AT HOME

ASHIS NANDY

UNIVERSITY OF
E x il e d at H om e
 A sh is N a n d y

E x il e d at H ome

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

DELHI
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CALCUTTA CHENNAI MUMBAI
1998
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© Urna Ashis Nandy 1998

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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

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and published by Marnar Khan, Oxford University Press
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 INTRODUCTION

D R. NAGARAJ

hat Ashis Nandy is one of the major critics of modernity from

the South is a cliché by now. But that cliché overlies an inter-
esting 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.
viii Exiled at Home

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, Sar-
hapada 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 self-
reflexivity. 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
X Exiled at Home

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 umbrella-
like 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.

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.
xii Exiled at Home

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
xiv Exiled at Home

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.
xvi Exiled at Home

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 univer-
salist 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.
xviii Exiled at Home

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.

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,
XX Exiled at Home

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
vi Preface

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 A sh is N a n d y

Developing Societies
 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 nineteenth-
centuries 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 Yajna-
valkya, 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.
4 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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, Sanskriti-
zing 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 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 children-
copartners. 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,
8 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
 Sati 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
12 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
 Sati 13

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.
 Sati 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 Tarini-
devi’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
 Sati 17

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
 Sati 19

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
 Sati 21

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 nine-
teenth-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
 Sati 23

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’ Shan-
karacharya’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
 Sati 25

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).
26 A t the Edge o f Psychology

3. Upendra Thakur, The History of Sucide in India (Delhi: Munshiram Mano-

harlal, 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 normless-
ness, 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. Majum-
dar, 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.
 Sati 27

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 ego-
alien.
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); Chintaha-
ran Chakravarti, Banglar Palparban (Calcutta: Viswa-Bharati, 1953); and
Tantrakatha (Calcutta: Viswa-Bharati, 1955).
25. These new maternal archetypes established links with a number of second-
order 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 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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.).
29. 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.
30. 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).
31. On rage as a response to adaptive impotence, see E. H. Erikson, Insight and
Responsibility (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 214.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. Rammohun Roy, 1816, English Works, Vol. II, p. 60.
37. 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.
38. Rammohun Roy, 1819, English Works, Vol. II, p. 23, also p. 52.
39. Ibid., p. vii.
40. Ibid., Vol. VI, p. 5; and Vol. Ill, pp. 87-137; and Granthabali, Vol. Ill; Collet,
Rammohan Roy, pp. 92-5.
41. See on this subject “Woman Versus Womanliness', Chapter 2.
42. Patricia Uberoi has drawn my attention to the fact that a similar latent theory
 Sati 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.
43. I. Singh, Rammohun Roy, Vol. 1 (Bombay: Asia, 1958).
44. 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.
45. 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.
46. 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.
47. 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.
48. See some instances in Kakar, ‘Aggression in Indian Society’, pp. 226-7, 23-6;
Carstairs, The Twice- Born, pp. 156-9.
49. Collet, Rammohun Roy, p. 4; and Singh, Rammohan Roy, pp. 22-3.
50. Singh, Rammohan Roy; R. C. Dutta, Cultural Heritage of Bengal (Calcutta:
Punthi Pustak, 1962), p. 91.
51. Singh, Rammohan Roy, p. 19.
52. Ibid., p. 20; Collet, Rammohan Roy, p.4.
53. Singh, Rammohan Roy, p. 20.
54. Ibid., p. 20, 22-3.
55. 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).
56. 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 A t the Edge o f Psychology
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 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 Cal-
cuttans, 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.
79. 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.
80. 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.
81. English Works, Vol. U, p. 92.
82. Ibid.
83. Letter to Estlin, 1827; English Works, Vol. IV, p. 90; also Ibid., Vol. II, p. 23.
84. Ibid., p. 92.
85. 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.
86. Ibid., Vol. I, particularly the tract on property rights of women, pp. 1-10.
87. Rammohun Roy, quoted by R. C. Majumdar in Majumdar, Majumdar and
Ghose, British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Vol. II, p. 101.
88. 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.
89. English Works, Vol. II, p. 174.
90. 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.
91. See on this theme 'The Making and Unmaking of Political Cultures in India’,
Chapter 3.
92. Roy, Translation of Kathopanishad, 1818, English Works, Vol. Ill, p. 93, 94.
93. 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-to-
person 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
34 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 pre-
Aryan dominance of woman was retained in many areas of life,
particularly in the symbolic system.10 This undeniably is a matri-
focal culture in which femininity is inextricably linked with pra-
kritiy 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,
36 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 encroach-
ements 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 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 self-
expression 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 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 endo-
genize 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 41

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
42 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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-
 Woman Versus Womanliness in India 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).
44 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 deempha-
sise 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.
 Woman Versus Womanliness in India 45
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
46 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
48 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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.
 Political Cultures in India 49

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 univer-
salist 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
50 A t the Edge o f Psychology
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
 Political Cultures in India 51

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 self-
seeking 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
52 A t the Edge o f Psychology
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
 Political Cultures in India 53

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 self-
affirmation 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
54 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
 Political Cultures in India 55

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
56 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 well-
defined 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 nineteenth-
century 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
 Political Cultures in India 51

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 univer-
salist, 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
58 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 synthet-
ism 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
 Political Cultures in India 59

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
60 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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, pro-
British, 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.
 Political Cultures in India 61

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
62 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
 Political Cultures in India 63

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 ‘intro-
ject’ 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
64 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
 Political Cultures in India 65

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.
66 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 self-
correcting 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 67

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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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).
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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).
18. 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.
19. 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
68 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.
20. 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).
21. See a discussion of this in Final Encounter, in this book.
22. 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.
23. 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 Non-
Antagonistic 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.
24. 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.
25. This distrust and cynicism perhaps had support in some aspects of the modal
personality system. See Carstairs, The Twice Born, particularly pp. 40-5.
26. 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).
27. 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.
 Political Cultures in India 69

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 de-
intellectualization, 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 ‘synthe-
ticism’ 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 self-
deprecating 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, semi-
modernized 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
74 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 non-
intrusive, nurturant, non-manipulative, non-violent, self-deem-
phasising ‘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.
76 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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.
 The Politics o f the Assassination o f Gandhi 77

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, ego-
ideals and admirers — they did not see themselves as morally
78 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
80 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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-com-
plexioned, 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
82 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
84 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 middle-
class 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 Chit-

pavans) 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
86 A t the Edge o f Psychology
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. Karuna-
karan, 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
88 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
90 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 near-
anarchic 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
92 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 point-
blank 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
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.
15. 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.
16. 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. Mukho-
padhyay, 1963).
17. 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.
18. Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 612.
19. J. C. Jain, The Murder of Mahatma Gandhi: Prelude and Aftermath (Bombay:
Chetana, 1961), p. 45; Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 750-1.
20. 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.
21. 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 bookshop-
owner, 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.
22. Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 616.
23. V. G. Deshpande in Ghose, Gandhi Murder Trial, pp. 280-1; also Gopal Godse,
 96 A t the Edge o f Psychology
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

Savarkar.
37. See Godse, Gandhihatya, Chapter 12, to get some idea of Nathuram’s idiom;
also his letter to Madholkar.
38. 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.
39. Jain, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 64.
40. Brijkrishna Chandiwalla, At the Feet of Bapu (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1954),
quoted in Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 573.
41. Jain, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 52.
42. Manuben, Bapu — My Mother, p. 49; Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi— The
Last Phase, 2 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan), p. 460.
43. N. K. Bose, My Days with Gandhi (Bombay: Orient Longman), p.250.
44. Manuben, Last Glimpses of Bapu (Delhi: S. L. Agarwala, 1962), p.81.
45. Ibid., pp. 81, 234, 252, 297-8.
46. Ibid., p. 114.
47. Ibid., pp. 297-8.
48. Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, pp. 550, 552.
49. Ibid., p. 549.
50. For example, Jain, Mahatma Gandhi, p. 62-3, Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi,
2, p. 101.
51. 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).
52. 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.
53. 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.
54. 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.
55. ‘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.
56. 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 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.
57. Quoted in Ghose, Gandhi Murder Trial, p. 229.
58. Quoted in Khosla, Nathuram Godse, p. 242.
59. Quoted in Ghose, Gandhi Murder Trial, p. 228, 229.
60. 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.
61. Godse, Gandhihatya ani Mee, pp. 221-3.
62. Khosla, Nathuram Godse, p. 243.
63. Godse, Gandhihatya ani Mee, pp. 46, 221.
64. See Horowitz, Politicai Terrorism and State Power; and Ashis Nandy, ‘Invita­
tion to a Beheading'.
65. 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.
66. 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.
100 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
 Psychology o f Fascism in India 101

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 soft-
minded 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
102 A t the Edge o f Psychology

to his rigid defences and cognitive narrowness. At one place in the

book the authors quote Max Horkheimer to make the now well-
known 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
 Psychology o f Fascism in India 103

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
104 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
 Psychology o f Fascism in India 105

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 non-
Hindus: 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 middle-
class 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
 Psychology o f Fascism in India 107

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
108 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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 self-
examination, 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
 Psychology o f Fascism in India 109

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
110 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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.
 Psychology o f Fascism in India 111
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 self-
consciousness 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 non-

Westem. 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 anti-
Indian 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-
114 A t the Edge o f Psychology
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 self-
interest 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
 Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics 115

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
116 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
 Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics 117

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 all-
India 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,
118 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
 Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics 119

social and economic institutions in India.6 If this was not possible,

they argued with the admiration which Western academic ethno-
centrism 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-con-
sistency. 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
120 A t the Edge o f Psychology

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
 Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics 121

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 witch-
hunting 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
 Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics 123

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 demono-
logy. 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
 Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics 125

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, achieve-
ment-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,
 Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics 127

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
128 A t the Edge o f Psychology

self-certainty is what m ade her so dangerous and yet, fortunately

for her country, so vulnerable. If she had been slightly less self-
confident, 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
 Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics 129

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 Hindu 71
Adorno, T.W. 99,103 political 47-50
Adyashakti 8, 33 Westernization of 53
Agranl 81
Anti-semiticism 100 De-Biahmanization 72
Apte, Narayan 76 Desai, Morarji 91
Arthashastra 105, 114 Dharma 49
Arya Samaj 59 Dissent 50
Aurobindo 40 and orthodoxy 51
Authoritarian personality 100—
3 ideological 51
Azad, Abul Kalam 90 of Gandhi 85
versus authority 102
Babus 60 Durga Puja 9
Bandamaike. Srimavo 127
Bengal 4-25 Elections, 1977 (see Gandhi, Indira)
crisis of values in 20 Emergency, roots of 123-4
dayabhaga system of law in 5 Engels, Friedrich 32
18th-century history of 4 Erikson, Erik 74
joint family system in 13 Ethics, public 56
women of 24
Berdyaev 39 F scales 100,106
Bettelheim 37 Fascism 103-4
Bhadralok aristocracy 4,18 in India 104, 105-7
Brahman {see also Chitpavans) Nazi experience in 106
as an -ism 58 pseudo-conservatism of 103
potency of 38,40 Fromm, Erich 101, 103
Brahma Samaj 25, 59
Brahmoism 22 Galtung, Johann 34
British colonialism 72 Gandhi, Indira 112-29
Bureaucracy 55' and bureaucracy 117
and censorship laws 119
Chandi image 8, 27 and 1977 elections 118
Chatteijee, Bankim Chandra 40-1, 50 and Soviet Marxism 118
Chatterjee, Sarat Chandra 40-1 India during the time of 117
Child political base of 113,114
aggression 102 psychology of 125-7,129
exploitation 33 style of politics of 116
Chitpavans 77 Gandhi, Mahatma 39, 61, 70-98
Cohn, Norman 122-3 anti-intellectualism of 53, 62
Collet 7 assassination of 76, 86,92, 93
Culture civil disobedience of 81
a* choice 47 death of 92 (also see Godae)
 132 Index

dissent of 85 Marx, Kail 32

last days of 88-9 Marcos, Ferdinand 127
political philosophy of 70, 71, 73, Masculinity 42
88,90 Monism 23-4
satyagraha of 71 Mother
superstitions of 114 and son 37
traditionalism of 114 in Indian philosophy 36, 39, 42
Gopal Godse 85 Myrdal, Gunnar 119
Godse, Nathuram Vinayak 70-91
ascetism of 82-3 Narayan, Jayaprakash J24
cultural evaluation of 86 Nehru, Jawaharlal 87, 113, 120
confessions of 91,114 Nineteenth century
education of 79-80 elitism 52
on Gandhi 81, 83 Hindu organization 57
sexuality of 85-6
Gokhale 80 Oakley 10
Grant, Chari« 11 Order of change 64
Organski, A.F.K. 104
Hastings, Warren 7 Owen 32
Hierarchy, social 54
Hindu Pahwa, Madanlal 87, 88, 91
chauvinism 57, 61 Patel. Vallabh Bhai 90
idolatory 11 Realpolitik of 90
Rashtra Dal 81-2 Payne, Robert 70
versus Christians 74 Politics
Hinduism as autonomy 60
versus Islam 88 as banality 62
Hindu-Muslim riots as self-affirmation 58, 64
sadism of 88-9 as self-redefinition 57
Horkheimer, Max 102 Polanyi, Michael 81
Power 50
Indian Prakriti 8, 35
mother 36 Psychology
system 48,113 Freudian 100
woman 41-2 of Indira Gandhi 125-8
of Gandhi, Mahatma 114
Jauhar 3 of Godse, Nathuram V. 79-86
Justice Khosla 92 of Hinduism 49, 74, 81, 83, 113
of political movements 57-64
Kautilya 3 Pumsha 35
Kher, B.G. 91
Kropotkin 32 Rahman, Mujibur 127
RSS81,113
Mahabharata 40, 92,105, 114 Ray, Satyajit 40
Manu 3 Redefinition
Man venus woman 33 of politics 57
 Index
Rokeach 100,106 Tarinidevi 15,16
Roy, Ramakanta 18-21
Roy, Rammohun 1, 2, 9, 11, 15-19, Upanishads 49
30-1. 58, 61, 121 Upasana 23
Brahmoism of 22
interpretations of 12 Vedanta, monism in 23-4
reform of 21, 24 Vidyasagar, Ishwar Chandra 40
Russell, Bertrand 32 Vishnu Dharma Samhita 3
Vivekananda 40-1
Sadomasochism 101
Salzman 37 Woman 32-43,48
Sati 1-25 of Bengal 40-1
causes of 6-12 creativity of 39
as enforced penance 9 dominance of 34, 38
folk base of 9 and man 33,41-2
mass base of 3 as mother 36, 37
practice of 3 paradox of 42
reform of 21 redefinition of 41
Satyagraha 7 (see also pp. 70-98) and womanliness 33, 39
Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 85
Savitri 9 Yajnavalkya 3
Schgal, Nayantara 122
Siculus, Diodorus 8 Zilboorg, Gregory 33, 37
Shaktd 26-7
Singh, Iqbal 15-16
THE INTIMATE
ENEMY

Loss and Recovery o f Self

Under Colonialism
 Contents

P reface v

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 i

Two 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 64

I ndex ” 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 l-
analytic 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 post-
C artesian E urope h ad been rational. I t is thus th a t the ahis-
torical 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-
vi Preface
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
 Preface vii
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
viii Preface
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,
 Preface ix
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 horse-
sense 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
 x Preface
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
 Preface xi
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 some-
Thlng 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 colo-
nialism 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
xii Preface
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
 Preface xiii
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 cross-
cultural 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 Para-
iara 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 ‘counter-
transference’, I hope this book contributes to th a t stream o f
xiv Preface
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
 Preface xv
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.
 2 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 seVenfy-
five 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 con-
C 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 scientific-
ratio 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.
 4 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~He-
tweenCi 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 jpoli-
tical 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 iddle-
class, 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 irunity-
in-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 undifferen-
T 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 ( 1861-
1907). 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 Vivek-
ananda, 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 a<^S^6nd-order
<légitím ácyxto w h at in the d o m in an t culture o f t h e cofoñy~Kad
already b ecome~!K^finaTdifferentiae o f m anliness: aggression,
achievem ent, controlTcom petition an d pow er.10 (I am ignoring
for the m om ent the structural changes w hich gradually cam e
to parallel this consciousness. K en n eth B allhatchet has recently
described the distan t intim acy betw een British soldiers an d j
adm inistrators, on the one h an d , an d In d ia n w om en, on the 1
other, w hich was officially prom oted an d in fact system atically
institutionalized.11 I am also ignoring the parallel process, re­
flected in the la te n t recognition by a n um ber o f w riters,1* th a t
the w hite w om en in In d ia were generally m ore exclusive and

1980) and Women, Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1980).
10 This in spite of the fact that many of these characteristics were traditionally
associated with femininity in India. See on this subject my ‘Woman Versus
Womanliness in India: An Essay in Political and Social Psychology’, Psycho­
analytic Review, 1978, 63(a), pp. 301- 15. Also in At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in
Politics and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 32- 46. Thus,
we find the well-meaning M. C. Mallik saying in his Orient and Occident: A Com­
parative Study (London, 1913), p. 183, quoted in Parkinson, East and West, p. 210:
‘Europeans even of a friendly type lament the want of manliness in Indian nature
and conduct. It would be strange if after so many centuries of coercion by reli­
gious, spiritual and political teachers, and of demoralizing social conditions, any
manliness should survive, especially as when any sign of it is displayed by indi­
viduals, it is discouraged by parents, teachers, spiritual guides and political rulers
as impertinence and disloyalty . . . ’ It is a minor tragedy of contemporary India
that one of its finest products, Satyajit Ray, expresses the same consciousness in a
more sophisticated way in his movie Shatranj Ke Khilari. Ray's ambivalence towards
the dancing, singing poet-king who loses out to British statecraft based on real-
politik represents a sophisticated version of Mallik’s awareness. See on this my
review of the movie in 'Beyond Oriental Despotism: Politics and Femininity in
Satyajit Ray’, Sunday, Annual No., 1981, pp. 56- 8.
11 Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson, 1980). I have spelt out the relationship between Ballhatchet’s work
and the argument of this essay in my review of it in the Journal of Commonwealth and
Comparative Politics, 198a, 20(a), pp. 39- 30.
11 This latent recognition comes close to being manifest in E. M. Forster, who
was himself a homosexual. See his A Passage to India (London: Arnold, 1967).
 IO The Intim ate Enemy
racist because they unconsciously saw themselves as th e sexual
com petitors o f In d ian m en, w ith w hom their m en h a d estab­
lished an unconscious hom o-eroticized bonding. I t was this
bonding w hich the ‘passive resisters’ and ‘non-cooperators’ ex­
ploited, not m erely the liberal political institutions. T h ey were
helped in this by the sp litjh a t-h a tL e m e rg e d in the V ictorian
culture betw een two ideals of jm asculinity. T o draw upon
B allhatchet and others, the lower classes were expected to act
Jd* o ut their manliness by dem onstrating their sexual prowess; the
up p er classes were expected t o affirm th eir m asculinity through
sexual distance, abstinence and self-control. T h e form er was
com patible w ith the style o f rulership of Spanish, Portuguese
and, to a lesser extent, F rench colonialism in L atin A m erica
an d A frica; the la tte r was com patible w ith, o f all things, one
strand in the traditional In d ia n concept of m anliness. T he
B rahm an in his cerebral, self-denying asceticism was th e tra d i­
tional m asculine counterpoint to the m ore violent, ‘virile’,
active K satriya, the la tte r representing— nowever odd this m ay
seem to the m odern consciousness— the fem inine principle in
the cosmos. T his is how trad itio n al In d ia im posed lim its on
K satriyahood as a w ay of life. T o avoid confusion, I am avoid­
ing here the languages in w hich hyper-m asculinity includes
w ithdraw al from sexuality or positive androgyny.)
In such a culture, colonialism was n o t seen as an a bsolute,
jv i l. For th^subjecfc^ it was a product o f one’s ow nem asculation
an d defeat iri legitim ate pow er p olitics. For the rulers, colonial
exploitation was an incidental and regrettable by-product o f a
t philosophy o f life th a t was i n harm ony ^ t h g11peri or form s,of
jjglitical and econom ic organization. T his was the consensus
'th e rulers of In d ia sought, consciously or unconsciously. T hey
could n ot successfully rule a continent-sized polity while be­
lieving themselves to be m oral cripples. T hey h ad to build
bulw arks against a possible sense of guilt produced by a dis­
ju n c tio n betw een th eir actions and w h at were till then, in
term s of im p o rtan t norm s o f their own culture, ‘tru e’ values.
O n the other han d , th eir subjects could n ot collaborate on a
long-term basis unless they h a d some acceptance of the ideology
 The Psychology o f Colonialism ii

o f the system, either as players o r as counterplayers. T his is the

only w ay they could preserve a m inim um o f self-esteem in a
situation o f unavoidable injustice.
W hen such a cu ltu ral consensus grows, the m ain th reat to
th e colonizers is bound to becom e the l a t e n ^ fearQ that th e
colonized w ill reject the consensus a n d f in g t^ aH p f trying to
redeem th eir ‘m asculinity’ by becom ing th e counterplayers o f
t i ^ m I e r s ~am?r3ixigLj:o Th€~esIa5IIsTie5 ruTesf.:will_discover~an
altern ativ e fram e o f referen^e w ithin w hich th e do -
n ot seem w eakr d eg rad ed an d distorted m en trying to break
the m onopoly of the rulers on a fixed q u a n tity o f m achism o. I f
this happens, the colonizers begin to live w ith the fear th a t the
subjects m ight begin to see th eir rulers as m orally an d culturally
inferior, an d feed this inform ation back to the rulers.18 Colo- I
nialism m inus a civilizational mission is no colonialism at all.
I t handicaps th e colonizer m uch m ore, th a n k h andicaps the /
culuiiizedr '

III
I now come tfcthe subs ^ a iy lio m o logy^etwee^hilHhQQtj^aTifi
th e state o f being colonized whir.h a moHern colonial system
111 have briefly dealt with this in my ‘Oppression and Human Liberation: To­
wards a Third World Utopia’, in The Politics of Awareness: Traditions, Tyranny and
Utopias (forthcoming); see an earlier version in Alternatives, 1978- 9,4(2), pp. 165- 80.
On this theme, see the sensitive writing of Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized.
One of the best examples of the absence or erosion of civilizational mission in the
colonizers is the Manchu conquest of China. The small group of conquerors
became integrated in Chinese society over one or two generations and what was
colonialism quickly became a variant of internal oppression. The more recent
Japanese conquest of parts of China, too, failed to produce a theory of civilizational
mission, though there were some efforts to do so. It is interesting that one of the
main themes in these efforts was the stress on Japan’s greater modernization and
on her ‘responsibility* to modernize other Asian societies. The modem West’s
contribution to Japanese society has been more wide-ranging than many believe!
The British conquest of India during its first phase showed all the signs of being
similarly integrated into Indian society. What probably stopped the integration
was mainly the digging of the Suez Canal, which allowed the British to have
stronger links with their cultural base than they previously had, and the entry
into the Indian scene of British women, which, combined with the Indian caste
system and the cultural self-confidence of large parts of Indian society, ensured
endogamy.
12 The Intim ate Enemy
a lm ost in v ariably-asesJ* Colonizers, as we have know n theml
in the last two centuries, cam e from com plex societies w ith '
heterogeneous cu ltu ral an d ethical traditions. As already noted,
itisT > y underplaying some aspects o f th eir cu ltu re a n d over­
playing others th a t they b u ilt th e legitim acy for colonialism .16
F or instance, it is im possible to build a h ard , this-w orldly
sense o f mission on th e 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
Ignatius 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 ckhart, J o h n R uskin an d Leo Tolstoy, based as it is on the
rejection o f the ideas o f an om nipotent high technology, o f
hyper-com petitive, achievem ent-oriented, over-organized p ri­
v ate enterprise, a n d o f aggressively proselytizing religious
creeds o p erating on th e basis o f w hat E rik Erikson calls pseudo­
species. O ne m ust find th a t legitim acy in u tilitarians such as
Jerem y: B entham an d Tames M ill, in the socialist thinkers con-
c e q u a liz in g rnlonialism as a necessary step to progress an d as
a rem edy for feudalism , an d in those generallvT rving to fit th e
r.oloniarexperiencp wH*"» i"o u ld o f a docTrfTnrof p ro g ress.
(C hildhood innocence serving as the prototype o f prim itive
com m unism was one of(^iaxx^> m ain contributions to th e
theory o f progress, w hich he conceptualized as a m ovem ent
from prehistory to history an d from infantile o r low-level com ­
m unism to a d u lt com m unism J^In^ia 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 brief introduction 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.
MMemmi, in The Colonizer and the Colonized, has graphically described the process
through which the new entrant is broken into the ruling culture of ihe 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 the 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 unities’, M arx argued, ‘. . .
b ro u g h t a b o u t a brutalising w orship o f n a tu re exhibiting its
degrad 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 the ad o ratio n o f Kanuman [sic], m onkey,
a n d Sabbala, 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 the
unconscious tool o f history’ .16 Such a view was bo u n d to con­
trib u te handsom ely— even if in ad vertently— to th e racist w orld
view and ethnoccntrism th a t underlay colonialism .17 A sim ilar,
thouglTTess influential, cu ltu ral role w as^played by some o f
F reu d ’s early disciples who 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 and psychological im ­
plications o f th e biological principle ‘ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny’, a n d th a t o f the ideology o f ‘norm 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 an d infantility w ith
disvalues like structural sim plicity an d ‘static history’.19)
T h ere was blood-curdling shadow -boxing am ong the com-

^ Karl Marx, ‘The BritisfiTRulejn India* ( 1853), Karl Marx and F. Engels,
ArticUs'ofrBritam^Mofcow: Progress Publishers, 1971), pp. 166- 72; see especially
pp. 171- 2.
17 These 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.
19See on this theme O. Mannoni, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Decolonization of
Mankind', in J. Miller (ed.),, Frmd (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 there can be no
d o u b t a b o u t w h ic h su b -tra d itio n iq E urope w as-ihe stronger.
T h ere was an alm ost com plete consensus am ong the sensitive
E uropean intellectuals th a t colonialism was an e v il^ a lb e it a
n^cessaryoneTTt was the age o f ^ tim is m in E urope. N o to n ly
the^rch= conservatives a n d the apologists o f colonialism were
convinced th a t one d ay th eir cu ltu ral mission w ould b e com ­
plete a n d the b arb arian s w ould becom e civilized; even the
rad ical critics o f W estern society w ere convinced th a t colo­
nialism wag a ner.essary stage o f m a tu ra tion for some societies.
T hey differed from the im perialists, only in th a t th e y ^ iid ln o t
expect th e colonigw*d to love, o r be grateful to th e colonizers
for in tro d u cin g th eir subjects to th e m odern w orld.20 T h u s, in
the eyes o f th e E uropean civilization th e colonizers w ere n o t a
group o f self-seeking, rapacious, ethnocentric vandals a n 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 u pliftm ent of 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 th e W est d u rin g the first phase
o f colonialism , the phase in w hich colonialism was becom ing
consolidated as an im p o rtan t cu ltu ral process an d a w ay o f life
for the Spanish an d the P o rtu g u ese. Philippe Aries argues th a t
the m odern concept o f ^ ^ M h o o ^ ^ a p ro d u ct o f seventeenth-
century E u ro p e.21 Before then tne child was seen as a sm aller
version o f the a d u lt; now the child becam e— this Aries does n o t
fully recognize— an inferior version o f the a d u lt an d had_ to
be educated througTTtKe new ly-expanded period o f childhood.

*° On the sense of betrayal which British colonialists had because o f 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.
11 Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, 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 o f Childhood
(New York: The Piychohistory 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 ogw om anhoodj underw ritten
by the changing concept o f C hristian godhead w hich, under
the influence o f Protestantism , becam e m ore m asculine.28)
T h e new concept o f childhood bore a direct relationship to
th e doctrine o f progress now reg n an t in the W est. C hildhood
now np-longCE seemed x m ly a happy^ blissful p rototype- of
beatific angels, as it h a d in the peasant cultures o f E urope only
a century earlier. I t increasingly looked like a ^rtankslate^pn
w hich adults m ust w rite their m oral codes— an inferior version
n fjn a tn rity , jess prnH nriiye an d ethical. and~Badly contam i­
n ated by the playful, irresponsible an d spontaneous aspects of
h u r a m jia ^ u r e ^ C oncurrently, probably- propelled by w iiat
m any W eberians have identified as the piim e^m pver behind
th e m odernization o f W est E urope, theQ ProtestantE tluc^) it
becam e the responsibility o f the .¿d u lt -to ‘sav ip'ljhe-chil^FfVom
a state o f u n rep en tan t, rep ro b ate sinfulness through proper
socialization, an d help the child grow tow ards a C alvinist ideal
o f adulthood an d m aturity. E xploitation o f children in the
nam e o f p u ttin g them to productive work, w hich took place in
the early days o f the In d u strial R evolution in B ritain, was a
n a tu ra l corollary o f such a concept o f childhood.23
C olonialism dutifully picked u p these ideas o f grow th an d
developm ent a n d drew a new parallel betw een p rim itivism a nd
^ H h o n r i . T hus, the theory o f social progress was telescoped
n o t m erely into th e individual’s life cycle in E urope b u t also
in to th e are a o f cu ltu ral differences in th e colonies.24 W h at was
childlikeness o f the child an d childishness o f im m atu re adults
now also becam e the lovable an d unlovable savagery o f prim i-
11 Nandy, ‘Woman Versus Womanliness*.
” See Nandy, ‘Reconstructing Childhood’.
MV. G. Kiernan says in the context of Africa in his The Lords of Human Kind:
European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1972), p. 243: ‘The notion of the African as a minor, endorsed at times even by a
Livingstone, took very strong hold. Spaniards and Boers had questioned whether
natives had souls: modern Europeans cared less about that but doubted whether
they had minds, or minds capable of adult growth. A theory came to be fashionable
that mental growth in the African ceased early, that childhood was never left
behind.’
i6 The Intim ate Enemy
tives an d th e prim itivism o f subject societies. T his version o f
th e theory o f progress is Sum m arized below.

The childlike Reforming the

Indian: innocent, childlike through
ignorant but will­ Westernization,
ing to learn, modernization or
masculine, loyal Christianization
and, thus, ‘cor­ Partnership in the
rigible’ liberal utilitarian
or radical utopia
The childish Repressing the within one lully
Indian: ignorant childish by con­ homogenized cul­
but unwilling to trolling rebellion, tural, political and
learn, ungrateful, ensuring internal economic world
sinful, savage, peace and provid­
unpredictably ing tough adminis­
violent, disloyal tration and rule
and, thus, ‘incor­ of law
rigible’

O n e elem ent in th e legitim ization o f colonialism through

reconstruing th e h u m an life cycle has n o t been touched upon.
N o t th a t it was u n im p o rta n t in the colonial cu ltu re; b u t it was,
I suspect, In d ia a n d C h in a an d t to th a t extent, less
generally applicable to m odern colonialism . I shall briefly say
som ething ab o u t it now , __ — _
M o d ern E urope h acL d elep tim ize^tio t m erely fem ininity an d
childhood b u t also void ag^*5^Judaeo-C hristianity always h a d
a n elem ent w hich saw aging as a n a tu ra l unfolding an d result
o f m an 's essential sinfulness. T h e decom position o f th e h um an
b o d y w as seen as only an in d icato r o f thp evil in th e one de­
gen eratin g : according to the o ld S o u th E uropean saying, till
y o u th a person looked the w ay god m ade h im ; after th a t he
looked the w ay he really was. W ith increasing stress on the
rep ro b ate n a tu re o f m an, it was this postulate w hich cam e to
th e fore in E urope’s new ideology o f m ale adulthood, com ­
p letin g th e pictu re o f a w orld w here only th e a d u lt m ale
reflected a reasonable approxim ation o f a perfect h u m an being.
MSee a brief statement of the problem in its interrelatedness with odbnial en­
counters in my ‘The Politics of Life Cycle', Mazmgva (forthcoming).
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 17
T h e elderly (representing wisdom and the negation o f ‘p u re ’
intellect) were now increasingly seen as socially irrelevant be­
cause o f their low physical pow er an d because their social pro-
ductivity an d cu ltu ral role coulcLnot be easily q u a ntified. I need
hardly add th at, given th e n atu re o f available technology, th e
ideological changes n eatly fitted the em erging principles of
‘productive’ work an d ‘perform ance’ as they were m onetized
an d enshrined in new political an d social institutions.
T his p a rt o f the ideology o f m ale-adulthood too was ex­
ported to the colonies in a few chosen cases. K ie m a n does refer
to the ideological problem o f British colonialism in In d ia w hich <
j o uld n ot easily grapple w ith th e la c t th a T tlld ia h a d a civili­
zation, howsoever strange by E u ro p ean standards. NeWly-j
discovered Africa, w ith its strong em phasis on the folk, the oral
an d the ru ral could be m ore easily w ritten off as savage. I t was
m ore difficult to do so for In d ia an d C hina w hich the E uropean
O rientalists an d even th e first generation rulers h ad studied
and, sometimes, venerated. A nd, everything said, there were
the traditions o f four thousand years o f civic living, a well-
developed literatijTsdidon (in spite o f all its stress on o ra t cul-
tures) / and altern ativ e traditions o f philosophy, a rt and science
w hich often attra c ted th e best m inds o f Europe. T h e fact th a t
fn d ia ’s past w&§ living (unlike, say, pre-Islam ic Egypt) com ­
plicated the situation. Some explanation h ad to b e given for
tier political an d cu ltural^clegrad^tron^
T h e colonial ideology handled the problem in two m utually
inconsistent ways. Firstly, it postulated a clear disjunction be­
tw een In d ia ’s past an d its present. T h e civiJUzecLIndia was in
the bygone p ast; now i t was dead an d (museumizedTT T h e
present I ndia, the_arg u m en t w ent, was o n ly n ö m in a lly re la te d 1
to its history; it was In d ia only to the extent it was a senile,
decrepit version o f her once-youthful, creative Self. As a p opular
m yth w ould have it, M ax M üller, for all his pioneering w ork in
Indology an d love for In d ia , forbade his students to visit In d ia ;
to him , the In d ia th a t was living was n o t the true In d ia an d the
In d ia th a t was true h ad to be b u t dead.
Secondly an d paradoxically, the colonial culture postulated
18 The Intim ate Enemy
th a t In d ia ^ Ia te r-á e ^ rra d atio n was n o t due to colonial j- ule
— w hich, if anything, h a d im proved In d ia n culture by fight­
ing against its irra tio n a l, oppressive, retrogressive, elem ents
— b u t due to £gpects o{ the trad itio n al In d ian culturé jwhich
in spite o£3om e good points carried the s e e d s o f In d ia ’s J.ater
cultural d ownfall. Like a sinful m an In d ia n cu ltu re was living
through a particularly debilitating senility. (T he very fact th a t
H induism did n o t have in its concept o f papa the strong inner-
directed connotations o f the C hristian, post-reform ation concept
o f sin was itself seen as one o f the m ain proofs o f In d ia ’s fatal
cultural flaw. Even a m an like A lbert Schw eitzer did n o t rem ain
uncontam inated by this ideology; he m ade it a central plank o f
his in terp retatio n o f H induism .28) T hus, in this argum ent, there
was a postulate o f continuity b u t it applied m ore to sinfulness
th a n to v irtu es; for an explanation o f In d ia ’s virtues one h ad to
fall back upon her contacts w ith the m odern w orld.

IV
W h at were the m ain dimensions o f the efforts to reorder In d ian
culture in response to an d as a p a rt o f these colonial categories ?
T h e answer is best given in term s o f a few o f the nineteenth-
century figures who revalued the trad itio n al H in d u orientations
to the m ale an d the fem ale, and coped w ith the m odern con­
cepts of m ature, a d u lt norm ality as opposed to abnorm al, im ­
m ature, infantile prim itivism .27
Probably the person who m ost dram atically sought to rede­
fine popular m ythology to fit the changing values under colo­
nialism was M ichael M adhusudan D u tt ( 1824- 73) whose
Bengali epic Meghnádvadh Kavya was hailed, in his lifetime, as
one o f the greatest literary efforts o f all tim e in Bengali.28
••Albert Schweitzer, Hindu Thought and Its Development (New York: Beacon,
>959)-
*7 The examples I shall use will be mainly from Bengal, not merely because the
Bengali culture best illustrated—and dramatized—the colonial predicament in
India’s political, cultural and creative life, but also because it was in Bengal that
the Western intrusion was the deepest and the colonial presence the longest.
“ ‘Meghnádvadh Kávya’, 1861, Kshetra Gupta (ed.), Madhusudan Racandvali,
vols. 1 and a (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1965), pp. 35- 117.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 19
M adhusudan, flam boyantly W esternized in life style an d ideo-
l°gy— he h ad even em braced the C hurch o f E n g lan d ’s version
o f C hristianity an d declared th a t he cared only ‘a p in ’s head
for H induism ’— first w anted to m ake his m ark in English
literatu re. B ut he retu rn ed to his m other tongue w ithin a decade
to w rite b rillian t interpretations o f some o f the P uranic epics.
Meghnadvadh was the greatest o f them all.
As is w ell know n, Meghnadvadh retells th e R am ay an a, tu rn in g
the trad itio n ally sacred figures o f R am a an d L aksm ana in to
w eak-kneed, passive-aggressive, fem inine villains an d the de­
mons R av a n a an d his son M eghnad into m ajestic, m asculine,
m odern heroes. I t interprets the encounter betw een R a m a an d
R av an a as a political battle, w ith m orality on the side o f the
dem ons. T h e epic ends w ith the venal gods defeating an d
killing the courageous, proud, achievem ent-oriented, com peti­
tive, efficient, technologically superior, ‘sporting’ dem ons sym­
bolized b y M eghnad.
Meghnadvadh was n o t the first rein terp retatio n o f the R a m a ­
y ana. I n south In d ia, an alternative trad itio n o f R am ay an a,
w hich an te d a te d M adhusudan, h ad off a n d on been a source o f
social conflict an d controversy. In Jain ism , too, a version o f the
R a m ay an a h ad been sometimes a source o f intercom m unal con­
flicts.29 I n an y case, R am a, how ever godlike, was traditionally
n o t the final repository o f all good. U nlike th e Sem itic gods, he
was m ore h u m an an d m ore overtly a m ix o f the good an d the
bad, the courageous an d the cow ardly, the m ale an d the fem ale.
R av an a, too, h ad never been traditionally all bad. H e was seen
as having a record o f genuine spiritual achievem ents.
M adh u su d an D u tt therefore was in th e living trad itio n of
dissent in In d ia. (This dissent did n o t becom e a political a b ­
surdity because he lived tow ards the end o f the period during
w hich th e British, though politically the m ost powerful, were
. / i t i l l only one o f m any forces in In d ia an d the W estern cu ltu re
*®At least one literary critic, it seems, has traced the source of Madhusudan’s
reinterpretation of Ramayana to his probable exposure to the Jain Ramayana
while he was in Madras. Asit Bandopadhyay, Adhunik Bangla Sdhityer Samkfipta
Itivftla, 1965, cited in Bishwanath Bandopadhyay, ‘Pramilar Utsa’, Desh, 49(18),
6 March 1982.
 20 The Intim ate Enemy
w as a m anageable vector w ithin In d ia ; W esternism enjoyed th e
su p p o rt o f only sm all m inorities o f b o th the rulers a n d the
ruled.) Sim ultaneously, M ad h u su d an ’s criterion for reversing
th e roles o f R a m a an d R av ag a, as expressed in th eir characters,
w as a d irect response to - tfac-colon ial situation. H e adm ired
R á v a n a for his m asculine vigour, accom plished w arriorhood,
a n d his sense o f realpolitik a n d history; he accepted R a v a ^ a 's
‘a d u lt’ an d ‘n o rm al’ com m itm ents to secular, possessive this-
worldliness an d his consum er’s lust for life. O n the o th er hand,
h e despised ‘R a m a an d his rab b le’— the expression was his—
because they w ere effem inate, ineffective pseudo-ascetics, who
w ere austere n o t by choice b u t because they were w eak.
T h ere was a n obvious political m eaning in the contradiction
M ad h u su d an posed in a cu ltu re w hich rejected most form s o f
com petitive individual achievem ent, frequently underplayed
sex-role differences, gave low status to high technology, g ran ted
equal status to m yth an d history, an d rejected hedonism , in ­
cluding possessive individualism an d consum erism . T his is n o t
to say th a t the values R áv ag a articu lated were alien to the
/In d ia n traditions: in fact, they w ere sometimes associated w ith
m ythical figures w ho evoked adm iration an d respect. But on
th e whole they h ad been contained or m arginalized as so m any
Iculturally-defined esoterica. R áv an a himself, after all, was seen
as someone w ho knew the V edas well an d had w on his powers
from sacred sources through years o f tapas. H is good qualities,
how ever, w ere recognized w ithin the constraints o f his rakfasa
self. M adhusudan now freed R áv an a from these trad itio n al
constraints to give him a new stature as a scientific, learned,
m o d em K satriya king, fighting the non-secular politics an d
anti-technologism of a banished pastoral prince.
Meghnadvadh wa$ a tragecly} M adh u su d an ’s heroes w ere, to a
point, oddities in a culture w hich ap p aren tly h ad no tra d itio n
o f tragedy. H owever, to get the full m eaning o f this deviation,
one m ust recognize th a t in the P uránic trad itio n there was a
distinctive concept o f the tragic in life and letters. T rag ed y in
i'the P uránas did not Centre around a g ran d final defeat or d e a th
|o f the hero, or around the final victory o f the ungodly. T ra g edy
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 21
in tfiem ajestic sweep o f tim e a n d in titcjin av o id able d ecline
c tfd e c a y th a t inform ed the m ightieat a n chthe h u m b lest,t3 ie
epocha l an d the trivial, an d the 'p erm an en t' an d the transient.
I n th e M a h â b h à r a ta, tfieself-chosen and yrtfatcdrnaJidprasthdna
o r the g reat d ep artu re o f the Pàççlavas after th eir clim actic
victory in the b a ttle a t K u ru k setra an d th e d e a th o f god K jç ç a
— lonely, aged, nostalgic, an d p artly forgotten— are good ex­
am ples o f w h at I am trying to convey.
AfjfleAfld&aiftnrcprcgcntcd a differen t concept_o
N o t only w ere th e good an d the evU^Tèarly separated in th e
epic, according to well-defined ethical c rite ria ^ b u t evil finally.
triu m p h ed . T rad itio n ally the rdkfasas represented a dem onic
version o f m asculinity w hich was u nfettered by d o m inant norm s
a n d traditions. N ow aspects o f this dem onic m asculinity were
endorsed, for the Indians, by the new cu ltu re o f colonialism
a n d th e v ariatio n on th e m yth o f th e P ro m eth ean m an it
p opularized. By m aking Meghnadoadh a tragedy, by inducing ^
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
the em erging ideology o f m odernity as w ell as com patible co n -\
cepts o f m asculinity an d adulthood in his com m unity’s w orld
view. W h a t was recessive an d in fetters in trad itio n al In d ian
m asculinity was now m ade salient w ith the help o f existing
cu ltu ral im agery an d m yths.
T his is how M adh u su d an u p d ated th e early cu ltu ral c rit­
icisms o f R am m o h u n R oy ( 1772- 1835).80 R am m o h u n h ad
in tro d u ced into the culture o f In d ia ’s expanding u rb an m iddle
classes— for the sake o f those alienated from the older life style
an d values by th e colonial intrusion in to 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 a d ‘mis­
re a d ’ th e nondualism o f S ankaràcàrya to suggest a hew defini­
tion o f m asculinity, based on the dem ystification o f w om anhood
••Sec Nandy, 'Sad: A Nineteenth Century Talc of Women, Violence and
Protest’, in At thi Edgt of Psychology, pp. i —
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.
12 The Intim ate Enemy
a lm ost in v a n ably-«ses>14 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, J
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-

^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 seventeenth-
century 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 <savey~tKe chik rfro m
a state o f u n rep en tan t, rep ro b ate sinfulness th ro u g h proper
socialization, an d help th e child grow tow ards a C alvinist ideal
o f adulthood a n d m aturity. E xploitation o f children in the
nam e o f p u ttin g them to productive work, w hich took place in
th e early days o f th e In d u strial R evolution in B ritain, was a
n a tu ra l corollary o f such a concept o f childhood.28
C olonialism dutifully picked u p these ideas o f grow th and
developm ent a n d drew a new parallel betw een p rim itivism ag d
T hus, the theory o f social progress was telescoped
n o t m erely into the in d iv id u al’s life cycle in E urope b u t also
in to the a rea o f cu ltu ral differences in the colonies.84 W h a t was
childlikeness o f th e child a n d childishness o f im m atu re adults
now also becam e the lovable and unlovable savagery o f prim i-
11 Nandy, ‘Woman Versus Womanliness’.
** See Nandy, ‘Reconstructing Childhood’.
MV. G. Kieman says in the context of Africa in his The Lords of Human Kind:
European Attitudes to the Outside World in the Imperial Age (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
197a), p. 243: ‘The notion of the African as a minor, endorsed at times even by a
Livingstone, took very strong hold. Spaniards and Boers had questioned whether
natives had souls: modem Europeans cared less about that but doubted whether
they had minds, or minds capable of adult growth. A theory came to be fashionable
that mental growth in the African ceased early, that childhood was never left
behind.’
16 The Intim ate Enemy
tivcs a n d th e prim itivism o f subject societies. T his version o f
th e theory o f progress is Sum m arized below.

The childlike Reforming the

Indian: innocent, childlike through
ignorant but will­ Westernization,
ing to learn, modernization or
masculine, loyal Christianization
and, thus, ‘cor­ Partnership in the
rigible’ liberal utilitarian
or radical utopia
The childish Repressing the within one fully
Indian: ignorant childish by con­ homogenized cul­
but unwilling to trolling rebellion, tural, political and
learn, ungrateful, ensuring internal economic world
sinful, savage, peace and provid­
unpredictably ing tough adminis­
violent, disloyal tration and rule
and, thus, ‘incor­ of law
rigible’

O n e elem ent in th e legitim ization o f colonialism through

reconstruing th e h u m a n life cycle has n o t been touched upon.
N o t th a t i t was u n im p o rta n t in th e colonial cu ltu re ; b u t it was,
I suspect, s p r r if in J o j n d ia and_Gh in a a n d T to th a t ex ten t, less
generally applicable to m o d em colonialism . I shall briefly say
som ething a b o u t i t now, -- -------
M o d em E urope h acjdelegitim ize^ n o t m erely fem ininity an d
childhood b u t alsov^ld a g ^ ^ ^ a e o - C h r i s t i a n i t y alw ays h a d
a n elem ent w hich saw aging as a n a tu ra l unfolding a n d result
o f m an ’s essential sinfulness. T h e decom position o f th e h u m an
body was seen as only a n in d ira tn r n f tfre rvil in th e one de­
gen eratin g : according to th e old S outh E u ro p ean saying, till
y o u th a person looked th e w ay god m ade h im ; after th a t he
looked th e w ay h e really was. W ith increasing stress on the
rep ro b ate n a tu re o f m an , it was this postulate w hich cam e to
th e fore in E u ro p e’s new ideology o f m ale ad ulthood, com ­
pletin g th e p ictu re o f a w orld w here only th e a d u lt m ale
reflected a reasonable approxim ation o f a perfect h u m a n being.
* See a brief statement of the problem in its interrelatedness with colonial en­
counters in my ‘The Politics of Life Cycle’, Macingira (forthcoming).
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 17
T h e elderly (representing wisdom and th e negation o f ‘p u re’
intellect) were now increasingly seen as socially irrelevant be­
cause o f their low physical pow er a n d becauSeTheTrsocial pro-
ductivity an d cu ltu ral role could n o t be easily q u a ntified. I need
hardly ad d th a t, given the n a tu re o f available technology, th e
ideological changes neatly fitted the em erging principles o f
‘productive’ w ork and ‘perform ance’ as they w ere m onetized
an d enshrined in new political an d social institutions.
T his p a rt o f the ideology o f m ale-adulthood too was ex­
ported to the colonies in a few chosen cases. K iern an does refer
to the ideological problem o f British colonialism in In d ia w hich 1
^could n ot easily grapple w ith the fact th a t In d ia h a d a civili­
zation, howsoever strange by E uropean standards. NeWly-j
discovered Africa, w ith its strong em phasis on the folk, the oral
an d the ru ral could be m ore easily w ritten off as savage. I t was
m ore difficult to do so for In d ia an d C hina w hich the E uropean
O rientalists an d even the first generation rulers h ad studied
and, sometimes, venerated. A nd, everything said, there were
the traditions o f four thousand years o f civic living, a well-
d eveloped literati trad itio n (in spite o f all its stress on oral cul­
tures), and alternative traditions of philosophy, a rt an d science
w hich often a ttra c ted the best m inds o f Europe. T h e fact th a t
In d ia ’s past was living (unlike, say, pre-Islam ic Egypt) com­
plicated the situation. Some explanation h ad to be_giv£ii for
faer political and cultu raP H eg rad atio n ’.
T h e colonial ideology handled the problem in two m utually
inconsistent ways. Firstly, it postulated a clear disjunction be­
tw een In d ia ’s past and its present. T h e civüized_India was in
th e bygone p ast; now it was dead an d (museumizedTT T h e
present In d ia, the arg u m en t’w ent~w as only nom inally related
to its history; it was In d ia only to the extent it was a senile,
decrepit version of her once-youthful, creative self. As a popular
m yth w ould have it, M ax M üller, for all his pioneering work in
Indology and love for In d ia, forbade his students to visit In d ia ;
to him , the In d ia th a t was living was n o t the true In d ia and the
In d ia th a t was true h ad to be b u t dead.
Secondly an d paradoxically, the colonial cu ltu re postulated
18 The Intim ate Enemy
th a t I n d ia’s latgr-^degradajion was n o t due to colonial r ule
— w hich, if anything, h ad im proved In d ia n cu ltu re by fight­
ing against its ir r a tio n a l, oppressive, retrogressive, elem ents
— b u t due to *&$pects o f the trad itio n al In d ian culturk jw hich
in spite^oLsoine good^ points carried the s e e d s o f In d ia ’s la te r
cu ltu ral dow nfall. Like a sinful m an In d ia n cu ltu re was living
through a p articularly debilitating senility. (T he very fact th a t
H induism did n o t have in its concept o f papa the strong inner-
directed connotations o f the C hristian, post-reform ation concept
o f sin was itself seen as one o f the m ain proofs o f In d ia ’s fatal
cultural flaw. Even a m an like A lbert Schw eitzer did n o t rem ain
u ncontam inated by this ideology; he m ade it a central plank o f
his in terp retatio n o f H induism .26) T hus, in this argum ent, there
was a postulate o f continuity b u t it applied m ore to sinfulness
th a n to v irtu es; for an explanation o f In d ia ’s virtues one h ad to
fall back upon h er contacts w ith the m odem w orld.

