ia n politics in the nineteen-tw enties. G a n d h i’s solution was different. H e used two orderings, each o f w hich could be in v o k e a a c c o rd ing to the needs o f the situation. T h e first, borrow ed in ta c t from th e g reat and little tra d i­ tions o f saintliness in In d ia, an d also probably from the doctrine ** Chaim F. Shatan, ‘Bogus Manhood and Bogus Honor: Surrender and Transfiguration in the United States Marine Corps’, Psychoanalytic Review, 1977, 64(4)» PP- 585- 610. •7 On the young Gandhi’s attempt to work out or pursue at the personal level the macho model to its logical absurdity see the sensitive account of Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Militant Non-Violence (New York: Norton,

>969)-

The Psychology o f Colonialism

53

ofjx>w er th ro u g h divine bi-unity in some o f th e odmdehdri or left-han3 ed sects, was as follows:

T h a t iv m a n lin e ss a n d wom anliness are /¿qua). 4 , b u t th e ability superior to both . being a n in d icato r o f godly a n d saintly qualities. T o do this G an d h i h a d to ignore the trad itio n al devaluation o f some forms o f androgyny in his culture. G an d h i’s second ordering was invoked specifically as a m e­ thodological justification for th e anti-im perialist m ovem ent, first in South A frica an d th en in In d ia . I t w ent as follows:

Ndritva > Purufatva > Kapurufatva T h a t is, th e essence o f fem ininity is superior to th a t o f m asculi­ nity,. which in tu rn is b etter th a n cow ardice or, as th ^ -Sanskrit expressio n w o u ld lia v e it, failure o fm a sc u lin ity . T h o u g h th e o rd erin g is n o t inconsistent w ith some in terp retatio n s o f In d ia n traditions, w hen stated in such a fashion it acquires a new play. T his is because th e first relationship (naritva > purufatva) often applies m ore directly to th e transcendental an d th e m agical, w hereas th e second relationship (Jninifatva > kdpurujatva) is a m ore general, everyday principle. P erhaps th e conjunction of th e tw o sets m akes available th e m agical pow er o f th e fem inine principle o f th e cosmos to th e m an w ho chooses to defy his cow ardice by ow ning to his fem inine self. T h ere are a few im plied m eanings in these relationships. T hese m eanings were culturally defined an d , therefore, ‘as­ sum ed’ by G andhi, b u t could be missed by an outside observer. F irst, th e concept o f naritva, so repeatedly stressed by G andhi nearly fifty years before the w om an’s lib eratio n m ovem ent began, represented m ore th a n th e d o m in an t W estern definition o f w om anhood. I t in c fu d e d ^ o m e /tra d itio n a l m eanings o f w om anhood in In d ia, such as th e b e lie ftir a'ciosef-ccttfttiiction betweeii^BQwer, activism a n d fem ininity-^han^BeTWeen pow er, -activism and m asculinity. I t also impliecT'ilTfrirettef tKat the fem inine principle is a m ore pow erful, dangerous a n d u ncontrol­

54

The Intimate Enemy

lable principle in the cosmos th a n the m ale principle. B ut even m ore central to this concept o f w om anhood was th e trad itio n al In d ia n belief in th e p rim acy o f m aternity over conjugality In in e id e n tity . T his belief specified th a t w om an as an object an d source o f sexuality was inferior to w om an as source o f m otherliness an d caritas. G an d h i’s fear o f h u m an sexuality, w hatever its psychodynam ic explanation in G an d h i’s personal history, was perfectly consistent w ith this reading o f In d ia n culture. S^cond^w hile the d o m in an t principle in G an d h ian praxis isyiolence or avoidable violence, an im plicit subsidiary principleis~w K at K . J . S hah cal(i unavoidable violence. T h e -principle o f non-violence gives m en access~to~protcCuve m ater­ nity a n d by im plication, to the godliFe state o f arllfiandriSvara, a god half-m an, hail-w om an. B ut given the cu ltu ral m eaning ’of^antoaTTnjii-violence also "gives m en access to the powerful, active, m atern al principle o f the cosmos, m agically protective a n d carrying the intim ations o f an oceanic an d u to p ian b eati­ tude. A long the sam e continuum , courage— w h at Lloyd and Susanne R u d o lp h call G an d h i’s new courage88— allows one to rise above cow ardice or kapurusatva a n d becam e a ‘m a n ’, on th e w ay to becom ing the au th en tic m an w ho adm its his drive to becom e both sexes. T his courage is not definitionally wedded to violence as in K satriyahood, b u t it m ay involve u nav jidable violence u n d er some circum stances, particu larly in circum ­ stances w here the alternative is passive tolerance o f injustice, inequality an d oppression— w illing victim hood an d acceptance o f the secondary gains o f victim hood— w hich are all seen as worse th a n violence. In sum , G an d h i was clear in his m ind th a t activism an d courage could be liberated from aggressiveness an d recognized as perfectly com patible w ith w om anhood, p articu larly m a te r­ nity. W h eth er this position fully negated the K satriy a world view or not, it certainly negated the very basis o f the colonial culture. T h e colonial cu ltu re depended heavily on W estern 88 Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), part 2.

The Psychology o f Colonialism

55

cosmology, w ith its built-in fears ab o u t losing potency th rough (i the loss of ac tivism and'O iF'atjiif ty to be violent. I h av eav o id ed 1 discussing here the- fantasies whicK lmderlTe these fears— fantasies o f rape an d counter-rape, seduction an d co u n ter­ seduction, castration an d counter-castration— w hich have ac­ com panied the W estern concept o f m anhood w henever W estern m an has gone beyond his narrow cu ltu ral borders to civilize, p opulate or self-improve. (T h e d epth o f this linkage betw een activism an d aggression in p arts o f the W estern w orld is evident from the fact th a t the W est’s m ajor ethnopsychology, F reudian psychoanalysis, locates the source o f all activism an d th e con­ cern w ith pow er in the in stin ctu al p atte rn in g qfaggression.) V II T he past in history varies w ith the present, rests upon the present, is the present. . . . There are not two worlds— the world o f past happenings and the world o f our present knowledge o f those past events— there is only one world, and it is a world o f present experience. M ichael Oakeshott**

G a n d h i’s reply to the colonial hom ology betw een childhood and political subjugation was indirect. He rejected history_and affirmed ih c jg rim acy of myths over historieat-chromcles. H e thereby the, unilinear pathw ay from primitivism to m odernity, and from political im m aturity to political adult­ hood, which the ideology of colonialism would have the subject society and the ‘child races’ w alk.90 This was his way of g rap p l­ ing with colonial racism, a racism at least one psychiatrist has diagnosed as ‘a historical ill, a disorder of the historical self’ *• Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1966), pp. 107-8 . Oakeshott’s classical conservatism is of course totally oblivious of the critical functions this orientation to history can be made to play. For an implicit awareness of those functions one might have to go back to a politically schizophrenic personality like Martin Heidegger in the modem Western tradition. *° As already noted, the equation between childhood and primitivism received powerful support from psychoanalytic ethnography. In Freud’s own lifetime, some of his followers were busy studying primitive cultures which supposedly displayed all the characteristics of childhood.

56

The Intim ate Enemy

w hich ‘reveals th e fullness o f th a t self even as it reveals its inadequacies’.#1 (T here was a direct com ponent in G an d h i’s defiance o f the ideology o f adulthood, b u t it was relatively trivial. N ot only d id every W esterner an d W esternized In d ia n w ho cam e in touch w ith G an d h i refer a t least once to his child’sLsmile, his adm irers an d d etracto rs d u tifblly Tound him childlike and childish respectively^ H is ‘infantile’ obstinacy anct'Tendency to tease, his ‘im m atu re’ attacks on th e m odern w orld an d its props, his ‘ju v en ile’ food fads an d symbols like th e s p i n n i n g wheel— all w ere view ed as planks o f a political platform w hich HefieH^rr»nvfntjr>n?1 iripas o f ad u lth ood.92 O n e C O uld offset these oddities a g a i n s t B runo B ettelheim ’s view th a t u n d er op­ pression, w hen survival is a t stake, there is regression to in ­ fantilism . A nd against Lionel T rillin g ’s observation, in the context o f In d ia, th a t ‘generations o f subjection can dim inish th e h a b it o f dignity an d teach grow n m en th e strategy o f the little c h i l d . ’83 A n e n t e r p r i s i n g p s y c h o a n a l y s t probably c o u l d even be persuaded to a r g u e th a t G an d h i’s style o f leadership was, in retrospect, a n a tu ra l corollary of th e cu ltu re o f oppres­ sion w ith w hich his people lived. F o r the m om ent, how ever, I shall stress^ th e o th er p a rt o f th e story w here a specific political position becam e in G a n d hi a p oin t o f convergence betw een im m ediate social r *»^g pH-apTivsiral defiance.) G an d h i’s position o n ^ s to r y was based o n th re e assumptions, tw o of them derived from the trad itio n al In d ia n orientations to tim e.94 T h e first o f these two was the salience given by MJoel Kovel, While Racism: A Psychohistory (London: Allen Lane, 1970), p. 232. MAshis Nandy, ‘From Outside the Imperium: Gandhi’s Cultural Critique of the “West” Alternatives, 1981, 7(2), pp. 171- 94. “ Bruno Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979); Lionel Trilling, ‘A Passage to India ( 1943)’, in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), E. M . Forster: A Passage to India (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 77- 92, especially p. 80. u For an excellent detailed analysis of the traditional Indian concept of time as it relates to authority and change, see Madhav Deshpande, ‘History, Change and Permanence: A Classical Indian Perspective*, in Gopal Krishna (ed.), Contribu­ tions to South Asian Studies, vol. 1 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. i-a 8.

57

The Psychology o f Colonialism

In d ian culture t a m v m as a stru ctu red fantasy w hich, in its d y n am ic o f T?TeTiere^and-tlfe-nowr represents w h a tin -g n o th er culture w ould be called the d y n amic o f history. I n oth er w ords, the diachronic relationships o f history are m irrored in the synchronic relationship o f m yths a n d are fully reproducible from th e la tte r if the rules o f transform ation are know n. Lin (G andhi, the specific o rientation to n w th becam e a m ore general orientation to public consciousness.} Public c o n sciousness was not seen as a causal pro d u ct o f history BuTas re la te d j& Jik to ry non^^causallythrough memories a n d anti-m em ories. I f for the W est the present was a special case of an urifbWing history, for G andhi as a representative o f tr a d itie n a ljn d ia history was a special case o f s ^ ^ i d n b r a c i h g ^ e r m a n e n t present, w aiting to be interp reted and~reirTTerpreted. (T h is U s b indirectly coped w ith the subsidiary homology betw een old age an d In d ia n civilization b u t, for the m om ent, I shall let th a t pass.) Even to the critics o f industrial capitalism in th e W est, history was a lin ear process som etim es w ith a n im plied cycle underlying it. M arx, for instance, following the Ju d aeo -C h ristian cosmology, conceived o f history som ew hat as follows: Prehistory proper -*■ Objective stage-► End of history (ahistorical bound history (class-less primitive (class struggle) adult communism) ; t communism, | ! based on False history as scientific a part of false history) consciousness (History as ideology) G andhi, how ever, was a p ro d u ct o f a society w hich ized the past, as a possible m eans o f reaffirm ing o r present: Past as a -*■ Fractured -*■ Remaking -*■ special present of present case of (competing including present pasts) past

conceptual­ altering the New Past

F ro m such a view point, t h e j j ast can be a n au th o rity b u t th e ’ n a tu re o f the a uthority is seen as shifting, am orphous a n d \ arn e^ b T e fo intervention. M ircea E liade pu ts it th u s : A

1 ^ ^ .9

58

The Intim ate Enemy

While a modem man, though regarding himself as the result of the course of universal history, does not feel obliged to know the whole of it, the man of the archaic societies is not only obliged to remember mythical history but also to re-enact a large part of it periodically. It is here that we find the greatest difference between the man of the archaic societies and modem m an: the irreversibility of events, which is the characteristic trait of History for the latter, is not a fact to the form er.. . .** T his is o f course a less colourful w ay o f p arap h rasin g T . S. E liot in Burnt Norton: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future is contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is [un] redeemable. Borrow ing from psychoanalysis, Ju rg e n H aberm as in an o th er context uses th e expression ‘future-oriented m em ories’ to de­ scribe th e m eans through w hich one breaks th e power, o f the past over the present.*® Some strands o f In d ia n cu ltu re w ould find this fully acceptable. B ut they w ould form ulate th e con­ sequences o f such a view differently. T h e In d ia n ’s past is always open, w hereas his future is so o n ly to ~ ihe~exte1it~th a t it is a rediscovery or renew al.97 F o rT re u d 7 as for M arx, ill h ealth follows from Tustory; health eith er from th e present o r from the future. T h e psychoanalyst, like th e M arxist historian, is an expert w ho anticipates the self’s capacity to bare, a n d live w ith, th e repressed o th er history w hich creates th e crucial disjunction betw een th e p ast an d the present. F o r ^ In d ian — the bhat, caran, or the kathakdr for instance— th ere can be no real disjunction betw een the past an d th e present. I f ill health follows from th e past, h ealth too follows from th e past. T h e id ea “ Mircca Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols, Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty (eds.) (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976), vol. 1, p. 5. MJurgen Habermas, ‘Moral Development and Ego Identity*, in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1979), pp. 69-94. *7 For a brief discussion of this attitude from a psychological point of view, see my Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity m Two Indian Scientists (New Delhi: Allied, 1980), Chapter 1.

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The Psychology o f Colonialism

o f ‘d eterm in atio n ’ could apply to the present or to the fu tu re ^ as the notorious In d ia n concept o f fatalism im plies; in the past the~e are always open choices. Past as present

i Determ ined future (Indian fatalism )

-*■ Fractured present

-*

Rem ade past

-► N ew past |

▼ A lternative determ ined future (new ‘fatalism ’)

W hile this position does n ot fully negate history an d in fact anticipates a n u m b er o f fashionable post-G andhian philoso­ phies o f history an d in terp retatio n s o f m yths as history, the G an d h ian position does m ake a^sabsidiary anti-historical as­ sum ption th a t, because they faithfully contain history, because they a re contem po rary an d , unlike history, are am enable to intervention, m yths are th e essence of a culture, history being a t best superttiw uslirK l~at-^brst misleading. G andhi implicitly ^ssum e 3T that history or itihâsa was one-way traffic, a set o f m yths ab o u t past tim e o r the atit, b u ilt u p as independent variables w hich lim it h u m an options an d pre-em pt h um an futures. M yths, on the o th er han d , allow one access to the processes w hich constitute history a t the level o f the here-andthe-now . Consciously acknow ledged as the core o f a culture, they w iden instead o f restricting h u m an choices. T hey allow one to rem em ber in an an ticip ato ry fashion and to concentrate on undoing aspects o f the present ra th e r th a n avenging the past. (M yths w iden h u m an choices also by resisting co-optation by the uniform izing w orld view o f m odern science. I n spite of recent attem p ts to show the rationality o f the savage m ind à la Lévi-Strauss, the savage m ind itself has rem ained on the whole unconcerned ab o u t its ow n rationality. Both the science o f m yth and the scientific status o f the m yth continue to be a predom i­ nantly m odern concern. In this sense, too, the affirm ation of ahistoricity is an affirm ation o f the dignity and autonom y of non-m odern peoples.) T he reverse o f the sam e logic, however, is th a t m yths can be analysed, traced or reduced to history as the do m in an t tradition

60

The Intim ate Enemy

o f W estern social analysis h ad tried to do th ro u g h o u t m o d em tim es. H istory here is seen as the reality, th e m yth being a flawed, irratio n al fairy tale produced by ‘unconscious’ history, m ean t for savages an d children. T h e core o f such a concept o f tim e— produced in the W est for th e first tim e after th e dem ise o f m edievalism — consists in the em phasis on causes ra th e r th a n on structures (on ‘w hy’ ra th e r th a n ‘w h at’), on progress an d evolution as opposed to self-realization-in-being, an d on the ratio n ality o f ad justm ent to historical reality (pragm atics) a n d o f change th ro u g h constant d ram atic action (rath e r th a n on th e ratio n ality o f a fundam entally critical a ttitu d e tow ards earlier in terp retatio n s an d change th ro u g h only critical in te r­ ventions an d new in terp retatio n s). F o r the m o d em W est, an d for those influenced by its concept o f tim e, history itself is a chronology o f good an d b a d actions a n d th eir causes, a n d every revolution is a disjunction in tim e w hich m ust be either pro­ tected against counter-revolutions o r reduced to th e statu re o f a false ‘com ing’ on the w ay to a real revolution. I T h e subsidiary assum ption o f th e second approach is th a t the cultures living by m yths are ahistorical an d thus, representa­ tiv e s o f a n earlier, second-rate social consciousness. H istorical societies are th e tru e representatives o f m atu re h u m an selfconsciousness an d , therefore, th eir constructions o f the ahistor­ ical societies are m ore valid scientifically th a n those o f these societies themselves. T h e la tte r m ust a c t o u t th eir ahistorical fates as understood by those w ho are historians to th e w orld. This-is_l h e p a ra digm o f th e ad u lt-c h ild relationship w hich was challenged in G an d h ian theory as weU as practice.®8 This •• It was at the level of practice that Gandhilntro3uceainto fndiariconcepts of childhood and child-rearing something analogous to the concept of original sin. It is a moot psychological point whether, without this distortion of the Indian tradition of childhood (see Sudhir Kakar’s ‘Childhood in India: Traditional Ideals and Contemporary Reality’, International Social Science Journal, 1979, 31(3)» pp. 444- 56), Gandhi personally could have given such a centrality to the concept o f sevi or service in the public sphere and to the idea of intervention in life situa­ tions for which there was very little place in the high cultures of India. Gandhi’s concept of seva was essentially reparative; it was bom of his own personal ex­ periences, which partly underwrote a Westem-style solution of his Oedipal conflicts. As a result, Gandhi built his concept of political and social work on an

The Psychology o f Colonialism was done in tw o w ays: by reaffirm ing th e language o f con­ tin u ity a n d by re-em phasizing th e language o f self. T h e language o f co n tin u ity took a dvantage o f th e deep am bivalence tow ards disjuncdo n jn the ideology o fm o d erru ly . t IM odernity seeks .to lo calc a ll ftru e’ CreativitA^ including creautive social action, in clear-cu t breaks with the past. Y etT para4pxicaliy, it strives h a rd to locate_each such break hririS tory^X ^ F o r instance, th e rhetoric o f revolution n o t only undervalues anything w hich is insufficiently disjunctive w ith the p ast; it positively disvalues reform ism as a h in d ran ce to revolution. A t th e sam e tim e, the effort o f every m odern history o f revolutions and, every revolutionary th o u g h t is to place all ‘tru e ’ o r ‘false’ revolutions in history. N o explanation of, or call for, a revolu-tion is com plete unless it has spelt o u t th e historical continuities w hich has o r could lead to a revolution o r w ould explain its career line. T h e language o f continuity re-legitim ized the under-em phasis on disjunction in the In d ia n w orld view. I t recognized th a t ex­ actly as the language o f revolution h id w ithin it th e message o f continuity, the language o f continuity too h ad a la te n t message o f disjunction. In d ia n cu ltu re em phasized continuities so m uch th a t even m ajor breaks w ith the p ast passed as m inor reforms, till th e full im plications o f th e break becam e evident after decades o r centuries, w hen th e m etaphors o f continuity an d perm anence could no longer hide th e fund am en tal changes th a t h ad already tak en place in th e culture. (T he B hakti m ovem ent is a reasonably good exam ple o f th e process being described.) I t therefore did n o t ultim ately m a tte r w hether one used the rhetoric o f disjunction o r o f continuity, as long as th e feel for th e im m ediacy o f suffering was m aintained a n d suffering was n ot reified th ro u g h a n o rn ate sophisticated intellectual packaging. T h e reaffirm ation o f th e language o f self could be briefly described as a p a rt o f an old dialectic. T h e m odern w orld view challenges th e trad itio n al faith th a t g reater self-realization un-Indian concept of a sinful childhood which could be atoned for in adulthood only through the feparative gesture of public service. See Erikson, Gandhi's Truth.

6

62

The Intim ate Enemy

leads to g re a te r un d erstan d in g o f th e not-self, including th e m aterial w orld. M odernity includes th e faith th a t th e m ore h u m an beings un d erstan d o r control th e ‘objective’ not-self, including th e not-self in th e self (the id, the b rain processes, social o r biological history), th e m ore they control a n d u n d er­ stand th e self (the ego, praxis, consciousness). A n o n -m o d em person, if using F reu d ian o r M arx ian categories, w ould argue th e o th er w ay ro u n d : th e m ore he understands his ego o r his praxis, he w ould say, th e m ore he understands th e universal p rim a ry processes o f th e id as well as th e universal dialectic o f history. I t is possible th a t th e n on-m odem civilizations h a d to some ex ten t exhausted th e critical o r creative possibilities o f this p rim acy given to self-realization w hen m odernity beg an to stress th e o th er side o f th e story. B ut m odernity in tu rn h a d over-corrected for the staleness o f th e older vision w hen critical traditionalists like T h o reau , Tolstoy a n d G an d h i began to re­ em phasize th e w orld views w hich, th ro u g h self-control a n d selfrealization, sought to un d erstan d a n d change th e w orld. I t was as a p a rt o f these tw o languages th a t G a n d h i broke o u t o f the determ inism o f history. H is concept o f a free In d ia , his solution to racial, caste an d inter-religious conflicts a n d his concept o f h u m an d ignity w ere rem arkably free from the constraints o f history. W hatever th eir o th er flaws, th ey gave societies th e o p tio n o f choosing th e ir futures here a n d now — w ith o u t heroes, w ith o u t high d ra m a a n d w ith o u t a constant search for originality, discontinuous changes an d final victories. T h ey w ere th e In d ia n version o f historians ‘w ho im pose dom i­ nion u p o n fact instead o f surrendering to it’.M I f th e p ast does n o t b in d social consciousness a n d th e fu tu re begins here, th e present is th e ‘historical’ m om ent, th e p erm an en t y e t shifting p o in t o f crisis a n d th e tim e for choice. O n e can eith er call i t a n O rien tal version o f the concept o f p erm an en t revolution or a p ractical extension o f the m ystical concept o f timeless tim e in some A siatic traditions. W ith this, G an d h i rou n d ed u p his critiq u e o f th e colonial " Ellmann, ‘The Critic as Artist as Wilde’, p. 30.

63

The Psychology o f Colonialism

consciousness an d proceeded to fight th e organized aspects o f colonialism . T h a t second b a ttle does n o t concern us here. V III

C..v L\y )

I started w ith th e proposition th a t colonialism is first o f all a m a tte r o f consciousness a n d needs to be defeated u ltim ately in t^ e nrinds o f m en. In th e rest o f this essay I have tried to id en tifv -tw o . m ajor p sy rh o ln g k a l -p.ategoriea -or. stratifir.atnrv p rinciples derived from biological jiffe re n c e s w hich gave structu re jto th ¿ i d enl ngy -o^eeloni a lism -inT n d ia u ncferB rltish rule ^n d to^shew-hnw these priniripW r ^ a t r d th^ “t o th eju h j e r t rr>mnr]iinityl arid ensured j h e survival o f colonialfis m in th e mindsjr>f m en. iT iav e'álsó , I hope^sH ow n^that the lib eratio n u ltim ately h ad to begin from the colonized a n d end w ith th e colonizers. As G an d h i was to so clearly form ulate th ro u g h his ow n life, freedom is indivisible, n o t only in the p o p u lar sense th a t th e oppressed o f the w orld are one b u t also in th e u n p o p u lar sense th a t th e oppressor too is cau g h t in the cu ltu re o f oppression. O n e question now rem ains to be answ ered. I n exam ining p arts o f th e m indscape o f British colonialism in In d ia I have gone back into tim e. H as th a t tim e trav el observed th e rules o f history o r is it also a m atter o f a m y th ? D id G an d h i really con­ stru ct h u m a n n a tu re and society the w ay I have described ? O r is m ine a second-order construction— a secondary elaboration, as a psychoanalyst m ay prefer to call it— w hich im putes to a m an a new stru ctu re in th e m an n er o f In d ia ’s tra d itio n a l com ­ m entators on persons and texts? P erhaps th e question is ir­ relevant. As G an d h i so effortlessly dem onstrated, for those seek­ ing liberation, history can som etim es be m ade to follow from m yths.

T w o

The Uncolonized Mind: A Post-Colonial View of India and the West i R u d y a rd K iplipg ( i 862-1936)>th o u g h t he knew w hich side o f th e g reat divide betw een im perial B ritain a n d subject In d ia h e stood. H e was certain th a t to be ruled by B ritain was In d ia ’s rig h t; to rule In d ia was B ritain ’s duty. H e was also certain th a t, as one w ith a know ledge o f b o th th eir culturesTTie h ad the respgnsibiliTy tp -d e fin e b o ih th e -rig h t a n d th e dntTTBut is it th e w hole story? O r is it th e "last'line "of a story w hich began years ago, in K ip lin g ’s childhood in In d ia ? Angus W ilson begins his biography o f K ipling by saying th a t K ipling was ‘a m an who, th ro u g h o u t his life, w orshipped and respected . . . children a n d th eir im aginings.’1 K ip lin g ’s early life provides a clue to th e childhood he w orshipped an d respected. H e was n o t m erely born in In d ia ; he was brought u p in In d ia by In d ia n servants in a n In d ia n environm ent. H e thought, felt arid d ream t in H in H n s^p i, m ainly com m unicated w ith Indians, an d even looked like an In d ia n boy.2 H e w ent to H in d u tem ples, for he was ‘below the age o f caste’, and once, ^ w hen he visited a farm w ith his parents, he w alked aw ay hold>ing th e h a n d o f a farm er, saying to his m other in H in d u sta n i: ‘G oodbye, this is m y b ro th er.’ ' Y oung K ipling was deeply im pressed by the rom ance, th e 1The Strangt Ride of RwfyardKipling (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 1. * Edmund Wilson, ‘The Kipling that Nobody Read’, in Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Kipling’s Mind and Art: Selected Critical Essays (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1964), pp. 17 - 69. See p. 18 .

The Uncolonized M ind

65

colour and the mystery o f In d ia . A nd the country becam e a perm anenFparToFTus idea o f a n idyllic childhood, associated w ith his ‘years o f safe delight’ an d his private ‘garden o f E den before the fall’.* T o speak o f this m em ory as th e core o f his" a d u lt self m ay seem overly psychological, b u t certainly^no o th er n o n-Indian write r o f JElnglish has equalled K ipling’s sensitivity to In d ia n w ords, to In d ia ’s flora a n d fauna, a n d to the people who in h a b it In d ia ’s 600,000 villages. T h e In d ia n peasantry rem ained for him his beloved children th ro u g h o u t his life.4 As against this affinity to things In d ian , there was his closcyet-distant relationship w ith his V ictorian parents. H e in ter­ acted w ith th e m m ainly w hen h e wasTormaliy;—an d som ew hat ritually—presented to them b y the serva»tsrW hen speakingjto his parents, his autobiography states, he ‘haltingly tran slated o u t o f the vernacular idiom th a t one th ought an d d re a m t in.’5 O vertly, his love,Jrespect. an d g ratitu d e to his p a re n ts, specially his m other, were im m ense. Y et, a t least one biographer has pointed out the gap betw een ‘the elevated, alm ost religious concept* o f a m o th er’s place in a son’s life, as found in K ip lin g ’s stories and verses, an d his ow n relationship w ith his m o th er.6 M other Alice K ipling was jiQt apparentl^-a^w om an-w feo-en­ couraged m uch em otionalism — Also, it was through his parents th a t R u d y ard w as exposed to the most painful experience o f his life. A fter six idyllic years in Bombay, he was sent w ith his sister to Southsea in E ngland, to one A unt R osa for education an d ‘upkeep’. M rs R osa H ollow ay belonged to an English fam ily o f declining fortunes, an d w ith her husband, a retired arm y officer, she kept boarders. O n the surface everything w ent sm oothly. Some visitors found M rs H ollow ay a loving g u ard ian to R u d y ard an d she did relate well w ith his sister. B ut it transpired after K ip lin g ’s * Edmund Wilson, ‘The Kipling that Nobody Read’; Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride, p. 3. 4 Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride, p. 4 . * Something of Myself, For My Friends, Known and Unknown (New York: Doubicday and Doran, 1937), p. 5. * Angus Wilson, The Strange Ride, p. 11.

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The Intim ate Enemy

d e a th th a t his years a t Southsea h a d been a (to rtu ri. H is posthum ous autobiography describes M rs H ollow ay’s estab­ lishm ent as a ‘H ouse o f D esolation’, characterized by restric­ tions, bullying, persecution an d some sadism . T h e m alefactors included b o th A u n t R osa a n d h er young son. I t m ust have been a lonely, hateful w orld for som eone b ro u g h t up,in close proxim ity to n atu re, in a free y et capsulating w orld, peopled by kindly, w arm , n o n -p aren tal figures. T o M rs H ollow ay, on the o th er h an d , R u d y a rd w as a stranger. Sold to lK e JV ictorian a n d C alvinist concept o f a sinful child­ hood th a llia d lQ be chastened; she m ust have found th e strongwilled, defiant, unin h ib ited child p a rtic u la rty sp o iltj^ in sa v e d an d reprobatç. P erhaps there was an~elemen t--of-jealeusy too. A t least one chronicler suggests th a t b o th M rs HôHoway an d her bully o f a son m ight have sensed th a t th e a rro g an t deceitful \ / r little boy h a d spent his tim e in a w orld q u ite beyond th eir | dreary horizon.7 T o young R u d y ard , the ill-treatm en t a t Southsea was a g reat b etray al by his parents. T o req u o te a passage by his sister m ade fam ous by E d m u n d W ilson in th e 1940s : Looking back, I think the real tragedy of our early days, apart from Aunty’s bad temper and unkindness to my brother, sprang from our inability to understand why our parents had deserted us. We had had no preparation or explanation; it was like a double death or rather, like an avalanche that had swept away everything happy and familiar . . . We felt that we had been deserted, ‘almost as much as on a door­ step’. . . . There was no getting out of that, as we often said .8 Some have argued th a t such banishm ent to E ngland was ' / V norm al in those tim es an d m ust be considered w elF m otiväted. A nglo-Indian parents d id live with the fear o f servants spoiling' th eir children, introducing them to heathenism a n d encourag­ ing in them sexual p recocity. Also, Alice K ipling’s th ird baby h ad died an d she was anxious a b o u t her surviving children. 7 Ibid., p. 32. • ‘Some Childhood Memories of Rudyard Kipling’, Chambers Journal, Eighth Series, V III (1939), p. 171, quoted in Edmund Wilson, ‘The Kipling that Nobody Read’, p. 20.

The Uncolonized M ind

67

B u t the issue is n o t w hether R u d y a rd was justified in feeling w h a t he felt ab o u t his parents, b u t w hether he actually h a rboured such feelings. H is sister was thtTonTyperson to know , a n d h e r evidence in this respect is conclusive. T h e o th er, an d m ore serious evidence is the fact th a t he finally h a d a t Southsea a ‘severe nervous breakdow n’, m ade m ore h g n ih le b y p a rtia l blindness an d h a llu c in a tio n s ^ - A t last, R udyard~w as taken aw ay from Southsea a n d p u t in a p u b lic school w hich catered for children o f fam ilies o f a m ilitary background, m ainly children plan n in g to en te r the navy. T h e school em phasized the m ilitary an d m asculine v ir­ tues. R agging was com m on, th e cu ltu ral com pulsion to enter sports enorm ous. B ut R u d y a rd was a sedentary, artisticallym inded child w ho h a te d sports, p artly because o f his d an g er­ ously w eak eyesight an d p a rtly because he was already sure th a t he w an ted to live-aJii& xi^the m ind. In addition, K ipling looked noticeably a SaQn -w h ite/ (at least some Indians have observed th a t K ipling h a d a ta n w hich could n o t be explained aw ay as a result o f the In d ia n su n ). T h e result w as m ore misery. I f his parents showed him th e oth er side o f English affection a n d M rs H ollow ay th e o th e r face o f English au th o rity , the bullying an d ostracism he suffered as an alien-looking ‘effe­ m in ate’ schoolboy gave him an o th er view o f the English su b ­ cu ltu re that, .produced the ru lin g élites foiLthexolemes.

/

In sum , reared in the com pany o f doting In d ia n servants who desanitized the V ictorian th o u g h non-C alvinist an d nonchurch-going K ipling fam ily, young R u d y ard found E ngland a harrow ing «»xp^nVnri-. I t wa^arcuHuTe he C6utd~admire— the ad m iratio n was also a p ro d u ct o f his socialization— bu t n o t , loye. H e rem ained in E ngland a conspicuous b ic u ltu ra î]s a h iiv < ^ / the English co u n terp art o f the ty p e he was to la ter despise : the / h in i|tn ra l In d ian O th e rs sensed this m arginality a n d the resulting social aw kwardness, an d this further distanced him from English society in E ngland an d subsequently in In d ia . H is w ritings w ere to reflect this rem oteness later, and he never • Edmund W ilsoo^Thc KipKng-that Nobody lLead,rp.'2o.

68

The Intim ate Enemy

\ could w rite ab o u t E ngland as captivatingly as a b o u t In d ia .10 Yet, his oppressive English years inevitably gave K ip h n g jh e message th a t England was a p art of his true self, th a t he w ould have to disown his Indianness and learn not to identify w ith the victims, and th at the victim hood he h ad know n m fin g la n d cquld-he avoided, perhaps even glorified, through identification' (with the aggressors^especially through loyalty to the aggressors’ y values: K ipling him self had been effem inate, w eak, individualistic, reb ellio u san d unw illing to see the m eaning o f life-only in w ork orjisefui-activity (he was bad a t figures in his school a t Southsea •h and could n o t read till he was six). T hese w ere exactly the . ^ f a u l t s he la te r bitterly attacked in W esternized T ndiafisrA lm ost self-depreciatingly, he idealized the herd an d the pack an d the kind o f m orality w hich w ould hold such a collectivity together. H e never guessed th a t it was a short step from the W esternized In d ia n to the Indianized W esterner an d he never realized th a t the m arginality he scorned in the p ro -In d ian intellectuals and the anti-colonial liberals was actually his^>wn> - W h at were the links betw een the two K iplings : betw een the~ hero loyal to W estern civilization arid the Indianized W esterner who~Hated~lhe W esTw ith in him j between th e hero Who~ihterfaced cultures and the anti-hero w ho despised cultural hybrids '_and bem oaned the unclear sense o f self in h im ? I t w as blind violence a n d a h u n g er for revenge. K ipling was * always ready to justify violence as long as it was counter­ violence. E d m u n d Wilson points out, w ith a touch o f contem pt, th a t m uch o f K ipling’s w ork is rem arkably free o f any real defiance o f au th o rity an d any sym pathy for the victim s.11 A ctually there is m ore to it. K ipling distinguished betw een the victim who fights well an d pays back the torm entor in his ow n coin an d the victim who is passive-aggressive, effem inate, and fights back through non-cooperation, shirking, irresponsibility, m alingering an d refusal to value face-to-face fights. T h e first 10 See on this K. Bhaskara Rao, Rudyard Kipling's India (Norman: University of Oklahama, 1967), pp. 23- 4. 11 Edmund Wilson, ‘The Kipling that Nobody Read’.

The Uncolonized M ind

69

/was th^*i 3 eal victihl’ K ip ling wished to be, th e second was the / |vir.tim,s ofe-yotnrg K ip ling lived an d h ated livm g T lfh c did n o t have an y com passion for the victim s o f th e w orld, he did n o t have any com passion for a p a rt o f him self either. ~~~~’ B oT K ipingV litefaryn?ensitivities d id n o t entirely fail him even in this sphere. H e knew it was n o t a difference betw een violence an d nonviolence, b u t b e tw e e ir^ tfy kinds o f violence. T h e first was the violence th a t was d irect, operT andH nged w ith legitim acy a n d au th o rity. _It was the violence o f self-confiden x u ltu ra l groups, used to facing violent situations w ith over_w heim ing a d vantages. T h e second was th e violence of the "weakjmcLtK&ifoTTfin a t H , used to facing violence w ith~over-( Q., w helm ing disadvantages. T here is in this second violence a ^ " ' to u ch o f n o n-targeted rage as well as o f desperation, fatalism an d , as th e w inners o r m asters o f th e w orld w ould have it, cow ardliness. T his violence is often a fantasy ra th e r th a n a n intervention in th e real w orld, a response to th e first kind o f violence ra th e r th a n a cause o r justification for it. In K iplin g’s life, th e first kind o f violence h ap p en ed to be th e prerogative o f th e B ritish rulers in In d ia ; th e second th a t o f In d ian s subjugated in In d ia. K ipling rorrer.tly sensed th a t the glorification of the w t n r ’i rrrrfrnfift-was fh f basis o f the dortrinfc* o f serial evolution and ultim ately colonialism , th a t pne _CQuld j n o t give u p the violence w ithout giving u p the concept o f j colonialism as an in stru m e n ro f progress: liT ^ ^ ^ ^ tJ f^ h is o iio ra l blirid.B6S5~Was enorm ous. T h e centre-­ piece o f K ipling’s life wasl a r efusal to look w ithin, an aggressive y ‘an ti-in tracep tio n ’ w hich forced him To avoid’aU deep conflicts, ~x/ an d prevented him from separating h u m an problem s from ethnic stereotypes. R em arkably extraversive, his w ork stressed all forms o f collectivity, and saw th e bonds o f race an d blood as m ore im p o rta n t th a n person-to-person relationships. As if th eir au th o r, he hoped th a t th e restlessness a n d occasional depression th a t h a d dogged him since the Southsea days could be driven off-scent by th e extraversive search for cu ltu ral roots, through the service he was rendering to th e im perial authority. H e lived a n d died fighting his other self—a softer, m ore creative

70

The Intim ate Enemy

an d h ap p ier self— and th e u n certain ty a n d self-hatred asso­ ciated w ith it. Sim ultaneously, the only In d ia he was w illing to respect w as , th e one linked to h er m artial past an d subcultures^ th e In d ia w hichw as~a~Dlbnysian countprplaypr as as an ally n f tka Wfist. Probably, a t an o th er plane, like N irad G. C h au d h u ri an d V . S. N aip au l after him , K ipling too lived his life search in g for a n In d ia w hich, in its h a rd m asculine valour, w ould be a n equal com petitor o r o pponent o f th e W est th a t h a d h u m iliated , disow ned an d despised his au th en tic self. Some critics have spoken o f the tw o voices o f K ipling. O n e, it seems, has even nam ed th e voices th e saxophone a n d th e oboe. T h e saxophone was, one suspects, K ipling’s m artial, violent, self-righteous self w hich rejected pacifism a n d glorified soldiery, w ent through spells of depression, was fascinated by th e gro­ tesque an d the m acabre, a n d lived w ith a n abiding fear o f m adness a n d d eath . T h e oboe was K ip lin g ’s Indianness a n d his aw e for th e culture a n d th e m ind o f In d ia , his bew ilderm ent a t In d ia ’s heterogeneity a n d com plexity, h e r incoherence a n d ‘an cien t m ystery’, her resistance to th e m echanization o f w ork as well as m an , a n d ultim ately h er androgyny. T h e antonym s were m asculine hardness a n d im perial responsibility on th e one h an d , a n d fem inine softness a n d cross-cultural em pathy, on th e other. T h e saxophone w on out, b u t th e oboe continued to play outside K ip lin g ’s earshot, trying to keep alive a subjugated strain o f his civilization in th e perceived weaknesses o f an o th er. II T his long story tells us a n u m b er o f things ab o u t th e w orld o f th e m en w ho b uilt, ra n , o r legitim ized em pires, ab o u t th e experienced violence w hich becam e in them a lifelong fear o f a n d respect for violence, a n d a b o u t the a tte m p t to give m eaning to p riv ate suffering by developing theories o f extraversive vioj lence. T h is in turn^ u n d ern eath all th e a tte m p tsjp i ^ " t i f y Vi™**1 I th e aggressor a n d despite singing the praise n f tfrf; pow erful, i was also a m a tter o f ‘tu rn ingjagainst th e self’ : a defence touch-

The Uncolonized M ind

7i

ing in this case the very m argins o f self-destructiveness. Such processes providtTvital clues to the fates oi polities and cultures. F or the m om ent, how ever, I shall focus on a dilem m a in K ipling’s personal life w hich was com m on to all colonial ideo­ logies and could be so to m ost post-colonial awarenesses. T his dilem m a is im p o rtan t because w hile the econom ic, political an d m oral results of colonialism have been discussed, its em o­ tional and cognitive costs have been ignored. A nd as F reud has rem inded us in this century, w hat we choose to forget has a tendency to com e back to h a u n t us in ‘history’. K ipling’s dilem m a can be stated sim ply: he could n ot b e ' b o th W estern and In d ia n ; he could be either W estern or In d ian . I t was this im posed choice w hich linked his self-destructiveness to the tragedy o f his life: K ip lin g ’s avow ed values w ere W estern, his rejected under-socialized self In d ian , and he h ad to choose betw een the two. H a d it been the o th er way ro u n d , he m ight have m anaged as a brow n sahib or as a b abu a t least to ac­ knowledge his b icultural self an d reconcile how ever crudely th e East an d the W est w ithin him . T his ap p aren tly trivial, hypothetical difference is the first clue to the w ay colonialism tried to take over th e W estern con­ sciousness, to m ake it congruent w ith the needs o f colonialism, to take aw ay the wholeness o f every w hite m an w ho chose to be a p a rt o f the colonial m achine, an d to give h im a new self­ definition w hich, while provincial in its cu ltu ral orientation, was-universal in its g eo g rap h icalsco p e. In retrospect, colonialism did have its trium phs after all. I t did make W estern m an definitionally non-E astern an d handed him a self-image an d a w orld view w hich were basically responses to the needs o f colonialism . H e could n o t b u t be nonE astern ; he could n ot b u t be continuously engaged in studying, in terp retin g an d u n derstanding the E ast as his negative iden­ tity .12 T he ‘discovery’ o f the O rien t, w hich E dw ard Said has so elegantly described,13 was designed to expel the oth er O rien t 11 The conccpt of negative identity is of course borrowed from Erik Erikson. See particularly his Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1958). 11 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