IV
W h at were the m ain dim ensions o f the efforts to reorder In d ia n
culture in response to an d as a p a rt o f these colonial categories ?
T he answ er is best given in term s o f a few o f the nineteenth-
century figures who revalued the trad itio n al H in d u orientations
to the m ale an d the fem ale, an d coped w ith the m odern con­
cepts o f m ature, ad u lt norm ality as opposed to abnorm al, im ­
m ature, infantile prim itivism .27
Probably the person who m ost dram atically sought to rede­
fine pop u lar m ythology to fit the changing values un d er colo­
nialism was M ichael M adh u su d an D u tt ( 1824- 73) whose
Bengali epic Meghnadvadh Kavya was hailed, in his lifetime, as
one o f th e greatest literary efforts o f all tim e in B engali.28
** Albert Schweitzer, Hindu Thought and Its Development (New York: Beacon,
»959)-
17 The examples I shall use will be mainly from Bengal, not merely because the
Bengali culture best illustrated—and dramatized—the colonial predicament in
India’s political, cultural and creative life, but also because it was in Bengal that
the Western intrusion was the deepest and the colonial presence the longest.
u ‘Meghn5dvadh KSvya’, 1861, Kshetra Gupta (ed.), Madhusudan Racanavalt,
vols. i and 2 (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1965), pp. 35- 117.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 19
M adhusudan, flam boyantly W esternized in life style an d ideo-
logy—he h ad even em braced the C hurch o f E ngland’s version
of C hristianity an d declared th a t he cared only ‘a p in ’s h ead
for H induism ’— first w anted to m ake his m ark in English
literature. B ut he retu rn ed to his m other tongue w ithin a decade
to w rite b rillian t interpretations o f some o f the P uranic epics.
Meghnadvadh was the greatest o f them all.
As is well know n, Meghnadvadh retells the R am ay an a, tu rn in g
the traditionally sacred figures o f R am a a n d L aksm ana into
weak-kneed, passive-aggressive, fem inine villains an d the de­
mons R av an a an d his son M eghnad into m ajestic, m asculine,
m odern heroes. I t interprets the encounter betw een R a m a an d
R av an a as a political battle, w ith m orality on the side o f the
dem ons. T h e epic ends w ith the venal gods defeating an d
killing the courageous, proud, achievem ent-oriented, com peti­
tive, efficient, technologically superior, ‘sporting’ dem ons sym­
bolized by M eghnad.
Meghnadvadh was not the first rein terp retatio n o f the R a m a ­
yana. In south In d ia, an alternative trad itio n o f R am ay an a,
w hich an ted ated M adhusudan, h ad off an d on been a source o f
social conflict an d controversy. In Jainism , too, a version o f the
R am ay an a h ad been sometimes a source o f intercom m unal con­
flicts.29 In an y case, R am a, how ever godlike, was traditionally
not the final repository o f all good. U nlike the Sem itic gods, he
was m ore h u m an an d m ore overtly a mix o f the good a n d th e
b ad, th e courageous an d the cow ardly, the m ale a n d the fem ale.
R avana, too, h ad never been traditionally all bad. H e was seen
as having a record o f genuine spiritual achievem ents.
M adhusudan D u tt therefore was in the living trad itio n o f
dissent in In d ia. (This dissent did n o t becom e a political ab ­
surdity because he lived tow ards the end o f the period d u rin g
w hich the British, though politically the m ost powerful, w ere
still only one o f m any forces in In d ia an d the W estern cu ltu re
** At least one literary critic, it seems, has traced the source of Madhusudan’s
reinterpretation of Ramayana to his probable exposure to the Jain Rlmayana
while he was in Madras. Asit Bandopadhyay, Adhunik Bdhgld Sahityer Samkppta
Jtitirtta, 1965, cited in Bishwanath Bandopadhyay, ‘Pramilar Utsa’, Desh, 49(18),
6 March 1983.
 20 The Intimate Enemy
was a m anageable vector w ithin In d ia ; W esternism enjoyed the
support o f only sm all m inorities o f b o th the rulers and the
ruled.) Sim ultaneously, M adhusudan’s criterion for reversing
the roles o f R a m a an d R ávana, as expressed in th eir characters,
was a directjresp o n gc to-th e colonial situation. H e adm ired
R áv an a for his m asculine vigour, accom plished w arriorhood,
an d his sense o f realpolitik and history; he accepted R áv ag a’s
‘adult* an d ‘normal* com m itm ents to secular, possessive this-
worldliness an d his consum er’s lust for life. O n th e other hand,
he despised ‘R a m a a n d his rab b le’— the expression was his—
because they were effem inate, ineffective pseudo-ascetics, who
were austere n o t by choice b u t because they w ere w eak.
T h ere was a n obvious political m eaning in th e contradiction
M adhusudan posed in a culture w hich rejected m ost forms o f
com petitive individual achievem ent, frequently underplayed
sex-role differences, gave low status to high technology, granted
equal status to m yth an d history, a n d rejected hedonism , in ­
cluding possessive individualism an d consum erism . This is n o t
Ito say th a t th e values R áv an a articu lated w ere alien to the
In d ian tra d itio n s: in fact, they were som etimes associated with
m ythical figures w ho evoked ad m iratio n an d respect. B ut on
the whole they h a d been contained o r m arginalized as so m any
Iculturally-defined esoterica. R áv an a himself, after all, was seen
as someone w ho knew the V edas well an d h ad w on his powers
from sacred sources through years o f tapas. H is good qualities,
however, were recognized w ithin th e constraints o f his rákfasa
self. M adhusudan now freed R áv a n a from these traditional
constraints to give him a new statu re as a scientific, learned,
m odern K satriya king, fighting the non-secular politics a n d
anti-technologism o f a banished pastoral prince.
Meghnadvadh w a ( a tragedy^ M ad h u su d an ’s heroes were, to a
point, oddities in a culture w hich ap p aren tly h a d no tradition
o f tragedy. H ow ever, to get the full m eaning o f this deviation,
one m ust recognize th a t in the P uránic trad itio n there was a
distinctive concept o f th e tragic in life an d letters. T ragedy in
the P uránas did n o t Centre around a g ran d final defeat or d e a th
| of the hero, or around the final victory o f the ungodly. T ra g edy
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 21
lay in tlic m ajestic sweep o f tim e an d in th eu iiav o id ab le decline
opciecay th a t inform ed th e m ighties t a n d t h e h u m b le s t,lh c
epochal a n d the trivial, a n d the ‘p erm an en t* a n d th e transient.
I n th e M a h a b h a ra ta , tlieself-chosen an d y e tfa te d mafidprasth&na
o r the g reat d ep artu re o f th e Paij^avas after th eir clim actic
victory in th e b a ttle a t K uruk$etra an d th e d e a th o f god K pjija
— lonely, aged, nostalgic, a n d p a ttly forgotten— are good ex­
am ples o f w h at I am trying to convey.
Mejzlmdd9adh~7rcr>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-
 24 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 un-
au 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.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 25
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 ‘conscient-
izatio 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 nineteenth-
century 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 this-
w 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 aya-
n 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 exo-
I genous categories o f self-criticism, indirectly collaborationist.
T here was y et another<pt5lidcaLp«r59Qx in w hich th e m odel
was caught. W hile in the n rst-p h ase-o fth e R aj the rulers sup­
ported political particip atio n o f the H indus (because such
p articipation by th e then pro-British H indus was advantageous
to the regim e), in the second phase, th e rulers discouraged it
because o f grow ing nationalism . Sim ilarly, w hile in th e first
phase the regim e frowned upon all social reform m ovem ents
an d often took decades to pass laws on any In d ia n social
practice against w hich In d ia n reform ers fought, in th e second
phase they prom oted those schools o f nationalism w hich exi
pected political freedom to follow from social reform , p a rti­
cularly th e reform o f In d ian n atio n al ch aracter.
T hough there w ere instances o f deviation even am ong those
w ho accepted th e second m odel o f critical H induism , such as
the g reat bravery a n d im m ense sacrifices m ade for the n atio n al­
ist cause by th e terrorists a n d by th eir larger-than-life versions
like V inayak D. S avarkar an d Subhas C h a n d ra Bose, th e m odel
did allow W estern cultural ideas to percolate to th e deepest
levels o f H in d u religious ideas a r d accepted W estern cu ltu ral
theories o f political su b jugation-and econom ic backw ardness.
T h e new ly created sense o f lin ear history in H induism — an
internalized co u n te rp a rt^ ^ tH F 'W e ste riT th eo ry o f progress—
was a perfect in stru m en t for this p u rp o s e ^ It allowecTone to
project into Kistory the sense o fIn ferio rity . uit-A-ms a n im p e ria l
fa&fcand iu setf tRe golden age o f H in duism as a n an cien t ver-
sio n o f the m odem W est.86

In short, both streams o f political consciousness, th o u g h seem­

ingly hostile to each other, produced partly-colonial designs o f
“ In fact, the anti-Muslim stance of much, of Hindu nationalism can be con­
strued as partly a displaced hostility against the colonial power which could not be
 %
The Psychology o f Colonialism 27
c u ltu ra l a n d political selfhood for the colonized. A ctually the
first, evolved by the likes o f R am m o h u n R oy, was based, ex-
p erientially a t least, o n g reater self-esteem a n d autonom y,
th o u g h later on it was to seem — as well as to becom e— m ore
subservient to the W estern w orld view, b o th to its opponents
a n d its supporters.
I t only slowly becam e obvious to those living w ith the full»
g ro w n cu ltu re o f British colonialism th a t neith er o f th e tw o
m odels could provide a n a d eq u a te basis for self-esteem and
c u ltu ra l autonom y. Y et, th ere was no alternative m odel in
sight th a t could take a critical look a t In d ia n traditions, eva­
lu a te th e n a tu re o f the W estern im p act on them , an d u p d a te
In d ia n culture w ithout distu rb in g its authenticity.
H ow ever, some scattered efforts were m ade to b reak o u t o f
this stagnation in the n in eteen th century itself. Persons like
Isw arch an d ra V idyasagar ( 1820- 9 1) did seek to create a new
political aw areness w hich w ould com bine a critical aw areness
o f H induism a n d colonialism w ith cu ltu ral an d individual
au th en ticity . I t is thus th a t they em erged, as a b iographer seems
to recognize in the case o f V idyasagar, ‘whole an d enriched
from th e clash o f cultures . . . in the nin eteen th cen tu ry ’.8*
Isw arch an d ra too fought institutionalized violence against
In d ia n w om en, giving p rim acy to social reform over politics.
B ut his diagnosis o f H induism did n o t grow o u t o f feelings o f
c u ltu ral inferiority; it grew o u t o f perceived contradictions
w ithin H in d u ism itself. E ven w hen he fought for In d ia n
w om en, he did n o t o p erate on th e basis o f W esternized ideals o f
m asculinity an d fem ininity o r on the basis o f a theory o f cul­
tu ra l progress. H e refused to Sem iticize H induism an d a d o p t the
resu lt as a ready-m ade theory o f state. As a result, his society
could n eith er ignore nor forgive him . (T he p a n d it, w hen he was
expressed directly because of the new legitimacy created withinJHiadmsnrfbrthis
power. Such a dynamic would seem to roughly duplicate the displacement of
Oedipal hostilities in the authoritarian personality. Cf. T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-
Brunswik, D. Levinson and R. N. Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York:
Harper, i 960).
** Amalesh Tripathi, Vidyasagar: The Traditional Modernizer (Calcutta: Orient
Longman, 1974).
28 The Intim ate Enemy
d ying, could h e a r the bands playing outside his house, cele­
b ra tin g his approaching death.) V idyasagar’s H induism looked
dangerously like H induism an d hence subversive to the o rth o ­
dox H indus. Sim ultaneously, his cu ltu ral criticism s seem ed
fundam ental even to those allegiant to the o th er tw o models o f
in te rn a l criticism an d cu ltu ra l change. H e could be ignored
n e ith e r as an apostate no r as an apologist.
V idyasagar acquired this cu ltu ral em bedding by eschewing
som e o f th e norm ative an d in stitu tio n al goals o f the com peting
m odels. H e refused to use the im agery o f a golden age o f the
H in d u s from w hich contem porary H indus h a d allegedly fallen,
he refused to be psychologically tied to the history o f non-H indu
ru le o f In d ia, he resisted reading H induism as a ‘p ro p er religion’
in th e Islam ic o r W estern sense, he rejected the ideologies o f
m asculinity a n d adulthood, an d he refused to settle scores w ith
the W est by creating a n atio n o f super-H indus o r by defending
H induism as an all-perfect an tid o te to W estern cu ltu ral en­
croachm ent. H is was an effort to p ro tect n o t the form al struc­
tu re o f H induism b u t its spirit, as an open, anarchic federation
o f sub-cultures an d textual authorities w hich allowed new read ­
ings an d in tern al criticisms.
T h u s, Isw arch an d ra’s anti-colonialism was n o t defined by
the W estern version o f rationalism , the p o p u lar Bengali
bhadralokstereotypes ab o u t him notw ithstanding. I t was also n o t
heavily reactive, though th a t im pression too was created by
some elem ents o f his everyday life (including his aggressively
In d ia n dress, interpersonal style a n d food habits).*7 H e was
first an d forem ost a B rahm a^ p an d it, a m an o f learning an d a
polem icist w ith a clear position on sacred texts w hich he saw
as congruent w ith his reform s.88 H e was n o t even a m an o f
religion o u t to sell a new version o f H induism and, unlike
G an d h i, he did n o t face the im position o f any m ahatm ahood on
,T Benoy Ghose, Vidydsdgar o B&Ag&li Samdj, vols. 1-3 (Calcutta: Bengal Pub­
lisher!, 1973), 2nd ed; Indra Mitra, Karupdsdgar Vidyasagar (Calcutta: Ananda
Publishers, 1971).
MTripathi, Vidyasagar, Chapter 1 . The problems involved in this reinterpretive
mode have been touched upon by Asok Sen, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar and His Elusivt
MUuUmts (Calcutta: Riddhi India, 1977 ).
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 29
him . B ut, like G andhi, he could have declared him self an
orthodox H in d u a n d claim ed his H induism b e tte r th a n th a t o f
his opponents because it encom passed the colonial experience.
T hough Isw arch an d ra cam e from a poor ru ral background,
his tim es d id n o t allow him to take his dissent outside the u rb an
m iddle classes, to m obilize the peripheries o f his society, or to
make a m ore creative use o f folk— as opposed to Sanskritic—
H induism . B ut his m odel d id resolutely resist the ideology o f
hyper-m asculinity an d ‘norm ality’. P o p u lar readings o f Isw ar­
c h an d ra recognized this. M adh u su d an D u tt once w rote th a t
the obstinate fiery B rahm aji had ‘a Bengali m o th er’s h e a rt’ an d
during V idyasagar’s ow n lifetim e the Sanskrit saying ‘tougher
th an th u n d e r a n d softer th an flower’ becam e a standard, if
trite, account o f his androgyny. T h ere was a n im plicit awareness
all around th a t his com bination o f aggressive defiance o f au th o r­
ity an d au th o ritativ e reinterpretations o f a u th o rity challenged
some o f th e basic postulates of the colonial theory o f progress,
particularly th e jo in t construction o f ‘legitim ate inequality’ by
th e In d ian s an d the British. I f Isw arch an d ra failed to fully
politicize this dissent, he a t least sought to m ake instrum ental
use o f th e transient, ‘unavoidable’ oppression o f colonialism to
m eet In d ia ’s needs. A nd this, w ith o u t accepting the W estern
u tilitarian , social D arw inist, and radical conceptions o f these
needs.

V
The problem o f colonization did not only concern the overseas
countries. T he process o f decolonization— which is in any case
far from complete in those countries— is also under way at home,
in our schools, in female demands for equality, in the education
o f small children and in m any other fields. . . . If certain cultures
prove capable of destroying others . . . the destructive forces
brought forth by these cultures also act internally.. . .
O . Mannoni**
T he colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the
habit o f seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms him self to
treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform

** Mannoni, ‘Psychoanalysis’, pp. 93- 4^

4
30 The Intim ate Enemy
him stlf into an a n im a l.. . . T hey thought they were only slaugh­
tering Indiana, or Hindus, or South Sea Islanders, or Africans.
They have in fact overthrown, one after another, the ramparts
behind which European civilization could have developed
freely.
-, Aimé Césaire**
\

T h e b ro ad psychological contours o f colonialism a r e j i o w

know n. T hanks tcfsen sitiv e w riters like O ctave M anrtoni,
F ra n tz F an o n an d A lb ert M etnm i we even know som ething
a b o u t th e interpersonal p attern s w hich constituted the colonial
situation, p articu larly in A frica.41 L gssjw ell-know n are the
cu ltu ra l a n d psychological pathologies p ro d u ced by coloniza­
tion in th ^colonizing societies?^
As foïFwîsHom w ould have it, th e only sufferers o f colonial-
istn ^ re^ tE èlù ^ ^ 'fcm tfflran itiesrC o Io n ialism , according to this
vîeW T irth c nam e o f c r ftoEScal econom y w hich ensures a one-
w ay flow o f benefits, th e subjects being th e p erp etu al losers in
a zero-sum gam e a n d th e T‘lilfrc tVlp T his is a
view o f h u m a n m ind a n d history prom oted by colonialism it­
self. T his view has a vested in terest in denying th a t the colo­
nizers are a t least as m uch affected by the ideology o f colonial-
ism. th a t their d egradation, too, can^someUmes b e te m p in g .
B ehind ail theTrhetoric o f th e E u ro p ean intelligentsia on th e
evils o f colonialism lay th eir u n stated faith th a t th e gains from
colonialism to E urope, to th e ex ten t th a t they prim arily in ­
volved m aterial products, w ere real, a n d th e losses, to th e
e x ten t they involved social relations a n d psychological states,
false. T o v en tu re a less p o p u lar in terp retatio n o f colonialism—
w hich I hope is relatively less co n tam in ated by th e ideology o f
colonialism — I shall produce exam ples from th e experience o f
one o f the w orld’s stablest a n d m ost subtly-m anaged colonial
polities o f all tim es, British In d ia . T hese exam ples will show
th a t w h at A im é Césaire calls th e ‘decivilization’ o f the colo­
nizers is i o t â iriïn p o te n t fantasy after all, th a t f t l s a n em pirical

44 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York and
London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 20, 57- 8.
11 Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban', Fanon, Black Skin, Whitt Masks', Memmi, The
Colonizer and the Colonized.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 3i
reality o f th e kind on wfaiclL_eyen M an n o n i an d F anon can
agree.4* F an o n describes a police officer w ho, as he to rtu red the
“ freedom fighters in A lgeria, becam e violent tow ards his ow n
wife an d children.4* E ven from F an o n ’s im passioned political
psychiatry, it becomes obvious th a t th e officer had to do w ithin
his fam ily— a n d w ithin himself— w h at he d id to th e freedom
fighters. Colonialism as a psychological process can n o t b u t
endorse th e principle o f isom orphic oppressions w hich restates
for th e era o f th e psychological m an the an cien t w isdom im ­
plied in th e N ew T estam en t a n d also perhaps in th e S auptik
P a rv a o f th e M a h a b h a ra ta : ‘D o n o t do u n to others w h at you
w ould th a t th ey do n o t do u n to you, lest you do u n to yourself
w h a t you do u n to others.’

T h e im p a c t o f colonialism on In d ia was deep. T h e econom ic

exploitation, psychological uprooting an d cu ltu ral disruption
it caused w ere trem endous.44 B ut In d ia was a country o f hun-
dreds o f m illions living in a large lan d mass. I n spite o f the
presence o f a p a ra m o u n t pow er w hich acted as th e cen tral
authority, t h e co u n try w as culturally fragm ented an d poli­
tically heterogeneous. I t could, thus, p artly confine the cu ltu ral
im p act o f Im perialism to its u rb a n centres, to its W esternized
41 C&aire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 13. The psychological principle involved
was recognized by Plato himself. As Iris Murdoch sums up in her The Fire and the
Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 39:
‘Whatever his [Plato’s] dogma, there is little doubt about his psychology.. . . We
cannot escape the causality of sin. We are told in the Theaetetus ( 176- 7) that the
inescapable penalty of wickedness is simply to be the sort of person one is.’ It is
surprising that Fanon, whom Peter Berger calls the ‘Clausewitz of Revolution’ had
only limited awareness of the creative possibilities of such a philosophy of evil.
“ Frantz Fanon, The Wretched o f the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967),
pp. a 15- 17.
44 The political and economic dislocation is of course well known and well
documented. For an early discussion of the economic exploitation under British
colonialism, see for example R. C. Dutt, Economic History o f India in the Victorian Age
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1903) and Dadabhoi Naoroji, Poverty and
Un-British Rule in India ( 1901), (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1969). For
{ instances of cultural and psychological pathology produced by colonization in
\lndia, see R. G. Majumdar, A. K. Majumdar and D. K. Ghose (eds.), British
v / yParamounUy and Indian Renaissance, part a (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan,
1965). For a case study of a specific cultural pathology under the Raj, see for
instance, my ‘Sad’..
 32 The Intim ate Enemy
a n d sem i-W esternized u p p er a n d m iddle classes, a n d to some
sections o f its trad itio n al élites. T h a t was n o t th e case for the
\ rulers from a relatively m ore hom ogeneous sm all island. T hey
\ w ere overw helm ed by the experience o f being colonial rulers.
V lAs a result, the long-term cu ltu ral dam age colonialism did to
Jthe British society was greater.
Firstly, th e experience o f colonizing d id n o t leave the in te rn a l
cu ltu re o f B ritain untouched. I t began to b rin g in to prom inence
tH o se^ art'T o T 'th e B ritish political cu ltu re w hich w ere least
ten d er a n d h u m an e. IjUle-em phasizedapeculation. intellection
a n d caritas <is fem irunè, a n d justified a lim ited cu ltu ral role for
w om en— a n d ie m m in ity — by holding th a t th e softer side o f
h u m a n n a tu re was irre levant to the public sphere. I t openly
sanctified— in the nam e o f such values a ^ o m p e titio n ^ a d iic iie -
TTHMtf, rnntrnl and p fftfiiirtiv ity ^ n p w forms o f institutionalized
x/ violence a n d ru thle&SQcial D a rwirugpi.46T heT nstrum ental con­
cep t o f the low er classes it prom oted was perfectly in tu n e w ith
th e needs o f in d u strial capitalism a n d only a slightly modified
version o f th e colonial concept o f h ierarchy was applied to th e
B ritish society itself. T h e tragedy o f colonialism was also th e
tragedy o f th e younger sons, the w om en, a n d all ‘th e etceteras
a n d and-so-forths’ o f B ritain.
Nobody who wandered among the imperial gravestones, though, pon­
dering the sadness of their separate tragedies, could fail to wonder at
the waste of it all, the young lives thrown away, the useless courage,
the unnecessary partings; and the fading image of Empire, its even
dimmer panoply of flags and battlements, seemed then to be hazed in
a mist of tears, like a grand old march shot through with melancholy,
in a bandstand by the sea .46
Secondly an d paradoxically, th e ideology o f colonialism pro-
y d u c e d ja false sense o f cu ltu ral hom ogeneity in B ritain. T his

\ !( u Some of these emphases are compatible with the ‘standard’ description of the
authoritarian syndrome deriving from the Frankfurt School of Marxists, elaborated
empirically in T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality. On the culture o f
social Darwinism in Britain, see Raymond Williams, ‘Social Darwinism’, in
j Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: NLB, 1980), pp. 86- 102.
MJames Morris, FartwtU the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (London: Faber and
Faber, J978), p. 556.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 33
froze social consciousness, discouraging the basic cu ltu ral criti­
cism th a t m ight have come from grow ing intellectual sensitivity
to the rigid British social classes an d subnational divisions, an d
from the falling qu ality o f life in a quickly industrializing
society. Colonialism blurred the lines o f social divisions by
opening up alternative channels o f social m obility in th e col­
onies an d by underw riting n ationalist sentim ents th ro u g h colo­
nial wars o f expansion or th ro u g h w ars w ith o th er am bitious
E uropean powers seeking a share o f colonial glory. T h e n ear­
to ta l cultural dom inance o f a sm all élite in B ritain was pmsîhb»
because the society.shunted r>fF tn th e rQlomes_certain in d irect y
expressions o f cu ltu ral criticism : social deviants u n h a p p y w ith
the social order an(Tbuf?etted~by the~W ëssè£w ithin it. I have
in m ind the crim inality w hich comes from the rage o f the
O p p r e s s e d , displaced from the rulers to the rn-nppresseH «7 T his

process was recognized even by some apologists o f colonialism .

H ere is one C arl Siger, speaking o f the F rench experience:
The new countries offer a vast field for individual violent activities
which, in the metropolitan countries, would run up against certain
prejudices, against a sober and orderly conception of life, and which,
in the colonies, have greater freedom to develop and consequently,
to affirm their worth. Thus to a certain extent the colonies can serve
as a safety valve for modem society. Even if this were their only
value, it would be immense .48
T h e British m ight n o t ever have p u t it th a t way, b u t this logic
was always im plicit in the ruling culture o f B ritain.
T hirdly, there was w hat E . M . Forster called the ‘undevel-
i________
47 Fanon in his The Wretched of the Earth seems to recognize this displacement.
4S Essai sur la Colonisation, Paris, 1907, quoted in Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism,
p. 20. Césaire also quotes one straight-thinking Renan: ‘The regeneration of the
inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order
of things for humanity. With us, the common man is nearly always a déclassé
nobleman, his heavy hand is better suited to handling the sword than the mental
tool. Rather than work, he chooses to fight.... Pour forth this all-consuming activity
onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the
adventurers who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like those of
the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and every man will be in his right role.
Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race . . . ; a race of tillers of the
soil, the Negro . . . ; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race’ (p. 16).
 34 The Intim ate Enemy
oped h e a rt’ in the British w hich separated them n o t m erely
fronTThe-Indians b u t also from each o th er.4* T his undevelop­
m ent cam e both in th e form o f isolation o f cognition from
affect— w hich often is a trigger to th e ‘b a n a l’ violence o f o u r
times— an d in the form o f a new pathological fit betw een ideas
and feelings. T h e theory o f im perialism did p n t r emain an
insulated political position in B rita in ; it becam e a religious an d
ethical theory ancTan in te g ra l parT ofa. cusm ofogy.T fnP t only
structured the inner lo e e d s o f th e changing^B ittisfr society b u t
also gave grotesque expression to a ‘prim itive’ religious an d
social consciousness th a t h a d acquired im m ense m ilitary an d
technological pow er a n d was now op eratin g on a global scale.
R ichard Congreve, .Bishop o f O xford, once said, ‘G od has
entrusted In d ia to us to h o ld it-fo rH im , an d -we~have no rig h t
1j g j j i v e i t u p .’*0 A nd w h at L o rd Jo h n T C u ssel7 a future prim e
m inister o f B ritain, said a b o u t A frica applied to In d ia , too. T h e
aim o f colonization, he declaim ed, was to encourage religious
instruction an d let the subjects ‘p artak e o f th e blessings o f
C hristianity’ .61 B oth these w orthies w ere articu latin g n o t only
an im perial responsibility o r a n atio n al in terest b u t also a felt
^^ reUgious d m yTTam esM Sfris sums il up neatly."*N ever
m ind the tru e m otives a n d m ethods o f im perialism ’, he says;
‘in the days o f th eir im perial suprem acy the B ritish genuinely
believed themselves to be perform ing a divine purpose, in ­
nocently, nobly, in the nam e o f G od an d the Q u e en .’52 T h e
other side o f this sense o f religious d u ty in th e rulers was the.
growing a n d deliberately prom oted sense o f a religious d u ty to
be ruled, including a cosm ologically rooted political fatalism
in some sections o f the Indians. E ven B ankim chandra C hat-
terji’s novel Anandamath sought to legitim ize this d u ty to be
ruled on th e basis o f a new theory o f stages o f history .
*• Forster’s A Passage to India of course examines this separation only in the
context of the British society in India.
40 Quoted in K. Bhaskar Rao, Rudyard Kipling's India (Norman: University of
Oklahama, 1967), p. 26. See an interesting treatment of this moral dimension in
Wurgaft, ‘Prospero and Caliban’, and Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban.
81 Quoted in Morris, Heaven's Command, pp. 37- 8 .
** Morris, Farewell to Trumpets, p. 551.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 35
Finally, as Francis H utchins a n d Lewis D . W u rg aft have so
convincingly argued in the context o f In d ia , colonialism en- I
couraged the colonizers to im p u te to themselves m agical feel- 1
ings of om nipotence a n d p e r m a n e n c e jh e se feelings hecam g a I
j>art of th e British selfhood in B ritain too. A nd the society was \
soId'Tfiefidea o f being a n advanced techno-industrial society I
w here science prom ised to lib erate m an from his daily drudgery,
an advanced cu ltu re w here h u m a n reason a n d civilized norm s
h a d the greatest influence, a n d — for the sake o f th e radical
in tern al critics o f th e society w ho took to th e id ea like fish to
w ater—a polity farthest on th e ro ad to revolutionary self-
actualization. B ritan n ia n o t only ru led th e w aves; for its in ­
h ab itan ts a n d for its m any adm irers in E urope it also ruled the
future o f h u m a n self-consciousness. (Both British liberalism and
th e vau n ted B ritish insularity w ere also u n d erw ritten by colo­
nialism in im p o rta n t ways. T h e full-blown theory o f colonial­
ism em erged exactly a t the tim e w hen, for the liberals, B ritain
h ad replaced N apoleonic F rance as the hope o f m an k in d .63
O nce the em pire broke dow n, th e liberalism revealed its racist?
underside. A nd the fam ous insularity, too, gave w ay to w hole­
sale W esternization— B ritain also has its ow n W est— a n a
th reaten ed to leave, as M alcolm M uggeridge once said,
some sections o f In d ian s as th e sole surviving Britons in the
w orld.)
Jacq u es E llul has argued th a t th e two m ajor m yths o f the
m odern world are science a n d history.64 T h e contours o f bo th
these m yths, th eir early ‘developm ental pathologies’, an d the
v/tnagicality associated w ith them could be found in th e d om inant
cnsmnlngy p f Britain.^. '' ^
These cu ltu ral pathologies invoked four distin ct responses in ^
British society. T h e m ore obvious o f them were reflected in
'^ R .u d y a rd K ipling ( 1865- 1936) an d G eorge OrweU ( 1303-4 ^ ,( 3
the form er representing th e p a th e tic self-hatred an d ego con­
striction w hich w ent w ith colonialism , and the la tte r the relativ e

M Morris, Heaven’s Command, Chapter I.

MJacques Ellul, The New Demons, trans. C. Edward Hopkin (New York:
Seabury Press, 1975), Chapter 4.
 36 The Intim ate Enemy
sense o f freedom an d critical m orality w hich w ere th e tru e
antitheses o f colonialism a n d w hich one could acquire only by
w orking th ro u g h th e colonial consciousness. B oth cam e from
d irect or in d irect exposure to the colonial situation an d b o th
struggled, though in dram atically different ways, w ith ideas o f
au th o rity, responsibility, p sychological^seeurity, self-esteem,
-hierarchy^jjQ w er an d jivangelism . T h ^ f th ird responsc^w asln-
direct, unselfconscious a n d overtly apoTittr*l-r-44u-wai^r^
in the chaotic, individuated, ‘pathological’ protests against
Irypfr-m agrnlinity anH over-socialization b y i n dividuals like
r —^ ( W a r WilHe anH._many_x>f..the m em bers o f th e B loom sbury
g roup a n d j j y aspects o f th e ¿lite cu ltu re i n in stitu tio n s like
O xford and C am bridge. I h a ve in m ind n o t the form al rad ical­
ism o f a few politically conscious intellectuals, b u t the^ half­
articu lated protest by m ore a p p aren tly apolitical intellectuals
agains t Tfreofficiar Id e a s o f n o rm ality an d ^dissent gradually
taking over th e whole of th e cu ltu re o f B ritain.
Lastly, there was the num erically sm all b u t psychologically
■r-r significant response of m any w ho w holly o p ted o u t o f th eir
colonizing society an d fought for th e cause o f I n dia. Som e o f
them becam e m arginaT to the W estern life style in the course o f
th eir search for an alternative vision o f an ideal society outside
technocratic utopias and outside m odernity. O n e m ay describe
th em as persons searching for a new u to p ia u n touched by any
H obbesian dream . Such persons as Sister N ivedita, born M a r­
g aret N oble ( 1867- 1911), A nnie Besant ( 1847- 1933) an d M ira
Behn, b o rn M adeleine Slade ( 1892- 1982), found in In d ia n ver­
.V
sions o f religiosity^ Jcnow ledge an d social in terv en tio n n o t
m erely a m odel o f dissent against th eir ow n society, b u t also
some jpr&lection for their search for new m odels o f transcen-

as well as legitim acy for w om en’s p articip atio n in social a n d

p o litic a rlife .65 "More releva n t for us how ever are others like
45 Cf. Mira Richard’s ease, briefly touched upon in p p .94- 6 , in this volume.
V It is also worth noting that many of these women weresjrish?^ leave it to the
psycho-historian« to work out the possible meanings of these relationships between
womanhood, dependency and independence, Anglo-Irish political relationships,
and Catholicism and its greater tolerance for premodem or nonmodem categories
of thought.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 37
<C. F. A ndrew s (1871- 1940) w ho never becam e m arg in al to th e
VVesty-fcut found a richer m eaning for W estern C hristianity an d
a new endorsem ent o f trad itio n al C hristian virtues in some
strands o f anti-colonialism in In d ia . In d ia for them was both a
place for C hristian social intervention an d a place w hich could
be a m irro r to organized W estern C hristianity w hich h ad be­
com e a c a t’s p aw o f British im perialism .
I shall very briefly describe th e four responses in th e rest o f
this section.

Liplina p robably was the inost creative b u ild e rjo fth e political
rrtyths w hich a colonial p o w e rie e c ls to sustain its self-esteem.
T h e psychological co-ordinates’ oTHIsTim perialistiH eologyhave
o ften been the co-ordinates o f the W est’s im age o f the non-W est
in o u r times.
Elsew here in this book I have described K ip lin g ’s early ex­
periences a n d w orld view to show th a t he was som ething m ore
th a n a ra b id im perialist w ith a n in teg rated identity. H e was, I ^
have argued,~ a tragH rfigure seekingTfTdisown in selfchatred a n Iv
aspect o f his self identified w ith Indianness— w hich in tu rn was —*
identified w ith victirm zation^ostracism a n d violence— because
o f a cruel first encounter w ith E ngland after an idyllic childhood
in In d ia .56 In this state, K ipling reproduced in his personal life
b o th the painful cu ltu ral changes th a t h a d taken place in his
society a n d the history o f British colonialism in In d ia from
R o b e rt Clive to W inston C hurchill.
Since ab o u t the seventeenth century, th e hyper-m asculine 1
over-socialized aspects o f E u ro p ean personality h a d been grad u ­
ally supplanting the cu ltu ral traits w hich h ad becom e identified
w ith fem ininity, childhood, a n d la te r on, ‘prim itivism ’. As p a rt
o f a p easant cosmology, these traits h ad been valued aspects o f
a culture n o t w edded to achievem ent an d productivity. Now
they h a d to be rejected as alien to m ainstream E uropean civi­
lization an d projected o n ln t h e MouTrnitiires’ o f E nrop e j n d on
to th e new cultures E uropean civilization encountered. I t was
as p a rt o f this process th a t the colonies cam e toHBe seen as the
ab o d e o f people childlike an d innocent on th e one han d , an d
MSec pp. 64-70 below.
38 The Intimate Enemy
devious, effem inate an d passive-aggressive on the other. T h e
positive qualities o f childlikeness, K ipling argued, were the
attrib u tes o f th e (good savage^—for instance, the devoted,
o b edient m artial races of I n d ia| the G u n g a Dins— an d those o f
the good-hearted, patriotic low er classes o f B ritain supplying
the R aj w ith ‘T om m ies’ w ho dutifully w ent to their untim ely
d eath in distan t lands. C hildish o r fem inine passive-aggression
was th e a ttrib u te o f the effete nationalists an d fa te sahiEs or
babus draw n from th e n on-m artial races an d th a t o f th e
uninform ed, shallow, British liberals supporting the form er. It,
w as also th e a ttrib u te o f w hatever a p p a re n t civilization In d ia,
as opposed to th e ‘savage’ A fricans, seem ed to have.
T h is was the u ltim ate m eaning o f th e spirit o f colonialism
an d its civilizing mission m ounted on b e h a lf o f m odernity an d
progress. K ipling m erely produced new m yths to consolidate
these cu ltu ral ideas as a p a rt o fT u T ow n search for an in ­
teg rated selfhood. T o use an overw orked expression o f H erb ert
M arcuse’s, it was an instance x>f in tern al repression m irroring
a n externally repressive system . K ipling’s idea o f the effem inate,
passive-aggressive, a n d ‘half-savage-half-child’ In d ia n was m ore
th an a n A nglo-Indian stereotype : it was an aspecTofK ipTm g’s
anrl flnrope’s o th er fa r p. r ^
T h e dénouement for K ip lin g cam e in his old a ^ w hen his
lite ra ry success w ith generations o f y o u n j^ re a d e rs/h a d very
n early established his superiority over his critics in T n d ia as well
as in th e W est. I t cam e w hen his only son died defending the
cause o f the E m pire K ipling held so dearM ^iplm g', neith er a
clear-cu t p ro d u ct o f th e self-confident colonialism o fth e -n in e ­
te e n th century nor a t hom e w ith m o d ern / w ars based on
mega^-technology an d m ega-death, was brojieji. T h e fear o f loss
o f n u rtu re h a d always h au n ted him . T h e characters in his
stories, m ostly parentless like W ilde’s, sometimes sought th a t
n u rtu re thro u g h a reversal o f roles : they secured n u rtu re from
th eir w ards, from children an d from th e childlike aliens they
befriended or protected. In the process, they presum ably en­
sured for their creato r a sim ilar n u rtu re from the children
am ong— an d the children in— his readers. T h a t fantasy w orld
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 39
o f'n u rtu re from h eleW Aperhaps com pensating loss or depriva-
tio iT o rp a re n ta l n u rtu re ^ e b Uapsed-w ith the^death o f K ipling’s
son. ^
E dm und W ilson sensitively captures the spirit o f this K ipling,
broken as m uch by th e im perialism he so ad m ired as by his
self-repression.67 W ilson does so by quoting the defeated im ­
perialist—lonely, depressed, a n d fearful o f insanity in his old
age:
I have a dream—a dreadful dream—
A dream that is near done,
I watch a man go out of his mind,
And he is My M other’s Son.

^G eo rg e Q rw e tt^ response to the ideology o f colonialism was the

an tip ode o f K ip lin g ’s ; he w orked w itiT creativeinyths th a t were
d irect attem pts to reassert Some o f the ya.lnes which rnlnnialism
forced o n e to disown. H e clearly sensed th a t B ritish colonialism
h a d c re a te d the dem an d for a ‘m other culture ’— a n d a produc-'^f
tion line for colomaTruTers— w hich alienated the colonizers n o t
only from th eir political subjects b u t also frnmTTTejr^ w n selves.
O rw ell operatecTfrom an anthropocentric, socialist-hum anistic \
rationalism w hich never aHowecTRim to develop th e full m ean-
ing o f the co n tin u ity betw een the oppressor and the o p p ressed .S8 1
Nevertheless, he did sense th at the siihjngation o f the ruled also
involved the subjugation o f the rulery t h a t th e s n h ^ e c ts jn jh e
colonies controlled their rulers_as^urelv-as the_ rulers controlled
tKeir subjects^ H e also was aw are, perhaps to some extent
against himself, th a t the first kind o f control was the more
difficult to defy because it w as covert, subtle a n d in volved
*7 Edmund Wilson, ‘The Kipling that Nobody Read’, in Andrew Rutherford I
(ed.), Kipling’s Mind and Art (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, v
1964), pp. 17- 69. J
** See for instance Orwell’s ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, in Sonia Orwell and Ian
Angus (eds.), Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (London: Seeker
and Warburg, 1968), vol. 4, pp. 463- 70. Orwell stresses the moral Gandhi and
rejects Gandhi’s world view as irrational and anti-humanist and his personality as
aesthetically distasteful. In the same volume however is his ‘James Burnham and
the Managerial Revolution’, pp. 160- 81, which does show an acute sensitivity to
the specific problem of modern oppression which Gandhi attacked.
 40 The Intim ate Enemy
w ithin-person repression, w hereas in th e second case, th e re­
pression was overt and involve«^ two culture^.
T h e m ost telling p o rtray al of~this m u tu a l bondage is in
O rw ell’s ^Shooting an E lep h an t’, an essay w hich graphically
describes some o f the anxieties a n d fears th e colonizer lives
w ith .69 All the them es w hich can be identified w ith the present
c u ltu ra l crisis o f the W est are in the essay: th e xeificatioii_of
social bonds^through form al, stereotyped, part-o b ject relation­
ships; a n i" ctr1irr»>ntal o f n a tu r e ; created loneliness o f the
i olonizers in the colony th ro u g h a theory of cu ltu ral stratifica­
tion a n d exclusivism; an unending search for m asculinity and
status before the colonized; the perception o f the colonized a r
gullible children who m ust be im pressed w ith conspicuous
m achism o (w ith resultant audience dem ands binding the colo­
nizer to a given form at o f ‘play’) ; a n d th e suppression o f one’s
self for the sake o f an im posed im perial id en tity —in au th en tic
an d killing in its grandiosity. W h a t K ipling articu lated in ­
directly through his life and tried to hide through his w ritings,
/ O rw ell a rtic u la te d openly th ro u g h his self-aw are political
I ^analysisv ~~ “ ----------
Q rw efrw as basically a. critic o f totalitarianism . B ut those w ho
have read his Animal Farm a n d Nineteen Eighty-Four w ilLxe-
cognize him also as a critic o f the oppression w hich grows o ut
o f ideologies o f egalitarianism an d progress. I t is this p a rt o f his
self w hich is relevant to this essay, because m uch before the
m odern doctrines o f progress cam e hom e to roost in the F irst
and the Second W orlds, the colonized societies h ad to bear
their full b ru n t.
O rw ell was the scion o f an old, quasi-aristocratic fam ily in
decline, w ith a history o f colonial service and slave-owning.
Eike K ipling, he was born in In d ia and b ro u g h t up in E ng lan d.
But he left the country o f his b irth too early to have any
memories. H e had, thus, a stan d ard English middle-class_ u p ­
bringing. In later life O rw ell believed th a t he h ad h a d an
‘'oppressive childhood and he w rote ab o u t his jo u rn ey through
88 George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
J957)> PP- 91- 100. See also his Burmese Days (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 41
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. 330-
69, see particularly pp. 351- 3, 359.
42 The Intim ate Enemy
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 ‘psycho-
pathological’— 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 icTeo-
logical 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.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 43
( 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: Heine-
mann, 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.
 44 The Intim ate Enemy
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.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 45
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 be-
rnm#* 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- 39-37-
Tt Ibid., pp. 30- 1. w Ibid., p. 30.
5
 46 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.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 47
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 (Ahmeda-
bad: 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).
 48 The Intim ate Enemy
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 ter-
secting 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 49
the British from th e history an d psychology o f B ritish colonial-
isnT 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 rior-
to 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 Vivek-
ananda 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 situa-
tio 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 ofjnasculi-
nity. 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 situa-
tion. 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:

4 , b u t th e ability
T h a t iv m a n lin e ss a n d wom anliness are /¿qua).
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
is<«Qi>yiolence 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.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 57
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 1
be interp reted and~reirTTerpreted. (T h is U s b indirectly coped ^ ^ .9
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 conceptual­
ized the past, as a possible m eans o f reaffirm ing o r altering the
present:
Past as a -*■ Fractured -*■ Remaking -*■ New
special present of present Past
case of (competing including
present pasts) 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
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.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 59
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 -*■ Fractured -* Rem ade -► N ew past
present present past |
i ▼
Determ ined A lternative
future determ ined
(Indian future (new
fatalism ) ‘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-and-
the-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 self-
consciousness 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 crea-
utive social action, in clear-cu t breaks with the past. Y etT para-
4pxicaliy, 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 self-
realization, 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.
 The Psychology o f Colonialism 63
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 struc-
tu 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 colonial-
fis 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 closc-
yet-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.
 66 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 strong-
willed, 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 r- /
boured 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, artistically-
m 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 non-
church-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’
values: y
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~ihter-
faced 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
colonialism as an in stru m e n ro f progress: j
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 vio-
j 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 non-
E 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 con-
Isciousness 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 a-
tions 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 predict-
able-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#»<i th r lan g u ag e n f fh *
m odern w orlcCalso tries to rem ain outside it. T h e shifts from
the past to th e present tense in th e iollowing"pages, a n d from
the present to the past, is a p a rt o f the sam e effort.

yTndia is n o t non-W est; it is In d ia . O utside th e sm all section o f

Indians w ho w ere once exposed to the full th ru st o f colonialism
and are now heirs to th e colonial m em ory, the o rd in ary In d ia n
has no reason to see him self as a counterplayer o r a n antithesis
o f the W estern m an . T h e im posed burden to be perfectly non-
W estem only constricts his, th e everyday In d ia n ’s, cu ltu ral
self, ju st as th e older b u rd en o f being perfectly W estern once
narrow ed— an d still som etimes narrow s— his choices in the
m atter o f his and his society’s future. T he new responsibility
forces him to stress only those parts o f his culture w hich are
recessive in the W est an d to u n d erp lay both those w hich his cul­
tu re shares w ith the W est an d those w hich rem ain undefined
by the W est. T h e p ressure to be the obverse o f the fficsLdisterts
the tradition al p rio rities T n t h e J jiHIarn’s t o t aW iew o f m a n a n d
universe a n d destroysJuiTculturi^s u n iq u cgestalt. I t in fact binds
hmTevenThore n rev o cab ly ltT th e W est.14
In this respect, there is a perfect fit here betw een m ap y ver-
sions of In d ia n nationalism an d the w orld view o f the K iplings.
Both share w h at th e M ^ d h y a m ik a rnighrcalT the"'tendency to
absolutize the relative differences betw een cultures.16 B oth
seek to set u p the E a s fa n d the W est as p e rm a n e n t1a n d n a tu ra l

141 need hardly draw attention to the logical and moral sleight-of-hand which
helps equate the refusal to be non-West with being Western.
11K. Venkata Ramanan, Ndgarjuna's Philosophy, As PnstnUd in tht Mahd-
PrcgMp&amitdSastra (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978).
 74 Tfc Intimate Enemy
antipodes. Both trace th eir roots to th e cu ltu ral arrogance o f
post-E nlightenm ent E urope w hich sought to define n o t only
the ‘tru e ’ W est b u t also th e ‘trueLEa&t. A nd b o th have pro­
duced social critics w ho share t f e naive belief th a t the resulting
cu ltu ral povertyL has-hw t 4he-East m ore-than the W est.
Y et, if there is an o th er Iridia., th ere ift also a n o th er W est. I f
the form er has been the forgotten m ajority, the la tte r has been,
even m ore tragically for th e globe, th e forgotten m inority. I f
the form er has been the never-fully-defeated E ast, th e la tte r
has been, a t least in this century, th e fully subjugated W est.
X h atW est survives as a n esoterica in th e W est an d perhaps, ju s t
perhaps, as a living reality a t th e corners o f th e non-W est.
^ I n d i a n s are th e only surviving E nglishmen*, M alcolm M ug-
geHdge once~reportedly said, in equaT exasperation a n d deri­
sion. I t can read as a n unw itting, recognition th a t the In d ia n
society has held in trusteeship aspects o f th e W est w hich are
lost to th e W est itself.
L et us, how ever, for the m om ent, shelve the problem o f the
W est an d concentrate on th e In d ia n pred icam en t an d o n th a t
o th er In d ia w hich is n eith er p r e ^ n q d e r n nor an ti-m o d ern b u t
v ^ ^ o n l y non-m odcqi. I t is t H e l n d i a w hich has^survived~~the
^ e s te m jo n s J lugnt. I t coexists w ith the In d ia o f th e m odernists,
whose attem p ts toidenHfy'W ith-tfre'coloiiiaTaggressors has p ro ­
duced th e p ath etic copies o f th e W estern m an in th e sub­
continent, b u t it rejects m ost versions o f In d ia n nationalism as
bo u n d irrevocably to the W est— in reaction, jealousy, h atred ,
fear a n d counterphobia. T h a t o th er In d ia lives as if it recog­
nized th a t, culturally, it is a choice neither betw een th e E ast
an d the W est n o r betw een th e N o rth an d the South. I t is a
choice— a n d a b attle— betw een the A pollonian an d th e D iony­
sian within In d ia an d within th e W est.16 As this cen tu ry w ith
its developed ability to translate utopias into reality has show n,
if such a distinction does n o t exist in an oppressive culture, it
has to be presum ed to exist by its victim s for m ain tain in g th eir

MI was brought up as a social scientist and only recently have found that these
two terms have many meanings. I have in mind only the meanings given to them
by Ruth Benedict in Patterns o/Cultur* (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).
 The Uncolonized M ind 75
ow n sanity a n d hum anness. T hom as M ann, I am told, affirm ed
after the N azi experience th a t there were n o t two G erm anies
b u t one. P erhaps it is for the M anns to own u p the singleness o f
G erm any. F o r the victim s o f G erm any, a t some plane there
have to be b u t two G erm anies interlinked if necessary by a
single cognitive an d ethical discourse.
In th e m o d em W est, this b attle betw een the A pollonian and \
the D ionysian has only m arginally involved the East— w hether I
it should have involved th e E ast or not is an altogether different
issue. In th e E ast the b attle has involved the W est. M ain - .
stream In d ia n culture does im plicitly recognize th a t, in term s
o f the them es central to it, it is n o t a m atter o f adjusting to or
fighting the m ight an d the w orld view o f the W est as an outside
agency. Because while the W est, in spite o f all its theories o f
m artial races an d ignoble an d noble savages, does n o t p robably
incorporate In d ia, In d ia does incorporate th e W est. T . K .
M ahadevan quotes an odd statem en t o f G andhi w hich d ra ­
m atizes this p red icam en t:

Everyone of the Indians who has achieved anything worth mentioning

in any direction is the fruit, directly or indirectly, of western education.
At the same time, whatever reaction for the better he may have had
upon the people at large was due to the extent of his eastern culture .17

T h e absolute rejection o f the W est is also the rejection o f the

basic configuration o f the In d ia n traditions; though, parad o x i­
cally, the acceptance o f th a t configuration m ay involve a q u a li­
fied rejection o f the W est.
T his is th e underside o f non-m odern In d ia ’s ethnic universal-
ism. I t is a universalism w hich takes into account the colo­
nial experience, including~tHe im mense suffering colonialism
Brought, a n d builds o u t o f it a m atu rer, more~contemp*orary,
m ore self-critical version o f In d ian traditions. ItT s a univer-
sa lis m w h ic h sees the W esternized In d ia as a su b trad itio n
.ighich, in spite o f its pathology an d its tragi-com ic core, is a
*d igest ed’ Yorm o f an o th er civilization th a t h ad once gate-
17 T. K. Mahadevan, Dvya (New Delhi: Affiliated East-West Press, 1977),
pp. 118 - 19 .
 76 The Intim ate Enemy
crashed into In d ia . In d ia has tried to cap tu re the differentia o f
th e W est w ithin its ow n cu ltu ral dom ain, n o t m erely oh th e
basis o f a view o f the W est as politically intrusive or as culturally
inferior, b u t as a subculture m eaningful in itself a n d im p o rta n t,
th o u gh n o t all-im p o rtan t, in the In d ia n context. T his is w h at
I m ean t w hen I said th a t K ipling, w hen he w anted to be
W estern, could n o t be b o th W estern an d In d ia n , w hereas th e
everyday In d ia n , even w hen he rem ains only In d ia n , is both
In d ia n an d W estern.
I f the E ast a n d th e W est never seem to m eet in In d ia, as both
K ipling an d E. M . F orster seem to argue, it is because o f jh is
in te rn aUty o f the W est a t different levels a n d a reas o f J n ^ ia n
life.18 F am iliarity can breed distance, too. I f m ost o f the society
is spared the problem o f h an d lin g th e W est a t th e deepest
levels o f consciousness, if there exists a prior endogenous W est
or a W est w ith its ow n lim ited place in In d ia n cosmology, th ere
is no reason w hy th e W esterner should be seen as a to tal
in tru d e r or, fo r ìH à tìn a tte r, as the all-im portant in tru d er. Nor
" is th ere any reason w hy the cu ltu ral conflict Jbetween th e E ast
a r i i the W est should be seen as the cen tral conflict in In d ia n
life. T ru e, in the process th e exposed sections o f In d ia n society
Fave been left to them selves to w ork th ro u g h th eir fears o f
lim inality an d rootlessness— ‘aw kw ardly suspended betw een
tw o w orlds’, as V . G . K ie m a n puts it. I t is also tru e th a t th e
low concern w ith th e E ast-W est issue in large p arts o f th e
society has left these exposed sections doubly concerned w ith
th e differences betw een the In d ia n an d the n o n -In d ian , an d
the ‘us’ a n d th e ‘th ey ’ an d forced them to fight a ru n n in g
b attle w ith th eir feelings o f self-hatred a n d powerlessness. B ut
even th e exposed In d ian s, w ith nearly four h u n d red years o f
exposure to the W est, have n o t been fully deprived o f th eir self-
confidence vis-à-vis th e W est; even they carry the intim ations
o f an in n e r conviction th a t they w ould n o t be sw ept o ff th eir

ME. M. Forster in A Passage to India (London: Arnold, 1967) ventures the

colonial culture as an explanation of this separation and in that form it is an
attenuated version of the argument of Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth,
trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
 The Uncolonized M ind 77
feet an d th a t they could use the O ccident for th eir ow n p u r­
poses. Even the crafty babus, as K ipling recognized in u tte r
disgust, know how to use the w hite m a n ; they too have a theory
o f the W est.
O nly recently have w e cau g h t u p w ith the full im plications
o f this. I find J . D u n can M . D e rre tt saying in 1979:

It was supposed, and the author of this paper used to suppose along
with his elders and betters, that Indians had learnt English ways and
values as they had learnt the English language, and that, as a race of
would-be parrots they ‘have done remarkably well. . . .’ One per­
ceived with pained surprise the conflict between profession and per­
formance. Indians trained almost exclusively in Western arts and
sciences reacted as irredeemable orientals in any crisis. They re­
inforced tK irfteim g^gaiirafid again by their lack of confidence when |
faced with aTiew problem, their pathetic desire for foreign advice )
(which they would iEelve when they had paid for it),j*nd their ‘going / 4-^
through the motions’ like a tight-rope walker who waBcs IiTsTope for j ( ■f - '
the sake of walking it, or like a somnambulist, avoiding desperate
accidents but unable to say why._.. . Very late in the day the present >
writer woke up to what he believes to be the fact, namely that Indian
tradition has been ‘in charge’ throughout, and that English ideas and
EnglislTways, like the English language, liave been used for Tmfian
purposes. T hat, in feet, it is the British who were manipulated, thei
British who were the silly somnambulistsj My Indian brother is not a/
brown Englishman, he is an Indian who has learned to move around! . 9, ^
in my drawing room, and will move around in it so long as it suits) |
him for his own purposes, ^ n d when he adopts my ideas he does so to
Suit himself, and refainsthem so far and as long as it suits him .19

D errett could have ad d ed , ‘In rig h t understanding (dharmdndm

bhutapratyaveksa) n o t only is revealed the determ inate as d eter­
m inate b u t there is also in it the in d eterm in ate o r the uncondi­
tioned.’20 Like all devious O rientals, th e Indians, even w hen
they seem totally controlled, do retain some indeterm inateness •v ,! ’~ '
an d freedom . I t is an o th e r m a tte r thatT the carrienT oFT he
tradTtiorTof the babus, th e lowest o f the low am ong the brow n
sahibs, w hom K ipling so obviously h ated , could never take

11 ‘Tradition and Law in India’, in R. J. Moore (ed.), Tradition and Politics in

South Asia (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979), pp. 32- 59. See especially pp. 34- 5.
*° Venkata Ramanan, Nagdrjuna's Philosophy, p. 39.
7
 78 The Intim ate Enemy
p rid e in the fact th a t while they could d are to b ep a rt-K ip lin g s,
K ipling c Q u ld never d are to be a p art-b ab u . _________ __
W h at a b o u t the subcategory callecTtRe p a r tia l In d ia n * jh e
! one who w as K ipling’s tru est In d ia n ? A nd w h at a b o u t K ip ­
lin g ’s authentic im perial rulerT tiie over-burdened w hite m an,
w ith his civilizing mission a n d his fear th a t, unless careful, he
w ould regress into the savagery o f the people he was o rd ain ed
to rule ? W ere there native constructions o f them , too, o r w ere
they m erely seen as strange, archetypal anti-gods w ho h a d
becom e a p a rt o f one’s fate ? Evidently, there does exist w ithin
the living traditions o f In d ia th e D ionysian aspect o f the
m odern W est as an identifiably In d ia n su b trad itio n , as the
dem onic self or asura prakfti:
Idamadya maya labdhamidam prdpsye manoratham,
Idamastidamapi me bhavifyati punardhanam.
Asau maya hatah sairuh hanifye cdparanapi,
Isvaro’hamaham bhogi siddho'ham balavan sukhi
Adhyo’bhijanavanasmi ko'nyo'sti sadrso maya.*1
Asuratva m ay be generally a negation o f virtues in In d ia n
society, b u t it can be seen som etimes as th e pathology o f
K satriyahood. I t is a K satriyahood w hich has ru n amuck.*2
P ro b ab ly this is the fram ew ork w ithin w hich K ipling’s im perial
consciousness— including th e British construction o f th e native
ideology o f th e m artial races— was fitted.(K ipiin^, provincial
m ore by choice th a n by circum stance, th o u g h t th a t th e ideology
o f K satriyahood was tru e Indianness, a p a rt from being con­
sistent w ith the w orld view o f colonialism . H e missed th e jim ite d
role given to K satriyahood in trad itio n al In d ia n cosmology an d
n ‘I wanted this, and today I got it. I want that: I shall get it tomorrow. All
these riches are now m ine: soon I shall have more. I have killed this enemy. I will
kill all the rest. I am ruler of men. I enjoy the things of this world. I am successful,
strong and happy. I am so wealthy and so nobly bom. Who is my equal V Gild,
Chapter 16, Slokas 13- 15. The translation follows Bhagavad-Giti, trans. Swami
Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math,
>974), P- 240.
** Richard Lannoy seems to recognize a part of the dynamic in his The Speaking
Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1975),
p. 356, when he says ‘From the viewpoint of the traditional society, Westernization
is an extension of Kshatryaization.’
 The Uncolonized M ind 79
the vested interest his kind h ad in denying these lim its in a co­
lonial culture organized aro u n d violence a n d counter-violence,
m an h o o d a n d m axim ized potency, an d a theory o f history th a t
saw a ll civilizations in term s o f the high an d the low a n d the
justifiably pow erful an d the deservedly w eak. I t is the different
weightages given to the m a rtia l an d th e n on-m artial in the
In d ia n culture th a t K ipling knew b u t req u ired to forget.

Ill
Consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism
and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying
truth of both.. . . Only naturalism is capable of comprehending
the action of world history.
Karl Marx'»

I have argued th a t the K iplings sought to redefine, on b e h a lf

o f th e m o d em W est, th e In d ia n as the antonym o f th e W estern
m an an d the W estern m an as a legitim ate conqueror a n d a
ru ler. I have also argued th a t unlike in the W est, these new
definitions w ere n o t deeply intern alized by m ost Indians w ho i
alread y h a d th eir native analogues o f the m o d em W estern 1
m an . T h ey saw the W estern m a n as a tran sien t ru ler w ho like I
all tran sien t rulers ten d ed to live w ith illusions o f perm anence. )
H oweveiV-the-imperial consciousness did m anage to take over
som e parts o f W esternized Ijid ia n r^sr.ioii.sness. I shall now
briefly tell one p a rt o f th a t story, using a§ m y e x a m p te th e w a y
th e experience of coIomaUsmfias forced th e W esternized In d ia n
to J ir s t split th e T n d ia n self-im age a n d th en reconstitute i t by
show ing one p a rt o f the im age to be false.

In d ia has ‘always been a separate w orld, h a rd for any o u t­

sider, Eastern or Western, to p en etrate.’*4 Such a cu ltu re becomes
a projective te s t^ it invites one n o t only to project on to it one’s
deepest fantasies, b u t also to reveal, through such self-projec-
" Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts o f 1844 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
*974). P- *35*
MV . G. Kieraan, Tht Lords of Human Kind: Europtan AuUudts to tht Outsidt World
n tht Imptrial A ft (Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 71. Emphasis added.
 80 The Intim ate Enemy
.tion. th e in te rp reter ra th e r th an the interp reted (All in terp reU -
Jtio n s-x jflliu U a ^ ^ u ltim a te ly autobiographical^ Predictably, a
subgroup o f K ip lin g ’s In d ia n brain-children “have set u p the
m artial In d ia as the genuine In d ia w hich w ould one day defeat
the W est a t its ow n gam e. T h ey w ait for th a t glorious day and
are q u ite w illing to alter th e w hole of In d ia n culture to bring
th a t victory a little closer, like th e A m erican arm y officer in
V ietn am w ho once destroyed a village to save it from its
enemies. T h ey dem ystify th e ordinary In d ia n as a pseudo-
alternative to th e W estern m a n : hypocritically spiritual while
being shrew dly m aterialistic, violent and self-interested; neither
a dedicated counterplayer o f the W est like J a p a n , trying to
defeat th e W est a t its ow n gam e, nor clearly O rien tal like
C onfucian C hina, w hich, while m anifestly hostile to the West,
shares w ith th e W est some basic values like perform ance,
organization a n d in stru m en tal ratio n ality ; neither a person
w ho m eets th e norm o f civility in th e W est, nor openly a noble
savage. T h e cu ltu ral ideal o f these new K satriyas is a h ard
In d ia n state backed by tough this-worldliness.
Jhi reaction, o thers have id en tified the spiritual In d ia as the
r e a lin d ia .'f o lh e m , therefore, alTdeviance irom spm tualisnTIs
a deviance from Indianness itself. As against th e m aterialism o f
th e m o d em W est, they see In d ia providing an axis for a dis­
senting global consciousness. T h e W est, according to this view,
is already defeated by the superior E astern civilizations; it only
obstinately refuses to ad m it the fact.
Is th e perception o f such contradictions undeterm ined by
cu ltu re? M u st a society always choose betw een m aterialism
an d spiritualism , betw een h ard realities a n d u nreal dream s?
O r is th e perception o f such a choice itself a p ro d u ct of K ip ­
ling’s im perial m ission?
T ru e to th e description o f ethnocentrism in som e contem ­
p o rary studies o f th e au th o rita ria n person§Utyr ^he-British colo­
nial a ttitu d e to In d ia n cu ltu re waij^always inconsistent; O n
th e one h a n d th e British saw the In d ia n a s overly this^wofldly—

rexceedingly shrew d, greedy, self-centred, m oney-m inded. O n

th e o th er h an d , they also despised the In d ia n as overly other?
 The Uncolonized M ind 81
worldly— n o t fit for th e w orld o f m odern science an d tech-
liology, statecraft and productive work. (T he colonizer in
In d ia thus proved, if such a p ro o f was necessary, th a t a n op ­
pressive system seeks legitim ation in all available ways. Spiri­
tualism in British In d ia was never th e only opiate.) T his is a
spm jw hich has persisted in In d ia ’s m odern secto r..O nce o ther
explanations o f In d ia ’s problem s are exhausted^ the m odern
In d ia n .is always tem pted to fall back upon either the stereotype
o f the spiritual In d ia n or on th a t o f the pseudo-spiritual.
It^LsUoubtftrl if most Indians look at In d ia this way. In d ia
is not m erely its spiritual self. T h e society does give an im p o rtan t
place,to spirituality,Tbut it is hardly the overw helm ing aspect
of In d ianness. T h e pleth o ra of em pirical studies done from
M arxistas well as stru ctu ral-fu n ctio n al vantage grounds should
have a t least m ade us aw are th a t underlying m uch In d ia n
spirituality lie this-w orldly choices, h ard self-interest, a n d
r eality testing. T his how ever has n ot stopped anyone, n o t even •i-L
the scholars who have done these studies, from exhorting the
Indians to be m ore this-w orldly and m ore realistic. Even a
scholar as erudite as D . D. K osam bi has a touch o f innocence
about him w hen he accuses the G ita in the sam e p arag rap h o f
‘slippery opportunism ’ an d o f ad m itting th a t ‘m aterial reality
is a gross illusion’.25 Sim ilarly w ith In d ian m aterialism . A fter
all the m aterialist interpretations are exhausted, there rem ains
an irreducible elem ent o f spiritual concerns w hich inform s the
toughest m aterialism in In d ia. Sometimes this elem ent is seen as
the residual irratio n ality o f a person whose flesh is w illing b u t
whose h eart is w eak— a reversal o f m etaphor w hich has its ow n
story to tell. Som etim es it is seen as simple hypocrisy, a political
compromise w ith the superstitious In d ian masses who have
more pow er th a n acum en. But the fact rem ains th a t from
rationalist social critic R am m o h u n R oy’s (1772-1833) prayer­
ful last days a t Bristol to agnostic Ja w a h a rla l N eh ru ’s (1889-
1964) mystical last will and testam ent it is the sam e story o f
tim e travel through the ctframas o f life.
Perhaps only in a C artesian consciousness does th e In d ia o f
*5 D. D. Kosambi, Myth and Reality (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1962), p. 17.
 82 The Intim ate Enemy
A n an d a Coom arasw am y an d Sarvepalli R adh ak rish n an negate
the In d ia o f D. D. K osam bi an d Devi Prasad C hattopadhyaya,
only w ithin the modern awareness do th e two_Jndias^become
two ideologies r.pmpetmff--W--*b<> minHg n f mpn> instead of
being tw o strains jwithin the sam e life style, dialecticajly inter-
related^m cT com plem entary.88 T his is an o th er w ay o f saying
th a t the.tw oT ndias wlucK~the ideologies project are b o th p ro ­
ducts o f W estern intrusion an d both are attem p ts to reconstruct
In d ia n culture according to categories w hich w ould seem
internally consistent to th e m odern W estern m ind. Both are
✓ T attem pts to convert levels o f living—o r aspects o f selfhood—
/ 4 c to ^types o f ideology. __
I n t h e In d ia n w orld view, as i n m o st worl<Tvie\frKpnce we
have u n learn t to see them as objects o f professional study^even
j h ^ j n o s t recalcitran t o f ideologies can be read as-a-level or^
C phase o r i m ng^br as a~response to a Rpvcifir ontological or
pastentraF proB rem 7 A plurality o f ideologies can always be
accom m odated w ithin a single life style. Fittingly so; a living
cu ltu re has to live an d it has an obligation to itself, n o t to its
analysts. Even less does it have any obligation to conform to a
m odel, its own o r someone else’s. M odern scholars o f course
have th e ir own obligation to their disciplines; they cannot
afford to g ra n t the convertibility betw een life styles an d ideo­
logies. T h c y jiave to r econcile the self-created- ‘contradiction’
betw een the m aterialist an d the idealist In d ia by unm asking
one of the Indias as false.
T hus ontTTscaught in a peculiar dilem m a in m odern In d ia.
** Actually the point can be made neatly through a comparison of the works of,
say, Radhakrishnan and Chattopadhyaya. In a strange way the two views can
become each other’s captive opposites. See particularly S. Radhakrishnan, Indian
Philosophy (Bombay: Blackie, 1977), vol. i; and The Hindu View of Life (London,
1926); D. P. Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (New
Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973); and What is Living and What is Dead in
Indian Philosophy (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1977). Alan Roland in
his forthcoming, as-yet-untitled work on the Indian personality treats this com­
plementarity in terms of a tripartite division of the self into the spiritual, the
familial and the individuated. There is here an isomorphism between the cultural
and the psychological.
 The Uncolonized M ind 83
O n the one side, there are thé m odern cult figures w ho stress
s y thesspiritual In d ia to exclu dp m a te r ia lis t In d ia from In d ia.
As they themselyes hernm e^om m oditifes in th e W estern m arket-
place o f spiritualism and in stan t salvation, as they becom e m ore
and m ore d ependent on m ajor structures o f the m odern w orld,
as they legitim ize ancient th o u g h t through m odern science, and
as they a d a p t trad itio n al know ledge for solving m o d em p ro b ­
lems a t the risk o f trivializing both, these gurus reportedly
rediscover for the Indians their true spiritual destiny !
O n the o th er side are those w h o \‘see through’ In d ia n spiri­
tualism an d find u n d ern eath only second-class m aterialism .
O nly by debunking the spiritual In d ia can the N irad C.
C haudhuris an d the V . S. N aipauls becom e the counterpoints
to the m odern maharsis an d âcdryas.21 O n ly as professional
debunkers are they a p a rt o f the m odern w orld o f th e p ro ­
fessional godm en. Like the godm en they reject, they also use
the m odern w orld to p ropagate th eir versions o f In d ia . O nly
instead o f selling the spiritual I n d ia an d explaining aw ay the
m aterialist, iliey vend the m aterialist In d ia and d ebunk the
spiritual. Being inverted m odern gurus, they can n o t forgive
In d ia for n o t being either a true copy or a tru e counterplayer
of lh e W est. T h ey h a te the confused self-definition oT the
In d ia n m ore th an w hat they see as the society’s m ajor failures.
T h e H in d u , for instance, is aggressive while talking o f pacifism,
d irty in spite of his ideology o f purity, m aterialist while p reach ­
ing spiritualism , an d com ically In d ia n w hen trying to be
W estern.28
Persons can be hypocrites. C a n cultures alsQ_be so ? Does the
: hypocrisy o f cultures on closer scrutiny tu rn o ut to be a con­
tradiction in the h u m an condition itself? For th a t m atter, is a
hypocrite only a casual ch eat ? O r is he som eone w ho reaffirms
the basic h u m an values in a w orld hostile to such values, while
i
*7 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe (London: Chatto and Windus,
1965) ; V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: André Deutsch, 1964) and
India: A Wounded Civilization (London: André Deutsch, 1977).
*8 Sec particularly Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe, Chapter 5.
 84 The Intim ate Enemy
him self succum bing to w orldly tem ptations? Is a hypocrite an
unw illing critic o f everyday life whose personal failure signals a
larg er cu ltu ral crisis ?
P robably the answers are less com plex th a n the questions.
In d ia after all is n o t outside th e w orld. C ertainly, for centuries,
it has m ounted the sam e chaotic, part-sincere search for a
h u m an e society th a t o th er p arts o f the w orld have m ounted.
C ertainly, m any o f In d ia ’s experim ents in civilized social life,
too, have been m akeshift efforts to survive enorm ous odds.
M an y o f these experim ents have failed an d m any o f the cul­
tu re ’s dream s, too, have tu rn e d in to nightm ares.
In addition, in recent centuries, the society has h ad to m ake
m ajor compromises w ith o u ter forces o f oppression, backed by
th e powerful ideology o f m odernity an d by an all-conquering
technology, an d it is still struggling to w ork thro u g h th a t ex­
perience. I t has been forced to cultivate th e creative self­
protection w hich the victim s often show w hen faced w ith an
inescapable situation: a slightly com ical im itativeness w hich
in d irectly reveals the ridiculousness o f the pow erful; an in ­
stru m en tal use o f the ways o f th e pow erful, w hich overtly
grants their superiority y et denies th eir cu ltu re (this m ay
involve the rejection o f values such as work, productivity,
m asculinity, m atu rity or adulthood, ratio n ality an d n o rm a lity );
an uncan n y ability to subvert the valued skills o r traits which
m ay ensure one’s a d a p ta tio n to the ‘system’ (such as in te l­
ligence, creativity, achievem ent, adjustm ent, personal grow th
or d ev elopm ent); an over-done obsequiousness w hich indirectly
seeks to lim it the options o f the targ et o f in g ratiatio n ; an d a
stylized other-worldliness w hich can disarm a t least those who
see it as a denial o f self-interest.
T h e pathology o f the W esternized In d ia n ’s personality,
w hicK ~K ipling so cleverly identified, was rooted in In d ia ’s
encounter wTtHThe ego-ideals of K ipling in the firsLplace. T h e
C haudK unT am T tiie NaTpauls are n o t only critics o f an inevit­
a b l e m ode o f self-defence, they are also a p a rt, o f iU -T h e y
provide ‘secondary elaborations’ o f a culture designed to hide
 The Uncolonized M ind 85
th e real self—the deepest social consciousness o f the victim s—
from the outsiders.
T h e determ inate is n o t th a t determ ined after all.

IV
P ro b ab ly in such a w orld, once the codes o f b o th In d ia n
m aterialism an d In d ia n spiritualism are cracked, b o th c an be
show n to share the sam e o r com plem entary concerns. L e t m e
exam ine this m u tu ality in th e life oC Srf^i\urobindo>( 1872-
1950), w ho in m any ways was a(co u n terp o in t to K ipling. I h o p e '7
to show th a t betw een K ipling a n d A urobindo, the la tte r’s
response to colonialism included a cu ltu ral self-affirm ation
w hich h a d a greater respect for the selfhood o f the ‘o th er’ a n d a
s e a rc h IS F 'a m ore universal m odel of. em ancipation, how ever
s ic k ^ F H z a rre th a ts e a rc h m ay seem to m any o f us. In fact, it
could be argued th a t the ‘sickness’ or the ‘bizarreness’ was
itself a p ro d u ct o f the colonial culture, telescoped deep in to the
personal life o f A urobindo. A urobindo’s spiritualism can be
seen as a w ay o f handling a situation o f cu ltu ral aggression an d
to th a t extent it was a language o f defiance, seeking to m ake
sense o u t o f the W est in In d ia n term s. I t is a m a tte r o f ju d g e ­
m e n t how far the a tte m p t m ade sense to his society a n d how
fa r it rem ained a reductio o f th e W est’s version o f the o th er­
w orldly In d ian .
K ipling was culturally an In d ia n child who grew u p to
becom e an ideologue o f the m oral an d political superiority o f
the W est. A urobindo was cu ltu rally a E uropean child w ho 7
grew up to becom e a votary o f the spiritu al leadership o f In d ia.
K ip lin g h a d to disown his Indianness to becormTTiis co ncept'of
the tru e E u ro p e a n ; A urobindo h ad to ow n u p his Indianness to
becom e his version o f the au th en tic In d ian . H ow ever, while
b o th could be seen as products o f the psychopathology o f
colonialism , A urobindo sym bolized a m ore universal response
to th e splits whir.h colonialism induced» H p 3 after a ll., did not
h av e to disown the-W est-w ithin h im to become his version o f
86 The Intim ate Enemy
a n In d ia n . T o the end o f his life W estern cu ltu re rem ained a
^ e M rie -e f his creative self-expression a n d he never th o u g h t th e
W est to be outside the reach o f G od’s grace. Even w hen he
spoke o f race an d evolution, tw o o f th e m ost dangerous them es
in W estern cosmology, n o t once d id he use th e concepts to
divide h u m a n k in d ; he always h a d th e h u m an race a n d h u m an
evolution in m ind. A nd d u rin g th e Second W orld W ar, w hen h e
m ade the stunning claim th a t his yoga was determ ining th e
course o f the w ar in E urope a n d deciding th e fate o f J a p a n , he
knew on w hich side in the clim actic battles he w an ted to be
a n d w hich strain in w hich civilization he w an ted to save
th ro u g h his psychic powers. N azi G erm any to him always re­
m ained a satanic force and, th o u g h th e re b irth o f A sia was one
o f his fondest dream s, he ab h o rred Ja p a n e se m ilitarism to th e
en d .29 O n e is forced to conclude th a t, com pared to K ip lin g ’s
‘sickness o f soul’, A urobindo’s sickness o f m ind was a superior
cognition o f th e h u m an p red icam en t a n d it did show, long
before the R . D . Laings entered the scene, th a t even th e
deepest feelings o f g ran d eu r an d depersonalization could carry
intim ations o f an alternative political m orality.
T h e p o in t can be m ade in an o th er w ay. W hile jV urobindo
belonged to th e trad itio n o f th e m ost deeply reactiv e-o L th e
In d ia n responses to colonialism — the one w hich p a rtly drew
inspiration from B ankim chandra an d V ivekananda— he always
h ad , like B ankim chandra a n d V iv e k a n a n d a /a genuine place
for the W est \yithin In d ia n civilization. F or ^K ipling on th e
o th er h an d , In d ia was n o t a civilization w hich enjoyed equal
-fightsj it was a geographical area o n e could love aniLa-socio-
" This was particularly noteworthy for two reasons. First, many of his ac­
quaintances from his earlier political days, as well as younger political leaders like
Subhas Chandra Bose whom he so admired, were seeking the help of Germany
and Japan to oust the British from India. Many of these young leaders had been
deeply influenced by Aurobindo’s earlier political ideology and record. Second,
he was perfectly aware of the possibility of misuse by the Allies of their victory in
the war. On his yogic intervention in the war, see Sri Aurobindo, On Himself
(Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972), pp. 38- 9 , 393- 9 ; see also p. 388 for
his comments on Lenin and the Russian Revolution which seem to suggest that
Aurobindo himself did not think of his yogic interventions in the ‘world forces’ in
too concretistic terms.
 The Uncolonized M ind 87
logical spacc w here you, if you were a real ‘man*, could find
yourself. ^Thfe certain ly was n o t accidental. A urobindo was
above a ll a victim w ho h ad fashioned o u t o f his victim hood a
new m eaning for suffering an d a new m odel o f defiance. As a
victim , he p ro tected — and h ad to protect— his h u m an ity and
m oral sanity m ore carefully because, jy h ile the colonial system
only saw h im as an object, he could n o rs e e th e colonizers as
m ere objects. As a p a rt o f his struggle for survival, th e W est
rem ained for In d ia n victim s like Aurobindo^an. iptft1-" * 1 hlim an
reality, in love as well as in h ate, in identification as well as in
co unter-identification«^

A urobindo A ckroyd Ghose— the W estern m iddle nam e was

given by his father a t b irth — was the th ird son o f his parents.
T h e Ghoses w ere u rb an e Brahm os from n ear C alcu tta an d fully
exposed to th e new currents o f social change in In d ia . F ath er
K rish n ad h an , a doctor trained in E ngland, was in governm ent
service. H e was well know n am ong his friends an d relatives for
his aggressively Anglicized ways. H e forbade his children to
learn or speak B engali; even a t hom e they h ad to converse in
English. T h e ir dress and food, too, were English. In addition,
K rish n ad h an was an atheist an d he tried h a rd to p ro tect his
children from the ill-effects o f H induism . F or some reason,
young A urobindo was the favoured object o f his fath er’s zealous
social engineering. K rish n ad h an ‘took the greatest care th a t
nothing In d ia n should touch this son o f his.’30
M o th er S w arnalata, about w hom ‘official’ biographers seem
reticent, was the d au g h ter o f R aj N aray an Bose, the renow ned
scholar, religious leader, social reform er an d nationalist. She
herself was know n m ainly for h er beauty. T h o u g h com ing from
a reform ist fam ily an d m arried to a highly W esternized m an,
S w arn alata was an orthodox H in d u , an d it is alm ost certain
th a t she d id n o t fully relish the W estern m anners o f her
husband. N or m ust she have enjoyed the ch arad e o f com-

*®Sisirkumar Mitra, The Liberator: Sri Aurobindo, India and the World (Delhi:
Jaico, 1954), p. 24. Also Satprem, Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness,
trans. Tehmi (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1968), Chapter 1.
88 The Intim ate Enemy
m u n icatin g th ro u g h English in th e fam ily. H ow ever, w h at
d istu rb ed h u m a n relations in th e fam ily m ore th a n th e oppres­
sion o f language was the illness S w am alata fell prey to early in
A u ro b in d o ’s life. Galled hysteria by h e r contem poraries, it was
obviously th e early stage o f som ething m ore serious. T hough
h e r fath er took h er to his house a t D eo g h ar to convalesce, she
g rad u ally becam e m ore an d m ore ‘u n m an ag eab le’. M eanw hile
K rish n ad h an installed a mistress a t hom e.
T im e has erased the details o f S w arn alata’s illness; we
m erely know th a t her side o f th e fam ily h a d a n u m b er o f
‘hysterics’ a n d th a t her illness was associated w ith occasional
bouts o f violence tow ards h er children. (T here was a t least one
instance w hen young A urobindo stood, stupefied an d fearful,
w itnessing his m other b eatin g his elder b ro th er.31) W e also
know th a t either as a response to h er o r as a general response to
th e environm ent a t hom e, young A urobindo show ed signs o f
m utism a n d interpersonal w ithdraw al, w hich his adm irers were
to la te r read as an early sign o f spirituality.*2
T h e W est continued to oppress A urobindo in o th er ways,
too. W h en five, he was sent to a totally W esternized, élite con­
v en t a t D arjeeling w ith a n English governess w ho served as
a surrogate m other. His co-students th ere w ere m osdy w hite.
E nglish was th e sole m edium o f in stru ctio n an d th e only m eans
o f com m unication outside school hours. T h e resulting sense o f
exile found expression, even a t th a t age, in a statem ent m ade
in th e th ird person: ‘In th e shadow o f th e H im alayas, in sight
o f th e w onderful snow -capped peaks, even in th e ir native land
th ey were b ro u g h t u p in alien surroundings.’83 W hen he h ad his
first p aran o rm al experience a t D arjeeling, it carried the impress
o f this loneliness an d depression. H e h a d th e vision o f a heavy,

u Niradbarati, Sri Awobvnddyan (Calcutta: Sri Aurobindo Pathmandir, 1980),

3rd ed., p. 17.
** Only one of them slips into the shrewd observation in his hagiography that
Aurobindo never cared much about any of his relatives except his maternal grand­
father. Pramodkumar Sen, Sri Aurobindo: Jioan 0 Yog (Calcutta: Sri Aurobindo
Pathmandir, 1977), pp. 9- 10.
11 Aurobindo quoted in K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo (Calcutta: Arya
Publishing House, 1950), p. 15.
 The Uncolonized M ind 89
palpable darkness speedily descending on to earth an d entering
him . T h e darkness stayed w ith him for the next fourteen years.
A urobindo was seven w hen his parents took him an d two o f
bis brothers to E ngland an d left them there. T h ey were now
to be exposed, n o t to the W esternized life style o f Indians b u t to
the W estern ways o f the English. A t L ondon, the brothers w ere
p u t un d er the tutelage o f an English couple, the R everend an d
M rs D rew ett, w ho w ere given ‘strict instructions’ n o t to allow
the children ‘to m ake the acqu ain tan ce o f any In d ia n or un d er­
go any In d ian influence. T hese instructions w ere carried out to
the le tte r.’34 T h e D rew etts were also told by K rish n ad h an to
spare his sons all religious education. (T he R everend D rew ett’s
m other, however, being m ore consistent in h er C hristian
evangelism, w orried ab o u t A urobindo’s soul. O ne Sunday she
did m anage to get him duly b aptized as a C hristian.)
D uring his days w ith the D rew etts an d la te r a t a n élite school
a t L ondon, A urobindo was exposed to the classical heritage o f
.£ u rope, especially to L atin a n d G reek. H e also ljeg an to w rite
and publish poetry in Latin, G reek and E nglish.86 A fterw ards I
he took a scholarship to T hing’s College, C am bridge, where,
too, he did brilliantly in the classics, w inning all the relevant
prizes for one year. H e also dutifully le a rn t F rench, some
G erm an and Italian . T h ere was still no rebellion in the air.
Scholarly success how ever was no protection against the deep
e c o n o m ic jm d jm rtu ra ljm x ie tie s to w hich A urobindo and his
brothers were som etimes subjected in E ngland. T h e ir father,
though w ealthy, stopped sending them m oney for no clear
reason- A nd the three brothers lived in acute poverty. A dded to
this was A urobindo’s loneliness; he h ad no close relationship
w ith anyone in E ngland.88 T h e result was an ‘in w ard depres­
sion’ w hich in m iddle age A urobindo was once to m ention
MMitra, The Liberator, p. 25.
** The interest in poetry was to persist and Aurobindo’s most creative work was
to remain an English epic, Savitri, which he began writing in his twenties and
completed shordy before his death. Aurobindo considered himself a poet first.
Niradbaran, Sri Aurobindàyan, p. 40.
*• Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 7. Also Aurobindo’s letter to Dilip (1935) quoted in
Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri Aurobindo, p. 19.
 90 The Intim ate Enemy
casually.87 T h e oth er result was m ore predictable. F o r years he
h ad been ta u g h t to view E ngland as an ideal society; now
E ngland was re-invoking his early anxieties associated w ith the
W est.
\ A t last A urobindo began to look for altern ativ e ways o f
handling the O ccid en t an d to defy the m odel o f success as­
sociated w ith the Anglicism o f his fath er.88 T hus, after taking
the first p a rt o f the Classical T ripos w ith a first class, A urobindo
did n o t take th e degree. A nd worse, tho u g h he d id very well in
the In d ia n Civil Service exam ination, he missed th e rid in g test
an d got him self disqualified, know ing fully th a t ‘his fath er was
very p a rtic u la r’ a b o u t the exam ination.8* Finally, A urobindo
delivered a few fiery n atio n alist speeches a t th e In d ia n M ajlis
in C am bridge a n d g o t involved w ith a n in cipient secret society
pursuing th e cause o f In d ia n freedom .
As if to sym bolize his b reak w ith th e W est, A urobindo
dropped th e A ckroyd from his nam e d u rin g this period o f his
stay in E ngland.

A fter fourteen years in E ngland an d after thorough d en atio n al­

ization— the expression was his— A urobindo cam e back to
In d ia. H e found his fa th e r d e a d ; he h a d died h eart-b ro k en on
h earing th e ru m o u r th a t th e ship carrying A urobindo hom e
h ad sunk. A nd A urobindo was soon to find o u t th a t his m other,
now in a n advanced stage o f insanity, could recognize him only
w ith difficulty. H ow ever, by this tim e he was alread y m oving
i tow ards new p aren tal figures. A lready, on touching th e soil o f
In d ia, the darkness th a t h a d h au n te d him since his D aijeeling
: days h ad lifted an d h e h a d h ad th e experience o f being envel-
\ oped by a deep calm a n d silence.40 A fter all, he h a d com e back

MAurobindo, On Himself, p. ao.

** He was helped in this by the traditions of the mother’s side of his family—
Raj Narayan Bose anticipated some of the tenets of Hindu nationalism—and by
his unpredictable father’s other self. Krishnadhan might have faltered on their
allowance, but he did not fail to send his sons in England a nationalist periodical
published from Calcutta, with its accounts of British oppression in India under-
; lined.
** Mitra, The Liberator, p. 26. M Ibid., p. 34.
 The Uncolonized M ind 9i
to his m otherland, toj^am -hw -rnod ier tongue and- ay-WP^shal1
soon find out, to discover th e p rim al authorityof_the_inother.
A urobindo started hisf life in ftaroda ar^T B ureaucrat a n d a
language teacher. H e h a d le a rn t some Bengali an d Sanskrit in
E ngland from a n English sch o lar; h e b ru s ftg Q E ts e u p in
BarodaTan d aiso pjckcdTlp Marathi a n d G ujarati. H e h ad been
always good a t“languages a n d public speaking; now, as he
tu rn ed q u ieter in personal life, he becam e m ore expressive in
his form al com m unication. H e began to w rite for nationalist
jo u rn als an d g radually becam e a m ajor public figure. I t was a t
B aroda again th a t he first found o u t his spiritual powers. O nce
h e saved him self from a n accident w hen a divine, lum inous self
separated itself from his ow n body and took control o f his
horse-draw n carriag e; an o th er tim e he saw a living presence
in an icon o f K ali.
I n 1901, A urobindo g ot m arried. H is bride M rin alin i D evi
was, to go by her fath er’s account, an attractive b u t otherwise
ord in ary girl o f fourteen. She was m ade to p ay for h er o rd in ari­
ness. T hough A urobindo chose h er himself, he was soon to
lose interest in h er— w hen it becam e clear th a t she w ould be
unable to live up to his expectations. M rinalini died childless,
lonely, h eart-broken a n d perhaps unlam ented in 1918, some
years after A urobindo renounced the w orld. By th a t tim e, she
h ad suffered from A urobindo’s long absences from hom e an d
from expectations th a t he w ould com e back a n d take h er into
his new life. T ill the end, she was innocently to try to becom e
acceptable to him th ro u g h h er religious activities, relying on
his vague hints th a t he m ight re tu rn to h er.41 H e never did.
T h e path etic essay w hich h er father w rote after h er d eath ,
though doctored by th e A urobindo A shram , brings o u t the
tragedy o f a sim ple, d o ting wife, crushed by forces o f w hich she
h a d no com prehension.
N either his spiritual quest nor his m arriage stopped A uro­
bindo from being d raw n into the vortex o f th e nationalist

41 Part of an untitled essay by Mrinalini’s father published in Sri Attrobinder

Patra, Mrinalinik» LikhUa (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1977), first ex­
panded edition, pp. 31- 5 ; see p. 33.
92 The Intim ate Enemy
m ovem ent a n d he soon becam e a n im p o rta n t lead er o f th e
groups fighting for the violent overthrow o f British rule. H e
also becam e th e editor o f a n im p o rta n t n ationalist periodical
a n d the principal o f a nationalist college in C alcu tta. S im ulta­
neously, he w orked o u t th e rudim ents o f a p olitiral ideology.
I t was b u ilt aro u n d a vague form o f populism in w hich ‘the
p ro le ta ria t’ was ‘the real key to the situation’“ a n d aro u n d a
m ythography o f In d ia as a pow erful m other, Sakti, w ho was
being oppressed by the W est a n d h ad to be lib erated th ro u g h
blood sacrifices m ade by h er children.
I know my country as Mother. I offer her my devotions, my worship.
If a monster sits upon her breast and prepares to suck her blood, w hat
docs her child do ? Does he quietly sit down to his m e a l. . . or rush to
her rescue? I know I have in me the power to accomplish the deliver­
ance of my fallen country.. . . It is the power of knowledge, Brahnatej
founded in Jnana. This feeling is not new to me . . . with this feeling
I was bom . . . God has sent me to earth to do this w o rk .. . .**
T h e im agery was o f course p artly borrow ed from B ankim -
c h a n d ra C h atteiji, th e first to introduce th e them e o f the g reat
m other into In d ian n ationalism . A urobindo ad m ired Bankim
as m uch for this as for th eK o p e B ankim ’s w ork gave o f being
able to drive o u t the English language, K rish n ad h an ’s beloved
English, from In d ia an d install his mother-tongue a t its place.44

41 Mitra, The Liberator, p. 37.

MSri Aurobinder Patra. Was it the nation which was conceptualized as mother by
Aurobindo or was it a still more primal image of the mother which found expression
in his concept of India? ‘In the unending revolutions of the world, as the wheel of
the Eternal turns rightly in the courses, the Infinite Energy, which streams forth
from the Eternal and sets the wheel to w ork.. . . This Infinite Energy is Bhavani.
She also is Durga. She is K ali; she is Radha the beloved, she is Lakshmi. She is our
mother and creatress of us all. In the present age the mother is manifested as the
Mother of Strength.’ Aurobindo in Bhavani Mandir, translated by Mitra, The
Liberator, p. 48.
A good description of Aurobindo’s political ideology in the context of his times
is in Haridas and Uma Mukherji, Sri Aufobindo's Political Thought ( 1893- 1908)
(Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1958).
44 Aurobindo once proudly said: ‘When a Maratha or Gujarati has anything
important to say, he says it in English; when a Bengali, he says it in Bengali.. . .
English is being steadily driven out of the field. Soon it will only remain to weed
it out of our conversation.’ Indu Prakdi, 33 July 1894. Quoted in Mitra, The
Liberator, p. 47.
 The Uncolonized M ind 93
A urobindo’s revolutionary politics ultim ately lan d ed him in
ja il an d involved him in a prolonged, d ram atic trial on charges
o f sedition.45 H is year in ja il, p articu larly th e tim e spent in
solitary confinem ent, m ade a g reat difference to him spiri­
tually. H e practised yoga, read the G ita a n d th e U panisads,
spoke to V iv ek an an d a over the barriers o f d eath a n d even saw
L ord K rsn a in the ja il. O nce in a w hile he broke th e m onotony
by levitating.46 E ven th e graces for w hich he was m ost thankful
were ones he found in ja il in 1908: ‘th e silence’ an d th e ‘em pti­
ness’.47 F rom th en onw ards, ‘w hatever else cam e, cam e in th e
em ptiness’, a n d he ‘could a t any tim e w ithdraw from activity
into the p u re silent peace.’48
In M ay 1909 A urobindo was acq u itted . Sedition in British
law was fortunately defined by principles com patible w ith the
philosophy o f J o h n Locke, an d w h at in o u r times, following
Isaiah Berlin, we have le a rn t to call th e id ea o f negative
liberty; sedition was n o t defined u n d er the guidance of the
philosophical forebears o f Sigm und F reud, or o f those of this
n arrato r. T hus, the O ed ip al m eanings o f the priv ate crisis o f
au th o rity in K rish n ad h an ’s son— th ro u g h all his political defi­
ance, trial, a cq u ittal a n d conform ity— could rem ain buried
u n d er legal docum ents. O n the o th er h an d , th e governm ent
was n o t taken in by A urobindo’s other-w orldly rhetoric o r by
the co u rt order. T h e th re a t of re-arrest persisted.49 P ro b ab ly J
A urobindo too was n o t taken in by th e liberalism o f British lawJ
H is mysticism h ad a p ragm atic side an d it explicitly included
the secular.60 So, in 1910, on receiving orders ‘from aBove^, he
u He was later to write an account of his jail days and his trial in elegant, witty
Bengali. It was also a brilliant sociological study of British justice in India under
stress. Aurobindo Ghose, ‘KarSkahim’, in Bangld Racana (Pondicherry: Sri
Aurobindo Ashram, 1977), pp. 257- 314.
44 On Himself, p. 68. See also Aurobindo, ‘Karakahiru’; also Niradbaran, Sri
Aurobinddyan.
47 One suspects that he had had them from his earliest years but discovered new,
non-threatening meanings for them.
41 Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 89.
41 Aurobindo had of course expected the acquittal: 'He had been assured from
within and knew that he would be acquitted.’ On Himself, p. 32.
** Aurob’ndo made it clear that his spiritualism had ‘nothing to do with ascetic
withdrawal or contempt or disgust of secular things.’ On Himself, p. 430.
8
94 The Intim ate Enemy
m oved to Pondicherry, th e n a F ren ch colony in In d ia . T h ere
h e started a life as a renujiciate, to th e chagrin o f m any a n d yet,
in a strange w ay, following th e p a th traversed by a n u m b e r o f
th e Bengali terrorists o f his tim e. A sm all b an d o f followers
collected aro u n d him in P ondicherry a n d they lived sim ply an d
inform ally, practising a form o f yoga w hich w ould free n o t only
In d ia b u t everybody everyw here. As A urobindo him self clari­
fied, he now sought brahmatej, b rah m an ic potency o b tain ab le
th ro u g h asceticisms a n d penances, in th e place o f kfdtratej o r
m a rtia l potency.

T h is could be th e end o f th e story, b u t th e W est h a d one m ore

decisive intervention to m ake in A urobindo’s life. I n 1914
M ira P au l R ich ard , a t th a t tim e a n attractiv e F renchw om an
o f thirty-seven, jo in ed A urobindo, leaving b ehind h e r hom e,
h u sb an d an d children. A urobindo an d M ira h a d know n each
o th e r th ro u g h yoga before th ey actually m e t; they h a d been
w orking together since th e daw n o f history to carry on th e
h u m a n evolution.51 (T h o u g h th e ir jo in t w ork h a d sp an n ed
centuries, they still differed in style: A urobindo m ad e all his
claim s p art-m etap h o rically ; M ira m ore literally.82 E ven in
occult m atters she was m ore dow n to earth .) A p p ropriately
enough, she soon took over th e organization o f the A shram an d
w as given th e title Sri M a, th e M o th er, by A urobindo.
T o sta rt w ith, the group a t P ondicherry h a d been a n associa­
tio n o f equals, alb eit w ith a charism atic leader. M ira R ic h a rd
im posed on it form al discipline, a clear h ierarch y a n d ended
its laissez faire am bience.63 N o pretension o f eq u ality was
allow ed an y m o re;64 A urobindo was now th e suprem e guru
a n d the final key to salvation. Sim ultaneously, M ira becam e
his new m eans o f com m unicating w ith this-w orldly others. As
11 Aurobindo, On Himself\ p. 445. Sri Aurobindo, The Mother (Sri Aurobindo
Ashram, 1928, republished 1979).
•* Readers of Bengali might remember Raj Sekhar Bose’s savage satire on such
idioms in his ‘BirincibabS’, Kajjali (Calcutta: M. C. Sarkar and Sons, 1968-9 ),
10th edition, pp. 1- 37.
•* Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 460.
MNiradbaran, Sri Aurobindajan; Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 460.
 The Uncolonized M ind 95
h e p u t it, she h a d ‘to com e dow n tow ards th e low er conscious­
ness’ because m ost people sought a n au th o rity w hich was n o t
too abstract, too d istan t a n d too ‘severe’.66 C onceivably for
th e ir benefit, h e r heavily brocaded figure a n d even m ore
heavily m ade-up face stared dow n from th e walls o f th e A shram
as consistently as A urobindo’s.
W ith th e acceptance o f M ira as his Jakti in 1926, A urobindo
w ithdrew further in to silence an d seclusion; only M ira an d a
few disciples h ad close contacts w ith h im an d m et him regularly.
As for the others, he m ad e four b rie f appearances a year. T h e
rest o f th e tim e he was k ep t busy by his yogic attem p ts to b rin g
dow n th e superm ind to th e e a rth a n d to produce a new race o f
superm en.66 T his seclusion allow ed th e M o th er’s control to
becom e tig h ter an d , after A urobindo’s d eath , absolute; m uch
o f the open-endedness a n d im ag in atio n o f A urobindo’s m ysti­
cism was slowly b u t surely rem oved by her. T h e A shram itself
becam e, un d er her pow erful presence a n d efficient guidance,
highly status-conscious, politically conservative a n d a m eans
o f oppressing th e people aro u n d . A fter A uro b in d o ’s d eath , for
a w hile it even opposed th e decolonization o f Pondichery.*7
Increasingly a n d inevitably, it acquired th e trappings o f a well-
organized m odem cu lt a n d o f a church-as-corporation.
T h e historical reality o f a person, how ever, is never a good
guide to the m eanings th a t are associated w ith th e person.
T hus, for S w arn alata an d K rish n a d h an ’s quiet, unprotesting,
long-suffering son, th e d ep th o f his relationships w ith the pow er­
ful, com m itted w om an from E urope h a d a n altogether
different m eaning. F or him , th e freed E ast h a d a t last m et th e
non-oppressive W est sym bolized by th e M o th er. A nd thence-
MAurobindo, On Himself, p. 450.
MThis idea of the superman had nothing to do with the Nietzschean world
view; Aurobindo’s superman was to carry forward the evolution of consciousness
and be more universal in his orientation and more powerful in his ability to change
the world through spiritual attainments.
•7 Claude Alvares, ‘Sri Aurobindo, Superman or Supertalk’ ? Quest, January-
February 1975 (93), pp. 9- 23, see pp. 10- 11. Alvares provides brief but telling
descriptions of the hostility of the local people and Ashram workers to the Ashram.
He however locates the origins of this in Aurobindo’s philosophy, which he judges
from the point of view of academic philosophy.
g6 The Intim ate Enemy
forth his E ast was incom plete w ith o u t th e M o th er’s W est an d
his W est w as p a rtia l w ith o u t h e r E ast. T h e W est once separated
him from nearness, love a n d .n u rtu re . N ow a p a rt o f th e W est
h a d re tu rn e d to p u t him in touch w ith them . ‘T h ere is one
force only’, he declared, ‘th e M o th er’s force— or, if you like to
p u t it th a t w ay, th e M o th er is Sri A urobindo’s Force.’68 A nd
‘if one is o pen to Sri A urobindo a n d n o t to th e M o th er it m eans
th a t one is n o t really open to Sri A urobindo.’69 G radually, dis­
covering th e E ast in oneself by losing oneself in th e E ast-in-the-
W est becam e a tran scen d en t goal a n d a p ractical possibility.
T h e last stage o f perfection becam e com plete surrender— ‘when
you are com pletely identified w ith the D ivine M o th er a n d feel
yourself to b e no longer an o th er a n d separate being, instrum ent,
servant o r w orker b u t tru ly a child an d etern al p o rtio n o f h e r
consciousness a n d force.’60
P erhaps A urobindo d id after all find a protection against
failures o f in tim acy a n d n u rtu re , against meaningless silence
a n d em ptiness, a n d against the innerm ost separations a n d dis­
ju n ctio n s th e W est h a d in d u ced in him .