72

The Intím ate Enemy

rW hich h a d once been a p a rt o f th e jn e d ie v a l E uropean conIsciousness as a n arch etype an d a potentiality. T h a t o th er O rien t, ~ tob,w as som etim es seen as a n enem y b u t it was re­ spected, even if grudgingly. I t was seen n o t m erely as the h a b ita t o f an a ltern ative w orld view b u t also arTalternative so u rc eo f ^ know ledge a b o u t th e W e st/V o lta ire ’s CM na, for S a m p le , was n o t th e m o d em anthropologist’s E ast; it was th e hum anist’s alter ego o f the W est. T h e m edieval M iddle E ast was the place w here m an y E uropeans w ent to study A ristotle. A nd even am ong th e first generation o f colonialists in British In d ia — am ong those w ho w ere actually th e greatest em pire builders— th ere w ere those like W a rre n H astings w ho felt th a t they h ad m ore to learn from th e civilization they ruled th a n they h ad to teach. _______ T his ó th e rjO rié n t, th e O rie n t w hich was th e O ccident’s [R o u b le ', d ifL n o t-fitlh g jie e d s o f colonialism ; it carried intim ations o f a n alternative, cosmopolitan, m ulticu ltu ra l living which was, fd “change the context o f A ngus W H sonV ^xpression, beyond th e d reary m iddle-class horizons o f K ip lin g ^and-ius E nglistr contem poraries. T h ey forced themselves and every I bicuItuiaT^Westernei' to m a k e h isx h o ic e . . i O n the o th er side, colonialism tried to su p p lan t the In d ian consciousness to erect a n In d ia n self-image w hich, in its op­ position to th e W est, w ould rem ain in essence a W estern con­ struction. I f th e colonial experience m ade th e m ainstream W estern consciousness definitionally no n -O rien tal and re­ defined the W est’s self-image as th e antithesis or negation of the E ast, it sought to do th e reverse w ith the self-image of the O rie n t a n d w ith th e cu ltu re o f In d ia . Colonialism replaced the n o rm a i ethnocentric stereotype o f the msCrtrtable-Orierital by the p ath o logical stereo ty p e o f th e strañge",“p rim al b u t predictable-O xdenial^religiQ us b u t siip£rstitious, cleyer b u t devious, ch ao tirally vinlp.nt hiit-gfFrroiflntply r pw ardly. Sim ultaneously, o lonia lk m created (IT dom ain o f discourse w here the stanc m ode o f transgressing such stereotypes was to reverse them : u p e rsth ró u s^ u T sp iritu a l, unecTuc~ared~~bu t wise, w om anly pacific, a n d so on a n d so forth. N o colonialism could be com-

The Uncolonized M ind

73

nlete unless it ‘universalized’ a n d enriched its ethnic stereotypes fey appropriating th e language o f defiance o f its V iclim s^T hat w asw fiy th e c ry o f th ev ictim s ofcolonialism was ultim ately the cry to be h eard in an o th er language—-unknown to th e colonizer and to the anti-colonial m ovem ents th a t he h ad bred an d th en dom esticated. T h a t is w hy the rest o f th is analysis has to se e k to u nderstand th e_ colonial legacy in post-colonial In d ia j m a language w hich, while _il in/»nrpryat#»‘'V I oppression. W hen such co-optation has taken place, resistance Y.,,. US'-!’ as welT as survival dem ands some access to the larger whole, howsoever self-defeating th a t process m ay seem in the light o f conventional reason an d day-to-day politics. T his, I suspect, is an o th er way o f restating the ancient w isdom — w hich for some cultures is also an everyday truism — th a t knowledge w ithout ethics is not so m uch b ad ethics as inferior knowledge.

iV

Index Acharya, Smaran, 8n Adorno, T. W., 2711, 3an, 45, 98n adulthood, 13, 20 ideology of adulthood, 56 Africa, 4, 10, isn , 17, 30, 34,37 age, politic* of {stt also childhood), 1618 aggression (sot also violence) activism as, 55 continuity between the aggressor and the victim, 38, 68-g identification with the Aggressor, 7*»,37* 7 °. 87 Indian, 50 passive, 38 Ahmedabad, 105 Algeria, 1,31 Alvares, Claude, 311, 95n America, 4, 80 Andrews, C. F., 36, 46-9 androgyny, 8, 10, 23, 29, 36, 43, 48, 53, 70,99

androgynes, 8 vdmicdri sects and, 53 Angola, 1 Angus, Ian, 39n anti-colonialism, 3, 26, 28, 36, 68, 73 anti-imperialism, 53 Spaddharma, 108 Apollonian cultures, 3, 74-5 ardhandrUvara, 54 Aries, Philippe, 14 Aristotle, 72 Arnold, Matthew, 45 Arya Samaj, 25 Ashe, Geoffrey, 105, io6n Asia, 4, 62,86 Asoka, 50 dirama, 81 asura prakfti (set aim rikftua), 78

Auden, W. H., 43 Augustine, St, 12 Aurobindo, Sri, 85-100 childhood of, 87-9 ‘insanity’ of, 86 motherhood of nation and, 92 Aurobindo Ashram, 91, 94-5 authoritarianism, 80 Aztec priests, 107, 110-11 babu, 77-8 Kipling’s concept of, 38,68 Baldick, Robert, i4n Ballhatchet, Kenneth, 9-10 Bandopadhyay, Asit, ign Bandopadhyay, Bishwanath, ign Baroda, 91 Behn, Mira, nit Madeleine Slade, 36 Benedict, Ruth, 74n Bengah, 7, 52, 87, 91, 94, 97, 106 Bentham, Jeremy, ra Berlin, 49 Berlin, Isaiah, 93 Besant, Annie, 36 Bettelheim, Bruno, 56 Bhakti movement, 61 Bhaskar Rao, K., 340, 68n Bhatta Mimftihsft, ggn Bible, 49 New Testament, 31 Sermon on the Mount, 51 Birenbaum, Halina, n o n bisexuality (set also androgyny), 4 , 43 Bloch, Ernst, 98n Bloomsbury group, 36, 42-3 Boers, i$n Bolton, Glomey, 106 Bombay, 65 Bose, Jagadis Chandra, 102-sn Bose, Raj Narayan, 87, 9on

i i

6

Index

Bose, Subhas Chandra, 36 Bose, Raj Sekhar, 94n Bosu, Suddhasatva, 8n Bowes, Pratima, 104x1 Braaksma, M. H., iogn Bradbury, Malcolm, ¿6n Brähman, 10, 24, gg, 107- 8, 110 brahmalej, 94 fear of, 5 Brahrao, 87 Bristol, 81 Britain, 2, 4- 7, g, 13, 15, 17, 19, 33, 39, 32- 51, 63-9, 74, 77-8, 80, 87- 93, 9 7 ,99-»°°, >05, »>0 British India, 1, 4- 6 , 30, 43, 73, 81 Brown, Maurice, io6n Buddhism, 49, 99 Burman, Debojyoti, 10m Cabral, Amilcar, g8n, lo in , 113 Calcutta, 87, 93 Calvinism, 15, 35, 66-7 Cambridge University (se* also Ox­ bridge) , 36, 89-90 Camus, Albert, 99 Césaire, Aimé, 30, 3 m , 33n, lot Chaplin, Charles, 104-5 Chatteijee, Bankimchandra, 33- 4, 34, 86, 92, lo in Anandamafh, 23, 34, lo in India as mother and, 92 Kr?na and, 23-4 Chattopadhyay, Devi Prasad, 82 Chaudhuri, Nirad C., 50, 70, 83- 4, loin childhood, politics of (su also Kipling and Aurobindo), 11-16 childlikeness os childishness, 15-16 oppression of children, 15 regression to infantilism as defence,

56 and ideology of colonialism, 55- 6, 57, 102 Victorian concept of, 65-6 China, 3n, 6n, n n , 16, 17, 33n, 72, 80 conquest of, 13 Chittagong, 106 Christianity, 14- 16, 18, 23- 5, 36- 7,

47- 9, 51- 7, 89, 100, 103, 107-8 Christianization of Hinduism, 22-6 evangelism, 6, 107 Churchill, Winston, 37 Clive, Robert, 37 Cohen, Elie, iogn colonialism, 1- 8, 10- 18, 21- 2, 27, 3 9 39, 42-3, 47-9, 52, 54-5, 75, 78, 80- 1, 85- 7, 100- 3, 111—13 as comical, 5 change in colonial consciousness, t, 7 British, 33, 34, 37, 47, 49, 63, 80 Christianity and, 34, 36- 7, 46-8 economic impact of, 3, 31 economic motives in, 1-2 French, 1, 10, 31, 33, 101 ideology of, 2, 4, 12, 17, 32, 39, 63, 78 mobility and, 33 political economy of, 2 Portuguese, 10, 14 psychology of, 1- 2 , 7 shared culture of, 2 Spanish, 10, 14, I5n Congreve, Richard, 34 consciousness Cartesian, 81 creative, 102 Coomaraswamy, A. K., 82, tog Coward, Noël, 43n Crick, Bernard, 41 critical traditionalism, 33, 37-g, 47 critical Hinduism, 36 cultural consensus, 11 cultural criticism, 33 Dandi, 105-6 Darjeeling, 88, 90 Darwinism, 3g, 33 decivilization of colonizers, 29-35 defiance, metaphysical, 56 deMause, Lloyd, I4n Deoghar, 88 Derrett, J. Duncan M., 77 Deshpande, Madhav, s6n, ggn Dionysian cultures, 3, 53, 70, 74- 5, 78, 108 displacement criminality as, 33

Index anti-Muslim feelings as, a6n Douglas, Lord Alfred (Bossie), 43-4 Drewett, The Reverend, 89 Dumont, Louis, io8n Dunkirk, 97 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 18- 23, 39 Dutt, R. C., 3m East India Company, 5-6 Eckhart, Johannes, 12 Egypt, 17 Eliade, Mircea, 57, ¿8n Eliot, T. S., 58 Ellmann, Richard, 43, 45, 49, 62n, 98n Ellul, Jacques, 35 endogamy, 11 Engels, F., I3n England (see under Britain) Erikson, Erik, 12, 52n, 6 in, 7m Europe, 14- 17, 30, 33, 35, 37, 72, 74, 85-6 , 89,95 Fanon, Frantz, 4n, 30- 1, 330, 76n Farrington, Constance, 7611 femininity (see also masculinity, nSrttva) and colonial ideology, 4-11 as repressed, 32,49 effeminacy, 110-16 Feyerabend, Paul, 3 Fischer, Louis, 106 Forster, E. M., gn, 33, 34, 42, 5611, 76 A Passage to India, 107 Foucault, Michel, H 2n France, 1, 35, 89, 94 Francis of Assisi, St, 12 Frenkel-Brunswick, E., 27n Freud, Sigmund, 13, 49, 55, 58, 62, 71, 93» 97. »08 Gandhi, M. K., 4, 26, 28- 9, 47- 57 , 59 60, 62- 3, 100-6 Christianity and, 48-9 constituency of, 48-51 Gandhian pacifism, 50 Gandhism, 50 image of, 105-6 Genovese, E. D., I04n Germany, 75, 86,89

117

Ghose, Binoy, 50, 28n Ghose, D. K., 3 m Ghose, Krishnadhan, 87, 8g, 92- 3, 95 Gîtâ, Bhagavad, 21, 25, 47, 78, 81, 93 Goffman, Erving, iogn, 11 in Gorer, Geoffrey, 44n, 50 Gramsci, Antonio, 99n Greenfeld, Howard, 6n Gupta, Kshetra, i 8n Habermas, Jürgen, 58 Hastings, Warren, 72 Heidegger, Martin, 55 hermaphroditism (see klibatoa) Hinduism, 18- 19, 23-9> 47-5*» 83, 87, 98, 103- 4, »07-8 Christianization of, 22-6 definition of, 102-3 Himalayas, 88 Hindustani, 64 history as ideology, 47ff defiance of, 45 freedom from, 62, 59-60 pathology of, 55,99 sense of, 103-4 Hobbes, Thomas, 36 Holland, Vyvyan, 44 Holloway, Rosa, 65-7 homosexuality (see also klibatoa), 9- 10, 42-6 ‘ideology of higher sodomy’, 43 Hopkin, C. Edward, 35n Howard, Dick, 98n Howard, Richard, 112n Hutchins, Francis, 6n, 35 Hyde, H. Montgomery, 44n hyper-masculinity (see under masculin­ ity) Ignatius Loyola, St, 12 IUich, Ivan, 107 imperialism, 2, 14, 34, 39, 98, 100, 110 British, 37, 42, 48 India, 12, 16- 31, 34- 8, 47-59» 61- 5, 67- 87, 89- 90, 92, 94, 98- 105, 107, 109-12 as counterplayer of West, 70-80

i i

8

Index

Indian majlis, 90 Indochina, 1 instrumentalism, 32 Irwin, Lord, 105-6 Isherwood, Christopher, 78n Islam (see also Muslim), 25, 28, 103, in n Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasan, 88n, 8gn Jahoda, Gustav, 4n Jainism, ign Japan, 1, n , 80, 86 Jephcott, E. F. N., g8n Judaeo-Christianity (see under Chris­ tianity) Kakar, Sudhir, 5 m, 6on K ill, gi kdpurufotva, 53-4 Karachi, 106 Keynes, John M., 42 Kieman, V. G., 17, 24n, 76, 7gn King’s College, 89 Kipling, Rudyard, 35- 42, 46, 53- 64, 76- 80, 84- 6, g&-i02, 104,110 dilemma of, 71 ego-ideals of, 84 quasi-, 100-1 childhood of, 40, 64-8 concept of babu of, 38,68 victimhood and, 68-9 klibatoa (see also homosexuality), 8, gn, 43» 52-3 Kosambi, D. D., 81-2 Kovel, Joel, 56n Krishna, Gopal, 560, ggn K f^ a, 23- 4, gs, io8n Aurobindo and, g3 Bankimchandra Chattaji and, 23-4 K#atriya, 10, 20, 54,80 kfdtratej, 24, 94, 105 Kfatriyaization, 780 Kfatriyahood, 7, 10, 24, 52, 54, 78 asuratva as Kfatriyaness, 78

hyp«-» 52 pathology of, 78 Kurukfetra, 21 Kubie, Lawrence, 43

Laing, R. D., 86 Lak$mana, ig Lannoy, Richard, 78n, 105- 7, 111 Latin America, 4 , 10 Levinson, D., 27n Lévi-Strauss, C., 5g liberalism, 2- 3, 10, 35, g3, 101 Lipsay, Roger, iogn Locke, John, g3 Lukács, George, ggn Ma, Sri (see Richard, Mira Paul) McCarthy, Thomas, s8n Madan, T. N., 103 MSdhyamikâ, 73 Madras, 106 Mahâbhârata, 21, 23, 31, io8n Mahadevan, T. K., 75, 70n Maharashtra, 7, 52 Majumdar, A. K., 3» Majumdar, R. C., 3 m Mallick, M. C., gn Mann, Thomas, 4g, 75 Mannoni, O., I3n, 29-31 Marcuse, Herbert, i 3n, 38, 45 Markman, C. L., 4n Marriott, McKim, 103 Marx, Karl, 12- 13, 57*-®» 62, 7g, 8 i, 101 concept of India, 12-13 concept of history, 57-9 masculinity (see alsopurufatod), 11, 20- 1, 55» 79» 98-9. i°3 bogus manliness, 51-2 British, 44 hypermasculinity, 10, 22, 2g, 37- 8, 52, 100 male adulthood, ideology of, 16- 17, 55 male sexual dominance, 4- 5 ,6 masculine Christianity, 47-8 masculine Hinduism, 8 Maugham, Somerset, 42 May, Rollo, 4gn Mazlish, Bruce, ian MeghnSd, ig Meghnidoadh KSxya, 18-21 Memmf, Albert, 6n, 1in, isn , 30

Index Middle East, 7s Mill, James, 12 Miller, J., I3n Mitra, Siiirkumar, 8711, 8911, 9011, gan modernity, 14, 16 ideology of, 61- 3, 84, 100-2 modem science, 3- 3, 10a Moore, G. E., 43 Moore, R. J., 77n Morris, James, 4 ~6n, 3a, 34, 350 Mother (see Richard, Mira Paul) Mrinalini Devi, 91 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 35, 74 Mukherji, Haridas, gan Mukheiji, Uma, gan Mdller, Max, 17 Murdoch, Iris, 3 m Muslim (see also Islam) anti-Muslim feelings as displace­ ment, a6n myths versus history, 59-60 Nag, Kalidas, 10m Naidu, Sarojidi, 106 Naipaul, V. S., 70, 83- 4, g8-g Nandy, Ashis, 3x1, gn, n n , ian, ijn , i 6n, 3in, 2511, 5 m , s 6n, 58, iosn ndriiva (set also femininity), 7- 8 , 53-4 Nazis, 49, 75,86 tteo-Hellenism, 43 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 81, 106 New Testament (stt under Bible) Nirmdbaran, 88n, 8gn, g3n, g^n Nivedita, Sister, nde Margaret Noble, 36 nonviolence (stt alto Gandhi), 50- 1, 54, 68-9 , 70-1 hypocrisy of, 83 in British society, 49-50 of Hindus, 50-1 Oakeshott, Michael, 55 O ’Flaherty, Wendy D., 8n omnipotence of thought, 97 ontogeny, 7, 13, 5a Orient, 6a, 70-2 rediscovery of, 71-3 as double of Occident, 70-3 Orwell, George, 35, 39-43,46

"9

Orwell, Sonia, sgn Oxbridge, 42 Oxford University (stt also Oxbridge),

36 Plgdavas, a 1 papa, 18 Pareekh, Udai, 5 m Parkinson, C. Northcote, 6n, gn passivity, 10, 104, 106-7 as effective activism, 107 passive aggression, 38 phylogeny, 13 Picasso, Pablo, 45 Pinkham, Joan, 101 Plato, 3 in pluralism, a Pondicherry, 94-5 Portugal, 1 Prabhavananda, Swami, 78n Pres, Terence Des, iogn, 110 progress, theory of, 7, 30 projective extroversion, 108 protection of civilization, 107-1 a Protestantism (stt also Calvinism, Christianity), 15 pseudo-asceticism, of Rftma, 30 psychoanalysis, 7, 55- 6, 58, 63 as ethnopsychology, 55 Punjab, 7, 5a Pur&pas, 19- 21, 23, 108 puntfatoa (set also masculinity), 7, 43, 58-3

Pyarelal,4 7 Queensberry, Marquess of, 43-4 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 8a Raj, a, 7, a6- 8, 5a rikfasas, 20-2 R&ma, 19- 20, 22 Ramanan, K. Venkata, 73n, yjn Ramanujam, Srinivasa, I02~3n RAmiyapa, 19-23 Jain RUmSyapa, 19 Tamil Rlm iyapa, 19 Rivapa, 19-20 Ray, P. CL, 47

120

Index

Ray, Satyajit, gn Renan, 33n Richard, Mira Paul (Sri Ma), 36n,

94"« Roland, Alan, 82n Roy, M. N., 3n Roy, Rammohun, a i - 2, 27, 51, 81, io in Rudolph, Lloyd, 54 Rudolph, Susanne, 54 R uskin, John, 12 Russell, John P., 34 Russians, the, g7 Rutherford, Andrew, 39n Ryan, Michael T., I2n Said, Edward, 71 Sakti, 92, 95 Salt March, 105-6 Sanford, R. N., 27n, 32n Sankaräcärya, 21, 91 Sanskrit, 50, 53, 91 Saraswati, Swami Dayanand, 24-6 Satprem, 87n tatyagraha, 106, i l l , 113 Sauptik Parva, 31 Savarkar, Vinayak D., 26 Schweitzer, Albert, 18, 47n »elf, 39» 69» British, 39,42 historical, 55-6 language of, 61- 2,104 splitting of, 108-10 Sen, Asok, 28n Sen, Atulchandra, io8n Sen, Pramodkumar, 88n Sepoy Mutiny, 6n Sereny, Gita, 1ion Sermon on the Mount (jm under Bible) Shah, K .J., 54 Sharpe, Gene, 4g Sha tan, Chaim F., 51, 520 Sheridan, Alan, i i 2n Sheth, Harihar, 5n Siger, Carl, 33 Smuts, Jan H ., 104-5 Somerville, P . C., 1 South Africa, 53, 104-5

Southsea, Kipling in, 65- 7, 68, 69 South Sea Islanders, 30 Spain, 107 spiritualism as a defence (see also Aurobindo), 105-9 sportsmanship, 50 Spratt, Philip, io8n iuddhi, 25 svabhdva, 8 svadharma, 8 Swamalata, 87, 88, g5 Szasz, Thomas, 112 Tagore, Rabindranath, 8, 47, 103 Car Adhyqy, 8 Corä, 8, 103 Teresa, Mother, 47 Thoreau, H., 62 time, 58-60 as in history, 57, 5g concept of, sg -6o idea of permanence, 35, 7g language of continuity, fii^a theory of progress, 16, 57-8 Tinker, Hugh, 46, 47n Tolstoy, Leo, 12, 62 Trilling, Lionel, 56 Tripathi, Amalesh, 27n ultra-materialism, 113 universalism, 6, 75 Unwin, J. D., sn Upadhyay, Brahmabandhav, 8 , 103 Upani$ads, g3, io8n Utilitarians, 12- 13, 2g, 101 Mill, James, 12 Bentham, Jeremy, 12 utopia, 36 Ved&nta, 8, gg Vedas, 20 Victorian age, 41, 44, 65-7 Vidyasagar, Iswarchandra, 27-g Vietnam, 80 violence [see also aggression, nonvio­ lence) justification of, 32 Vishwanathan, Shiv, 3n

Index Vivekananda, Swami, 24, 25, 47, 51, 86, 93, io in Voltaire, 72 weakness as strength, 104-7 Weber, Max, 15 Welsh, David, n o n wholism, use against oppression, 71-85 Wilde, Oscar, 36, 38, 42- 6, 98n

121

Williams, Raymond, 32n, 43n Wilson, Angus, 64, 6511, 66, 68, 72 Wilson, Edmund, 39, 64^ 6sn, 67n, 68, n on Woolf, Virginia, 42-3 Wurgaft, Lewis D., 6n, i 4n, 35 Zahar, Renate, 4n Zimmer, H., 106

CREATING A NATIONALITY The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and Fear o f the Self

Ashis Nandy Shikha Trivedy Shail Mayaram Achyut Yagnik

C ontents Preface CHAPTER ONE: I The Beginning II The Past

v 1 6

CHAPTER TWO: III The Battle for the Birthplace IV Contending Reactions

24 31

CHAPTER THREE: V Creating a Nationality VI Family Business

56 81

CHAPTER FOUR: VII Hindutva as a Savama Purana VIII Violence and Survival

100 123

CHAPTER FIVE: IX The Aftermath and theRuins—I X The Aftermath and theRuins—II

156 169

CHAPTER SIX XI The Final Assault XII Ayodhya’s ‘First’ Riot

181 197

Index

207

Prefa ce his book began as an effort to give, through a partial narration of the Ramjanmabhumi conflict, a glimpse into the political culture of inter-religious or, as the South Asians prefer to call them, communal conflicts. The book, as it has emerged from our hands, seems to stand witness to the cultural and moral resilience of traditional communities in South Asia and their resistance to the assembly-line violence that now characterizes ethnic conflicts global­ ly. That resistance has not always been successful or consistent. It has not even been always a matter of individual or collective volition; it has been rarely if ever heroic. It depends on social inertia and local politics, on the robust commonsense of people living ordinary lives, and on their sheer ‘cussed’ refusal to change their way of life when under cultural attack. At Ramjanmabhumi, this resistance faces formidable odds. Hie following story, which had a happier ending in its earlier tellings, has now a more uncertain ending. Not merely due to the bitter memories of the recent past but also because of the more impersonal political processes taking over the entire public sphere in the sub­ continent today. Community life in India may not be facing extinc­ tion, but it has obviously become a part of a larger project. That explains why the narrative, despite being in many ways an optimistic essay, is nevertheless tinged with a certain sense of tragic inevitability at times. But it does, we believe, make a case that no analysis of the Ramjanmabhumi movement is possible without reference to the resis­ tance to the impersonal forces of organized mass violence at ground level. This study of communal violence is actually part of a series on ethnic conflicts. Serious academics tell us that the two are not the same. Usually, the core concept in studies of religious fanaticism is fundamentalism; in studies of ethnicity, it is nationality. Our title hints

T

vi

Creating a Nationality

at how we reconcile this anomaly, which we consider a direct product of western scholarship on the subject. The title represents the aware­ ness that the chain of events we describe is the end-product of a century of effort to convert the Hindus into a ‘proper’ modem nation and a conventional ethnic majority and it has as its underside the story, which we have not told here, of corresponding efforts to turn the other faiths of the subcontinent into proper ethnic minorities and well-behaved nationalities. To many, these are worthwhile goals but unfortunately, for a world defined by the concepts of progress, deve­ lopment, secularism, national security and the nation-state, these goals have to be achieved in a society where the borderlines of communities and cultures have not been traditionally defined by cen­ sus operations or electoral rolls and where traditional ideas of com­ munity life and inter-community relations survive. For others, therefore, even the partial achievement of these goals is a minor tragedy, for its consequence cannot be anything but ethnocide in the long run. We hope we have captured something of that tragic aware­ ness in the following pages. South Asia has always been a salad bowl of cultures. For long it has avoided—to the exasperation of modem nationalists and statists of the right and the left—the American-style melting pot model and its individualistic assumptions and anti-communitarian bias. In a salad the ingredients retain their distinctiveness, but each ingredient transcends its individuality through the presence of others. In a melt­ ing pot, primordial identities are supposed to melt. Those that do not are expected to survive as coagulates and are called nationalities or minorities; they are expected to dissolve in the long run. Much of the recent violence in South Asia can be traced to the systematic efforts being made to impose the melting-pot model upon time-worn Indian realities. Not that everyone rues this imposition. Now that the witches’ broth has been brewed in South Asia, those committed to the nineteenthcentury European concepts of state and nationalism seem happy that old-style conflicts of nationalities have surfaced in Mother India to prove that the savages have entered the modern age and have begun to diligently climb the social evolutionist ladder so thoughtfully gifted to them by the European Enlightenment. To such statists and nationalists, the escalating communal and ethnic violence in South Asia is only an unavoidable by-product of state-building and nation-

P reface

vii

form ation and could be easily handled by the law -and-order machinery of the state, given adequate political will. What remains unexplored is the way the modern state itself invites the formation of such adversarial nationalities by leaving that as the only effective way of making collective demands on the state and playing the game of numbers in competitive politics. For reasons of space and the limited skills available to us, we have focused here on a part of the story: on how such nation-building has unfolded in the case of the Hindus, the largest and most pervasive religious commu­ nity in the region, with notoriously ill-defined borders. (As Kumar Suresh Singh’s recent work, done for the Anthropological Survey of India shows, about one-sixth of the communities in the landmass called India cannot be clearly identified as belonging to any single religion, as conventionally defined.) We have told the story mainly from the point of view of Hinduism not only because it scaffolds the Indie civilization but also because it is now being pummelled into a standardized religion of a standardized majority, no different from the other religions in the ‘advanced’ societies that have already be­ come primarily the markers of majorities and minorities in the world of enumerative politics. We hope we have been able to give a flavour of that process of apparently inevitable social progress. We say ‘apparently inevitable’ because cultures protest, even if sometimes in silence. As those who speak on behalf of Hindu nationalism froth at the mouth to sustain the fever-pitch pace of the cultural engineering of the Hindus, the lived world of Hinduism has brought into play its own mechanisms of re-reading and cauterizing its traumatic experiences and its even older traditions of social heal­ ing. In this tradition of re-reading, cauterizing and healing of social traumata, two crucial psychosocial attributes are: principled forget­ fulness (as an antidote to the ravages of modern historical conscious­ ness) and multi-layered primordialities within an open-ended self (as an antidote to the ravages of the impersonality and massification that characterize the modern market, economic as well as political, and have become the underside of modern individualism). No description of inter-religious violence in India is complete unless it takes into account these attributes. It is also our belief that any description of inter-religious violence in South Asia must take note of the resistance that such violence faces from everyday Hinduism and Islam. That resistance is not noticed because another kind of ‘principled’ forgetfulness comes into

viii

Creating a Nationality

play when modern, secular scholars study religious or ethnic violence. That forgetfulness is not accidental, for to remember such resistance is to deny the importance of one’s own categories and the monopoly that one’s class has come to claim in the matter of ethnic and religious tolerance. That forgetfulness sanctions the use of state power and statist propaganda for repressing the awareness that the ideologues of religious violence represent the disowned other self of South Asia’s modernized middle classes. That is why any interpreta­ tion of ethnic and religious violence that defies the categories of the subcontinent’s westernized bourgeoisie manages to trigger such im­ mense anxieties; it becomes in effect an attempt to defy the defences that protect oneself from any awareness of that disowned self. This book, being mainly written frdm the point of view of Hindu­ ism, makes no attempt to balance its portrayal of Hindu nationalism by a discussion of Islamic revivalism or of the cynical Muslim leaders who have played a significant role in the Ramjanmabhumi issue. Nor is there in the book any discussion of the truth or otherwise of the historical or archaeological evidence adduced by the contending par­ ties. They are important, but not for this narrative. We are primarily concerned here with the living reality of Indian civilization and the fate of its moral vision. This has imposed on us the responsibility of first stating what the Ramjanmabhumi events might mean to a majo­ rity of Indians. Is it all a losing battle against time? Are we chronicling a present that is quickly becoming a past? Does the future lie only in the impersonal checks of institutions and ideas such as the constitution, democratic elections, and human rights? We are reluctant to answer these questions here. Let our story speak for itself. But we are not giving out too much of it if we reveal here that we have been forced to reckon with the tendency in the contending parties to bounce back to what might be called their authentic primordialities once they have even partly extricated themselves from the loving embrace of the cultures of the modem state and nationalism. Ayodhya has often been close to being back to its ‘normal’, lethargic, easy lifestyle and to its own distinctive mix of the petty and the sublime even while it has waited warily for the next move on the chessboard of national politics. Even today the sacred city is trying to return to its own rhythm: almost all the victims of the riots that followed the traumatic events of December 1992 are back, and the political formation that

Preface

ix

hoped to ride the Ramjanmabhumi movement to power has been defeated in the state elections of 1993, even in eight out of the nine constituencies in the district of which Ayodhya is a part. That there are still forces resisting this return to Ayodhya’s own concept of nor­ mal life is part of the same story. In other words, while this is a simple story simply told, we are aware that the Ramjanmabhumi conflict is part of a larger civilizational encounter, though not in the way it is often made out to be. H ie conflict can be read as another unresolved problem bequeathed to Indian civilization by the imperial West and its vision of a good society, the last frantic assault by nineteenth-century social evolutionism on the core organizing principles of Hinduism, another great proxy battle the modern West has chosen to fight through its brain children in the Southern world. On this plane, the conflict is not the climax in a series of grand crusades between Hindus and Muslims, but one more desperate attempt to make the two com­ munities deserving citizens of a global order built on the values of the European Enlightenment. That is why in the story we have told there are no villains. We might have slipped here and there, as for instance in chapter 4 where we come close to identifying individuals and groups which systemati­ cally stoke communal violence. Usually those who look like villains in our story turn out to be messengers carrying messages they them­ selves cannot read. For to get behind their slogans, in the words of Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wynch Davies, ‘is fo enter the world of the marginalized and realize that theirs is an invaded, fragmented, destabilized, recreated, modified territory.’ To see these unhappy, tom, comic-strip crusaders for Hindutva as great conspirators and bloodthirsty chauvinists is to underwrite the self-congratulatory smugness of India’s westernized middle class and deny its complicity in the Ramjanmabhumi stir. But perhaps we are being unfair. Every­ thing said, in both cases we are dealing with a frightened species facing extinction, trying to discover in its own ideology of violence clues to a changing world where neither the definition of a ‘proper’ state nor that of nationality or nationalism has remained constant. We are grateful to the United Nations Research Institute of Social Development and its imaginative director, Dharam Ghai, and to Rodolfo Stavenhagen, who co-ordinated the programme, for sup­ porting this venture and providing the comparative intellectual back­

X

Creating a Nationality

ground that frames this study. They are not, of course, responsible in any way for the contents of this book. For all we know, they might violently disagree with some of our interpretations. Others who have contributed to the book in various capacities are the not-so-anonymous referees of UNRISD, the plethora of political functionaries, activists, religious leaders and plain citizens whom we interviewed in and around Ayodhya. We specially remember with a deep sense of gratitude the help given to us by the chief priest of the Ramjanmabhumi temple, Laidas, who was murdered in 1993 when this book was in press. Parts of the work were presented at a meeting organized by the UNRISD at Dubrovnik in the summer of 1990 just before that breath­ taking medieval city tasted the fruits of another grand venture in state-formation and nation-building that sought to sacrifice the ver­ nacular at the altar of the global and the modern. We have gained much from the comments and suggestions of participants at that meet­ ing. Another part of the work was presented at the Wellfleet Con­ ference in the autumn of 1993 where the participants, especially Robert J. Lifton and his colleagues at the Center for Violence and Human Survival, were a source of rich insights. This study was done at the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, a collaborative venture of scholars, activists and thinkers. It has gained much from the criticisms of G. P. Deshpande, Asghar Ali Engineer, Harsh Sethi and Yogendra Yadav, and from the help given by institutions such as the Centre for the Study of Deve­ loping Societies (Delhi), Setu (Ahmedabad), Institute of Development Studies (Jaipur), and the Indian People’s Front (Colonelgunj, UP). We are especially grateful to Pankaj Chaturvedi for assistance in field­ work and to Dr Binda for the map used in the section on the Jaipur riot in this book. Vaqqar ul Ahad, Shubh Mathur and Kavita Shrivastava commented on this section and voluntary groups that helped are PUCL, IPTA, Hindusthani Manch, Vishakha, Coordination Committee on Relief and Rehabilitation and Communal Harmony, All India Mus­ lim Women’s Welfare Organization, Rajasthan University Women’s Associations, Sampradayikata Virodhi Samiti, Prayas, and Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan. Others to whom we are particularly indebted are Ramkripal Singh, B. N. Das, Bhalubhai Desai, and Ramesh Parmer. But above all, we are beholden to C. V. Subba Rao, gifted human rights activist, for his detailed suggestions and critical com­ ments; many parts of the present version of the book have improved

P reface

xi

enormously due to his painstaking notes. Subba Rao died when the book was in press. It is to the memory of Laldas and Subba Rao that this work is dedicated. One final word of apology. This is a collaborative work done by four independent, self-willed persons who differ in significant ways in their approach to the problem handled in this book. These dif­ ferences are sometimes reflected in the book. We have not tried to hide them in the belief that what binds us together is a common commitment to a more humane society in South Asia, a conviction that professional and academic boundaries will have to be crossed to make sense of the problem, and the belief that the social pathologies in this part of the world will have to be grappled with on the basis of the inner strengths of the civilization as expressed in the ways of life of its living carriers. Our attempt has been to make this a straightforward narrative woven around a reportage on Ayodhya that would allow for a glimpse of the sacred city at three critical moments in its life. It is meant not so much for specialists researching ethnic violence as for intellectuals and activists trying to combat mass violence in the Southern societies unencumbered by the conceptual categories popular in the civilized world. We are told that there are at least 2,500 potential nationalities in the world waiting to stake their claim to full nationhood. Maybe that is one way of looking at the problem. We have tried to show in the following pages that the idea of such nationhood is not a space-andtime-independent mode of self-affirmation and that it may have to be built, as it has been in the case of India, on the ruins of one’s civilizational selfhood. It is too early to say whether the effort will be successful. For the fastidious reader, we should clarify that for easier reading we have avoided all diacritical marks except a (as in palm) and f (as in deep). In the case of proper names, diacritical marks have been done away with altogether (Rath Yatra though otherwise yatra}. We have also tried to be faithful to the local languages rather than to Sanskrit. Hence, Rath and not Ratha, Ram and not Rama.

Seeing Ravan riding a chariot and Ram chariotless, Vibhishan was worried.... Touching Ram’s feet, he asked af­ fectionately, ‘Lord, chariotless and barefooted, how will you vanquish such a brave and powerful adversary?’ Ram the all-m erciful replied, ‘Listen friend. The chariot that leads to victory is of another kind. Valour and fortitude are the wheels of the chariot; truthfulness and virtuous conduct are its banner; strength, discretion, self-restraint and benevolence are its four horses, har­ nessed with the cords of forgiveness, compassion and equanimity.... There is no other way of victory than this, my friend, whoever has this righteous chariot, has no enemy to con­ quer anywhere.’ —Tlilsi, ‘Lankakanda’, Ramcharitamanas

CHAPTER ONE

I.

t h e b e g in n in g

he temple town of Ayodhya is situated on the bank of the river Saryu, some six miles from the city of Faizabad in east­ ern Uttar Pradesh or UP Ayodhya is a sacred city. Its name suggests a place where battles cannot or do not take place. Tradition says that it is the birthplace of Lord Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu. According to the 1991 census Ayodhya has about 41,000 residents; it is a part of the Faizabad urban conglomerate which has a popula­ tion of about 1,77,000. Ayodhya being a pilgrimage town, such es­ timates can only be rough. The number of its residents constantly fluctuates. It is as difficult to guess the number of temples the city has. Estimates by local residents usually range between three and five thousand, though many mention figures around six thousand and a few mention figures close to ten thousand. As in a few other temple towns of India, the temples in Ayodhya have been places of residence for its inhabitants. Till some decades ago, it is said, nearly all the inhabitants of the city stayed in these temples. Even now, a huge majority does so. Probably as a result, the style of the city is clearly influenced by its religious status; it is markedly Vaishnava. Daniel Gold begins his analysis of organized Hinduism with the following comment on the city:

T

Ayodhya has ... managed to escape the chaotic excitement and hucksterism that comes with the worst excesses of the pilgrim trade. To the jaded re­ searcher of traditional Hindu life, it can seem an unusually peaceful place, with visitors and residents calmly following their customary pursuits in the shops and temples throughout the town. Only once during my several sojourns there in 1980 and 1981 was an attempt made to draw me into a charged religious situation—and this by no traditional pilgrim guide.1 'Daniel Gold, ‘Organized Hinduism: From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation’,

2

Creating a Nationality

Unlike the famous temples in some other Indian cities, Ayodhya temples are open to all— Hindus and non-Hindus, Brahmans and ‘un­ touchables’, believers and non-believers. There are at least two temples that have been constructed by Muslims.2 One of them is still managed by a Muslim. A fairly large number of temples, according to their priests, have benefited from land grants and tax exemptions given by Ayodhya’s erstwhile Shia Nawabs and British rulers and some of the most famous temples have been built on land donated specifically for that purpose by Muslim aristocrats. Many temples enthusiastically show their visitors documents relating to land grants given by Muslim officials during the times of the Nawabs in return for rituals performed by the priests of the temples. Hanumangarhi, for instance, was built with the help of a land grant from Nawab Safdar Jang (1739-54) to the mahant or abbot of Nirvani akhadd, Abhayramdas, and Khaki akhada was established on the basis of another land grant from Nawab Shuja-ud-Daulah.3 Peter van der Veer goes so far as to say that Ayodhya became an important pilgrimage centre in the eighteenth century not as a result of the removal of interference by the Nawabs but, on the contrary, as a result of the patronage of the court of the Nawabs.4 According to the belief of some local Hindus, the city of Ayodhya itself was gifted to one Darshan Singh by the Muslim nawab of Lucknow to honour god Shankara. Some priests say that the city was given as a gift by the Emperor Babar to the Acharyas, a Vaishnava sect. And there is at least one instance when a Muslim philanthropist donated his all for the founding of a temple and lived the rest of his life on the food and apparel provided by the temple itself. There are other forms of interweaving of pieties and communities, too. Even today, despite the bitterness of the last eight years, the flowers offered for worship in the Ayodhya temples are almost all grown by Muslims. The Muslims still weave the garlands used in the temple and produce everything necessary for dressing the icons in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds), Fundamentalism Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) pp. 531—93; see p. 531. ^ e sentiments are reciprocated; there still survive in the region imambadas owned by Hindus. 3Peter van der Veer, Gods on Earth: The Management o f Religious Ex­ perience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre (New Delhi: Ox­ ford University Press, 1989), pp. 143-4. 4Ibid„ p. 37.

T h e B e g in n in g

3

preparatory to worship. Until some years ago, the making of the crowns of the gods was the near-monopoly of Muslim master craftsmen such as Rahmat Sonar and Nannu Sonar; the thrones for the gods are even today made by the likes of Balam Mistri, a highly respected Muslim carpenter. All this is not strange, some say. After all Ayodhya is located in the cultural region called Avadh, a region that has been remarkably free from communal or inter-religious tension and strife in recent times. There has always been in the high culture of Avadh a certain mix of courtly sophistication, pastoral earthiness and, one might add, an androgynous creative style. To this culture the Nawabs of Avadh, who came into their own during the decline of the Mughal empire, contributed greatly. To them, respect for the faith of the majority of their subjects made both moral and political sense. During their rule the administrative control of Avadh was mostly in the hands of Hindu Khatri and Kayastha families; even the army was dependent on the regiments of Dashanami Nagas and, at times, a majority of the generals were Hindus. Talking of the reign of one of the Nawabs, Asaf-ud-Daulah (1775-93), van der Veer says: ‘It is not difficult to conclude that ... the nawab i Avadh was as much a Hindu state as it was a Muslim one.’5 Most of the older temples of Ayodhya were built in the eighteenth century under the rule of the Nawabs. The last Nawab of Avadh, Wajid Ali Shah (1847-56), is often mentioned as a typical product of the region; many consider him a king only Avadh could have produced. The Nawab was a scholar, musician, poet and dancer deep­ ly influenced by the Vaishnava lifestyle and legends (he himself sometimes danced in the role of Krishna). When he was deposed by Lord Dalhousie in the mid-nineteenth century, these ‘unkingly’ quali­ ties were used as a justification for his unceremonious dismissal. Many modern Indians, too, saw and—like film director Satyajit Ray in Shatranj ke Khilari—continue to see his fall as just desserts for his effeminacy, feudal decadence, and poor grasp of realpolitik.6 In such a culture, Ram might not have been a national hero, but he certainly was a cultural hero. Historian Bipan Chandra tells us that in parts of UP the standard greeting used by both Hindus and 5van der Veer, Gods on Earth, p. 144. 6Satyajit Ray, Shatranj ke Khilari (Calcutta: D. K. Films Enterprise, 1977), producer: Suresh Jindal, script: Satyajit Ray, story: Premchand.