V
I t is im possible to read th e life o f A urobindo w ith o u t sensing
th e ‘in n e r’ p a in w hich w ent w ith im perialism in In d ia . M uch
o f th e p a in was inflicted a n d m uch o f th e destru ctio n o f his
cu ltu ra l self u n d ertak en w ithin th ej:onfines ofTiis fam ily. T his
fu rth er ensured th a t his suffering passed as education* u p ­
bringing o r developm ent. I t was a to tal system w hich young
A urobindo h a d to confront. R ebellion in su ch a case was boim d
to seem hopeless a n d the ‘exotic’ altern ativ e he found to it in
m ysticism jw a s p ro h ah ly .the only one available to h im . T h e
challenge w as to Jkeep .the mysticism h u m an e an d politically
nonconform ist. F o r a long tim e A urobindo, w ithin lim its, did
m anage to do th a t. ( I t was th e organizational edge M ira
R ic h a rd b ro u g h t to his spiritualism w hich tu rn e d th e language
MAurobindo, On Himself, p. 458. ** Ibid., p. 458.
*° Aurobindo, The Mother, p. 24.
 The Uncolonized M ind 97
o f spirit in to a m o d em technology o f salvation a n d A urobindo
into In d ia ’s first m o d em gu ru . I t was in th a t guise th a t A uro­
bindo spoke o f ‘in terv en tio n in w orld forces’ th e w ay his co­
professionals today speak o f ‘alliance w ith n a tu ra l law s'. A t
this plane, A urobindo was defeated by the W est.)
T his could be p u t in an o th er w ay. I f A urobindo’s life story
an d his spiritualism w as a statem en t o f p a in it was also a n
in terp erso n al w ithdraw al to p ro tect values w hich he w ould
have h ad to ffiv e u p - i n t h e lig h t o f conven tio n al reason. A nd
echoing F reud on a rt, he could have said, only in spiritualism
has th e om nipotence o f th o u g h t— an d , hence, th e political
potency a n d m oral vision o f th e d om inated— been retain ed in
o u r civilization. I t was an ‘insane’, ‘irra tio n a l’ a tte m p t to p re­
serve th e ideas o f the oneness o f m an, a n d o f m an as a p a rt o f
an organic universe. I n th a t universe, w h at a necrophilic w ar
m achine d id to the R ussians a t S talin g rad o r to th e British a t
D unkirk, called for in terv en tio n by a m iddle-aged B engali yogi
w ho h ad once tried to organize an arm ed rebellion against the
R aj he was now defending. A ll oppression is one a n d each m an
bears his responsibility.

D id A urobindo sym bolize th e larger suffering o f his society

u n d er colonial rule ? D id his a tte m p t to speak in a new language ,
parallel his society’s a tte m p t to express— a n d yet protect—its
secret awareness o f its suffering ? N o final answers are possible
b u t a few guesses can be m ade.
First, to pro tect its self-esteem in the face o f defeat, indignity,
exploitation a n d violence, In d ia n society has indeed evolved a
m odel o f autonom y th a t its victim hood has defined for it. I t
has evolved a theory o f suffering in the form o f a set o f m eta-
p h o rs which speak th ro u g h cu ltu ral ‘absurdides!_and m oral
‘contradictions?: the absurdities w hich spring from an over­
done m oralism , hiding the p ain o f protecting values in a w orld
hostile to such values; the ^contradictions o f a victim whose
w orld has been fractu red by his need to s u m v e a “spHtTautRor-
itv. p a rt tra d ilio n a L a n d p a r T T m p o s a
bank-clerk who secretly w rites poetry an d either hides it from
98 The Intim ate Enemy
a prosaic w orld o r com ically affirms it from th e house-top to
establish his intellectual superiority. T o some, poetry is only
p oetry an d clowns are only clowns an d both should be ju d g e d
as such. T o others, poetry— a n d fooling— could also be a secret
defiance, a reaffirm ation o f th e rig h t state o f m ind in a h ard ,
m asculine, anti-poetic w orld.61 Defiance need n o t alw ays be
self-conscious. I t need n o t b e always backed by th e ard en t,
m urderous, m oral passions in w hich the m onotheistic faiths,
a n d increasingly the m ore m o d em a n d nationalist versions o f
H induism , specialize.“
T o the K iplings an d N aipauls such defiance is a n obfusca­
tion. Especially as it blurs the lines betw een the violent a n d the
non-violent, the victorious a n d the defeated, the past a n d the
present, th e m aterial a n d th e non-m aterial. B ut th e victor,
insecure in his victory, an d th e co u rt poet, insecure in his self-
41 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno’s position on the role of culture in society Minima
Moralia, tram. E. F. N. Jephcott (London:NLB, 1977), pp. 43- 4 ; also Ernst Bloch’s
position in On Karl Marx (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971). This position
emerges even more clearly from the chapter on Bloch by Dick Howard in his The
Marxian Legacy (London: Macmillan, 1977), Chapter 4. Amilcar Cabral places the
argument squarely in the context of modem colonialism when he says in his
'National Liberation and Culture’, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 39- 56, pp. 39- 40:
‘When Goebbels . . . heard culture being discussed, he brought out his revolver.
That shows that the Nazis—who were and are the most tragic expression of im­
perialism and thirst for domination— . . . had a clear idea of the value of culture
as a factor of resistance to foreign dom ination.. . . Whatever may be the material
part of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent, organized
repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.
‘The idea for foreign domination, whether imperialist or not, would be to choose:
'—either to liquidate practically all the population of the dominated country,
thereby eliminating the possibilities of cultural resistance;
'—or to succeed in imposing itself without damage to the culture of the domi­
nated people—that is to harmonize economic and political domination of these
people with their cultural personality.’
The first part of this book is a detailed analysis of this part of the story.
41 In the Western context the avowed aesthete Oscar Wilde, given both to
poetry and to the kind of fooling which in polite society goes by the name of posing,
would have understood this. As a poet he sang of things as they were not; as a
poseur he defied the existent of everyday life. Wilde was a critic not in spite of but
because o f these. See Richard Ellmann, ‘The Critic as Artist as Wilde’, Encounter,
July 1967, pp. 29- 37. Wilde was only actualizing the belief of Ernst Bloch that
‘banality’ is counter-revolutionary.
 The Uncolonized M ind 99
repression, have bo th reasons to absolutize relative differences.
T h e defeated, a n d th e p o et who, heeding A lb ert Camus* injunc­
tion, sings o f th e victim s o f history, have lesser reasons to do so.
XhuaT w h a t looks like obfuscation an d com p rom ise w ith evil
m ay be seen also as a tru e r u n d erstanding o f th e oppressors v £ ,
whose suffering a n d decadence is, for once, tak en seriouoly by
th eir victim s, w ho b ear th e responsibility o f being b o t h t h e ^
subject a n d th e object o f ‘history!.*8 W h a t looks like a failure to
m ake cognitive distinctions m ay in fact b e a recognition th a t
th e p o p u lar m oderji_aiitonym s_are n o t always th e tru e o p ­
posites. T his cen tu ry has sh o w n ^ th at in every H ttratitm o f
organized oppression th e tru e antonym s are always th e ex­
clusive p a rt versus th e inclusive w hole— n o t m asculinity versus
fem ininity b u t eith er o f th em versus androgyny, n o t th e p ast
versus th e present b u t eith er o f th em versus the timelessness in
w hich th e p ast is th e present a n d th e present is th e p ast, n o t
th e oppressor versus th e oppressed b u t b o th o f th em versus the
ratio n ality w hich tu rn s th em in to co-victims.
I n his ow n o d d w ay, A urobindo d id try to recognize this on
b e h a lf o f his culture. T o trivialize b o th th e English language
a n d th e categories popularized by nineteen th -cen tu ry W estern
social criticism , one could p erhaps say th a t in th e chaos called
In d ia th e opposite o f thesis is n o t th e antithesis because they
exclude each o th er. T h e tru e ‘enem y’ o f th e thesis is seen to b e '
Its*
in th e synthesis because it includes th e thesis a n d ends the
J U' < <V
la tte r ^ reasorTfor being. I t is S a n & a V V e d a n ta ^ 'c a rry in g the
clear im press o f B uddhism , w hich finished B uddhism as a living
faith in In d ia, a n d n o t either B riihm anic orthodoxy o r any
state-sponsored anti-B uddhist ideology.*4 Successfully o r un-
** This may sound like a sentence borrowed from George Lukács. But it is cer­
tainly not aa attempt to place the sufferer’s understanding of the human predica­
ment outside culture and outside time. The formulation is closer to some readings \ y
of the works o f Antonio Gram*ci within the Marxist framework. '
14 By only slightly stretching Madhav Deshpande’s analysis, the idea of synthesis
here can be made into what VedSnta and Bhafta Mim&msS. call ‘a higher order
cognition’ which can prove false an earlier valid cognition (JxtraUA aprdmdyyam
and svatah pramdvyam). See Deshpande’s 'History, Change and Permanence: A
Classical Indian Perspective’, in Gopal Krishna (ed.), Contributions to South Asian
Studiu 1 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 1- 28; particularly p. 3.
 IO O The Intim ate Enemy
successfully, A urobindo d id try to evolve such a response to the
W est.
O nly prolonged victim hood could give d ep th to such a view
o f life, even w hen the view happens to be rooted in an cien t
wisdom a n d in h erited cosmology. O nly the victim s o f a culture
o f hyper-m aseulinity, adulthood, histoncism , 6bjectivism , an d
hypernorm ality protect themselves b y sim ultaneously conform -
jngtcTtlTF ^ e i e o t ^ e oT thtrrtri^^I)y.Q vef-^ressIhgthose aspects
o f the self w hjch they share w ith th e pow erful, an d b y pro-
IteciihgTnT the co m er of th eir h e a rt a secret defiance w hich
|re d u c e sto a b su rd ity T H e victor’s concept o f th e defeated and
is unspoken frelieffh at Tie is m orally and~cuTtuicaIly superior to
his subjects, cau g h t on the w rong side o fK sto ry .
A lmost unw ittingly I seem to have com e back to (Sandhi w ho
was one o f th e few who successfully articu lated in politics the
consciousness w hich h ad rem ained u n tam ed by B ritish rule in
In d ia . H e transform ed th e d eb ate on In d ia n hypocrisy into a
^ i i n u fian eoug te x t o n B ritish sflf-doubt. I n spite o f His oc­
casionally strid en t m oralism , he recognized th a t once the hege­
m ony o f a theory o f im perialism w ith o u t w inners an d losers was
established, im perialism Jhad lost o u t on cognitive, in ad d itio n
ethical, grounds. T o jth e jC iplings this-w as a th reaL -T h ev
likecTtoliee colonialism as a m oral statem ent on the superiority
o f some cultures a n d inferiority o f others. F o r this reason, they
were even w illing to accept th a t some h ad the rig h t to speak o f
the superiority o f In d ia n culture over th e W estern. C u ltu ral
relativism by itself i s n o t incom patible..w ith im perialism , as
long as one cu ltu re’s categories harked by p olitical, eco­
nom ic an d technological pow er.
G an d h i queerecTEhe p itch a t tw o planes. H e ad m itted th a t
colomalfenT was a m oral issue a n d took tKe b a ttle to K ipling’s
I hom e g ro u n d b y ju d g in g colonialism by C hristian Tatue» an d
/ | declaring it to be an absolute evil. A t the second planeThe m ade
1his *o3 d ’ cognitive assessment* o f th e gains a n d losses from
colonialism a p a rt o f his critique o f m odernity a n d found the
British w anting i n b o th ethics an d rationality. T h is th reaten ed
the in tern al legitim acy o f th e.niljng~7rnTfnite by splitting open
' the private w ound o f every K ipling an d quasi-K ipling to wh om
 The Uncolonized M ind IOI
riilprship was a m eans of h id in g one’s m oral self in th e-aam e o f
the-bighftf-m n rality n f history, in tu rn seen as a n em bodim ent
o f h u m a n ratio n ality . A naive F rench im perialist once said in
th e context o f A frica:
I know that I must takepride in my blood. When a superior man ceases to believe
himself\ he actually ceases to be superior.. . . When a superior race ceases
to believe itself a chosen race, it actually ceases to be a chosen race.**
e a n d m oral fram es o f this

I n this respect he dittered from th e o th er anti-K iplings to

w hom colonialism was a m oral statem ent. T h e final m orality
to them , too, was ‘history’ a n d th e im m orality o f colonialism
for them , too, was m itigated by th e historical role o f colonialism
as a n in stru m en t o f progress. E ith er th ro u g h a c u ltu ra l renais­
sance set off by th e im p act o f a m ore vigorous cu ltu re (as
m any o f th e n inteenth-century social an d religious reform ers in
In d ia a n d recent m odernists in o u r tim es have described
it) or th ro u g h th e grow th o f m o d em capitalism on th e w ay to
full-blow n liberalism or com m unism (à la th e utilitarians an d
K a rl M arx), th e m odem id ea o f history has im plicitly ac-1
cep ted th e cu ltu ral superiority— or a t least th e m ore advanced j
cu ltu ral state— o f the colonizing pow er.6* I t has thus endorsed
M Psichari-Soldier-of-Africa, quoted in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism,
trans. Joan Pin1tham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), p. 29. Italics in
the original.
** Among Indians, elements of such an awareness can be found for example in.
Rammohun Roy, The English Works, vols. I-V I, ed. Kalidas Nag and Debo-
jyoti Burman (Calcutta: Sadharon Brahmo Samaj, 1945- 8); Bankimchandra
Chatteiji, Racanàoalï, vols. 1 and 2 (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1958) (see especially
‘Ànandamatfi’, pp. 715- 88); Swami Vivekananda, Prâcya o Pâicâtya (Almora:
Advaita Ashrama, 1898) ; and Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown
Indian (London: Macmillan, 1951). O f these, Rammohun Roy and Bankimchandra
Chatteiji do not fully fit the bill. The former, particularly, lived and worked at a
time when one could think of incorporating the ideas of science, history and prog­
ress as forces of criticism within Indian traditions. He could not visualize an
epoch when modernity would take over the world and marginalize all non­
modem cultures as well as the nonmodem West. He was a product of an age
which was culturally more self-confident. To a lesser extent, these arguments
apply to Chatteiji, too.
Cabral has expressed similar sentiments in the context of Africa. See his ‘Identity
and Dignity in the Context of National Liberation Struggle’, Return to the Source,
PP- 57-69-
 102 The Intim ate Enemy
one o f th e m ajor axiom s o f th e colonial theory th e K iplings
advanced. -As against this, G an d h i reaffirm ed a n autonom ous
o rld view w hich refused to separate facts Iro m values j r f d
ejusedTto see colonialism as a n im m oral p ath w ay to a v a lu ed
fi
ta te o f being. In stead o f m eeting the W estern criterio n o f a
r ue antagonists-1^ j ^ ^ n o n ^ o d e ra In d ia n re a d ing-
th e m odern W est as one o f th e m any possible life styles w hich
lad^uH ibrttffialeiy for b o tE lh e W est a n d In d ia , becom e can -
<erous by v irtu e o f its disproportionate pow er a n d spread.

I t is this aw areness w hich is th e strongest— a n d th e strangest—

enem y o f m odernity in In d ia n traditions, n eith er th e ‘radical*
critiques o f W est n o r th e aggressive affirm ation o f Indianness.
^M odernity, like m odem science, could live w ith everything
except a n a tte n u a te d status a n d a lim ited, non-proselytizing
ia l role for it.
le aw areness has allow ed b o th insiders a n d outsiders to
define o r redefine In d ia a n d y et refused to force th e non­
m o d em In d ia n to alter his priorities to prove o r disprove th e
cross-sectional ideas o f In d ia held by In d ian s a n d n o n -In d ian s.
T his is th e nthgr^w ay by w hich th e ry ltu re has p ro tected its
core— by using th e dialectic betw een th e cojatinuom a tte m p t b y
som e sm all groups a n d pers o n sjo define Indianness a n d large
groups to live th eir life as if such definitions w ere irreleV antr-it
iT true th a t tra d itio n a liy lh e m ain instances u f In d ia n creatfvity,
often th e m ain expressions o f Indianness, have com e from those
aspects o f In d ia n consciousness w hich are nationally a n d cul­
tu rally less self-conscious. B ut it is also tru e th a t they c a n com e,
less frequently, from th e m argins o f th e culture, from am o n g
those w ho can cap tu re in th e ir personal life or in th e ir self-
expression som ething o f this cu ltu ral tension betw een self­
definition an d unselfconsciousness.67
•7 I once worked on two Indian scientists and their models of endogenous
scientific creativity. One of them, Srinivasa Ramanujan, fell in the first category;
the other, Jagadis Chandra Bose, in the second. At the time I wrote my book, my
sympathy was mainly with Ramanujan. He seemed to need protection from the
modem world. He was less contaminated by that world but, for that very reason,
innocent about it while Bose, with his subtle intellectual antennae, could at least
manipulate his way through. I am no longer sure of this. Ramanvyan was not
 The Uncolonized M ind 103

T he w ord ‘H in d u ’, T . N . M ad an has again recently rem inded

us, was first used by th e M uslim s to describe all Indians w ho!
were n o t co n v erted -to Islam . O n ly in recent tim es have th e I
H indus begun to describe themselves as H indus.68 T hus, the
very expression has a b uilt-in co n trad ictio n : to-aise the le rm \
H in d u to selfcdefjnp is in-flo n t »h r fiflf-ijgfinjtinn o f I
th e H in d u , a n d to assert aggressively one’s H induism is to very \
nearly deny one’s H induness. (R a b in d ra n a th T a g o re ’s novel
Gora, possiBly based on the life o f the turn-of-the-century
nationalist-revolutionary, B rah m ab an d h ab U padhyay, rem ains
a m agisterial study o f the n atu re o f this com prom ise and the
underlying cu ltu ral a n d psychological dilem m a in the In d ian
middle-classes.69) F ortunately, m ost H indus have lived w ithout
such self-consciousness for centuries. T h ey certainly did not
need a n exclusive concept of H induism till th e nineteenth
century w hen some m odernist H in d u religious reformers
th o u g h t otherw ise. T hey are the ones w ho tried, in response to
th e faith o f th eir m artial rulers, to indirectly C hristianize w hat
they saw as em asculated H induism . A ppropriately, these
m odern H indus saw contem porary H induism n o t as perm a­
nently inferior to th e Sem itic creeds b u t as a once-great-but-
now-fallen religion w hich h ad possibilities. So they tried to
im prove the H indus a n d m odernize th eir faith. T h ey sought a
sense o f com m unity as H indus a n d a sense o f history as a
com m unity.70
especially vulnerable after all, I found. Nor was Bose particularly inauthentic; the
cultural problems he dealt with in his science were real and immediate. And he,
too, was vulnerable. As he negotiated his way through the ruthless world of modern
science, he had to cope with the hostility which the liminal man always arouses as
opposed to the proper alien. Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenti­
city in Two Indian Scientists (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1980).
*8 ‘The Quest for Hinduism’, International Social Science Journal, 1977, 19(2),
pp. 261- 78. The psychological counterpart of such open-ended, fluid, cultural
self-definition is the ‘liquid’ reality of the self McKim Marriott speaks about. See
his ‘The Open Hindu Person and Interpersonal Fluidity’, unpublished paper
presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, 1980.
•* Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Racandvali (Calcutta: West Bengal Govern­
ment, 1961), pp. 1- 350.
70 See Part One in this book. See also my ‘Psychology of Communalism’,
The Times of India, 19 February 1978; and ‘Relearning Secularism’, The Times of
India, 20, 21, and 22 February 1981.
104 Tfo Intim ate Enemy
F o r b e tte r o r for worse, m ainstream In d ia n culture has
le a rn t to deal w ith political defeat an d instability differently.
T h e sense o f com m unity or history w hich comes from a n
overlap betw een religion a n d nationhood has never been a n
im p o rta n t constituent o f In d ia n selfhood. T h e culture has
m ostly rejected th e n atio n al self-consciousness w hich the
m ode m W est has tried to foist on it, often th ro u g h In d ia ’s own
m odern spokesmen. I n s te a d ^ jh e ^ ^ tu r^ p r^ter.ts itself— against
cosmologies w hich a re~proselytizing, hegem onistic and com-
miM tT to ~ jnmR secular o r no n s e ^ a r . .theories o f cultural
evolution—by projecting th e id ea th a t th e In d ia n is com ­
prom ising f h e li^ ^ ilu i^ js e lf - d e f ih itiQ a , and-hfc-isjMolling to
leanTThe ways o f his civilized b reth ren unconditionally, pro­
vided such learn in g is profitable. Some cu ltu ral traits can be
used^both a ^ ethnopsychological categories a n d as p rotective.
^tereotyges^^lTiuSj^ike^om e o th er cu ltu re sc a u g K t in an op­
pressive system, the In d ia n too does n o t protest, conform ing to
th e do m in an t concept o f m asculine protest, p articularly if the
cost is too high.71 B ut he retains his la te n t rebelliousness and
turns even th e stan d ard stereotypes others have o f him into
effective screens a n d m eans o f survival. T h e alternative to
H in d u nationalism is the peculiar m ix o f classical and folk
H induism and th e unselfconscious H induism by w hich most
Indians, H indus as well as n on-H indus, live. I t is th a tlim in a U ^
w hich K ipling resented. I t is th a t lim inality o rt^ h ic E ^ th e
greatest o f In d ia n social a n d political leaders b u ilt their self­
definition as Indians over th e last two centuries.72
N o b etter exam ple can be given th a n th a t o f the ‘comic’ and
‘ab su rd ’ m ix o f the folksy a n d th e canonical, an d o f the ‘hypo­
critical’ mix o f effective protest an d the ‘m inim um gesture of
protest’ in the political style o f G an d h i, a m an sometimes
com pared to C harles C h ap lin a n d M icky M ouse less seriously
th a n one wishes. G eneral J a n H . Sm uts (1870-1950), South
71 Cf. E. D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York:
Pantheon, 1970); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.
71 These leaders have partially coped with the problem of non-critical traditions
in India which Pratima Bowes seems to pose in her The Hindu Intellectual Tradition
(New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1977).
 The Uncolonized M ind 105
African prim e m inister and one o f G an d h i’s staunchest enemies
and adm iring friends, unw ittingly ad m itted th e pow er of this
mix in a tired , exasperated com m ent on G an d h i’s dep artu re
from South Africa. ‘T h e saint has left our shores’, he said, ‘I
sincerely hope for ever.’ A nd here is R ich ard L an n o y ’s de­
scription o f the S alt M arch , b u ilt on snippets g arnered from a
num ber o f sources. I hope it provides a clue to the exasperation
o f bo th Sm uts a n d his brain-children in m odern In d ia w ith a
m an an d a m ethod w hich rejected n o t m erely kfdtratej b u t
also, it seems, brahmatej:

The Salt M arch makes its point through richly tragi-comic in­
cident^) . . .
Gandhi marches for twenty-four days from his ashram in Ahmedabad
to Dandi, 241 miles distant on the seashore, there to pick up salt in
defiance of the Salt Laws imposed with crushing effect on the Indian
peasant by the British Raj. After defying the laws he withdraws from
the action. . . .
Behind the Salt M arch lie years of patient preparation.. . . The
Satyagrahis are taught how to obtain strength through perfect weak­
ness, or, if one likes, how to do nothing. . . . In a tropical climate salt is
a staple food; Gandhi had already renounced the eating of salt for
six years. In advance, he announces his intention to break the law
himself by writing to his ‘Dear friend’ the Viceroy of India, Lord
Irwin. . . .
The image of Gandhi marching in a loin-cloth to the seashore with a
motley band of seventy-eight workers set on picking up a pinch of salt
is deceptively anachronistic, even in 1930. The march was to last
sufficient time for the eyes of India and the world to be riveted on the
frail old man of sixty-one plodding on under a merciless March
s u n .. . . ‘O n the Salt M arch he fully entered the world of the news­
reel and documentary. Henceforth we have many glimpses of him
flickering in black and white, a brisk, mobile figure, with odd but
illuminating moments of likeness to Charlie Chaplin’ (Ashe). As
Gandhi Marched, behind him ‘the administration was silently crum­
bling as three hundred and ninety village headmen resigned their
posts’ (Ashe).
. . . ‘And there was Gandhi, walking along, with his friends round
him, it was a sort of terrific anti-climax. There was no cheering, no
great shouts of delight, and no sort of stately procession at all, it was
all rather, in a sense rather farcical. . . there I was, seeing history
 io6 The Intim ate Enemy
happen in a strange anti-climax way: something completely un-
European and yet very, very moving’ (Bolton).
When they reached Dandi they camped for seven days, eating parched
grain, half an ounce of fat, and two ounces of sugar daily. On 6 April
Gandhi rose at dawn, took his bath in the sea, and then walked over
to the natural salt deposits. Photographers at the ready, he picked up
a treasonable pinch of salt and handed it to a person standing at his
side. Sarojini Naidu cried out, ‘Hail deliverer!’ and then he went
back to his work.
The news flashed round the world and within days India was in
turmoil; millions were preparing salt in every corner of the land. Vast
demonstrations were held in every large city in the country, from
Karachi to Madras. Women in purdah mounted demonstrations in
the streets. Like automata, the British administration responded with
blind and incoherent action of extreme violence. The army and police
moved as if hypnotized into a response from which all meaning had
vanished. Indians were beaten, kicked in the groin, bitten in the
fingers, and fired on by vindictive constables. They were charged by
cavalry until they lay on the ground at the horses’ feet.. . . Between
60,000 and 100,000 non-violent resistors went to jail. Save for one
small incident at Chittagong, Bengal, no Indian struck a violent blow.
Gandhi was arrested after midnight sleeping under a tree in camp
near Dandi and sent to jail. O n his release eight months later he
concluded the Gandhi-Irwin pact, after which the government
abandoned its repressive measures and released political prisoners.
This was the occasion when . . . Nehru wept.
. . . Louis Fischer concludes his account of the Salt March with a
crisp comment: ‘India was now free. Technically, legally, nothing
had changed.’78
A t some plane, L annoy has cau g h t th e spirit o f the ‘halting,
stop-go’ style o f creative politics in In d ia :
Everything is for ever going wrong, in Satyagraha as in the myths.
Y e t,. . . one cannot help drawing the conclusion that Gandhian
Satyagraha is peculiarly well suited to permit the transformation of
setbacks into what Zimmer describes as ‘miraculous development’,
jolting the movement from crisis to crisis. Zimmer ascribes this familiar
‘muddling through’ in the Puranic myths to insight into the essential
71 Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree, pp. 400- 7; Geoffrey Ashe, Gandhi: A
Study in Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 286; Glomey Bolton in Francis
Watson and Maurice Brown (eds.), Talking qf Gandhiji (London: Longmans,
Green, 1957), pp. 58-9 . Italics in original.
 The Uncolonized M ind 107
nature of the contending forces.. . . Ultimately, this rests on . . . ac-:
ceptance of suffering.. . . Under certain Indian conditions this ‘pas­
sivity’ is probably more effective.. . .74
L et m e sum u p in th e words o f a n English c h aracter from A
Passage to India w ho says, perhaps influenced by h e r experience
in In d ia, ‘there are m any kinds o f failure, some o f w hich suc­
ceed.’

T h e differentia o f In d ia n cu ltu re has often been sought by

social analysts, including this w riter, in the uniqueness o f cer­
ta in cu ltu ral them es or in th eir configuration. T his is n o t a
false trail, b u t it d oes lead to s o m e h alf-tm ths. O n e o f them is
th e clear line draw n, on b eh alf o f th e In d ian , betw een the past
an d the present, the native a n d the exogenous, a n d the H in d u
a n d the n on-H indu. B ut, as I have suggested, the W est th a t is
aggressive is sometimes inside; th e earnest, self-declared native,
too, is often a n exogenous category, and th e H in d u w ho a n ­
nounces him self so, is n o t th a t H in d u after all. P ro b ably the
uniqueness o f In d i*" n iltn rp )ies n o t sn rrm rh in a u nique
ideology as in the society’s tra d itio n a l^abiUtv~ftr live With cul-
tu ra l am biguities and to usf^them to build psychological an d
even m etaphysical defences against cultural invasions. P ro­
bably, the culture itself dem ands th a t aT S rtaih perm eability o f
Krmr|Haripg hp in rme’^ Sf)f-tmage a n d th a t th e S e lf f
.be n o t defined too tightly or separated me^h 11 j
,not-self. T his is the oth er side o f the strategy o f survival— the
clue to In d ia ’s post-colonial w orld view— wliich I have dis­
cussed above.
I rem em ber Iv a n Illich once recounting how a g roup o f
fifteenth-century A ztec priests w ho, herded together as sorcerers
by their Spanish conquerors, said in response to a C hristian
serm on th a t if as alleged the A ztec gods w ere dead, they too
w ould ra th e r die. A fter this last a c t o f defiance, the priests were
dutifully throw n to the w ar dogs. I suspect I know how a group
o f B rahm an priests w ould have behaved u n d e r th e sam e cir­
cum stances. All o f them w ould have em braced C hristianity a n d
u Lannoy, Tht Sptakmg Tru, pp. 404- 5.
 10 8 The Intimate Enemy
•some o f them w ould have even co-authored an elegant praiasti
to praise the alien rulers an d their gods. N ot th a t they w ould
have becom e good C hristians overnight. M ost probably their
faith in H induism w ould have rem ained unshaken and their
C hristianity w ould have looked after a while dangerously like
a variation on H induism . B ut u n d er the principle o f apaddharma,
or the way o f life u n d e r perilous conditions, an d the principle o f
oneness o f every being— the m etaphysical correlate o f w hat a
w ell-intentioned F reu d ian m odernist has called projective ex­
traversión born o f extrem e narcissism 75— they w ould have felt
perfectly justified in bow ing dow n to alien gods a n d in overtly
renouncing their cu ltu re and their past. T h e H in d u s have tra d i­
tionally felt b u rd en ed w ith the responsibility o f protecting their
civilization n ot by being self-conscious, Jbut Jby securing a
m ythopoetic u n derstanding— an d thus n eutralizing— the mis-
Sionary zeal o fth e ir conquerors. W h atIrtn kslike Wpstp-rnizatinn
___js often only a m eans dLdpm esticatin^ th e WesT^so me tim es by
reducin g th«* W est tr> W p I o f thp rnm ic a n d th e triv ial. As
the H in d u P uranas repeatedly seem to suggest, blind, straight
courage is all rig h t for individual piety an d im m ortality, not
for ensuring collective survival.76 A nd there is also perhaps the
feeling, legitim ized by m ore canonical texts, th a t the D ionysian
.can be in tern alized a n d then contained by the wise. I t need n o t
be always fought as a n outside force.
Tastu sarvani bhutani atmanyevanupasyati
Sarvabhutefu catmdnam tato na vijugup/ate77

A t a m ore m u n d an e plane, o ur hypothetical B rahm ans w ould

be splitting their personalities. T o them , the conversion an d
75 Philip Spratt, Hindu Culture and Personality (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1966).
7* For instance, it is possible to read the political and social choices of Kf?na
in the Mahabharata entirely along these lines. Probably the more significant clue
is the traditional responsibility for sustenance and protection of the Brahmans and
the responsibility for disjunctive, normative creativity given to renunciators like
Aurobindo. On this see Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1970).
77 ‘He who sees every being in his own self and sees himself in every other being,
he, because of this vision, abhors nothing.’ ‘Isopani?ad’, in Atulchandra Sen (ed.),
Upanifad (Calcutta: Haraf, 1972), pp. 130- 55; see especially p. 138.
 The Uncolonized M ind 109
th e h u m iliation w ould be h ap p en in g to a self w hich is already
seen a n d felt as somebody else o r as som ebody else’s. T his is a
self from w hom one is alread y som ew hat abstracted a n d
alienated. Such splitting o f one’s self, to p ro tect one’s sanity
an d to ensure survival, m akes th e subject a n object to him self
a n d disaffiliates th e violence a n d th e hum iliation he suffers
from th e ‘essential constituent* o f his self.78 I t is an a tte m p t to
survive by inducing in oneself a psychosom atic state w hich
w ould ren d er one’s im m ediate context p a rtly dream like or
unreal. Because, ‘in order to live a n d stay h u m an , the survivor
m ust be in th e w orld b u t n o t o f it.*79 (In th e final analysis, this
has been one o f the m ajor psychological responses o f In d ian
spiritualism to the W est, w hatever be its m etaphysical content.
U sing th e ancient distinction betw een w h at could be called th e
existential consciousness o r atman a n d th e a ttrib u te conscious­
ness, w hich m o d em psychologists m ainly study, m ost schools o f
In d ia n spiritualism give m eaning to a controlled in n er schism
w hich, instead o f th reaten in g m ental health, contributes to a
peculiar ro bust realism . I t helps one, to use A n an d a C oom ara-
sw am y’s language in a n altogether different sense, to m aster
fate an d transcend necessity a n d to ‘becom e the Spectator o f
all tim e an d all things’.80) F o r all we know, the In d ia n ’s alleged
w eak grasp on reality, his w eak ego, his easy transference to
political authorities a n d his vague presence in social situations—
howsoever deeply rooted in trad itio n al child rearing they m ay
71 Confronting a concentration camp for the first time, psychiatrist Elie Cohen
found himself resorting to a similar splitting. See his Human Behaviour in the Concert*
tration Camp, trans. M. H. Braaksma (New York: Norton, 1953), p. 116, quoted
in Terence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camp (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 82. The idea of the ‘essential constituent of the
self* is Erving Goffman’s. It has meanings similar to the more loosely defined idea
of the core of Indianness vised in this analysis. See Goffman’s Asylums: Essays on the
Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Chicago: Aldine, 1962), p. 319.
Goffman calls this entire process 'secondary adjustment’. It involves the rejection
o f the self imposed by a total institution or situation.
71 Des Pres, The Survivor, p. 99.
•• Ananda K. Cdomaraswamy, 'On the Indian and Traditional Psychology, or
Rather Pneumatology’, Selected Papers, vol. 9 : Metaphysics, ed. Roger Lipsey
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) pp. 333- 78, see especially pp. 365,
377-
9
if ' 1 b o The Intim ate Enemy
\ seem to be— are also th e^isescap ab le iogiG o f a c u l t u r e ex-
' pcriencigg prnhlegis o f survival over generations. T o fit th e
logic to the experience o f an o th er viGtim a t an o th er tim e, these
‘personality failures’ o f th e In d ia n could be an o th er form o f
developed vigilance, o r sharpened instinct o r faster reaction to
m an-m ade suffering.81 T h ey com e n o t from *a fundam ental
submissiveness to a u th o rity ’ w hich breaks th ro u g h some o f
K ipling’s m ore sham eless apologia for the E m pire, b u t from a
certain ta le n t for a n d faith in life.8* T o borrow a picturesque
im age from K ip lin g ’s account o f his ow n oppressed childhood
in E ngland, some people are fated to live long stretches o f tim e
like h u n ted anim als a n d to keep th eir senses p erpetually on th e
alert to escape from th e toils o f th e hunters.8*
Ever since th e m o d ern W est’s encounter w ith th e non-
W estern w orld, th e response o f th e A ztec priets has seem ed to
th e W esternized w orld th e p arag o n o f courage a n d cu ltu ral
p rid e; th e hypothetical response o f the B rahm an priests hypo­
critical a n d cow ardly. B ut the question rem ains w hy every
im perialist observer o f th e In d ia n society has loved In d ia ’s
m artial races a n d h a te d a n d felt th reaten ed by th e rest o f
In d ia 's 1etfem lnate^~ lnen'w illing to com prom ise w ith th eir
victors ? W h a t is it in th e .la tte r th a t Kas arousecTsuch a n ti­
p a th y ? W hy should they m a tte r so mucH lo the^conquerers o f
I n c d a if they are so triv ial ? W hy could they so effortlessly be­
com e th e antonym s o f th eir n ilers? W hy hav e so m an y m odem
In d ian s shared this im perialist estim ation? W hy have they felt
p ro u d o f those w ho fought o u t a n d lost, an d n o t o f those w ho
lost o ut an d fought?
A t one plane th e answ er is sim ple. T h e A ztec priests after
th eir last a c t o f courage die a n d they leave th e stage free for
J th ree wfr'Q kill th em a n d th en sing th eir p ra ise ^ the i inheroic
In d ia n response ensures th a t p a rt o f th e stage always rem ains
11 Halina Birenbaum, Hop* is the Last to Die, trans. David Welsh (New York:
Twayne, 1971), p. 103, quoted in Des Fret, Tht Survivor, p. 87.
** Cf. Gita Sereny, Into That Darkness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974)1 P* I®3*
** Stalky's Reminiscences (London, 1928), pp. 30- 1, quoted in Edmund Wilson,
T h e Kipling that Nobody Read*, p. 22.
 The Uncolonized M ind i n

occupied by th e ‘cowardly* a n d Jhe-lGom premisinff* w ho may

some oppo rtu n e m om ent assert th eir presence. Arid then,
there is th e ad d ed advantage th a t th e A ztec priests set a good
precedent for— an d endorsed th e w orld view o f—the low er
classes o f th e colonial societies w hich have to serve as the
foot=soldier£ o f colonialism . T h ere is, thus, a vested interest in
th e simphTrouraprF o f iftfr A rtec p rie sts ^ - ------------------
B uT another answ er to th e question can also be given. I t is
th a t the average In d ia n has always lived w ith th e awareness
an d pos&iblity o f long-term suffering, always seen him self as
protecting his deepest faith w ith the passive, ‘fem inine’ cunning
o f the w eak an d th e victim ized, a n d surviving o u ter pressures
by refusing to overplay his sense o f autonom y an d self-respect.
A t his heroic best, he is a satyagrahi, one w ho forges a partly-
coercive w eapon called saty ag rah a o u t o f w h at L annoy calls
‘perfect weakness’. I n his non-heroic ordinariness, he is the
arch ety p al survivor. Seem ingly he m akes all-round com pro­
mises, b u t he refuses to be psychologically sw am ped, co-opted
o r p en etrated . D efeat, his response seems to say, is a disaster
a n d so are th e im posed ways o f the victor. B ut worse is th e loss
o f one’s ‘soul’ an d the internalization o f one’s victor, because
it forces one to fight th e victor according to th e victor’s values,
w ithin his m odel o f dissent. B etter to be a com ical dissenter th an
to be a pow erful, serious b u t acceptable opponent.84 B etter to
be a h a te d enem y, declared unw orthy o f an y respect w hat­
soever, th a n to be a p roper opponent, constantly m aking
‘p rim ary adjustm ents’ to th e system.85
I n o rd er to tru ly live, th e inviolable core o f Indianness seems
to affirm, it m ight be som etim es b e tte r to be dead in som ebody
else’s eyes, so as to be alive for one’s ow n self. I n o rd er tojaccept
oneself, one m ust learn to hold in tru st ‘w e a k n esses1 to^w hich
M It is interesting that organized Islam in India has always feared losing its
identity. The dominant ideology of Islam in India has always been confident that
it could hold its own against Hinduism in statecraft and in martial prowess; it
has always feared being overwhelmed or swamped by the slow, soporific sedativity
of everyday Hinduism. This has never been the fear of folk Islam because it shares
the world view of folk Hinduism to a great extent.
“ Goffinan, Asylums.
112 The Intim ate Enemy

VI
national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.
Amilcar Cabral“
In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human
Jringdom, define or be defined.— -
Thomas Szasz'7
T hose w ho have f o u n d l h e foregoing a loose-ended, old-style
n arrativ e m ay read t h ^ posts c n p ra s th e m o ra l o fth e stofy.
I have exam ined, u n d e r different ru b n c ^ T o u r ¥ets o f polar-
itiesjyvhich have inform ed m ost discourses on the E ast and the
W est in colonial a n d post-colonial times. T hese polarities a r e :
th e universal versus th e p aroehia l^ th c m aterial (or th e realistic)
versus th e spiritual (or th e unrealistic), the achieving (or the
perforxfiiilgJ v o i u s^the non-achieving (or th e non^perfbrm ing),
a n d th e sane versus th e insane.88 I have also touched upon a
fifth set w hich cuts acrossTthese four: a self-conscious.vfrell-
(difined Indianness versus a fluid open self-definitio n .~At one
plane, I have tried to s h o w lh a t th e tw o e n d so fth e se polarities
m eet if th e cen tral problem is ra p in g w ith— or resistance to—
** Cabral, 'National Liberation and Culture’, p. 43. Italics in me original.
tT Thomas S. Szasz, The Second Sin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974),
p. so.
" T h e last two polarities may not be as disparate if we remember Michel
Foucault’s formulation that the confinement of the insane and the confinement of
the criminal were both related to the confinement of the idle, that is o f those who
defied the'oppression of modern industrial work. See Madness and Civilization: A
History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock,
1971), Chapter 2 ; and Discipline andPunish, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmandaworth:
Penguin, 1978), particularly Part 3. Szasz writes in The Second Sin, p. 89:
'Among persons categorized as mentally ill, there are two radically different
types which are systematically undifferentiated by psychiatrists and hence con­
fused by them. One is composed of the inadequate, unskilled, lazy, or stupid; in
short, the unfit (however relative this term might be). The other of the protestors,
the revolutionaries, those on strike against their relatives or society; in short, the
unwilling.
'Because they do not differentiate between these two groups, psychiatrists often
attribute unfitness to unwillingness, and unwillingness to unfitness.*
 The Uncolonized M ind ” 3
oppression an d n o t the scholarly_understanding o f a civiliza­
tio n . A t an o th er plane, I have tried to show th a t the parochial, I
the spiritual, the non-perform ing an d the insane can sometimes 1
tu rn o u t to be b e tte r versions o f the universal, the realistic, the I
efficient an d the sane.
A t neither o f the planes, however, have I tried to reverse the
stan d ard stereotypes to create a neo-rom ^ntic ideology o f the
rational, theTirythic o r th e renunciatory. N or have I tried to
legitimizeTHe populist im agery o f an all-know ing com m on m an.
M y concerns h e re ar^fu n h ero ic ra th e r th a n heroic and em ­
pirical ra th e r th a n philosophical. T h e arg u m en t is th a t when
psychological an d cu ltu ral survival is a t stake, polarities such
as the ones discussed here do break dow n a n d becom e p artly /pm** ¿-.'f
irrelevant, a n d the directness o f the experience o f suffering and 7
spontaneous resistance to it com e through a t all planes. W hen
this happens, there emerges in the victim of a system a vague
awareness o f the larger whole w hich transcends tKe~sysiem’^l
an aiy tic^ atcg u ries'an d /o r stands them on their head. T hus, t h e '
vTctim may^>ecome aw are th a t, u n d er oppression, the parochial
could p ro te c t some forms o f universalism m ore snrressfullv-than
does conventional universalism ; th a t the spiritualism of the
weak m ay articu late or keep alive the values o f a non-oppressive
w orld b etter th a n the ultra-m aterialism o f those w ho Iw eT n
vision-less w orlds; a n d th a t the non-achieving an d the insane
m ay often K av ea higher chance o f achieving their civilizational
goal o f freedom an d autonom y w ithout m ortgaging their
sanity. I im ply th a t these paradoxes are inevitable because the ^
d o m in an t idea o f (atio n ality is the first strand o f consciousness
to be co-opted by any successful stru ctu re o f institutionalized iV
J -5V>‘'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.
 Index