Creating a Nationality

4

M uslim s until the 1920s was ‘Ja i Ram ji' (victory to Ram). We found that in Ayodhya, even till 1991, despite what had happened during the previous few years, the M uslims continued to use the salutation ‘Ja i Ram ji ki' or lJai Siya Ram ' (victory to Sita and Ram). Ayodhya, however, is not all pastoral innocence. There have been Hindu-M uslim conflicts even in the earlier centuries centring on the Ram janm abhum i, which the Hindus claim ed, and H anum angarhi, • • 7 r . which the M uslims did. (These conflicts were obviously interspersed by periods o f mutual accommodation. The first European visitor to the place, William Finch, for instance, found that even in the com ­ pound of the newly built Babri masjid, Hindu worship was possible between 1608 and 1611).8 Today, the priests of Ayodhya have their usual proportion of the corrupt and the lecherous. Some of them have also developed criminal connections. The succession of a m ahant is no longer a simple, peaceful affair. Politics and money play an im­ portant part in it. Electoral politics has also entered Ayodhya in a big way. There have been local elections in the region since the latter part of the nineteenth century but, since 1952, the town has been a part of the Faizabad Parliamentary and Assembly constituencies, where a num ­ ber o f castes have tried over the years to translate their numerical strength into political presence. In the Faizabad Parliamentary con­ stituency and district, Brahmans, Ahirs and the previously untouch­ able Cham ars are numerically the strongest. When the geographically sm aller Faizabad tehsil or pargana is taken into account, political com petition seems to involve, apart from these three castes, also the Pasis. In the Ayodhya Assembly constituency though, the Chamars have been much less important. But even in an open polity, political success is not a matter o f only numbers; it also depends on local pow er bases and alliances. The most consistent competition in Ayod­ hya and the area around it has been between the Brahmans and the Ahirs, but it has crucially involved a number of other communities, notably the Kurmis and the M uslims.9 •

i

•

.

7van der Veer, Gods on Earth, pp. 38-9. "Ibid. ^ o r a comprehensive account of the politics of the Faizabad district, see Harold Gould, ‘Modem Politics in an Indian District: “Natural Selection” and “Selective Co- Optation”’, in Richard Sisson and Ramashray Roy (eds), Diver­ sity and Dominance in Indian Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1990), Vol. 1: Changing Bases o f Congress Support, pp. 217-48.

T h e B e g in n in g

5

As a result of this long exposure to competitive politics, the denominational and caste divisions among the priests of the Ayodhya temples have now in many cases acquired political meanings and factionalized even the supporters of individual parties. With politics have come the media, new kinds of entrepreneurs and, in recent years, larger contingents of police and paramilitary forces. To the older divisons and hostilities among sects have been added new divisions and hostilities based on party allegiances, factional alignments and economic interests. On 30 October 1990, a few thousand men, largely members or sym­ pathizers of ultra-Hindu organizations belonging to the Sangh parivar or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) family, mainly the RSS itself, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), Bajrang Dal, and their common electoral face, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) converged here in response to a call given by a militant section of their leadership to liberate.the ‘real’ and ‘only’ site of Lord Ram’s birth. This site, they claimed, was the same on which stood the Babri masjid of Ayodhya and where an ancient Ram temple built by Maharaja Vikramaditya had been dese­ crated and destroyed in 1528 by Mir Baqi, a noble in the Mughal Emperor Babar’s court. There was, at the time this story begins, a relatively modest temple within the compound of—actually telescoped into— the masjid called the R am janm abhum i tem ple, w ith its garbha griha, sanctum sanctorum, located within a part of the masjid.10 It co-existed with a number of other temples claiming the same status near about the same place and at least two of them had traditionally competed, more or less on an equal footing, with the now-controversial temple for devotees, offerings, and fame. lwWithin the compound of the mosque there was also a charming little temple called Sita-ki-Rasoi, Sita’s Kitchen, which was conveniently forgotten with the rising tempo of the Ram temple movement and its demand for a big temple and the demolition of the mosque. On the larger meaning o f this for­ getfulness, see Ramchandra Gandhi’s evocative account, written from the point o f view o f India’s spiritual traditions, Sita’s Kitchen: A Testimony o f Faith and Inquiry (New Delhi: Penguin, 1992). For the moment, we bypass the dishonesty and moral vacuity of the likes of Koenraad Elst (Ramjanmabhumi vs Babri Masjid: A Case Study in Hindu-Muslim Conflict, New Delhi: Voice of India, 1990) on this issue. In any case, they have been adequately answered by Gandhi in Sita’s Kitchen, see esp. pp. 108-9.

6

Creating a Nationality

To ‘liberate’ meant to pull down the existing structure of the Babri masjid and perform karseva, work as service or offering, to construct a Ram temple exactly at the same spot to avenge the injustice done to the Hindus in the past. At 12.02 PMthat day, a 300-strong vanguard of karsevaks representing the militant spirit of Hindutva—the early tw entieth-century expression for Hindu nationalism or political Hinduism— were marginally successful in their attempt to damage the mosque as thousands more cheered this act of ‘vengeance’.11 Five people were shot dead by the security forces at various spots in Ayodhya during the day. Two days later, on 2 November, another attempt was foiled, resulting in the death of nineteen people. But before we begin to tell that story, a brief digression on what we know about inter-religious strife in contemporary India.

II. T h e P a s t he incidence of communal riots has been increasing consistently in India over the last four decades. Available data show that the increase has been more than six-fold between 1954 and 1985 (Table 1). The annual casualties in such riots, too, have increased nearly ten-fold. Given the vagaries of official statistics, both figures are likely to be underestimates; this underestimation probably compensates for the growth in communal violence due to the country’s growing population. These incidents of violence in India are not distributed random ­ ly. A large proportion of them take place in six states—Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. In four states, they take place infrequently, some would say rarely. In ten other states, virtually no riot ever takes place, not only showing the difficulty of formulating propositions that can have pan-Indian applicability, but also the difficulty of relating such problems to the general contents of faith. After all, most of the ten states that are almost entirely peaceful are inhabited by the

11Karsevaks are those who offer karseva, worship through work. There is

no tradition o f karseva in Hinduism. No Hindu temple has ever been built through karseva. In much of Hindu India, the word did not even make any sense till recently. The idea and the term have been borrowed from Sikhism and, as a result, have meaning only for north Indians.

7

T h e P a st

Table 1 FREQUENCY AND CASUALTIES OF COMMUNAL INCIDENTS (1954-85) Year

Number o f incidents

Persons killed

Persons injured

1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985

84 75 82 58 40 42 26 92 60 61 1,070 173 144 198 346 519 528 321 240 242 248 205 169 188 230 304 421 319 470 500 476 525

34 24 35 12 7 41 14 108 43 26 1,919 34 45 251 133 673 298 103 69 72 87 33 39 36 110 261 372 196 238 1143 445 328

512 457 575 316 369 1344 262 593 348 489 2,053 758 467 880 1,309 2,702 1,607 1,263 1,056 1,318 1,123 890 794 1,122 1,853 2,379 2,691 2,631 3,025 3,652 4,836 3,665

SOURCE:

P. R. Rajgopal, Communal Violence in India (New Delhi: Uppal, 1987), pp. 16-17.

8

Creating a Nationality

FIGURE 1 DECADE-WISE RISE IN RATES OF COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN INDIA (CASUALTIES PER 1 MILLION)

49.82

50 45 40 35 30 25

20

24.45

22.45 16.5

15

^

10 5

0

6

1.76 0.7 T7 TL 1954-59 t / / \ Incidents

39

^

1960-69

6.59 6.62

4.87

1970-79

Persons killed

S

3

1980-85 Persons inured

same religious comm unities, and at least two o f them have undergone communal holocausts in 1947 in which nearly one million died. Within the ten states in which the bulk of riots take place, the great majority o f the violent incidents takes place in the cities. Accor­ ding to Gopal Krishna, of the 7,964 incidents of communal violence in the period 1961-70, only 32.55 per cent took place in rural India though roughly 80 per cent of Indians lived in villages at the time (see Table 2).12 Data for recent years are not available but P. R. Rajagopal says that 46 per cent of communal incidents in 1985 were rural.13 That may have been an aberrant year; there are indications l2Gopal Krishna, ‘Communal Violence in India: A Study o f Communal Disturbance in Delhi’, Economic and Political Weekly, 12 January 1985, 20, pp. 62-74; see p. 64. l3Rajgopal, Communal Violence, p. 20.

T h e P a st

9

that rioting in villages is growing at a much slower rate than in the cities, except probably in eastern India, though it has been increasing, especially in villages close to cities. However, if one goes by the place where riots originate, cities reportedly account for about 90 per cent of the riots even today. Table 1 and Figure 1 give the reader an idea of the growing scale of communal violence in India. These figures can, however, be read another way. To be fair to the reader and to the Indian experience with inter-religious violence, one must at least mention the alternative, more optimistic interpretation here. The casualty figures mentioned above do not add up to the total number of homicides in a respectable North American metropolitan city.14 Though in recent tim es these figures have sometimes risen dramatically— 1990 and 1992, for in­ stance, were particularly bad years—the Indian figures still remain remarkably small when viewed in the context of the nearly 900 million who inhabit the country.15 For instance, the other large, multi-ethnic, open society, the United States, though one-third of India in popula­ tion, had in 1990 more than 30,000 cases of homicide (about twenty times the number of people killed in communal violence in India). There is also the possibility that the Indian over-concern with communal violence is at least partly a result o f the over-concern with communal violence in the national media, particularly in the publi­ cations that cater to the north-lndian audience— so at least one would suspect from the recent exploratory work done by a journalist.16 We hope that those who would prefer to read the following account as an exercise in qualified optimism will find in it reasons for optimism. The most influential explanations of communal riots in India are the ones that emphasize communal ideology. Most people are convinced, 14We are grateful to Otto Feinstein for bringing this to our notice at a meeting on ethnic conflicts at Dubrovnik (6 -1 0 June 1991). 15Even when one looks at the spate o f separatist movements in contem­ porary India— a major source of anxiety for Indian political leaders and the country’s well-wishers— the total population involved in such movements turns out to be not more than roughly 25 million out o f 900. 16Sukumar Muralidharan, ‘Mandal, Mandir aur Masjid: “Hindu” Communalism and the Crisis of the State’, in K.N. Panikkar, ed., Comunalism in India: History, Politics and Culture (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991), pp. 196218, esp. pp. 206-18. Muralidharan has, however, an entirely different ex­ planation for this difference. That interpretation, derived from his ideological posture, is not relevant here.

10

Creating a Nationality

Table 2 INCIDENTS OF COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN RURAL AND URBAN INDIA 1961-70 (PER CENT) Year

Incidents

1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970

439 211 138 2,115 487 573 1,471 475 1,126 929

34.9 52.1 49.3 41.2 29.0 13.1 26.9 25.7 22.5 43.4

65.1 47.9 50.7 58.8 71.0 86.9 73.1 74.3 77.5 56.6

Total

7,964

32.5

67.5

Rural (%)

Urban (%)

Source: Adapted from Krishna, ‘Communal Violence in India’, p. 64.

like Rajgopal, that ‘communalism as an ideology is the ultimate 17 source of all communal riots’. As with some of the major inter­ pretations of racism offered in North America and Europe in the im­ mediate post-World-War-II period, such as the trend-setting work on the authoritarian personality by T. W. Adorno and his associates in the early 1950s,18 most modern social thinkers and activists in India have used communal ideology, if not as the ultimate source, at least as a major independent variable in their explanations o f communal riots. In fact, this is the modernist explanation of ethnic violence in the country.19 l7Rajgopal, Communal Violence, p. 20. 18T.W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levenson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Norton, 1950). 19Some examples are Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia, and Bipan Chandra, Communalism and the Writing o f Indian H istory (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1969); most of the papers included in Asghar Ali Engineer (ed.), Communal Riots in Post-Independence India (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 2nd ed., 1991); and S. Gopal (ed.), The Anatomy o f a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhumi Issue (New Delhi: Viking, 1991). For even neater examples, see Akhilesh Kumar, Communal Riots in India: Study o f Social and Economic Aspects (New Delhi: Commonwealth, 1991); and Nirmala Srinivasan, Prisoners o f Faith: A View From Within (New Delhi: Sage, 1989).

T h e P a st

11

Many of those who use western studies in fascist personality as their theoretical and operational frame are not psychologists. Their practice, therefore, has been to offset this emphasis on ideology against a straightforward socio-economic or class profile of the prota­ gonists and to ignore both the core fantasies and psychological defen­ ces behind communal ideology and the cultural links between the ideology and the social background of the ideologue, as if the stress on ideology was not fully acceptable even to those researching the ideology and had to be forgotten as soon as possible. T his am bivalent fascination with com m unal ideology could have many sources. First, there is the fact that all political parties that have espoused the ‘H indu’ or ‘Islam ic’ causes have been heavily ideological parties. For various reasons, they have sought to plead their case prim arily on ideological grounds. One reason could be that the stress on ideology m akes organized violence against victim com m unities m ore palatable to the social sectors having a disproportionate access to, or control over, the state machinery, the judiciary and the media. As a result, those who oppose such ideology have also, over the years, come to con­ centrate on ideology as the prime m over o f communal violence. Even this book, though it tries to break out of the straitjacket, is itself implicitly structured at many places by the ideological con­ cerns of the main protagonists. Second, communal ideology, though tinged with the language of religion and tradition, is usually crude, offensive and violent. That mix makes excellent copy for the news media and manages to get wide coverage. And when given massive publicity, such ideologies can be used as triggering mechanisms for communal violence. So both the spectators and the organizers of such violence come to ac­ quire a morbid fascination with ideology. What is often purely politi­ cal or economic is thus given an artificially moral stature, even sanctity. Also, the emphasis on ideology in this instance gives outsiders, especially perhaps modem scholars, the feeling that they have entered the mind of the actor and attained mastery over the problem posed by the actor. This presumed accessibility, as we shall show later in this book, comes partly from the core concerns that communal ideologies share with the ideologies of modernity, including that of the internal critiques of modernity such as Marxism. Perhaps this is the reason why many interpretations of communal ideologies in India

12

Creating a Nationality

so easily become a play of liminalities and cross-projections and an attempt by modernists to set up as an Other that which is an essential constituent of the self. Paradoxically, this emphasis on ideology is often the forte of intellectuals who otherwise refuse to view human subjectivity as the prime mover of social behaviour in other areas of life, and who see com m unalism as part of a historical process, m oving through social evolutionary stages. The em phasis on ideology often sits uneasily upon the presumption that societies are like biological species, moving from a more primitive stage encoded in tradi­ tion towards a modem, secular humanism that would de-ethnicize all 20 communities. Such evolutionism sees communalism as defining an earlier stage of social development or as a throwback or regression to such a stage. The expectation is that with the forces o f secular individualism gaining ground, communalism will die an unnatural but deserved death. Communal ideology will then enter the textbooks of history and politics as a marker of a transient historical stage in which Indian society was once caught.21 It is against this background that one must examine the secularist consensus that modem India has built and brought to bear upon the communal problem. This is a consensus which now extends beyond the boundaries of the country. Much of the work on communalism in South Asia is contextualized by the ideology of secularism. 2For a recent example, see Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen, Khaki Shorts Saffron Flags (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993). 2‘This attitude is only an internalized version of the secular evolutionalism that defines western attitudes towards the non-West. Secularism once gave Western man and woman an assurance about their past that legitimated the extension of political and economic control over all traditional cultures and societies. The patterns of life o f all traditional societies represented stages of human social development the West had transcended in its history.... All that the secular outlook admitted was a distinction in the form of domination: naked force as in chattel slavery: or benign upliftment of the inferior according to the dictates of the master. — Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Distorted Imagination: Les­ sons from the Rushdie Affair (London: Grey Seal and Kuala Lumpur: Berita, 1990), p. 243.

T h e P a st

13

In recent years, though, some have critiqued the intellectual and cultural limits of such an approach to ethnic violence. Empirically, too, the approach has not fared well.22 As the reader might have noticed, the data presented at the beginning of this section are not compatible with secularist dogmas. Indeed, they seem to support the proposition that as the modernization and secularization of India has progressed, communal violence too has increased. It is in fact a major paradox for the secular Indian that religious and ethnic riots have now become one of the most secularized areas of Indian life; money, politics and organized interests play a much more important part in them than do religious passions.2 Communal violence in India varies with geographical areas; it tends to be concentrated in cities and, within cities, in industrial areas, where modern values are more con­ spicuous and dominant. As Asghar Ali Engineer in a moment of absent-mindedness puts it, communalism is an urban phenomenon, whose roots may be traced to the middle and lower classes; peasants, w orkers, and upper class élites are seldom affected by com22T. N. Madan, ‘Secularism in its Place’, The Journal o f Asian Studies, 1987, 46(4), pp. 747-59; and ‘Whither Indian Secularism?’, Modern Asian Studies, July 1993, 27(3), pp. 667-97; Ashis Nandy, ‘An Anti-Secularist Manifesto’, Seminar, October 1985, (314), pp. 14-24; and ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’, Alternatives, 1988, 13(3), pp. 177-94; and Don Miller, ‘Religion, Politics and its Sacred State’, The Reason o f Metaphor: A Study in Politics (New Delhi: Sage, 1992), pp. 159-80. Also, less directly, K. Raghavendra Rao, ‘Secularism, Communalism and Democracy in India: Some Theoretical Issues’, in Bidyut Chakrabarty (ed.), Secularism and Indian Polity (New Delhi: Segment Book, 1990), pp. 40-7; Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction o f Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Rustom Barucha, A Question o f Faith (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1992). For a critique of this position, see Prakash Chandra Upadhyay, ‘The Politics of Indian Secularism: Its Practitioners, Defenders and Critics’, Oc­ casional Papers on Perspectives on Indian Development II (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1990), mimeo; and ‘The Politics of Indian Secularism’, Modern Asian Studies, 1992, 26(4), pp. 8 1 5 -5 3 . A spirited, if conservative, constitutionalist reply to the criticisms of secularism has been given by Upendra Baxi, ‘The Struggle for the Redefinition of Secularism in India: Some Preliminary Reflections’, Social Action, JanuaryMarch 1994, 44(1), pp. 13-30. ^Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery o f Religious Tolerance’.

Creating a Nationality

14

Table 3 CAUSES OF COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN INDIA, 1961-70 (N= 841) Causes o f Violence

Per Cent

Religious causes Festivity/celebrations

26.75

Cow slaughter

14.39

Desecration of religious places

4.04

Disputes over graveyards

2.14

Subtotal

47.32

Secular causes Private property disputes

19.26

Quarrels over women

16.89

Personal transactions, enmities, etc.

16.53

Subtotal

52.68

Total

SOURCE: Adapted

100.00 from Krishna, ‘Communal Violence in India’, p. 66.

munalism. Though recent experience confutes Engineer’s engaging faith in workers, on the whole his formulation holds. As telling are the causes of communal violence between 1961 and 1970 identified by the Home Ministry, Government of India. They show that the majority of riots during the period were trig­ gered not by religious but by secular conflicts (Table 3). If one excludes from consideration Bihar— a state chronically prone to rural violence, where 33.17 per cent of the riots over religious m atters took place, almost all of them in villages— the trend be­ comes even clearer. In contrast to those who emphasize communal ideology, there are the scholars and human rights activists who emphasize structural 24Asghar Ali Engineer, ‘The Ideological Background of Communal Riots’, quoted in Hussain Shaheen, ‘Software and Hardware of Communalism’ in Ashghar Ali Engineer and Moin Shakir (eds), Communalism in India (Delhi: Ajanta, 1985), pp. 82-7, see p. 85. Actually, Bipan Chandra in his Communalism in Modern India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1984) was one of the first to draw attention to the modern connection o f communal violence but, caught in the progressivist discourse, failed to recognize or pursue the implications o f his own formulation.

15

T h e P a st

Table 4 PROPORTION OF MUSLIMS IN RIOT-PRONE STATES State Andhra Pradesh Bihar

Proportion o f Muslims 8.5 14.1

Gujarat

8.5

Maharashtra

9.2

Rajasthan

7.3

Uttar Pradesh

15.9

India

11.4

SOURCE:

Census o f India: Household Population by Religion o f Head o f Household (New Delhi: Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, 1984), pp. 2-5.

factors such as the human geography of Hindu-Muslim violence. The focus is usually on the spatial concentration of Muslims. (In recent times, some Hindu chauvinist elements, too, have adopted this argu­ ment about the concentration of Muslims being a major cause of communal clashes.) Muslims are the largest religious minority in India; they form roughly 11 per cent of the Indian population and constitute the w orld’s second largest Muslim community. Even Pakistan, which claims to be the home of all subcontinental Muslims, houses fewer Muslims. Only Indonesia, with 153 million Muslims, boasts of a larger settlement of Muslims. However, they are not distributed ran­ domly in India. At the state level, this does not make a difference. The concen­ tration of Muslims in the six riot-prone states of India is not above the national mean (see Table 4). But the relationship changes when one moves from the level of the state to that of the city where more than 90 per cent of the riots still reportedly originate. Table 5 suggests that cities which have a higher rate of communal violence tend to have larger proportions of Muslims. One possibility is that the places where the M uslims are numeri­ cally strong, and can take advantage of competitive democratic politics to assert their rights, are more prone to communal violence. In such places, it is probably possible to mobilize larger sections of the

Creating a Nationality

16

Table 5 PERCENTAGE OF HINDUS AND MUSLIMS IN SOME CHRONICAL­ LY RIOT-PRONE CITIES25 Cities

Hindus

Muslims

Hyderabad

59.9

36.9

Bhiwandi

41.5

52.4

Moradabad

51.2

47.4

Aligarh

63.8

34.5

Ahmedabad

78.2

15.3

Nalanda (Biharsharif)

61.1

38.7

Urban India

76.5

16.3

majority com m unity against the ‘upp ity ’ m inorities, and to use the stereotype of socio-econom ically aggressive ethnic groups taking advantage of their political clout to pose a threat to the social order ‘naturally’ dominated by the majority. There is scattered support for such a form ulation in the rep o rts on riots in places like Moradabad, Aligarh, Ahmedabad, Etawah and now Bombay. Often riots in such cities do not remain confined to random acts of violence and end up in heavily damaging the socio-economic life-support sys­ tems of the Muslims.27 The structural factors involved in communal violence do not negate the role o f stereotypes, folk sociologies, and subjective justifications for communal violence at the community level. The two kinds of predisposing factors often feed on each other. For example, in some metropolitan cities where Muslims form a sizeable proportion of the population, large sections of Muslim youth are unemployed or 25Adapted from Rajgopal, Communal Violence, p. 19. As can be seen from Tables 3 and 4, while Muslims are roughly 11.4 per cent of the Indian popula­ tion, they are about 16.3 per cent of urban India. 26See the Pioneer editorial quoted in Section IV for a neat example o f this strand o f consciousness. 27See for instance Ajay Singh, ‘Mafia Politics led to Etah Violence’, The Times o f India, 9 December 1990; and Asghar Ali Engineer, Delhi-Meerut Riots. Also Radhika Ramaseshan. ‘A Date with Destiny’, The Pioneer, 23 March 1992. In 1986 at Ahmedabad, for the first time, the Akhil Hind Sanatan Samaj gave a call to boycott Muslim shops; some pamphlets openly suggested that the Muslims should be ‘killed’ economically. See chapter 4.

T h e P a st

17

underemployed either due to poor access to modern skills, including modern education (borne out by available data) or due to social discrim ination (more difficult to document for low-paid jobs and self-employed people). Many of these youth, therefore, are easy re­ cruits for criminal gangs and ‘vocations’ such as smuggling, illicit distillation, extortion and drug-pushing. This allows negative stereo­ types of the minorities fuller play in such cities, and the fear and anger against urban crime strengthen communal hostilities. In many instances, criminals from Muslim communities precipitate riots by the very nature of their activities as well as by their attempts to redeem themselves in the eyes of their community by aggressively taking up the com m unity’s cause. There is some indirect support for the proposition in Krishna’s data which show that as much as 52.68 per cent of cases of communal riots are directly triggered by personal conflicts of various kinds (Table 3). While such form ulations are seen as politically incorrect and have not been explored by scholars and human rights activists fear­ ful o f com prom ising their secular credentials, they have been system atically used by grass roots workers of Hindu nationalist parties and organizations. The stereotype of Muslim aggressive­ ness, the alleged tendency of fanatic lumpen proletariat elements among the M uslim s to precipitate communal clashes, and their dis­ proportionate involvem ent in urban crime (often because of their lesser access to the usual channels of employment), are all popular themes in the m obilization that precedes a communal riot and in the post fa cto justifications offered for the consum ption of the newspaper-reading public. The mobilization that precedes communal violence is also im­ portant because it is now a part of ‘normal’ politics. Few social pro­ cesses have contributed as handsomely to communal violence as the demands of competitive mass politics. These demands have turned communal violence into another form of organized politics. After all, communal attitudes by themselves do not lead to violence in a politi­ cally ill-organized society. The violence has to be specifically or­ ganized by groups keen to politically cash in on the fall out of such violence. Those who organize the violence or encash it politically are not necessarily communal. They can even be fully secular in their calculations and are often even in league with politicians of the

18

Creating a Nationality

victim com m unities.As Engineer graphically comments, ‘the politi­ cians are the principal and anti-social elements, at their beck and call, the subsidiary agents in promoting and inciting communal violence.’28 As we have already said, communal riots have become over the years one of the most secularized aspects of Indian public life. Though it does have support in Indian experience, one must hasten to add that, for long, one variant of this interpretation has served as a staple of mainstream Indian nationalism and has also heavily in­ fluenced left-wing political theory. The main consumers of official nationalism and mainstream left politics have been the urban middle class, which is increasingly ambivalent towards the mass politics threatening to marginalize the class. Any interpretation that even par­ tially hides the complicity of the middle class in communal violence has a natural appeal for the Indian nationalists and radicals. Starting as the widespread belief that communal clashes were the direct or indirect products of the colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’, this inter­ pretation has acquired a new slant in independent India due to the middle-class hostility to competitive, democratic, mass politics. In­ stead of the colonial power, it is now the interests of competing poli­ tical parties, factions, or local leadership which are seen to create communal vote banks and, in the process, to mobilize communal 29 sentiments and contribute to communal violence. Some analysts see a few communal parties as the main culprits; others see all parties as responsible to a greater or lesser degree, for all ofinthem now have to compete to win or maintain unstable vote banks. Surely one o f the root causes of ethnic violence in a diverse society like India is the entry of large sections of the population into what political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj calls an enumerative world 28A sgh ar A li E n g in eer, ‘B o m b a y -B h iw a n d i R io ts— A N a tio n a l Perspective’, in Engineer and Shakir, Communalism in India, pp. 205-14, see p. 205. Also Dilip Simeon, ‘Power at any Price is Communalism’s Worst Legacy’, The Tunes o f India, 26 March 1990; and A. D. Bhogle, ‘Communal Violence as a Political Weapon’, The Independent, 14 December 1990. 29It is said that the internal party report o f the Communist Party of India on the great Partition riots, 1946-7, represented this line o f argument. Inter­ estingly the BJP’s position on communal violence is the same. Only it paints the Hindus as the victims o f political parties exploiting religion for partisan purposes. The BJP calls such exploitation ‘minorityism’. A recent analysis of this part of the story is in Rajni Kothari, ‘Challenge Before Nation: Dealing with Rabid Populism’, The Times o f India, 22 January 1993.

T he P a st

19

where numbers matter. The entry itself expands the scope for communal politics. Earlier in Indian society everyone was in a ‘minority’ and no one’s status as a member o f a minority was ‘fixed’, in that one was invariably a member of more than one minority. Now, with the borders of many communities getting less permeable, the expression ‘minority’ is acquiring a clear-cut and rigid meaning. We shall see in this essay that this formulation has some relevance for the present narrative. Finally, there is a growing belief that the changing contours of Indian nationalism and the concept of nation-state have contributed heavily to the growth of communal hostilities in the country. This belief is sustained by the clear difference between the standardized concepts of nationalism and nation-state—which nineteenth century India bor­ rowed from Europe and which, since 1947, its modernist élite has applied uncritically to all situations— and the traditional Indian con­ cepts of allegiance to one’s soil and the traditional view of the state as a protector of a social order that is expected to elicit different levels of allegiance from different sections of the people. The modem ideas of nationalism and state have sanctioned the concept of a ‘mainstream national culture’ that is fearful of diversi­ ties, intolerant of dissent unless it is cast in the language of the m ainstream , and panicky about any self-assertion or search for autonomy by ethnic groups. This culture promotes a vision of India that is culturally unitary and a belief that the legitimacy of the modem state can be maintained only on the basis of a steamrolling concept of nationalism that promises to eliminate all fundamental cultural differences within the polity.31 Occasionally, modem nationalism and the modem state can make compromises with ethnicity or religion on political grounds, but that is seen as only a temporary compromise. 3,A succinct discussion of this part of the story is in Tariq Banuri, ‘Official Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict and C ollective Violence’, Symposium on Nationalism Revisited, Goethe Institute, Colombo, 1994, mimeo. See a dis­ cussion of the culture o f the state within which this belief is located in Ashis Nandy, ‘Culture, State, and the Rediscovery of Indian Politics’, in Iqbal Khan (ed.), Fresh Perspectives on India and Pakistan: Essays on Economics, Politics and Culture (Oxford: Bougainvillaea Books, 1985, and Lahore: Book Traders, 1987), pp. 304-18; and ‘The State’, in Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed, 1992), pp. 264-74.

20

Creating a Nationality

For both these institutions are essentially secular in their ideological thrust. It is in this context that one must read the proposition of Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies that fundamentalism is a direct creation of secularism— ‘the last refuge from the abuse and ridicule of the secular m ind’ and ‘a grotesque projection of the worst nightmares of secularism on the world stage’. 2 Both these ideas of state and nationalism have as their model the pre-war European colonial state, as it is remembered by large sections of the Indian élite. That remembered state underwrites the idea of an imperial, native state that would act as the ultimate arbiter among ‘traditionally warring’ communities in the country and ruthlessly sup­ press religious and ethnic separatism.33 A case can, however, be made that while in India these concepts of state and nationalism were un­ derwritten by imperialism, the colonial state itself was, in its actual style of governance, more open-ended on communal and ethnic issues and often borrowed much from the traditional Indian concepts of statecraft and Indian style of configuring political loyalties. The need to survive in an alien environment forced the British-Indi an state to compromise its European principles and grant greater play to the surviving memories and expectations from the state in India. The successor regime did not feel pressed to make such qualifications. Those who consider the ideas of nation-state and nationalism themselves to be major contributory factors in communal violence believe that the ideas have, over the years, reduced the range of op­ tions within Indian public life and made it more difficult to accom­ modate or cope with the grievances, demands, and anxieties of the different ethnic groups. First, if all ethnicity is seen as dangerous and all ethnic demands are seen as falling outside the range of normal politics, they are naturally sought to be contained with the aid of the coercive power of the state. This in turn leads to deeper communal divides and to the perception of the state as essentialy hostile to the interests of the aggrieved communities. Also, the state itself often 32Sardar and Davies, Distorted Imagination, p. 242. 33Rabindranath Tagore, one o f the major builders o f Indian and Bangladeshi national self-consciousness, was also one of the first to draw attention to the problems associated with such uncritical import of categories. His novel, Ghare Bàire specifically relates communal violence to the adoption of the European ideas of state and nationality. See Ashis Nandy, The Il­ legitimacy o f Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics o f Self (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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becomes partisan in communal conflicts, not necessarily because of communal considerations—even though that also sometimes happens— but because of electoral and other secular considerations. In either case, the state is unable to prevent such violence.34 Those given to this way of looking at the communal situation in India emphasize political processes, both within and outside the state sector, as vital linkages between contesting religious communities, and between such commu­ nities and the state. They are convinced that communal problems can be contained primarily through politics.35 For democratic politics al­ lows the resistance to communal violence that exists at the level of communities to assert itself. From such a perspective Indian secularism, given its strong statist connections, is itself a part of the disease. In the contemporary world, the ideology of the state and official nationalism are not isolated entities. They are embedded in a world­ view that systematically fosters the breakdown of traditional com­ m u n ity ties and the tra d itio n a l so c io -ec o n o m ic and c u ltu ral interdependence of communities. Inter-community ties in societies like India have come to be increasingly mediated through distant, highly centralized, impersonal administrative and political structures, through new consumption patterns and priorities set up by the process of development, and through reordered traditional gender relation­ ships and ideologies which now conform more and more to the needs of a centralized market system and the needs of the masculinized culture of the modern state. These issues have remained mostly un­ explored in existing works on ethnic violence in India. Only from ^Random recent examples are People’s Union of Democratic Rights and People’s Union o f Civil Liberties, Who are the Guilty?: Report o f a Joint Inquiry into the Causes and Impact o f the Riots in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November (Delhi: PUDR and PUCL, 1984); Vikalp (published by the Sampradayikata Virodhi Andolan), January-March 1985; Asghar Ali Engineer, Delhi-Meerut Riots: Analysis, Compilation and Documentation (Delhi: Ajanta, 1988); and Hemlata Prabhu, PUCL Investigation Report: Jaipur Communal Riots (Jaipur: Rajasthan PUCL, n.d.); Ghanshyam Shah, ‘The 1969 Communal Riots in Ahmedabad: A Case Study’, in Engineer, Communal Riots, pp. 175— 208. 35Rajni Kothari, ‘Culture, Ethnicity and the State’, The Thatched Patio, April 1989, 2(2), pp. 22-6; and ‘Communalism: The New Face of Indian Democracy’, The State Against Democracy: In Search o f Humane Governance (Delhi: Ajanta, 1988), pp. 240-53; Ashis Nandy, ‘The Discreet Charms of Indian Terrorism’, Journal o f Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, March 1990, 28(1), pp. 25-43; and ‘Terrorism— Indian Style: The Birth of a Political Issue in a Populist Democracy’, Hull Papers in Politics (Hull: University o f Hull, 1991).

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the intermittent attention paid to such issues by such writers as Vandana Shiva and Helena Norberg-Hodge would one suspect that they have become tragically relevant to our times.36 The reasons for this scholarly blindness are not clear, but there are clues in works such as Tapan Raychaudhuri’s recent autobio­ graphical essay.37 Raychaudhuri, a professional historian fully com­ mitted to the dominant ideology of the state backed by the ideologies of progress and secularization, has to set up a formidable anti-self, part-comic and part-serious, through which only can he articulate, in quasi-anecdotal style, his powerful insights into the religious ‘divide’ in South Asia and its complex relationship with community life. Presumably these insights his professional self has to disown— as irra tio n a l, n o n -se cu la r, a h isto ric a l co m p ro m ises w ith n ativ e categories. He defends the enterprise, as the title of his book indi­ cates, as the memoirs of a senile gossip.38 We shall try in the next section to briefly narrate the build-up, course, organization, and ideology of the most important communal conflict in India today, the one centring on the Ramjanmabhumi, with refer­ ence to these broad formulations. However, the narrative will be guided by the implicit, as yet inadequately explored perspective that sees communal violence as a direct product of three processes: (1) the breakdown of traditional social and cultural ties crossing religious 36Vandana Shiva, The Violence o f Green Revolution (Penang: Consumers Association o f Penang, 1990); Helena Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), pp. 122-30. 37Tapan Raychaudhuri, Romanthan athaba Bhimratipraptar Paracharitacharcha (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1993); see esp. pp. 56-99. 3itSuch defensiveness is not unique to the social sciences. A similar defen­ sive structure, based not on professionalism but on radical and modernist rhetoric, forces the famous film-maker Ritwik Ghatak to disown the ‘her­ meneutic self’ projected into his films that identifies the breakdown of com­ munities and loss of culture as the crucial issue in communal divide. Only a few such as Sadaat Hassan Manto, the Urdu writer, seem to have escaped, through a tremendous effort o f will, this defensiveness of modem India. On the complicity of history as discipline in the growth of communal divide, see Vinay Lai, ‘The Discourse of History and the Crisis at Ayodhya: Reflec­ tions on the Production of Knowledge, Freedom, and the Future of India’, 1994, unpublished MS; and Ashis Nandy, ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, H is­ tory and Theory, Studies in the Philosophy o f History, 34(2), 1995, pp. 44-66.

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boundaries, as these boundaries are conventionally defined within the modern sector; (2) the emergence of a modem, massified, and para­ doxically ¿litist version of religion that acts as a political ideology but also compensates for the deculturation, rootlessness, and loss of faith in the massified sections of the urban population; and (3) the emergence of a politicized modem and semi-modem middle class that seeks to have access to political power disproportionate to its size on grounds other than numbers and its need for an ideology of state that would legitimize that access.

CHAPTER TWO

III. THE BATTLE FOR THE BIRTHPLACE et us now get back to our story. Behind the bald statement of facts in chapter 1 lie contending strands of consciousness and contending constructions of the past and the present. Some of them will become clearer from the following narration of the events of 30 October 1990, as witnessed by one of us, and some random reactions to the events. The first clash between the police and the k a rseva k s took place at the crack of dawn, on the two-kilometre long Saryu bridge linking Ayodhya with the neighbouring district, Gonda. A crowd of 2,000-odd people, intent on forcing their way into Ayodhya, were being pushed back slowly and with restraint by a small police contingent under the command of a tall, well-built Sikh whose identification badge had been removed but who belonged to the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). Brandishing their sticks in the air and rarely striking anyone, they successfully thwarted this first attempt by the k a rseva k s to overrun the bridge. There were a few casualties, none of them serious. The crowd was a mix of those who had come to Ayodhya speci­ fically to participate in the k a rseva and others who had come to per­ form the yearly p a n c h k o s i p a r ik r a m a (a five-kilometre ritual perambulation that takes place before the k a rtik p u rn im a fair in Ayodhya every winter). They were largely elderly men who were unaware of anything else happening in Ayodhya that day, and stood around totally confused and helpless, begging the police to let them go back to their homes. The determ ination of the ka rseva k s to cross into Ayodhya remained unaffected despite this reverse. Those who avoided arrest, mainly students, spilled on to the left bank of the river, where they stood raising slogans, ranging from their anthem of the previous few weeks, ‘R a m la lla hum ayen ge, m a n d ir w ahin b a n a yen g e' (Dear Ram,

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we will come and build your temple right there), to the plea to the security forces obstructing their path, *Hindu Hindu bhai bhai, bCch mein vardi kahan se ayV (All Hindus are brothers; how has a uniform come between them?). The police were not taken in, but a large number of them were unhappy with the duty they had to perform. This was evident from the half-hearted manner in which they had pushed the crowd back earlier. In fact, one of the policemen burst into tears in the middle of the operation, saying that he could no longer carry on. He was immediately surrounded by his concerned colleagues and seniors. They did not admonish him; they pleaded with him to keep his emo­ tions in check and concentrate on his work. Meanwhile, the ranks of karsevaks began to swell rapidly as hundreds more, who had spent the night among the tall grass on the river bank or in villages nearby, started to come out of hiding. Back in Ayodhya town, the situation at first appeared to be under control. Small groups of karsevaks could be seen squatting harmlessly in the many lanes and bylanes leading to the disputed site, chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram' and ‘Baccha baccha Ram ka, Janmabhumi ke kam kcC (Every child is Ram’s, all serve his birth place) It was around mid-morning that things began to go wrong, as a few thousand karsevaks suddenly materialized in the streets of curfew-bound Ayod­ hya, despite the district adm inistration’s claims of ‘water-tight security arrangements’. These arrangements had been in effect for weeks to prevent these very people from entering Ayodhya. Once again, it was clear where the sympathy of a section of the security forces and administration lay. For the karsevaks could not have reached the town without their connivance, as they themselves admitted freely. In no time at all, all roads leading to the Babri masjid were swarm­ ing with sadhus in saffron, red and white, ash and vermilion smeared on their foreheads and chests; with men, young and old, drawn from different parts of the country, different professions, and different cas­ tes (though a majority of the karsevaks interviewed were found to belong to the upper castes).1 The party workers were, of course, ‘Another observer, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, found that while volunteers came from all states except Jammu and Kashmir and north-east India, most of them were from the Hindi-speaking states. Also, roughly three-fourths were from urban India, mainly from small towns. Pradip K. Datta, ‘VHP’s Ram at Ayodhya: Reincarnation through Ideology and Organization’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 November 1991, 36(44), pp. 2517-26. This is a useful essay based on observations made soon after the events of 1990.

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present in full force, along with some of their leaders such as Vinay Katiyar, the head of the Bajrang Dal, and K. Narendra, Vice President of the BJP in Andhra Pradesh. They were joined later on by Ashok Singhal, General Secretary of the VHP, and Shrish Chand Dikshit, a former DIG of the UP police who was, at the time of these events, the vice-president of the VHP Some of the karsevaks carried tridents, sticks and pick-axes, but otherwise were largely unarmed. But they had a fearsome resolve to demolish ‘this symbol of national shame’. As a group of traders com­ ing from Lucknow put it, ‘Today, we have the blessings of Lord Ram on us. Hence, no force can stop us from wiping out from this sacred earth all signs of the masjid of these sinning Muslims. We shall kill or be killed, but we shall complete the task.’ A large proportion of the crowd was what some commentators in India have begun to call elements of the lumpen proletariat—jobless, ill-educated, partly massified, urban youth, waiting to be mobilized for any cause that would give them some sense of solidarity, purpose, and adventure, preferab­ ly of the violent kind.2 By now, all movement of traffic in the area had come to a standstill. As a result, most of the state government buses loaded with arrested karsevaks could not move at all. It was the hijacking of one such bus, full of frenzied karsevaks near the Hanumangarhi temple by one of its priests, that helped pave the way for what was to come later on. The security personnel, on duty in the area, were caught unawares as the bus veered around dramatically and roared down one of the roads—which eventually lead to the mosque some one and a half miles away—at a wild speed. Later, it could be seen clearly that of the several iron checkposts the bus encountered on its flight, only one was slightly dented, not broken. Either the bus had hit the checkpost and the fastening had come loose and opened on its own, or the checkpost was deliberately opened. The second was ^ e massification and criminalization of some sections o f Hindu youth in north India is a relatively new phenomenon. Although some elements in the RSS family had been allegedly trying for decades to link up with this process, they had failed time and again, till taking a leaf out of Shiv Sena head Bal Thackeray’s book, sections of the family, especially some closely associated with the VHP, began organizing the urban, upper caste, jobless youth, frustrated and angry against the establishment, on the pattern of his Sena in Bombay. Apparently, the Bajrang Dal in north India has more or less the same profile as the Sena.

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more likely because there was no sign of any damage to the remain­ ing checkposts. They were simply not fastened. The bus was ulti­ mately stopped, just a few feet away from the disputed site, and the hijackers arrested. This incident made it clear to those leading the karsevaks that the security arrangements were not impregnable. Either the administra­ tion had not expected and, therefore, was not prepared to handle such a massive turnout, or some of the security personnel were more than willing to oblige the karsevaks. Emboldened by this awareness, the karsevaks began to get more aggressive, testing the patience of the police force. As one of the leaders revealed, the idea was to tire out the forces, before reassembling for the final assault. The police were by now barely able to hold the crowd at bay with their sticks. Even the bursting of tear gas shells had little effect. Partly because some of the karsevaks had smeared lime on their faces to nullify the effect of the gas, but mainly because the shells were being used with great discretion just two or three at a time. A word now on the reactions of the citizens of Ayodhya. Before the incident of 30 October, there was no evidence that Ayodhya felt very strongly on the Ramjanmabhumi issue. This was always a matter of great concern to those leading the movement for the temple. While they could generate passions in many parts of the country and abroad for their cause, Ayodhya itself had remained an island of peace.3 Now, they felt, was their final chance to involve the people of Ayod­ hya in their cause. All this time the citizens of Ayodhya had stayed away, at least physically, from the events of the morning—this, despite being heckled loudly by those among them who had already thrown in their lot with the karsevaks. A young teen-aged boy, the son of a local chemist, was for instance seen running up and down the lane in which his house was located shouting at the closed windows and banging his fists on the locked doors, ‘Come out people of the locality. Why are you sitting in your homes wearing bangles? If you are men, come out on the streets.’ The local people had hidden the karsevaks in their houses, given them food and shelter, and that, they said, was enough. But now seeing that slowly and steadily the karsevaks were gaining 3See for instance D. R. Goyal, ‘At Peace with Themselves’, The Indian Post, 12 October 1989.

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the upper hand, they got carried away by the excitement and the religious fervour in the air and poured onto the streets. They were joined by a few women as well. But it was the manner in which those who stayed back in their homes and lent their support to the karsevaks, that turned the tide in favour of the latter. While to begin with they had thrown packets of food from the rooftops to the karsevaks below, they now started pelting the police with stones and bricks, injuring several of them. In one of the main lanes around the corner from Hanumangarhi, the mood turned ugly, when a brick cracked open the head of a senior Sikh officer leading the forces there. As he was carried away bleeding profusely, his men, including the young Sikh CRPF man who had been in command on the bridge in the morning, rushed up to the District Magistrate of Faizabad, Ram Sharan Srivastava, and demanded permission to open fire. The police wanted to open fire not on the karsevaks but on those people who were attacking them from the rooftops, that is, they wanted to shoot in self-defence. The DM refused to give permission and quietly began to walk away from the scene. The policemen ran after him, caught him, and openly threatened to shoot him if he left them there to fend for themselves. The DM had no choice but to return. However, the police them­ selves, under attack once again, suddenly seemed to lose their will to continue. One of them bitterly remarked, ‘Look at the DM. He has not taken his helmet off since the morning. And look at us; we have not even been provided with helmets. Why should they care if we break our heads.’ Thereafter the police contingent positioned there just sat around doing nothing. ‘If we cannot shoot, there is little else we can do now,’ they said flatly. In the meantime, the rumour had spread that Ashok Singhal, who had entered the city with the covert help of some senior police and district officials, had been injured in a lathi charge in an adjoining lane. Close on its heels came word of a shoot-out on Saryu bridge in which a second attempt by karsevaks to reach Ayodhya had resulted in ‘hundreds’ of deaths. (Actually, Ashok Singhal had received minor injuries and the death toll in the shooting on the bridge was two). This news excited the crowds even more. Just as it looked as if all hell would break loose— now that the police had more or less assumed the role of bystanders—the DM suddenly produced S. C. Dikshit in front of the throng, microphone in hand, and requested him to appeal to the crowds to disperse.

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Dikshit, in what later turned out be a clever ploy, asked the karsevaks to turn back: ‘You have already performed k a rse va by coming to Ayodhya. I am now telling you to leave.’ Dikshit made this speech over and over again, and held repeated parleys with the DM and other officials. It turned out, however, that he was marking time, diverting the attention of the officials from the karsevaks, in the neighbouring lanes and bylanes who were closing in on the disputed site. When this particular crowd saw hordes of ka rseva k s rushing past them at the other end of the lane, up the road leading to the site, they too joined the race in one big surge. It was about 11.00 AM now. The ka rseva k s took just fifteen minutes to bring down the first barricade. Faced with an unruly mob and fearing for their own safety (and having personal sympathy for the cause), the security forces proved totally ineffective. Incidentally, the Sikh CRPF man, who till then had done his job efficiently, was suddenly relieved of his duty at the trouble spot. ‘I have been as­ signed another duty’ is all that he would say. However, for about an hour, he could still be spotted just hanging around in the area. (Later the VHP showroom, near the place where the foundation for the Ram temple had been laid, put up a poster of a tall helmeted Sikh police officer with a name tag. The officer was turned into an object of hate and contempt by the VHP propaganda machine. He was portrayed as a murderer of innocent ka rseva k s and had a price on his head, whereas on 30 October he was the one policeman who, unprotected by a helmet, was doing his duty while exercizing restraint at the same time.) For some distance after this, there was no one and nothing to stop the karsevaks, who on the way set fire to a UP Roadways bus and a jeep. The violence of their slogans more than matched the violence of their actions: lK a tu a j a b ka ta ja y e g a to R am R am c h illa y e g a ’ (When the katu a —a derogatory term for the circumcised—will be cut into pieces, he will take the name of Ram). The more excited they became, the more Violent became their words: ‘K atu on ke b a s d o hi sthan, P akistan y a K a b rista n ' (There are only two places for the circumcised to be in; Pakistan or the graveyard). One song they sang had been popularized in the previous months. It went something like this; A o s a b m il chalen, R am ka m a n d ir b h a iya ban an e ko, Khun kh a ra b a h o ta h a i,

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To ek bar ho jane do . . . Samajh na paye baton se, Ab laton se samjhane do ... (Let us all get together brother, to build the temple of Ram, If there is bloodshed, then for once let it happen ... Since our words have not made them see reason, let us now make them understand by kicking them ...) If the slogans and the songs were to be taken as a reflection of the prevailing mood at that point in time, then there was a definite softening in the karsevaks’ attitude towards the police, whom they now began to recognize as partners in the same enterprise. 4Police hamara bhai hai, inse nahin ladai hai' (The police are our brothers; we have no quarrel with them) was the new slogan. They were not far from the truth. The police took no notice of the manner in which residents of the lanes through which the karsevaks were passing, were egging them on, much in the manner of spectators cheering their team in a soccer game. Asked why no one was trying to restrain the residents, a police officer responded, ‘It is not a crims to encourage someone.’ Soon afterwards, just before the crowd reached the last barricade, the police did fire with plastic bullets on the karsevaks, injuring two of them. But it was already too late. The police, heavily outnumbered, could no longer control the thousands pressing forward in a final desperate attempt to enter the masjid. Now only a single iron gate stood between them and their objective. Police officials later said that there was no sense in opening fire at that point on an unarmed crowd. They were not wrong; all the roads in the vicinity were choked with people and any such action would have only resulted in a massacre. Suddenly, at 12.08 PM, before anyone could realize what was hap­ pening, the iron gate opened wide enough and long enough for about 300 men to enter the mosque, pull down the fence separating the Ramchabutra from the structure of the mosque and leave gaping holes in its walls. They climbed atop the mosque’s three domes, and loosened some stones there with pickaxes to unfurl saffron flags on each dome.

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The police ju st stood and watched, apart from giving some karsevaks a helping hand over the ledge, and into the grounds of the mosque. For instance, Dikshit—aged, and not very agile, was helped thus when he twice failed to cross the ledge on his own. At 12.20 PM, senior police officers finally swung into action and managed to clear the site of the mob and restore some order. A carnival-like atmosphere prevailed in Ayodhya following the attack on the mosque. The sound of conch shells and the peal of temple bells filled the air. Sweetmeats were distributed by the residents to the karsevaks, who danced down the streets, chanting ‘Ayodhya to has ek jhanki hai, Mathura, Kashi baki hai'— ‘Ayodhya is only a sample; Kashi and Mathura remain [to be taken]’. Policemen, who till just a little while ago looked tense and wary, were also seen celebrating the occasion with the karsevaks, accepting the prasad given to them with folded hands and a *Jai Shri Ram1 on their lips. They certainly did not look unhappy that they had failed in carrying out their duty. During the countdown to 30 October the RSS had been saying that the police was going to revolt and not follow the orders of their seniors. As events unfolded, it became clear that the RSS may not have been literally correct, but it had certainly anticipated the police reactions at ground level better than the administration.4

IV. CONTENDING REACTIONS We tried to find out the reactions of a small, randomly chosen group of educated young men who had participated in some of the events at Ayodhya. They said that, at long last, the first step had been taken to avenge the partition of the country and the sell-out to the Muslims by M. K. Gandhi; ‘he was no Mahatma, he was a traitor’. However, 4The BJP was to field in the 1991 Parliamentary elections S. C. Dikshit and B. P. Singhal, another senior police officer, as party candidates. They contested from Varanasi and Moradabad respectively. Incidentally, during the Moradabad riots in 1980, when the police opened fire on Muslims praying in the Idgah on Id day, Dikshit was the Deputy Inspector General (Intelligence) o f UP, and Singhal the DIG of Moradabad Division.

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they also seemed horrified by the idea that G andhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse could be their hero. To them Godse was a murderer, even if the murderer of Gandhi. But they did feel that, even in death, Gandhi had cheated the nation. For had he been killed by a Muslim, they said, the Muslims would have been wiped off the face of India a long time ago. Whom did they regard as national heroes? They mentioned four names—Shivaji, Maharana Pratap, Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad. The first two they admired for their relentless fight against the Muslim conquerers of India; and the other two for their bravery in the face of British repression. Probably Bhagat Singh and Azad were singled out from among the freedom fighters because of their mili­ tancy, since neither of them had anything to do with a Hindu cause5' The youths were unaware that Bhagat Singh was not a Hindu, but a Sikh. Nor did they seem to know that he and Azad were non-believing socialists. That night Diwali was celebrated in Ayodhya with much pomp and splendour. Many of the residents lit up their houses with earthen oil lamps and sparklers, decked themselves up in their finery, and flocked to the temples where devotional songs were sung late into the night and broadcast from the rooftops. Also seen celebrating Diwali that night were some senior officers of the district administration and jour­ nalists. One of the officers—he had been a Maoist in his student days in Bihar—was congratulating the people of Ayodhya for their remark­ able behaviour that day. He said that if they had wanted, the people could have done anything in the town that day— looted property, set houses on fire, even killed people, and no one would have been able to do anything because, for a couple of hours, the law and order machinery had completely broken down. But they did nothing; ‘they have protected the prestige of Ayodhya today’. ‘What else do you expect to happen if you try to swim against the tide of overwhelming public sentiment, if you disregard it and try to crush it?’ he asked rhetorically. Paradoxically, the names of those associated with the birth o f political Hinduism— V. D. Savarkar, who did the most to give a political content to the concept of Hindutva, is an example— are often avoided in BJP propaganda lest they might give political mileage to other political parties such as the Hindu Mahasabha.

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Such statem ents, though at that time sounded crudely selfcongratulatory, did contain a kernel of truth, at least as far as the participants from Ayodhya were concerned. The city might have at first reluctantly given some marginal support to the movement launched by the VHP, but the hamhanded political style of the administration, combined with the propaganda unleashed by the move­ ment, had turned the events into a civil disobedience movement, a satyagraha, for the citizens. It is no accident that Pradip K. Datta, though clearly hostile to the entire Ramjanmabhumi movement, fre­ quently uses the expression satyagraha, with its clear Gandhian associa­ tions, to describe the nature of the movement at the grass roots level.6 About sixteen months after the event, in February 1992, the chief priest of the Ramjanmabhumi temple, Laldas, otherwise a sworn enemy of the VHP-led movement, was to say with some pride that it was the earthy, traditional sense of decency, tolerance, and restraint of the people of Ayodhya that ensured that the Muslim community of Ayodhya, though about one-fortieth the size of the Hindus, could continue to live in safety and dignity when the outsiders left Ayodhya to itself. Local journalists were seen distributing offerings from the temples in the streets on the day of the ‘great victory’, afterwards to be com­ pared by the leaders of the movement to Vijaya Dashami, one of the most sacred days in the Hindu calendar. But this was not the first time that the journalists had participated in the spirit of karaseva. For the real victory of the movement had been in the domain of the local print media. Even before the events of 30 October, two leading Hindi dailies Dainik Jagran (published from Kanpur, Lucknow, Jhansi, Gorakhpur, Varanasi, Meerut, Agra and Bareilly in UP and New Delhi) and Aaj had already begun their karseva. They had invited their readers—through news reports, editorials and published state­ ments and appeals by just about any Hindu religious leader—to take an open stand on 30 October. A front-page headline in Aaj on 30 October enquired whether ‘Emergency had been enforced’. It was referring to the precautionary curfews and cancellations of trains to Ayodhya and invoking the fear of the internal emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during 1975-7 when civil rights were suspended in the entire country. The same day, the paper invited ftDatta, ‘VHP’s Ram’.

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its readers ‘to decide, once and for all, whether India should become a theocratic state, or remain secular’!7 Prior to 30 October, these newspapers either accused the security forces of atrocities on the karsevaks or sought to undermine their confidence as agents of law and order. For instance, it was alleged that the police were harassing anyone who publicly took the name of Ram whether it was by way of the traditional greeting ‘Ram Ram ’ or ‘Jai Ramji ki' or mourners chanting ‘Ram nam satya hai' over a dead body. Aaj accused the police of forcing the karsevaks to say ‘Mulayam’ instead of Ram.8 Another report in the same paper claimed 7The reader might have noticed that in the temple agitation and the political subculture the Scmgh parivar represents, the idiom is often strongly secular and anti-theocratic, even anti-theological. The p a riva r’s anti-Muslim senti­ ments, too, now increasingly find expression in secular arguments, such as the risks to national security, population control policies, and urban law-andorder situation that the Muslims supposedly represent. See on this theme, Ashis Nandy, ‘An Anti-Secularist Manifesto’, Seminar, October 1985, (314), pp. 14-24. In other words, the BJP’s emphasis on genuine as opposed to pseudo-secularism and its continuous attempts to recruit at least a section o f the Muslims are no accident. Even assuming these to be a form of tokenism, the fact remains that even symbolic ethnic purity has never been a passion with the leadership of the BJP. At the height o f the temple movement, two o f the national leaders of the BJP, including Advani, were neither uncomfortable nor secretive when their close relatives married Muslims and the BJP ministries continued to have Muslim cabinet members. Despite all facile comparisons between fascist movements in the West and the BJP, this remains a crucial difference between the two. This, combined with the party’s demonstrated commitment to democratic rights, which it re­ reads as only an endorsement o f its ruthless majoritarianism, at certain crucial times (as for instance during the Emergency in 1975-77, when civil rights were suspended in India and when some o f the most dedicated political enemies o f the BJP collaborated with the regime) explains its success in recent years in recruiting a few conspicuous members o f the minority communities. See also the memoirs o f the secretary to the late Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, a Congress party stalwart who was the President of India during the Emergency, on the discomfort of the Congress regime and the Congress Muslim leaders at the increasing closeness o f the BJP and the Jamat-e-Islami activists in jail. F. A. A. Rehmaney, My Eleven Years with Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (New Delhi: S. Chand, 1979). *Aaj, 19 October 1990.

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that the police was feeding horse dung to the karsevaks lodged in Mirzapur jail!9 Paradoxically, and as if to spite those who saw in the supporters of the Sangh parivar only Indian versions of European fascists of the 1930s, this crude propaganda often went hand in hand with an almost pathetic attempt to establish the non-sectarian nationalist credentials of the movement. A series of reports in the press around this time also claimed wide Muslim support to the movement. A front-page report in The Pioneer of Lucknow claimed that the Muslim driver of L. K. Advani’s rath was persuading other Muslims to offer karseva.10 The same newspaper carried a story headlined ‘Five Thou­ sand Muslims to Demolish Masjid’, quoting one Mukhbar Abbas Naqvi of Lucknow saying that ‘the Babri Masjid will be demolished by a batch of five thousand nationalist Muslims who will reach there on October 29 under their secret plan.’11 Such stories, untrue though they were, suggest that the partisan press might have been as aware as some of the BJP functionaries of the limits of unqualified majoritarianism. While trying to profit politically from the religious senti­ ments of the majority community, both consistently felt compelled, for the same political reasons, to demonstrate that it had place within it even for the minority it was attacking. A front-page story headlined ‘Will it be another Operation Bluestar?’ was a warning by one Brigadier Dal Singh, President of the Uttar Pradesh Ex-Servicemen’s League. He warned against the danger of deploying the army because its personnel, being trained to sacrifice their lives for the cause of the country, were deeply religious.12 He stressed that it would be highly improper and dangerous to utilize their services for a task that might bring their religious sentiments into conflict with their duty. Singh’s warning was not particularly unthinking or unjust. How­ ever, the overall result of such media coverage was the build-up to 30 October, for partisan religious colour began to be given to the most trivial of incidents. For instance, a monkey dropped a burning 9Ibid, 25 October 1990. 1(VThe BJP made much o f the fact that the driver of Advani’s chariot was a Muslim, which he indeed was. On the other hand, he had converted to Islam not very long ago. reportedly in order to marry a Muslim girl with whom he had subsequently parted ways. llThe Pioneer (Lucknow), 25 October 1990. n The Sunday Pioneer (Lucknow), 28 October 1990.

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C o n t e n d in g R e a c t io n s

log, which it had stolen from some soldiers cooking in an open field, on the nearby DAV college in Azamgarh which got slightly burnt. Some 500 karsevaks were being held in this building. The Pioneer of Lucknow carried a front-page report on the incident titled, ‘A LankadahanV, drawing a parallel with the burning of the city of Lanka by Hanuman in the Ramayana. On 30 October, many of the journalists reporting from Ayodhya described their experience as way beyond the normal. The report of the hijacking of the bus at Hanumangarhi, and its moment of entry into the disputed site by karsevaks read something like this in the daily Dainik Jagran: It was a miracle. Here was this bus full of devotees of Ram, who were desolate at the thought o f not being allowed to perform karseva as they had been arrested, when suddenly a priest from the Hanumangarhi temple leapt into the driver’s seat from nowhere and drove off as if possessed towards the mandir. It was as if Hanuman himself had appeared to drive the bus. The power o f the goddess [presumably Durga] opened each and every barrier on the way just as the bus would approach them. When it finally halted at the gate o f the Ram temple, it appeared from the expression on the faces of the devotees that Ramlalla himself had come down from the heavens to applaud their bravery. Much later when the gates opened to let the devotees o f Ram in for performing karseva, many believed that it was Ramlalla himself waiting impatiently, who opened the gates and invited them in.13

Another report detailed the efforts of a dying karsevak to write Jai Shri Ram with his own blood on the street where he had fallen. Apparently he died the second he finished writing. Almost all newspapers reported that day that karseva was per­ formed at the Janmabhumi temple and that the construction of the temple had begun—they meant the damage inflicted on the structure of the mosque and the unfurling of saffron flags on its domes. Even the Press Trust of India, one of India’s two official news agencies, flashed the news that karseva had begun at 1.00 PM at the disputed site with an Ayodhya dateline. Later it was discovered that the news had emanated from Delhi, not Ayodhya. The number of those dead in the shoot-outs was quickly inflated to absurd figures, especially with regard to the firing on 2 November. Aaj carried the headline, ‘Hours of firing on the unarmed devotees of Ram after surrounding them—200 dead, Ayodhya bathed in blood on Kartik day dip, Jalianwala Bagh episode dwarfed’.14 13Dainik Jagran, 30 October 1990. 14Aaj, 3 November 1990.

Creating a Nationality

37

Similarly, Dainik Jagran in its special bulletin brought out in the afternoon of 2 November taking advantage of the usual official ten­ dency to under-report casualty figures, claimed that ‘Hundreds of karsevaks had died on the spot in the indiscriminate police firing on devotees of Ram’. Next morning the paper itself inexplicably reduced the death toll to thirty-two.15 The Lucknow edition of Aaj spoke of corpses of karsevaks being fished out of the river Saryu. It carried the headline: ‘Over a hundred bodies have been thrown into the river Saryu.’16 The administration denied all such reports. None of these local papers as much as mentioned that during this period, every day, huge public meetings were being held in Ayodhya outside the Maniram Chavni temple, where the most abusive speeches were made against the Muslims. Neither were reports of the attacks on the homes and properties of Muslims in Ayodhya-Faizabad, spe­ cially in the Chunniganj area, carried in the local press. If the reporting was partisan, the editorials were no better. One simply said, ‘They did it.’ Another in The Pioneer was grandiloquent: It was bound to happen. People’s power at its extreme. Everyone knew it except our wooden headed government. For the next 1,000 years, this day will be remembered for what honest, simple religious folks wanted to do out of devotion and faith, and how many obstacles were put in their path by a state machinery determined at every stage to stop their march to Ayodhya. Mulayam Singh will have to answer before the bar of the people and that of history. Because o f this short-sightedness, in gaining a few votes, he has lost sight of the basic tenet of democracy— that is, it is the rule o f the majority— the minority is heard, respected and given equal time, but it is the majority that forms the government.17

Some rather fantastic stories continued to make headlines in the regional press till many days later. This was not particularly sur­ prising, given that, in the case of some newspapers, the local stringers were partisan priests of local temples in Ayodhya and the editors VHP sympathizers. For instance, Dainik Jagran carried a news item based on an anonymous letter which claimed that at least 1,000 police and army men who were devotees of Ram were quitting their jobs to support the activities of the newly formed Shriram Kranti Brigade, the first task of which would be to cut off the hands and feet of Mulayam Singh Yadav.18 15Dainik Jagran, 3 November 1990 Aaj, 2 November 1990. llThe Pioneer (Lucknow), 31 October 1990. 18Dainik Jagran, 18 November 1990.

38

C o n t e n d in g R e a c t io n s

The Course o f the Movement Since India’s independence few issues have aroused such violent emotions as the Ramjanmabhumi-Babri masjid controversy. The polarization of public sentiments over it has been associated with a number of communal riots, two of which we have briefly covered in chapter 5. At the forefront of the temple movement has been the VHP, backed by the RSS, the BJP, and their youth fronts, Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini. (We provide thumb-nail sketches of the four major organiza­ tions involved in the movement later in this book.) The VHP had by the early 1950s launched their agitation for the construction of the Ram mandir in Ayodhya with the slogan, ‘Ake bolo, jor se bolo, Janmabhumi ka tala kholo.' (Come and loudly ask for the lock on the Janmabhumi to be opened.) More than thirty years later, in 1986, the Congress (I) regime, apparently trying to appear impartial after a section of Muslim religious and political leadership had forced its hand in the Shah Bano case, allowed the lock on the disputed shrine to be opened, and thus gave VHP the hope that its dreams might be realized. We say ‘apparently’ because the aim of the Congress was no different from that of the Sangh parivar,—to build a vote bank that would undercut the support base of the Hindu nationalists. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had then not only unlocked the disputed shrine, but had sought to take electoral advantage of it. As a BJP leader, Atal Behari Vajpayee, told one of us: It was not the BJP which made Ayodhya into a burning issue. It was the Congress which did that. It was they who allowed the shilanyas ceremony. It was Rajiv Gandhi who went to Faizabad to stait his election campaign and he solicited votes on the promise of ushering in Ramrajya [literally the kingdom of Ram but, connotatively, an ideal polity]. The BJP had to respond to the situation.19

19This is one o f the few issues on which Vajpayee and Syed Shahabuddin, the Janata Dal MP and leader o f the Babri Masjid Action Committee, agree. The latter, as alert as Vajpayee to the politics o f nationalities, said to us in an interview in October 1990: ‘Rajiv Gandhi played his cards very badly. Mrs Gandhi from 1979 onwards indirectly helped the Hindu communal and chauvinistic forces. I don’t say that she was communal in a strategic sense. But in her quest for power she could take help from Hindu communalism as a tactical measure. It was she who really reopened the Babri Masjid issue. ... And o f course, her son was the beneficiary. He inherited this. And in 1986

Creating a Nationality

39

But once the issue became live, the VHP was better equipped to take political advantage of it. Emboldened by the unlocking, the VHP intensified its campaign for the liberation of the Janmasthan and its posture became increasingly aggressive. ‘Jab tak mandir nahin banega, tab tak yeh sangharsh chalega' (We will continue our strug­ gle, till the temple is constructed) was their new war cry. However, despite its determination, the VHP did not think it was going to be either an easy or a short struggle. But electoral politics made things easy for them. In 1989, the Congress (I), trying to win over the Hin­ dus, once again acquiesced with the demands of the VHP and allowed the foundation-laying ceremony of the temple to take place near the disputed site. The foundation stone had been laid, the VHP claimed, not only for the proposed Ram temple but also for a Hindu rashtra in the hearts of the people. Without losing any time, the VHP announced their next pro­ gramme of karseva, borrowing a term normally used in connection with the building of Sikh places of worship. In this instance, the term had more to do with destroying rather than building a place of wor­ ship. It was a small step from the more tentative ‘we shall struggle till a temple is built’ to the assertive, ‘we will build the temple only here’. In other words the aim was to break the mosque[s] to humiliate the M uslim s and to affirm ‘H indu’ potency and pride. Syed Shahabuddin recognizes this. In an interview with us he conceded that in the eyes o f the Shariat only about the three mosques at Mecca, at Medina and Jerusalem can one make a distinction, if at all. Otherwise all mosques have equal sanctity in the eyes o f the Shariat. After all you worship the same Allah in every mosque. You don’t worship Babar in the Babri mosque or the structure o f the Babri Masjid. In fact, the structure of the Babri Masjid is not important at all. You can demolish it. You can completely replace it. After all, the holiest o f the holy mosques in Islam have been built and rebuilt many times. But the fact is that the Babri Masjid has been made by the Hindu chauvinists into a symbol o f assertion and the Muslims are on the defensive.

on February 1, when the lock was opened, there is no doubt in my mind that the order o f the district judge o f Faizabad was a contrived order. The entire scenario was written by the government. It was done as a matter o f state policy. Thus a monster was raised which grew and grew and has come to the present stage.’

40

C o n t e n d in g R e a c t io n s

The countdown to 30 October began the day the BJP President, Advani, set out on his Rath Yatra on 25 September, 1990—literally a journey on a chariot—which was to take him from Somnath in the state of Gujarat in western India to Ayodhya in UP, to create public opinion in favour of the construction of a temple to Ram.20 Advani, a soft-spoken, urbane, Sindhi refugee who migrated to India from Pakistan in the 1940s and claims, like most Sindhi Hindus, to be ‘spiritually a Sikh’, had been a film journalist who reviewed popular Bombay films in his less glorious days. Perhaps appropriately, the chariot in this instance was a decorated, expensive old Chevrolet. The politically alert, however, saw the Yatra as the beginning of the BJP’s election campaign. They felt the party had correctly guessed that the general elections were round the comer and it needed a new platform to improve upon its earlier performance. Syed Shahabuddin, Janata Dal mp and no stranger to hard-boiled politics of nationalities, had a perfect understnding of Advani’s motives. In the course of an interview he said to us: The Rath Yatra undertaken by Advani ... is not a religious movement. It is basically a political movement and therefore the reason for the causes must be sought in the political domain.... I shall give you one proof o f it. There are many sects in Hinduism. The Ram upasaks are Vaishnavas who worship Ram as a deity. The entire Indian society, as a matter of fact, considers Ram as a purushottam. Even Iqbal described him as 'lmam-e-Hind' and not the Imam of an ordinary mosque or even a shahi mosque but considering India as a place of worship. Therefore, Ram as a great human being, as a moral ideal is accepted by everybody. But “ Speaking o f the symbolism o f the chariot, Datta ( ‘VHP’s Ram’) notes that the chariot invokes the image of Krishna, rather than Ram. He could have added that the chariot is only associated with the Mahabharatic Krishna, not the Krishna o f the Bhagavat Purana. The VHP’s imagery in this respect is in continuity with the attempts that began in the nineteenth century to establish the primacy o f the Krishna o f the Mahabharata— specially the Gita— over the erotic, androgynous, playful Krishna of Bhagavat. The VHP iconography of Ram represents the same tensions, the same potency strivings, and the same attempts to disown the androgynous, pastoral, and less technologized maleness that Ram symbolizes. This iconography has to reverse the original Ramayana in which Ram fights his climactic battle with the demon Ravana without a chariot, standing on ground and defying his own technolgical backwardness and Ravana’s more advanced war machine. In both Valmiki’s and Tulsidasa’s Ramayana, it is Ravana the demon who uses a chariot, not Ram representing divinity.

41

Creating a Nationality

as an avatar [incarnation] he is accepted only by the Vaishnavas. Now, tell me, is there any prominent Vaishnava in this movement? There is none. There are aghorpanthis, there are tantriks who have always fought against Ram; there are Arya Samajis who do not believe in idol worship at all and do not accept avatars, there are Jains. But no Vaishnavas. For the Vaishnavas there is already a site in Ayodhya which for the last 300-400 years they have considered sacred as the birthplace of Ram and that is where the Ram Janmasthan Mandir stands. Now how can the others say that that place is false and the real site is the inner sanctum of the mosque? It is nothing but an act o f political assertion.

By the time Advani was finally arrested in Bihar on 23 October the Yatra had succeeded in creating widespread communal tension to which the activists of the VHP and Bajrang Dal had already con­ tributed by taking out Ram Jyoti processions throughout the country (see Tables 6 and 7). And unlike earlier times, this time the violence showed a tendency to spread to rural areas (Table 8).

Table 6 INCIDENCE OF COMMUNAL RIOTS BETWEEN 1 SEPTEMBER AND 20 NOVEMBER 1990 State

Places

Killed

Andhra Pradesh

4

27

Assam

1

7

Bihar

8

19

Delhi

-

8

Gujarat

26

99

Karnataka

22

88

Kerala

2

3

Madhya Pradesh Maharashtra

5 3

21

13

52

Tamil Nadu

1

-

Tripura

1

-

28

224

2

6

116

558

Rajasthan

Uttar Pradesh West Bengal

Total

4

SOURCE: Collated from newspapers by the People’s Union for Democratic Rights for their posters. It has not been possible to separate people killed in communal violence and people killed in police firing during such violence.

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C o n t e n d in g R e a c t io n s

At the other end of the spectrum were the sadbhavana or amity rallies organized by the then Chief Minister of UP, Mulayam Singh Yadav, throughout his troubled state to gamer grass roots support for whatever action he had to take. Mulayam Singh’s main base was the large Yadav community of the state, politically the most powerful of the ‘backward’ castes of UP. This was resented by the Hindi press of UP, dominated by the élite castes, which stressed that the riots came in the wake of the BJP’s and the VHP’s innocuous attempts to take out Ramjyoti processions. Some of these local newspapers were T able 7

DISTRIBUTION OF VIOLENCE RELATED TO THE TEMPLE MOVEMENT State

Number killed

Affected places

Population un­ der curfew (in millions)

Jammu-Kashmir

-

4

NA

Punjab

-

1

0.04

Haryana

1

7

0.22

Delhi

15

15 police sms.

1.10

Rajasthan

49

10

2.50

Gujarat

258

35

5.70

Uttar Pradesh

170

35 dists.

Madhya Pradesh

133

17

3.30

Bihar

40

11

2.20

West Bengal

27

6

5.50

Assam

98

12

0.70

434

32

7.00

2

1

0.40

Andhra Pradesh

23

20

3.70

Karnataka

78

13

4.50

Tamilnadu

3

11

NA

11

7

Maharashtra Orissa

Kerala

Source: People’s Union for Democratic Rights

58.70

2.00

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Creating a Nationality

Table 8 SPREAD OF VIOLENCE IN RURAL AREAS Districts

State

Villages

Andhra Pradesh

6

1

12 9 2

12

Bihar

Dates Oct. 24 Oct. 12-28

9

Sep. 18-Oct.22

2

Sep. 13-Oct. 9

18

18

Sep. 28-O ct.22

2

2

11

11

Tamil Nadu

1

1

Oct. 6

Uttar Pradesh

1

1

Sep. 28

Gujarat Karnataka Madhya Pradesh Maharashtra Rajasthan

Oct. 10-13 Sep. 13-Oct 19

Source: C. V. Subba Rao, Seminar on

Communal Violence, organized by the PUCL at the Centre for the Study o f Developing Societies, February 1993.

to be later found guilty of fomenting communal violence by the Press Council of India. 1 The campaign against Yadav in the local press took other forms, too. For instance, the BJP had set the date of 30 October for the start of karseva in Ayodhya. The date coincided with the day of the pancha kosi parikrama that year. The party probably calculated that, if there were trouble, the regime could be blamed for it. The press dutifully swallowed the BJP line and blamed Mulayam Singh Yadav for all the violence in the state. His mobilizational efforts earned him the title ‘Maulana Yadav’ from his opponents and a large section of the local press, unimpressed by his low-brow, street-fighter-like image. As for the more suave Advani, ‘he seemed to have’, the press said, ‘acquired an aura of religiosity for the people who hung on to[sic] every word he spoke.’ While the press wrote about the spontaneity with which the people turned up to greet and hear the BJP president from his chariot, it 21Report o f the Subcommittee Appointed by the Press Council o f India on 8.11.1990 to Examine the Role o f the Press on the One Hand and on the Other the Role o f the Authorities in Dealing with the Press Relating to the C o v e r a g e o f the R am jan m abh um i-B abri M a sjid Issue, p resen ted at Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, on 21 January 1991. Also the testimony o f Manimala at Citizens' Tribunal on Ayodhya, New Delhi, 12 July 1993.

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insisted that the local administration had stage-managed the mam­ moth crowds at Yadav’s rallies. When communal riots broke out in the state—among other places in Gazipur, Bijnor, Pratapgarh, Meerut and Colonelganj—the local press blamed Yadav, accusing him of making intemperate statements against the Hindus in his rallies, which had encouraged the Muslims to indulge in violence. Never was the violence or the crisis traced to inter-party competition; the press chose to depict it as a confrontation between the people and the government. Mulayam Singh in his political short-sightedness and arrogance fell almost eagerly into the trap. In one of his several speeches he appealed to the people to perform the parikrama in their own villages, since this time it would fall on 30 October. Next day, most newspapers, including major English dailies, carried a report saying that, for the first time in centuries, the parikrama would not take place because Mulayam Singh had banned it. The sentiments of religious Hindus were deeply hurt, especially since the government’s denial next day was dismissed in a paragraph by the same news­ papers. Similarly, in another rally in Kanpur, Mulayam Singh men­ tioned the well-known fact that, because Muslims had scant faith in the security forces, they tended to arm themselves for self-protection. (The Muslims of UP are said to fear the police, especially the Provin­ cial Armed Constabulary, more than the rioters themselves.22) The press claimed that the chief minister was exhorting the Muslims to take up arms against the Hindus. The newspapers’ campaign against Mulayam began to have an effect on the readers after a while. The incident that decisively turned popular Hindu opinion in UP, particularly in Ayodhya-Faizabad, in favour of the VHP and the BJP was the removal of a tin canopy covering the spot where the shilanyas ceremony had been performed in November 1989. On the night of 23 October, the canopy was removed under the supervision of the district administration. Mulayam Singh Yadav had visited the site a few days earlier; it is said that the chief minister was alarmed at the transformation of what was just a pit till a year ago into something close to a little temple, with its idols of Ram and other gods and offerings piled up before them. He ordered that the canopy be re­ moved. 22The main episode responsible for such fears could be the one at Maliana where the PAC ran its own pogrom against the Muslims. People’s Union o f Democratic Rights, Forgotten Massacres (Delhi: PUDR, 1989); and Indian People’s Human Rights Commission, Report on Meerut (Delhi: IPHRC, 1989).

Creating a Nationality

45

Given the prevailing tension, it was a dangerous political error. On 26 October, the Hindi daily A a j splashed the news in bold letters on its front page; the headline in its Ranchi edition said, ‘Ram temple broken in Ayodhya’. The Patna edition of the paper reported that the VHP’s general secretary, Ashok Singhal, had been injured in the in­ cident and that the idol of Ram had been removed from the pit. Later, the VHP had to issue a statement saying that it was their people, present at the site at the time, who had removed the idol before the canopy was brought down. But few were in any mood to pay heed to the clarification. The damage had been done. O th e r C on stru ctio n s

A journey through Ayodhya-Faizabad around this time revealed much diversity of opinion on the temple issue. A large proportion of the priests, pilgrim guides, holy men and mendicants in Ayodhya seemed to agree with the VHP line that the temple had to be built at any cost and the mosque had to be relocated or destroyed. We were to be proved wrong, but more about that later. Nrityagopal Das, the abbot of Maniram Chavni and Vice President of the Ramjanmabhumi Mukti Yajna Samiti, was one of the most vocal and active supporters of the cause. A dark, thick-set man with a ready, almost childlike smile, he certainly did not come off as a firebrand religious chauvinist, though it was also obvious that, over the years, he had learnt the jargon and the standard arguments of the VHP rather well. When we spoke to him, he was surrounded by some fawning disciples and political hangers-on. Like his fellow traveller Ramchandra Paramhans, he often seemed to be enacting a role and addressing a large audience even when he was talking only to us. Ironically, he used the famous lines of Mohammed Iqbal’s song, ‘Sare Jdhdn se a ch ch d H industan ham ara' to emphasize his point that the politicians and their politics were responsible for the contro­ versy in the first place. He added, quoting Iqbal again, ‘M a zh a b nahin sikh atd d p a s m ein b a ir rakhnd; H indu hain hum va ta n h ai H industan h a m a ra ’ (Religion does not teach us to bear grudges against each

other; we are Hindus and our land is Hindustan). It is love of the ku rsi, the “chair”, which often, creates tension between people, not their religion,’ he explained. Subsequently, Nrityagopal Das was to tell us on his own that the Ramjanmabhumi controversy had come close to a solution a couple

46

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of times. Once, some years ago, the local Shia leadership generously offered to shift the Babri masjid to Sehanawa village where the des­ cendants of Mir Baqi, the builder of the mosque, lived. But, according to Nrityagopal, the politicians on both sides objected to such a solu­ tion, saying that the locals did not have the right to barter away things which belonged to the entire community. However, the priest also hastened to add, word for word, the argument of Ramchandra Paramhans that Muslims, when less than 25 per cent of the population of a city or a community, were never a problem; and that, only when their population exceeded this proportion, did they become assertive. He talked of the Muslim refusal to conform to a common civil code, their right to have four wives simultaneously, and their extra-ter­ ritorial allegiances—all in the language of his colleague in the VHP, Paramhans. But somehow he seemed to lack Paramhans’ shrewdness and political sense. However, there was what seemed at that time to be a minority among the abbots, priest and holy men who thought differently. Chief priest Baldev Prasad Chaturvedi of Kanak Bhavan, one of the biggest temples in Ayodhya, refused to talk about the mandir-masjid contro­ versy. He was, he said, a religious man, and had no interest in any­ thing other than the performance of his daily religious duties. Indian classical music was his other abiding passion; he had trained in it for seven years. The politics of religion, he said, would have inter­ ested him only if he was not a man of religion. But since this was not the case, he did not concern himself with it. According to Chaturvedi, if Hindus and Muslims practised their religion in true faith, there would be no problem at all. It was the non-adherence to religious traditions of the past, their dismissal as ‘old fashioned nonsense’, which was the root cause of all the trouble. He cited the example of the telecast on Doordarshan of the hit serial Mahabharata: In the old days only a few great saints recited the Mahabharata and that too after performing special rituals. It was never recited inside a house because it was said that a Mahabharata would take place wherever the epic was recited. If at all it was recited, it was done somewhere outside, in the open. And now it [the epic] is there in each and every house. So why should anyone be surprised at all at these disturbances? If you show Mahabharata on television they are bound to happen, and much worse will come.