Acharya, Smaran, 8n Auden, W. H., 43

Adorno, T. W., 2711, 3an, 45, 98n Augustine, St, 12
adulthood, 13, 20 Aurobindo, Sri, 85-100
ideology of adulthood, 56 childhood of, 87-9
Africa, 4, 10, isn , 17, 30, 34,37 ‘insanity’ of, 86
age, politic* of {stt also childhood), 16- motherhood of nation and, 92
18 Aurobindo Ashram, 91, 94-5
aggression (sot also violence) authoritarianism, 80
activism as, 55 Aztec priests, 107, 110-11
continuity between the aggressor
and the victim, 38, 68-g babu, 77-8
identification with the Aggressor, 7- Kipling’s concept of, 38,68
*»,37* 7 °. 87 Baldick, Robert, i4n
Indian, 50 Ballhatchet, Kenneth, 9-10
passive, 38 Bandopadhyay, Asit, ign
Ahmedabad, 105 Bandopadhyay, Bishwanath, ign
Algeria, 1,31 Baroda, 91
Alvares, Claude, 311, 95n Behn, Mira, nit Madeleine Slade, 36
America, 4, 80 Benedict, Ruth, 74n
Andrews, C. F., 36, 46-9 Bengah, 7, 52, 87, 91, 94, 97, 106
androgyny, 8, 10, 23, 29, 36, 43, 48, 53, Bentham, Jeremy, ra
70,99 Berlin, 49
androgynes, 8 Berlin, Isaiah, 93
vdmicdri sects and, 53 Besant, Annie, 36
Angola, 1 Bettelheim, Bruno, 56
Angus, Ian, 39n Bhakti movement, 61
anti-colonialism, 3, 26, 28, 36, 68, 73 Bhaskar Rao, K., 340, 68n
anti-imperialism, 53 Bhatta Mimftihsft, ggn
Spaddharma, 108 Bible, 49
Apollonian cultures, 3, 74-5 New Testament, 31
ardhandrUvara, 54 Sermon on the Mount, 51
Aries, Philippe, 14 Birenbaum, Halina, n o n
Aristotle, 72 bisexuality (set also androgyny), 4 , 43
Arnold, Matthew, 45 Bloch, Ernst, 98n
Arya Samaj, 25 Bloomsbury group, 36, 42-3
Ashe, Geoffrey, 105, io6n Boers, i$n
Asia, 4, 62,86 Bolton, Glomey, 106
Asoka, 50 Bombay, 65
dirama, 81 Bose, Jagadis Chandra, 102-sn
asura prakfti (set aim rikftua), 78 Bose, Raj Narayan, 87, 9on
i i 6 Index
Bose, Subhas Chandra, 36 47- 9, 51- 7, 89, 100, 103, 107-8
Bose, Raj Sekhar, 94n Christianization of Hinduism, 22-6
Bosu, Suddhasatva, 8n evangelism, 6, 107
Bowes, Pratima, 104x1 Churchill, Winston, 37
Braaksma, M. H., iogn Clive, Robert, 37
Bradbury, Malcolm, ¿6n Cohen, Elie, iogn
Brähman, 10, 24, gg, 107- 8, 110 colonialism, 1- 8, 10- 18, 21- 2, 27, 3 9 -
brahmalej, 94 39, 42-3, 47-9, 52, 54-5, 75, 78,
fear of, 5 80- 1, 85- 7, 100- 3, 111—13
Brahrao, 87 as comical, 5
Bristol, 81 change in colonial consciousness, t, 7
Britain, 2, 4- 7, g, 13, 15, 17, 19, 33, 39, British, 33, 34, 37, 47, 49, 63, 80
32- 51, 63-9, 74, 77-8, 80, 87- 93, Christianity and, 34, 36- 7, 46-8
9 7 ,99-»°°, >05, »>0 economic impact of, 3, 31
British India, 1, 4- 6 , 30, 43, 73, 81 economic motives in, 1-2
Brown, Maurice, io6n French, 1, 10, 31, 33, 101
Buddhism, 49, 99 ideology of, 2, 4, 12, 17, 32, 39, 63, 78
Burman, Debojyoti, 10m mobility and, 33
political economy of, 2
Cabral, Amilcar, g8n, lo in , 113 Portuguese, 10, 14
Calcutta, 87, 93 psychology of, 1- 2 , 7
Calvinism, 15, 35, 66-7 shared culture of, 2
Cambridge University (se* also Ox­ Spanish, 10, 14, I5n
bridge) , 36, 89-90 Congreve, Richard, 34
Camus, Albert, 99 consciousness
Césaire, Aimé, 30, 3 m , 33n, lot Cartesian, 81
Chaplin, Charles, 104-5 creative, 102
Chatteijee, Bankimchandra, 33- 4, 34, Coomaraswamy, A. K., 82, tog
86, 92, lo in Coward, Noël, 43n
Anandamafh, 23, 34, lo in Crick, Bernard, 41
India as mother and, 92 critical traditionalism, 33, 37-g, 47
Kr?na and, 23-4 critical Hinduism, 36
Chattopadhyay, Devi Prasad, 82 cultural consensus, 11
Chaudhuri, Nirad C., 50, 70, 83- 4, cultural criticism, 33
loin
childhood, politics of (su also Kipling Dandi, 105-6
and Aurobindo), 11-16 Darjeeling, 88, 90
childlikeness os childishness, 15-16 Darwinism, 3g, 33
oppression of children, 15 decivilization of colonizers, 29-35
regression to infantilism as defence, defiance, metaphysical, 56
56 deMause, Lloyd, I4n
and ideology of colonialism, 55- 6, Deoghar, 88
57, 102 Derrett, J. Duncan M., 77
Victorian concept of, 65-6 Deshpande, Madhav, s6n, ggn
China, 3n, 6n, n n , 16, 17, 33n, 72, 80 Dionysian cultures, 3, 53, 70, 74- 5, 78,
conquest of, 13 108
Chittagong, 106 displacement
Christianity, 14- 16, 18, 23- 5, 36- 7, criminality as, 33
 Index 117
anti-Muslim feelings as, a6n Ghose, Binoy, 50, 28n
Douglas, Lord Alfred (Bossie), 43-4 Ghose, D. K., 3 m
Drewett, The Reverend, 89 Ghose, Krishnadhan, 87, 8g, 92- 3, 95
Dumont, Louis, io8n Gîtâ, Bhagavad, 21, 25, 47, 78, 81, 93
Dunkirk, 97 Goffman, Erving, iogn, 11 in
Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, 18- 23, 39 Gorer, Geoffrey, 44n, 50
Dutt, R. C., 3m Gramsci, Antonio, 99n
Greenfeld, Howard, 6n
East India Company, 5-6 Gupta, Kshetra, i 8n
Eckhart, Johannes, 12
Egypt, 17 Habermas, Jürgen, 58
Eliade, Mircea, 57, ¿8n Hastings, Warren, 72
Eliot, T. S., 58 Heidegger, Martin, 55
Ellmann, Richard, 43, 45, 49, 62n, 98n hermaphroditism (see klibatoa)
Ellul, Jacques, 35 Hinduism, 18- 19, 23-9> 47-5*» 83, 87,
endogamy, 11 98, 103- 4, »07-8
Engels, F., I3n Christianization of, 22-6
England (see under Britain) definition of, 102-3
Erikson, Erik, 12, 52n, 6 in, 7m Himalayas, 88
Europe, 14- 17, 30, 33, 35, 37, 72, 74, Hindustani, 64
85-6 , 89,95 history
as ideology, 47ff
Fanon, Frantz, 4n, 30- 1, 330, 76n defiance of, 45
Farrington, Constance, 7611 freedom from, 62, 59-60
femininity (see also masculinity, nSrttva) pathology of, 55,99
and colonial ideology, 4-11 sense of, 103-4
as repressed, 32,49 Hobbes, Thomas, 36
effeminacy, 110-16 Holland, Vyvyan, 44
Feyerabend, Paul, 3 Holloway, Rosa, 65-7
Fischer, Louis, 106 homosexuality (see also klibatoa), 9- 10,
Forster, E. M., gn, 33, 34, 42, 5611, 76 42-6
A Passage to India, 107 ‘ideology of higher sodomy’, 43
Foucault, Michel, H 2n Hopkin, C. Edward, 35n
France, 1, 35, 89, 94 Howard, Dick, 98n
Francis of Assisi, St, 12 Howard, Richard, 112n
Frenkel-Brunswick, E., 27n Hutchins, Francis, 6n, 35
Freud, Sigmund, 13, 49, 55, 58, 62, 71, Hyde, H. Montgomery, 44n
93» 97. »08 hyper-masculinity (see under masculin­
ity)
Gandhi, M. K., 4, 26, 28- 9, 47- 57 , 59 -
60, 62- 3, 100-6 Ignatius Loyola, St, 12
Christianity and, 48-9 IUich, Ivan, 107
constituency of, 48-51 imperialism, 2, 14, 34, 39, 98, 100, 110
Gandhian pacifism, 50 British, 37, 42, 48
Gandhism, 50 India, 12, 16- 31, 34- 8, 47-59» 61- 5,
image of, 105-6 67- 87, 89- 90, 92, 94, 98- 105, 107,
Genovese, E. D., I04n 109-12
Germany, 75, 86,89 as counterplayer of West, 70-80
i i 8 Index
Indian majlis, 90 Laing, R. D., 86
Indochina, 1 Lak$mana, ig
instrumentalism, 32 Lannoy, Richard, 78n, 105- 7, 111
Irwin, Lord, 105-6 Latin America, 4 , 10
Isherwood, Christopher, 78n Levinson, D., 27n
Islam (see also Muslim), 25, 28, 103, Lévi-Strauss, C., 5g
in n liberalism, 2- 3, 10, 35, g3, 101
Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasan, 88n, 8gn Lipsay, Roger, iogn
Locke, John, g3
Jahoda, Gustav, 4n Lukács, George, ggn
Jainism, ign
Japan, 1, n , 80, 86 Ma, Sri (see Richard, Mira Paul)
Jephcott, E. F. N., g8n McCarthy, Thomas, s8n
Judaeo-Christianity (see under Chris­ Madan, T. N., 103
tianity) MSdhyamikâ, 73
Madras, 106
Kakar, Sudhir, 5 m, 6on Mahâbhârata, 21, 23, 31, io8n
K ill, gi Mahadevan, T. K., 75, 70n
kdpurufotva, 53-4 Maharashtra, 7, 52
Karachi, 106 Majumdar, A. K., 3»
Keynes, John M., 42 Majumdar, R. C., 3 m
Kieman, V. G., 17, 24n, 76, 7gn Mallick, M. C., gn
King’s College, 89 Mann, Thomas, 4g, 75
Kipling, Rudyard, 35- 42, 46, 53- 64, Mannoni, O., I3n, 29-31
76- 80, 84- 6, g&-i02, 104,110 Marcuse, Herbert, i 3n, 38, 45
dilemma of, 71 Markman, C. L., 4n
ego-ideals of, 84 Marriott, McKim, 103
quasi-, 100-1 Marx, Karl, 12- 13, 57*-®» 62, 7g, 8 i,
childhood of, 40, 64-8 101
concept of babu of, 38,68 concept of India, 12-13
victimhood and, 68-9 concept of history, 57-9
klibatoa (see also homosexuality), 8, gn, masculinity (see alsopurufatod), 11, 20- 1,
43» 52-3 55» 79» 98-9. i°3
Kosambi, D. D., 81-2 bogus manliness, 51-2
Kovel, Joel, 56n British, 44
Krishna, Gopal, 560, ggn hypermasculinity, 10, 22, 2g, 37- 8,
K f^ a, 23- 4, gs, io8n 52, 100
Aurobindo and, g3 male adulthood, ideology of, 16- 17,
Bankimchandra Chattaji and, 23-4 55
K#atriya, 10, 20, 54,80 male sexual dominance, 4- 5 ,6
kfdtratej, 24, 94, 105 masculine Christianity, 47-8
Kfatriyaization, 780 masculine Hinduism, 8
Kfatriyahood, 7, 10, 24, 52, 54, 78 Maugham, Somerset, 42
asuratva as Kfatriyaness, 78 May, Rollo, 4gn
hyp«-» 52 Mazlish, Bruce, ian
pathology of, 78 MeghnSd, ig
Kurukfetra, 21 Meghnidoadh KSxya, 18-21
Kubie, Lawrence, 43 Memmf, Albert, 6n, 1in, isn , 30
 Index "9
Middle East, 7s Orwell, Sonia, sgn
Mill, James, 12 Oxbridge, 42
Miller, J., I3n Oxford University (stt also Oxbridge),
Mitra, Siiirkumar, 8711, 8911, 9011, gan 36
modernity, 14, 16
ideology of, 61- 3, 84, 100-2 Plgdavas, a 1
modem science, 3- 3, 10a papa, 18
Moore, G. E., 43 Pareekh, Udai, 5 m
Moore, R. J., 77n Parkinson, C. Northcote, 6n, gn
Morris, James, 4 ~6n, 3a, 34, 350 passivity, 10, 104, 106-7
Mother (see Richard, Mira Paul) as effective activism, 107
Mrinalini Devi, 91 passive aggression, 38
Muggeridge, Malcolm, 35, 74 phylogeny, 13
Mukherji, Haridas, gan Picasso, Pablo, 45
Mukheiji, Uma, gan Pinkham, Joan, 101
Mdller, Max, 17 Plato, 3 in
Murdoch, Iris, 3 m pluralism, a
Muslim (see also Islam) Pondicherry, 94-5
anti-Muslim feelings as displace­ Portugal, 1
ment, a6n Prabhavananda, Swami, 78n
myths versus history, 59-60 Pres, Terence Des, iogn, 110
progress, theory of, 7, 30
Nag, Kalidas, 10m projective extroversion, 108
Naidu, Sarojidi, 106 protection of civilization, 107-1 a
Naipaul, V. S., 70, 83- 4, g8-g Protestantism (stt also Calvinism,
Nandy, Ashis, 3x1, gn, n n , ian, ijn , Christianity), 15
i 6n, 3in, 2511, 5 m , s 6n, 58, iosn pseudo-asceticism, of Rftma, 30
ndriiva (set also femininity), 7- 8 , 53-4 psychoanalysis, 7, 55- 6, 58, 63
Nazis, 49, 75,86 as ethnopsychology, 55
tteo-Hellenism, 43 Punjab, 7, 5a
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 81, 106 Pur&pas, 19- 21, 23, 108
New Testament (stt under Bible) puntfatoa (set also masculinity), 7, 43,
Nirmdbaran, 88n, 8gn, g3n, g^n 58-3
Nivedita, Sister, nde Margaret Noble, 36 Pyarelal,4 7
nonviolence (stt alto Gandhi), 50- 1, 54,
68-9 , 70-1 Queensberry, Marquess of, 43-4
hypocrisy of, 83
in British society, 49-50 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 8a
of Hindus, 50-1 Raj, a, 7, a6- 8, 5a
rikfasas, 20-2
Oakeshott, Michael, 55 R&ma, 19- 20, 22
O ’Flaherty, Wendy D., 8n Ramanan, K. Venkata, 73n, yjn
omnipotence of thought, 97 Ramanujam, Srinivasa, I02~3n
ontogeny, 7, 13, 5a RAmiyapa, 19-23
Orient, 6a, 70-2 Jain RUmSyapa, 19
rediscovery of, 71-3 Tamil Rlm iyapa, 19
as double of Occident, 70-3 Rivapa, 19-20
Orwell, George, 35, 39-43,46 Ray, P. CL, 47
120
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
Index
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 v
CHAPTER ONE:
I The Beginning 1
II The Past 6

CHAPTER TWO:
III The Battle for the Birthplace 24
IV Contending Reactions 31

CHAPTER THREE:
V Creating a Nationality 56
VI Family Business 81

CHAPTER FOUR:
VII Hindutva as a Savama Purana 100
VIII Violence and Survival 123

CHAPTER FIVE:
IX The Aftermath and theRuins—I 156
X The Aftermath and theRuins—II 169

CHAPTER SIX
XI The Final Assault 181
XII Ayodhya’s ‘First’ Riot 197

Index 207
 Prefa ce

his book began as an effort to give, through a partial narration

T 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
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 nineteenth-
century 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 civiliza-
tional 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 Shrivas-
tava 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-and-
time-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, Vib-
hishan 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

T 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:
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 Dar-
shan 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 imam-
badas 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.
4 Creating a Nationality
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 i • . .
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

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 Vidyar-
thi 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 Ayod-
hya 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 consis-

tently 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.
 T h e P a st 7

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

Year Number o f Persons killed Persons injured

incidents
1954 84 34 512
1955 75 24 457
1956 82 35 575
1957 58 12 316
1958 40 7 369
1959 42 41 1344
1960 26 14 262
1961 92 108 593
1962 60 43 348
1963 61 26 489
1964 1,070 1,919 2,053
1965 173 34 758
1966 144 45 467
1967 198 251 880
1968 346 133 1,309
1969 519 673 2,702
1970 528 298 1,607
1971 321 103 1,263
1972 240 69 1,056
1973 242 72 1,318
1974 248 87 1,123
1975 205 33 890
1976 169 39 794
1977 188 36 1,122
1978 230 110 1,853
1979 304 261 2,379
1980 421 372 2,691
1981 319 196 2,631
1982 470 238 3,025
1983 500 1143 3,652
1984 476 445 4,836
1985 525 328 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 24.45
22.45
20
16.5
15
10 6 ^ 39 ^ 4.87
6.59 6.62
5 1.76 0.7
0 T7 TL
1954-59 1960-69 1970-79 1980-85

t / / \ Incidents Persons killed S 3 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” Com-
munalism and the Crisis of the State’, in K.N. Panikkar, ed., Comunalism in
India: History, Politics and Culture (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991), pp. 196-
218, 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 Rural (%) Urban (%)

1961 439 34.9 65.1
1962 211 52.1 47.9
1963 138 49.3 50.7
1964 2,115 41.2 58.8
1965 487 29.0 71.0
1966 573 13.1 86.9
1967 1,471 26.9 73.1
1968 475 25.7 74.3
1969 1,126 22.5 77.5
1970 929 43.4 56.6
Total 7,964 32.5 67.5

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.

2<>For 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 ab-
sent-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 com-

22T. 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 Pan-
dey, 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, January-
March 1994, 44(1), pp. 13-30.
^Nandy, ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery o f Religious
Tolerance’.
14 Creating a Nationality
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 100.00

SOURCE: Adapted 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.
 T h e P a st 15

Table 4
PROPORTION OF MUSLIMS IN RIOT-PRONE STATES

State Proportion o f Muslims

Andhra Pradesh 8.5

Bihar 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
16 Creating a Nationality
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).
 T h e P a st 21
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).
22 Creating a Nationality
the intermittent attention paid to such issues by such writers as Van-
dana 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 Paracharita-
charcha (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.
 T h e P a st 23

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

L 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,
 Creating a Nationality 25
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.
26 T he B attle for th e B ir t h p l a c e

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 mas-
sified, 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.
 Creating a Nationality 27
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.
28 T he B attle for th e B ir t h p l a c e

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.
 Creating a Nationality 29

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,
30 T he B attle fo r t h e B ir t h p l a c e

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.
 Creating a Nationality 31

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

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.
 Creating a Nationality 33

Such statem ents, though at that time sounded crudely self-

congratulatory, 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, Jhan-
si, 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’.

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

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-and-
order 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-secu-
larism 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.
 Creating a Nationality 35

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 majori-
tarianism. 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 Blue-
star?’ 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.
36 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.
 Creating a Nationality 41
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 Jan-
masthan 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 5 21
Maharashtra 3 4
Rajasthan 13 52
Tamil Nadu 1 -
Tripura 1 -
Uttar Pradesh 28 224
West Bengal 2 6
Total 116 558

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.
42 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 Affected Population un­

killed places 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. 58.70
Madhya Pradesh 133 17 3.30
Bihar 40 11 2.20
West Bengal 27 6 5.50
Assam 98 12 0.70
Maharashtra 434 32 7.00
Orissa 2 1 0.40
Andhra Pradesh 23 20 3.70
Karnataka 78 13 4.50
Tamilnadu 3 11 NA
Kerala 11 7 2.00

Source: People’s Union for Democratic Rights

 Creating a Nationality 43
Table 8
SPREAD OF VIOLENCE IN RURAL AREAS

State Villages Districts Dates

Andhra Pradesh 6 1 Oct. 24

Bihar 12 12 Oct. 12-28
Gujarat 9 9 Sep. 18-Oct.22
Karnataka 2 2 Sep. 13-Oct. 9
Madhya 18 18 Sep. 28-O ct.22
Pradesh
Maharashtra 2 2 Oct. 10-13
Rajasthan 11 11 Sep. 13-Oct 19
Tamil Nadu 1 1 Oct. 6
Uttar Pradesh 1 1 Sep. 28

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

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

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 court-
appointed 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; Vaish-
navas 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,
48 C o n t e n d in g R e a c t io n s

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.
 Creating a Nationality 49

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 riots that broke out immediately after the demolition
o f the Babri masjid on 6 December 1992, Kanpur was the worst-affected city
in UP. Srivastava was the District Magistrate of Kanpur at the time. When
the violence continued for some days, he had to be hurriedly transferred from
the city.
50 C o n t e n d in g R e a c t io n s

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
 Creating a Nationality 51

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

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.
 Creating a Nationality 53
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. ’
54 C o n t e n d in g R e a c t io n s

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.
 Creating a Nationality 55
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 Ram-

T janmabhumi 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.

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
 Creating a Nationality 57

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 liberal-
secular 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 identi-
fiably 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.
58 C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

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 semi-
modemized 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 Brah-
mabandhav Upadhyay (1861-1907), probably the first activist-scholar to sys­
tematically develop the ideological content o f Hindu nationalism. Already the
 Creating a Nationality 59
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 margi-
nality, 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*.
60 C r e a t in g a N a t io n a l it y

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 un-
militarizable.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).
 Creating a Nationality 61
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 pre-
British 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 pre-
British 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 Hin-
dutva 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 nineteenth-
century 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 Hindu-
Muslim Gap’, Prout, 25 January 1992, p. 15) who quotes the prophet’s son-
in-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 Bankim-
chandra 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.
70 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 Be-
hari 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.
 Creating a Nationality 71
Table 9
AGGREGATE ELECTORAL PERFORMANCE OF BJS/BJP
FOR LOK SABHA

Year Total seats Seats con­ Seats won Votes won

tested (%) (%) (%)
1952 489 19.2 3.2 3.1
1957 494 26.3 3.1 5.9
1962 494 39.7 7.1 6.4
1967 520 48.3 13.5 9.4
1971 518 30.9 13.8 7.4
1977 542 - 17.0 14.0
1980 542 - - 8.6
1984 542 42.3 0.9 7.4
1989 529 42.7 37.6 11.5
1991 508 87.2 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 Seats won Votes won

tested (%) (%) (%)
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 11.7
1991 420 100.0 53.3 _*
Parliament
1971 85 47.1 10.0 12.3
1984 85 58.8 00.0 6.4
1989 85 36.5 25.8 7.6
1991 82 100.0 60.9 32.7

* 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

State Total Seats Votes Seats Votes

seats won polled won polled

MP 320 18.2 32.4 68.4 39.2

Himachal Pradesh 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
Haryana 90 16.7 NA 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

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
 Creating a Nationality 75
Table i2
STATE-WISE DISTRIBUTION OF LOK SABHA SEATS AND VOTES
WON BY THE BJP. IN THE 1989 AND 1991 ELECTIONS (PER CENT)

1989 1991

States Total Seats won Votes Seats won Votes

seats polled 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
All-India 465 18.5 11.4 25.8 19.9

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 Indepen-

Dal/Party dents/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 built-
in 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 Brah-
manic, 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 self-
image. 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 Sam-
buddha 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 them-
"ÎQ

selves 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

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

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 Chinmayanan-

da 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
 Creating a Nationality 89
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 electo-
rate. 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, ‘Vish-
wa 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.
90 F a m i l y B u s in e s s

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 prak-
hands. 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.
 Creating a Nationality 91

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

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.
 Creating a Nationality 93

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

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.
 Creating a Nationality 95

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 Chinmayanan-
da 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
96 F a m i l y B u s in e s s

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.
 Creating a Nationality 97

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 semi-
urban 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 Baj-
rang 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 full-
fledged 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
98 F a m i l y B u s in e s s

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
 Creating a Nationality 99

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 Ramjan-
mabhumi 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, hard-
headed, 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.
 Creating a Nationality 101
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.
102 HlNDUTVA AS A SAVARNA PURANA

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, cash-
crop-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 Con-
gress-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 low-
status 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.
 Creating a Nationality 103

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 Ah-
medabad 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 Jagan-
4There 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.
104 H indutva as a S a v a rn a P urana

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
 Creating a Nationality 105

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 alit-
Muslim 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.
106 H indutva a s a S a v a rn a P u ran a

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 Savar-
nas 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
 Creating a Nationality 107
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 Ekat-
mata 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.
108 HlNDUTVA AS a SAVARNA PURANA

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.
 Creating a Nationality 10 9

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.
110 H indutva a s a S a v a rn a P urana

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 Som-
nath 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
 Creating a Nationality 111
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 caste-
based 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 Singapore-
type 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.
112 H ind u tv a as a S a v a rn a P urana

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 Muslim-
majority 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 Par-
mar (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.
 Creating a Nationality 113

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-tumed-
builder 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 well-
to-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
114 HlNDUTVA AS A SAVARNA PUftANA

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
 Creating a Nationality 115
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 Sabar-
mati, 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.
116 H indutva as a S a v a rn a P vran a

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.
 Creating a Nationality 117

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 Us-
mane 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
118 H in dutva a s a S a v a rn a P u rana

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 upper-

class 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.
 Creating a Nationality 119

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.
120 H in dutva a s a S a v a rn a P uràna

As for the distribution of violence, in the industrial areas of Ah-

medabad 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-middle-
class 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.
 Creating a Nationality 121
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:
122 HINDUTVA AS A S a VARNA PURANA

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 Juhapura-
Vasna, 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 Location Comment

1981 Ahmedabad city, First and-reservation agitation.
Ahmedabad, Gandhi­ Main contestants Savamas and
nagar, Kheda and Avamas; main feature violence and
Mehsana districts social boycott directed against
Dalits.
1982-83 Baroda city Clashes between Hindus and
Muslims on Ganesh Chaturthi festival.
1985 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’.
1986 Ahmedabad city Rath Yatra: between Hindus and
Muslims
—Dalit areas affected
—Growing distance between Dalits
and Muslims.
19 8 7 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
Modasa) districts Virpur.
 Creating a Nationality 12 3

1989 Banaskantha, Clashes between Hindus and

Panchmahal, Mehsana, Muslims around Ramshila Pujan
Kheda and Bhamch Shobha Yatra.
1990 The whole o f Gujarat Clashes between Hindus and
(except Jamnagar, Dang, Muslims over the Rath Yatra.
Sabarkanta, Junagadh,
districts)

VIII. 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

T 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?

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,
124 V io l e n c e a n d S u r v i v a l

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.
 Creating a Nationality 125
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 V io l e n c e a n d S u r v i v a l

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).
 Creating a Nationality 12 7

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.
128 V io l e n c e a n d S u r v i v a l

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, Dungar-
pur and Udaipur appealed to the tribal, mainly Bhil, sentiments;
the Vir Durgadas and Hadarani Raths, that travelled to Jodhpur-
Nagaür 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 San-
ganer 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.
 Creating a Nationality 129
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 pro-
cession. 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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 Creating a Nationality 131

‘Why do only M uslim s begin R io ts?’, explains the riots of

Varanasi, Sultanpur, Faizabad, Aligarh (UP), Munger (Bihar), Indore
(MP) in terms of Muslim attempts to obstruct shilapujan pro­
cessions.
Muslim sources in Kota say that the VHP, RSS, Bajrang Dal, Shiv
Sena and several akhâdâs carrying a large number of weapons were
part of the 10,000 strong procession. Those in the procession were
shouting slogans such as ‘Hindustan mein rahnà hai to Hindu bankar
rahnâ hogâ' (If you want to live in India, you will have to live like
Hindus), and ‘Babar ki santânon ko Hindustan mein nahin rehne
denge' (We will not let Babar’s progeny live in India).30 Two persons
were killed in the rioting according to official figures, and huge losses
were sustained by the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim business commu­
nity.
It was, however, the riot at Jaipur on 27 November 1989 that
involved large numbers from both the communities. It came after the
campaign for Parliamentary elections had already polarized Jaipur,
with the BJP seeking Hindu votes to build the Ram temple at Ayod-
hya and the Congress being backed by the Muslims. The presence
of the ultra-Hindu Shiva Sena had also heightened tension. Handsome
contributions to the polarization were made by Chittaranjan Sharma,
President of the Sena, through his speeches and pamphlets.31 The riot
itself was set off by the BJP’s victory procession after the elections.
The victors at Jaipur and Dausa, Girdhari Lai Bhargava and Nathu
Singh, led the procession. A section of the procession under the
leadership of Bhanwar Lai Sharma, President of the state BJP, after
assuring the police that it would not do so, entered the ‘communally
sensitive’ Ramganj area—with predictable results.
The First Information Report (FIR) filed with the police says that,
although Sharma had between 1,000 and 2,000 followers only, they
did not fail to repeat their favourite slogans: ‘Every child is Ram’s,
the rest are bastards’ and ‘The Muslims have only two places, Pakis­
tan or the cemetery ’ .32 A mosque, too, was damaged at the Chandi
ki Taksal. As the news spread in Ramganj, the latter part of the
^’Asghar Ali Engineer, ‘Kota: Another Graveyard o f Secularism?’ (Bom­
bay: Institute o f Islamic Studies, 1989), Occasional paper, No 12(5).
3'Testimony o f Dr Bhupendra of the Indian Police Service, Tibrewal Com­
mission, 30 April 1992.
32FIR 410/1989 o f Rajendra Tÿagi, Sub-Inspector (SI), Ramganj police
station.
132 V io l e n c e a n d S u r v i v a l

procession was stoned .33 A Hindu mob then looted and burnt the guns
in Shikar store and a Muslim mob set fire and threw gas cylinders
at the crowd. The Muslims burnt Hindu shops in Ghat gate and Ram-
ganj; the Hindus reciprocated at Jauhari, Tripolia and Chand Pole
markets.
Although the rioting and arson primarily affected the walled city,
there were also attacks on individual houses in the outer city. At 5.30
PM, roughly two hours after the rioting broke out, curfew was im­
posed. Eventually the army was called in at 11 PM. The rioting left
5 persons dead and 200 seriously wounded. About 70 Hindu shops
were looted or burnt; the Muslims lost 41 shops, 44 brick houses
i j

and 104 hutments.

Next year a rash of violence broke out in Rajasthan following
Advani’s Rath Yatra. On 4 October there had already been rioting in
Udaipur, and the political temperature in the state was still rising.
The anti-Mandal agitation had spawned numerous organizations of
students and traders. They were now remobilized under a different
guise. The supporters of the ABVP among the youth were now part
of an anti-Muslim formation whose influence had begun to sweep
the middle classes, especially the young and the educated, as
Advani’s chariot proceeded on its 4,000-km journey from Somnath
to Ayodhya.
As in Gujarat, plans for a grand reception to Advani went with
other kinds of mobilizational efforts. The Ram Jyoti Shobha Yatras,
for instance, were the reverse of the worship of the bricks; the jyoti
or sacred light brought back from Ayodhya was used to light lamps
in local temples, beginning with the highly venerated Govind Deo
temple. A series of processions then went to the 56 subdivisions of
the state. In each case, the Ram jyoti was kept in a prominent village
and people were exhorted to light the lamps in their homes with the

33A human rights group points out that the first stone-throwing incident
occurred approximately three hours after the slogans had begun to be raised.
People’s Union for Civil Liberties, ‘The Jaipur Riots’, Lokayan Bulletin, 1989,
7, pp. 43-4. According to the report the riots could have been averted had
the district administration acted on intelligence reports, quoted even by the
press, that anticipated communal tension in four cities in Rajasthan, and had
the victory procession been banned in Jaipur as had been done in Udaipur,
Sikar, Jalore and Bharatpur.
^PUCL, ‘The Jaipur riots,’ pp. 41-6.
 Creating a Nationality 133
sacred fire. While the welcome given to the Rath Yatra was organized
by the BJP and to the jyoti by the VHP, the RSS busied itself with
preparations for the karseva at Ayodhya. The Rajasthan Karseva
Samiti declared that 1,00,000 youths would be sent for the karseva.35
An Akhil Bharatiya Sarva Dharma Sammelan was organized on 6-7
October 1990 at Jaipur. It brought together BJP leaders of Delhi and
Udaipur and several religious leaders. Subsequently, meetings of the
‘Hindu society’ were organized across the state.
From Gujarat Advani’s chariot entered Banswara where chief
minister Shekhawat and his cabinet went to receive it on 10 October.
Shekhawat had been a strong critic of the Rath Yatra in private, like
the party’s well-known national leader, Atal Behari Vajpayee, an
erstwhile foreign minister of India. Both were afraid that the Yatra
would isolate the BJP politically and destroy its image as a res­
ponsible all-India party built assiduously over the previous fifteen
years. But like Vajpayee, Shekhawat had to conform to the party line
in public.
In two days the rath covered half a dozen districts of Rajasthan.
The atmosphere, according to several Jaipur residents, had begun to
deteriorate .36

As we know, Advani’s arrest a few days later led to violence in many

parts of the country, particularly in Gujarat, UP and Rajasthan. In
Rajasthan clashes took place at Kota, Churu, Udaipur, Jaipur, Jodhpur
and Beawar. At several places the army had to be called out. In
Jaipur, on the day Advani was arrested, a meeting was held in the
evening at the Choti Chaupar, and when the crowd dispersed, it
shouted offensive slogans.
The next morning around 9 AM, as though in response to a signal,
the burning of tyres began simultaneously at several main thorough­
fares in many parts of the city: on Amber road and Subhash chowk
in the north, Tonk road towards the south, the bridge of the Ajmer
road, and behind the Governor’s residence in the west, in Purani

35Later, returning karsevaks were to be put in areas near Muslim mohallas.

See letter of Ghulam Mustafa, m la , to the Chief Minister, 5 November 1990.
36It improved according to Ghanshyam Tiwari, as the rath came closer to
Jaipur. See BJP affidavit, exhibit B-77, Tibrewal Commission. But there was
certainly a determination among BJP cadres not to let violence take place
when the rath was on the road.
134 V iolence and S urvival

Basti and on Agra road .37 Also, large groups of people began gather­
ing in the main streets of the walled city to enforce the BJP’s call
for a general strike. They moved about obstructing traffic, shouting
slogans, Oand
Q
threatening the shopkeepers who had not downed their
shutters. By 9.30 AM, the crowds had grown larger. According to
the BJP version, the rioting by the Hindus was sparked off by a
rumour that Hindu children had been held captive in a mosque at
Ramganj. This rumour was said to have sprung from an actual
episode involving a struggle between some Muslim kidnappers, their
screaming child victims, and a courageous karsevak who had stepped
in to save the children. People poured into the streets and moved
towards Ramganj.39
Why were tyres burnt all over Jaipur? One answer is: the thick
black smoke rising from burning tyres in different places could easily
be seen from people’s rooftops; it could be both dramatic and
awesome. As for the captive children, the SHO of the Ramganj area
said in his deposition to the Tibrewal Commission, set up to inquire
into the riots, that he had checked the mosque and found no child
there .40 The kidnapping story, it appears, was planted.
The simultaneous burning of houses and shops in different parts
of Jaipur also seems to have been planned. The ‘style’ of setting fire
was similar: holes were made in the walls of houses and burning
rags doused in kerosene thrown in. Some women reported seeing
these rags being supplied by jeeps to various localities.41 Besides,
there was widespread use of audio cassettes, even after curfew was
imposed on the city later in the day. As in 1989, the cassettes of
Uma Bharati were used; in addition, this time some cassettes simu­
lated scenes of riots: recorded voices shouted ‘Allah ho Akbar,' lmaro

^Testimony of Jagmal Singh, Additional Superintendent of Police (north),

Tibrewal Commission, 26 April 1992. See also the affidavits of Jagmal Singh
and Hetram Vishnoi, SHO, Ramganj Police Station, exhibits FW28 and A18,
Tibrewal Commission.
testim ony of Hetram Vishnoi, 19 May 1992.
39Later, to establish that the kidnapping actually took place, the ‘rescuer’,
Ashwini Kumar, was produced. But he was unable to explain during cross-
examination why, despite his training in law, he had failed to register an FIR
or report the matter to the police till more than a year had lapsed.
40This was also confirmed by the Additional Superintendent of Police
(ASP) Jagmal Singh’s testimony to the Tibrewal Commission, April 1992.
4lThe Navbharat Times (8 October 1990) reported that the simultaneity of
incidents also created a special problem for the police.
 Creating a Nationality 135
rriàro' and 'Jai Siya Ram', followed by the voices of screaming
women and children .42
In other words, as is usual with riots in India these days, the Jaipur
riot was methodically planned and professionally executed. In this
planning and execution, apart from some BJP leaders, important par­
ticipants were from Jaipur’s 92 akhâdàs or wrestling clubs, especially
the 14 or 15 branches of Balwant akhâdà. Members of Balwant
akhâdâ ransacked and burnt shops at Purani basti and Brahmapuri.
More unusual, considering the by-now standardized technology of
riots in the subcontinent, were the artificially produced clouds of
smoke, the cleverly floated rumours, the use of audio-cassettes, in
addition to the intense emotions aroused by the Rath Yatra.43
Let us get back to our story. At Ramganj bazar, the crowd by all
accounts was initially a procession intent upon closing the few shops
that had opened despite the call for a general strike.44 It was shouting,
according to police officials, ‘mandir vahin banàyenge . . . ’ and
4Bacchâ bacchâ Ram kâ, bâki sab harâm k a —two slogans that had
become hot favourites of the Hindu nationalists over the previous
year. Stoning began either from Muslim houses reacting to the
slogans or from the enforcers of the strike, keen to close Ramganj’s
Khan Hotel which refused to join the strike. By 10.30 AM, police
reports say, a crowd of Muslims were also out on the streets. There
was mutual stoning, abuse, attacks on shops, and arson. Both sides
were well armed with bottles, iron rods, sticks and stones. At first,
the police and administration mostly stood by. The Muslims say that
the pro-strike crowd disappeared after the police arrived; it then became

42Affidavit of Abdul Bashir, Cl exhibit of Tibrewal Commission. Also,

Binu Gupta’s interview with Gopal Lai, Kumharon ki Nadi, Jaipur, 10 May
1992. Gopal Lai, a potter, claimed that cassettes were used by both Hindus
and Muslims.
43Interview with K. B. Garg, Member, Coordination Committee for Relief,
Rehabilitation, and Communal Harmony, Jaipur, March 1992.
44The owner of the Islamic Book Center recounted, ‘We said “Why should
we close? We shall not participate in the general strike. The organizers of the
strike are against the mosque [at Ayodhya] and the Qur’an”.’ The owner of
the book shop is one of the few members of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Jaipur.
However, in politics, even if it is the politics of religion, things are rarely
that simple. According to Jagmal Singh, then Additional Superintendent of
Police (North) in the Ramganj Chaupar area, Congress party members insti­
gated the shopkeepers to keep their shops open, Tibrewal Commission, 25
April 1992.
136 Violence and S urvival

a clash between the police and the Muslims.45 Several Muslims claim
that the SP himself shot Ishaq, a butcher, at point blank range at
about this time. The police call Ishaq a rioter; the Muslims say he
was an ordinary butcher, shot even as he was closing his shop .46 A
barber who was among the rioters at Ramganj and Hida ki Mori
recounts, ‘The police were with us and told us to go ahead: “Beat
them up; we are with you.” They [the police] gave us support; the
Muslims could not do anything.’
Curfew was imposed only at 11.15 am , after over two hours of
violence (despite the prior warnings that the police and the ad­
ministration had and despite a ready contingency plan prepared by
the local SP on 20 October). But violence continued during the cur­
few. A police jeep was burnt almost next to a police station, though
a force of 75 men was present right there. At Ramganj, to begin with,
seven shops were burnt, six belonging to Muslims and one to a
Hindu. The death of a police constable, Braj Mohan, started rumours
that a Hindu policeman had been killed by Muslims even though he
was the victim of a police bullet. Among the Muslims the rumour
spread that Shahzad, a Muslim policeman, had been killed by Hindu
rioters.
At about the time the general strike went out of control at Ghat
gate, Hindus collected at Ghosiyon ka Rasta shouting, ‘Tel lagâo
Dabur kâ, nàm mitâo Babar kâ' (Use the oil of Dabur, erase the
name of Babar), ‘Hindustan mein rahrià hai to choti rakh ke rahnâ
hogà’ (If you have to stay in India, you shall have to sport a sacred
tuft of hair), and lJo mângegâ Bâbri uskâ bacchâ âkhri' (The child
of anyone who asks for the Babri mosque will be the last of the
lineage). The Muslims collected at the Machlivalon ka Rasta on the
opposite side shouting ‘Allah ho Akbar' and ‘Jo hamse takrâyegâ,
sfdhe kabr mein jâyegà’ (Those who clash with us will go straight
to the grave). Despite police intervention, both sides returned with
arms and began stoning and arson. Firing had to be resorted to.
Roughly at the same time violence also broke out at Bandri ka
Nasik, Tripolia, Chaura Rasta and at thé Jauhari, Kishan Pole and
Chand Pole markets. Mostly young persons were said to be involved

45Hetram Vishnoi’s FIRs, 449/1990 and 457/1990, 24 October 1990, Ram-

guni Police Station.
Affidavits of Naimuddin, Abdul Sattar and Gafur Khan, Tibrewal
Commission.
 Creating a Nationality 137
on both sides, and there was much use of slogans. Once again, there
were signs of prior preparation.47
In retrospect both sides see this riot as more lethal (jani) than that
in 1989 when the damage was mainly material. This time, besides
the killings, there were a large number of incidents of knifing and
acid throwing. The targets of attack were often religious places such
as mosques and dargahs.iS As in Gujarat, at several places they were
converted into temples and renamed. For instance, Pir’s mazhar at
Kagdiwara was renamed Pir Pachar Hanuman and Gaffareshwar
Mahadev was built on Gaffar’s land. The official tally of the dead
was 50. The loss of property was estimated at 1,000 million. The
situation could be brought under control only after the army was
called out.

The Police Narrative and Rishi Ghalav Nagar

The police narrative that emerges from the hearings of the judicial
inquiry into the riots, now under way two years after the event, has
a few clear components. First, the riot was sudden (‘akasmik’) rather
than planned or systematic.49 So the police and the administration
could not have anticipated or prepared for it. Second, not only were
the losses of the Hindus and the Muslims equal, the two communities
were present in roughly equal strength in all the areas where rioting
broke out. For instance, the deposition of Satyendra Singh, a police
officer, says that the crowd at Suraj Pole bazar consisted of Hindus
and it faced the Muslims who flooded the streets of Ramganj bazar.50
The police were caught between the two at the crossing.
Third, the action of the Hindus was retaliatory and defensive; all
the FIRs except one implicate Muslims. Sub-Inspector Hari Narayan’s
testimony is a case in point. It blames the Muslims for the burning

47On the Muslim side, neighbourhood organizations played an important

role; less important were political groups such as the Jamaat-i-Islami or the
Muslim League. Interview with Hetram Vishnoi, SHO; Ramganj Police Sta­
tion, 20 May 1992.
48The affidavits of Manoj Sharma and Pawan Kumar describe a large mob
of between 2,000 and 3,000 Hindus moving towards New Gate and Phoo!
Shah Baba ki Mazhar. Exhibit B-12, Tibrewal Commission, 13 October 1991.
49Statements of police officials at the Tibrewal Commission hearings
during April 1992.
S0Deposition of Satyendra Singh, Tibrewal Commission, 22 April 1992.
13 8 Violence and Survival

of the ASP’s jeep51; and for beginning the sloganeering.52 Only under
cross-examination did Narayan admit that the crowd that initially
burnt waste on the streets supported the general strike. He also
acknowledged that they raised the slogan ‘Use the oil of Dabur, erase
the name of Babar.’ Narayan, however, refused to confirm that the
procession was led by BJP’s Mohan Lai Yadav; he only said that the
procession later fell into the hands of musclemen, as the BJP leader­
ship ‘lost control’ over the processionists. Most police accounts also
claim that the use of force by the police was ‘sufficient’ and
‘effective’.
There is striking similarity between the constructions of the se­
quence of events by the police and the BJP. The BJP claims that the
first day’s violence was caused by the rumour that some Hindu
children were being held captive in a mosque, the second day’s by
the news of the killing of seven persons at Koliyon ka Mohalla, head­
lined by the Navbharat Times on the morning of 25 October. Since
the Mohalla had a predominantly Koli population, it was assumed
that Hindus had been killed. The carnage of Muslims at Rishi Ghalav
Nagar was explained away as a reaction to the killing of the Kolis.
In the police version, the events of Rishi Ghalav Nagar are located
in the evening; both Natwarlal and Hari Narayan explain Rishi
Ghalav Nagar as a response to the happenings at Koliyon ka Mohal­
la .53
Others dispute this thesis. Many people in the Pahadganj area,
who can see Rishi Ghalav Nagar in the distance from their rooftops,
told us that they saw smoke rising and people moving about in groups
between 9.00 AM and 11.00 AM. Civil liberties groups and the residents

51FIR 450/1990, 24 October 1990 of Hari Narayan, Ramganj Police Sta­

tion, names Mazhar, Khurshid and Gomak. According to Narayan, a wild
crowd at Ramganj was throwing stones and shouting slogans. After a lathi
charge,, there was stone throwing from the roofs. From Bisaytiyon ka Mohalla
hundreds came armed with iron rods, bottles and lathis shouting ‘Allah ho
Akbar' and 'Mar do mär do They came to the main road and moved towards
the main crossing, breaking shutters, throwing stones and setting shops on
fire.
52Testimony of Hari Narayan, Tibrewal Commission hearings, 24 April
1992. Hari Narayan’s one-sided account needs to be read along with Nanha
Singh’s FIR. The latter says that an excited crowd of 400 to 500 Hindus came
from Ramganj to Suraj Pole shouting anti-Muslim slogans. See FIR 451/1990,
25 October 1990, of Nanha Singh, SI, Ramganj Police Station.
53Testimony of Jagmal Singh, Tibrewal Commission, April 1992.
 Creating a Nationality 139

of Rishi Ghalav Nagar, too, maintain that the events in their colony
began early in the morning and were simultaneous if not prior to the
incidents at Ramganj. One eyewitness was precise enough to say that
the events began between 10 and 11 AM. The first body was found
at the crossing of the Galta temple in Rishi Ghalav Nagar around
noon.
Police testimony at the Tibrewal Commission hearings tries to
cover up police inaction and the tacit police support to the Hindu
rioters. As we found out, in one case, a policeman told a Muslim
that day, ‘Say “Jai Siya Ram” or we shall beat you’. Ashok Panchal,
a self-confessed rioter, even named a policeman who told them, ‘Go
and grab guns from the police. In the course of the grabbing, we
shall begin firing on the Muslims.’ Panchal adds, ‘We looted Muslim
shops while the police fired on the Muslims. The SP shot a Kasai
from the back as he was locking the shutter of his shop.’
Also, the reports which several victims wanted to lodge with the
police were either disregarded, censored or edited by the police. In
Rishi Ghalav Nagar, only one FIR was accepted. And Shabuddin,
who filed it, does not recognize more than half the names of the
accused in the statement he himself gave to the police .54 The police,
he insists, have added names that were in their diary. In another
instance, a Muslim, who had a case involving a jeep pending against
him at the police station, was forced to give a statement that the
police came to the neighbourhood at 11 PM, when the residents openly
say that they came much later in the night.
Rishi Ghalav Nagar is a JDA planned colony that came up in the
1980s. Originally the plots in it were given to the dwellers of various
slums. Many, however, resold them to others who built houses. The
plot owners then moved into hutments in a new slum in the same
area. The Muslims who came into Rishi Ghalav Nagar range from
the lowly to the fairly well-to-do. Several were in the gemstone busi­
ness earning between 200 and 250 rupees per day. Among some Hin­
dus in Rishi Ghalav Nagar there was a sense of being encroached
upon, both geographically and economically. Their sense of space
was also partly defined by Jaipur’s sacred geography, especially by
their proximity to the local Galta temple. But the growth of an ag­
gressive Hindu self-definition was almost certainly a product of the
Ramjanmabhumi movement, for at the local level the Hindus and the
Muslims had been participating in a large number of co-operative activities,
54FIR 480/1990, 24 October 1990, of Shabuddin, Ramganj police station.
138 Violence and Survival

of the ASP’s jeep51; and for beginning the sloganeering.52 Only under
cross-examination did Narayan admit that the crowd that initially
burnt waste on the streets supported the general strike. He also
acknowledged that they raised the slogan ‘Use the oil of Dabur, erase
the name of Babar.’ Narayan, however, refused to confirm that the
procession was led by BJP’s Mohan Lai Yadav; he only said that the
procession later fell into the hands of musclemen, as the BJP leader­
ship ‘lost control’ over the processionists. Most police accounts also
claim that the use of force by the police was ‘sufficient’ and
‘effective’.
There is striking similarity between the constructions of the se­
quence of events by the police and the BJP. The BJP claims that the
first day’s violence was caused by the rumour that some Hindu
children were being held captive in a mosque, the second day’s by
the news of the killing of seven persons at Koliyon ka Mohalla, head­
lined by the Navbharat Times on the morning of 25 October. Since
the Mohalla had a predominantly Koli population, it was assumed
that Hindus had been killed. The carnage of Muslims at Rishi Ghalav
Nagar was explained away as a reaction to the killing of the Kolis.
In the police version, the events of Rishi Ghalav Nagar are located
in the evening; both Natwarlal and Hari Narayan explain Rishi
Ghalav Nagar as a response to the happenings at Koliyon ka Mohal­
la .53
Others dispute this thesis. Many people in the Pahadganj area,
who can see Rishi Ghalav Nagar in the distance from their rooftops,
told us that they saw smoke rising and people moving about in groups
between 9.00 AM and 11.00 AM. Civil liberties groups and the residents

5’FIR 450/1990, 24 October 1990 of Hari Narayan, Ramganj Police Sta­

tion, names Mazhar, Khurshid and Gomak. According to Narayan, a wild
crowd at Ramganj was throwing stones and shouting slogans. After a lathi
charge, there was stone throwing from the roofs. From Bisaytiyon ka Mohalla
hundreds came armed with iron rods, bottles and lathis shouting ‘Allah ho
Akbar' and 'Mär do mär do They came to the main road and moved towards
the main crossing, breaking shutters, throwing stones and setting shops on
fire.
52Testimony of Hari Narayan, Tibrewal Commission hearings, 24 April
1992. Hari Narayan’s one-sided account needs to be read along with Nanha
Singh’s FIR. The latter says that an excited crowd of 400 to 500 Hindus came
from Ramganj to Suraj Pole shouting anti-Muslim slogans. See FIR 451/1990,
25 October 1990, of Nanha Singh, SI, Ramganj Police Station.
13Testimony of Jagmal Singh, Tibrewal Commission, April 1992.
 Creating a Nationality 139

of Rishi Ghalav Nagar, too, maintain that the events in their colony
began early in the morning and were simultaneous if not prior to the
incidents at Ramganj. One eyewitness was precise enough to say that
the events began between 10 and 11 AM. The first body was found
at the crossing of the Galta temple in Rishi Ghalav Nagar around
noon.
Police testimony at the Tibrewal Commission hearings tries to
cover up police inaction and the tacit police support to the Hindu
rioters. As we found out, in one case, a policeman told a Muslim
that day, ‘Say “Jai Siya Ram” or we shall beat you*. Ashok Panchal,
a self-confessed rioter, even named a policeman who told them, ‘Go
and grab guns from the police. In the course of the grabbing, we
shall begin firing on the Muslims.’ Panchal adds, ‘We looted Muslim
shops while the police fired on the Muslims. The SP shot a Kasai
from the back as he was locking the shutter of his shop.’
Also, the reports which several victims wanted to lodge with the
police were either disregarded, censored or edited by the police. In
Rishi Ghalav Nagar, only one FIR was accepted. And Shabuddin,
who filed it, does not recognize more than half the names of the
accused in the statement he himself gave to the police .54 The police,
he insists, have added names that were in their diary. In another
instance, a Muslim, who had a case involving a jeep pending against
him at the police station, was forced to give a statement that the
police came to the neighbourhood at 11 PM, when the residents openly
say that they came much later in the night.
Rishi Ghalav Nagar is a JDA planned colony that came up in the
1980s. Originally the plots in it were given to the dwellers of various
slums. Many, however, resold them to others who built houses. The
plot owners then moved into hutments in a new slum in the same
area. The Muslims who came into Rishi Ghalav Nagar range from
the lowly to the fairly well-to-do. Several were in the gemstone busi­
ness earning between 200 and 250 rupees per day. Among some Hin­
dus in Rishi Ghalav Nagar there was a sense of being encroached
upon, both geographically and economically. Their sense of space
was also partly defined by Jaipur’s sacred geography, especially by
their proximity to the local Galta temple. But the growth of an ag­
gressive Hindu self-definition was almost certainly a product of the
Ramjanmabhumi movement, for at the local level the Hindus and the
Muslims had been participating in a large number of co-operative activities,
54FIR 480/1990, 24 October 1990, of Shabuddin, Ramganj police station.
14 0 Violence and Survival

such as protests against poor water supply and absence of drainage

facilities, the construction of a park, a tank and even a temple. Deep
and enduring friendships had also developed between some Hindu
and Muslim neighbours. In fact, the FIRs filed at the Ramganj police
station from the area suggest many more conflicts within com­
munities than between them. In 1989, when there was rioting else­
where in Jaipur, both Hindus and Muslims of Rishi Ghalav Nagar
had participated in a day-and-night vigil to maintain peace.
The demand for a local mosque by the Muslim leaders and the
purchase by them of two plots for the purpose, however, re-invoked
the controversy over the Babri masjid. To the Hindus the demand
showed aggressive affirm ation of Muslim identity and social
cohesion, not religious sentiments or piety. The local Masjid Com­
mittee was strongly opposed by a group of Hindus led by Shyam
Sunder Gupta and Mohanlal Sharma. The polarization was aggravated
by local conflicts such as a brawl involving a drunken Muslim and
some Dalits.55 Simultaneously the new leadership of upper-caste and
better-off Hindus established links with a wider network in the neigh­
bouring areas. A skirmish was reportedly planned at a goth or feast
hosted for several neighbourhood leaders at the temple of Kolevale
Hanuman. A branch of the RSS became active in the area and was
in the forefront of both the shilâpujan and kârsevâ, in both of which
the local Hindus participated enthusiastically.56
On the eve of the general strike, Rishi Ghalav Nagar’s Hindu
homes were distinguished by decorative red lights and fluorescent
stickers. Ganesh statues in nichés over the front door (compulsory
for the Hindus in this colony) also served the same purpose. The
Muslims thus got automatically marked. In the walled city, com­
munities and castes live together in clusters; modern living caters to
the individual and the family but not to the security of the community.
At Rishi Ghalav Nagar the 500 Muslim homes were scattered among
the 2,000 Hindu homes. Not only that, but the geometrical patterns
of crossings and lanes alternating with rows of houses could be par­
ticularly helpful to mobs. A mob standing at a crossing could effec­
tively prevent escape and access to the outer world.

55FIR 354/1990, 19 August 1990, Ramganj police station.

56Rishi Ghalav Nagar had its own Shri Ram Karseva Samiti; grand pre­
parations were made for welcoming it, and a huge religious conference was
organized. Navbharat Times, 8 October 1990, p. 7.
 Creating a Nationality 141

On 24 October, at the major crossings on the National Highway,

groups of people had collected by 11 AM, shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram',
According to an insider, RSS activists led the mobs drawn from the
nearby areas of Govardhanpuri, Lachminarayanpuri and Ganeshpuri.
They had the active support of persons from Rishi Ghalav Nagar,
particularly of gangs whose leaders belonged to the Nav Yuvak Man-
dal. Another informant, Wazid Ali, confirmed the beginning of dis­
turbances in the colony at around 11 AM. From the roof of his
two-storeyed house he saw fire and smoke and 200 persons coming
to the colony armed with lances, spears, swords and sticks. Persons
from the locality were behind the outsiders, who had been positioned
in front.
The mosque was smashed and Hindu icons placed in it. Muslim
leaders of the Masjid Committee, who sought shelter in Gupta’s
house, were attacked .57 One Shahid was surrounded and killed. His
mother, who went to collect the clothes of her dead son from the
hospital morgue, found those of her second son there as well. Yusuf
had learnt of his brother’s death and had come on a scooter along
with a friend to take home his sister-in-law and her child. A mob
stopped his scooter at a bridge and asked his name. As Yusuf’s friend
(who was with him on the scooter but managed to run away) tells
the story, Yusuf mentioned a Hindu name but was asked to strip.
When it was found that he was circumcised, acid was poured on him.
Salma, also called Munni, is a widow with three daughters and
three sons. She was doing embroidery on a salwar-kameez when in­
terviewed. Her gem-cutting machine had been destroyed by the rio­
ters, apparently as part of a now-not-uncommon attack on the sources
of livelihood of the Muslims.
They came at around noon while 1 was washing. They were shouting ‘Musalla
katalla, hum tumko jinda nahin chodenge' (Circumcised Muslims, we shall
not leave you alive). We locked ourselves in one room. I was so scared; I
nearly fainted. My three young daughters and no man to protect us. They

57Gupta, an RSS leader and chief of the Shanti Samiti from Rishi Ghalav
Nagar, was later arrested. His wife claimed that the Muslims had come shout­
ing slogans and throwing stones and, later, dragged him and his daughter
away. Gupta’s affidavit states that the Muslims dragged him to the mosque;
his screams brought his wife and friends to his rescue. Exhibit B31, Tibrewal
Commission. Gupta’s school-going son, however, gave away that Gupta’s wife
and sons had been been sent off a day earlier to his grandmother’s place in
anticipation of violence.
142 V iolence and S urvival

broke our lattice, windows, television set, electricity meter, and sewage pipe;
they took the three tolas of gold and all the vessels I had collected for my
two daughters’ weddings. They broke my gem-cutting machine. 1 used to do
turquoise cutting and get 50-60 rupees a day. All our family worked on it.
Now for this golden thread embroidery I get only 25 for one set. We live in
the dark as I have no money for the meter. I cannot send my seven-year-old
daughter to school, because I cannot pay the 22 rupees that they are de­
manding as a deposit. My sons are learning gemstone work at Babu ka Tiba,
Hida ki Mori and Ankur cinema. The ustad [master craftsman] gives them
very little.