Creating a Nationality

47

Chaturvedi must have seen the happenings of 30 October and 2 November in Ayodhya as the final proof of the truth of his belief. Even more clear-cut was the position of Swami Laldas who had been appointed chief priest of the Ramjanmabhumi mandir by the courtappointed Receiver of the temple. Laldas stays at a temple formally called Vijay Sundar Vihar Kunj but better known as Kurmi Mandir. Unlike the chief priest of Kanak Bhavan, who was pained by the turn of events and unwilling to talk about the controversy, Laldas is forceful and articulate. Short, plump and fair, Laldas is only 45 years old, but looks more like a well-preserved 60. He is politically alert and shrewd, but also has a certain social charm and much intellectual stamina. From our various conversations with him, it became gradually obvious that the VHP movement is seen by him, and others like him, as a Shaivite encroachment, if not attack, on the deeply Vaishnava culture of Ayod­ hya. ‘Shaivas consider Ram as a human being and as a king; Vaishnavas consider him the Brahma,' he said to us, as if passing a final judgement. Laldas was bom at a village close to Ayodhya, Shringrishi, in a Kshatriya family. O f course, he went out of his caste when he renounced the world. He had his religious education at Raghunathpur in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and later became a temple priest at Mehsana, Gujarat. A former member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Laldas was for a while the secretary of the Party in Ayodhya. As he puts it, he was impressed by the party’s commitment to the traditional ideal of samyata, equality, not by its hostility to religion, especially to idolatry. Laldas is accused by his detractors of being a maverick. But they also fear him for his aggressive ‘in house’ criticism which goes down well with those not fully converted to the VHP point of view, both because of his knowledge of the scriptures and his polemical talents. Laldas was in hiding at the time of our meeting, fearing physical attack from both the VHP and the police. According to Laldas, the BJP supported the movement for political gains. Why did its leaders not demand a Ram mandir on the disputed site, he asks, when they were in power as members of state coalition governments in the 1960s in UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and else­ where? Why did Lai Krishna Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee not raise the issue when they were ministers of the central government in 1977-9?? It was only now that they had jumped into the fray,

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because after winning 86 seats in the last general elections, they were seeing visions of conquering Delhi. ‘The BJP does not want the temple to be built. The day that happens, they will be finished politi­ cally. Because they will have no issue left to fight elections on.’23 Laldas is strengthened in his belief by the record of the RSS. The RSS has never built or helped maintain a temple; it has never even taken an interest in any temple, he affirms. In fact, the RSS, which has supplied the leadership of the entire movement, has been consis­ tently against idol worship. Laldas is deeply suspicious of the new­ found enthusiasm for temples in the ranks of the RSS.24 No important leader of the Sangh family, except the BJP Vice-President Vijaya Raje Scindia, has ever worshipped at the Ramjanmabhumi temple till the time of our interview. As for the VHP, not a single one of its functionaries has even come to the temple with a garland. ‘You can­ not fill the empty stomachs of people by building temples,’ he adds. He is particularly scathing about the VHP: Who cares about them in Ayodhya and Faizabad? Not even 10 per cent o f the population. When they hold meetings here, they have to bring their workers from outside to attend them. When they wanted to rent a house here to open their office, nobody wanted to give them a place and, so, they were offered houses at double the normal rent. It is largely an organization of the Brahmans and for the Brahmans.

But the VHP propaganda is more dangerous than the organization, he believes. It is like the creeper bannar, which is rootless all right but lives on and destroys trees even though, in the process, it dies itself. His opinion of the priests of Ayodhya is no better: If you want to know what happened to the lakhs of bricks collected from all over the country for the foundation-laying ceremony [of the planned Ram temple], you only have to look at the additions and extensions made in the recent past to the temples of which Nrityagopal Das and Ramchandra Paramhans M,If there is an election today, the BJP would lose,’ he was to affirm in February 1992. For the Parliamentary elections held after the temple episode in November 1990 had gone aginst the BJP in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh where it was a ruling party. The BJP would not have won even the elections in UP, he was to say, but for the ‘stupidity’ of Mulayam Singh Yadav. ^See chapter 3 for a brief discussion of this paradox. Much of the intel­ lectual baggage as well as ideological contradictions of Hindu nationalism come from the religious reform movements o f the nineteenth century. Thus, the Arya Samaj, despite its strong tradition of uncompromising anti-idolatry, has also declared its support for a Ram temple at the disputed site.

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arc the chief priests and you will have your answer. And these are the kind o f people who are the local leaders of the movement.

In earlier days, Laldas claims, the heads of monasteries and temples were learned men from good families. But today even a criminal could give Rs 20,000 to the police and with the help of four disciples lay siege to a temple and become a mahant. ‘It has become like another Chambal valley (the dacoit-infested ravines in central India).’ Laldas adds, ‘If you ever learn the truth about what goes on in the temples here, you will become an atheist.’ These are the very people who, according to him, are recognized by the VHP as religious leaders. Subsequently, in another interview with us, Laldas was to suggest that this attempt to establish links with the criminally inclined had something to do with the criminal or quasi-criminal connections of some of the political parties involved in the dispute. He alleged that a factory of the brother of an important VHP functionary had stored 27 tons of lard; it was reportedly being used to adulterate vegetable oil. The priest was particularly sarcastic about the millions of rupees the VHP had collected and about the salience of Marwari businessmen among its functionaries. The situation has been worsened by the local police and adminis­ tration. According to Laldas, the police has always been partisan. As for local administrators, every now and then there have been good officers, but the current lot are entirely with the BJP. The District Magistrate, Ram Sharan Srivastava, was the worst. He was posted in Meerut before being transferred to Faizabad. Both cities witnessed 25 communal violence during his tenure. The people of Faizabad-Ayodha are sensible and tolerant, Laldas says. If they are communal, he asks, why did they vote a Communist to power from here in the previous general elections? While widespread violence rocked the rest of the state in the wake of L. K. Advani’s Rath Yatra, there was relative peace and calm in the area. Left to themselves, Laldas feels, the citizens of Ayodhya would have settled the matter amicably. Laldas, however, sees no possibility of a solution in the existing atmosphere. It is already too late, unless the VHP withdraws its 25In the communal o f the Babri masjid on in UP. Srivastava was the violence continued the city.

riots that broke out immediately after the demolition 6 December 1992, Kanpur was the worst-affected city the District Magistrate of Kanpur at the time. When for some days, he had to be hurriedly transferred from

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movement and— here Laldas shows some political sense, despite lending support to the state government’s secular rallies—unless the government of Mulayam Singh Yadav becomes less aggressive. Only then could a solution, acceptable to both the Hindus and Muslims, be worked out. The Muslim religious leadership of Ayodhya-Faizabad was bitter. ‘Now we cannot even say, all right take this masjid and spare us, because they have already staked their claim to 3000 more mosques. Today they want our mosques, tomorrow they will want our homes. There will be no end to it,’ said Haji Muhammad Kalim Samshi, the head of the Tatshah mosque in Faizabad. According to him the only thing to do was to accept the court’s verdict. But when asked what he would do if the judgment went against the popular sentiments of the Muslims, he remained silent for a few seconds and then mumbled T il go away.’ He did not say where. But despite such strong feelings on the issue, Haji Samshi ap­ peared on television, on the night of 30 October, and said that no damage had been done to the structure of the mosque. He added that he had been to the site and inspected it. It was obvious that apart from being a religious leader, he also had worldly wisdom. At that point in time, the fears of the Muslims of Ayodhya-Faizabad and those all over the country had to be allayed and the aggressive ele­ ments in his community had to be prevented from reacting by com­ mitting acts of violence which would only have invited the wrath of the majority community. Despite the bitterness, the local Muslims tried to keep their emo­ tions in check. While talking of a last-ditch effort to save the situa­ tion, the fear showed, not the anger. Said a youth leader of Ayodhya, Khalid Ahmed, ‘What will happen if Muslims take up arms tomorrow and turn terrorists? The government has not been able to control the Sikh problem in so many years. How will they control us?’ A senior Muslim leader of Faizabad, Nasir Sahib, talked of how life had be­ come a living hell ever since 26 February 1986, when the opening of the lock on the Janmasthan was celebrated with fireworks and distribution of sweets in Ayodhya. He said angrily: For 37 years before that everyone had forgotten about it, and then suddenly all these outsiders came here and made it an issue o f life and death. If only we had been left alone to decide for ourselves what we wanted! Instead it is

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L. K. Advani and the Shahi Imam, who have never even visited Ayodhya, who are going to decide the fate o f its residents.

The leader was open to a suggestion made just that day that the Hindus and Muslims of the twin cities should stage a bigger march than the army’s flag march in a show of solidarity and communal harmony. But it was left to Haji Abdul Ghaffar, then in his nineties, who used to read namaz in the Babri masjid until it was converted into a temple overnight, to express the depth of the fears of the mino­ rity community, which others were too sophisticated to do. ‘I have purchased my funeral shroud’, said Ghaffar. The residents of Ayodhya had long regarded the whole town as the Ramjanmabhumi. Neither they, nor the priests of the innumerable temples which dot the town’s landscape, could identify with total conviction, one particular site as the birthplace of Ram. As we have already said, there are at least two other spots in Ayodhya, besides the one on which the Babri mosque stood, that have long been con­ sidered the site of Ram’s birth. One is the Ramchabutra, outside the actual structure of the mosque but within its compound, which has been worshipped as the Ramjanmasthan since the mid-nineteenth cen­ tury. The other is the Ramjanmasthan mandir which stands close to the masjid and where the worshippers and the priests had long been relatively indifferent to the cause of liberating the Ramjanmabhumi. But the VHP propaganda had made some difference to their way of thinking, as in fact events at the end of October were to show. The Propaganda Machine The Hindus and Muslims of India do not constitute, we have said, distinct ethnic groups in any conventional sense. Nor do they con­ stitute, despite differences in their socio-economic and educational profiles, distinct socio-economic formations having distinct political interests. There are 650 million Hindus in India and more than 110 million Muslims. Such large aggregates, in a society as diverse as India, cannot but have internal divisions that are in some cases less and in other cases more significant than religious divisions. Even religious divisions within the two aggregates often bear ‘peculiar’ relationships with divisions within the other community. Thus, the Pranami sect in Gujarat (the one in which Gandhi was born) is in many ways closer to Islam than it is to many other sects within Hin­ duism; likewise, most versions of Sindhi Hinduism look terribly

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Islamic to many South Indian Hindus and many Muslim communities in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Bengal look disturbingly Hindu to Mus­ lims in other parts of India. Such variations mean that all attempts to mobilize Hindus and Muslims as Hindus and Muslims must concentrate on broad ideo­ logical issues and subjective configurations of grievances, memories, and cultural differences, specially engineered for mobilizational pur­ poses. The VHP provided such a configuration. Its propaganda in Ayodhya was shrill and vitriolic, especially near the disputed site where it set up a showroom during the movement. The approach to the disputed structure was through a heavily guarded iron gate. On the other side of the gate was the temple with a sanctum sanctorum that projected into the masjid. In it, there were three low stools on which were placed the idols that miraculously ‘appeared’ there on the night of 23 December 1949, and pictures of some other gods and goddesses.26 Besides, there were pictures of four individuals: K. K. Nayar, the District Magistrate of Faizabad at the time the idols made their appearance, Thakur Gurudutt Singh who was the city magistrate at the time, and freedom fighters Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad. Less than thirty yards away from the temple, separated by a fence, was the site of the foundation and adjoining it was an exhibition set up by the VHP, a visit to which was a must for any visitor according to a policeman standing on guard nearby. At the entrance of this showroom was the model of the proposed Ram mandir to be con­ structed at a cost of five hundred million rupees where the masjid stood. The idol of Ramlalla was placed in this model and all visitors were asked by VHP workers to bend down to have a look at the idol. The psychological impact of the showroom on at least some visitors was profound: The organized conjunction o f the model [of the proposed temple] with the shilanyas site suddenly transforms the showroom. It becomes no longer simply a place to exhibit the wares o f the VHP... The showroom makes the spectator complirit in the building of the VHP dream, by making the dream appear

26By now about six persons have claimed to have stealthily put the icons in their present place on 23 December 1949. See the interview with one claimant, Mahant Ramsohandas Shastri, in Anand Patwardhan, Ram ka Nam (Documentary film, 1992). Ramchandra Paramhans is another such claimant.

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fully formed. The future becomes inevitable: it transforms into the grand design o f fate.27

A brief history of the controversial structure was sought to be given through a series of large posters. One showed the miracle by which Vikramaditya found the Ramjanmabhumi, a second detailed the story of the temple, and a third showed its destruction by Babar. On the wall was written: ‘It is the religious duty of every Hindu to kill those who kill cows.’ There were also two large pictures of K. K. Nayar and Gurudutt Singh. The write-ups at the bottom lavished praise on these great men, honouring them for their great sacrifice.28 Outside the exhibition, a few policemen were playing an audio cassette on the public address system. It was a recording of some highly aggressive and somewhat vulgar speeches made by the BJP leader Uma Bharati. The one who can console our crying motherland, and kill the traitors with bullets, we want light and direction from such a martyr, we want a Patel or a Subhash for our nation.... When ten Bajrangbalis will sit on the chest of every Ali, then only will one know whether this is the birthplace o f Ram or the Babri masjid, then only will one know that this country belongs to Lord Ram.29

We tried to find out why they were playing this particular cassette. ‘Oh, we were just trying it out,’ they clarified. The trial lasted more than an hour. 2*Datta, ‘VHP’s Ram’, p. 2525. 28The reason for Nayar’s greatness becomes clear from his letter of 27 December 1949 to the then Chief Secretary o f UP, Bhagwan Sahay, ... I would if the government decided to remove the idols at any cost request that I be relieved and replaced by an officer who may be able to see in that solution a merit which I ct^ iot discern[quoted bySatyapal Dang, New Age, 15 October 1989]. /*" K. K. Nayar was eventually removed from government service after which he served one term as a Jan Sangh m .p. ‘Jo hamari roti matribhumi ko sukun de, aur deshdrohiyon ko goliyon se bhun de aise sarfarosh ka hamen prakash chahiye, desh ke liye hamen Patel ya Subhash chahiye.... Jab ek-ek A li ki chchati p a r das-das Bajrangbali chadhe honge, tab pata chal jayega ki yeh sthan Ramjanmabhumi hai ya Babri Masjid. Tab pata chal jayega ki yeh desh Prabhu Ram ka hai. ’

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The literature being sold in the VHP showroom was not different. Comprising mainly histories of Ayodhya, they centred on one main theme: how the sanctity of the Janmasthan in Ayodhya, attested by its association with miracles that had surfaced in many myths, had been defiled by the Muslims. Two such publications were the book Ayodhya Guide and the pamphlet Angry Hindu! Yes, Why Not? Both pleaded for aggressive assertion of Hindu power to avenge the wrongs inflicted on them by the Muslims in the past. Yes, certainly 1 am angry. And I have every reason to be angry. And it is also right for me to be so. Otherwise I would be no man. Yes for too long I have suffered insults in silence. Uptil [sic] now I have been at the receiving end ... My people have been kidnapped by the enemies. My numbers have dwindled ... my goddess-like motherland has been tom asunder ... My tradi­ tional rights have been snatched away from me. And still you tell me I should not get angry? That 1 should not stand up and shout ‘that’s enough’? My temples have been desecrated, destroyed. Their sacred stones are being trampled under the aggressor’s feet. My gods are crying. They are looking to me for their re-establishment in ail their original glory. When I speak out my agony, the secularists see it as a threat to our ‘secular peace’. You add insult to my injury. You rub salt into my wounded heart and expect me to keep my mouth shut. I am proud that you called me an ‘angry Hindu’. Till now I was an angry zamindar, angry farmer ... or an angry Maratha, angry Bengali ... or angry Jain, angry Arya Sam aji... But now you have given me a new name in which all this is absorbed ... I now realize I had been too good for this world of ‘hard reality’. I believed that others would respect my gods and temples as I respected other’s ... I believed generosity begets generosity.... But alas, again and again I was deceived, I was betrayed, I was stabbed in the back. I know now something o f the ways o f the world. And I have decided to speak to others in the language they understand ... And finally, I have come to know the value of my anger itself.30

A poem in the same pampfiMet, now known to be written by Atal Behari Vajpayee when he was in high school, sought to define the identity of this new mi'itant Hindu: Hindu tan-man, HinduJivan, rag-rag Hindu mera parichay Main Shankar ka woh kiodhanal, kar sakta ja g ti kshar-kshar ^Anonymous, Angry Hindu! Yes, Why Not? (New Delhi: Suruchi, 1988), pamphlet.

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Main damru ki pralayadhvani hun jismain nachta bhishan sanhar Ranachandi ki atripta pyas, main Durga ka unmatta has, Main Yam ki pralayankar pukdr, jalte marghat ka dhuandhar Phir antartam ki jvala se ja g ti mein dg laga dun main, Yadi dhadak uthe jal-thal-ambar-jad-chetan phir kaisa vismav? Hindu tan-man Hindu jivan, rag-rag Hindu mera parichay: (This is the identity o f the Hindu body, the Hindu soul and the Hindu life, I am that rage of Shankar, which can destroy the earth and reduce it to ashes, I am the devastating sound o f his drum to which death dances, I am the unquenched thirst of the goddess o f war, I am the divine laughter of Durga, I am the doomsday call of the god of death, the burning fire from the funeral pyre, If with this fire raging inside me, I bum the earth, And the water, earth, sky, soil go up in flames on theirown, donot be surprised.)

Towards its end, the poem also spoke of the victimization of the Hindus in history and their overall martial and moral superiority over the Muslims. Mein vir-putra, meri Janani ke ja g ti mein jauhar apdr; Akbar ke putron se puccho—kya yad unhe Mind Bazar? Kya yad unhe Chittor durg mein jalne wali dg prakhar? Jab hai! Sahasron mdtaen til-til jalkar ho gayin amar. Vah bujhne wali dg nahin, rag-rag mein use sanjoye hun, Yadi kabhi achanak phut pade, viplav lekar to kya vismay?*2 (I am the son of the brave, there are many Jauhars hidden inme; ask the sons o f Akbar, whether they remember Mina Bazar? Do they remember the raging fire in the fort of Chittor? When thousands o f mothers attained martyrdom by burning themselves. This fire which I have nurtured in every vein of my body is not one which can ever be put out, If it suddenly erupts in the form of a revolution, it will hardly be a surprise.) B oth the b ooks and pam phlets w ere sellin g briskly.

31Anonymous, Krudh H indu?—Han Main Krudh Hun (N ew D elhi: Suruchi, 1988), 2nd ed., pamphlet. 32Ibid.

CHAPTER THREE

V. C r e a t in g

a

N a t io n a l it y

he social sources and political motives propelling the Ramjanmabhumi movement were related to the contents of the pro-' paganda unleashed by the movement. Its consumers, in turn, were not distributed randomly over all social segments; they came with a particular social profile. For more than a hundred years, these sources and motivations have been shaped by the growth of the political culture of Hindu nationa­ lism. The growth parallels similar movements within South Asian Islam, Sikhism, and Buddhism. The emergence of Hinduism itself as the religion of the majority community in urban, modernizing India has its mirror image in the emergence of Islam as the religion of a minority with roughly similar ideological and programmatic content. Both in turn have striking similarities with the emergence of Buddhist Sinhala majoritarianism and Sikh minority consciousness roughly along the same lines.

T

The P o litic s o f an Idea

Hindu‘nationalism does not have a long past in India. Nor for that matter has Hinduism itself in its present sense. The idea of Hindus as a single political community that can be specifically called a nation is relatively new.1 Its beginnings can be traced to the middle of the ‘As repeated ad nauseum these days, the word Hindu is of Arabic/Persian origin and has exactly the same meaning etymologically as the word India, which is o f Graeco-Roman origin. None o f the Hindu sacred texts even once mentions the word Hindu. Both these foreign words have served, for outsiders unacquainted with the complexities of the country, as a generic name for the different, mainly non-Islamic, but also non-Christian, communities living in the subcontinent. It is doubtful if the word Hindu excluded before the nineteenth centuryvthe ancient Christian communities o f the present-day Kerala, the Zoroastrians, and the Jewish communities o f Maharashtra and

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nineteenth century when, in reaction to the onslaught of aggressive modernism of mainly the Utilitarians and the social Darwinists, Christian evangelism, and exposure to European ideologies of natio­ nalism, there began to crystallize a wide variety of ‘Hindu’ responses in the public sphere of India. These responses gained strength because the modem and secular ideologies, that came into India primarily through colonialism, began to be backed, since about the 1830s, by the colonial state trying to establish a closer link between colonialism and modernism and using the latter as an endorsement of the Raj’s civilizing mission. The re­ sulting feelings of inferiority, insecurity about the future, and moral disorientation provoked responses that were frequently a strange mix ' of the classical, the folk, and the imported western categories that had produced the cultural and psychological disruption in the first place. One reaction took the form of a defensive attempt to redefine Hinduism as a ‘proper’ religion along Semitic lines and to make this redefined Hinduism the pillar of a second, nativized theory o f mod­ ernization of mind and society in India. In opposition to the liberalsecular model, becoming popular among the more Anglicized sections of the élites, this second strand retained some of the basic concerns of modernization, but gave them a new twist. Concepts such as the nation-state and modern technology continued to be important, but they were now to be pursued through a language that was Hindu in its new, redefined sense. Simultaneously, the ideology of nationalism was nativized in a form that could sanction the attempts to convert the Hindus into a conventional, European-style nation. This new Hinduism—the political ideology of which was to be later given the name Hindutva and which some of its detractors prefer to call ‘toady Hinduism’—had a number of important features. First, Kerala, and even many of the Muslim communities of the subcontinent. For the West Asian Muslims who coined it in the twelfth century and the pre-British rulers o f India who used it, ‘Hindu’ was an administrative term. The British and, following them, the westernized Indians turned it into a reli­ gious category. The definition and parameters o f Hinduism are being settled now. There is the other side o f the story too; many other communities now widely recognized as non-Hindu are actually becoming so now in India. For example, whatever the official census might say, Sikhism became an identifiably separate ‘religion’ in the minds of Indians only in the 1980s and, formal­ ly, probably after the riots in the city of Delhi in November 1984.

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it defensively rejected or devalued the little cultures of India as so many indices of the country’s backwardness and as prime candidates for integration within the Hindu/national mainstream. Instead, the new Hindus sought to chalk out a new pan-Indian religion called Hinduism that would be primarily classical, Brahmanic, Vedantic and, therefore, not an embarrassment to the modern or semi-modern In­ dians in touch with the more ‘civilized’ parts of the world. It was this high culture, more acceptable to the modem or westernized In­ dians and to post-Enlightenment Europe, which was sought to be made the basis of the new Hindu nation. The nationhood was also projected into the past and the Hindu cultural uniqueness was reinter­ preted as merely the marker of a modem national ideology. This attempted Brahmanization or, what at that time could be safe­ ly called, Aryanization was sustained by the poor access and even contempt that many of the early stalwarts of Hindutva had for the diverse lifestyles that went with Hinduism in South Asia. For these stalwarts mostly came from the uprooted, urban, modernized or semimodemized sectors of the country and, in fact, their Hindutva was often a reaction to, and compensated for, their distance from the lived traditions of Hinduism. The poor access did not appear a handicap at the time because of the ambience created by the rediscovery of classical Hinduism by sympathetic European scholars,3 by the spread of Hindu reform movements such as Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj, and by the devaluation of the little cultures of Hinduism by aggres­ sive modernism and evangelical Christianity.4 fo llo w in g Majid Rahnema, one could call this the tradition o f vernacular Hinduism or vernacular India. Majid Rahnema, ‘Reflections on Fundamenta­ lism ’, Alternatives, forthcoming. Anthropologist Michael Robert has drawn our attention to the parallel split in Sri Lankan Buddhism between vernacular Buddhism serving as a faith of the kind so elegantly depicted in Gananath Obeseykere’s M edusa’s Hair: The Cult o f the Goddess Petini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and the ideological Buddhism o f the likes of Dhammapal serving as the basis of Sinhala nationalism. 3In this neoclassicism and neo-Brahmanism an important role was played by Orientalists such as William Jones and Max Mueller whose enthusiasm for ancient India was sometimes matched by a distinct distaste for the living reality of India and Hinduism. Particularly revealing in this context are the life and writings o f Brahmabandhav Upadhyay (1861-1907), probably the first activist-scholar to sys­ tematically develop the ideological content o f Hindu nationalism. Already the

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The Orientalists and the religious reformers created the impression of there being a ‘real’ Hinduism which transcended the ‘trivialities’ o f the local traditions. The m odernists and the m issionaries delegitimized Hinduism as a lived experience and left open, for the increasingly insecure Indian literati, the option of defending only philosophical Hinduism as the real Hinduism. Second, the redefined version of Hinduism allowed those who saw the new religion more as an ideology than as a faith, to use Hinduism as an instrument of political mobilization a la European-style national ideology. This part of the redefinition of Hinduism derived strength from the fact that Indian culture was primarily organized around religion and it seemed natural to some Indians, sold to the new myth of the nation-state, to use Hinduism as a national ideology rather than as a repertoire of religious, cultural and moral categories in politics.5 In fact, Hindu nationalism had to specifically reject a cul­ tural-moral definition of Hinduism, the political possibilities of which were to be later developed by M. K. Gandhi. The two strands of consciousness were never to be reconciled, despite the efforts of a number of individuals and parties. Occasional paeans to Gandhi notwithstanding, Hindu nationalism continued to see Gandhism as a mortal enemy. It is not widely known that all three attempts on G andhi’s life in India were made by Hindu nationalists. During his lifetime, his commitment to eternal Hinduism, sanatana dharma, was itself seen as one of his stigmata. And fifty years after his death, his Hinduism continues to look to Hindu nationalists openly anti-statist, anti-Brahmanic, disaggregating, emasculating and hostile to modern science and technology. Even more dangerous, his Hinduism brings to politics a cultural-moral culture o f the twice-born castes and Aryanism were evident in Upadhyay. It is no accident that Upadhyay’s nationalism was tinged with his own marginality, religious and cultural. Upadhyay, brought up as an orthodox Brahman, first embraced Protestant Christianity and then Catholicism, and returned through Christianity to Vedantic Hinduism. An aggressive nationalist, he was the first to theoretically explore the possibilities o f using political terrorism as an instrument o f anti-imperialism. See the section on Upadhyay in Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy o f Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics o f Self (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). Similar uprootedness characterized the life o f Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), also. The nationalism o f the early Savarkar, especially as projected in his novel, 1857, has many similarities with that of Upadhyay’s. 5Nandy, ‘Politics o f Secularism*.

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critique of Hindutva from the point of view of Hinduism as the living faith of a majority of Indians. The political possibilities of such a critique in competitive, open politics are not lost on the Hindu nationalists. (Suresh Sharma draws attention to the paradox that the ultim ate protagonist of Hindu nationalism , Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, had little to say about the content of Hindu religious tradi­ tion, whereas Gandhi, whom Savarkar considered a danger to Hindu­ ism, spent his life exploring and redeploying these traditions in politics.6) As it happened, many of those who helped to redefine Hinduism as a national ideology were themselves either agnostic or non­ believers; some of them were not even practising Hindus.7 But they were convinced that the Indians had to be pummelled into a single nation through the ideology of Hindutva. In this respect at least, there was no difference whatsoever between Hindu nationalism and statist secularism. Actually, the fanaticism associated with Hindutva at the highest levels of the organizations swearing by Hindutva is political, not religious. At its core lies a secular ideology of the state and a modem rationality. Both have a totally instrumental concept of piety and of the faith of the lesser mortals who supply the personnel and, occasionally, the cannon-fodder for the movement. Third, this Hinduism sought to masculinize the self-definition of the Hindus and, thus, martialize the community. The more the sense of cultural and personal impotency produced by the colonial political economy, the more pronounced became the attempts to give public shape to these masculinity strivings, to militarize the seemingly unmilitarizable.8 To bring about this change, the Hindu nationalists 6Suresh Sharma, ‘Hinduism in Colonial Times’, unpublished paper presen­ ted in the seminar on ‘Hinduism: Religion or Civilization?’, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, 2-3 December 1991. A similar paradoxical situation obtains in the case of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1875-1948), the best known spokesman for subcontinental Muslims who had little to say about their faith and culture, and Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958), who lost out as a leader of the subcontinent’s Muslims but showed a lifelong concern with Islamic theology and culture. 7Once again there is a vague parallel between Savarkar and Jinnah in this respect, apart from the fact that they both embraced a two-nation theory for India. Savarkar’s two-nation theory of course predated Jinnah’s. "For a more detailed discussion of some of these issues, see Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery o f S elf Under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).

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systematically began to use the newly discovered discipline, history.9 They did so not with the Orwellian conviction that one who control­ led the past controlled the future, but with the enthusiasm of one who had introjected the colonial estimate of Indians as ahistorical and irrational. Defensive about the traditional Indian emphasis on myths as the major means of constructing the past, they enthusiasti­ cally used the colonial histories of communities identified by the British as martial, such as the histories of the Rajputs and the Marathas by scholars like James Tod and Jadunath Sarkar. They then turned these sectional histories into powerful nationalist, often Hindu nationalist, interpretations of the past. In their new editions, these interpretations selected and absolutized elements of history that eli­ cited the passions and the sacredness traditionally associated with myths, without the openness, multiple narrations, and interpretations that went with these myths in an epic culture. Having done so, Hindu nationalism had to specifically reject the Indian openness to all alternative forms of construction of the past and underplay or ignore the latent Indian hostility to history as con­ ceptualized by Enlightenment Europe. In this respect, the Hindu nationalist commitment to the idea of history was to be matched only by the Leninist-positivist concept of history as internalized by the Indian Left. The Hindu nationalists sought to justify everything by history; they invoked and instrumentally used myths only when his­ tory failed them; and they absolutized history in a way that abridged and delegitimized the open hermeneutic« of myths, legends and epics in Indian civilization.1 With the secular liberals and the socialists they also shared a common faith in scientized history; all of them 9For an excellent discussion of the process see Vinay Lai, ‘On the Perils o f History and Historiography: The Case, Puzzling as Usual, of India’, ms, 1988. lwIn other words, they absolutized myths, too. It is not surprising that, in the context o f the Ramjanmabhumi stir, when the Hindu nationalists, feeling betrayed by their beloved history, tried to return to myths as a crucial orga­ nizing principle o f society, they fell flat on the face. See, for instance, K. R. Malkani, Letter to the Editor, The Times o f India, 15 December 1989. Their discomfiture was matched only by that of their ultra-secular brethren trying to combat the Hindu nationalist exploitation of the Ramjanmabhumi contro­ versy through ‘hard’ history. S. Gopal, Romila Thapar, and others, The Politi­ cal Abuse o f History (New Delhi, pamphlet). See also A. R. Khan, ‘In the Name o f History’, Indian Express, 25 February 1990; S. Gopal et al., i n the Name o f History’, ‘Dr A. R. Khan Replies’, Ibid., 1 April 1990.

62

C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

criticized colonial history, but they did not see history itself as having a colonial connection. We have already mentioned how this historical consciousness has itself become a major contributor to communal tensions in India today.11 Fourth, Hindu nationalism not only accepted modern science and technology and their Baconian social philosophy, it also developed a totally uncritical attitude towards any western knowledge system that seemed to contribute to the development and sustenance of state power and which promised to homogenize the Indian population. There is no critique of modem science and technology in Hindutva, except for a vague commitment to some selected indigenous systems that are relatively more Brahmanic and happen to be peripheral to the pursuit of power. So Ayurveda and Siddha can have some legiti­ macy for the Hindu nationalists, not the traditional folk or tribal sys­ tems of healing. Nor has Hindu nationalism shown the slightest sensitivity to the traditional Indian concepts of statecraft or village technology or artisan skills. For there cannot be in Hindutvi any acceptance of any traditional technology or skill that diminishes or subverts the power of the state or its centralizing thrust or detracts from its phallic symbolism. Hence, the fanatic commitment both to nuclear weaponry and nuclear power even among those votaries of Hirdutva who are ideologically committed to indigenous systems of knowledge in other areas of life. Consequently, there is a complete rejection of not only the preBritish Islamic concept of state in India—which in any case was seen as totally hostile towards the Hindus, even the traditional Hindu ex­ perience of running large states in India is seen as entirely irrelevant. Thanks to the new historical consciousness, acquired through the colonial connection and the systematic delegitimization of the preBritish cultures of politics after the entry of the Utilitarian theories of progress into the Indian scene in the 1830s, any appreciation of the Hindu past could only be an appreciation of the contemporary West superimposed on the Hindu past. Despite all the lip service paid to non-Muslim rulers and warriors such as Chandragupta Maurya, Rana Pratap, Shivaji and Guru Govind Singh, Hindu nationalism has always held in contempt the memories of Hindu polity as it survives in the traditional sectors of the Hindu society. There is not a single uCf. E. Valentine Daniel, ‘History and its Entailments in the Violence o f a Nation’, in Frederique Apffel Marglin (ed.), Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, forthcoming.

Creating a Nationality

63

respectable study of the political theories of pre-colonial Hinduism done from within the tradition of Hindu nationalism which is not shot through with western concepts of statism and nationalism. Though the concept of Hindu rashtra was introduced in the middle of the nineteenth century and later systematized by the likes of Savarkar, the concept is culturally hollow; it is nothing more than the post-seventeenth-century European concepts of nationality and nation-state projected back into the Indian past; such a nation-state is expected in contemporary times to be controlled by modernized Hindus and inhabited by their likes. It is this modem content of Hindutva which explains part of the enthusiasm for the idea among urban, middle-class Indians and expatriate Indians in the first world; they see their secular interests as well as private hopes, anxieties, and fears well-reflected in the ideology. In other words, even the Hindus who would constitute the Hindu rashtra are not expected to be Hindus in the traditional sense. The traditional Hindus are seen as too diverse, feminized, irrational, un­ versed in the intricacies of the modem world, and too pantheistic, pagan, gullible and anarchic to run a proper state. So, the emphasis is on the new version of Hindus emerging in metropolitan India, with one foot in western education and values, the other in simplified versions of classical thought now available in commoditifiable form in the urban centres of India. This simplified version is expected to be a substitute or compensation for the loss of access to traditional social relations and lifestyles, both in the growing urban jungles of modern India and in the cultural melting pots of the First World. (In a way, the attempt was to take to its logical conclusion Vivekananda’s belief that a European society could be built in India on the basis of re-interpreted Vedanta.) This re-engineered, culturally bipedal Hindu is to be backed by an ideology that is a pasteurized, Brahmanic version of the dominant public ideology of the modem West. This ideology works on the basis of a number of conspicuous polarities—genuine secularism as opposed to pseudo-secularism, genuine history as opposed to false history, true nationalism as opposed to false or effete patriotism, and so on. No wonder that from the beginning, the ideologues of Hindutva found that a majority of their supporters came from urban India and spe­ cially from among the same modem Indians who were unable to

64

C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

break into the high-status, oligarchic club of the fully westernized Indians. The Party To start with, the ideologues of Hindutva were a small minority in the public sphere, though their presence in the culture of Indian poli­ tics was never insignificant. But their influence grew with the widen­ ing reach of the modem institutions. The major breakthrough came when the colonial state began to falter due to the growing politiciza­ tion of the Indian middle classes. When the movement against the partition of Bengal began in 1905, the Hindu nationalists for the first time made their political clout felt. Though there persisted a powerful liberal-syncretic strand of political consciousness in the public sphere, the appeal of Hindu nationalism was visible enough for some, like Rabindranath Tagore, to register their dissent even during the heady days of the Banga Bhanga movement.12 The reason for the visibility is not difficult to guess. The ‘syncretism’ that had been once so conspicuous in the Indian political scene had begun to look to many politicized Indians, thanks to the humiliations being inflicted by the colonial regime, as too com­ promising and obsequious to the colonial establishment. That syn­ cretism had even failed to produce an adequate critique of the modem West, these Indian felt. There was a time when such syncretism had its aggressive, fanatic proponents in associations such as the Young Bengal group led by Henry Derozio (1809-31) and Krishna Mohun Banerjea (1813-85). They were ardent nationalists and modernists, and their syncretism was actually a not-so-hidden plea for full-scale westernization and war against Hinduism. In the first decades of the new century, such syncretism, even when preached by more moderate movements, began to look like an alliance against the victims of colonialism. The proliferation of ‘terrorist’ outfits—many of them inspired by the ideo­ logy of Hindu nationalism—could be said to be a direct outcome of the manifest impotency of the liberals in the Indian freedom move­ ment in the face of the arrogance and arbitrariness of the colonial regime. What further underwrote the ideology of Hindu nationalism was the fact that this arrogance and arbitrariness were based on a Kiplingesque division between the so-called martial and non-martial I^

Nandy, The Illegitimacy o f Nationalism.

Creating a Nationality

65

races of India and on the belief, openly articulated by colonial bureaucrats such as Lord Curzon, that the martial races deserved to rule India. Hindu nationalism in this respect was another case of identification with the aggressors and internalization of the key cat­ egories of the colonial discourse. The battleground of the contestants—Hindu nationalism and modern liberalism—was the middle-class Indian. The influence of both strands of political consciousness was confined to urban India and to those who had some exposure to the process of modernization. Within this sector, by the second decade of this century and especially after the Jalianwalabagh massacre in 1919, there were signs that the Hindu nationalists were gradually winning more and more support, and the liberals were losing out. This contest, however, was disrupted by the entry of M. K. Gandhi into Indian politics. By the middle of the 1920s, he had consolidated his dominance in the Indian national movement by checkmating both the ‘moderates’ and the ‘extremists’. He had done so by taking his anti-imperialist politics beyond the urban middle classes, into India’s sleepy villages. The cultural fall out of the process included the con­ tainment of the Hindu nationalists who began to see Gandhi’s emer­ gence as a defeat for them. This explains the persistent simmering hostility towards Gandhi, particularly towards his philosophy of politics and perception of India’s civilizational future, among the more modernized Indian communities that supplied the clientele of both Hindu nationalism and western liberalism as well as the leadership of the freedom movement till then. Among these displaced commu­ nities were the Brahmans of Maharashtra and South India, the bhadralok of Bengal, and a sizeable section of the upper-castes in northern India who had come under the influence of the Arya Samaj. Not only were all three attempts on Gandhi’s life made by Hindu nationalists, all three involved Maharashtrian Brahmans. One by-product of this defeat at the hands of Gandhian mass politics—which brilliantly used the strengths of vernacular Hindu­ ism—was the gradual withdrawal of Hindu nationalism from the mainstream of the anti-imperialist struggle. Many stalwarts of Hindu nationalism—starting from Savarkar, who had once made enormous personal sacrifices for the freedom struggle, to Hegdewar, who had started his life as a freedom fighter—veered round to take a more benign view of western colonialism. They wanted to use the British presence in India not only to cure Indians of their unconcern with things

66

C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

like history, nation-state and modem science, but also to free India from the scourge of the Muslims. Anti-imperialism was not aban­ doned, but it was given a much lower place in the hierarchy of politi­ cal goals. This sense of defeat in the Hindu nationalists lasted until the 1960s by when, with the introduction of full-fledged general elections after the partition of the country into India and Pakistan, they had marked out a small constituency that stood by them through thick and thin. The constituency served not so much the old Hindu Mahasabha, with which the likes of Savarkar were associated, but the newly founded Jan Sangh. The Jan Sangh was established in 1953 by Shyamaprasad Mookerji (1901-53) who, though by conviction and family traditions was sym­ pathetic to Hindu nationalism, had been a respected member of Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet. His political break with Congress was bound to come, but it took on the colour of a serious policy difference on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir, though the treatm ent o f minorities in East Pakistan was also a contributing factor. In fact, the first session of the Jan Sangh at Kanpur was dominated by two issues: (a) Hindu refugees streaming into India from East Bengal and (b) the India-Pakistan conflict on, and the especial status given to, Kashmir. On both issues the government of India was condemned for taking a soft stand and a demand was made for firm action short of war. On the refugee problem, Mookerji had the support of most oppo­ sition parties, including most sections of the Left. On Kashmir too, Mookerji had the tacit support of a large part of Indian public opinion. Later, when the Kashmir issue became more conspicuously an all-party issue, at least one commentator was to go so far as to say that on Kashmir, after Mookerji, ‘the Jan Sangh did not have a more brilliant spokesman of its policies than [V. K. Krishna] M enon....’13 The M a ss P o litic s o f H in d u tva

Before we look at the performance of the BJP in the electoral arena— after all, according to many that was what Ramjanmabhumi was all about—a word on the party’s precursors. The first party to contest elections in India on a Hindu nationalist platform was the Hindu Mahasabha. It grew out of a few Hindu l3Quoted in Craig Baxter, Jan Sangh: A Biography o f an Indian Political Party (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969), p. 116.

Creating a Nationality

67

organizations established in the first decade of the century. The Mahasabha was established partly in reaction to the establishment of the Indian Muslim League. At the beginning, the Mahasabha’s programmes were not seen as entirely incompatible with those of the Indian National Congress. Some members of the Congress were members of the Mahasabha, too. Also, despite its style and idiom, the new party maintained a certain openness to political manoeuvrings. It even once formed a coalition ministry with the Indian Muslim League in Punjab. This openness lasted through the early years of independence; in fact, one internal historian of the Mahasabha, deploring the failure of the party to capitalize on the tension between the Hindus and Muslims, blamed its own moderate leaders .14 This open style was maintained even when Savarkar dominated the Mahasabha between 1937 and 1948. The political openness was not matched by ideological flexibility, particularly during the Savarkar era, partly because Savarkar, being an intellectual, painstakingly formalized the ideological presupposi­ tions of Hindutva that were only implicit in the earlier leaders of the Mahasabha, and partly because the arrival of pan-Indian electoral politics had created a space for a political definition of the Hindus that could be more exclusivist. Here is what the privately faithless votary of Hindutva said on more than one occasion: ‘a Hindu means a person who regards his land of Bharatvarsha from the Indus to the seas, as his Fatherland as well as his holy land .’ 15 In this definition, for the first time, the concept of Hindu is given a predominantly territorial component, a concept of holy land is specifi­ cally introduced in a fashion that would create a stratarchy of Indians ;16 l4Indra Prakash, A Review o f the Work o f the Hindu Mahasabha, quoted in Baxter, p. 16-17. ,5We are grateful to Govind Deshpande for pointing out to us that the spatial part of this definition was taken from the Vishnu Purana. However, it is doubtful that Savarkar borrowed it directly from that source. More likely, he borrowed it from one o f a number o f writers and thinkers o f nineteenthcentury Bengal who had used this definition in roughly the same form. l6The tacit assumption was that this concept of the holy land would not be acceptable to the Christians and the Muslims, especially the latter. As it happens, Islam in South Asia, too, has a rich plural tradition even on this score. See chapter 5 o f their book. Also, Tahir Mahmud ( ‘Bridging the HinduMuslim Gap’, Prout, 25 January 1992, p. 15) who quotes the prophet’s sonin-law, the fourth Caliph Hazrat Ali as saying, ‘Of all the places on earth the holiest and most fragrant is India.’

68

C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

and the imagery of fatherland is borrowed from European nationalism and introduced into a culture that had specialized in sacralizing the country as a mother.17 Trivial though these differentia might be, they were the ones that distinguished the Hindu nationalism of the likes of Savarkar from that of his declared precursors such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya and Swami Vivekananda, both of whom ar­ ticulated a more nuanced approach to the politics of culture and were more willing to celebrate India’s diverse cultural traditions.18 Savarkar’s definition was wedded to a few other clear-cut demands on the Hindus, demands later repeated by virtually every important Hindu nationalist leader. The Hindus had to profess Hindutva rather than Hinduism as the first defining characteristic of themselves; they had to organize themselves as a religious as well as a political com­ munity and disown all internal divisions such as caste; they had to opt for the classical, pan-Indian version of their religious philosophy; they had to systematically de-paganize their faith, preferably by giving up all forms of idol worship; and, above all, they had to mod­ ernize and kshatriyaize—read masculinize—themselves.19 All these preferred traits were seen as features of the Semitic creeds and the aim, ultimately, was to engineer the Hindus into a nTo thus masculinize Mother India, Savarkar had to even drop the word bhumi, land, which was grammatically feminine and had been traditionally used in expressions such as janmabhumi, birthplace, and matrbhumi, mother­ land. 18See, for instance, Chaturvedi Badrinath, Dharma, India and the World Order: Twenty Essays (New Delhi: The Centre for Policy Research, 1991), p. 138: ‘Neither does Golwalkar refer to another central perception o f Vivekananda that it was in Islam and Islam alone, that the Vedanta had found its true practical application, and therefore what was required for the future o f India was a fusion o f Islam and Vedanta.’ l9It is fascinating how the Belgian Jesuit scholar Koenraad Elst, manfully bearing the burden o f the guilt of the colonial record o f European Christianity, has consistently tried to re-read Hindu nationalism as exactly its reverse— as a defence of paganism. See his What After Ayodhya: Issues Before Hindu Society (Delhi: Voice o f India, 1991). Elst’s last book, Negationism in India: Concealing the Record o f Islam (Delhi: Voice o f India, 1992), even granting the truth o f his accusations against the Eurocentric secularist scholars of India, makes it obvious that at least one o f his aims is perfectly compatible with that o f Hindu nationalism. He wants to establish that the European colonial record in South Asia was far superior to that o f Islam which he finds comparable with that of Nazism. We return to this issue more than once in this book.

Creating a Nationality

69

dark-skinned version of the most successful species on earth, the Europeans. One even suspects that the hostility to Muslims came at least partly because they now appeared to have, after the entry of politically truculent monotheism into the Indian scene, similarities with the Europeans in their faith and this similarity was read as a clue to their dominance over India for 700 years and the ‘unfair 20 advantage’ they enjoyed in Indian public life. Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), the father of modem India, might have put it on behalf of the entire galaxy of Hindu social reformers of the nineteenth cen­ tury when he said, I have observed with respect to distant cousins, sprung from the same family, and living in the same district, when one branch of the family had been converted to Mussulmanism, that those of the Muhammadan branch living in a freer manner, were distinguished by greater bodily activity and capacity for exertion, than those o f the other branch which had adhered to the Hindoo simple mode o f life.21

Predictably, Roy traced this difference to Hindu vegetarianism, which he traced to their ‘religious prejudices’, and their ‘want of bodily exertion and industry’ brought about by a hot climate and a fertile land .22 The B JP

This is the cultural baggage with which the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, the forerunner of the BJP, entered the electoral arena in independent India for the first time in 1952. Its electoral performance was not specta­ cular till 1977 (see Table 9), but from its beginning, the party carved out a small, reliable, steady, support base among the urban middle classes and sections of the twice-born castes, especially the Banias. 20Both Islam and Christianity were seen as predatory faiths by the ideologues o f Hindu nationalism. See for instance, Badrinath, Dharma, pp. 117-18. This entire section o f Badrinath’s book (pp. 111-39) provides an excellent analysis o f Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar’s (1906-73)— and, in the process the RSS’s— intellectual mission. The analysis is offered from the point o f view o f the traditional concerns of Indian society and it reconfirms the colonial roots o f Hindu nationalism. It was in Golwalkar’s thought that Hindu nationalism found its final fulfilment. 2lRammohun Roy, ‘Additional Queries Respecting the Condition o f India’, The English Works (Calcutta: Sadharon Brahmo Samaj, 1947), part 3, pp. 63-8; see p. 63. 22Ibid.

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C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

In 1977, this marginality ended for the Jan Sangh electorally. This was one by-product of the Internal Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during 1975-77. The Jan Sangh was one of the first parties to oppose the suspension of civil rights and its cadres suffered imprisonment and other forms of harassment along with the workers of other parties. As a result, the Jan Sangh workers, most of them from the RSS, managed to break do*n a part of the fear and discomfort they used to arouse in many activists of the other opposition parties and the Left. The RSS itself was banned during the Emergency, nearly 27 years after it had been banned for the first time after the assassination of Gandhi. But, given the political cir­ cumstances in the country, the ban this time did not enjoy the legitimacy it had done in 1948. It was also the time when the Left, with some exceptions, suffered a decline in intellectual influence and political legitimacy. Sixteen other organizations were banned during the Emergency along with the RSS, fourteen of them small Maoist groups of various kinds. But what stuck in public memory was the support given to the Emergency during its early days— and some mealy-mouthed opposition to it afterwards— by important sections of the mainstream communist movement. Also, given the close links many Leftists had with the Congress party through the Nehru-Gandhi family and its entourage, the Emergency years marked the emergence of the Jan Sangh as a serious, authentic opposition for a large section of Indians. So, when the Janata Party was formed in 1977, it did not hesitate to include within it the Jan Sangh. The founder of the party Jayaprakash Narayan (1902-80) himself insisted on such a united front, perhaps motivated by the belief that this would further smoothen the edges of Hindu nationalism. When the Janata Party won the general elections and came to power that year, its Jan Sangh component acquired an impressive political presence, with two important cabinet posts and a certain new-found respectability in the public sphere. The process of legi­ timation acquired further momentum when the Jan Sangh’s Atal Behari Vajpayee turned out to be an enlightened foreign minister, sensitive to South Asian issues and especially successful with and respected in Pakistan and other neighbouring countries. L. K. Advani, the other stalwart of the Jan Sangh, also acquitted himself well as minister of information and broadcasting.

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Creating a Nationality

Table 9 AGGREGATE ELECTORAL PERFORMANCE OF BJS/BJP FOR LOK SABHA Year

1952 1957 1962 1967 1971 1977 1980 1984 1989 1991

Total seats

489 494 494 520 518 542 542 542 529 508

Seats con­ tested (%)

Seats won

Votes won

(%)

(%)

19.2 26.3 39.7 48.3 30.9

3.2 3.1 7.1 13.5 13.8 17.0

3.1 5.9 6.4 9.4 7.4 14.0 8.6 7.4 11.5 -

-

-

42.3 42.7 87.2

0.9 37.6 25.3

Source: Adapted from Shankar Bose and V. B. Singh,

Elections in India:

D ata Hand Book on Lok Sab ha Elections—1952-85 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986), Table 1.3.; and Election Commission of India, Report o f the Ninth General Elections to the House o f People in India 1989 (Statistical) (New Delhi: Election Commission, 1990).

Note: The BJP performance in 1977 and 1980 are estimates because the party contested as part of a larger party/front. Also, for the same reason, the percentage of the party’s share of votes is calculated on the basis of the number of seats which it captured as part of the Janata Party. In 1989, too, the BJP had seat adjustments with a major opposition party, the Janata Dal. The lessons learnt from the experience were not forgotten for a long time by the party. Even when the Janata Party split in 1980, the Jan Sangh was not resurrected. A new party called the Bharatiya Janata Party was launched with Gandhian socialism as its ideological platform. Both the choice of the name of the party and the ideological label indicated that the attempt was to maintain a continuity with the erstwhile Janata Party and the political tradition associated with its founder, Jayaprakash Narayan. There is a widespread impression in India that the BJP reached the pinnacle of its electoral glory in 1989 and 1991 with 88 and 117

72

C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

parliamentary seats respectively. Actually, the party did very well in 1977 also, when it won 92 seats with a softened Hindu nationalist stand. What changed the party’s stance was its performance in the general elections of 1980 and 1984. In the former it won 16 seats; in the latter two (see Table 9). The BJP began reverting to its ultra-Hindu posture soon after the 1984 elections. One important reason for that was the Congress party’s success in winning over the BJP’s mainly upper-caste, urban vote bank as a compensation for the perceived loss of scheduled caste and minority—specially Muslim and Sikh—votes since the Emergen­ cy years. Thus, Rajiv Gandhi’s landslide victory in the 1984 par­ liamentary elections was attributed partly to his ability to win over most of the upper-caste support that previously went to the BJP. After the 1989 General Elections, no party won an absolute majo­ rity in Parliament. When the results were declared, the BJP, along with the Left Front led by the two major communist parties of India, decided to support the Janata-Party-led National Front in Parliament. The latter then formed a minority government. It was an obvious attempt by the BJP and the Left to keep the Indian National Congress out of power. Both anticipated that the minority government would not last long and there would soon be a mid-term poll. This of course also meant that all the major political parties con­ tinued to compete to expand their own support bases in preparation for the expected mid-term poll. Things hotted up when Prime Mini­ ster V. P. Singh accepted the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, under consideration for several years, and reserved an additional 27 per cent of government jobs for the ‘backward’ castes. This action immediately identified the Janata Party with the interests of the numerically preponderant backward castes, but also made it a deeply hated formation among the upper castes and the urban middle class, specially the professionals. It also successfully antagonized the media and the intelligentsia, dominated by the upper castes and fear­ ful of losing their easy access to power, ensured by their education and ability to cope with modern institutions. But, above all, the acceptance of the Mandal Commission recom­ mendations threatened to split the political base of the BJP. The BJP had been working assiduously to expand its upper-caste support by utilizing the ideology of Hindu nationalism. Its targets were primarily the numerically strong and politically mobilized backward cartes. Singh’s strategy now seemed to strike at the roots of Hindu electoral

Creating a Nationality

73

consolidation so important to the BJP. The party reacted by organiz­ ing its Rath Yatra, from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. The rest of the story is already known, at least in its outlines. In any case, we shall describe its specific course in two states in chapter 5 of this book. All that remains to be done here is to give an idea of the electoral gains the BJP made from its cultural politics (see Tables 10, 11 and 12). They show that the BJP did profit substantially from its temple agitation and the Rath Yatra. The party’s vote base had already registered a small growth over the previous decade, but that could be explained away by its decision to put up a larger number of candidates. Certainly the number of seats won by the party had little to do with the proportion of votes it won. In 1991, the party won not merely a sizeable vote but also managed to translate much of it into seats. Roughly, it doubled its national vote and its gains cut across state boundaries (see Table 11). Though in some states its gain in number of seats was small, it made spectacular inroads into the bastions of other parties. (In Karnataka, for instance, the BJP seemingly finished the Janata Party, even as an opposition.) T a b l e 10

ELECTORAL PERFORMANCE OF BJS/BJP IN UTTAR PRADESH (1970 ONWARDS); Year

Total seats

Seats con­ tested (%)

Seats won

Votes won

(%)

(%)

State Assembly 1974

424

94.6

15.2

17.1

1980

425

94.1

2.8

10.8

1985

425

81.6

4.6

9.9

1989

421

66.0

20.5

1991

420

100.0

53.3

11.7 _*

1971 1984

85 85

47.1 58.8

10.0 00.0

12.3 6.4

1989

85

36.5

25.8

7.6

1991

82

100.0

60.9

32.7

Parliament

* Data not yet available.

74

C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

T able 11 SEATS WON AND VOTES POLLED BY THE BJP IN STATE ELECTIONS IN SELECTED STATES: 1985 AND 1990 (PER CENT) 1985

1990

Total seats

Seats won

Votes polled

Seats won

Votes polled

320

18.2

32.4

68.4

39.2

68

10.3

30.6

67.6

42.7

Rajasthan

200

19.5

21.2

43.0

25.2

Gujarat

182

6.0

15.0

13.4

26.4

UP

425

3.8

9.9

13.4

11.6

90

16.7

6.7

10.1

Bihar

324

4.9

7.5

12.8

11.0

Maharashtra

288

5.6

7.3

14.6

14.6

Karnataka

224

0.9

3.7

0.0

4.1

Orissa

147

0.7

2.6

1.4

3.9

Andhra Pradesh

294

2.7

1.6

1.2

1.7

State

MP Himachal Pradesh

Haryana

NA

SOURCE: Election Commission of India.

Report on the General Elections to the State Legislative Assemblies 1985-6 for the figures presented in col.

1-3. Figures presented in col. 4-5 are computed from the provisional results sheets of the Commission. In India’s largest state, UP, its gains were immense and it formed the new government (Table 10). In the Ayodhya assembly constituen­ cy itself, the BJP won a handsome victory, made doubly sweet by the party’s earlier defeat (Table 13). The victory may or may not have made much of a change in the sprawling state of UP with its 100 million inhabitants, one of the poorest in India, but the new dispensation did make a difference to the politics of Ayodhya. One of the first things the new government did was to change the Deputy Inspector-General of Police and the Superintendent of Police of the Faizabad division. The District Magistrate of Faizabad, Net Ram, was also removed. The new government also helped the VHP to remove one of the main thorns in its side, Laldas, the mahant of the Ramjanmabhumi temple. He was replaced by a priest close to the VHP. While admitting

75

Creating a Nationality

Table i2 STATE-WISE DISTRIBUTION OF LOK SABHA SEATS AND VOTES WON BY THE BJP. IN THE 1989 AND 1991 ELECTIONS (PER CENT) 1989 States

Total seats

Seats won

1991 Votes polled

Seats won

Votes polled

Andhra

42

0.0

2.0

2.4

8.6

Assam

14

0.0

0.0

14.3

8.6

Bihar

54

16.7

13.0

9.3

17.0

Gujarat

26

38.5

30.4

76.9

51.4

Haryana

10

0.0

8.3

20.0

10.3

Karnataka

28

0.0

2.6

14.3

28.8

Kerala

20

0.0

4.5

0.0

4.7

MP

39

69.2

39.7

30.8

42.0

Maharashtra

48

20.8

23.7

10.4

20.6

Orissa

21

0.0

1.3

0.0

9.7

Rajasthan

25

52.0

29.6

48.0

41.0

UP

85

11.8

7.6

58.5

33.0

West Bengal

42

0.0

1.7

0.0

9.5

Delhi

7

57.1

26.9

71.4

40.1

Himachal Pradesh

4

75.0

45.3

50.0

42.8

465

18.5

11.4

25.8

19.9

All-India

Source: Election

Commission o f India: Report o f the Ninth General Elec­ tions', Also India Today, 15 July 1991, pp. 40-48; and provisional result sheets of the Election Commission.

Table 13 PERFORMANCE OF MAIN POLITICAL PARTIES AT THE AYODHYA ASSEMBLY CONSTITUENCY IN 1991 ELECTIONS (PER CENT) Year

Congress-1

BJP

BSP

Janata Dal/Party

Independents/others

1985

32.9

9.9

-

21.6

35.6

1989

20.3

24.9

13.7

34.8

6.3

1991

10.6

51.3

11.7

19.6

6.8

76

C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

that there were no specific charges against Swami Laldas, a spokes­ man of the VHP vaguely claimed that the mahant had been creating various problems for the pilgrims visiting Ayodhya. Laldas also had some altercation with the PAC men at Ayodhya, the VHP alleged, causing serious law and order problems .23 Supporters of Laldas claimed that the VHP had been looking for an opportunity to get rid of the intrepid priest and the altercation with the PAC men had been stage-managed to frame charges against the priest.24 On closer scrutiny, however, some of the gains of the BJP look less impressive. Thus, in Karnataka, according to James Manor, the gains were connected not so much with the temple agitation as with ‘continuous problems and decline’ of the Janata Dal, the major op­ position party, the voters’ dissatisfaction with the poor performance of the Congress-I’s state government, and the widespread feelings among the two dominant castes, the Lingayats and the Vokkaligas, of being abandoned by both the Congress and the Janata Dal. A very large proportion of the votes cast against the Congress party for its lack-lustre governance, as a result, went to the BJP.25 Even in UP, it is doubtful if the gains of the BJP were as spectacular as they at first appeared to be. Indeed, they could be considered a gift from Mulayam Singh Yadav. The BJP stalwarts and its new President, Murli Manohar Joshi, more or less admitted this in their interviews on the national media soon after the results of the UP elections were announced. Vajpayee said point blank to one of us that the credit for the BJP’s success should go to the other political parties, especially to Mulayam Singh and V. P. Singh. The BJP’s electoral performance, however, is only the manifest poli­ tical return of the Ramjanmabhumi movement. Underneath it lie the more important, long-term cultural forces that found systematic ex­ pression, perhaps for the first time, in the movement and the politics 23Arvind Singh Bisht, ‘Priest of Ayodhya Shrine Removed’, The Times o f India, 2 March 1992. 24Laldas was shot dead on 20 November 1993 by unknown assailants. According to a press report, he was killed because he got involved in a land dispute. However, the police refused to admit the First Information Report of an eyewitness and, instead, depended on the FIR of his nephew who was not present at the site. 25James Manor, The BJP in South India at the 1991 General Elections’, unpub. MS, esp. p. 18.

Creating a Nationality

77

of culture contextualizing it. Let us summarize them before we move on to the next section. Basically, the Ramjanmabhumi movement represents the recogni­ tion by the BJP, and the larger Hindu nationalist formation of which it is a part, that their day has come. The movement is an attempt to make short-term political gains, but beneath it lies the awareness that the BJP and its allies are no longer as peripheral in Indian politics as they once were. For nearly a hundred years the Hindu nationalists have been a fringe—according to many a lunatic fringe—in the poli­ ty. The RSS family now knows that they are no longer so; they have broken into the mainstream of Indian politics. This recognition is based on irreversible social changes. Though the proportion of urban Indians has risen from roughly 20 to 25 per cent during the last 50 years, in absolute terms, they are now more than 200 million strong. Likewise, while India may officially be a less industrialized society, in absolute terms it is as industrialized as France. Again, only two per cent of Indians know English, but two per cent of Indians are a lot of human beings; they constitute a population larger than Australia’s and New Zealand’s put together, both of which are entirely English-speaking. These modernized sec­ tions have behind them a substantial number of literate and semi­ literate Indians accessible to centralized media, propaganda and currents of political communications. They have been constantly ex­ posed to what can be called, in the absence of a better expression, the modem idiom of politics (including the ideologies of nationalism and nation-state). Especially, the ideology of the Indian state—by which we mean the constant em phasis on national security, secularism, development, and scientific rationality—has now a hegemonic presence among the politically exposed Indians. The modern means of communication, especially the national media, have underwritten the presence. To put it another way, in the culture of Indian politics, modem India is no longer a mythic reality or statistical artefact. Nor is it solely an institutional reality built through the dedicated efforts of a few modernists in key political positions. For the first time, modem India is a powerful political reality, with a large number of Indians, uprooted from their local or vernacular culiures and traditional social ties, living with that reality. These Indians have to make sense of their environment, their uprooting, deculturation and massification.

78

C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

The politics of Hindu nationalism allows scope for reconciling these two sets of demands within the terms of discourse of modem India. As a consequence, the political culture of India is no longer merely a site of contention between the modern and the traditional, with the state clearly on the side of the former. It has become an site of conten­ tion between the modem that attacks or bypasses traditions and the modem that employs traditions instrumentally. This has opened up political possibilities for Hindu nationalism that were not open when the traditional idiom of Indian politics was the major actor in the culture of Indian politics and when a sizeable section of Indians were not insecure about their H induism . As we have said, Hindu nationalism has always been an illegitimate child of modem India, not of Hindu traditions. Such a nationalism is bound to feel more at home when the main struggle is between two forms of modernity and when the instrumental use of traditions—the use of religion as an ideology rather than as a faith—is not taboo for a majority of the political class. Given this configuration of cultural forces, the Sangh parivar has taken full advantage of the keywords of political ‘modernism’ in India, and taken to its logical conclusion the constant emphasis on nationalism, secularism, national security, history, and scientific temper. It has rightly guessed that, given this idiom, it is possible to mount systematic political attacks on the forms of ethnicity and reli­ gious cultures that are identifiably different in their reaction to the mainstream culture of Indian politics and which offer strong resis­ tance to the modem idiom of politics. The culture of the majority usually comes to enjoy some primacy in the culture of an open polity. The moment nationalism is given a monocultural content and the definition of Indianness ceases to be a statistical artefact to become a reality on the ground, the minority cultures become easy and legitimate targets of criticism, social en­ gineering and, as a leader of the erstwhile Jan Sangh once put it, ‘Indianization’. When such targeting takes place, Indianness is no longer defined in terms of what Indians are and the ways in which they live; it is derived from ideal-typical definitions. Such ideal-typi­ cal definitions then become the staple of the formations which see the majority itself as flawed in character and as a fit subject for large-scale social engineering. Hence the long and abiding connection between Hindu nationalism and Hindu social reform movements of all hues.

Creating a Nationality

79

When that is the project designed for the majority, the minorities cannot hope to fare any better. And naturally every marker of diffe­ rence, howsoever peripheral to the culture of a minority, becomes a marker of the political backwardness and even national betrayal by the minorities. So things like the refusal of some Muslim men to reconsider their customary right to marry four times or the resistance many Muslims offered to the Indian Supreme Court’s judgement in the Shah Bano case, sanctioning certain property rights to divorced Muslim women (however much such reactions might have been shaped by the sense of cultural insecurity of the Muslims) become grist to the mill of an absolute, uncompromising, steam-rolling nationalism .26 Gone are the days when the Dravida Kazhagam and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam could openly, in the streets of Madras, bum the flag and the Constitution of India or heap insults on the images of Ram as a symbol of Aryan and upper-caste domi­ nation and could still hope to enter into a political dialogue with national leaders and occupy seats of power. Such ‘compromises’ with national honour and national politics are now seen as unforgivable sins and any government tolerating such anti-national acts is now unlikely to survive in power. Some scholars, such as historian Bipan Chandra, seem to suggest that what we see in India today is a political contest between the nationalism represented by the Indian freedom movement and a new­ found ‘pseudo-nationalism’ built on the collaborationist past of the Sangh parivar,27 It can be argued that the parivar has only taken to a logical conclusion one significant aspect of the nationalism implicit in some strands of the anti-imperialist movement in India. That nationalism, borrowed from the likes of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72) and Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), was an imitative con­ cept to start with. Following the thrust of its European versions, it 26When this happens, the arguments o f the likes o f Syed Shahabuddin that the social practices o f Muslims that do not harm the Hindus should not be the concern o f the latter has no impact in a political culture wedded to a melting-pot model of nationalism. Nor can the arguments o f others that polygamy is more prevalent among the Hindus (0.8 per cent) than among the Muslims (0.7 per cent) in India cut any ice. 27Bipan Chandra, presentation made in the Seminar on The State and National Identity in India, Pakistan and Germany, organized by the Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore, 2 5 -3 0 January 1992. See also his Indian National Movement: The Long Term Dynamic (New Delhi: Vikas, 1988).

80

C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

always had the potentiality of developing into the particular form of exclusivism that Hindu nationalism has become. On the other hand, the dominant form of ‘nationalism’ of the freedom movement—which became dominant only in certain phases, thanks to leaders like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—had little to do with the western concept of nationalism. It had its origins in the traditional allegiance to or bonding between the individual and the idea of India as a civilizational and territorial entity, fuzzy at its borders. The civilization, the state and the territory were seen to over­ lap, but only to an extent. The Gandhian and proto-Gandhian nationalism was clearly predicated on a refusal to define a political cultural mainstream and a periphery, and it even refused to define the West in its entirety as an alien presence in India. With the significant bridgeheads established by the global mass culture and the European concepts of nationalism and the nation-state in India, this traditional patriotism began to recede in the articulate sections of society.28 The significant growth of the BJP in Indian politics, whether permanent or temporary, reflects that change. It would be unfair to the reader, however, if we do not mention that the Indian political culture has usually functioned with a builtin political thermostat. The culture copes with any of its major strands that threaten to establish total dominance by reviving or « • • 29 • empowering the strands peripheralized. It is not impossible that the present salience of Hindu nationalism will also be similarly neutralized in the long run by the dynamics of the culture of Indian politics. We shall see that in the case of the Ramjanmabhumi agitation, there was a noticeable shift from heroic, high-pitched p o litics to unheroic, m essy, everyday politics and the BJP ‘connived’ with that everydayness. The very success of the move­ ment contributed to that change. That the change was not per­ manent is another story. *

“ The political contest between the indigenous forms of patriotism and the imported nationalism has been discussed in Nandy, The Illegitim acy o f Nationalism. wOn this theme see Ashis Nandy, ‘The Making and Unmaking of Political Cultures in India’, in At the Edge o f Psychology: Essays in Politics and Cul­ ture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 47-69.

Creating a Nationality

81

V I. FAMILY BUSINESS The BJP is backed by a number of semi-political organizations that have gradually moved centre-stage during the last two decades, the most important of them being the RSS, the VHP, and the Bajrang Dal. Of these, the crucial actor in the Ramjanmabhumi movement is the VHP. There is also a small women’s wing of the Bajrang Dal, the Durga Vahini. It is reportedly not doing well. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the BJP’s student wing, has also been somewhat o/\ overshadowed by the more flamboyant Bajrang Dal in recent years. The over-arching organizational frame is provided by the RSS which we shall briefly discuss first.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Much work has been done on the history, politics and structure of the RSS and there are a few full-length analyses of the subject.31 We shall therefore avoid the institutional and historical details of the RSS and instead provide a brief cultural introduction to the organization as a carrier of the principles of Hindutva developed by Savarkar. (Savarkar in his lifetime did not have much to do with the RSS and the RSS has never fully owned him, probably because he was never a part of the organization and could never persuade it to give all-out support to his political party, the Hindu Mahasabha.) Our introduction will be incomplete in another sense; we shall not discuss here the complex and, often, complementary relationship between the RSS and its religious counterpart, the Arya Samaj.32 31‘This is why we have not discussed the Durga Vahini and the ABVP in this section. The BJP also once made an abortive attempt to set up a student wing, Janata Vidyarthi Morcha or JVM, that would be, unlike the ABVP, fully under its control. 3'The best known account is that o f Walter K. Anderson and Sridhar D. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (New Delhi: Vistaar, 1987). For more partisan but useful accounts see K. R. Malkani, The RSS Story (New. Delhi: Impex India, 1980); Nana Deshmukh, RSS: Victim o f Slander (New Delhi: Vision, 1979); and D. R. Goyal, Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (New Delhi: Radha Krishna, 1979). 32A succint and sensitive discussion of that complementarity is in Daniel Gold, ‘Organized Hinduism: From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds), Fundamentalism Observed (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 531-93.

82

F a m i l y B u s in e s s

The RSS was established in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hegdewar (1889-1940). He was a nationalist and a worker of the Indian Natio­ nal Congress, who lived at Nagpur. Influenced by Savarkar on the one hand, and his friend and senior, Dr Balkrishna Shriram Munje, on the other, Hegdewar gave the organization its distinctive cultural style. All three were Maharashtrian Brahmans and modern profes­ sionals who sought to rise above their parochial and local allegiances and their vernacular selves. ‘The roots of the RSS,’ Anderson and Damle say while talking of its beginnings, were ‘embedded in the soil of Maharashtra; its membership and symbols were almost ex­ clusively Maharashtrian.’33 But between Maharashtra and the RSS mediated the personalities like those of Savarkar, Munje, and Heg­ dewar, who were, from the beginning, at the margins o f the mainstream public culture of Maharashtra and who were to be, from the 1920s, further marginalized by the political rise of the numerically strong non-Brahmanic castes of the region. It would be more appro­ priate to insist that the roots of the RSS lay primarily in the Brahmanic, westernized, tertiary sector of Maharashtra. Hegdewar was a successful modem doctor who gave up his prac­ tice for the sake of the new organization. He had studied medicine at Calcutta and, during his six years in the city, had become a member of the Anushilan Samiti, a revolutionary group set up soon after the movement against the division of Bengal started around 1905. The Samiti was one of two most distinguished outfits—the other being the Jugantar Samiti—that tried to violently overthrow the Raj. Heg­ dewar had been sent to Calcutta by Munje who had been a doctor of the British Indian Army and had participated in the Boer War. TTiough Hegdewar’s name is often associated today with Hindu fundamentalism or fanaticism, like his gum Savarkar, he had scant interest in Hindu religion and culture. His father actually avoided putting him into the traditional vocation of a priest because young Keshav was uninterested in orthodox rituals, much of which he con­ sidered ‘silly ’ .34 The son’s main interests were history and politics. Despite this interest of its founder in politics, from the beginning the RSS was conceived of as a cultural organization that eschewed politics. Throughout the colonial period it remained tme to its selfimage. This had its in-built advantages. The RSS avoided the wrath 33Anderson and Damle, The Brotherhood, p. 30. “ Ibid.

Creating a Nationality

83

of the colonial regime; it could create a space within its ideology for categories that were derived through the colonial connection, and it could concentrate on its anti-Muslim stance. Savarkar in any case had already perfected this part of the ideology. He, the one-time in­ trepid freedom fighter, wanted in his later years to take advantage of the British presence in India to improve the character and culture of the Hindus and to solve the Muslim problem once and for all. The early writings on the subject by some of the worthies of the RSS show that the motivating forces for the establishment of the organization were two. One, they saw the Hindus as effeminate, spineless and non-martial and, thus, as vulnerable to the more aggres­ sive faiths such as Islam and Christianity. (For that same reason the RSS has always maintained a sneaking respect for the more mascu­ line strands of the two faiths, especially European Christianity.) Two, the founding fathers of the RSS saw the Hindus as unorganized, given to religious superstitions of all kinds and, hence, incapable of resist­ ing the more organized, rational faiths. Anderson and Damle quote Munje, Hegdewar’s guru, who said at the time the RSS was founded: Out of 1.5 lakh (1,50,000) population o f Nagpur, Muslims are only 20 thousand. But stiU we feel insecure. Muslims were never afraid o f 1 lakh 30 thousand Hindus. So this question should be regarded hereafter as the question o f the Hindus. The Muslims themselves have taught us to behave as Hindus while in the Congress, and as Hindus outside the Congress.35

Like most well-known social reform movements in the colonial period, the RSS, during the seventy years of its existence, has tried to become the symbol of martial, organized, rational Hinduism, strip­ ped of its pagan superstitions. Though itself dominated by Brahmans for most of these seventy years, it has been consistently against the caste system, idol worship and most versions of folk Hinduism. In this respect, it is a secular analogue of the Arya Samaj in north India (which has supplied many of the north Indian leaders of Hindu nationalism in recent years). The RSS has no formal membership, but insiders claim that those who maintain close links with it now number around two million. The number represents an estimated ten-fold increase from the time of independence. These ‘members’ are linked through a country-wide network of branches, modelled on traditional a k h a d a s or gymnasia, and they now represent one of the most organized sectors of Indian 35Quoted in ibid., p. 33.

84

F a m i l y B u s in e s s

politics. Their discipline and cohesion are matched only by the mem­ bers of some of the cadre-based Leninist parties of the Left. Many of the rituals of the RSS are derived from colonial times, including the uniform its members wear when in the gymnasia. The uniform includes khaki shorts and lathis or bamboo sticks, the com­ bination clearly borrowed from the standard gear of the colonial police. The main slogans and heroes of the RSS, too, are predictable, though they have been broadened in recent years to cover the names of leaders such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel. Both, but especially the former, were anathema to the RSS even 20 years ago. This broadening of the ideological platform, combined with faithful adherence to the essential dogmas of Hindu nationalism, was primari­ ly the contribution of Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906-73) and, to a lesser extent, Deendayal Upadhyaya. Chaturvedi Badrinath has recently written a brief but elegant account of the worldview of the former.36 Like the other stalwarts of Hindutva, Golwalkar, too, was not bur­ dened by any noticeable millenialism. He was educated as a scientist and a lawyer. He taught science at Benaras Hindu University from 1930 to 1933. Science remained important to him; he disowned and refused to reprint his first book We or Our Nationhood Defined, be­ cause it was not scientific.37 He did not practise law either. He wanted to be a sanyasf and renounce the world, and he received his initiation from Swami Akhandananda of the Ramkrishna Mission, Calcutta. Golwalkar succeeded Hegdewar in 1940 as the sarsanghchalak or head of the RSS, but never gave up his saintly style. Savarkar the ■^Badrinath, Dharma, India and the World Order, pp. 119-39. 37M. S. Golwalkar, We or Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Publi­ cations, 1939). The book’s pro-Nazi tone and proto-Nazi ideas also must have been an embarrassment to its author, especially during the war years when the colonial regime was touchy about such ideas and the RSS was keen to be in the good books of the regime. On Golwalkar’s attitude to We or Our Nationhood Defined, see Badrinath, Dharma, India and the World Order, p. 112. For his analysis of Golwalkar’s political ideology, Badrinath depends on writings owned by Golwalkar. His conclusion, that the ideology is adharmik, is therefore likely to be particularly galling to the RSS. Recently an analysis o f this disowned book has been attempted in Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar and Sambuddha Sen, Khaki Shorts Saffron Flags (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993).

Creating a Nationality

85

modernist found that saintliness amusing and made no secret of it. He would have been the last person to notice that Golwalkar’s saintli­ ness, too, had no deep roots in tradition. It was processed through his exposure to the cultures of modem professions of science and law on the one hand, and the modernist Hinduism of the Ramkrishna Mission on the other. Much of what Golwalkar says is standard stuff unlikely to enthuse those acquainted with the colonial interpretations of Indian traditions proffered by psychologically defensive, urban, westernized Indians. However, in one respect he faithfully replicates and builds upon Munje, Hegdewar and Savarkar. Like Munje, Golwalkar believes that the enemies of Hindus are not the Muslims or the English, but the Hindus themselves. For the Muslims and the English are predatory by nature and it isoo in them to ‘overrun, plunder and destroy other weaker countries’. Golwalkar is more concerned that the Hindus do not have a national consciousness and have fought among themselves for the previous one thousand years. Like most writers deeply impressed with the British colonial enter­ prise, Golwalkar sees the absence of a developed sense of nationalism and statism as basic flaws of Hindu character. He uses what he sees as three main elements in the modem western concept of the nation and then claims that the Hindus alone meet the criteria of nationhood in the subcontinent. Yet, the Hindus do not seem to know this. Hence, ‘the remedy of Indian ills lies in resurgent Hindu Nationalism; for it [is] in the decline of Hindu character that those ills originate.’40 Somewhat predictably, the only cultures worse than that of the Hindu are some of the non-Semitic oriental ones, not Islam or Chris­ tianity. Gyanendra Pandey has drawn attention to Golwalkar’s com­ ment on China (peopled by ‘intoxicated monkeys’) to show how such evaluations contrast with the RSS theoretician’s estimate of the erstwhile rulers of India. According to Golwalkar, ‘the Englishmen were a civilized people who generally followed the rule of law. The "ÎQ

38Quoted in Badrinath, Dharma, India and the World Order, p. 118. O f course, the judgment on the West was moderated by a deep conviction about the superiority o f the western civilization over the Islamic, which is seen as only predatory, and the Hindu, which is seen as cowardly and effeminate. Ibid.; see also p. 132. '"ibid., p. 130.

86

F a m i l y B u s in e s s

Chinese are a different proposition .’41 The ideology of the RSS towards the ‘lower order’ of the Hindus is only a trifle less hostile. Its Aryanism, partly imported from nineteenth century Bengal and partly from pre-war Europe, combines with its Brahmanic worldview to grant the plebian Hindus only a second-class cultural citizenship in the Indian civilization. In the course of time, through social evolu­ tionism and re-education, they are expected to merge themselves into the Brahmanic mainstream as an indicator of their social progress.42 The RSS is not uniformly spread all over India, though it now has branches in virtually every state. It provides the main functionaries at the upper echelons of the BJP, VHP, ABVP, Bajrang Dal, and Durga Vahini and acts as their organizational and intellectual hub. All these organizations are open to directions from the RSS head­ quarters at Nagpur. However, the-openness to such directions varies with time and the nature of the organization. For instance, the Jan Sangh was heavily dependent on the RSS for its organizational clout but was founded by a person who had no exposure to the RSS in his formative years. The BJP, after becoming politically powerful, was in­ creasingly becoming more independent of the RSS, but its recent in­ volvement in the Ramjanmabhumi movement has again made it more dependent on the RSS. Likewise, the Shiv Sena at all levels and the Bajrang Dal at the lower levels have always been relatively free from RSS influence and discipline, not always with happy consequences.

Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Compared to the older Hindu nationalist organizations, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or VHP is relatively new in Indian public life. Cul­ turally, its uniqueness and strength lie in its ability to draw upon 41M. S. Golwalkar, quoted in Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Hindus and Others: The Militant Hindu Construction’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 December 1991, pp. 2997-3009; see p. 3001. 42Pandey ( ‘Hindus and Others’, p. 3003) points out that the RSS term for the tribes o f India is vanavasis, the forest dwellers, not the more common adivasis, original dwellers. For cultural life begins in India, according to the RSS ideologues, with the Aryans who, unlike the Muslims, were not invaders. The standard expression for cultural integration used in the RSS literature is samaras, which invokes the idea of an American-style quasi-Brahmanic melting pot.

Creating a Nationality

87

both the Arya Samaj and the Sanatan Dharma movements. This has given it a geographical spread and resilience, especially in the Hindi­ speaking areas of India, that was once only a distant dream of the RSS.43 But the main heritage is the nineteenth-century attempts to turn Hinduism into an organized creed. The attempts gave most reli­ gious activities in the expanding modern sector of the time, even when based on orthodoxy, a reformist tinge. Deviating from RSS orthodoxy, which permits only Mother India or Bharat Mata as a theistic presence, the VHP leadership, mostly 43For instance, in parts o f northern India, the VHP has built upon the heritage o f movements committed to the protection of cows and sanatan dhar­ ma (crudely, eternal codes of conduct) and the promotion of Hindi. All these movements were active in the late nineteenth century along with the Arya Samaj. Though the orthodox and the reformists differed on issues such as image worship, widow remarriage, and the interpretation o f caste status, they could unite on issues such as cow protection, reconversion (usually o f Chris­ tians and Muslims), and the agitation for the adoption o f the Hindi language and Devanagari script. In UP, the most prominent leaders o f local sanatani or orthodox organiza­ tions also promoted Tulsi’s Ramcharitmanas, increasingly hailed as the ‘Hindi Veda’ or ‘the sanatani scripture par excellence’. The Ramcharitmanas for these leaders came to symbolize the ‘upward mobility’ o f Ram: ‘ ... from an earthly prince with godlike qualities o f heroism, compassion, and justice, to a full-fledged divinity—or rather, the divinity; for in north India today the word Ram is the most commonly used non-sectarian designation for the Supreme Being.’ Peter Lutgendorf, The Life o f a Text: Performing the Ram­ charitmanas o f Tulsidas, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 4, 10, 364, 365-9. The Ramcharitmanas also reconciled the traditions of worshipping a form­ less God with that of a God ‘with attributes’, a reconciliation that was to pay indirect dividends to the RSS family when the Ayodhya temple became a public issue.

The reader may get the impression from these details about movements that the Sanatanis were fighting for the cause o f the vernacular and local. Actually, from the beginning, the cow protection movement made a clear distinction between cows consumed by the British in India and those consumed by some sections of the Indian Muslims. The movement was directed only against the latter. Likewise, the movement for Hindi was also a movement for the abo­ lition of the local and vernacular. The Hindi that the ‘orthodox’ fought for was built on the ruins of at least three well-established languages with rich cultural traditions and literary heritages. These languages were politically reduced to the status of dialects to produce an artificial new language that would serve the purposes of an emerging nationality.

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Hindi-speaking north Indians, admit the greater power of theisti£> Hin­ duism as compared to that of the Neo-Vedantic Arya Samaj. This theism, though, is given a monotheistic slant, as an antidote to Hinduism’s ‘embarrassingly’ non-revelatory, pagan character. Thus, in some northern Indian states the temples at the VHP offices have icons of Ram-Sita-Laxman-Hanuman, along with the regulation plaster-of-Paris Bharat Mata spreadeagled across a map of India. True to the Hindu-nationalist tradition though, the Bharat Mata dwarfs the icons and the temple is called Bharat Mata Mandir. And the new greeting, ‘Jai Shri Ram', has to accompany the standard RSS fare­ well, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai' (Victory to Mother India). The VHP was formally registered in 1966 with Swami Chinmayananda and S. S. Apte as its working President and General Secretary. Jaichamraj Wodeyar, the erstwhile Maharaja of Mysore and at the time Governor of Madras, was its first chairman. The decision to constitute the VHP was, however, taken in 1964, at a conference convened in Bombay at the instance of the then head of the RSS, Golwalkar.44 The meeting, in his words, was aimed at ‘inspiring all those faiths and beliefs that have sprouted from the ashwath (banyan) tree, to unite on a single platform and safeguard their common interests.’45 H ence, apart from such prom inent religious Hindu leaders as the five Shankaracharyas and Sant Tukaraoji Maharaj, the meeting was also attended by, among others, the Dalai Lama, Jainmuni Sushil Kumar and the Sikh leader, Master Tara Singh.46 44The decision to found the VHP during the mid-sixties was no accident. M. K. Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu nationalist in 1948, the political success o f Nehru’s secular policies, and the post-independence consensus on the style o f ‘nation-building’, all combined to push the aspirations o f the RSS leadership for a Hindu state into the background for well over a decade. The failure o f their political wing, the Jan Sangh, in the general elections o f 1952, 1957 and 1962 marginalized the RSS family even further (see Table 8). But, in 1962, Nehru’s image was severely damaged by the Indian debacle in the Indo-China border war. It marked the beginning of the end of the Nehruvian era. In 1963 the idea of founding the VHP was floated. 45Narayan Rao Tarte, ‘ Vishva Hindu Parishad ki Kalpana Hindu Vishva, Vishva Hindu Parishad Rajat Jayanti Vishesh anka, August 1990, 25(12), pp. 13—16; see p. 13.