The attack on the Muslims— looting, arson and killings— started

again around 9 PM and continued till 2 am. The police knew of the
killings by noon, but made no attempt to stop further violence. They
had taken a round and had tea at Gupta’s place at about 4 PM and
that was that. All appeals to the Ramganj Police Station were ignored.
The attackers, to judge by the list of those indicted, came from a
variety of castes but were mostly young. A few of them were un­
employed or had criminal records, but most were by no means poor.
A prominent leader of the exclusively Hindu colony of Govardhan-
puri describes how the attack on Rishi Ghalav Nagar was planned at
the office of the BJP’s ‘anti-riot squad’ called the Shanti Sena (Peace
Brigade). The main gate of the office, known as Alakh Math, opened
on to Rishi Ghalav Nagar. Previously it had been a temple of the
Nath sampradaya. But Ramcharan Vyakul, a relation of the Bajrang
Dal leader Acharya Dharmendra, had forcibly occupied it two months
before the riot. When some questioned his illegal occupation of the
temple and the destruction of the existing icons and sacred places—
eleven of Rudra Mahadev or Siva, one of Devi and three samadhis—
they were beaten up by the police. When the subject was raised in
the Rajasthan Assembly, the temple was overnight declared a Shanti
Sena office.
One b y -p ro d u ct o f the rio ts is the c o n so lid atio n o f the
dominance of the Brahmans and the Banias in Rishi Ghalav Nagar,
for many Muslims have sdld their homes and moved out. Ironi­
cally, despite the mutual enmity of the Hindu and Muslim leaders
on the issue of the mosque, some of them have got together after
the riot to sell the plot meant for the mosque and re-register it,
presumably to pocket the proceeds. Among the few exceptions to
the general atmosphere of violence, suspicion, greed and con­
spiracy in Rishi Ghalav Nagar was a house where Hindu neigh­
bours locked in some Muslims for safety and a row of houses
 Creating a Nationality 143
inhabited by poor Dalits and Muslims where the Dalits either helped
the Muslims or were themselves so terrified that they left their own
homes. Elsewhere in Rishi Ghalav Nagar open involvement or a con­
spiracy of silence was more common. This is how part of a conver­
sation between a Hindu couple, Rameshwar and Chatardevi, and one
of us went:
Question: What happened at Rishi Ghalav Nagar?
Husband: We don’t know. We were sleeping.
Question: But during the day did you hear anyone.?
Wife: I heard them say, ‘kill kill’.
#

Husband: We don’t know who they were, Hindu or Muslim. No we didn’t

hear anything.
Question: What were they shouting?
Wife: They were shouting slogans.
Husband: What do you know. Keep quiet.
Question: Did you see anything burning.
Husband: No nothing.
Wife: Yes, I saw, in the back lane. They were setting fire.
Husband: She is mad (págal hai).
Question: What time was this?
Wife: They came around 1 p m . Then they came again at 4.30.
Question: Didn’t the police come?
Wife: The police? Only late at night.

The Newspapers and Mohallá Koliyon

The vernacular press contributed generously to the growth of commu­
nal hatred in Rajasthan by stoking ill-defined fears of the Muslims.
Some wrote of the ‘declining’ ratio of Hindus to Muslims in the
country and restated the stereotype that the Muslims, in contrast to
the Hindus, did not practice family planning .59 More lethal were,
however, other kinds of lapses.

s*For instance, see the editorial page article published just before the riots,
titled ‘Decreasing Population of Hindus in India’, in the Navbharat Tunes, 4
October 1990.
144 Violence and Survival

For two days corpses were being hauled in from Rishi Ghalav
Nagar but the media and politicians seemed possessed by the events
in the Koli Mohalla .59 Milap Kothari wrote in the Rajasthan Patrika
of the ‘funerals of the living’ in the Koli Mohalla60; the same
newspaper, when it came to the Muslim-dominated Pahadganj, wrote
of the two-hours of firing (presumably by the Muslims) which killed
one jawan of the Rajasthan Armed Constabulary. Was the news of
Koli ‘deaths’ deliberately leaked by the police? One clue is the paral­
lel between the newspaper reports and the FIR of Jagmal Singh, Ad­
ditional SP (North), which mentions stoning and firing by the
Muslims as a result of which constable Sada Sukh died. According
to Singh, ‘some person with the intention to kill the policeman fired
and killed him.’ That person later turned out to be not a Muslim but
another RAC constable whose bullet had killed Sada Sukh .61
Similarly the seven persons killed in Topkhana Huzuri were in­
stantly assumed to be Hindus. Mohalla Koliyan is in Topkhana
Huzuri, one of the later chowkris. This is the heart of the gemstone
area; the jawahrat mandi or traditional gem market is held here in
which rough and finished gemstones exchange hands. The population
is 90 per cent Muslim, many of them affluent Julahas. Mohalla
Koliyan is an island of Kolis, a Dalit group, within Topkana Huzuri.
When a newspaper carrying the headline ‘Seven killed including two
children in Koli Mohalla’ was distributed in the area on 25 October,
it was assumed that the Muslims were the culprits.62 The Chief Min­
ister immediately announced a compensation of Rs 100,000 for each
person killed. Only much later did it become known that not a single
Koli had been killed in the mohalla itself. By then the locality had
become the locus of media attention, police protection, and relief.
Two Kolis were indeed killed, but that was in the Nathji ki Bagichi
and in the carpet factory adjoining Mohalla Koliyon. A Hindu police
constable, too, had been killed during an attack by the Rajasthan
Armed Constabulary (RAC) on M uslim homes at Pahadganj.
Pahadganj residents give a stark account of the RAC rampage in the

59For an example o f this contrast, see Rajasthan Patrika, 25 October 1990.

60Rajasthan Patrika, 26 October 1990.
6lOn the other hand, the seven-year-old girl in the house where the incident
took place was so terror-stricken by Sada Sukh’s behaviour with the women
and children that she broke down while describing him to us.
MSee front pages o f both Navbharat Times, 25 October 1990 and Rajasthan
Patrika, 25 October 1990.
 Creating a Nationality 145
area. On the other hand, in an adjacent lane, three of the seven Hindus
allegedly killed belonged to a single Muslim family, that of Qazi
Daud Khan who had been burnt alive in their jeep. Several persons
interviewed alleged the involvement of two Nepali brothers, Manoj
and Dinesh Thapa, whose father worked for the RAC and maintained
links with the RAC camp.
Previously there were between 2,000 and 3,000 houses in the Koli
Mohalla; they are now deserted. The Kolis say that the Muslims first
assured them of their security, then suddenly turned on them and
burnt their homes after returning from namaz. But some questions
remain. First, photographs and other evidence suggest that the Kolis
had been evacuated by the RAC on the morning of the 24th itself.
The evacuation began at 11 AM and continued till 2.00 pm, whereas
Koli homes were set on fire just before 4 pm. Second, the police for
some reason did not record the testimony of the mother and sister
who according to them were eyewitnesses to the killing of the Koli
in the Bagichi.63 There is also the strange case of Nauliya, a Koli,
who burnt his own house to get compensation. He was persuaded to
do so, some sources say, by an RAC tenant.
Did the Kolis then bum their own houses with the assistance of
RAC personnel after their families were in safe custody in the nearby
RAC camp? Several informants held that the burning of the Koli
homes did not do much damage and left the structures of the houses
intact. Almost immediately after the riot these homes were sold to
the local Muslims for prices up to Rs 4,00,000. The Kolis were given

63On the whole, the police have tended to disparage women’s testimony
on the 1990 riots. Radheshyam Pujari and Nandram were killed in the presence
o f their mother and sister respectively. But Nandram’s sister Shanti’s version
was ignored. Interestingly, she had sought protection with a Muslim family
for 4 to 5 days. Instead o f the testimony of these two women, we have the
affidavit of Kesar Lai, Nandram’s brother, who claims to have seen it all till
the police arrived. Exhibits B -l and B-2, Tibrewal Commission. Oddly
enough, the police FIR did not note his presence. Was Kesar Lai really an
eyewitness?
At Pahadganj, too, the police did not record the testimony o f the Muslim
woman in whose house the RAC constable had been shot dead. Again, at
Rishi Ghalav Nagar, a woman’s account o f how her husband was killed, and
the identity of those who stripped her naked and left her with a dozen or so
corpses in the dry rivulet behind Rishi Ghalav Nagar, could have been critical.
The police say she was not approached because she was manda buddhi (dim-
witted).
146 Violence and S urvival

alternative residential sites at Jamdoli, in close proximity to Keshav

Vidyapith, an élite RSS school.

Sources o f Violence and Resistance

The Jaipur riot was shaped by public responses to three issues that
have during the previous five years deeply affected the political cul­
ture of Rajasthan: the Deorala sati, the Mandai Commission recom­
mendations, and the Ayodhya temple controversy. Each led to the
mobilization of new sections for political purposes and spawned
organizations such as Sangharsh Samitis and Dharma Raksha Senas.
They introduced a new idiom and a certain frenzy in Rajasthan poli­
tics.
The pro-sati movement tried to tighten Rajput solidarity cutting
across clans and lineages, and sought to form a broad coalition with
the Hindu and Jain mercantile castes and with chunks of Rajasthan’s
culturally insecure and defensive middle class, particularly students,
retired government servants, and army personnel.64 The anti-Mandal
and Ram mandir agitations appealed to increasingly larger constituen­
cies.
The emergence of these constituencies has coincided with the
gradual merger of different narratives on Hindu-Muslim relations
originating from the ruling party, the written media and the police.
TTiis has given a new meaning to the role of the state in communal

^The Jaipur riots were contextualized by the larger political process in

Rajasthan and the attempts of some social groups to rectify their perceived
marginalization. For the preceding thousand years or so the region was marked
by Rajput rather than Brahmanical dominance in the princely states. See on
this, Iqbal Narain and P.C. Mathur, ‘The Thousand Year Raj: Regional Isola­
tion and Rajput Hinduism in Rajasthan before and after 1947’, in Francine
R. Frankel and M. S. A. Rao (eds), Dominance and State Power in M odem
India: Decline o f a Social Order (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), Vol.
2, pp. 1-58; and Suzanne H. Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, Essays on Raj-
putana (New Delhi: Concept, 1984).
During the freedom movement Rajput hegemony was challenged by Cong­
ress-affiliated praja mandals and parishads under largely Brahmanic leader­
ship. Although in the three decades following independence Congress stayed
in power, in 1952, 1957 and 1967, the ex-rulers and large landlords made
major dents in the Congress suppoit-base. The Congress came back dramati­
cally on a populist platform, cornering most lower-caste and minority votes
in the elections o f 1971 and 1984. The marginalization o f the Rajputs seemed
complete, until the Deorala sati gave them an opportunity to remobilize.
 Creating a Nationality 147

politics. And not only has a distinct police narrative on the riots taken
shape, but it has begun to provide a defence of the police and Hindu
nationalism in urban violence. As in Gujarat, the state-police-local
media narrative in Rajasthan, too, has begun to cohere with the narra­
tive of the more articulate among the lower castes. The theme of the
Muslim-as-a-traitor is pervasive in a large number of FIRs filed by
the Kolis. ‘First the Muslims reassured us and then attacked us after
their return from the namaz,' is the bottom line .65 The theme recurs
in the Banjara basti, Suraj Pole bazar and Mina Mohalla affidavits.
It could simply be an attempt to please the BJP regime of the state
and profit from it. It could be an attempt to justify the hostility in
the lower castes towards the upwardly-mobile Muslims; Koli ac­
counts did frequently refer to the multi-storeyed houses that the Mus­
lim gemstone dealers had been able to make at Topkhana Huzuri.
However, as in Gujarat, in Rajasthan, too, the growing distance be­
tween the underprivileged castes and the Muslims is partly a product
of the serious efforts made by the RSS family to accommodate the
former within the Hindu fold on a new basis, as in fact the fighting
arm of Hinduism, and to give them a new feeling of social worth as
Hindus.
The converging narratives of the RSS family, the police and the
local press also draw upon the changes introduced by the recent riots
into Jaipur’s urban geography. The last two years have seen much
cross-migration in the city. There are now only a few Muslim families
in Rishi Ghalav Nagar. Some have needed great persuasion to stay,
others are waiting for a decent price before selling their houses. In
the Bhishti Mohalla, a Muslim area, six Hindu families have moved
out and only one remains. In Mohalla Koliyan not a single Koli can
be found; the houses have all been sold to Muslim occupants. This
despite a complete ban on the registration of such distress sales by
the district administration. Jaipur is fast becoming a city of mohallas
organized on religious rather than occupational lines, akin to the
black or white neighbourhoods of the North American cities. Many
call the areas beyond Rishi Ghalav Nagar ‘Pakistan’, as they include
Bas Badanpura, Idgah and Van Vihar. Around it lie the Hindu areas;

65See Chunni Lai’s and the large number of near-identical Koli affidavits
that uniformly harp on the theme o f weak Hindus surrounded by Muslims.
Likewise, Ganesh Narain Mina’s affidavit complains o f how after namaz the
Muslims attacked at the Balaji ki Kothi rasta. Exhibits B15, B16, B17, B18,
Tibrewal Commission, 10 December 1991.
148 Violence and Survival

Govindpuri, Lachminarayanpuri, Mandi Khatikan and, now, Rishi

Ghalav Nagar. Similarly, some of the outlying areas of Jaipur—Man-
sarovar, Raja Park, Jawahar Nagar and Shastri Nagar are now almost
exclusively Hindu and identified as BJP bastions. The walled city is
not only Hindu but also upper-caste dominated. Such communally
homogeneous neighbourhoods do give people a sense of security, but
they also reduce the everyday interactions that at one time were a
long-term safeguard against stereotypy.
The gemstone industry, traditionally a meeting ground of people
from different faiths, is also being affected by the changing political
culture of Rajasthan. Some Bania and Jain traders are training Hindu
craftsmen to take the place of the Muslims.
The emerging ‘master’ narrative is also shaped by the inter-genera­
tional contradictions within the communities. During the riot itself
there was conflict between younger leaders of the Mochis and the
biradari's elders. As for the Muslims, earlier the Muslim League in
Jaipur barely managed to get enough votes in elections to save its
security deposit, but the fanaticism of the Bajrang Dal youth is now
sought to be matched by the Students Islamic Movement of India
(SIMI) and the Students Islamic Organization of India (SIO), the
youth wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami which has gained a foothold in
areas like Topkhana Huzuri. The master narrative, if one ignores its
community-specific contents and focuses on its demonology, is find­
ing new adherents among the Muslims, too.

Mutuality and Survival

Two issues remain to be discussed. The first of them can be posed
in the form of a question. Does the term ‘communal riot’, which we
have ourselves used throughout this book, describe adequately what
happened at Jaipur on 24 and 25 October? The media play up the
violence in their reports on death, arson, and aggressive assertion of
ethnic barriers. But a closer scrutiny of the violence itself reveals the
riot to be an omnibus expression for a variety of conflicts, not all of
them communal. In Jaipur, the violence served as a rubric under
which many diverse motives could find place. These motives ranged
from the eagerness to settle personal scores or oust one’s tenants to
open greed and plunder. (The frankness with which some of the
rioters confessed that they had been motivated by the prospect of a
good loot surprised at least one of us during the fieldwork.) To
 Creating a Nationality 149

categorize such a riot as ‘communal’ only strengthens the popular

middle-class belief in India that there are inexorable divides among
communities and that religious identities, especially when brought
into public life, are a constant source of conflict.66
Second, obscured by the dominant narrative and its authors in
Rajasthan, there is the mutuality between persons who helped, re­
assured, protected each other, and shared the moments of immense
fear and anxiety. That mutuality was not based on modern, secular
ideologies but on values derived from the same ‘primordial’ religious
sentiments that were mobilized to sanctify the violence of the riots.
In neighbourhood after neighbourhood one heard of people risking
their life and their own well-being for the sake of others. At Koliyon
ki Kothi the women reported how their Muslim neighbours protected
them, saying ‘We are between you and the attackers; nothing will
happen [to you]’; near the Pahadganj park a Muslim boy saved an
old Hindu woman who would have otherwise died, from mob fury.
From Rishi Ghalav Nagar three orphaned children came to the
Shamins for shelter; a Dalit family had taken care of them till it was
safe to move out.67 Shanti, whose brother had been killed (presumab­
ly by a Muslim) found it safest to stay with Baba Mohammed Sahab
for four to five days. An unknown Hindu tongawala helped Moham­
mad Naimuddin to escape after a crowd shouting lJai Shri Ram' had
caught hold of his cycle and beaten his friend Siraj to death with
sticks and iron rods. Later Naimuddin was able to bring the police
to the Galta crossing where Siraj’s body was lying .68
Most of the survivors of Rishi Ghalav Nagar received help and
protection from members of the other community. Hammu, whose
wife and brother-in-law were killed, found shelter at the home of a
Sikh; Hammu’s children were brought to the safety of a relative’s
place by one Raju Pandit.69 Darbar Ali’s daughter, Tahira, was saved
even as his son was killed and he was brutally assaulted; Shabuddin’s
aunt was killed as he himself would have been had it not been for
66As for the ‘fundamental’ communal divide, the fact remains that barely
three weeks before the Rath Yatra, using the same strategy o f political mobi­
lization, the upper castes had sought to divide the Hindus to protect their
privileges against affirmative action by the state in favour of the lower castes.
Only with the court’s stay order on the issue could the time become opportune
for using the idiom o f Hindu unity.
67Interview o f Ms Shamin by Mamta Jaithly, 6 November 1990.
“ FIR 456/1990, 24 October 1990, Ramganj Police Station.
69FIR 480/1990 of Shabuddin, 24 October 1990, Ramganj Police Station.
150 Violence and S urvival

two Khatiks who hid him and then misdirected the rioters. At Abdul
Hakim’s house, Hakim himself and several persons belonging to a
Pinnara family lay dead but his children were sheltered by a Dalit
woman who worked for the family; her daughter suckled Hakim’s
child even though her own son was on the rampage with the rioters.
This was not the only case; in some other instances too, help and shelter
came even from persons and families responsible for the violence.
Gupta, the local BJP leader had tacitly supported the violence, but
he also locked in his neighbours, Ali Sher Khan and his family, to
protect them from the rioters .70 And Khan’s family was rehabilitated
with the help of Deepak Purohit, gemstone dealer and employer of
Khan’s son. ‘He was an angel (farishta) for us,’ says Khan.
Adjacent to Rishi Ghalav Nagar is the colony’s extension where
families belonging to different faiths had been living together for a
longer period; many of them had been shifted from the Surya Nagar
slum, following the floods of 1981. Here the rioters were not even
allowed to enter the neighbourhood. Many Muslims of the area vivid­
ly remember the efforts of their neighbours to protect them. One such
survivor is Yusuf Ali. He recalls that Ram Narayan, a local tough
belonging to the Khatik caste, almost single-handedly confronted a
crowd of some 200 rioters who came to the neighbourhood. ‘Go
away,’ he shouted at them, ‘all houses are ours; no one will do any­
thing.’ Ram Narayan, Ali adds, was a feared ‘history sheeter’, a man
with a criminal record. He ran a taxi, lived in a hut near A li’s house
and often came to take water from Ali. His attitude mattered. Together
with Lalchand, a Khatik meat seller, and a Punjabi called Harishji,
he refused to allow rioting in their area.
There are other instances, too, where a little personal courage paid
rich dividends, as if the mobs were unable to handle resistance and
waited to be hoodwinked or defied. When a mob banged on the door
of Shafiquddin and shouted, ‘We will burn you alive if you don’t
open up,’ he opened the door to find a large number of armed men.
His neighbours who were with the crowd whispered to him, ‘Just do
as we say. Say Ram Ram.’ He did so. They took him with them
around the corner. After a while, the neighbours told him ‘Now you

TOln the course o f an interview on 16 July 1992, Ali Sher Khan remem­
bered: ‘[Gupta said], “Chacha, you sit here quietly. Nothing will happen to
you.” ... There had been mohabbat (affection) between us. When I was doing
my tailoring, 1 would supervise the construction of his house. Gupta and Dhan
Singh were my good friends till the issue o f the mosque arose in the colony.’
 Creating a Nationality 151
fall behind and slip away. We shall do the explaining.’ They apparent­
ly told the leaders of the mob later that though he was a Muslim he
was a good man. When the rioters went to the next person’s house
he ran back.
Razia’s account re-lives that night of terror for her three children
and extended family staying in four houses at Surya Nagar and their
survival, made possible by Hindu families in the neighbourhood. At
about noon, Razia’s family had seen the dense black smoke rising
from seven to eight places in the city.
Then we saw between 100 and 150 young, low caste men, between the ages
o f 18 and 25 years, armed with sticks. I did not recognize them; they were
from outside the colony.... at the crossing, they asked which were the Muslim
houses. ‘No one lives here’, our mohalla people told them. One was Kajod,
who works in the Collectorate, Jai Singh, a tailor master and Babu Lai Bijwala.

All of Razia’s family collected in her house. They locked themselves

in. An hour later, at about 1.30 pm a child came running to then and
said that he had seen the local mosque burning and one person being
killed. Razia’s younger brother and sister’s husband went to see what
had happened. They were spotted, but they managed to escape
through a lane to Babubhai’s house. Then in the evening around 7 pm,
Razia needed some milk powder for the children. Her sister’s baby
was only one year old. Some eight to ten ‘boys’ standing there recog­
nized her brothers and her sister’s husband. They followed them,
caught them and asked them their names; Mahesh and Rakesh, they
replied. But while replying Razia’s brother hesitated. That was a
dangerous slip. ‘Where do you live?’ the boys now asked. At Kajod’s,
the two answered. The boys did not believe them and so followed
them. Razia immediately opened the door and let them in. Let her
tell the rest of the story in her own words:
The boys then started banging the door with sticks, yelling ‘Muslims come
out.’ A crowd of about a hundred collected with swords, cycle chains and
iron rods. We went to the roof and four o f us women jumped over to the
Kajods’ roof. We hid among the goats but they had seen our shadows and
started shouting. We went down to the Kajods’ house all of us crying. They
made us wear ghagra-lugdi [women’s wear more frequently worn by Rajput
women in Rajasthan] and said, ‘You are with us. Nothing will happen. We
shall not allow the heat to touch you-anch nahin ane denge.' Then Kajod
went and spoke to them and told them, ‘Leave them they are good people,
else you will have to deal with us.’ After that the police jeep came and the
rioters ran away. This was at about 8.30 at night.
152 V iolence and Survival

Later Kajod told us, ‘Our house is now unsafe.’ He took us to Jai Singh’s
next door. But the men had seen us and we jumped onto the Smdhi’s roof.
He locked us inside for the night. They came again at 9.30 PM. All night we
heard cries and saw people with torches burning houses. In our colony people
sat at the crossing all night so that nothing would happen. No one came that
night. At 5.30 am we left for Pahadganj where my devar lives. Jai Singhji
and the Sindhi had come to leave us. At the crossing five persons with sticks
and lutiyas stopped us. They said, 'Bolo Jai Siya Ram.’ All o f us said ‘Jai
Siya Ram.' Then they let us go. We were again stopped at the mandi and said
‘Jai Siya Ram.’ A little ahead we told them, ‘Now we are in the Muslim area.
Go back now.’ We stayed two months at Pahadganj, then went to Sanganer,
then Tonk for three months. The people of our colony asked us to return but
we are afraid. We rented, then bought a house at Van Vihar. Our colony people
are very good. They still come to see us on festivals, our children tie rakhis
on them.

The fate of Jamil, too, was decided by his Hindu neighbours.

Pappu, the young son of Chatar Singh, came to know of the presence
of a lone Muslim tenant in a neighbouring house. While a crowd was
shouting 4Jai Shri Ram’ and banging at his door, Chatar Singh and
another neighbour, Babulal Bijwala, leapt across the roof and per­
suaded Jamil to open the backdoor. ‘We dragged Jamilbhai to safety,’
Pappu says. For two days Jamil was kept in Babulal’s house in his
daughter-in-law’s room, where she had just delivered a baby. Jamil
was shaven clean and presented as her uncle who had come from
outside. When he left, Pappu’s mother, Premdevi, put a ritual mark
of tilak on his forehead and tied kalava (sacred thread) on his hand,
to make him look like a Hindu and, perhaps less intentionally, to
protect him by providing him with a ‘magical’ guard .72
We talked to Premdevi, a devout Hindu and naturally confident
of the breadth of her piety. It was from her ‘low-brow’ piety that she
drew her public norms.
I follow all Hindu devatas and I also believe in Muslim gods. I believe in
Ajmer’s Khwaja saheb and Sayyad baba. You find his sthans everywhere; he
fulfils all desires and brings peace o f mind. I even follow the isai devatas
[Christian gods] like Ishamasih and Guru Nanak. The gods tell us to do one’s
karma. They were men but great men and we must fold our hands. All people
who do good work must be worshipped. There are fanatics in all communities,
whether Hindu or Muslim. Compassion is within all individuals.

?1Razia Sultan on 30 April 1992.

72Interview with Ismail Khan, landlord o f Jamil’s house, 30 April 1992.
Khan’s family, like six other Muslim householders in the same lane, has sold
its house.
 Creating a Nationality 153

‘Should there be a temple or a mosque at Ayodhya?’ we asked. Prem-

devi said: ‘The best thing will be if both the mandir and the masjid
remain. They are god’s homes, not made to be destroyed. The
janmabhumi controversy is a fight for the chair among leaders, and
the poor die.’
In the same neighbourhood lived Gangadevi, the wife of Babulal
Bijwala. She recounted her family’s close relations with the Muslim
Manihar family she had been so protective towards:
For 20 years we lived together in the basti below in huts. They [the Manihar
family] had a hutment and so did we. Then they were allotted a plot. We had
very good relations with them, no sense o f being Hindu or Muslim. We came
here in 1973 and lived together after that. There was affection between us.
When I faced a problem— for instance, when my child had an accident on
Moharrum— Munna [their eldest son] rushed her to the big hospital. She had
come under a truck when she was going with her grandfather to see the tazia.
She was saved but her foot was cut; she has an artificial foot. So we shared
each other’s sorrows and joys.

Like others, Gangadevi was shocked that religious violence had

erupted in Jaipur at all. ‘This is the first time I’ve heard of such a
thing [the riot]. But nothing happened in our neighbourhood.’ She
seemed unaware that the violence did not touch her neighbourhood
because some like her had taken a position:
When we heard of Jamil, we jumped across and fetched him. We were so
scared, we thought someone might kill u s.... My elder son had gone to Ayod­
hya for karseva— he ran away ... I had the responsibility of my daughters-
in-law and grandchildren. 1 don’t go anywhere, to any temple. My temple is
in my home where I worship all gods. For Ram and Rahim I light agarbattis,
[incense sticks], for Sayyad baba I light an agarbatti.
I said to Jamil, ‘see son, you are just like this son [of mine] here.’ Then
I gave him tea and dinner. If anyone asked, I said, ‘He is our guest, my
daughter-in-law’s uncle from Delhi.’ The next day my nephew came to sell
some newspapers. I told him to leave Jamil at Galta Gate....
After eight or ten days his [Jamil’s] relatives and his mother came to thank
me. Possibly it is due to their dua (blessing) that my son returned from Ayod­
hya where so many died. His mother said, .‘you have saved my son, your son
will also come back safe.’ He [the karsevak son] is not in the BJP but went
because o f his friends; he was only twenty. The police came to leave him in
a car. He said, i was put in jail.’ I said ‘good, even better if they’d broken
your limbs. Here you come back after twenty-two days, and you knew your
wife was going to have a baby.’
... I was going mad. Some strangers would pass by our house saying ‘they
are coming. Coming in a bus, in a truck.’ I said ‘let them come. I was so
15 4 Violence and S urvival

sick o f the rumours.’ We were all together, the people o f this colony. We’d
been together for twenty years. But who listens to poor people? Our daughter
was killed for dowry. It is now one and a half year, the police don’t listen.
She was hanged by her husband and in-laws, Agarwals o f our own caste.
Who bothers? ... our Muslim neighbours left the colony even though we did
not want them to. But when our daughter was killed by her in-laws, they all
came to share our sorrow.

Such experiences allow one not merely to relive the fear and the
trauma that persons or families lived through, but also their survival
through their community ties with concerned Hindus. These ties
manage to cross even ideological divides—the mother of a karsevak
protects his declared ‘enemy’, and the enemy’s relatives in turn come
to offer their blessings for the safe return of the karsevak from his
mission of destroying the enemy’s place of worship. We end this part
of our story with the account of an interview with a group o f Kolis
in mid-1992 that shows the complexity of social relationships that
religion qua ideology has still not been able to linearize.
‘The Muslims killed many,’ Dalchand Koli began, ‘Eight to ten
corpses were found, all after the curfew was lifted. They had been
so badly burnt by Muslims they were unidentifiable.’ Nathuram, a
more elderly Koli, gently corrected him, ‘No, two were killed.’
Keshav Lai said, ‘We learnt that Koli houses had been burnt. My
son and his friend went to the park to see what had happened. He
saw thousands of Muslims. As he was running away, another group
of Muslims surrounded him. He was stabbed. Another was hit by an
iron rod.’ However, the women of Koli households had a different
story. One said, ‘Of the two who had gone to investigate and were
injured; one was a Hindu, the other a Muslim.’ Hemlata remembered
that the crowd had come shouting lJai Shri Ram'. She added, ‘The
Muslim who lives in the house across us, Rais, who does gemstone
work, protected us.’ Toshibai, her mother, confirmed her account,
‘The Muslims did nothing to us. They did not bum my house, break
anything. During curfew Rais and Jumma came to our home, sat with
us, and helped us.’ Keshav Lai, a Koli whose son had been stabbed,
was treated by Seraj, the Muslim doctor at what is called the
Mahavaton ki Dispensary.74

73Kesar Lai’s affidavit is similar. It says that the Muslims set fire to Koli
homes so that ‘several were burnt alive’. Exhibit B- 1, Tibrewal Commission.
74Dalchand acknowledged his good work among the poor as he charges
only Rs 3 per person irrespective of religion.
 Creating a Nationality 155

At several Koli homes, machines for bindai indicate their shift

from unskilled labour ( beldari), which fetches between 30 and 40
rupees a day, to the gemstone business. They get their work from
local Muslim manufacturers. Dalchand refers to his patrons as ‘Rajak
bhai’ and ‘Babu bhai’. ‘Are they Hindus?’, we ask him. ‘No they are
Muslims.’ The Muslims he feels are ‘milansar’ (friendly); at least
their older folks are.
If we don’t go to their weddings and festivals then they send us food.... Its
the Baman-Banias [Brahmans and Banias] who practice chchua-chchut against
us.... Now see what a struggle it is to get a piao [drinking water kiosk] at
Manak Chowk. But the Banias o f Jauhari bazar, the sethlog, refuse to permit
the release o f the order [to set up a kiosk].’

We shall return to this theme of community and survival in the

next section.
 CHAPTER FIVE

IX. T h e A f t e r m a t h a n d t h e R u in s —I

n 29 October 1991, we were at Ayodhya again. This time

O the VHP and the Bajrang Dal, with support from the rest of
the RSS family, had planned a 40-day-long sacrificial ritual
called Bajrang Rudra Yajna. Since Ayodhya had become the focus
of an agitation in 1990, this was the first time that the RSS made its
presence known openly and visibly. The Yajna was to be followed,
starting 27 November, by a Ram Yajna.1 A four-day meet was or­
ganized as a part of the first Yajna to propagate the cause of the
parivar. Of these four days, the first (30 October) was designated as
shaurya divas, the day of valour, and the fourth (2 November) as
shraddha divas, day of respect. Both were meant to honour those
who had fallen martyrs to the cause of the new Ram Temple at Ayod­
hya between 30 October and 2 November in 1990. Presumably, keep­
ing in mind the press and.other sundry demands of high politics in
India, the Gregorian calendar had to be used instead of the Indian
for deciding the dates of the yajna.
We listened to five of the speeches and the chairman’s frequent
brief interventions on the Day of Valour at the newly established
Karsevakpuram, a temporary campus or mini-township established at
Ayodhya for the participants in the Yajna and for housing the
karsevaks from all over India. The township had its own checkposts,
passes, including passes for parking space, and even a public relations
office. It had two retail booksellers and a separate tent where the
yajna was being actually conducted but which seemed to elicit little
interest. One of the two booksellers was a Bengali RSS activist from
Allahabad, deeply committed to the unification of all Hindus. But
her Bengali cultural chauvinism was not dead. Her mournful refrain

'The Ram Yajna was subsequently cancelled because the organizers feared
that it would tire out the karsevaks and other outsiders who had been in the
city already for 40 days.
 Creating a Nationality 15 7

during our chat was the ‘backwardness’ of the Uttar Pradeshis, spe­
cially the Uttar Pradeshi women, and their lack of knowledge as well
as interest in the ‘unhappy’ situation of the Hindus.
The pandal where the meeting was held and the speeches delivered
was a large one, with sitting space for roughly 12,000 people. On
the Day of Valour it was about one-fourth full and, though the crowd
was sometimes enthusiastic, it could hardly be called frenzied or
even forbiddingly aggressive. The speeches, however, made up for
the absence of fanatic listeners; they were fiery in the old oratorial
style. Unfortunately for the press and outside visitors, they were also
variations on a single set of arguments and soon became tiresome.
Two or three recurrent themes characterized them. All the speakers
emphasized the intrinsic tolerance of Hinduism and the Hindus and,
predictably, some of the speakers used that to ‘prove’ Hinduism’s
intrinsic superiority over other religions. Most speakers reminded the
audience of the VHP’s claim that, while historically speaking 3,000
Hindu temples had been destroyed or desecrated by Muslims, the
VHP was demanding the return of only three. The sole variation on
this theme was in the speech of a non-resident Indian from Britain,
one Mr Khanna, who was introduced as a functionary of the VHP in
England. He said that if non-violence did not work, the movement
would have to take to violence. He claimed that 20,000 temples were
due to the Hindus from the Muslims, but they were claiming only
three of them. And if the three were not returned, 20,000 mosques
would have to be destroyed. Probably, being an expatriate, Mr Khan­
na was not that well-informed about the changing currents of Indian
politics. He said things which the more hard-boiled political kinds
avoided. We shall come back to this.
A second important theme was Mulayam Singh Yadav. He was
repeatedly described as a Ravan who had insulted and humiliated all
Hindus by organizing state repression of the karsevaks at Ayodhya
the previous year. Virtually all speakers claimed that the Day of
Valour would go down in the history of India as a day as important
as Vijaya Dashami, the final day of the Durga puja as well as a day
that celebrates the triumph of Ram over Ravan. This was because a
demon as dangerous as Mulayam Singh had been defeated on that
day by Ram himself. And his demonic pride, that had led him to say
that not even a bird in flight could get near enough the disputed
structure to touch it, lay shattered.2 The same fate had befallen his
minister Azam Khan (also a member of the Babri Masjid Action
158 T he A ftermath and the R uins—I

Comm ittee) who had declared that any eye raised at the mosque
(presum ably with the intention of dem olishing it) w ould be
pulled out; when the day of reckoning came, not merely were
thousands o f eyes raised at the mosque but saffron flags were
flown atop it.
There were some wild exaggerations in this context, too. Two of
the speakers mentioned the hundreds of thousands of karsevaks who
had descended upon and fought at Ayodhya in October 1990.
Strangely, some of the strongest attacks and epithets were reserved
for Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the erstwhile prime minister. Though
Mulayam Singh and Vishwanath Pratap had already fallen apart
politically and were now in opposite camps, they were usually
clubbed together. The latter was depicted as the political twin of
Mulayam Singh and as a dedicated enemy of Hindu nationalism. He
was sometimes referred to as Bhi Bhi Singh (cowardly lion, a pun
on his name), paidaishi andha (congenitally blind) and dasiyon ka
das (a servant of maid-servants) and ridiculed as a lover of Muslims,
a protagonist of minorityism, and as the authentic progeny of Babar.
One speaker, Shakti Swarupji Maharaj from Gujarat, accused him of
implementing the Mandal Commission Report to divide the Hindus.
(The Maharaj was introduced to the audiences as the rightful inheritor
of Vallabbhai Patel’s legacy, as he was now repeatedly doing in the
rest of Gujarat what Patel had done at Somnath; namely, the Maharaj
was trying to rebuild temples destroyed by medieval Muslim invaders
from outside India.)
Comparatively, the Congress-I party and the Muslims were at­
tacked or ridiculed much less: The reasons for this were not very
clear. Perhaps, it was easier to attack someone with a strong ideo­
logical posture, rather than a political party that seemed to have a
diffused ideological commitment. As for the Muslims, at that point
in time they probably appeared less dangerous than the ‘hidden inter­
nal’ enemy. The attack on V. P. Singh was particularly vicious because

2On the day the results o f the state elections in UP were declared in 1991
and the BJP was declared the winner, the party’s president as well as some
of its major functionaries were interviewed on camera for the television by
anchorman Pranay Roy’s team presenting the election results. All the BJP
leaders openly admitted that Mulayam Singh Yadav had served as the greatest
benefactor o f the BJP by his unthinking, crudely provocative stance and total
dependence on the coercive power of the law-enforcing machinery o f the
state.
 Creating a Nationality 159

he perhaps posed, in the eyes of the Sangh family, a greater electoral

threat than Mulayam Singh at that point of time. Also, the family
probably perceived Mulayam as a local, short-term threat, Vish-
wanath Pratap as a long-term, country-wide threat. The latter after
all was the supremo of a party in alliance with the ‘pseudo-secularist’
Left parties (in turn seen as particularly dedicated enemies of the
family) and seemed to command the allegiance of a majority of the
Muslims.
It is even possible that Vishwanath Pratap was seen as an imme­
diate political threat, given his protest against the demolition of some
temples in the annexe of the Ramjanmabhumi.3That this particular
act of protest by the former prime minister had struck home became
obvious when one speaker wondered why Singh had not gone to
Kashmir till then to agitate against the destruction of thousands of
temples there? Was it because he knew that if he did that, the same
Muslims whom he loved so dearly would chop his body into little
pieces and throw them into the river Jhelum? Was that why, the
‘singh’ became a ‘gidadh’ (jackal) at the very thought of such an
intervention in Kashmir? Whatever the reason, V. P. Singh was the
constant butt of the black humour of the speakers and all of them
called upon the audience to teach a lesson, presumably electorally,
to the two Singhs, sons of Babar.4

3By the time we undertook this visit, the VHP and its allies had acquired
and demolished a few of the adjoining old temples and acquired the land for
constructing the proposed Ram temple, to the chagrin o f many pujaris and
residents o f Ayodhya, especially Chetram Das of Sankatmochan temple. The
Janata Dal threatened to start a counter-karseva and some priests went to the
press on the issue. See for example ‘JD to start Karaeva’, The Times o f India,
21 October 1991; and ‘No Sign o f Yagna in Ayodhya’, The Hindu, 25 October
1991.
About five months later, on 22 March 1992, four old temples were razed
to the ground to make place for VHP’s grandiose scheme: Sankatmochan
mandir, Sumitra bhavan, Lomesh Rishi Ashram mandir, and Dwarkadas man-
dir. The Pioneer, 23 March 1992; and Radhika Ramaseshan, ‘On a Demolition
Spree’, The Pioneer, 24 March 1992.
4Girilal Jain ( ‘The Challenge for the BJP’, Sunday Mail, 3 November
1991), no lover o f Singh or the Janata Dal, was the only political analyst to
sense that ‘V. P. Singh has ... helped focus attention sharply on the fact that
the Ramjanmabhumi-Babri masjid dispute is as much an intra-Hindu one as
a Hindu-Muslim one, if not more [so].’
160 T he A ftermath and the R uins—I

Third, following the long-standing RSS practice, almost all the

speakers bewailed the absence of unity among Hindus and the
presence of internal enemies among them. The only variation was
provided by one rather shrill demagogue from Rajasthan, Shiva
Saraswati, who lamented the lack of proper religious ‘capitals’ in
Hinduism of the kind Muslims and Christians had—such as Mecca,
Medina and the Vatican. She expected the Ramjanmabhumi to per­
form that function in the future. The enemies of Hinduism were the
ones, she suggested, who sought to subvert this project.5
Finally, every speech pointed out that if the people could hand
out a humiliating electoral defeat to the Mulayam Singh government,
they could throw out R V. Narsimha Rao’s government in Delhi the
same way, if it stood in the way of the construction of the Ram
temple. This was followed, in two speeches, by direct pleas to the
listeners to ensure the victory of the BJP in the next general elections.
However, some speakers also made it clear that if the BJP dragged
its feet over the construction of the temple, its government in the
state would be pulled down. One of them decried the fact that despite
a government of Ram-worshippers at Lucknow, no action had yet
been taken against the officials who had been responsible for the
deaths of the karsevaks on 30 October and 2 November the previous
year.

We heard four speeches at the Ramjanmabhumi at a memorial meet­

ing that started around 12 noon. The meeting attracted an audience
of between 1,000 and 1,200 people—a remarkably small number,
considering the preparations that had gone into it. The number was
a source of embarrassment to some of the organizers, too.
The meeting was held next to the Babri mosque, near about the
place where the foundation-laying ceremony of the future Ram
temple had been performed by the Sangh family and where the
pilgrims offered their donations, many of them mechanically, under
the impression that the structure belonged to the temple complex.
The VHP showroom that provided the backdrop for the stage from
which the Hindu religious and political leaders spoke looked rather
bare in comparison to its old self just a few months ago. The posters
and large portraits had been taken down. A new addition was a fairly
^ i s theme of territorialization of the sacred and mimicry of faiths repor­
tedly enjoying more this-worldly power were to recur more and more fre­
quently over the next eighteen months.
 Creating a Nationality 16 1

large sticker pasted on one of the walls. It read, paradoxically invok­

ing Islamic imagery: Ayodhya, crushed by oppression, do not be sad.
We will pass your way again, carrying with us our own kafans
(shrouds used by Muslims for covering dead bodies).6
The speeches were delivered by Swami Avaidyanath, Nrityagopal
Das, Uma Bharati, Vinay Katiyar and Saakshiji Maharaj. All were in
continuity with the speeches at Karsevakpuram, but for a slightly
more aggressive tone. However, there was now an additional element
in the speeches which did not entirely fit in with the tone. Despite
the aggressiveness—Nrityagopal Das even prophesied the total des­
truction of the families and lineages, vamshanush, of the enemies of
the Ram temple—all the speakers took care to avoid provoking the
listeners to attack the mosque and Muslims. It was very skilled tight­
rope-walking.
The most skilful turned out to be Uma Bharati, ostensibly a world-
renouncer (sanyasini) but actually a tough politician and a BJP mem­
ber of Parliament. She had a somewhat rough, masculine voice and
compensated for it by her conspicuously feminine, elegant attire and
smart, contemporary make-up and hair-do. The temple would have
to be built on the basis of strength, not anybody’s kindness or charity,
she affirmed. Bharati went so far as to specifically request the
audience not to call their ‘Muslim brethren’ Babar ki aulad (children
of Babar). She said that the real progeny of Babar were those Hindus
who were trying to protect the mosque. ‘Our opponents are not
Muslims’, but ‘eunuchs’ like V. P. Singh and Mulayam Singh. In this
connection, she also compared the strong reaction to the mention of
Maulana Azad as a ‘show boy’ over Indian television to the feeble
reaction to the comment of Rajnath Sonkar Shastri, Janata Dal MP
from Uttar Pradesh, that Ram was a durachari (one who flouts codes
of conduct). ‘Such persons should be burnt alive’, she thundered.
Bharati attacked the Muslims for putting their religion before their
country, for thinking of themselves as ‘Muslim Indians’ and not ‘In­
dian Muslims’. But she did so in the guise of a tale about a Buddhist
monk in Thailand who was asked what he would offer Lord Buddha,
if they ever came face to face. The young monk replied that he would
cut his head off with a sword and offer it to Buddha. Whereupon he
was asked what he would do if Lord Buddha came to conquer his
land at the head of an army. The monk replied, without any hesitation,
6‘Daman se kuchli hui Ayodhya, tu udas na ho. Ham apne kafan sath le
ph ir wohin se guzrenge. ’
162 T he A ftermath and the Ruins—I

that he would use the same sword on Buddha, because the country
came first, even before religion and God. As at Karsevakpuram, all
four speeches at Ramjanmabhumi made a fervent plea to the audience
to vote for the BJP and not to allow the demon Mulayam Singh to
stage a comeback to the Assembly. In the process, the speakers once
again ridiculed V. P. Singh and his party. Uma Bharati borrowed a
few lines from a famous Urdu couplet, even as she apologized to the
crowd for making use of that language, to abuse V. P. Singh: ‘Inki
tarif kya punch rahe ho, inki umra to gunahon mein guzri.' (Why do
you ask who he is, his whole life has been spent in sin.) The speakers
also urged the listeners to work towards a BJP government at the
Centre.
At exactly 12.07 PM three saffron flags were hoisted. Which means
three flagpoles with flags were brought in and held up in front of
the audience. The hoisting—that is, the unfurling by hand—was done
by Swami Avaidyanath, Ramchandra Paramhans and Nrityagopal
Das. In the course of the speeches it was said that these flags sym­
bolized the three flags hoisted by the karsevaks on top of the Babri
masjid in 1990. Two speakers added that the flags symbolized the
three flags that would one day fly at Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura.
According to Saakshiji Maharaj, the BJP MP from Mathura, the saf­
fron flag that had fallen from the hands of the Hindus in the Battle
of Panipat had been at long last picked up again, on the day it was
unfurled on the dome of the Babri mosque the previous year. How­
ever, the speakers also made explicit that they would not like any
adventurous or precipitate action by the karsevaks. The speeches, like
the ones delivered at Karsevakpuram, contained hints that the or­
ganizers did not want the temple right then, but would probably
prefer the work to begin some time before the next national elec­
tions, so that it could be electorally encashed. They seemed afraid
that the people might lose interest in the Ramjanmabhumi movement
as quickly as the people of Ayodhya had already seemed to have
done.
One thing was very clear. The leadership of the BJP, the VHP and
the Bajrang Dal were trying to check their over-enthusiastic fol­
lowers. They did not want any trouble. The followers, mostly teen­
agers and young adults from the lower-middle class, were not that
easy to control—they appeared keen to mount an attack or a move­
ment for the demolition of the Babri masjid right then. The leader­
ship, on the other hand, seemed to know the risk that such a step
 Creating a Nationality 16 3

would constitute for the survival of the BJP government in UP. In

fact, some of them in their speeches emphasized the need not only
for valour, but also for discipline as a vital principle of their move­
ment. They obviously failed to make an adequate impression on the
karsevaks, for the next day a restless mob of young men attacked
the Babri masjid once again and caused some damage to it, besides
planting the mandatory saffron flags on the domes of the mosque.
In sum, two impressions remained vivid in the minds of the ob­
servers. First, one got the feeling that the conciliatory behaviour un­
derlying the non-conciliatory posture and idiom was not merely an
attempt to placate the sizeable national and international press, but
probably represented a political design. Second, the speeches were
obviously campaign speeches. Altogether, the meeting had the flavour
of a small, roadside election meeting of the BJP.

Otherwise too, Ayodhya seemed to be returning to ‘normal’. All

around there were signs that the Ramjanmabhumi movement was
being accommodated within the normal culture of Indian politics.
The claim of many that the people of Ayodhya were mostly not
interested in the movement and were in fact hostile to it—till the
ham-handedness of Mulayam Singh Yadav pushed them into the lap
of the movement—seemed to have a certain face validity. We hardly
saw anybody from Ayodhya taking interest in the happenings around
the Ramjanmabhumi temple or in the Karsevakpuram that housed the
karsevaks. Even the children of Ayodhya, as a priest pointed out,
were not interested in the fun any more. They lived their life as if
the Bajrang Rudra Yajna was being held in some other city.
Nor did the people of Ayodhya seem to take interest in the fiery
speeches and in the coverage o f the m ovem ent in the local
newspapers. Probably the stand taken by some of the priests against
the movement had influenced them. Probably they had read between
the lines of the speeches made on the Day of Valour at Karsevak­
puram and Ramjanmabhumi and felt that the leadership of the move­
ment was more interested in politics than.in the temple.
Even the visiting journalists of the national papers were gradually
getting sucked into the normal politics that the movement had now
come to represent. Some complained to us that they were being
forced to listen to standard election speeches. A few journalists left
Ayodhya, claiming that nothing much was happening there and it
was getting boring. Many of them were overtly pessimistic or had
162 T he Aftermath and the R uins—I

that he would use the same sword on Buddha, because the country
came first, even before religion and God. As at Karsevakpuram, all
four speeches at Ramjanmabhumi made a fervent plea to the audience
to vote for the BJP and not to allow the demon Mulayam Singh to
stage a comeback to the Assembly. In the process, the speakers once
again ridiculed V. P. Singh and his party. Uma Bharati borrowed a
few lines from a famous Urdu couplet, even as she apologized to the
crowd for making use of that language, to abuse V. P. Singh: llnki
tarif kya punch rahi ho, inki umra to gunahon mein guzri.' (Why do
you ask who he is, his whole life has been spent in sin.) The speakers
also urged the listeners to work towards a BJP government at the
Centre.
At exactly 12.07 PM three saffron flags were hoisted. Which means
three flagpoles with flags were brought in and held up in front of
the audience. The hoisting—that is, the unfurling by hand—was done
by Swami Avaidyanath, Ramchandra Paramhans and Nrityagopal
Das. In the course of the speeches it was said that these flags sym­
bolized the three flags hoisted by the karsevaks on top of the Babri
masjid in 1990. Two speakers added that the flags symbolized the
three flags that would one day fly at Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura.
According to Saakshiji Maharaj, the BJP MP from Mathura, the saf­
fron flag that had fallen from the hands of the Hindus in the Battle
of Panipat had been at long last picked up again, on the day it was
unfurled on the dome of the Babri mosque the previous year. How­
ever, the speakers also made explicit that they would not like any
adventurous or precipitate action by the karsevaks. The speeches, like
the ones delivered at Karsevakpuram, contained hints that the or­
ganizers did not want the temple right then, but would probably
prefer the work to begin some time before the next national elec­
tions, so that it could be electorally encashed. They seemed afraid
that the people might lose interest in the Ramjanmabhumi movement
as quickly as the people of Ayodhya had already seemed to have
done.
One thing was very clear. The leadership of the BJP, the VHP and
the Bajrang Dal were trying to check their over-enthusiastic fol­
lowers. They did not want any trouble. The followers, mostly teen­
agers and young adults from the lower-middle class, were not that
easy to control—they appeared keen to mount an attack or a move­
ment for the demolition of the Babri masjid right then. The leader­
ship, on the other hand, seemed to know the risk that such a step
 Creating a Nationality 16 3

would constitute for the survival of the BJP government in UP. In

fact, some of them in their speeches emphasized the need not only
for valour, but also for discipline as a vital principle of their move­
ment. They obviously failed to make an adequate impression on the
karsevaks, for the next day a restless mob of young men attacked
the Babri masjid once again and caused some damage to it, besides
planting the mandatory saffron flags on the domes of the mosque.
In sum, two impressions remained vivid in the minds of the ob­
servers. First, one got the feeling that the conciliatory behaviour un­
derlying the non-conciliatory posture and idiom was not merely an
attempt to placate the sizeable national and international press, but
probably represented a political design. Second, the speeches were
obviously campaign speeches. Altogether, the meeting had the flavour
of a small, roadside election meeting of the BJP.

Otherwise too, Ayodhya seemed to be returning to ‘normal’. All

around there were signs that the Ramjanmabhumi movement was
being accommodated within the normal culture of Indian politics.
The claim of many that the people of Ayodhya were mostly not
interested in the movement and were in fact hostile to it—till the
ham-handedness of Mulayam Singh Yadav pushed them into the lap
of the movement—seemed to have a certain face validity. We hardly
saw anybody from Ayodhya taking interest in the happenings around
the Ramjanmabhumi temple or in the Karsevakpuram that housed the
karsevaks. Even the children of Ayodhya, as a priest pointed out,
were not interested in the fun any more. They lived their life as if
the Bajrang Rudra Yajna was being held in some other city.
Nor did the people of Ayodhya seem to take interest in the fiery
speeches and in the coverage o f the m ovem ent in the local
newspapers. Probably the stand taken by some of the priests against
the movement had influenced them. Probably they had read between
the lines of the speeches made on the Day of Valour at Karsevak­
puram and Ramjanmabhumi and felt that the leadership of the move­
ment was more interested in politics than.in the temple.
Even the visiting journalists of the national papers were gradually
getting sucked into the normal politics that the movement had now
come to represent. Some complained to us that they were being
forced to listen to standard election speeches. A few journalists left
Ayodhya, claiming that nothing much was happening there and it
was getting boring. Many of them were overtly pessimistic or had
164 T he A ftermath and the Ruins—I

total contempt for and fear of the movement. One of them, working
for an international news agency, even confided to us that he was
tired and demoralized by his experiences at Ayodhya and would ask
the agency for a different assignment on his return to Delhi. One
other journalist had coined a slogan as a spoof on a VHP slogan
which went: ‘Ramlalla ab ayenge, mandir wohi banayenge (Dear
Ram will now come, and make the temple himself).’
There had already grown a flourishing market relating to the
movement—to serve the visitors, journalists, karsevaks, and the simp­
ly curious. The two respectable Faizabad hotels were packed with
journalists; it was impossible for any newcomer to get a place in
them. There were also a few Shri Ram fast-food outlets. A number
of shops sold cassettes of fiery speeches about the temple move­
ment—mostly by Uma Bharati and Ritambhara, the two sanyasinis
who neither spoke nor dressed like world renouncers. The shops also
sold aggressive political-religious bhajans, usually set to the tunes
of popular commercial film songs, including disco numbers. We
found a bhajan that sang the praises of Lord Krishna in the tune of
the film song that was a great hit of 1990— Jumma chumma de de
(Jumma, give a kiss). Two of the fire-eating cassettes of bhajans had
a Muslim, Sayed Ali, as the director of the orchestral arrangements
for the songs. For the small shopkeepers who sold these cassettes, it
was business as usual.
Even the karsevaks, though always looking for excitement and
sometimes for trouble, seemed mainly in search of some entertain­
ment. Many contingents of visiting karsevaks, who were supposed
to depart after a few days to make way for new batches of volunteers
(there being insufficient space at Karsevakpuram), refused to call it
a day and hung around the city. They had come on a free trip and
apparently wanted to make the most of it.
It was also obvious that the leaders of the movement were looking
for respectability and were unwilling to precipitate a crisis. We got
involved in a fracas that exemplified this unwillingness neatly. An
elderly Muslim was caught, allegedly stealing a curtain from a
temple. He was wearing a tattered dhoti and looked both hungry and
mentally disturbed. Some of the Da! activists, at last finding an
opportunity to satisfy their blood lust, were about to lynch him. The
police were helpless or, rather, said they were so. They certainly did
not want to take on the Bajrang Dal. The thief was badly beaten in
front of the policemen and was being accused of being a spy of Syed
 Creating a Nationality 165
7
Shahabuddin and others of his ilk. There were demands from the
Bajrang Dal boys that the thief be handed over to them for disposal
of the case. The police seemed to agree quite readily. Guessing what
such disposal would mean, we rushed back to inform Vinay Katiyar,
the MP for Faizabad, and the founder-head of Bajrang Dal, whose
house was just a few steps away in the same lane where the event
was taking place. A tense Katiyar immediately rushed to the spot
with his security guards in a jeep and embarked on what can only
be called a one-man lathi-charge to disperse the crowd. After that he
told the police, loudly and publicly and probably for our benefit too,
to maintain law and order strictly. The ‘thief’ was then taken to the
police station. We have no further clue as to his subsequent fate.
The Bajrang Dal boys were very angry that Katiyar had used force
on them. They felt betrayed and said so. But it was patent that Katiyar
did not want an incident under the eyes of the national and inter­
national press and he did not want to embarrass the BJP government
of UP.
Within a few days even the newspapers caught on to the game.
Though their editorial positions and middle-class morality forced
their staff to continue either with their partisan pro-BJP stand or with
their sanitized, by-now anaemic slogans of secularism, they also
sensed the declining interest in the movement and the re-emergence
of unheroic politics. Though some of them continued to talk of the
fanaticism of the BJP and the VHP, this talk no longer had the touch
« • • ft
of panic it previously had; exactly as some of their other colleagues
did not sound that enthusiastic when talking of the beauties of
karseva.
Even the BJP, its all-India political ambitions now aroused and
trying to behave like a responsible future government in waiting,
knew that the political returns from the Ram Mandir issue were

7The alleged thief’s dhoti seemed to have been subtly provocative to north­
ern and western Indian karsevaks. They were unaccustomed to see Muslims
in dhotis worn in the ‘Hindu’ way and yet that happens to be the dress of a
majority of the Muslims in many parts of Uttar Pradesh. Especially to the
Gujarati karsevaks with whom we talked, the ‘culprit’ seemed to be in dis­
guise.
RFor example, Bhaskar Roy, ‘Confusion in the Ranks’, and Coomi Kapoor,
‘The BJP’s Dilemma’, Indian Express, 15 September 1991; Sumit Mitra,
‘Softening Stance, Friendly Overtures’, Indian Express, 10 November 1991;
and Saroj Nagi, ‘BJP Does the Balancing Act’, The Illustrated Weekly o f India,
12 October 1991, p. 16.
16 6 T he A ftermath and the R uins—I

diminishing. Jaswant Singh, the suave BJP Member of Parliament,

virtually gave the game away when he said, ‘You cannot make politi­
cal soufflé rise twice from the same recipe .’9 Bhausaheb Deoras,
younger brother of Sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras, was even more
direct when he came to the next phase of politics. Claiming that he
was speaking in his personal capacity—unheard-of liberty in a cadre-
based, disciplined party—he pleaded for parliamentary support to the
minority Indian National Congress government and talked of the
indisciplined nature of the Bajrang Dal (brought about, he felt, by
the absence of RSS training for the rank and file of the Dal).10
Apparently, competitive, democratic politics has its own logic. In
another few weeks, most of the major members of the RSS family
were shyly learning to sing a new tune. The VHP was trying to soften
its language and stand; the RSS seemed willing to shelve temporarily
even its core ideology of Hindutva. It was now talking of the svadeshi
(the indigenous), with its strong Gandhian associations, and of social
justice, with its clear social democratic connotations .11
The BJP, being a political party, could afford to go further. It
ventured into a new programme, an Ekta Yatra or pilgrimage of unity.
Starting from Kanyakumari on 26 December, the Yatra was supposed
to end at Srinagar in separatist, violence-ridden Kashmir, on India’s
Republic Day, 26 January. As many as 20,000 BJP volunteers from
all over India were to join the flag-hoisting ceremony at Lai Chowk,
Srinagar. The party probably felt that this would be a reasonably
good distraction from its pussyfooting on the Ayodhya front. This
time it was not starting a religious movement but a nationalist move­
ment, for its overt aim was to raise the national flag which the Sangh
family had previously refused to own as its own. It expected to get
a good press and good public support.

9j as want Singh, in India Today, quoted in The Times o f India, 1 December

1991, p. 24.
"*Prasun Sonwalkar, ‘RSS Leader for BJP-Cong Tie-Up’, The Times o f
India, 26 November 1991.
“ Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyer, ‘Views on Ekta Yatra—I’, The Times
o f India, 19 December 1991; ‘"Hindutva" Fades from RSS Ideology’, The
Times o f India, 14 March 1992. Also Rajni K Bajaj, ‘BJP Changes Horses
Mid-Stream’, Current, 14 March 1992, who says at one place: ‘... People like
firebrand MP from Madhya Pradesh Uma Bharati have started shunning the
press completely since her only constituency so far has been her battle for
the construction of Ram Temple at Ayodhya.’
 Creating a Nationality 167
As it happened, at the end of the Yatra, the BJP had to raise the
flag under the auspices of the Indian army and under the patronage
of the Congress government at New Delhi, to the embarrassment of
its supporters. For the flag-hoisting, a token contingent of BJP leaders
had to be flown in and out by the army. The BJP leadership were
taken to the venue in government vehicles; previously they had been
put up by the government around the headquarters of the Border
Security Force. The flagpost had to be provided by the Central
Reserve Police Force and even the flag had to be borrowed from the
army because the one that the BJP leaders were carrying got torn
19
in the mêlée. Judging by the video footage obtained by the news
agencies on the scene, it was, by all criteria, a pathetic and comical
performance. And this time the media, that had played such a signi­
ficant role in playing up the Ayodhya episode, was unwilling to play
footsie.
The party, however, had other logs in the fire. It was systematically
but without any fanfare trying to build bridges with the newly elected
Congress regime at Delhi. So much so that, to, some journalists cover­
ing the budget session of Parliament, the BJP’s opposition to the
party in power looked like part of a pre-arranged game.13
Otherwise too, ‘normal’ politics was catching up with the BJP
Within it, there were now the squabbles usual in a large party trying
to represent a highly diverse society. By the end of March 1992, the
temple issue itself had factionalizsd the party. One group wanted to
commence work on it straightway; the other, politically more alert
and with larger pan-Indian ambitions, wanted to put it on the back-bumer.14
There were other more serious forms of factional battles, too,
within the party. In April 1992, party functionary Uma Bharati ac­
cused the BJP government of Madhya Pradesh of harassing not mere­
ly her but also her family for factional reasons. She herself had been
l2Venkitesh Ramkrishnan, ‘A Caravan to Kashmir: The End of the Ekta
Yatra’, Frontline, 14 February 1992, pp. 4-18; see pp. 4-5; Chidananda Raj-
ghatta and Prema Viswanathan, ‘BJP: Unflagging Tempo’, and Sunil Narnla,
‘The Fold that was Left out in the Cold’, The Times o f India, 2 February
1992; ‘A Pyrrhic Victory for the BJP’, The Pioneer, 28 January 1992.
l3See for instance, Praful Bidwai, ‘Congress Identity in Peril: Playing Foot­
sie with BJP’, The Times o f India, 2 February 1992; Sunil Saxena, ‘I Don’t
Want a Tiff with the Centre: Kalyan’, The Pioneer, 9 February 1992; and
Ajay Bose, ‘It’s only a Charade’, The Pioneer, 9 March 1992.
l4Diwakar and Rajiv Saxena, ‘BJP Leaders Split over Temple Deadline’,
The Sunday Observer, 5 April 1992.
168 T he A ftermath and the R uins—I

accused, falsely she claimed, of being sexually involved with a

general secretary of the party (Govindacharya, the party theoretician
and the party’s main link with the Indian literati). In addition, false
and fictitious criminal cases had been slapped on her brother, she
alleged. Though she had managed to get these cases cleared through
the intervention of the central leadership of the party, she had to ‘pay
a high price’ for it and had to ‘go through hell’. This ‘mental torture’,
she said, had resulted in a nervous breakdown and she had even tried
to commit suicide because of the torment. She expressed her desire
to resign from the party to go back to the life of an ascetic .15
To cap it all, a crude opinion poll conducted at Delhi and Lucknow
revealed that, in both cities, roughly three-fourths of the Hindu
respondents were against the demolition of the small temples at Ayod-
hya (to make way for the large Ram temple) and were hurt by it.
They felt that such demolitions were not in the best tradition of the
Hindu religion (Table 15). It was not very happy news for the party
functionaries at a time when some of them were already saying
privately that, in case of a snap poll in UP, the party would lose
decisively.

Table 15
SUMMARY OF OPINION POLL AT DELHI AND LUCKNOW,
APRIL 199216 (ALL FIGURES IN PERCENTAGES)

Questions Yes No D on’t know/

Can’t say

Is it justified to demolish small temples 24 74 2

to build a larger Ram temple?
As a Hindu, have the demolitions of 76 20 4
temples in Ayodhya hurt your sentiments?
Is the demolition of temples in the best 73 20 7
tradition of Hindu religion?

15‘Uma Bharati Seeks Sanyas’, The Pioneer, 8 April 1992; Also Prasun
Sonwalkar, ‘Uma Bharati Threatens to Quit BJP’, The Times o f India, 8 April
1992; ‘Bharati’s Move Shows up Fissures in BJP Ranks’, The Pioneer , 10
April 1992.
16For further details of the poll see ‘Most Hindus Oppose Temple Demoli­
tions’, The Pioneer, 5 April 1992. Also Kanchan Gupta, ‘Can the BJP Hold
Out?’, The Pioneer , 7 April 1992.
 Creating a Nationality 169

X . THE AFTERMATH AND THE RUINS— II

We were in Ayodhya again at the end of February 1992. By this time

Mother India seemed to have swallowed up the Ramjanmabhumi
movement even more decisively. A few told us that the political situa­
tion had not changed, but everyone insisted that the social situation
had certainly done so .17
Some of the changes were not obvious. Others were. The litigation
between the Hindus and the Muslims over the Babri masjid went on,
but the litigants, who had to travel between Faizabad-Ayodhya and
Lucknow for the hearings of the court cases, travelled together in
the same car. They were old friends and petrol was expensive, we
were informed. In the Ramjanmabhumi complex, the place where the
foundation of the Ram temple had been laid and the VHP showroom
that had aroused so much of ire and anxiety in activists, scholars and
journalists, now looked desolate, lifeless, and terribly shabby. The
heat and the dust of India had caught up with them.
When two of us walked into the showroom, we constituted a
majority, for there was only one other apathetic, elderly visitor strol­
ling around the place, apart from the caretaker. In the temple annexe
there were still a number of metal detectors, but none of the police
personnel manned them carefully, not even to ensure that everyone
walked through them. When one of us walked around one of the
detectors deliberately, no one even noticed. The number of pilgrims
visiting the place was small. Probably the history of violence kept
many of them away, more so given that there were other quieter and
less controversial temples associated with Lord Ram’s birth in the
same area. The two Faizabad hotels where journalists used to vie for
accommodation were now busy with marriage parties; and it was
with much difficulty that we could discover a few of the fiery tapes
that had been selling like hot cakes in November 1991.

The fate of a movement provides only a partial guide to the fate of

the lifestyle into which the movement is supposed to be an inter­
vention. Ayodhya, the timeless, sacred city and the chosen site of the
secular battle for the political allegiance of Indians, also seemed to
l7Mahant Laldas in his interview in Patwardhan’s film, Ram ka Nam had
already compared the events of 1990 with a storm that fells large trees and
houses but none the less has some time or the other to pass; and with a bad
trip that ends when the effects of the intoxicant wear off.
164 T he A ftermath and the Ruins—I

total contempt for and fear of the movement. One of them, working
for an international news agency, even confided to us that he was
tired and demoralized by his experiences at Ayodhya and would ask
the agency for a different assignment on his return to Delhi. One
other journalist had coined a slogan as a spoof on a VHP slogan
which went: ‘Ramlalla ab dyenge, mandir wohi bandyenge (Dear
Ram will now come, and make the temple himself).’
There had already grown a flourishing market relating to the
movement—to serve the visitors, journalists, karsevaks, and the simp­
ly curious. The two respectable Faizabad hotels were packed with
journalists; it was impossible for any newcomer to get a place in
them. There were also a few Shri Ram fast-food outlets. A number
of shops sold cassettes of fiery speeches about the temple move­
ment—mostly by Uma Bharati and Ritambhara, the two sanyasinis
who neither spoke nor dressed like world renouncers. The shops also
sold aggressive political-religious bhajans, usually set to the tunes
of popular commercial film songs, including disco numbers. We
found a bhajan that sang the praises of Lord Krishna in the tune of
the film song that was a great hit of 1990—Jumma chumma de de
(Jumma, give a kiss). Two of the fire-eating cassettes of bhajans had
a Muslim, Sayed Ali, as the director of the orchestral arrangements
for the songs. For the small shopkeepers who sold these cassettes, it
was business as usual.
Even the karsevaks, though always looking for excitement and
sometimes for trouble, seemed mainly in search of some entertain­
ment. Many contingents of visiting karsevaks, who were supposed
to depart after a few days to make way for new batches of volunteers
(there being insufficient space at Karsevakpuram), refused to call it
a day and hung around the city. They had come on a free trip and
apparently wanted to make the most of it.
It was also obvious that the leaders of the movement were looking
for respectability and were unwilling to precipitate a crisis. We got
involved in a fracas that exemplified this unwillingness neatly. An
elderly Muslim was caught, allegedly stealing a curtain from a
temple. He was wearing a tattered dhoti and looked both hungry and
mentally disturbed. Some of the Dal activists, at last finding an
opportunity to satisfy their blood lust, were about to lynch him. The
police were helpless or, rather, said they were so. They certainly did
not want to take on the Bajrang Dal. The thief was badly beaten in
front of the policemen and was being accused of being a spy of Syed
 Creating a Nationality 165
Shahabuddin and others of his ilk .7 There were demands from the
Bajrang Dal boys that the thief be handed over to them for disposal
of the case. The police seemed to agree quite readily. Guessing what
such disposal would mean, we rushed back to inform Vinay Katiyar,
the MP for Faizabad, and the founder-head of Bajrang Dal, whose
house was just a few steps away in the same lane where the event
was taking place. A tense Katiyar immediately rushed to the spot
with his security guards in a jeep and embarked on what can only
be called a one-man lathi-charge to disperse the crowd. After that he
told the police, loudly and publicly and probably for our benefit too,
to maintain law and order strictly. The ‘thief’ was then taken to the
police station. We have no further clue as to his subsequent fate.
The Bajrang Dal boys were very angry that Katiyar had used force
on them. They felt betrayed and said so. But it was patent that Katiyar
did not want an incident under the eyes of the national and inter­
national press and he did not want to embarrass the BJP government
of UP.
Within a few days even the newspapers caught on to the game.
Though their editorial positions and middle-class morality forced
their staff to continue either with their partisan pro-BJP stand or with
their sanitized, by-now anaemic slogans of secularism, they also
sensed the declining interest in the movement and the re-emergence
of unheroic politics. Though some of them continued to talk of the
fanaticism of the BJP and Q the VHP, this talk no longer had the touch
of panic it previously had; exactly as some of their other colleagues
did not sound that enthusiastic when talking of the beauties of
karseva.
Even the BJP, its all-India political ambitions now aroused and
trying to behave like a responsible future government in waiting,
knew that the political returns from the Ram Mandir issue were

7The alleged thief’s dhoti seemed to have been subtly provocative to north­
ern and western Indian karsevaks. They were unaccustomed to see Muslims
in dhotis worn in the ‘Hindu’ way and yet that happens to be the dress of a
majority of the Muslims in many parts of Uttar Pradesh. Especially to the
Gujarati karsevaks with whom we talked, the ‘culprit’ seemed to be in dis­
guise.
*For example, Bhaskar Roy, ‘Confusion in the Ranks’, and Coomi Kapoor,
‘The BJP’s Dilemma’, Indian Express, 15 September 1991; Sumit Mitra,
‘Softening Stance, Friendly Overtures’, Indian Express, 10 November 1991;
and Saroj Nagi, ‘BJP Does the Balancing Act’, The Illustrated Weekly o f India,
12 October 1991, p. 16.
166 T he A ftermath and the R uins—I

diminishing. Jaswant Singh, the suave BJP Member of Parliament,

virtually gave the game away when he said, ‘You cannot make politi­
cal soufflé rise twice from the same recipe.’9 Bhausaheb Deoras,
younger brother of Sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras, was even more
direct when he came to the next phase of politics. Claiming that he
was speaking in his personal capacity—unheard-of liberty in a cadre-
based, disciplined party—he pleaded for parliamentary support to the
minority Indian National Congress government and talked of the
indisciplined nature of the Bajrang Dal (brought about, he felt, by
the absence of RSS training for the rank and file of the Dal).10
Apparently, competitive, democratic politics has its own logic. In
another few weeks, most of the major members of the RSS family
were shyly learning to sing a new tune. The VHP was trying to soften
its language and stand; the RSS seemed willing to shelve temporarily
even its core ideology of Hindutva. It was now talking of the svadeshi
(the indigenous), with its strong Gandhian associations, and of social
justice, with its clear social democratic connotations.11
The BJP, being a political party, could afford to go further. It
ventured into a new programme, an Ekta Yatra or pilgrimage of unity.
Starting from Kanyakumari on 26 December, the Yatra was supposed
to end at Srinagar in separatist, violence-ridden Kashmir, on India’s
Republic Day, 26 January. As many as 20,000 BJP volunteers from
all over India were to join the flag-hoisting ceremony at Lai Chowk,
Srinagar. The party probably felt that this would be a reasonably
good distraction from its pussyfooting on the Ayodhya front. This
time it was not starting a religious movement but a nationalist move­
ment, for its overt aim was to raise the national flag which the Sangh
family had previously refused to own as its own. It expected to get
a good press and good public support.

9Jaswant Singh, in India Today, quoted in The Times o f India, 1 December

1991, p. 24.
l0Prasun Sonwalkar, ‘RSS Leader for BJP-Cong Tie-Up’, The Times o f
India, 26 November 1991.
"Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyer, ‘Views on Ekta Yatra—I’, The Times
o f India, 19 December 1991; ‘"Hindutva" Fades from RSS Ideology’, The
Times o f India, 14 March 1992. Also Rajni K Bajaj, ‘BJP Changes Horses
Mid-Stream’, Current, 14 March 1992, who says at one place: ‘... People like
firebrand MP from Madhya Pradesh Uma Bharati have started shunning the
press completely since her only constituency so far has been her battle for
the construction of Ram Temple at Ayodhya.’
 Creating a Nationality 16 7

As it happened, at the end of the Yatra, the BJP had to raise the
flag under the auspices of the Indian army and under the patronage
of the Congress government at New Delhi, to the embarrassment of
its supporters. For the flag-hoisting, a token contingent of BJP leaders
had to be flown in and out by the army. The BJP leadership were
taken to the venue in government vehicles; previously they had been
put up by the government around the headquarters of the Border
Security Force. The flagpost had to be provided by the Central
Reserve Police Force and even the flag had to be borrowed from the
army because the one that the BJP leaders were carrying got torn
• 1 2 * •
in the mêlée. Judging by the video footage obtained by the news
agencies on the scene, it was, by all criteria, a pathetic and comical
performance. And this time the media, that had played such a signi­
ficant role in playing up the Ayodhya episode, was unwilling to play
footsie.
The party, however, had other logs in the fire. It was systematically
but without any fanfare trying to build bridges with the newly elected
Congress regime at Delhi. So much so that, ta some journalists cover­
ing the budget session of Parliament, the BJP’s opposition to the
party in power looked like part of a pre-arranged game.13
Otherwise too, ‘normal’ politics was catching up with the BJP.
Within it, there were now the squabbles usual in a large party trying
to represent a highly diverse society. By the end of March 1992, the
temple issue itself had factionalizsd the party. One group wanted to
commence work on it straightway; the other, politically more alert
and with larger pan-Indian ambitions, wanted to put it on the back-bumer.14
There were other more serious forms of factional battles, too,
within the party. In April 1992, party functionary Uma Bharati ac­
cused the BJP government of Madhya Pradesh of harassing not mere­
ly her but also her family for factional reasons. She herself had been
l2Venkitesh Ramkrishnan, ‘A Caravan to Kashmir: The End of the Ekta
Yatra’, Frontline, 14 February 1992, pp. 4-18; see pp. 4-5; Chidananda Raj-
ghatta and Prema Viswanathan, ‘BJP: Unflagging Tempo’, and Sunil Narula,
‘The Fold that was Left out in the Cold’, The Times o f India, 2 February
1992; ‘A Pyrrhic Victory for the BJP’, The Pioneer, 28 January 1992.
13See for instance, Praful Bidwai, ‘Congress Identity in Peril: Playing Foot­
sie with BJP’, The Times o f India, 2 February 1992; Sunil Saxena, ‘I Don’t
Want a Tiff with the Centre: Kalyan’, The Pioneer, 9 February 1992; and
Ajay Bose, ‘It’s only a Charade’, The Pioneer, 9 March 1992.
l4Diwakar and Rajiv Saxena, ‘BJP Leaders Split over Temple Deadline’,
The Sunday Observer, 5 April 1992.
168 T he A ftermath and the R uins—I

accused, falsely she claimed, of being sexually involved with a

general secretary of the party (Govindacharya, the party theoretician
and the party’s main link with the Indian literati). In addition, false
and fictitious criminal cases had been slapped on her brother, she
alleged. Though she had managed to get these cases cleared through
the intervention of the central leadership of the party, she had to ‘pay
a high price’ for it and had to ‘go through hell’. This ‘mental torture’,
she said, had resulted in a nervous breakdown and she had even tried
to commit suicide because of the torment. She expressed her desire
to resign from the party to go back to the life of an ascetic .15
To cap it all, a crude opinion poll conducted at Delhi and Lucknow
revealed that, in both cities, roughly three-fourths of the Hindu
respondents were against the demolition of the small temples at Ayod-
hya (to make way for the large Ram temple) and were hurt by it.
They felt that such demolitions were not in the best tradition of the
Hindu religion (Table 15). It was not very happy news for the party
functionaries at a time when some of them were already saying
privately that, in case of a snap poll in UP, the party would lose
decisively.

Table 15
SUMMARY OF OPINION POLL AT DELHI AND LUCKNOW,
APRIL 199216 (ALL FIGURES IN PERCENTAGES)

Questions Yes No Don't know/

Can’t say

Is it justified to demolish small temples 24 74 2

to build a larger Ram temple?
As a Hindu, have the demolitions of 76 20 4
temples in Ayodhya hurt your sentiments?
Is the demolition of temples in the best 73 20 7
tradition of Hindu religion?

l5‘Uma Bharati Seeks Sanyas’, The Pioneer, 8 April 1992; Also Prasun
Sonwalkar, ‘Uma Bharati Threatens to Quit BJP’, The Times o f India, 8 April
1992; ‘Bharati’s Move Shows up Fissures in BJP Ranks’, The Pioneer, 10
April 1992.
16For further details of the poll see ‘Most Hindus Oppose Temple Demoli­
tions’, The Pioneer, 5 April 1992. Also Kanchan Gupta, ‘Can the BJP Hold
Out?’, The Pioneer, 7 April 1992.
 Creating a Nationality 169
X. T h e Afterm ath and the R u in s — II

We were in Ayodhya again at the end of February 1992. By this time

Mother India seemed to have swallowed up the Ramjanmabhumi
movement even more decisively. A few told us that the political situa­
tion had not changed, but everyone insisted that the social situation
had certainly done so .17
Some of the changes were not obvious. Others were. The litigation
between the Hindus and the Muslims over the Babri masjid went on,
but the litigants, who had to travel between Faizabad-Ayodhya and
Lucknow for the hearings of the court cases, travelled together in
the same car. They were old friends and petrol was expensive, we
were informed. In the Ramjanmabhumi complex, the place where the
foundation of the Ram temple had been laid and the VHP showroom
that had aroused so much of ire and anxiety in activists, scholars and
journalists, now looked desolate, lifeless, and terribly shabby. The
heat and the dust of India had caught up with them.
When two of us walked into the showroom, we constituted a
majority, for there was only one other apathetic, elderly visitor strol­
ling around the place, apart from the caretaker. In the temple annexe
there were still a number of metal detectors, but none of the police
personnel manned them carefully, not even to ensure that everyone
walked through them. When one of us walked around one of the
detectors deliberately, no one even noticed. The number of pilgrims
visiting the place was small. Probably the history of violence kept
many of them away, more so given that there were other quieter and
less controversial temples associated with Lord Ram’s birth in the
same area. The two Faizabad hotels where journalists used to vie for
accommodation were now busy with marriage parties; and it was
with much difficulty that we could discover a few of the fiery tapes
that had been selling like hot cakes in November 1991.

The fate of a movement provides only a partial guide to the fate of

the lifestyle into which the movement is supposed to be an inter­
vention. Ayodhya, the timeless, sacred city and the chosen site of the
secular battle for the political allegiance of Indians, also seemed to
17Mahant Laldas in his interview in Patwardhan’s film, Ram ka Nam had
already compared the events of 1990 with a storm that fells large trees and
houses but none the less has some time or the other to pass; and with a bad
trip that ends when the effects of the intoxicant wear off.
17 0 T he Aftermath and the R uins— II

be following its own trajectory, partly independent of the concerns

of outsiders and their game plans.
In February 1992, we met two prominent Muslims, one said to be
a moderate, the other recommended to us as a hard-liner by local
journalists. They, we thought, might provide clues to the mind of a
community that, according to some, comprised the ultimate victims
and, according to others, the ultimate aggressors in inter-religious
strife in India.
We first met Munnu Mia, also known as Munnubabu. His formal
name is Ilias Ansar Hussain. A prominent Shia of Ayodhya and a
devout Muslim, he is also the builder and manager of a Ram temple
called Sundar Bhavan. It is a small temple close to the better-known
Kanak Bhavan. The Hindu estate owner who financed the temple
came to know of Munnu Mia when the latter helped him get timber
supplies. When work on the temple began in 1949, Munnu Mia was
appointed the person in charge. The temple was completed in 1951
and he has been its manager ever since. Munnu Mia is proud of his
temple. Though the financier had the major say in the design of the
temple, Munnu Mia claims to have introduced into the design ele­
ments of ‘English’ style’, whatever that might mean.
Munnu Mia’s family has stayed in Ayodhya for approximately 450
years. They came with the Mughal Emperor Humayun (1507-56).
The family has always owned land, but the family finances improved
after one of Munnu M ia’s forefathers safely handed over to the
British garrison at Kanpur seven white women stranded at Lucknow
during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. As a reward, he was given a land
grant of seven villages. Munnu Mia’s father remained a landlord till
the Zamindari Abolition Act was passed. After that the elder Hussain
became a compounder in a hospital and started a business in tobacco.
Munnu Mia was born in 1907 or 1908—he does not know for
sure. However, he might have been born one or two years earlier for
he claims to be 87 or 88. Though more than 85, he is in good health
and looks seventyish. For much of his life, he was in the Indian
Forest Service. After retirement, he has become a timber merchant.
His son Sabir Ali works for the Uttar Pradesh Electricity Board. He
was present during part of the interview.
In his long life, Munnu Mia says, he has seen only two riots in
Ayodhya, one in 1912, the other in 1934. The first one was over the
killing of cows which the Bairagis opposed. The killing of cows in
Ayodhya was finally stopped and the Muslims switched to buffaloes.
 Creating a Nationality 17 1

Subsequently, all butchery was banned within the municipal area of

Ayodhya. Meat now comes to Ayodhya from Faizabad. Munnu Mia’s
son hinted that, given these restrictions, even some of the babas,
belonging mainly perhaps to sects that permit meat-eating, visit Mus­
lim households nowadays to secretly eat meat.
The riot of 1934 was over the Janmabhumi temple and it was
partly instigated by outsiders. The Hindus wanted the temple to be
opened. The riot ended without any clear-cut decision on the subject.
With only these two riots during a period of more than 80 years,
communal relations in Ayodhya had always been good, Munnu Mia
says. He remembers saying namaz at Babri masjid for many years,
without any problem. When they used to go to the masjid, the priests
were friendly and hospitable to the namazis. Shoes had to be taken
off at the insistence of the Bairagis, but the latter used to look after
the shoes and also give prasad, offerings, to the Muslim devotees
when they came to collect their shoes after saying namaz.
This tradition of amity, Munnu Mia feels, is not dead. During the
recent curfews, every Muslim household was supplied with food by
the Hindus. Otherwise, too, the social relationships and cultural bonds
remain intact. Even today the gold and silver embroidery work on
the dress of the icons is done by both Muslims and Hindus (pre­
viously it used to be the monopoly of Muslims); the dresses and
crowns of the gods are still stitched by Muslim tailors and Muslim
craftsmen. The only thing the Muslims do not do is to sell sweets,
for the sweets are often used as offerings to the gods. Even today,
when Muslims take out a tazia, Hindus throw rice and money on it
and walk under it, for a tazia is supposed to be auspicious.
N othing— Munnu Mia emphasizes the word ‘nothing’—has
changed in the relationship between the two communities. ‘The recent
riots have had no effect on us’, he says, because ‘the resident and
the educated Hindus do not want the masjid to be demolished.’ ‘Only
the goondas want that’, he adds in English.
Ayodhya is sacred to both Hindus and Muslims, Munnu Mia avers.
To the Hindus for obvious reasons. To the Muslims because it is
associated with Hazrat Shis (apparently Noah of the ark fame) who
is buried at the Shis Parvat at Ayodhya. The Hindus know the same
hillock as Mani Parvat; they view it as the discarded part of
Gandhamadan Parvat that Hanuman brought for Lakshman in the
days of the Ram ayana, to get hold of the life-saving herb,
vishalyakaranf.
172 T he Aftermath and the R uins— II

The presence of Hazrat Shis makes Ayodhya doubly sacred. Con­

trary to the popular belief, Munnu Mia says, Babar never visited
Ayodhya; nor did he construct a mosque there. His general Mir Baqi
constructed the mosque ‘with the consent of the babas' . That is why
the residents of Ayodhya have no animus towards the masjid and do
not want it levelled. Till now, in trying to demolish the masjid, the
outsiders have only managed to demolish some mandirs.
Even today, Munnu Mia says, irrespective of whether one is a
Hindu or a Muslim, the standard greeting of Ayodhya remains Jai
Siya Ram or, if the other party happens to be a priest, Babaji dan-
davat. In this respect, things have not changed since the nineteenth
century, Munnu Mia insists. All communal frictions at Ayodhya have
been instigated by outsiders motivated mainly by money. The local
Hindus know this. That is why the babas stood guard for ten days
without sleeping in front of Muslim homes during the recent riots.
‘There has been no effect on us of the riots,’ he repeats.
He recognizes, though, that in recent years, some things have
tended to interfere with the placid rhythm of Ayodhya. Becoming a
priest at Ayodhya is now occasionally a means of avoiding detection
as a criminal. Many babas now come from Bihar and it has become
easy for a Bihari with a shady past to become a disciple of a baba
to avoid the police.
Also Advani has reportedly collected 470 million rupees and that
money is having its impact. Munnu Mia implies that some of the
money has gone to the pro-VHP priests. However, Munnu Mia has
a soft corner for even Ramchandra Paramhans, the fiery leader of
the Ramjanambhumi movement and one of the small minority of
pro-BJP priests left in Ayodhya at the time. Ramchandra is Munnu
Mia’s childhood friend, ‘langotia yar', and is apparently seen by the
latter as a lovable rogue whose angry rhetoric is mainly a political
ploy. Now that Ramchandra has made a lot of money after joining
the BJP and the VHP, he sends sweets to Munnu Mia and helps him
with money. Munnu Mia calls him a competent person (kabil adrni),
a good orator, and a ‘very good man’. Ramchandra always joins his
friend’s family on religious festivals and special occasions. He came
to dine at Munnu Mia’s place at the time of the marriage of his son
Sabir. ‘When you had money’, Munnu Mia quotes Ramchandra as
saying, ‘You gave me money and food; now that I have money, you
also deserve this.’
 Creating a Nationality 173

We also met Haji Mohammad Kalim Shamshi, the administrator of

Tatshah mosque. He also looks after a madrasa or traditional Islamic
school, an idgah, and a musafirkhana or travellers’ lodge. The
madrasa and the musafirkhana are both under the Tatshah mosque.
Shamshi himself has been educated in the Tatshah madrasa. He also
has a private business. Shamshi is the one who was described as an
orthodox and aggressive Sunni leader.
The interview took place in the austere musafirkhana, inhabited
by poor, itinerant lodgers and small-time traders such as a seller of
grass mats from Bihar. Shamshi turned out to be a well-preserved
man of 73, with a powerful voice and a self-assured manner. He told
us that for the last hundred years his family has been living in Ayod-
hya. He himself, though, was born at Ujjain and brought up at Etawa.
The Shamshis originally belonged to Multan and are, therefore, Pun­
jabis. They were Khatris before being converted to Islam.
Like Munnu Mia and many others in Ayodhya—and for that matter
in the w hole o f A vadh— Sham shi spoke elegant, som ew hat
Sanskritized Urdu, generously sprinkled with both Urdu couplets and
Avadhi sayings. Shamshi told us that the relationship between the
Hindus and the Muslims had not been destroyed by the events of
1990-91. In fact, the relationship had reverted to its older form. For
the ordinary people had already seen through the games of the politi­
cians. As a result, inter-religious relationships were again becoming
what they had been over the centuries. When specifically asked, he
said that his shop, which had predominantly Hindu clients, did not
lose any business. The temporary aberration during 1990-91 was
brought about by the love that some politicians had for power and
money.
In other words, rightly or wrongly, Shamshi blames greedy
politicians entirely for what happened in Ayodhya during 1990-91.
‘We do not want to fight among ourselves, neither the Hindus nor
the Muslims.’ Outsiders have instigated the quarrel and they might
still manage to damage the good relations between the two commu­
nities. Some of the politicians have amassed massive fortunes; they
might still precipitate some crisis or other; just as in the late 1940s,
one Mr Nayyar spoilt the cordial atmosphere by introducing icons of
gods into the Babri masjid, and as, in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi aggravated
the conflict by unlocking the masjid.
174 T he A ftermath and the R uins— II

Shamshi seems convinced that the issue of the Babri masjid has
been wrongly posed. ‘In our faith, you cannot read namaz at a masjid
built on forcibly occupied land.’ Though doubtful of the wisdom of
the courts, Shamshi claims that the Muslims were willing to abide
by the decision of the court. He, however, adds: ‘We are capable of
offering major sacrifices; we are also capable of giving enormous
amounts of love.’ Islam does not teach blood-letting; it teaches one
to live in peace with one another. lAtma saf, paramatma pas' (If the
heart is clean, God is close).
Ayodhya is ‘pavitra’ (sacred) for both Hindus and Muslims. Mus­
lims have 1,24,000 prophets. Hazrat Shis was one of them. He is
buried at Ayodhya. ‘Let God give understanding to both us and them.’
This is not the kind of understanding the politicians arrive at, Sham­
shi adds. For them the basis of any understanding is: ‘You worship
money; we also worship money.’
The bitterness between the Hindus and the Muslims has also
grown, Shamshi feels, because of the use of abusive terms such as
katua. But something of the older relationship survives. It survives
because people now know that the conflict about the Babri masjid
is actually a struggle for power. It is a bkttle for ‘votes and notes’.
The leaders’ seats of power are seats studded with nails.
When asked how his own Hindu friends have reacted to the tur­
moil of the last two years, a tinge of sorrow creeps into Shamshi’s
voice. Referring to his own age, he says, ‘Hindu friends of mine who
were humane are now mostly dead; a new crop has taken their place.
This crop consists of pujaris (worshippers) of dharma, not of insaf
(justice).’ So they have not been always articulate on this issue. If
and when some have been so, those in power have tried to make
sure that such voices do not find public expression. The latter do not
want the local Hindus and Muslims to settle the issue through
negotiations among themselves. ‘If we were given a chance’, Shamshi
says, ‘we would have solved the problem long ago. Either we would
have taken away the temple or given away the mosque. Or both
would have been there and puja and namaz would have gone on as
usual.’ But the public figures make statements elsewhere (presumably
at political centres like Lucknow and Delhi) which again ‘ignite’
emotions. This is compounded by the unthinking, partisan behaviour
of the newspapers. When the newspapers start to write the truth, the
condition of Hindustan will improve.
 Creating a Nationality 175
At Ayodhya itself, even today, whatever might be in the hearts of
the people, they come and talk nicely and smilingly to each other,
Shamshi adds. ‘Even when the Rajah of Ayodhya comes to me, he
touches my feet in respect, and calls me chacha (uncle).’

The evening prayers are announced and Shamshi politely seeks our
permission to go back to his mosque. It also begins to get dark and
we, too, begin to think of returning to our hotels and, then, after a
decent interval, to our known world at Delhi. Despite our long, in­
tense conversations, we sense that both Munnu Mia and Haji Shamshi
live in a world mostly unknown to us. Along with their fellow Mus­
lims, Hindu neighbours and friends, they are part of an Ayodhya to
which we will remain as much strangers as the members of the Sangh
parivar with their high-pitched nationalism and use of faith as a
political ideology. And that Ayodhya, we also sense, is once again
trying to return to its normal rhythms of community life.
But does that Ayodhya have any chance of survival? Are its resi­
dents living in an unreal world of which the social and political sup­
port-base has already collapsed? Is the cultural geography of Ayodhya
an exception within a modernizing, developing, secularizing India?
Do those who are a part of that psychological landscape have any
future? Was the trust of the Muslims of Ayodhya in their Hindu neigh­
bours a self-destructive romanticization and a pathetic self-delusion?
We felt that we might get a part-answer in Colonelgunj. There
had been a riot in the town the previous year, the closest that com­
munal rioting had come to the sacred town of Ayodhya.

Colonelganj
Colonelganj is a small town in the Gonda district of east UP, some
three hours journey by road from Ayodhya. From 30 September to 2
October 1990, the town and a number of small rural hamlets around
it saw Hindu-Muslim clashes which left, according to official figures,
41 dead—five in Colonelganj and the rest in the villages—and scores
injured. Unofficial estimates put the toll at over 200 dead. None of
the affected areas had ever seen a communal riot before.
The trouble, we were told, started at around 2 PMon 30 September
when the annual Durga procession was subjected to brickbatting as
it wound its way through the narrow lanes of Kasaibadi, a Muslim
dominated area of the town. One press report said that the provocation
176 T he A ftermath and the R uins—II

was a rumour that a Muslim boy had been beaten up by some Hindus.18
Another said that some of the young men leading the procession were
giving a display of their skill with lathis when one of them was
accidentally injured. As he was being rushed to a hospital, a cry of
‘he has been killed’ went up. In the ensuing confusion, stones and
bombs began to be thrown from the rooftops of an orphanage and a
mosque.19 In any case, the procession had been all along shouting
inflammatory slogans, as if its aim was to provoke violence.20 Those
who threw stones and bombs from rooftops were also probably wait­
ing for an opportunity to do so.
Those marching in the procession lost no time in retaliating. They
were not unprepared for the attack; in fact, they had come well
armed. They hit back with bricks and bombs.
The situation in the town itself was brought under control by night­
fall following an afternoon of intense violence. But in whichever
direction the processionists scattered after being attacked, they
wreaked havoc on the property and lives of any Muslims they could
lay their hands on. For instance, a large mob assembled outside the
police station on the main Gonda road and torched the huts of some
Muslims located right opposite it, besides spearing to death four men
who could not escape in time with the rest. The policemen present
there did nothing to prevent the killings. The fall out of the riots in
the adjoining rural areas in the coming days was to prove equally
brutal.
Since Colonelganj was placed under curfew soon after the violence
erupted, people from neighbouring villages who had come to par­
ticipate in, or simply see, the procession, could not return to their
homes. It took little effort and even less time, for some political
activists to spread the rumour that thousands of Muslims had in a
pre-planned move swooped down on the villagers who had gone to
Colonelganj and massacred them. Women and children had been spe­
cially singled out.21 By mid-morning on 1 October, the looting and
burning of Muslim homes in the rural areas surrounding Colonelganj

l8Rajiv Saxena, ‘200 Die in Gonda Carnage’, The Sunday Observer, 7

October 1990.
19‘Gonda me Danga: Tanav Gaon me Pasar Raha hai’, Navbharat Times,
Lucknow, 5 October 1990.
2l)The Times o f India, 7 October 1990.
21 'Indian People’s Front Janch Dal ki Report' (Report of the investigative
team o f the Indian People’s Front), mimeo.
 Creating a Nationality 17 7

had begun. And when the villagers still did not come back that night,
on the following day, 2 October, the slaughter of the Muslims got
underway.

We went to a village where such killings had taken place. According

to Ram Raj Singh alias Nangu Singh, the son of the gräm pradhän
or village chief of Chatrauli, there were only ten Muslim families in
his village. They had been settled there by his forefathers on land
which still belongs to his family. On 1 October, around noon, some
500-odd men attacked the Muslims in the village and killed eight of
them, including a three-month-old child whom they drowned in a
well after beating his mother unconscious. When Nangu Singh tried
to save the Muslims, the mob turned on him. Unarmed, he ran and
took refuge with the family of one Bhole Singh. In no time, the
latter’s house was surrounded by hundreds of rioters howling for
Nangu Singh’s blood. But they did not give him up, allowing him
instead to slip out of the backdoor to safety.
Why had he risked his life to save the Muslims from being killed?
Nangu Singh had a simple answer. He said that since he was the son
of the village pradhän, it was his duty to protect his people, irrespec­
tive of their caste or religion. He had a responsibility towards them
which had to have priority over everything else. But the real tragedy,
felt Nangu Singh, was that the bloodthirsty mob of looters and mur­
derers was not made up of unknown outsiders but of those who knew
their victims well and who were equally well-known to them. ‘They
were not all lakhiäräs’ (local toughs); they were from adjoining vil­
lages, many of them people from whom such violence was totally
unexpected. And, said Nangu Singh, they were led by a local land-
14

lord, who had a hand in most of the crimes in the area but had never
been arrested.
Now there were no Muslim families left in his village. The few
who survived the carnage had shifted to areas where there were larger
concentrations of Muslims.
Bhole Singh is a painfully shy man in his early twenties. Only
after a great deal of persuasion did he haltingly tell his story. He was
sitting on the roof of his house, when he saw some people forcibly
dragging a girl away. He recognized her as belonging to a Muslim
family from the village. On seeing him, she screamed for help. Bhole
Singh somehow managed to rescue her from her abductors—he has
only one arm—and then locked her up in his house. Later, they came
178 T he Aftermath and the Ruins— II

back and demanded that he hand her over to them, but he refused.
Then some men from the PAC came for her, saying that the girl’s
brother had sent them. Bhole Singh told them to bring the brother
along because he did not trust the police. ‘It was only after he came,
that I let the girl out of the locked house.’ Bhole Singh’s act of
chivalry did not go down well with the criminals-tumed-fanatics in
the village, specially since they were already sore with his family
over another matter concerning a Muslim neighbour.
According to Bhole Singh, his family wanted to purchase a plot
of land behind their house which belonged to a Muslim. After he
had agreed to sell, they made him an advance payment of Rs 25,000
pending registration. This angered the Hindu landlords of the area.
Not that they wanted the land for themselves or that they did not
want Bhole Singh’s family to have it. What was the need, they asked,
to pay anything to a Muslim, when his land could have been easily
acquired for free with the use of just a little force? The family
refused to backtrack despite their threats. Furious, the landlords took
advantage of the communal frenzy sweeping the area and mur­
dered the Muslim landowner. Subsequently, one of them turned up
in court and produced a forged will in which the Muslim had gifted
away his entire land to him. ‘Now, why would he do that’, asks
Bhole Singh, ‘when he had a wife, two children and a third one on
the way?’
Bhole Singh was visibly agitated when we suggested that some
might accuse him of being a bad Hindu.
In which Ramayan does it say that Muslims should be killed? I have also
read it. Ram made so many sacrifices in his life, and now look what they are
doing in his name. Why is it that there is no difference between Hindus and
Muslims when we work alongside in the fields or when they come to thatch
our roofs, but when there is a riot they suddenly become our enemies fit to
be killed?

Bhole Singh said that he and his family were being continually
harassed since the riot, but they did not have a moment’s regret for
what they had done.

The social situation of Jaiswal, a medical doctor in private practice,

was better. The doctor stays close to the centre of the town of
Colonelganj in an old-style, semi-colonial mansion surrounded by
land in which he grows mainly vegetables. We went to him because
some Muslim informants had mentioned his name as a person who
 Creating a Nationality 17 9

had saved a number of Muslims, both individuals and families, from

certain death. We visited him at his home with two other social acti­
vists and one of his Muslim admirers whose family he had saved.
The doctor looked an ordinary general practitioner with some land,
cattle and a large house. The whole episode now seemed to his family,
his wife casually remarked, a strange aberration in their otherwise
placid life. We found the doctor a quiet family man who did not
dramatize his exploits. Nor did he try to turn the targets of his good
work into ‘pure’ victims. He told one of us, who had stayed back a
few minutes at his home after the others had taken their leave, that
he had not mentioned in front of all the visitors that some of the
Muslims he had saved or tried to save, including the person who was
accompanying us and was obviously an admirer of the doctor, were
also aggressive persons. They had given a good fight to the Hindu
mobs and the police. But he felt that they did not deserve to die
because some of their violence was counter-violence. The doctor pre­
sumably did not operate on the basis of any romantic concept of
amity when he had ordered one of his sons to stand with a gun to
protect the Muslims, telling him, ‘Son, you must protect them even
if you have to sacrifice your life.’
Perhaps a part of Jaiswal’s concern for the Muslims derived from
the fact that the labourers working on his farm were mostly Muslim.
The activists accompanying us, members of the Indian People’s Front
and all given to various versions of Maoism, were also quick to point
out to us that the Muslims constituted an economic investment for
the doctor; that his kindness had a hard ‘material’ basis. It could be
so, but the family did not seem to be particularly aware that their
self-interest also was tied up with the fate of the Muslim families in
their neighbourhood. The doctor seemed to trace his concern for his
Muslim neighbours to his family’s three-generation-long exposure to
Muslim friends, colleagues and their culture. One of the Jaiswals had
learnt Persian and many others knew excellent Urdu and studied
through it. The Muslims were not strangers to them, the doctor
seemed to suggest.
Mrs Jaiswal, who joined our conversation, spoke admiringly of
her husband’s courage and seemed proud of him. She felt that he
had done his duty and conformed to his true dharma. She was ob­
viously touched by the fact that the Muslims had mentioned the Jais­
wal family as their benefactors and had sent us to their place. In fact,
18 0 T he Aftermath and the R uins—II

she seemed surprised that we had taken the trouble to come to her
home to ask about the family’s experiences.