‘wThe word ‘Hindu’ was defined at this convention to mean ‘one who respects, has faith in, and adheres to the principles of all those moral and

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The VHP was conceptualized by Golwalkar as an organization that would be ‘totally non-political, so that people of all castes, faiths and parties could associate with it’. This was also probably an attempt by the RSS to further distance itself from politics, especially from the Jan Sangh that had failed to sell the RSS ideology to the electorate. The RSS might have felt that such distancing would widen its base. One other objective could have been to attract the leaders from the various national parties who, despite their diverse political ideologies, were one on the issue of Hindu unity (such as the second chief minister of UP, Sampoomanand, who was sympathetic to the VHP when it was being constituted). Thus, when the first convention of the VHP was held, there was no mention of any senior Jan Sangh leader, or for that matter of any prominent RSS leader except Gol­ walkar, attending.47 After the VHP was formally formed, a Marg Darshak Mandal was set up to direct its activities. These activities were broadly listed as: spiritual lifestyles which have their origin in India.’ Jaswant Rao Gupta, ‘Vishwa Hindu Parishad: Gathan aur Kramik Vikash’, ibid., pp. 17-20; see p. 17. This automatically made outsiders o f Muslims and Christians whom Hindu nationalist literature calls ‘invaders’, and Parsis and Jews, who are called ‘refugees’. On the other hand, the definition proposed that Shaiva, Lingayat, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Dadupanthi, Nanakpanthi, Ravidasi, Kabirpanthi, Arya Samaji, Brahmo and other cognate faiths were all part o f the larger Hindu faith, the tolerance of which allowed such diverse beliefs to exist and thrive under it. The same line of thinking informs the newly constituted minority cell of the BJP. It is made up entirely of Muslims. None from other ‘faiths’ finds a place in it, simply because most o f them are not considered non-Hindu. 47Even today, the VHP hopes to attract Hindu politicians from different parties, not only from the BJP. In an interview with one of us, the VHP’s President, Vishnu Hari Dalmia, while commenting on the success of the BJP in the 1991 elections, repeatedly differentiated the VHP members who had been elected to Parliament on the BJP ticket from the rest of the party can­ didates. He stated categorically that if the BJP failed to keep its promises on issues that concerned the VHP, it would not hesitate to part ways with the BJP. Because, unlike the BJP, the VHP’s aim was not to capture political power, but to establish a Hindu rashtra. This statement bears comparison with the frequently repeated assertion of the leaders of the BJP like Advani that India is already a Hindu rashtra, the implication being that nothing further need to be done in this regard.

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strengthening, organizing and energizing Hindu society; conservation and promotion of Hindu moral and spiritual values; liberating Hindu society from outdated social customs and practices and general back­ wardness, a result of centuries of foreign rule; and protection of Hin­ duism by maintaining strong ties with Hindus living outside India.48 As anyone with even tangential acquaintance with the RSS literature would immediately sense, these goals are a direct response to some of the main anxieties of the nineteenth-century Hindu religious reformers and the early twentieth-century Hindu nationalists. This linkage acquires another meaning when one consults some of the manuals which the VHP produces for the training and guidance of its grass roots workers. The operational definitions of the larger goals at that plane become close to the stereotypical anti-minorityism for which the organization is known.49 To meet these goals, the VHP has divided the country into 5 zones, 10 regions, 25 provinces, 210 divisions, 706 districts, and 7,180 prakhands. It itself has also expanded considerably, with 18 departments currently functioning at the national level. Each of them looks after one programme of the Parishad, ranging from cow protection to the use of Sanskrit. (Sanskrit in Devanagari script is identified as the premier language; other Indian languages are seen as its offshoots. Urdu, is naturally excluded from the list.)50 The VHP also has a unit in every state, with branches at district, subdivisional and block levels. Special emphasis has been placed on making inroads into tribal areas and into areas with a large concentration of ‘backward’ castes and dalits, ‘so that they can be educated regarding the Hindu way of living and the Hindu gods and godesses and ultimately be absorbed in the mainstream of Hindu Society.’51 Predictably, this emphasis on Sanskritic Hinduism and the attempts to abolish the little cultures of India go hand in hand with attempts to reach out to the westernized middle-class Hindus as the ‘natural “^ a rte, ‘Vishwa Hindu Parishad ki Kalpaná p. 14. 49See for example the privately printed Pradesh PadádhikñriShikshan Varg (Ahmedabad: VHP, no date), a Gujarati training manual used by the VHP in Gujarat. ^Yhis is depicted visually in a VHP pamphlet from Rajasthan (Jaipur: VHP office, undated) which shows languages such as Vedik (sic), Gurumukhi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Bengali and Assamese as deriving radiance from Sanskrit/De vanagari. 51Shrivastava, Hindu Visva.

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clientele’ of the VHP. The Parishad has tried to bring expatriate In­ dians into its fold in a big way. It has divided the world, excluding India and its neighbours, into four regions—USA, Europe, Africa and Middle East, and South Asia—to facilitate easier access to ex­ patriates. It began functioning in the USA in 1970 and currently it has branches in forty states. The VHP has compiled a list of all the ethnic Indian students studying in American universities and bom in that country, and is now trying to establish contacts with them. It runs summer camps and has also instituted an ‘adopt a child scheme’ through which it has so far collected one million dollars for the education of poor children back home. This scheme has also been introduced in Hong Kong. In Britain, where it started functioning in 1972, the VHP has four­ teen branches, and is also supported by some local Hindu organiza­ tions. The VHP has five branches in West Germany, one in Spain and, although it does not as yet have a set-up in the Netherlands, efforts to establish one received a boost in 1988, after a successful European Hindu Sammelan was held there. It was attended by, among others, the mayor of The Hague, the Dutch home minister, the envoys of India and Nepal, and the chief justice of the International Court of Justice. (The VHP attaches importance to Netherlands because droves of Surinamese of Indian origin have migrated to that country.) Except for Zambia, where the VHP has a branch, the organization does not have a formal presence in Africa. It has, however, developed contacts with many Hindu organizations throughout the continent and works through them. For instance, it organized an African Hindu Sammelan in 1988 at Nairobi under the aegis of a ‘Hindu Council of Kenya’. In some other countries like Mauritius, Burma, Guyana, Malaysia, Tanzania, Indonesia and Fiji, the VHP is trying to establish itself by forging links with local Hindu organizations. As the activities of the VHP have continued to grow, it has consti­ tuted several bodies and trusts to look after them. One of them is the Dharma Sansad. It is a synod of saints and seers of ‘all faiths prevalent in Hindu society’ as well as of VHP-chosen representatives of the religious heads of the various tribes.52 Some of the more 52One of the achievements- of the VHP in recent years has been its ability to bring together on one platform some o f the religious leaders who were previously at loggerheads with each other. But still, a dissenting note was struck by Swami Swarupanand, the Shankaracharya o f Dwarkapeeth, who was against the movement launched by the VHP.

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important functions of the Dharma Sansad are: to provide a religious order capable of sustaining the integrity of Hindu society in the pre­ sent age; to develop shrines and places of pilgrimage into powerful cultural centres; to help those who voluntarily opt for conversion to Hinduism; and, for those who might otherwise miss the touch of the parivar's usual paranoia, to provide effective measures for countering the evil designs of non-conformists.53 These goals, too, are obvious extrapolations from the core con­ cerns of Hindu nationalism, especially if one scrutinizes the way they are sought to be operationalized for purposes of training and organi­ zation.54 The Dharma Sansad has held three conventions since its inception to provide ‘guidelines’ to Hindu society. In the first convention held in Delhi in 1984, the religious leaders deliberated on the problems of re-acquiring Hindu property in Bangladesh and on the liberation of the Ramjanmabhumi and Kashi Vishwanath temples. In addition, a twelve-point code of conduct was drawn up to safeguard Hindu culture and values. At the second, held at Udipi in 1985, the main concerns were riots in the name of religion and the take-over of monasteries and temples by the government. The third convention, held in Prayag in 1989, tried to work out ways of ending the ‘in­ justices being heaped on Hindus’. The VHP has also set up two trusts, the Bharat Kalyan Pratishthan, to provide education and medical aid to the poor and needy, and the 53Omkar Bhushan Goswami, ‘Dharma Samsad’, Hindu Visva, pp. 21-3; see p. 21. The VHP has revived the Arya Samaj’s shuddhi or purification movement with the concept of paravartan. Paravartan is said to be different from mere conversion, but is actually only an attempt to introduce the standardized con­ cept of proselytization in Hinduism. The VHP claims that in Rajasthan, for instance, a total of 48,310 persons or 8311 families have been converted out of a national figure of 120,000. The VHP in Rajasthan acknowledges, how­ ever, that they have achieved little success in reconverting the Meos, the largest Muslim community in the state. Such reconversion is supposed to counter the phenomenal growth of mino­ rities in India— the increase in the number of Indian Muslims from 30 million in 1947 to 141.2 million now and their reported attempts to convert 200 million o f the lower strata of the society to Islam; and the proselytizing goals of the 20 million Christians who threaten to convert the 100 million of tribals and backward castes. MSee the Gujarati training manual of the VHP.

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Vishwa Hindu Parishad Foundation, to work for the upliftment of tHe rural poor and the backward castes. Patently, neither when it came into being nor for years afterwards did the VHP have very specific objectives, other than the vague and general one of bringing about Hindu unity through the better organi­ zation and the Hinduization of the Hindus. This objective was ob­ viously in continuity with the nineteenth-century Hindu nationalist conviction that the Hindus had suffered the indignity of Muslim and British rule, despite having a superior civilization, because they had been divided and had strayed from true Hinduism. We have already told this part of the story. This single-issue concern persisted till the beginning of the 1980s. Only around 1983 did the VHP begin to come into its own and start acquiring a more differentiated set of concerns.55 That year it or­ ganized the Ekatmata Yajna in which the waters of different sacred rivers were intermingled. For instance, pots carrying the water of the Erawati river in Burma, were taken in a chariot to Gangasagar and released there. Similarly, water from the Pashupatinath temple in Nepal was released into the sea at Rameshwaram and so on. This demonstration of the unity of waters was followed by the Shri Ram Janaki Rath Yatra. The Yatra commenced its journey from Sitamadhi in Bihar in September 1984, but was cut short in the wake of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. In April 1984, the VHP announced for the first time its intention of liberating the Ramjanmabhumi. In 1986, the lock on one of the gates of the disputed structure was ordered to be opened by the court and, as a result, the VHP’s movement gained in momentum. Taking full advantage of the unexpected turn of events in which it had played no role, the VHP by the end of 1987 had formed Shri Ram Janmabhumi Mukti Samitis throughout the country. Realizing how invaluable the financial support of the expatriate Indians could be to their movement, the VHP in 1988 alone organized as many as six major 55The time when the VHP became active is significant. After Operation Bluestar, Indira Gandhi’s popularity was at an all time low and, had it not been for her assassination, it is doubtful whether the Congress would have won the General Elections that were due in 1985. The VHP leadership sensed that the people were in a mood for change, and it launched its programmes by the end o f 1983. Mrs Gandhi’s assassination was a setback for them for a while, but not for long.

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conferences of Hindus spread over the world—in Nairobi, Kathman­ du, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and the Hague—followed by one in England in 1989. After deciding to perform the foundation laying ceremony of the Ram temple at the Prayag Kumbh in February 1989, a joint programme was launched by the RSS family to make a door-to-door collection of sanctified bricks for the Ram temple.56 The response was massive. It was obvious that a political ritual had been invented and marketed successfully as each brick—wrapped in red cloth, tied with a sacred red-yellow thread and marked with a swastika—became an object of worship. The worship of the bricks took place on 10 November the same year. The first brick was laid by a Dalit from Bihar, Kameshwar Chopal.57 Following the foundation-laying ceremony, the VHP spent consi­ derable time and energy mobilizing public passions and support for the issue. This culminated, almost a year later in October 1990, in the storming of the Babri masjid and the tragedy of 2 November. The communal riots that broke out throughout the country following the events in Ayodhya did not deter the VHP from organizing an Asthi Kalash (urn of ashes) Yatra of those karsevaks who had died in the police firing. More riots followed in the wake of this yatra. Encouraged by its success in Ayodhya and the subsequent fall of the V.P. Singh government at the centre, the VHP became more vocal about its immediate intentions. Not only did it want to construct the Ram temple at any cost, but also to liberate the Kashi Vishvanath temple complex at Varanasi and the Krishnajanmabhumi in Mathura. They also tasted victory when more than twenty of their members were elected to the Lok Sabha on BJP tickets from UP and Madhya Pradesh in the 1991 elections and several more got elected to the UP Legislative Assembly. 56Workers o f Astha, an NGO that works in the tribal areas of Sirohi and Udaipur in Rajasthan, say that despite their poverty, tribals contributed Rs 5 or Rs 10 each. Cf. the report on Gujarat below. 57The VHP leadership for the first several years of its existence was mainly drawn from the trading castes. Even now, its topmost echelon is dominated by Banias. Slowly, however, Rajputs and Brahmans have also become im­ portant in the organization. Except for Vinay Katiyar, who heads the Bajrang Dal and belongs to a backward caste, no other VHP leader has emerged from among the backward castes or classes.

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A word on the composition of this group of legislators. A number of them are religious leaders and priests, such as Mahant Avaidyanath from Gorakhpur, who is also the President of the Ramjanmabhumi Mukti Samiti, Sakshiji Maharaj from Mathura, Swami Chinmayananda from Badayun and Swami Yogeshwarananda from Bhind, Madhya Pradesh. They have entered Parliament they say, with the sole pur­ pose of pressuring the government of the day to meet their demands. A few of these MPs, such as Shrish Chand Dikshit from Benaras, are former high-ranking government officials. Dikshit was at one time Deputy Inspector General of Police, UP, and the reader may remem­ ber that it was he who led the karsevaks in the assault on the Babri masjid on 30 October. Bhartendu Prakash Singhal, a former police official and chairman of the Film Censor Board during V. P. Singh’s tenure as Prime Minister, was also in the fray at Moradabad. He, however, lost to a Janata Dal candidate. Yet another high-profile VHP parliamentarian is the former Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court, Justice Devaki Nandan Agrawal. Currently, the VHP seems preoccupied with the Ramjanmabhumi agitation and has threatened to go ahead with the construction of the temple irrespective of the stand that the BJP takes.

Bajrang Dal Bajrang Dal was formed in July 1984 as the youth wing of the VHP and, according to its chief, Vinay Katiyar, Member of Parliament from Faizabad, its main purpose is ‘to implement the policies of the VHP’. The name of the Dal invokes the imagery of the army of monkey warriors in the Ramayana, led by their king Hanuman, also known as Bajrang. As the functionaries of the Dal never fail to remind one, Hanuman was the most devoted and obedient of all dis­ ciples of Lord Ram and fought on the side of the Lord against the demon-king Ravan, to ensure the triumph of good over evil. Probably because it is primarily seen as an instrument of another organization, the Dal is neither registered as a society nor does it have any constitution or code of conduct. There does not appear to be even a formal record of the names of its members and it is difficult to estimate its size. No data are available on the officials and repre­ sentatives of the Dal. Though this gives the impression that the Dal does not have a structure and is plagued by organizational chaos, it is not a light-weight political outfit. In the temple agitation, it has

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certainly pushed the ABVP, the student wing of the BJP, out of reck­ oning. At least one commentator had said, The uniqueness o f this force lies in its ill-defined and amorphous character and extremely loose organizational structure. In this respect, it was, and remains, an oddity in the Sangh parivar. The parivar takes pride in its strict discipline....

The same commentator goes on to hint that this looseness may not have been a matter of choice: ‘Acutely aware that it is almost im­ possible to discipline this riff-raff, the VHP has left the Bajrang Dal largely to its own.’59 Katiyar himself is a traditionally low-caste Kurmi, an uncommon presence among the upper-caste dominated Sangh parivar. He belongs to a small town in west UP. His family originally owed alle­ giance to the Indian National Congress during the Raj and parti­ cipated, Katiyar claims, in the freedom struggle. Others dispute the claim. Katiyar lists the tasks the Bajrang Dal has taken upon itself since its inception. They include protecting cows, fighting the ‘abduction of Hindu mothers and sisters’, preventing innocent Hindus from ‘being lured by petrodollars’ to convert to Islam, spreading education, stopping infiltrators (mainly Pakistanis) from entering India, and identifying and weeding out ‘foreigners’ from the country (mainly Bangladeshis). If the Bajrang Dal’s concern with these issues appear vague and undirected, it is because of its almost full-tim e in­ volvement till now with the VHP’s programme for the liberation of the Ramjanmabhumi. The Dal was, after all, founded for that purpose. The VHP had all the essentials to launch a massive agitation of the kind it wanted—a well-planned strategy and financial and politi­ cal backing. The only thing that was missing was somebody to take the issue to the streets. The VHP required, to put it plainly, substantial muscle power under its control to meet the needs of agitational politics. In time, the youth power of the Dal came to fulfil this need of the VHP. Though a few of the functionaries of the Dal had been RSS volunteers, the organization as a whole had little patience with the kind of discipline, personal integrity, ideological cohesiveness and austerity which the RSS was known for. The goal of the VHP was

58‘Angry Members of the Family’, The Pioneer, 6 December 1992. 59Ibid.

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obviously to have easy access to a reservoir of street-smart muscle power. The youth exercizing this power are drawn mainly from the ranks of the poor, upper-caste population of the smaller cities and the semiurban areas. They are partly educated and socialized to the burgeon­ ing modern sector of India and are often jobless. The VHP helps them to cope with their anxieties by handing them a cause to fight for and by persuading them that on their young shoulders lies the responsibility of restoring to the Hindus their lost honour and pride. As if out to prove their worth to society and to themselves, the Bajrang Dal youth have expressed their restlessness and frustrations through some of the more violent incidents that have taken place as part of the Ramjanmabhumi agitation. The Dal has become better known after these as the militant outfit of the VHP. In defence of the Dal, Katiyar draws an analogy with the incident in the Ramayana where Hanuman bums down Lanka. According to him, Hanuman had no other choice after the demons tied a burning rag to his tail to reduce him to ashes. Similarly today, a new set of demons have put a torch to the hearts of the youth. So why should anyone complain if they now spit fire. They are only following in Hanuman’s footsteps. Katiyar claims that his ‘boys are fully disci­ plined and fully aggressive.’ According to him, they indulge only in ‘disciplined aggression’. Similarities between the Bajrang Dal and its far older counterpart in Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena, become clear at this point, both in the social background of their members and in their participation in a well-developed cult of violence. The Shiv Sena, though, is a fullfledged political party now; the Dal merely an affiliate of one. The Bajrang Dal first came into the limelight in December 1985, when it called for a general strike in UP to demand the removal of the lock on one of the gates of the Babri masjid. In the following years it was in the forefront when the VHP organized a number of programmes in connection with the Ramjanmabhumi Mukti Andolan. In October 1988, the Dal forcibly closed down for a day all educa­ tional institutions in UP to protest against the Ayodhya march or­ ganized by the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the latter’s plan to read namaz at the mosque. Later in the month, the Bajrang Dal announced that its volunteers were going to recite the Hanuman Chalisa, a religious text associated

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with the epic Ramayana in some parts of north India, at the Jama Masjid in Delhi. It also added that Dal members in Rajasthan, Mad­ hya Pradesh and Maharashtra were going to sing Hindu religious songs at the mosques in their respective areas. The countdown to the events of 1990 began for the Bajrang Dal in July 1989. This was when the Dal held a Bajrang Shakti Diksha Samaroh (a training programme given the form of an initiation ceremony) at Ayodhya ‘to strengthen them [the boys] for the fight that lay ahead’. More than 6,000 volunteers, it is claimed, went through the initiation rites. Before the BJP government was installed in UP, any action of the Bajrang Dal volunteers—ranging from raising anti-Muslim or anti­ government slogans to active participation in communal riots, to damaging the Babri masjid—was dismissed by their peers in the VHP as ‘natural over-enthusiasm’. But now, the Dal is being increasingly regarded as an embarassment. Senior BJP and VHP leaders privately confess that the Dal’s volunteers are beginning to get ‘totally out of control’. This tension between the political leadership of the temple move­ ment and their fighting arm became obvious during November 1991 in Ayodhya, where the karsevaks, of whom a large number were Baj­ rang Dal volunteers, had assembled to observe the first anniversary of the storming of the Babri masjid and to honour those who died in the violence associated with the event (see chapter 5). Despite warnings and entreaties issued by the top brass of the VHP not to mount any attack on the Babri masjid on 1 November, some of the karsevaks once again succeeded in causing further damage to the structure. On the other hand, the general feeling among the Bajrang Dal volunteers, who had come from places as far as Surat in Gujarat, was that of being let down. Many of them had slowly come to believe that they had been used. As one of them summed it up, ‘the priorities of our leaders have changed; politics has won over the temple.’ This was true at that point of time. But it was clear that the VHP was not going to distance itself from the Bajrang Dal or disclaim responsibility for it. For the VHP knew that, if it was to achieve its goals, it needed the muscle power of the Dal. Because we have avoided in this book the details of the actual nature of the quarrel about the Babri mosque and the legal position of the two sides as irrelevant to our story, we must re-emphasize that the

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groups that we have described here, though deriving inspiration from the tradition of Hindu nationalism, have not really been constrained by the tradition in any serious fashion in the matter of the Ramjanmabhumi movement. None of the exemplars the parivar claims to respect—from Shivaji to Swami Vivekananda and Bal Gangadhar Tilak to V. D. Savarkar and Deendayal Upadhyay—ever demanded the destruction or removal of the Babri mosque. Nor did the RSS ever show any interest in the construction of any temple, least o f all a Ram temple. The attitude of Hindu nationalism to Ram was defined by the major nineteenth-century Hindu reform movements which were primarily anti-idolatrous. The choice of Ram as a symbol in the 1990s was determined by political strategy and cost calculation, not by religious fervour or theology or by any attempt to return to the fundamentals of faith. It was a perfectly instrumental, hardheaded, secular choice made possible in an environment where the dispassionate, cynical use of the faith of others has acquired certain political legitimacy. The little-known story of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s sole visit to an RSS office is worth recapitulating here. Seeing on the wall pictures of the martial Hindu leaders of the past, Gandhi, a life-long devotee of Ram, had reportedly asked why a picture of Ram was not there. The elders of the RSS present there explained for his benefit that Ram was too effeminate a figure to serve their purpose.60

60The metamorphosis that Ram himself had to undergo, to serve the pur­ poses of the RSS has been studied by Anuradha Kapur, ‘Deity to Crusader: Changing Iconography of Ram’, in Gyanendra Pandey (ed.), Hindus and Others: Question o f Identity in India Today (New Delhi: Viking, 1993), pp. 74-109.

CHAPTER FOUR

V II. H i n d u t v a a s a S a v a r n a P u r a n a Ayodhya, everything said, is not an isolated pilgrim city. What hap­ pened there in 1990-91 had links with intercommunal relationships in other regions of India. These regions have often brought into the Ayodhya conflict their distinctive pasts. Ayodhya in turn has con­ tributed to these regional conflicts both a pan-Indian issue and a potent new political symbol. On this plane the local, the national and even the international have merged at the sacred city.1 It is impossible to cover here the entire political process that Ayod­ hya has come to represent. What follows are thumbnail sketches of the politics of hate and fear that has informed the Ramjanmabhumi controversy in two states, Gujarat (from where, the reader may remember, Advani’s chariot began its fateful journey towards the city of Ayodhya in 1990) and Rajasthan (which has never previously figured in studies of riot-prone states). To keep our account brief, in the case of Gujarat we focus upon the larger political process and mobilization that produced the violence in the wake of the Ram­ janmabhumi movement; in the case of Rajasthan we emphasize the actual process of violence associated with the movement.

Gujarat: Political Mobilization o f the Middle Classes The reactions to the Ayodhya episode in Gujarat are framed by the changing political sociology of self-validation. For more than two decades, like characters in search of an author, the expanding and modernizing middle class of Gujarat has been looking for a new 'Not only have there been reverberations of the Ayodhya episode in Pakis­ tan and Bangladesh, in both countries similar attempts are on to redefine traditional lifestyles and communities as conventional nationalities and minorities and similar roles are being played by the cultures o f the nation-state and the westernized middle classes.

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purána, a sacred if non-canonical myth or epic, to validate its past and protect its future. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Brah­ mans, Rajputs and Banias of the region got their pedigrees authen­ ticated through one of the eighteen puranas, with the help of interpolations carefully arranged by obliging shastris or small-time Brahmanic theologians. Now the new Hindu middle class of Gujarat is searching for a new purána to explain and legitimize its domina­ tion. The search has been part of the attempts to cope with rapid urbani­ zation and industrialization coupled with the breakdown of the caste society among the dvija or twice-born castes and the absence of tradi­ tional validation for the enhanced status of landowning middle castes like the Patidars, who were considered low-caste until the late nineteenth century. By the 1970s, the twice-born castes, after being stripped of land by the land reforms initiated in the 1950s, began to move into Gujarat’s fast-growing cities and towns on a massive scale. Those among them who had migrated to the cities before Independence were satisfied if they were able to establish their own caste associations. These associations started schools, hostels or scholarship schemes for students from their own caste in big cities and district headquarters. But within three decades of Independence, the demands of urban living compelled many to look for new, broader identities that would transcend caste. For such dvijas a more generic Savarna or high-caste identity seemed both viable and rewarding. For landowning castes like the Patidars, too, who acquired economic power through the ‘green’ and ‘white’ revolutions and political power through the Con­ gress Party, only a Savarna identity could provide the social recog­ nition they so badly sought.2 As long as the undivided Congress Party in Gujarat remained the main vehicle for social mobility and political self-expression for the upper castes and the Patidars, they felt secure. This sense of security also allowed them to co-opt the emerging Dalit and Adivasi leaders into the power-structure of the Congress. The Congress split of 1969 changed these caste equations. The Congress now tried to mobilize the disgruntled elements in the lower castes and classes through populist slogans such as garibf hatao (remove poverty). This new ^ i s was, of course, less true for the high-status Leva Patidars of central Gujarat than for the newly rich, low-status Kadva Patidars of north Gujarat and Saurashtra.

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formula attracted not only those from among the have-nots and the minorities who had till then not broken away from the politics of patronage of the party but also some sections of the emerging, cashcrop-cultivating Patidar farmers of north Gujarat and Saurashtra. The youth-led Navnirman Movement of 1974 and the debacle of the Congress Party in the general elections of 1977 brought new sec­ tions of the people into the party and smoothened the exit of others from it. When the re-christened Congress-I prepared, under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, to fight the 1980 general elections, it was forced to look for a new electoral formula in Gujarat. It came out with one known as KHAM—an electoral combine of Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims. Between 1976 and 1980, the Congress-I leadership in Gujarat virtually eliminated the Brahmans, Banias and Patidars from core positions in the party. KHAM succeeded in wresting political power from the upper cas­ tes. For the first time in the history of Gujarat there was not a single Patidar minister of cabinet rank. A Dalit was sent to the Union cabinet as Minister of State for Home. And, for the first time, not only did a tribal find a seat in the Gujarat cabinet but also held the important portfolio of irrigation, with which the rich Patidar cash-crop farmers were directly concerned. Even more important, the Dalit, tribal and Kshatriya leadership was no longer subservient to upper-caste estab­ lishments. In fact, the chief minister of the state himself was a lowstatus Kshatriya. Above all, the low castes, the tribes, and the minorities held more than 100 of the 180 seats in the legislature, the Congress strength being 140. For the first time the upper castes in the state, particularly the Patidars, sensed a political and economic threat to their domination. The electoral performance of KHAM in 1980 created the impression of a massive transfer of power from the upper castes to the backward castes. However, the latter never really tasted the fruits of power. 3The Kshatriyas in Gujarat are not a traditional or homogeneous caste. They are a political caste in which the Rajputs and other backward castes like the Kolis, Barias, and Patanvadias are projected as one single caste. The caste was created soon after Independence to counter the domination of Patidars in electoral politics by some Rajput leaders. In the political sociology of Gujarat, Kshatriyas constitute the largest caste bloc, covering a quarter of the population. Of them, the Rajputs account for about 5 per cent and the low-status Kshatriyas about 20 per cent.

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The educated m iddle class— mainly Brahmans, Banias and Patidars—reacted sharply by starting an agitation against the reser­ vation system in 1981. The myth of Gandhi’s Gujarat—peaceful, tolerant and non-violent—exploded in the first quarter of 1981. For the first time in independent India, a modern industrial metropolis stood witness to extreme forms of caste violence. The clashes be­ tween the Savamas and the Dalits in the industrial periphery of Ahmedabad gradually became a caste war that spread to the towns of 18 out of the 19 districts of Gujarat and to many villages dominated by the Patidars in north and central Gujarat. The first anti-reservation agitation was aimed at the Dalits who were beneficiaries of the reservation system which gave them access to medical and engineering colleges. Although the second anti-reser­ vation agitation in 1984 was against the hike in job quotas for the backward-but-not-‘untouchable’ castes (the Mandal communities) in government and in educational institutions, the victims were all Dalits. During these two agitations, the Brahman-Bania-Patidar com­ bine acquired a Savarna unity. In both the agitations, the Sangh parivar directly or indirectly supported the Savamas. However, after the 1981 agitation the national leadership of the BJP became conscious of the growing anti-BJP feeling among Dalits and, by the mid-1980, they had systematically started co-opting Dalit and Adivasi communities. By 1986-87, they had some success with the urban Dalits using the VHP’s Hindutva-based programmes.4 The party’s anti-reservation stance was also corrected and, after 1985, the ABVP started talking in favour of a reservation system for the Dalits and the Adivasis. The following year, the VHP, in one of its Hindu Yuva Sammelans, asked the youth to dedicate themselves to the aboli­ tion of untouchability. They were also asked to work for the all-round development of their ‘economically and socially backward Hindu brothers’. All this paid dividends. In the 1986 communal riots in Ahmedabad, which broke out during the Rath Yatra of Lord Jagan4There are many reasons for the Sangh parivar’s success in recruiting and mobilizing the Dalits, which is a source of much discomfort and defensive denial amongst Dalit leaders. One of the most important of these reasons could be the apparent capacity of the parivar to provide an easy channel of upward mobility to the Dalits within Hindu society. It seems that a sizeable .section of the Dalits, despite popular stereotypes, have been looking for such an alternative model of Sanskritization. In this model, a violent or heroic defence of Hinduism allows one to transcend one’s lowly caste status, at least temporarily.

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nath, the impression was widespread that the Dalits and Muslims were killing each other. By the mid-1980s the message of the VHP, that the idea of Savarna had to be supplanted by that of Hindutva as the binding cement for Hindus, had spread. Earlier the ultimate symbolic target of hate was the Dalit; now it was the Muslim. At last the Gujarati middle-class— spread out over large cities like Ahmedabad, Baroda and Surat and more than forty other large towns, and consisting mainly of Savarna, but also Dalit and Adivasi government servants, teachers and petty contractors—had begun to find security within the ideology of Hin­ dutva. Cut off from older cultural and social ties, the class had learnt to use the ideology as a ready cure for rootlessness and as a substitute for traditions. Hindutva had become for this class a new purana to validate their pre-eminence. From Hulladia Hanuman to Shri Ram Temple

Let us now turn to the way the tempo of communal violence has risen in Gujarat in recent times. Over the past two decades the whole of Gujarat, Ahmedabad in particular, has witnessed a series of com­ munal conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. The most violent of these took place in 1969, when five weeks of clashes left more than two thousand dead. A few medieval dargahs or mausoleums and mosques were also destroyed or damaged; overnight some of them were transformed into Hanuman temples with faceless stone icons. The most prominent among these new temples is the Hanuman temple at Raipur Gate in Ahmedabad city, the icon of which is called Hul­ ladia (riot-related) Hanuman. In 1990, too, a few dargahs were destroyed or damaged during the communal violence which rocked Ahmedabad following Advani’s Rath Yatra. The most prominent of them was a medieval dargdh that was razed to the ground in the elegant Navarangpura area of Ah­ medabad on 30 October 1990. While earlier the desecration of places of worship was entirely the work of lumpen proletariat mobs and unemployed youth, in 1990 it was often the handiwork of educated, middle-class youth belonging to the upper castes. At least it was clearly so in the case of the Navarangpura dargdh. These youth later, with the consent and active support of their elders, managed to build a new cement temple of Ram at the very site where till recently the dargdh had stood. Neither has the state government moved against

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those who were actively involved in the episode nor have the Gujarati media projected the issue. The change in the sentiment of the Hindus is evident in the shift from the Hulladia temple to the Shri Ram temple. In 1969, the Hanuman temple built on the ruins of the dargah was stigmatized by the very use of the adjective hulladia; in 1990, the Shri Ram temple fails to remind anyone of the fact that a dargah had once stood in its place. It was almost as if nothing had changed .5 At present, the communal configuration in Gujarat is triangular, with the Muslims occupying one corner, the Savarnas and the Avamas (Dalit castes and tribes) the other two, respectively. In 1981, when the first anti-reservation movement was launched by the Savarnas in Ahmedabad, the whole o f Gujarat witnessed a polarization along caste lines. In Ahmedabad the Dalits were physically attacked and their houses burnt down; in many villages they were socially boycotted. Throughout the three-month-long caste riot, Muslims either re­ mained aloof or, whenever possible, tried to protect the Dalits. The slogan ‘Dalit-Muslim Bhai Bhai’ also echoed in a number of D alitMuslim neighbourhoods o f Ahmedabad. Some Muslim and Dalit leaders even got together and organized a state-level conference that stressed the need for ‘minority unity to withstand the communal cyc­ lone of Gujarat’. However, after the conference, no further attempt to mobilize the minorities was actually made and the whole thing eventually petered out. Between 1981 and 198S when the second anti-reservation agitation was launched, the unity of the Dalits themselves was damaged by caste divisions within their ranks .6 Also there was little understanding sThis collective complicity of the middle class, supported by the state’s political and cultural establishments, bears comparison—far-fetched though such a comparison may at first look—with a similar event in the eleventh century that gives clues to the traditional cultural norms of the region. During the reign of Siddharaj Solanki of the Chaulakya dynasty, one of the earliest mosques built in India was damaged by some members of the majority com­ munity at Cambay following one of the earliest Hindu-Muslim riots. The caretaker of the mosque went to Patan and complained to King Siddharaj. Not only was the mosque rebuilt by royal order, but the local officers as well as the minister who tried to hide the facts of the destruction were punished. 6The Dalits of Gujarat are traditionally divided into at least seven castes, located in a hierarchial order. Each caste is again divided into paragna or marriage circles. Though the allegiance to these circles is now giving way to feelings of caste solidarity in urban Gujarat, the divisions persist.

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among the Avamas about the second anti-reservation agitation in 1985. The agitation was against quotas for the OBCs (the other back­ ward castes, as they are called in Indian officialese). Hence the OBCs were more active in the counter-agitation. But the target of the Savarnas remained the Dalits, although in north Gujarat violent clashes between the Patidars and the Thakardas took place in at least 33 villages, and in the city of Surat in south Gujarat a few clashes were reported between tribal and Savarna college students. The disintegration or the absence of solidarity among the Avamas was matched by the counter-integration achieved by the upper castes during 1981-85 on the issue of reservation. A new ‘we-ness’ emerged among at least the Brahmans, Banias and Patidars. Today for the first time in Gujarat, these three castes are being identified as one single unit. The word Savarna has become more common in day-to-day conversation in the castes which between themselves dominate the political, economic and cultural spheres of Gujarat and constitute a majority of the urban, educated, middle class in the state. Significantly, the ABVP, the student wing of the BJP, was the first organization to raise the banner of protest against reservation in post­ graduate medical studies introduced by the Gujarat government in 1981. The ABVP not only initiated the agitation but also took it to the middle-class localities of Ahmedabad. By the middle of 1982 however, the BJP leadership had changed its strategy and dropped its anti-reservation stance. Instead, the BJP workers in Gujarat started developmental and relief work in tribal areas and by 1983 they had begun to win over the Dalits. During the Ekatmata Yatras of 1983, the local BJP-VHP leadership systematically involved Dalit leaders. Again, when communal riots broke out in Ahmedabad during 1986, at the time of the annual Rath Yatra of the local Jagannath temple, the Dalits were repeatedly invited by the BJP and the VHP to join the holy war to protect Hinduism. The detailed narratives of the local police and media on the violent clashes that took place in industrial Ahmedabad conveyed the impression that the Dalits and Muslims were out for each other’s blood. In the wake of the 1986 communal riots, a series of stabbing incidents took place; the police reports made sure that they all appeared to involve only Muslims and Dalits. The growing distance after 1986 between Dalits and Muslims, and between Hindus and Muslims in general, should be also viewed against the five successful mobilizational efforts made by the VHP

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in Gujarat between 1983 and 1990 to actualize its national pro­ grammes. The following are thumbnail sketches of the five efforts.

The Politics o f Yatras The VHP planned three major ‘pilgrimages’ between 16 November and 16 December 1983, for the whole of India: the Gangajal or Ekatmata Yatra from Haridwar in the foothills of the Himalayas to Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu; the Ekatmata Yatra from Pashupatinath in Nepal to Kanyakumari; and the Ekatmata Yatra from Gangasagar in West Bengal to Somnath in Gujarat.7 Twenty-three subsidiary pil­ grimages were planned for Gujarat. They were to originate from dif­ ferent places and merge with one of the main ones from Gangasagar to Somnath. Their aim was to rise above caste, sect and denomina­ tional differences and invoke the spirit of unity amongst the Hindus.8 Signatories to the appeal to join the Yatras included the ABVP, the RSS, the Arya Samaj, the Rotary Club, the Lions Club and also, m ore notably, the Jain Sampradaya, Vaishnava Parivar, Sikh Sampradaya, Bauddha Sampradaya and Bhartiya Dalit Varga Sangh. In other words, an attempt was made to associate virtually all the non-Hindu communities with the Yatras and to isolate the Muslims. The Yatras used not merely the symbol of sacred Ganges water but also that of sacrificial rituals and pilgrimages. The routes of the Yatras were so charted that they touched the maximum number of shrines and centres of pilgrimage. Advantage was also taken of the fact that these temples were identified for centuries with different sects belonging to three main streams of Hindu tradition—Shaivism, Shaktism and Vaishnavism. They also often bore the signatures of Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. In this respect, the Gangajal Yatra contained all the main features of subsequent programmes of the same kind. For instance, the route and the form of Advani’s Rath Yatra, the links with the symbols of religious traditions that have originated in the subcontinent, and the attempt to construct a Hindu nationality that would span the major and minor sects and the dif­ ferent castes—they were all there. Only after 1984 did the VHP begin to use Ram in its mass mobili­ zation programmes. The first organized effort was the Ram-Janaki 7VHP pamphlet, published by the Mehsana branch of the VHP (Mehsana: no date). "Ibid.

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Dharma Yatra in 1987. It took place throughout Gujarat including the tribal areas .9 The stated aim was to transcend caste and sect dif­ ferences in the worship of Lord Ramchandra and to affirm the unity of the Hindus. The meaning of that unity became clear during the Yatra itself. Virpur is a small town at the junction of Kheda, Sabarkantha and Panchmahal districts of GujaraL On the day the Ram-Janaki Dharma Yatra was to pass through it, the town witnessed violent clashes be­ tween the local Hindus and Muslims and, for the first time in Gujarat, the tribals of nearby villages rushed in to attack Muslim localities and bum down Muslim shops and houses.10 The second effort was the Ramshila Pujan—worship of sanctified bricks meant for the projected Ram temple at Ayodhya. The VHP organized the Pujan in 1989. After Gandhi’s Dandi March, which took place as a part of the independence movement, the Pujan turned out to be by far the most impressive mobilizational effort in Gujarat. It was successful beyond the VHP’s wildest dreams, as even villages with no more than fifty to a hundred houses participated in the wor­ ship. Apart from sacred bricks made from the soil of their own land, they offered vast sums of money. Dalit slums of Ahmedabad and less accessible tribal villages in far-flung areas took enthusiastic part in the programme. According to the state government, in the wake of the Ramshila Pujan, 180 towns and villages witnessed Hindu-Muslim clashes. Even after the processions with sanctified bricks were banned by Chief Minister Amarsingh Chaudhari of the Congress-I, there was com­ munal tension at 95 more places. Next in the series were the Ram Jyoti and Vijaya Dashami Vijay Yatras. Even before Advani’s Rath Yatra was announced, the VHP had announced its own plans to launch these pilgrimages before 30 October 1990, the day karseva was to commence at Ayodhya. ^Pamphlet published by the Virpur town unit of the VHP, 10 April 1987. 1(>Two days later, a study team of Ahmedabad Ekfa, a voluntary group fighting communal violence, visited the town for an on-the-spot study of the situation. When the team complained to the district collector about the tribal attacks on the Muslims, the collector’s response was: ‘one should not be sur­ prised if the tribals come out to protect their Ram.’ A more likely explanation, offered by a sociologist, is the old hostility of the tribals towards Muslim money-lenders that got generalized to the entire Muslim community, thanks to the charged atmosphere created by the yatras.

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This time communal violence had broken out even before these events were announced, during the Ganesh immersion celebrations. The continuous efforts by the VHP to mobilize the Hindus had spurred the religious fervour of some sections of Hindus to find ex­ pression in more and more grandiose ways. Every passing year saw bigger and bigger icons being worshipped at a larger number of places during the annual Ganesh festival. Simultaneously, reports of communal violence, coming from the Muslim-dominated areas through which the Ganesh processions passed, grew in number. The explanations were always the same: either stones had been thrown from a mosque on a procession, or offensive anti-Muslim slogans had been successful in provoking what they were trying to provoke. Often the two explanations went together. On 4 September 1990, the day of the immersion, 15 persons were killed in communal clashes in Baroda, Anand, Surat, Bardoli and Ankaleswar. On 16 September 1990, Pravin Togadia, General Secretary of the VHP in Gujarat, announced that 101 Ram Jyoti Yatras and 15,000 Vijaya Dashami Vijay Yatras would cover the entire state. He also announced that 1,00,000 volunteers from Gujarat would participate in the karseva in Ayodhya, including 50,000 trident-carrying Bajrang Dal volunteers and 1,000 tribals with bows and arrows. He added that 18,000 religious conferences would also be held in all the 18,000 villages of Gujarat. Apparently, even before the public announcement of Advani’s Rath Yatra, the VHP had started preparing for it on a large scale. Every mobilization since 29 September 1990 left behind a record of communal clashes. The Vijaya Dashami Yatras brought in their wake clashes in Palanpur and Vijapur towns of north Gujarat; the Ram Jyoti Yatras led to clashes in Baroda, Balashinar and Lunawada in central and east Gujarat and in Bharuch in south Gujarat. In the predominantly tribal areas of Bharuch and Surat districts, in at least 33 villages there were attacks on isolated Muslim houses by tribals .11 Advani’s Rath Yatra, already briefly described in chapter 2, was the last of the big mobilizational efforts. On 13 September 1990, Narendra Modi, the General Secretary of the BJP in Gujarat, an­ nounced the programme of Advani’s Rath Yatra from Somnath to "Gujarat is one of the more urbanized states in India, with about 50 large urban settlements. As a result, the villages in the state are more accessible and more exposed to the culture of urban India and more frequently affected by communal tension as compared to villages in most other states in India.

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Ayodhya at a press conference. He gave a stern warning to the Central and UP governments that the BJP was even prepared for a repetition of the Jalianwala Bag massacre at Ayodhya. When a journalist asked him about the possibility of communal riots breaking out during the Yatra, Modi replied that this would not happen, but added that com­ munal tension was woven into the life of Gujarat. When Advani commenced his pilgrimage on a chariot from Somnath on 25 September 1990, the Muslims in Gujarat were feeling very insecure. For instance, in Veraval, the city adjoining Somnath, they sent off the children, women and the aged to nearby ‘safe’ vil­ lages having sizeable Muslim populations. The Yatra, however, passed off peacefully in the state, mainly because the entire state machinery was on the alert. The Yatra was a great political success. Nearly half of Chimanbhai Patel’s cabinet were from the BJP. They used their official position to promote it in their own way. They piloted it in their own areas and used the government’s wireless service to relay information on Advani’s movement, so that he could be given a proper welcome everyw here. The VHP was one up on the BJP; it put up big signboards in each city and town en route, declaring them to be cities of a Hindu state. The communal situation in Gujarat worsened after the arrest of Advani at Samastipur, Bihar, on 23 October. That afternoon, curfew was declared in two of the most sensitive areas of Ahmedabad, Dariyapur and Kalupur in the walled city. Riots also broke out in a number of cities in Saurashtra, north and east Gujarat and continued till 30 October, by which time almost the entire state was affected. Sporadic rioting continued till 6 November at Ahmedabad. We shall briefly describe the riots in Ahmedabad here but, before we do so, a word on the changing human geography of the city.

The Ahmedabad Riots Actually there are three Ahmedabads. The first is the five-century-old walled city founded by Sultan Ahmed Shah. It features a number of medieval mosques, representing Indo-Islamic architectural styles, and innumerable pols—groups of densely packed houses in narrow wind­ ing lanes that together have a main entrance by way of a huge wooden gate that can be shut. Most of the pols are occupied traditionally by a

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homogeneous community or caste—Savaraa Hindu, Dalit or Mus­ lim—and each has a separate subculture. The second Ahmedabad developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century around old villages on the periphery of the city, after the rise of its famous textile industry. In these medieval villages turned industrial townships, slums and chàlis mushroomed around the textile mills and other factories having huge compounds and high walls .12 While this Ahmedabad retains much of the traditional castebased lifestyle of the old villages, the slums and chàlis also carry the imprint of the social composition and segregated diversity of the textile mill workers. Those who migrated into the second city during the last century and in the early decades of this century settled in chàlis and those who migrated after Independence were forced to live in slums. Almost one-third of the textile workers before 1980 were Dalit and another one-third Muslim. This Ahmedabad has also seen large-scale immigration from Hindi-speaking North India and from areas around the river Godavari in South India during the last three decades. The third Ahmedabad is new; it is separated from the first two by the river Sabarmati. An élite area, populated by the upper and middle classes with a minuscule and scattered Muslim population and a few Dalit housing colonies and slums, this part of the city hosts most of the modern institutions of higher learning, including the university. During the last decade, the character of this Ahmedabad has changed. After each riot, the middle and upper classes in the walled city have felt more insecure, and the traders with their shops and the profes­ sionals with their practices in the other two Ahmedabads have moved to the new Ahmedabad. The process quickened after 1985, with the rise of multi-storeyed offices and residential buildings and Singaporetype shopping arcades. These made the élite areas of the new Ah­ medabad even more exclusive. Whereas the membership of housing societies established before or immediately after Independence in the new Ahmedabad were caste-or community-based and recreated the lifestyle of the walled city in a modern guise, housing societies estab­ lished during the last two decades have exclusive Savama member­ ships that transcend caste differences among the Savamas and reflect their new we-ness. af\

_

A chàli or chawl is a multi-storeyed, concrete slum; a ‘proper’ slum usually has an assortment of hutments which in some ways duplicate a village.

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The 1980s saw two major changes in the life of Ahmedabad. First, the century-old textile industry started crumbling and, by 1982, around 50,000 textile workers became jobless. About two-thirds of them were Dalits and Muslims. The proportion would have been higher but for the gradual elimination of Muslims and women workers from the textile mills during the previous three decades. Many of the jobless joined the unorganized sector and the children of families that had lost their income due to joblessness or the elimination of women workers, were attracted to the expanding un­ derworld of the city, with its close links with the police and the politicians .13 After the two caste riots and the numerous communal riots, this underworld in turn began to reflect, from about the middle of the 1980s, the triangular polarization among the Dalits, the Muslims and the Savarnas. The gang rivalries within it also became more violent. The polarization reached its political climax in 1987 when Abdul Latif, an underworld don, got himself elected from five Muslimmajority constituencies at the same time, presumably to enter both the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, where the BJP otherwise got a thumping majority, and the Guinness Book of World Records. The emergence of such local heroes further underwrote the decline of the traditional community leadership. According to Rameshchandra Parmar (political activist, a pioneer of the Dalit movement in Gujarat and a schoolteacher for more than 30 years), the older culture of the merchant guilds and trading castes—the tradition of the mahajan or the shreshthf— and the more recent Gandhian tradition, had pre­ viously served, despite their many limitations, as powerful cultural forces that imposed some social control and moral restraint on the working classes and younger generations pf Ahmedabadis. By the 1980s, other forces had begun to replace them. The second change was the impact of the Urban Land Ceiling Act of 1976 (ULCA) on landholding patterns in Ahmedabad. According to a 1976 survey of slums undertaken by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, at least 78 per cent of the city’s slum houses were on private land. After the introduction of the ULCA, private land could not be used for slum creation; only municipal or government land remained available for such use. This encouraged the growth of a new I3Prohibition being in force in Gujarat, a relatively more urban and in­ dustrialized state, suppliers and producers of illicit liquor formed an important section of this underworld.

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class of quasi-criminal entrepreneurs capable of illegally occupying open land through their powerful political connections. These slum­ lords took money from poor immigrants to first settle them on such land and then, after a while, eager to profit from soaring land prices, turned against the settlers and tried to oust them through ‘communal’ riots. The cleared land was then again ‘sold’ to the highest bidders. Today it is not unusual to meet at Ahmedabad a slumlord-tumedbuilder who at the same time is a municipal councillor or office­ bearer of a national political party. While Ahmedabad was witnessing a shift from its organized textile industry to unorganized industries (such as powerlooms), of the kind which are usually in search of a location, in the walled city there began a scramble for old houses nearer to one’s own community. After the communal riots of 1985 and 1986, the distress sale of houses increased so enormously that the government had to issue an ordinance denying, with retrospective effect, registration of such sales. But communal exodus continued and, while the wellto-do m igrated to the third Ahmedabad, the lower-m iddle-class and backward-caste families moved into their community pols in old Ahmedabad. By the end of the 1980s, living had become communally homogeneous in all the three Ahmedabads. But homogeneity did not lead to the sustenance or restoration of a stable community life, for many of the inhabitants were now newcomers and there was always a trickle of migration to the new Ahmedabad. It is against this background that the events of 23 October to 6 November 1990 should be seen. On 22 October, the General Secretary of the BJP in Gujarat, Narendra Modi, declared a red-alert, anticipating Advani’s arrest. It was to be observed during 24-26 October. He also gave a call to observe 23-30 October as a ‘week of determination’ and declared that meetings would be organized in 1,500 towns and villages of Gujarat. There was tension in the air. As an immediate reaction to Advani’s arrest, the local BJP and VHP workers called a general strike on the morning of 23 October in the Khadia and Raipur areas of the walled city. They were soon out on the streets, to throw stones or erect barricades with the help of uprooted electricity poles. By the afternoon, in Kalupur and Dariapur, two predominantly Muslim areas, large-scale group clashes began. In the walled city, rioters riding two-wheelers began to move

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around stabbing people randomly; they killed four and seriously in­ jured another ten. Among those killed was a ten-year-old girl. (This was the first time that a child had been attacked thus in Ahmedabad. In 198S for the first time a woman was stabbed in the city. Earlier, attacks on women and children were taboo in Gujarat riots; they are now common.) Banks closed by noon and so did the General Post Office in another couple of hours. There was an exodus of people from the walled city who rushed home to the other side of the river Sabarmati, and wild rumours and exaggerated casualty figures freely circulated in the city. For more than four decades riots had always begun in the walled city but all the three Ahmedabads had rarely been affected simulta­ neously. This time the violence spread rapidly outside the old city walls. Two banks, two post offices and an office of the Life Insurance Corporation of India were set on fire and a jeep belonging to a government corporation was burnt—all in Hindu middle-class areas in the new Ahmedabad. Industrial Ahmedabad was also affected by the evening, though less so. Within one day, the situation was so tense and the communal divide so intense that rampaging crowds attacked each other at many places, like two small armies fighting a battle to the finish. A general strike was called on 24 October and most of the markets remained closed. City buses were withdrawn from the roads in the morning itself. Yet, in Bapunagar and Gomtipur in industrial Ah­ medabad, confrontations took place between Dalit and Muslim crowds. The reason was obvious. To make a complete success of the strike, the workers of the BJP and the VHP tried to close down Mus­ lim shops; this led to pitched battles and, before noon, curfew was clamped in these areas. By the afternoon, some more areas of in­ dustrial and walled Ahmedabad were brought under curfew (for map of areas under curfew, see endpapers). But the main battleground had already shifted to the Naranpura area of the third Ahmedabad. The targets there were the properties of the Central G overnment. Telephone cables worth 30 million rupees were destroyed and even railway tracks were damaged. By the next day Ahmedabad had calmed down and there was only sporadic violence, though half of the industrial and walled city was still under curfew. The city continued to be tense, though not as much as its politics. All kinds of speculation and rumours floated around because Chief Minister Chimanlal Patel had asked the ten BJP ministers

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in his cabinet to resign. By the following day, the seven-month-old coalition government came to an end. So did the relative calm of the previous day, as if the exit of the BJP from power was a trigger.14 Random stabbings by youths on scooters resumed, especially in the walled city. In industrial Ahmedabad, a woman was stabbed and pas­ sions rose again. The next two days, 27 and 28 October, were quieter; only stray incidents of violence took place. On 29 October curfew was lifted from the entire city, though violence continued elsewhere in Gujarat. The Gujarat units of the BJP and the VHP called another general strike on 30 October. It was a great success in Ahmedabad. That morning Ramdhun was sung at most of the important temples of the city. The BJP mayor of the city, Gopalbhai Solanki, set up the first road blocks at Asarwa at around 9.00 AM On the main Ashram Road, close to the statue of Gandhi, the deputy mayor, another BJP stalwart, set up another blockade, while the Gandhi Bridge on the river Sabarmati, was blocked by the President of the BJP’s women’s wing and other party activists. Soon all the bridges on the river Sabarmati were closed. All buses run by the city municipal corporation were withdrawn from the roads. People on bicycles and two-wheelers were stopped and forced to say ‘Jai Shri Ram’. Those who refused or even fumbled were either beaten up or allowed to go after their tyres were deflated. Within minutes of the first arrest by the police, violence erupted. Roads were barricaded with the help of heavy iron road-dividers, uprooted electricity poles, dism antled bus stands, and broken signboards of ransacked shops. By the afternoon, life had come to a halt in the city, though not for the more dedicated rioters. A number 14The breakdown of civil order in Ahmedabad was certainly worsened by the political situation. The chief minister had to sack the BJP ministers in his cabinet when his seven-month-old coalition ministry was reduced to a minority in the Legislative Assembly after the BJP withdrew support to it. He claimed on 26 October that he would prove his majority on the floor of the Assembly on 1 November. So while the state capital burned, the chief minister was busy trying to save his ministry. He managed to do so, by es­ tablishing his majority in the Assembly with Congress support, but at an enor­ mous cost. In the absence of clear political authority and regular political monitoring, the law and order machinery in the city of Ahmedabad gave way on 30 October. In contrast, some 120 miles away, at Rajkot, a road blockade by the town’s powerful RSS family flopped because, the police commissioner acted firmly.

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of houses and shops were set on fire, including some near police stations. Fire engines trying to fight arson were also attacked. At some places, mobs clashed too. By the evening, the army was called out and it staged flag marches on both sides of the Sabarmati. But even as the army was marching, mobs were burning shops and looting houses in many places. In the narrow lanes and by-lanes of the walled city, stabbing and heavy stoning were going on, and burning rags wrapped on bicycle tyres were being thrown from the terraces of old multi-storeyed houses on the mobs below. As in the earlier riots, these burning rags were supplied by women of both communities. On the outskirts of new Ahmedabad, frenzied crowds of Savamas and Muslims in mixed neighbourhoods attacked each other with swords, sticks and iron rods; and in crowded industrial Ahmedabad, where Dalits and Muslims lived in adjacent localities, both sides used crude acid bombs, petrol bombs and even private guns. The situation in the new Ahmedabad was particularly bad. Op­ posite the Gujarat Vidyapith, the university established by Gandhi, the handicrafts emporium of the Government of West Bengal and a large retail outlet for khadi were torched .15 Some small roadside wooden cabins belonging to Muslim petty shopkeepers were also des­ troyed and then used as road barricades. Near the Vidyapith, a medieval dargah in an upper-middle class locality was razed to the ground and by the evening the place was declared a Ram mandir. We have already commented on this episode. Further west on Ashram Road, near the National Institute of Design, a number of Muslim upper-middle class localities were at­ tacked by a large mob that set fire to parked vehicles. Muslim shops in some of the debonair shopping complexes were also burnt down or ransacked. Sometimes, the ransacked goods were burnt on the main road though, usually, they were simply taken away. In the same area, a young Muslim chemist was killed by a mob that attacked the Seven Heaven Apartments where he Jived. He fired from his revolver in self-defence and the angry mob rushed to his apartment, broke open the door and dragged him downstairs to burn him alive in front of his brother and mother, both of whom were seriously injured when they tried to intervene. A few miles further west in Juhapura, late in the afternoon, mobs armed with swords, daggers and iron rods, attacked three Hindu, middle-class l5The emporium probably became a target because the West Bengal government had belligerently opposed the Ramjanmabhumi movement.

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co-operative housing societies—Shailesh Park, Venugopal Society and Zalak Apartments. They burnt at least 21 houses to cinders and damaged 9 others. In retaliation, within one-and-a-half hours the Usmane Haroon Housing Society was attacked and 17 houses were either looted or set on fire. Attacks and counter-attacks continued till late evening. The last target was yet another housing co-operative, Sham Society, where nine houses were plundered or damaged. Three persons died in the clashes and 73 were injured. To control the violence, the police opened fire and killed another 6 persons. Juhapura-Vejalpur had never had a communal clash. In Juhapura, a predominantly Muslim suburb of some 20,000 people, twelve Hindu temples had existed for years. Even during the earlier riots they had not been touched. Several huts belonging to Dalits and other ‘Backward’ communities and a large Hindu housing society, situated just across the highway at Juhapura, had also remained intact. This time, it Was said, some real estate developers were interested in an expensive piece of disputed vacant land in the area. The outbreak of violence in other parts of the city gave the builders the opportunity they were waiting for and sealed the fate of the community. Even the élite residential area around the campus of the Indian Space Research Organization did not escape the rioters. Gangs of youngsters moving about there on two-wheelers set on fire a number of isolated Muslim upper-class houses that had been marked earlier and then disappeared on their vehicles. The victims included a num­ ber of professionals—a doctor, a college professor, a social worker and a Muslim architect married to a Hindu who lived just opposite the Satellite Police Station. In some cases, Hindu neighbours did resist the mobs; in others they did their best but failed. For instance, when a gang of rioters on two-wheelers entered the grounds of the Indian Institute of Management looking for the house of a Muslim plumber, his neighbours saved him by swearing that he was not a Muslim. Again, when a mob broke open the locked house of a Mus­ lim teacher and made a bonfire of all his belongings, his Hindu neigh­ bours tried to stop them, but failed. Later, they collected whatever was left of the household goods and gave them to the teacher when he returned home. The victim himself was stoic: At the beginning, I turned down the request of my Hindu neighbours to move to a safer place. But on 27 October, I realized the seriousness of the situation and moved to a Muslim locality. When the boys came to my locked house on 30 October, one of my Hindu neighbours telephoned me and then, every

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ten minutes, I was given a blow by blow account of what was happening. How the boys broke open my iron grill, then my front door and collected our clothes, furniture etc. outside our house and made a bonfire of them. They were also planning to bum our locked kitchen. But when they saw from the window the cooking gas cylinder [they] probably thought that the explosion would damage the first-floor apartment of a Hindu ... .’

Of his new residence he said, ‘I have spent my childhood and youth in a Muslim locality of the walled city. To again live in that environment is not much of a problem. But my two school-going daughters will cer­ tainly suffocate in that conservative locality; that is my only worry.’ 16 Never before had such systematic attacks been mounted on upperclass Muslim houses. Though there had been widespread arson during the communal riots of 1985-86, the rioters were careful not to attack Muslim shops covered by any kind of insurance since eventually the government paid the damages. And most upper-class Muslim houses were insured. No such consideration was shown in 1990.17 l6This fear of re-ghettoization also haunted a Muslim researcher working in a well known research institute of Ahmedabad. He said: Coming from a Muslim lower-middle-class family of a village near Allahabad, when I got my doctorate in social science, I thought that now onward I would enter mainstream society and my children would grow up in a cosmopolitan environment. But after witnessing the current riot in this city and realizing what is happening to educated Muslim families, I feel, we are being pushed back to our ghettos. The problem was even more acute for Jamindar, a Bohra social reformer and social worker whose house was burnt: You know that because of the fatwa of the Bohra chief priest, we were forced to leave our ancestral house in Voharvad. There was a total social boycott by my Bohra relatives earlier. Since the last few years I have been living in a mixed locality. Now where should I go from here? 17Actually, the property of the Central Government was a major target of the rioters. Mobs had set on fire reels of telephone cable worth about Rs 30 million near the new telephone exchange at Naranpura on 24 October, during the first Gujarat bandh. This time a violent mob attacked the Jammu-Tawi Express near Chandlodia railway station and set one of its carriages on fire. Municipal property was also attacked. According to the Municipal Commis­ sioner of Ahmedabad, P. Basu, a mob set on fire the furniture of the Bal Bhavans at Usmanpura and Khokhara and the octroi collection centres at Shara Mandhir and Ghatlodia. The more serious attacks were on the municipal fire brigade. A water tanker and an ambulance belonging to the brigade weFe burnt.

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On 31 October, more than two-thirds of the city was under curfew and the army continued its flag marches. Elsewhere in the State, 14 towns were brought under indefinite curfew. By then 5,000 people had been arrested, of whom 1,000 were held under the harsh Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA). In Ahmedabad alone 1,300 were arrested, 94 of them under TADA. Thanks to such measures, the situation improved on 1 November, but the following day, just when a semblance of calm was returning to the city, two women were stabbed to death at Gomtipur when curfew was relaxed. This was the third time that the tradition of sparing women and children, that had survived through a series of riots in the city, was flouted to rekindle violence. By this time trade and industry were getting nervous about the long-drawn-out routine of violence. Apart from the loss of their busi­ ness, there was also the fact that most of them stayed in the new Ahmedabad and they had not bargained for a long stretch of in­ security in their part of the city. The office-bearers of the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry met the police commissioner in a group and suggested the creation of a separate cell to give correct information about the situation in the city in order to contain provoca­ tive rumours. The suggestion was accepted and two telephone num­ bers were allotted for the purpose, and an effort was also made to fight rumours through the newspapers. As if to reaffirm the class affiliation of the rioters and their dis­ tance from the local residents, on 4 November, five young men in a car were caught; they were carrying stolen goods worth Rs 80,000 as well as equipment for breaking open shops. The riots went on till 6 November. By then, 63 persons had been killed in Gujarat. Even after the Government declared normalcy in the state, hundreds of families who had fled their homes and taken refuge in relief camps refused to go back. In Ahmedabad, the local administration seemed to be in a hurry to disband these camps, but a steady stream of new arrivals and persisting tension even after 6 November, did not allow them to do so .18 '"Describing two of the largest relief camps, located at Shahalam Roza, a five-hundred-year-old dargah, and in an open ground at Charodia in Bapunagar, the Ahmedabad edition of The Times of India (7 October 1992) wrote: ‘the government authorities claim that the new refugees are allured by the cash dole and other benefits available at the camps, not all the new arrivals agree.

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As for the distribution of violence, in the industrial areas of Ahmedabad clashes took place in all the localities where Muslim houses bordered Dalit houses. In the upper-middle-class areas, well-to-do Muslim families were the targets—as if the social success and the very entry of the Muslims into these areas was being grudged. So even the homes of families resulting from Hindu-Muslim marriages were not spared. Most such victims left their homes and went into hiding in safer places. Though some of them might have come back, ghettoizadon, in some cases re-ghettoization, of middle-class and even upper-middleclass Muslims has become now a distinct possibility in Ahmedabad. If the Muslim upper-middle class was a prime target this time, the complicity of large sections of the Hindu upper-middleclass was also clearer this time. That complicity also introduced into the culture of riots in Gujarat a new form of youth participation. In the last two days of October, it was fairly common to come across teen-aged boys and girls from well-to-do families, often only ten or twelve years old, moving around in small cars (usually Marutis) and looting Mus­ lim shops located on the main roads. These teenagers were often egged on by their parents and, in some cases, scolded for not doing a good job of the looting .19 The symptoms might have been new, the *... Iqbal Mohammed and a part of his family had left the house even before the trouble broke out. The others stayed back to take care of the house and their belongings. But the following day after some incidents of violence, the police forced them to abandon their homes. The police allegedly told them that they were likely to be attacked and should seek shelter elsewhere, Iqbal Mohammed said “the police even beat up some of us who were reluctant to leave our homes.” ... A man from the camp had gone to his house this morning to see if things had improved. But he came back terrified because he had been threatened with dire consequences if he, his family and other neighbours returned to their houses.... ‘Mustaqbhai, a resident of Bhilnivas in the Behrampura area also alleged that he and others were forcibly asked to evacuate their houses by the police after some violence in the neighbourhood. Some have suffered lathi blows inflicted by the police, while others have suffered bum injuries when burning rags were thrown at them. Ramzanbhai, another resident of the same area, alleged that his house was also attacked by the police and some medals belonging to his father, who was in the army, were stolen by the police.’... ‘A similar situation prevails at the camp at Charodia’. l9One informant, staying in an élite area, described how her prosperous next-door neighbour, a respectable housewife, rebuked her teenaged daughter for hurriedly plundering from the showcase of a Muslim shop only shoes and sandals meant for the left foot.

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affliction was not. To many, the city of Ahmedabad now showed all the signs of large-scale anomie, a breakdown of community life and the erosion of traditional social norms. In the 1985 riots, 210 persons were killed in Gujarat; in 1990 the toll was 220, the highest for the decade. If one went by numbers, the difference was insignificant. However, if one goes by public sen­ tim ents, the divide between the Hindus and the Muslims had deepened during the five intervening years. In Ahmedabad in 1985, only one high wall came up between a Patidar and a Muslim neigh­ bourhood in the old city. By the end of 1990, the residents of almost all Dalit chawls in the industrial areas had erected high walls around them, interrupted by iron gates. At places where Hindus and Muslims lived side by side, the dominant sentiment now was one of fear and mistrust. When talking to their friends from other parts of the city, they usually referred to their own- place of stay as a frontier. The divide between communities was obvious even to outsiders. Those in the affected neighbourhoods had drastic solutions to offer to whoever was willing to listen. The Hindu driver of our auto­ rickshaw, realizing that we were returning from a relief camp meant for Muslims, asked point blank, ‘Don’t you think Nehru committed a blunder? He should have sent the Muslims to Pakistan!’ A retired government official was only slightly more suave. He said that he knew it was impossible to drive the Muslims out of India, but many problems could be solved if their voting rights were taken away. Others sought more violent solutions. And when some volunteers of Ahmedabad Ekta went to purchase bread for riot victims, a Muslim bakery owner near the railway station said straight out, ‘Sir, why do you give us bread? Give us gunpowder’. These sentiments went with a growing demand for guns for self­ protection. In industrial areas like Gomtipur and in outlying areas like Juhapura-Vejalpur, the demand did not slacken even after the riots subsided. When we visited some households in Vejalpur, most residents spoke of the need to acquire firearms. Still deeply distrustful of the police, members of both the communities felt that only direct access to arms would give them security. A Dalit textile worker stay­ ing in a Gomtipur slum, close to a large Muslim settlement, thought that we were from the VHP and said: ‘Sir, only milk and medicine will not do, give us guns and teach us how to use them.’ Just across the road, a Muslim college student lamented:

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Now my friends are so desperate that they are asking for guns. No one in my community trusts the local police after the recent experiences. All my friends think that now they have to protect themselves on the basis of their own strength and create a line of defence.

The demand for arms paralleled an almost paranoic concern with security; people seemed to think in strategic terms. In JuhapuraVasna, an area new to communal violence, a business executive ‘explained’ for our benefit the ‘gameplarf’ of the Congress-Muslim leadership. Pointing at the highway, he said: Look, the earlier Congress mayor of our city, Rafiuddin Shaikh, allowed the Muslim slum to grow near Chandala lake as well as Juhapura so that they could blockade us. After the BJP came to power, the new Hindu mayor has not allowed the Muslims to get concentrated on the approach roads to Gandhinagar. Now it will be difficult for the Muslims to blockade us. T a b le 14 SUMMARY OF MAJOR RIOTS IN GUJARAT FROM 1980

Year

1981

1982-83 1985

1986

19 8 7

Location

Ahmedabad city, Ahmedabad, Gandhi­ nagar, Kheda and Mehsana districts

Comment

First and-reservation agitation. Main contestants Savamas and

Avamas; main feature violence and social boycott directed against Dalits. Baroda city Clashes between Hindus and Muslims on Ganesh Chaturthi festival. Ahmedabad and Baroda Second anti-reservation agitation cities —it was anti-Dalit in the begin­ Ahmedabad, Baroda, ning, then got transformed into a Mehsana, Sabarkantha communal riot directed mainly and Kheda districts against the Muslims —counter-agitations by the tribals and other ‘backwards’. Ahmedabad city Rath Yatra: between Hindus and Muslims —Dalit areas affected —Growing distance between Dalits and Muslims. Kheda (Cambay, Thasra, Clashes between Hindus and Dhundara, Virpur, Nadiad, Muslims over the Ram-Janki Dakor) and Sabaikantha Shobha Yatra (Prantij, Himatnagar, —Tribals attacked Muslims in Virpur. Modasa) districts

Creating a Nationality 1989

1990

Banaskantha, Panchmahal, Mehsana, Kheda and Bhamch The whole o f Gujarat (except Jamnagar, Dang, Sabarkanta, Junagadh, districts)

VIII.

12 3

Clashes between Hindus and Muslims around Ramshila Pujan Shobha Yatra. Clashes between Hindus and Muslims over the Rath Yatra.

V io le n c e a n d S u r v iv a l

he communal violence that broke out at Jaipur in 1990, in the wake of Advani’s Rath Yatra, bewildered its citizens. Some were surprised that the violence took place at all, for it was wholly unprecedented. ‘The riots did not happen, they were made to happen,’ was the refrain of many. Others like Khandelwal, a Hindu broker in the gemstone trade, were incredulous because they felt that the Hindus and Muslims of Jaipur ‘just could not carry on without each other’. When we interviewed him, Khandelwal was helping Yusuf and Vasif Ali, two of five brothers who ran their own business. The three were classifying gleaming garnets and aquamarines accor­ ding to their lustre into packets to be delivered to showrooms of Hindu traders. Zahoor Mohammad, a resident of Jaipur’s Pahadganj area, insisted that the city’s Hindus and Muslims lived lives that were completely interlocked— 4aise jude hue hain jaise apas me ali se sali mili hui hai.' Nonetheless, hundreds participated in the loot, arson, killings and in the rapes that were often not reported because of the stigma that attached to the victims. What ruptured the social fabric woven over the centuries?

T

The Social Fabric o f Jaipur The riots were not a ‘spontaneous’ or inevitable clash between two communities given to primordial religious sentiments. On the other hand, to regard them as the work of only criminals would also be an over-simplification. The conflict had been planned by people other than the underworld and enjoyed ample political backing. And when it came, it did exteriorize the latent or implicit violence within several sections of society. In this section, we show how the diverse accounts of violence coming from the ruling party, the written media, the state,

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and the police gradually converge to produce a single narrative fram­ ing social consciousness and action. This narrative constructs the Muslim as a foreigner, invader, fanatic and traitor, and it acquires legitimacy from an ideology in which the Hindu community and faith are seen as requiring protection from the enemy within. This emerg­ ing narrative has ensured widespread post facto sanction for the riot from the city’s middle class. As one refrain of Jaipur’s edu­ cated middle class goes: ‘It was right; the Muslims needed to learn a lesson. In every riot they attack unarmed Hindus. Look at the way the Muslims are multiplying and the number of the Hindus is getting reduced.’ Jaipur has obviously changed since 1947. When much of north India was gripped by the great Partition riots Rajputana, present Rajasthan, remained mostly unaffected. With the exception of Alwar and Bharatpur, where massacres, large-scale evictions from villages, and forced conversions of the Muslim Meos took place, the princely states, by and large, maintained communal peace. In Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur, the rulers themselves intervened to prevent violence. That relative insulation of Rajasthan from the pan-Indian politics of ethnic violence has now ended. The state is already on the list of communally sensitive states, one of the ten which will soon have a special riot squad. Riots in Rajasthan previously meant anti-Jain riots in the late eighteenth century and Jat-Rajput riots in the early twentieth century; they have now come to mean Hindu-Muslim clashes.20 Before we proceed with our story, a word about our major concern in this section. As we have said, most studies of communal and ethnic violence take for granted the existence of two antagonistic groups engaged in violence and counter-violence. In the context of South Asia, such antagonisms are often presumed to be a part of the natural state of the communities. Yet, it is pretty obvious that such an­ tagonisms, and the ideologies and social theories that justify them, are contested at each stage. Report after report on riots in South Asia reveal the elaborate planning and mobilizational effort that go into them. And it must have become obvious to the reader from our ac­ count of the growth of Hindu nationalism that at every stage the movement has faced not only passive non-cooperation but spirited ^Ashim Kumar Roy, History o f the Jaipur City (Delhi: Manohar, 1978), p. 186.

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resistance from a large majority of Hindus. In this respect, the Jaipur riot was no exception. It is our belief that no description of the spread of an ideology of hate and violence can be complete without an awareness of this re­ sistance which it faces at the ground level. The resistance finds ex­ pression in the ways in which people behave or intervene in events during a crisis, sometimes to protect others at enormous risk to their own life and well-being. Our account of this resistance implicitly uses an expanded version of Robert J. Lifton’s concept of the sur­ vivor, to cover not only the victim who experiences violence and survives but also the survivor who has experienced protection and care from members of the ‘other’ community.21 Such a concept allows one to look at communal violence not as a clash between two ex­ clusive groups but as a complex encounter between man-made suf­ fering and human empathy and care. Such encounters, perhaps more frequent where communities are more intact, keep open the possi­ bility of social healing, of the kind that has allowed some of the older civilizations to survive and triumph over their experiences of violence, exploitation and uprooting. Jaipur, a city situated in the plains bound by the Aravalli range of hills, was founded by Raja Jai Singh in 1727 and was the capital of a prosperous princely state of the same name. An important aspect of this prosperity were the Muslim and Hindu craftsmen brought in by its rulers from various parts of the country. Jaipur came to be known for its marble and stone carving, brass work, block printing, carpets, gold and silver thread work, tie and dye, handmade paper, and other crafts. But the premier industry was that of jewellery. Jaipur became famous in the late nineteenth century as one of the world’s largest centres for cutting emeralds. Gemstone cutting and polishing gradually became Jaipur’s core industry, involving the participation of some of the major communities in the city. Jaipur today is founded on an interweaving of castes and com­ munities that is not fully reflected in its demographic data. Jaipur district has, the 1991 census says, a population of 4.72 million, of which 78 per cent are Hindu. Though the densely populated walled 2lRobert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors o f Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1968). Also Amrit Srinivas, ‘The Survivor in the Study of Violence’ in Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors o f Violence: Communities, Riots, Sur­ vivors (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 305-20.

12 6

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city of Jaipur has a large concentration of both Hindu and Muslim upper castes, Jains and Muslim artisans, the Muslims are a little more than 18 per cent in a population of 1.45 million in urban Jaipur and the Scheduled Castes and Tribes about 10.5 and 2.3 per cent respec­ tively .23 But it is the traditional economy of Jaipur that reflects the city’s plural culture most accurately—the grain trade, the vegetable market, the textile hand-block printing, and the gemstone industry. If Muslim craftspersons require Hindu patrons and marketing, Hindu festivals and rituals are inconceivable without Muslim craftspersons. The Manihar women make the mandatory lac bangles for Hindu mar­ ried women, and strands of the kalâvâ (Hindu sacred thread required for yajna) can be found hanging from the balconies in the Nilgaron ka Mohalla behind Ramganj. Sankrânt, a major festival in Jaipur, when kites literally crowd the city’s sky, is inconceivable without Muslim kite-makers, exactly as Diwali is unthinkable without Muslim firework manufacturers. The category ‘Muslim’, however, includes a world of cultural and occupational variations and social stratification. The conventional ashraf of Sheikhs, Saiyads, Pathans, Khojas, and Bohras are better off. The poorer Muslims consist of Mochis (leather-workers), Kasais (butchers), Lohars (blacksmiths), Darzis (tailors), Nilgars (dyers), Manihars (bangle makers), Pannigars (silver paper makers), Pinnaras (quilt makers), Chipas (block printers), kite- and firecracker makers. Besides these traditional crafts, Muslims are also mechanics, rick­ shaw pullers, and unskilled labourers. As in Ahmedabad, by and large, the Muslims are concentrated in the old walled city. Frequently occupational groups live in mohallàs or localities, named after their o ccu p atio n . The K ayam khanis, P athans, B h ish tis, M ochis, Pinnaras, Kasais (called Querishis), Julahas, Pannighars constitute well-knit birâdaris with systems of internal decision-making and ad­ judication. Jaipur is getting further urbanized. Increased migration has ensured a growth of over 37 per cent in the last decade. While the medieval ^Ashish Bose, Demographic Diversity o f India: 1991 Census (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 1991), pp. 315-20. In Rajasthan, Hindus are 89.3 per cent and Muslims 7.28 per cent. Boileau’s Narrative o f 1835 mentions 17 per cent Muslims, that grew to 25 per cent in 1901. Apparently, there were not many artisans then except for the chipas (printers). ^Government o f Rajasthan, D istrict Census Handbook, Jaipur 1981 (Jaipur: Government of Rajasthan, 1981).

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walled city has grown, there has also been a movement from it to the new residential colonies that have proliferated in recent years, many of them built by the Housing Board or the Jaipur Development Authority (JDA). Their new-found prosperity in the gemstone indus­ try has encouraged many Muslims to purchase plots or homes in these colonies. (As in Ahmedabad, these were major sites of rioting in 1990, even though communal riots are usually associated with congested areas in walled cities.) With this urbanization has come Hindu nationalism. In the last two decades it has brought about a pronounced shift in the attitude of many Hindus in Jaipur though, as we shall see, it has not suc­ ceeded in eliminating the voices of many others. The rise of the BJP in the state has paralleled these shifts. As in some other states, the party is no longer dependent in Rajasthan, as its precursor the Jan Sangh was, on the support of urban shopkeepers and traders. The first break came in the 1977 elections, when the Jan Sangh cashed in on the anti-Congress sentiments as part of the Janata Party which, after a resounding victory, formed the first non-Congress government in the state. They had come a long way from the 3 per cent of the popular vote they had won in 1952, for they were now the major constituent of the Janata Party .24 Rajasthan’s BJP govern­ ment has had one of the longest runs among the non-Congress re­ gimes in India. In the elections of 1990 the BJP again swept the polls in alliance with the Janata Dal and formed the government. As a consequence of changes in the BJP’s national policy, the attitude of the leadership of Hindu nationalism in the state has also changed, though it is still led by a known moderate within the BJP, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat. A decade or so ago, Jan Sangh leader, Satish Chandra Aggarwal, stepped in to prevent a conflict over the killing of some cows by a Muslim Kasai. ‘The entire Muslim com­ munity cannot be expected to pay for what one Muslim has done,’ he reportedly said at a public meeting. On another occasion, tempers were similarly cooled when a Muslim driver ran over some children. Today, even minor issues, such as a dispute between a shopkeeper and a customer, or a boy teasing a girl, tend to polarize a moha Ila, Satyabhan Singh, Station House Officer (SHO) of the Ramganj police station, complains. 24In 1977 the Janata Party won 65.2 per cent of the votes. It fell to 31.7 per cent in the elections o f 1980.

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The huge success of the Ramshila Pujan in Rajasthan had much to do with this increase in communal tension. Rajasthan was one of the states which contributed the largest number of shilás, 20,000, for the Ram temple. It also collected the largest purse, VHP’s Jai Bahadur Shekhawat proudly claims. Unlike in Gujarat, much of the money came from the Banias, Brahmans and Rajputs, the dominant castes of Rajasthan and the VHP’s main support base. The Shri Ramshila Pujan Rath Yatra and the Shri Ram Mahayajna Rath Prasthan went along nine sub-routes in Rajasthan. As in Gujarat, the names of the y a tra s were carefully chosen, to define the VHP’s inclusivity. The Ekalavya Rath that went through Banswada, Dungarpur and Udaipur appealed to the tribal, mainly Bhil, sentiments; the Vir Durgadas and Hadarani Raths, that travelled to JodhpurNagaür and Kota-Bundi-Tonk respectively, invoked local Rajput heroes. All nine rath s converged at Jaipur following shilapujan ceremonies at 26,000 places. Shilapujan and Mahayajna Samitis had been formed in each p ra k h a n d and each important village to organize the rituals and processions that passed through each lane and m o h a llá .25 Pradeep Vyas, a Congress party worker, described his experience around Sanganer in the following words: In each village a specially selected brick was placed in the Ram temple fol­ lowing worship. It was kept there for eight days. The order then came that all bricks be sent to the tehsil headquarters (Sanganer). In the village a boli (auction) was held. The wife of the person who made the highest boli (bid) was given the honour o f carrying the brick on her head and leading the pro­ cession through the village. From each home people participated in the proces­ sion. They went through the village singing songs. The brick was then placed 25The VHP has divided India into 5 zones, 10 regions, 25 provinces, 210 divisions, 706 districts, and 7180 subdivisions. For the pujan, Rajasthan was organized into 3 zones (sambhags), 10 divisions (vibhágs), 298 subdivisions (prakhands), 2,980 khands, and 14,900 upkhands o f 2,000 population each. Shilapujan was organized at 26,601 places from where 22,416 shilas were sent to Ayodhya. In all over 10.2 million men and 7.1 million women took part. The VHP also held Shri Ram Mahayajnas at 318 places, large religious conferences at 653 places, and exhibitions at 104 places; 414 processions too were taken out. People from all over the state bought coupons worth 15.6 million rupees to assist the temple construction. Over 300 Muslims par­ ticip ated in the Shilapujan and o fferin gs. ‘R ajasthan main Shriram Shilapujan’, Shriram Shila Smarika, Rajasthan, p. 20. It was indeed a majestic organizational feat.

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in a jeep and taken to the tehsil. All the bricks from all the villages were then loaded on to trucks.26

According to some eyewitnesses, the level of mobilization achieved through such programmes exceeded that achieved by the freedom movement.

Riots in Rajasthan The first communal riot took place at Jaipur in November 1989.27 It was preceded by a conflict on 6 October at Shastri Nagar, a new residential area dominated by Sindhis. Forced to migrate from Pakis­ tan at the time of the Partition in 1947, the Sindhis are usually strong supporters of the BJP. The salience of Advani, a Sindhi, in the BJP has also given them a new stake in the party; it is not often that the numerically small Sindhi community throws up a national leader. The conflict began, the BJP spokesmen say, when a Muslim overturned the cart carrying sacred bricks for Ayodhya at the head of a procession. Others claim that the cart was overturned by a local Sindhi leader of the BJP who wanted a communal altercation. The events then followed the standard pattern. The local BJP now insisted on taking the procession through Muslim areas and shouting ‘provo­ cative’ slogans. Violence broke out in Jalupura and Kalyanji ka Rasta in the walled city. It was followed by the imposition of curfew for nine days. One person was killed. The riot at Kota was said to have a similar beginning. On the day of the Anant Chaturdashi festival, the VHP says, the Muslims ‘attacked’ a Ganesh procession .29 An article in a VHP journal, titled 26Vyas, while talking to one o f us on 12 March 1992, added that the Rath Yatra touched the feelings of everyone, irrespective of party affiliation. Only later did some realize, Vyas said, that they had been duped. 27The Sampradayikta Virodhi Samiti, a voluntary organization fighting communal violence, calls this Jaipur’s first communal riot. However, there had been communal conflicts in other cities o f Rajasthan in the 1980s: at Beawar in 1986; at Sojat and Pali in 1987; at Makrana and Tonk in 1988; and at Bigodh, Kota, Fatehpur and Udaipur in 1989. 28The BJP testimony, filed by Ghanshyam Tiwari before the Tibrewal Commission on 13 December 1991 (Exhibit B-77), says the cart was over­ turned by the Congress-I which then led the procession with a new cart that deliberately passed through Muslim majority areas. 29As a VHP pamphlet put it, this was not unnatural, for ‘the Muslims, true to their nature, began the riots all over the country.’ Shriram Shila Smarika, Rajasthan, p. 3.

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