We did not get any clear answers to the questions with which we
had gone to Colonelgunj, but when we left the town at dusk, we
carried back memories of the inner resilience of those who refused
to be swept off their feet by the atmosphere of hate and violence.
Once again we had found the willingness to resist in places where
com m unity life and com m unity obligations were not distant
memories and where the traditional codes of conduct had not
weakened through processes of social change and massification.
Perhaps the answers we sought lay not in objective history but in
the fate of the shared traditions and moral universe of the residents
of Ayodhya, Hindus and Muslims, and in the ability of that universe
to evoke a response in the rest of the society. That response and its
contours constitute the ending of our story of Ayodhya in the next
chapter.
 CHAPTER 6

X I. T h e F i n a l A s s a u l t

True to Indian practices, the problem at Ramjanmabhumi did not die

out or get resolved once and for all. It again began to simmer towards
the middle of 1992. What had once looked like the resolution of a
crisis began to look like the end of a cycle and the beginning of
another. And this time, neither the traditional cultural, economic and
social ties of the Muslims of Ayodhya with their Hindu neighbours
nor their three-century-old integration into the lifestyle, cultural con­
cerns and manners of the pilgrim town could protect them from the
larger political and social forces buffeting South Asia.
On 5 July 1992, more than a year-and-a-half after the symbolic
karseva was first performed in Ayodhya, karsevaks from various parts
of the country, including a sizeable number of priests and holy men
began to construct ‘a part’ of the projected Ram temple just east of
the Babri masjid. The construction began with the singhadvar (lion
gate)— a 138 foot long, 116 foot wide and 6 foot deep foundational
structure. The place had been taken over by the BJP government of
UP in the name of building tourist facilities. This was also the place,
the reader may remember, where some temples had been demolished
earlier to make way for the Ram temple.
The reasons for this sudden spurt of activity were not impossible
to guess. The BJP regime in UP felt it was not doing particularly
well. The party had come close to ensuring a riot-free state—there
had been only one major flare-up at Varanasi during its rule—but it
was itself acquiring the standardized form and flabbiness of the
governments by other parties that had ruled the state. The logic of
Indian politics was catching up with it. Riddled with charges of
corruption and bad governance, true and false, the party sensed that,
to retain its support and come back to power in the next elections,
it had to provide some spectacular diversion from everyday politics.
The Ram temple promised in the party’s manifesto must have looked
18 2 T he F inal A ssault

an easy way out, especially as the party was under pressure on this
score from the VHP and the Bajrang Dal.
No fully reliable clue to the public mood during the period is
available, but one opinion survey was conducted at Lucknow and a
few nearby villages (N= 413) at the time. It showed that while the
BJP was not in the doghouse as far as public opinion went, there
would have been wide public support if the Central government
had handled the parivar firmly at that stage. (Tables 16-18. As
the survey had a disproportionately high number of urban respon-
dants, the table also gives figures adjusted for rural-urban dif­
ferences in UP.)
The mood of the karsevaks, who were this time carefully chosen
and then directed to Ayodhya by their local VHP or Bajrang Dal
leaders, was one of defiance. It was turning so even before the Al­
lahabad High Court had ordered, on 28 November 1992, that all con­
struction activity at the Ramjanmabhumi had to cease at the borders
of the disputed site. The Bajrang Dal chief, Vinay Katiyar, had al­
ready warned the Central Government that if force was used against
the karsevaks, the streets would be strewn with their dead bodies.
This gave weight to rumours that a few of the more fanatic elements
amongst the karsevaks had been organized into balidani jathas or
suicide squads, and some were armed with plastic bombs and other
such explosives.

T a b l e 16
ESTIMATES OF PUBLIC OPINION IN UP ON THE EVE OF
6 DECEMBER 1992

Questions Yes No Other Total

Should the UP govt, prevent the pro­ 59.0 36.5 4.5 100.0
posed karseva on the disputed area? 56.5 37.0 6.5 io o .o |
If the UP govt, allows the karseva to 48.5 41.0 10.5 100.0
take place, should the Centre dismiss it? 50.5 **c.: 37.5 12.0 100.01

SOURCE: MRAS-Burke Survey, The Pioneer, 29 November 1992.

NOTE: Shaded figures are adjusted for actual rural-urban differences in UP.
 Creating a Nationality 18 3

T a b l e 17
ESTIMATES OF PUBLIC OPINION IN UP ON THE EVE OF
6 DECEMBER 1992

Question Good or Fair Poor D on’t Total

better know

How would you rate the overall 66 25.5 8.5 101

performance of the UP govt? 63 24.5 10.5 l l
■ "■ .-W ife ., i vO H ":

S o u r c e and N o t e , as in T ab le 16.

T a b l e 18
ESTIMATES OF PUBLIC OPINION IN UP ON THE EVE OF
6 DECEMBER 1992

Question Cong-I BJP JD / Others DK/Can-

SJP not say

If the Centre dismisses the UP 41.5 26 7 1 24.5

govt, for allowing karseva against •.•vW
jv' :;;;,.;. *.;\V
• ••: •
v m m *
the court orders and Assembly
39.5 23.5 10.5 1 2 5 .5 \a
elections are held, which party j- "y
would you vote for?
. ............
S o u r c e and N o t e , as in T able 16.

The mood of the kàrsevaks was matched by some grandiloquent

statements from their leaders. The politician-.ra<//iu Ramchandra
Paramhans asked, rhetorically, ‘If we could perform kàrsevâ during
the rule of Mulayam Singh Yadav, who can stop us now?’ Swami
Parmanand declared, more dramatically, ‘Now, even if Ramlalla him­
self comes down from the heavens and asks us to stop kàrsevâ, we
will not listen to him.’ Ashok Singhal threatened the Central Govern­
ment that if it made any attempt to interfere, kàrsevâ would imme­
diately begin from the garbha griha (sanctum sanctorum) itself; that
is, the mosque would be destroyed. Later, upon seeing one of the
thousands of monkeys of Ayodhya climb on to a dome of the Babri
masjid, he said that since Hanumanji himself had come and blessed
them, there could not be a better omen.
184 T he F inal A ssault

Initially the number of people engaged in karseva ran into a few

hundreds. Gradually, the number swelled but, according to intel­
ligence reports, did not cross 8,000. The VHP maintained that more
than 50,000 kdrsevaks were present at any given time in Ayodhya
during the entire period. A number of MLAs of the BJP arrived with
their supporters and constituents to perform karseva. Among them
was Badshah Singh, m l a from Hamirpur, who brought along with
him 40 Muslims for the purpose.
Matters came to a head when the construction activity continued,
violating the orders of the High Court. Singhal issued a statement
asking kdrsevaks from all over the country to rush to Ayodhya for a
possible confrontation with the authorities. When the District
Magistrate of Faizabad, Ravindranath Shrivastava, along with the
Senior Superitendent of Police, D. B. Roy, went to the site to try and
implement the orders of the Court, unaccompanied by any police
contingent, angry kdrsevaks chanting lJai Shri Ram ’ surrounded
them. Singhal had to intervene before the crowd would release them.
Onkar Bhave and Paramhans were also present at the spot. The
magistrate’s appeal to the sants to obey court orders angered them,
and it was only after he and the SSP touched their feet and begged
forgiveness that the sants were mollified.1
Effigies of the High Court judges, two Hindus and a Muslim, who
gave the order, were burnt at Ayodhya, and it was announced that
20 July would be observed as anti-judiciary day. The day after the
order was passed, lawyers of the the Bar Association of Faizabad
arrived in Ayodhya to perform karseva.
This time the local Muslims did not remain quiet. About a hundred
of them staged a protest march to the disputed shrine and courted
arrest. This was the first time since the temple movement had been
launched that they took to the streets in Ayodhya. Earlier, they had
expressed fear, anger, despair; this time they talked the language of
confrontation. In a meeting of the Babri Masjid Action Committee
held in Faizabad during the time, Muslim leaders announced that if
within ten days all building activity near the disputed structure was
not stopped, they would lead others of their faith to Ayodhya and
physically force the kdrsevaks to stop. But despite this brave talk,
the Muslim shopkeepers of Ayodhya, fearing a backlash, downed
their shutters on hearing the Court judgement.2
1Jansatta, 18 July, 1992.
2Jansatta, 16 July 1992.
 Creating a Nationality 185
Muslims in some other parts of India were less constrained. At a
few places they took to the streets, provoking inevitable organized
reaction. Communal riots broke out in Malegaon in Maharashtra, and
Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, where members of the Islamic Sevak
Sangh (ISS), a militant Muslim outfit, attacked Hindus participating
in an RSS drill. The ISS, as its name suggests, is modelled on, of
all things, the RSS. The rioting lasted over two days and left at least
six people dead. Elsewhere in the state, thousands of Muslims demon­
strated, demanding protection for the Babri Masjid.

Just when it began to look as if the dismissal of the state government

for its failure to implement court orders and a clash between the
Central government and the karsevaks would take the crisis to its
logical end, the newly elected Prime Minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao,
bought himself a four-month reprieve. He promised to solve the prob­
lem at Ayodhya if he could be given time and the karsevaks were
withdrawn from the construction site. An agreement between the
government and the movement, including the activist sadhus and
sants, was signed, and the VHP ordered the karsevaks to shift con­
struction work to an undisputed site nearby where a Lakshman temple
was supposed to come up. (At the time the VHP razed to the ground
a number of small temples in the vicinity of the disputed structure,
a temple where the mythic king of the serpents, Sheshnag, used to
be worshipped was also torn down. As many believed this to be in­
auspicious, they now hastily turned their energy to building a temple
to Ram’s brother, since Lakshman was an incarnation of Sheshnag.)
From the beginning of September to almost the end of November,
over 90 meetings were held between Hindu and Muslim delegations,
but oth6r than bringing leaders of the Babri Masjid Action Committee
and the VHP to the negotiating table little else was achieved by the
government. (Privately however, the Prime Minister was said to be
in touch with Rajendra Singh, the most important of the RSS general
secretaries. Singh reportedly urged Rao more than once to pressurize
the Allahabad High Court to give its judgement, so that some solution
could be found on the basis of the judgement, whatever be its nature.
He probably felt that the parivar could hold the karsevaks in check
taking advantage of the verdict. It seems that there was no response
from Narsimha Rao to Singh’s plea.3)
3By 4 December, Singh’s patience was to wear thin. He was to say to one
o f the mediators that those who had betrayed the parivar thus would certainly
18 6 T he F inal A ssault

The VHP maintained all along that they would not extend the
deadline any further. In the meanwhile, to keep the issue alive they
launched yet another of their mass contact programmes, the Ram
Charan Paduka Pujan. The Pujan involved consecrating at Nandigram
in Faizabad on 22 September some 12,000 khadaus or wooden slip­
pers, a huge number of them built by local Muslim artisans. Local
myth has it that it was at Nandigram that Bharat worshipped the
khadaus of Lord Ram, when the latter was in exile. After consecra­
tion, the khadaus were sent out to all corners of the country and
prayers were offered to them at local temples. The campaign, how­
ever, failed to elicit much popular response.
Even as its talks with the government were going on, the VHP
announced on 31 October that karseva would resume at Ayodhya on
6 December. Later, when the negotiations failed, it appeared that the
government was thinking of taking over the 2.77 acres of disputed
land and dismissing the BJP ministry in UP, so that there could be
no defiance of the Allahabad High Court’s order staying building
activities at the disputed site. But on the evening of 28 November,
the Supreme Court accepted a four-point affidavit of the UP Govern­
ment which promised that the karseva would be symbolic, there
would be no construction activity, no court order would be violated,
and the security of the disputed structure would be ensured. Later
events suggest the BJP’s submission had been a ploy to allow the
unhindered flow of karsevaks and party leaders into Ayodhya,
By the end of November, more than 20,000 karsevaks had reached
the city, and as their numbers continued to rise with the approach of
6 December, it became clear that the entire show was, probably for
the first time, being orchestrated by the RSS. Never before in the
history of the temple movement had the BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal com­
bine managed to collect such large crowds at Ayodhya on their own.
At the final count, an estimated 2,00,000 persons came from all the
states of India barring those in the north-east, a large proportion of
them drawn from the RSS cadres. Everyone could not join the
karsevaks', severe controls and preliminary screening were introduced
by the RSS.4 It was not a purely spontaneous show put up by the
faithful but a tightly organized, fully planned political exercise.

be taught a lesson. Singh’s feelings were communicated to the RSS leaders

camping at Ayodhya, who took it as the final nod they had been waiting for.
4Sanjay Kaw, ‘A Karsevak for Three Days’, The Statesman, 4 December
1992; and ‘Fanaticism in Uniform’, ibid., 5 December 1992. Kaw, a freelance
 Creating a Nationality 187
The largest representations were from M aharashtra, Andhra
Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka and UP And this time round, the com­
position of the karsevaks differed from that of the earlier gatherings
at Ayodhya. Th^re was a heavy turnout of women, Dalits, and tribals
and the ‘backward’ castes. Besides, a large number of karsevaks were
drawn from the rural areas.5
The high level of motivation of the karsevaks was evident from
the testimony of Kaw. Continuously exposed to the VHP’s massive
propaganda, many of them believed that only they were the true Hin­
dus; the rest were traitors .6 Their faith infected many ordinary citizens
and even the paramilitary arm of the government. Talking of the tradi­
tionally anti-Muslim Provincial Armed Constabulary, Kaw mentions
how the karsevaks were ‘treated with respect, even deference’ by the
guardians of law and order. As a PAC man told a group of karsevaks
that included Kaw, ‘Don’t worry about us, we are solidly behind
you.’ Subsequently the PAC invited some of the karsevaks to their
camp for breakfast.

Meanwhile, the BJP sent Lai Krishna Advani and Murli Manohar
Joshi on separate yatras to mobilize karsevaks for Ayodhya. The
tempo was building up. Though towards the end of November Advani
had advised party m p s to stay away from Ayodhya, within 36 hours
he was to change his mind. Now he himself was going to offer
karseva, presumably to convince the supporters of his party that he
was not backtracking on the promise to build a temple at the place
of the Babri mosque .7 Carried away by his new-found enthusiasm,

journalist, who with great difficulty managed to enlist as a kârsevak, describes

the strict control exercised on them by the RSS. His testimony vividly captures
the centralized, heavily organized, orchestrated nature o f the events of 6
December. The organization included liaison with the security apparatus of
the government as well as surveillance on journalists and the karsevaks them­
selves.
5In chapter 5, especially in the context o f Gujarat, we have already hinted
at the political processes contributing to the changing composition of the acti­
vists going to Ayodhya.
'Ibid.
7Ajoy Bose, ‘Caught in a Dilemma’, The Pioneer, 1 December 1992. Bose
also notes that Advani was no longer his normal self, ‘convincing and
forthright’; he was ‘tense and irritable’. This ambivalence, Bose adds, ‘char­
acterized the entire BJP leadership then.’
188 T he Final A ssault

Advani in a public meeting at Azamgarh, UP, assured the crowds on

2 December that the karseva would be ‘physical, with bricks and
shovels,’ a remark he was later to deny making .8 Vinay Katiyar had
been less circumspect. He had already declared on 30 Novemebr:
There is nothing called symbolic karseva. ... This country is not run by court
orders. It is run by society. ... [The] judiciary has no authority to pass any
orders regarding the Ram mandir. ... If there is any sangharsh we are ready
for it. ... Kuch bigadne p a r hi kuch banta hai (Only when something is
destroyed, something is bom).9

Atal Behari Vajpayee was subtler when speaking to one of us on

the morning of December 5 at Lucknow. Asked if, given the large
gathering of karsevaks at Ayodhya, he thought the Babri masjid
would remain safe on 6 December, Vajpayee said, ‘Asha hai, aur
ashanka bhi' (There are hopes, but also doubts).10 On 6 December,
minutes before the Babri masjid was attacked by the karsevaks,
Sadhvi Ritambhara in a brief conversation at the site used a similar
‘double entendre’. Asked if she thought that the Allahabad High
Court order would be violated that day, she replied, ‘Karseva will
be performed like karseva. Whether there will be any violation or
not, you will see later.’ She added ‘All the tasks that are carried out
before the construction [of the temple] begins will be performed. We
will do karseva only in the mandir.’ What did she mean by karseva,

Why did Advani, expected to reach Ayodhya on the morning o f 6 Decem­

ber along with journalists who had accompanied him in his yatra, change his
schedule to reach Ayodhya the previous evening? Apparently, he joined a
closed-door meeting that same evening and another one the next morning at
Katiyar’s home. Others in the meetings were Moreshwar Save of the Shiv
Sena, K. S. Sudarshan and H. V. Sheshadri of the RSS, Pramod Mahajan of
the BJP«. Katiyar and Singhal. Some reports claim that Advani left the meeting
‘grim-faced’. Citizens’ Tribunal on Ayodhya, Report o f the Enquiry Commis­
sion (New Delhi: Citizens Tribunal on Ayodhya, 1993). Others say that some
o f the more aggressive karsevaks gathered outside Katiyar’s house to raise
slogans against Advani.
Amit Prakash, ‘Advani Denies Making “Shovel and Bricks” Statement’,
The Pioneer, 9 December 1992.
9Kanchan Gupta, ‘"Karseva Can’t be Symbolic", Says Katiyar’, The
Pioneer, 1 December 1992.
1(>When asked in the BJP’s first press conference after 6 December why
he did not offer karseva despite being at Lucknow on 5 December, Vajpayee
made what in retrospect was to look like a tell-tale slip. He had to manage
the aftermath at Delhi, he said.
 Creating a Nationality 18 9

as opposed to the official VHP announcement? ‘Now look,’ she

replied, ‘We can calm ourselves, but we cannot calm lakhs of people
by making them pour some water around. Everyone knows this well.
So we are not going to leave this place after only washing and clean­
ing it.’ Did that mean they were going to pull the mosque down?
‘What we want to say is that, today, we do not want to break the
structure, and it will not survive either.’
One of us reached Ayodhya in the early afternoon of 5 December,
in time to hear some of the most important leaders of the p a r iv a r
addressing the thousands of assembled k a rseva k s on the sprawling
grounds of the Ram Katha Kunj, adjoining the disputed plot of 2.77
acres. The lectures continued till late in the evening, with speaker
after speaker assuring the crowd that they would return home com­
pletely satisfied. Paramhans told the karsevaks, ‘What is in your mind
is in ours as well; do not think that you will be unable to finish the
task you have come here to perform.’
In the midst of these speeches, the VHP’s Marg Darshak Mandal
after hours of deliberation communicated to its impatient flock the
nature of the k a rseva that was to be performed the following day.
Acharya Dharmendra, one of its prominent members, and Katiyar,
President of the Bajrang Dal, announced that symbolic k a rse va would
be in itiated by the sa n ts at four locations sim ultaneously at
12.15 PM.
This symbolic k a rse va would include fetching water from the river
Saryu to wash and clean the ch a b u tra (platform), constructed the
previous July (according to one of the sa n ts, this was essential be­
cause politicians visiting the site had made it impure); the filling of
the sh ila n ya s pit next to the platform with sand from the river bed,
followed by the sprinkling of holy water over the entire disputed
plot; the levelling of the low-lying area around the Sheshavatar
temple; and the laying of bricks at an undisclosed place. It appeared
at the time that the VHP had decided to continue with symbolic
k a rse va till the Allahabad High Court gave its judgement in the land
acquisition case on 11 December.
But by the day-end there were signs that Vajpayee’s misgivings
about the k a rseva k s would be proved right and the k a rse va would
not be restricted to hymn-singing on the disputed site, as Kalyan
Singh had claimed in his affidavit before the Supreme Court. In the
evening, angry k a rseva k s confronted Nrityagopal Das and Paramhans
and abused them for agreeing to a symbolic k a rseva . Hundreds more
19 0 T he F inal A ssault

roughed up Katiyar, when he went to Karsevakpuram to pacify the

already highly charged and motivated k a rseva k s. They made it clear
that they had come to Ayodhya to demolish the mosque and would
not settle for less. The plan to have carefully selected, highly indoc­
trinated k a rseva k s was now paying dividends.
If there were pressures from large sections of the k a rseva k s, sub­
jected to intense propaganda for months if not years, the intentions
of a section of the leadership of the p a r iv a r , too, had become suspect
by this time. Journalists were barred entry into the Ram Katha Kunj
and the surrounding areas adjoining the disputed 2.77 acre plot where,
it was widely believed, selected groups of ka rseva k s were being
trained to demolish the masjid. A photograph of ka rseva k s pulling a
huge boulder with ropes at a practice session at the Ram Katha Kunj
on 5 December was published the following day in the In dian E x­
p re ss. The same day a journalist from Lucknow, who managed to get
into the forbidden premises, was detained for several hours, and al­
lowed to go only after her captors were sure that she would not file
any copy for her newspaper on what she had witnessed.
Shortly before midnight, we found near the mosque, Katiyar deep
in discussion with a youngish man called Champat Rai, a relatively
unknown and non-descript RSS leader posted at Ayodhya who headed
the Sangh’s activities in the Avadh region and, thus, was automat­
ically in charge of the k a rse va scheduled for the following day. The
two men surveyed more than once the area that lay between the
makeshift gate that was the only way open to the mosque and a pit
that had been the sh ilan yas sth a l (before being demolished earlier in
the year). It seemed that they were deciding upon the spot where
k a rse va would be performed the following day, especially since the
area they were marking out was not on the disputed plot. By the next
morning, a saffron flag, too had been planted at the spot. As later
events showed, it was through this very place that hundreds of
k a rseva k s were allowed to force their way in, after breaking down
the bamboo fence enclosing the disputed plot, and attack the mosque.
By about 7 am on 6 December, the entire area surrounding the
Babri masjid had been cleared of ordinary k a rseva k s and was under
the control of small teams of RSS men. One of them contained about
fifteen men from Maharashtra; its task was to ensure an orderly
k a rseva . But apart from that, they were unwilling to reveal anything
about themselves, which may or may not have been under instruc­
tions. But a group of teenagers, also from Maharashtra, who were
 Creating a Nationality 191
being hustled out of the grounds along with an elderly man by the
RSS volunteers and two policemen were more vocal. ‘Jab hum idhar
se finally jayenge na, to idhar kuch nahin bachneka (When we final­
ly leave this place, nothing here will survive), they declared confi­
dently, amidst much laughter in which the RSS workers and the
police joined. The elderly man, obviously not one of them, chided
the boys for their disobedience and urged them to follow the directive
of the Marg Darshak Mandal. ‘I am also a karsevak,' he told them,
‘but I believe that our karseva should be as disciplined as Gandhiji’s
satyagraha.’ The boys jeered at him for taking Gandhi’s name with
respect, 'Are turn use Gandhiji bolte ho, par hum to use sala buddha,
harami bolte hain' (You call him Gandhiji, but we call him a bloody
old bastard), they said, leaving the old man staring after them.
By mid-morning, the area surrounding the disputed site was over­
flowing with karsevaks straining at the barricades. Their mood was
belligerent. They were being held back by RSS volunteers and a
handful of policemen. Some of them who managed to break the cor­
don from time to time and rush into the grounds looked almost pos­
sessed; they broke down when they were dragged out.11 Assorted
sadhus, including the better known ones—such as Paramhans in a
canary yellow sweater, his normally unkempt beard and hair neatly
combed out—bustled about importantly, airing their views. Sadhu
Vishwas Bapu of Junagadh, who said he had been a paratrooper in
the Indian army before renouncing the world, was one of them. Ac­
cording to his not terribly cogent argument, if the government and
the secularists wanted the people to believe that the disputed structure
was indeed a mosque and not a temple, they would first have to say
that Godse, Beant Singh and Sivaresan (assassins of M. K. Gandhi,
Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi respectively) were the heroes and
Gandhiji, Indira and Rajiv the offenders. ‘If they agree, so will we’,

n At least one newspaper mentioned psychiatric problems that broke out

in a number of karsevaks who had to be hospitalized after 7 December. Bis-
wajeet Banerjee, ‘Sevaks Found to be Mentally III’, The Pioneer, 24 December
1992. According to the psychiatrist treating them, who refused to be identified,
the patients reportedly suffered from, among other things, auditory hallucina­
tions, paranoia, insomnia and aggressiveness. Poverty, unemployment and il­
literacy may have contributed to their illness, he said, and the absence of
proper treatment had pushed them towards religion. Bagfuls of letters, mostly
incoherent, were recovered from the patients, a majority o f them addressed
to the President, the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister of UP.
192 T he F inal A ssault

concluded Vishwas Babu in fluent English, before wandering off in

search of a new audience.
As the appointed hour came closer, a last minute change was made
in the scheduled programme. Karsevaks were now not required to
form human chains from the banks of the Saryu some distance away
to the site of the karseva to supply the sand needed for the cleaning
operation. Sushil Modi, the BJP MLA from Patna, said that this would
now be done the following morning at 8.30 AM He rushed away
when we asked, ‘What use will the sand be tomorrow, when it is
needed for today’s ceremony.’
From 11 AM onwards, the top leaders of the parivar including
Advani, Joshi, Singhal, Sheshadri, Sudarshan, Katiyar, Bharati and
Avaidyanath began arriving at the disputed site. They did not go
anywhere near the spot where they were going to perform karseva
in less than an hour, but moved around aimlessly and left as hurriedly
as they had come, surrounded by security men and small groups of
karsevaks. By 11.45 AM all the leaders had left. The last to be seen
was Singhal who was trying to push some karsevaks away from the
fence surrounding the mosque .1
At about the time Singhal was spotted near the mosque, the posse
of the Provincial Armed Constabulary posted inside it inexplicably
began to move out. Senior police officials drinking tea on the terrace
of the control room did not stop them as they strolled past below, as
if the PAC had orders to quit its post. At about the same time, two
karsevaks could be seen climbing the boundary wall of the mosque
from the back before quickly disappearing from sight.13
Soon after the bigwigs of the parivar had left, at about 11.45 AM,
a group of not more than twenty boys suddenly rushed into the fenced
ground, ostensibly to help the RSS men evict some of the karsevaks
who had earlier broken the police cordon at the temporary gate. This
group was not wearing the usual saffron headband with Jai Shri Ram
written on it, but lemon yellow bands that could be clearly seen from
a distance because of the brightness of the colour. No one quite
remembered seeing headbands of this colour before.

l2At least one news report says that Advani made some half-hearted efforts
to stop the karsevaks but soon gave up and was, by some accounts, close to
tears. Singhal did try to stop the ‘frenzied’ karsevaks who tried to disrobe
him. The Pioneer, 10 December 1992.
,3These events have been captured in the video-newsmagazine Newstrack,
January 1993.
 Creating a Nationality 193
The yellow-banded group moved towards the gate where the
police was perfunctorily trying to control a rapidly swelling crowd
which outnumbered them hopelessly. This could have been a signal,
for no sooner had these boys been sighted by the karsevaks straining
at the barrier, than there was an announcement on the public address
system asking the boys to withdraw from there immediately. As the
boys left, followed by the RSS men who had been positioned there
since the morning, the crowd of karsevaks broke through and rushed
to the mosque armed with hammers, iron rods, pickaxes, crowbars,
bamboos and shovels. Simultaneously, hordes of karsevaks appeared
on top of the outer wall of the mosque from the sides and back,
pelting the police with stones and bricks. As the forces ran for safety,
D. B. Rai, Senior Superintendent of Police, Faizabad, could be seen
shouting at them to return. They chose not to obey him and, instead,
stood around watching from the sidelines.14
As some of the karsevaks started to break down the mosque with
their bare hands, an RSS functionary stood on the watchtower in
front of the mosque, directing them, and frequently blowing a whistle
and waving a flag, as if he was directing a work squad or athletic
team. Small groups of women collected on the rooftops of adjoining
buildings, and threw gulal at the karsevaks. They sang and clapped,
even as a few others began to uproot telephone wires.
Did the leaders know beforehand what was going to happen that
afternoon? There can be no final answer to that question. Perhaps
some did, others did not. Certainly one answer seems to emerge from
our narrative, another from the likes of Chandan Mitra .15 Not that
the leadership of the parivar comes off any better from Mitra’s
graphic description of their behaviour during that crucial period when
the attack on the mosque was mounted—the giggling political
sanyasins, Uma Bharati and Ritambhara; Joshi overcome by the size
of the mammoth crowd; Singhal, convinced that the karseva would
go along expected lines and giving precise orders, to a crowd that
could not care less, about how to wipe and clean the site of the
projected temple; the moment of reckoning when the crowd goes
berserk on seeing two karsevaks on the top of the domes of the mosque

l4After the events o f 6 December, Rai was suspended. He later publicly

expressed his desire to contest the State Assembly elections on a BJP ticket.
15Chandan Mitra, ‘Control Room that had no Control’, The Hindustan
Times, 8 December 1992.
19 4 T he Final A ssault

while the high command sat, ‘tense’, ‘sombre-faced’, ‘hopelessly

sullen’, with faces like ‘grim death’; the lament of Rajendra Singh,
the de facto supremo of the RSS, ‘the ministry is gone’; and finally
the pathetic and belated attempts to calm down the crowd by the
leaders taking turn in appealing to the karsevaks, while others like
Acharya Dharmendra tried to interest an uninterested crowd in a
bhajan,16 The high command recovered soon enough, but for Advani
who, perhaps sensing the long-term implications of what was hap­
pening, wore a ‘worried, faraway expression on his face ’ .1
At about 12.30 PM some half an hour after the mosque had been
stormed, water began to be pumped into a small, crude, tank-like,
brick-and-mud structure a little distance away from the mosque, just
below Manas Bhawan. This was to mix the cement that was later
used to build the platform and wall of the temple on the rubble of
the mosque. VHP ambulances stood ready in all the nearby lanes to
cart away injured karsevaks to the civil hospital in Faizabad where
the former health minister in the BJP government in UP, Harish
18
Chandra Shrivastava, was said to be in command.
Soon after the karsevaks started tearing the mosque down, jour­
nalists and cameramen covering the events came under a well-
orchestrated attack. It was not difficult to single them out for this
purpose, since all media persons present wore prominent pink identity
badges issued to them by the VHP the day before. Most cameramen
and photographers had their equipment smashed to pieces. Journalists
were beaten up, in some cases seriously, their notebooks were tom

16Ibid.
,7Ibid.
18How much commitment to a cause the temple movement elicited can be
gauged from the police reports which say that 869 karsevaks were injured
that day. Citizens’ Tribunal on Ayodhya: Report o f the Enquiry Commission
(New Delhi: Citizens’ Tribunal on Ayodhya, 1993), p. 155. TTiough in this
description of events, we have adduced evidence o f prior planning and even
a conspiracy, the element of ideological fervour and moral passion in some
o f the young karsevaks and the simple faith o f some of the older ones should
not be under-estimated. Certainly the prior planning was not very efficient
and the conspiracy not widespread, for most o f the injuries were easily
avoidable. Many were due to the angry, spontaneous attempts by the younger
volunteers to break the mosque by their own efforts, often with their bare
hands. The passions that were often conspicuous by their absence in the
leaders, were all too obvious in some of the followers.
 Creating a Nationality 195
and tape recorders broken. At least in one instance, there was an
19
attempt to kill a young woman journalist.
One group of karsevaks blocked all entry points into Ayodhya to
keep out central security forces, while another began to loot and burn
the homes of the Muslims of the city and destroy masjids and idgahs.
The low, continuous chant of ‘Jai Shri Ram,' coming over the
loudspeakers since dawn, suddenly became more aggressive in both
tone and content:
Jai Shri Ram, bolo Jai Shri Ram,
Jinnah bolo Jai Shri Ram,
Gandhi bolo Jai Shri Ram,
Mullah bolo Jai Shri Ram...

Initially, there were some hurried, panicky pleas to the karsevaks

over the public address system to maintain discipline. These were
followed by expressions of concern for their safety, as the 500 year
old mosque began to come apart slowly. After a while the karsevaks
received only guidance and encouragement from the BJP leaders and
the sants of the VHP’s Marg Darshak Mandal assembled at the Ram
Katha Kunj. Singhal grandly announced that the dawn of Hindu rebel­
lion had arrived, while Vijaya Raje Scindia declared that she could
now die without any regret, for she had seen her dream come true.
Kedarnath Sahani’s short speech was a warning to the Muslims.
Those who do not even want to say Vande Mataram, those who want to
see the flag of Pakistan flutter in Kashmir, the process o f showing them
their right place has begun.

It was, however, the triumvirate of Uma Bharati, Ritambhara and

Dharmendra who dominated the ‘show*. Bharati in her several turns
at the microphone gave the crowds two slogans, ‘Ram nam satya hai,
Babri Masjid dhvasth hai,' (True is the name of Ram; Babri masjid
has been demolished) and ‘Ek dhakka aur do, Babri masjid tod do'
(Give one more push, and break the Babri Masjid). Both, along with
the old favourite ‘Jai Shri Ram', rent the air for hours afterwards.
She also introduced to the crowd one Shiv Kumari Prachchanya of
Meerut as ‘the first woman ever to have climbed the dome of that
iySee for example Saroj Nagi and Vrinda Gopinath, ‘Media Attacked to
Stop Demolition Photos’, The Pioneer, 14 December 1992.; and ‘President
Hears Media’s Horrific Tales’, The Pioneer, 10 December 1992. On 5 Decem­
ber, too, a German television crew had been beaten up by the karsevaks at
Ayodhya.
19 6 T he F inal A ssault

structure,’ and the parents of Sharad and Ram Kumar Kothari, two
brothers killed in police firing on 2 November 1990, while trying to
attack the mosque. ‘There were tears in the eyes of their mother’,
Bharati told her audience, ‘as she for the first time felt that her sons
had not sacrificed their lives in vain, and that their murder at the
hands of those nar pishdchs (blood-sucking monsters), Mulayam and
V. R Singh, had been avenged.’
As the day wore on, Ritambhara took over. She asked the
karsevaks to immerse themselves totally in this auspicious and holy
task, specially since the administration was lending them its full sup­
port by remaining mute. The sadhvi instructed them to leave the site
only if they had been hurt or were feeling unwell. Ritambhara made
several speeches and followed them up by what appeared to be a
VHP version of the traditional larti’ to the goddess Durga in which
the crowds lustily joined:
Mil ke bolo, ja i mala di
Ma tere bete, tujhe bulate
tu niche aja,
hum shish kata dein, tujhe chadha dein
tu khappar la de, hum khun baha dein
tu binti meri, puri kar de
tujhse mangun, mannat meri puri kar de
mujhko chahiye,
Ayodhya chahiye, Mathura chahiye, Kashi chahiye
tu puri kar de, ja i mata di.

(Let us together praise Mother Durga,

Mother your sons are calling you,
Come down
We shall cut our heads off and offer them to you
Bring your drinking bowl and we will fill it with blood,
Listen to my pleas,
Fulfil my wishes,
Give me Ayodhya, give me Mathura, give me Kashi.)

By the time the last of the domes of the Babri masjid came crash­
ing down at 5.45 PM, scattered spirals of smoke could be seen at a
distance. Realizing that Muslim houses in the city were being attack­
ed by the karsevaks, Ritambhara quickly began to urge the authorities
on the public address system to stop the ‘Mussalmans from burning
their own homes’. She was joined by Dharmendra, who shouted that
some ‘outlaws’ were setting fire to their own huts to make a fast
buck and give the innocent karsevaks a bad name. Later, he changed
 Creating a Nationality 197
his tune and said to the press that this was the only way in which
Ayodhya could become a Vatican for the Hindus.

X II. AYODHYA’S ‘FIRST’ RIOT

The two earlier riots at Ayodhya had become distant memories for
the residents of the town. Moreover, in retrospect they had reworked
the memories to read the riots as aberrant behaviour produced by
transient passions to which a neighbourhood could sometimes be
prone. More so as the seven-year-old movement run by the parivar
had failed to polarize the community. The community’s moment of
reckoning had now come.
Between nightfall on 6 December and mid-afternoon the next day,
rampaging mobs of karsevaks killed and then burnt 13 men and
children in Ayodhya. While nearly all the Muslims of the town had
left their homes before 6 December for safer spots, many others fled
on hearing the news that the Babri masjid had fallen. Those who
died were the ones who could not escape in time.
Simultaneously, as if to spite the VHP’s claim that the Hindus had
never destroyed places of worship of other faiths and that it was the
most tolerant of faiths, scores of places of worship at Ayodhya were
systematically destroyed by the karsevaks. Table 19 gives the es­
timates made by three agencies.
For nearly twelve hours after the resignation of Kalyan Singh’s
government and after governer’s rule had been imposed in the state,

Table 19
ESTIMATES OF DAMAGED RELIGIOUS PLACES AND TOMBS BY
DIFFERENT AGENCIES

Agency Mosque M azar Idgah Madrasa Temple

District Administration 19 9 0 2 0
District Police 14 5 3 0 1
Relief Council 23 11 0 0 0

S o u r c e : Kamala Prasad, Dinesh Mohan, Kamal A. Mitra Chenoy, Kirti Singh,

Sagari Chhabra, S. C. Shukla, Report o f the Inquiry Commission, Submitted
to Citizens’ Tribunal on Ayodhya (New Delhi: Citizens’ Tribunal on Ayod­
hya, 1993), p. 154.
198 Ayodhya’S ‘F irst ’ R iot

mobs roamed the streets of the temple town, shouting *Jai Shri Ram ’
and plundering and torching Muslim homes and business estab­
lishments in broad daylight and without resistance. It was Ayodhya’s
first proper Hindu-Muslim riot and it turned out to be quite im­
pressive in scale; in all 134 houses were destroyed.
The destruction had a pattern. First the kârsevaks looted the valu­
ables and currency. Most kârsevaks who participated in the sacking
of the Muslim localities of Ayodhya were from South and West India;
they found jewellery and cash particularly attractive because they
could carry them back with them unobtrusively. Then they smashed
to pieces all the things inside the houses and what they could not
break with their bare hands or sticks—from furniture to motorcycles
to books and clothes—they made into bonfires. In some cases, the
kârsevaks distributed what they could not carry away among a few
favoured local Hindus. A few houses were not set on fire bcause they
were too close to Hindu homes; the rest were systematically burnt.
Any mosque they could find was a bonus. Within the day, barring
two, all the masjids and idgahs of Ayodhya were either destroyed or
damaged.
In this systematic destruction, the kârsevaks received some useful
help from a majority of the UP police, the PAC and, for the first
time, a few of the local Hindus. While some locals identified Muslim
property for the kârsevaks, the police did its bit by either actively
participating in the looting or considerately turning a blind eye to
what was happening around them. For instance, on the morning of
7 December, in the heavily policed Ramkot area, just behind the
disputed site, some kârsevaks set fire to Lala Tailors, a shop owned
by a Muslim. The PAC men on duty there, instead of interfering,
urged the arsonists to throw out the odd pieces of wooden furniture
lying inside; the agents of the law then used the wood to make a
fire in the middle of the road to ward off the winter chill.

Ten days later, many localities of Ayodhya still bore the scars of the
victory march of Hindu nationalism. Everything had been left as it
was; the 24 hour curfew was still in force, making it impossible for
those who had run away to come back. Only a handful of Muslims

2<>We need hardly tell the reader that the victory march touched many
places other than Ayodhya. For a random sample, see ‘15 Kashmiri Students
Thrown off Running Train’, The Times o f India, 13 December 1992.
 Creating a Nationality 19 9

could be found in Ayodhya, those who had either been saved by their
neighbours or had successfully evaded the karsevaks.
Fifty-year-old Beechu was one of them. His house, overlooking a
rather beautiful garden, was in the basti of Mirapur Bulandi, on a
stretch of road called Rajghat. It was attacked by about a hundred
men at 11 AM on 7 December. Within half-an-hour, the other seven
Muslim houses in the mohalla met the same fate. There were no
casualties, for most of the families had left well in advance. Beechu,
who owns a cycle shop, was saved by two of his Hindu neighbours,
Sarju Yadav and Subhash, who tied a Bajrang Dal band on his head
and passed him off as a karsevak. ‘It was very difficult,’ says Yadav,
because the men who came here, did not speak any Hindi, only
Telugu. ‘I somehow managed to convince them in the little English
I know.’ Subhash did not think that any Hindu from their basti was
involved in the attack; on the other hand, he was convinced that the
karsevaks had prior knowledge about the location of Muslim
households in the area. Where were the police at the time? Yadav
and Subhash replied, almost in unison, ‘We only saw one man in
uniform, and he was leading the karsevaks.'
Around the time Mirapur Bulandi was being overrun, the neigh­
bouring locality of Machwana situated on Kaushalya Ghat was under
siege. An embittered Abdul Sattar pointed out what used to be his
house. ‘I am a very poor man, and so I also had very little. But now
even that has gone.’ He had not yet lodged an FIR with the police,
preferring to wait for some local Muslim leader to accompany him
to the police station. ‘The police are pressurizing us to sign state­
ments they have prepared. I am not educated; who knows what they
have written,’ he said.
All the seven or eight Muslim homes in Machwana and a similar
number in adjoining Shikwana were, when we visited them, little
more than burnt-out shells. Sattar, who was hiding in a flower bed
nearby, when the karsevaks were ransacking the place, swears that
he saw Hindus from his own locality as well as some from the neigh­
bouring ones egging the outsiders on. The inhabitants of Shikwana
agree. They say that the karsevaks were brought back to their locality
three times to break down the house of the local landlord, Nawab
Tahir Husain Sahib. They succeeded the third time and reduced to
ashes most things in the house, including the 75-year-old Tahir
Husain himself. He was torched at his front door, and a few bones
20 0 A yodhya ’s ‘F irst ’ R iot

were all that were found of the aristocrat whose family had lived in
Ayodhya for more than three hundred years.
Stepping inside the ruins of what must once have been a grand
house, we saw a frail woman of about 70 years, wearing a shabby
sari and high-powered glasses standing with her hands folded and
tears rolling down her cheeks. She was looking very vulnerable in
front of two uniformed policemen. She was pleading with them to
let her testify as one of the witnesses to the murder of her husband.
The police refused. She was not present inside the house when the
karsevaks descended on it and, as far as they were concerned, she
was of no use to them. She tried to argue with them through her
tears: ‘It is true that I didn’t see anything, but I could hear them
shouting, "maro, kato, luto, phunk-do, phunk-do” (Kill him, cut him
into pieces, loot, bum, bum), as I hid in the bushes under the window
at the back of the house. I also heard Husain Sahib begging the
karsevaks to spare his life — "mujhe mat maro, mujhe mat maro“
(Don’t kill me, don’t kill me), he had screamed.’
The police were unmoved; they wandered off to round up other
witnesses for the inquiry, unconvinced even about Tahir Husain’s
death. ‘The mohalld people say that the bones are his, but what is
the proof? Nobody actually saw him being killed; he might have run
away.’ ‘That is untrue,’ wailed Aliya Begum after them. ‘I will swear
on anything you say, the Qur’an, the Ramayana.’ No one paid much
heed, as she stood alone in the courtyard of her house surrounded
by spilt grain, broken china, burnt beds and chairs, torn photographs,
and bits and pieces of other personal belongings, awaiting the return
of her sons, their wives and children who had managed to escape in
time.
Outside the two policemen continued with their investigations.
Why did they wait for ten days before starting them, we tried to find
out. ‘We only heard what had happened here yesterday, ’ said one
of them, slightly affronted. The police chowki to which they were
attached, we soon found out, was less them a five-minute walk from
the house of Tahir Husain.
Husain’s neighbour, Ali Ramzan’s cycle shop was located at the
same crossing as the Katra police chowki. ‘When a mob began
destroying my shop, the police encouraged them by shouting, “loot
it, loot it”; and now they want me to lodge an FIR with them.’ Ram­
zan, however is not complaining too much. His 6-year-old son, Zubair
Ahmed, is still alive. Zubair was trying to slip out of the back of his
 Creating a Nationality 201

house, when he was caught by the karsevaks attacking it, who then
tried to throw him into the bonfire they had made of the things taken
from his house. Zubair was saved by a Hindu friend of his father’s,
who claimed Zubair was his son.
Further down the road, across from Ashrafi Bhavan are the
mohallas of Mughalpura and Begumpura. A few Muslim houses here
survived the karseva. According to Mohammed Amin and Abdul
Hafiz of Mughalpura, around 8 AM on 7 December, minutes after the
PAC guard posted in their basti went off duty, an army of karsevaks
overran their houses. While Amin hid in some tall grass behind his
house, Hafiz slipped into a freshly dug grave. Too scared to go back
to their homes even after a couple of hours had passed, Amin, Hafiz
and the others who had fled with them, decided to seek refuge in
the Katra police chowki. ‘They refused to let us in,’ says Amin; so
they went running to a PAC camp at a nearby school.
The situation there was even worse. The police accused us of being murderers.
They said we must have knifed some people and were running away from
being caught, and that in order to hide our crime we were bringing in the
story about the karsevaks. They threatened to kill us and had their command­
ing officer not turned up, we don’t know what would have happened to us.

Except for the wife of their zamindar, no other neighbour came out
to help them. ‘Many of us were also terrified,’ says Sheetal, a young
man who lives in Begumpura, ‘because if we pleaded with the mob
to stop the looting and burning, they were quite ready to turn on us.’
Despite which, Sheetal personally saved the lives of a number of
people of his neighboourhood and was dubbed a ‘traitor’ for his ef­
forts by his Hindu friends.
Unlike many other towns and cities, there are no Muslim ghettos
in Ayodhya. Muslim and Hindu houses stand side by side in most
localities. But there are a few, very small, predominantly Muslim
pockets like Alamganj Katra and Society. These neighbourhoods were
still totally deserted; they had been completely destroyed, especially
Society, with its 20 odd Muslim houses reduced to rubble and the
minarets of its tiny mosque strewn about on the grass. Most of the
bricks from the house were dated 1924. The hungry street dogs of
the localities moved around with us hoping for some food and, per­
haps, happy to see some signs of life again.
In the Tehdi Bazar mohalla just behind the disputed site, adjacent
to a vacant plot of land where many of the karsevaks had camped
202 Ayodhya s ‘F irst’ R iot

daring their stay in the city, 13-year-old Tony and his father Shaukat
were first attacked and then burnt in the courtyard of their house.
Shreds of their blood-stained clothes still lay at the spot where they
had been lynched. The Muslims of the basti had not yet returned;
three of their Hindu neighbours, all women, told the story.
Tehdi Bazar was the first neighbourhood to be attacked at around
4 AM, on 7 December, by a mob of ‘thousands’ carrying guns and
swords. The ten to twelve Muslim houses were ransacked and then
set on fire. Apart from Shaukat and his son, two brothers Salim and
Nadir were killed. They were two of the three sons of the last imam
of the Babri masjid. The remaining brother was spared because the
karsevaks thought he was insane. ‘We hid some of them in our houses
for three days, the others took refuge in the Ramjanmabhumi police
station,’ said one of the women.
Tehdi Bazar was the place from where the Ayodhya riots really
began, and Hindus of the town blame Haji Mehboob, the local head
of the Babri Masjid Action Committee, for it. Mehboob’s house, lo­
cated on the outskirts of the basti, overlooks one of the main roads
leading up to the disputed site, which was constantly used by the
karsevaks. According to those who hold him responsible for starting
the violence, and they include local journalists and a number of
mahants, Mehboob fired a gun—some say he threw a bomb— on a
procession of karsevaks on the evening of 6 December. As a result
one person— some say five—died. The karsevaks were enraged and
swore vengeance. The rest of the events at Ayodhya followed from
Mehboob’s folly, it is said. The two prominent VHP mahants of Ayod­
hya, Ramchandra Paramhans and Nrityagopal Das, disagree. They
insist that the Muslims, taking advantage of the prevailing situation,
set fire to their own houses to claim compensation from the govern­
ment.
The Muslims are reluctant to accept the more popular theory, al­
though they do not deny it outright either. Says Nasir Husain, the
administrator of the Shahi mosque in Faizabad,
I don’t know whether he fired the shot, but if he did, it must have been in
self-defence. Only a fool could have been aggressive at that point in time,
with lakhs of karsevaks milling around the place, and Haji Mehboob is no
fool.

Others cite the curious behaviour on that day of Station House

Officer Shukla of the Ramjanmabhumi police thana. It was well
 Creating a Nationality 203
known that the SHO intensely disliked Mehboob. In fact, just a few
weeks earlier Shukla had arrested him on what many think was a
trumped-up charge. Yet, not only did Shukla save the lives of Meh­
boob and his family by locking them up in jail till the danger was
over, but also let Mehboob walk away scot-free afterwards. The Mus­
lims say that, given the enmity between the two, Shukla would not
have let Mehboob escape had there been any truth in the popular
story.
When the conversation veered round to Mehboob, one of the
Hindu women in Tehdi Bazar had also murmured under her breath:
‘He had to save his own life after all.’

The fact that Muslims and their property were rather systematically
attacked this time, as if the karsevaks had gone around with a voter’s
list in their hands, has for the first time clearly divided the city along
religious lines. What eight years of propaganda could not do, the first
riot of the city has done. The reader might remember that earlier
both communities held outsiders responsible for the large-scale
violence at Ayodhya and often proudly insisted that they would sur­
vive karseva after karseva together. This time there has been no such
talk. Ayodhya as a community—and as a sacred city where both the
Hindus and the Muslims, with their interlocking myths, legends, life­
styles and shared experiences of co-survival have a place, perhaps
even a sanctified place—might not yet be defeated but it is certainly
in decline. The community at Ayodhya was always an imperfect one
but it was' a community all the same, whereas it has become now a
place haunted by the private demons of two separated groups, fearful,
suspicious and on guard. Hindu nationalism and its foot-soldiers have
done their job.
Though virtually in every locality we discovered some Hindus
who had protected their Muslim neighbours, often at great risk to
themselves, and though all the Muslims we met, with one exception,
acknowledged this handsomely, there was a clear decline in the casual
approach many locals had to the political 'tamashas’ or ‘spectacles’
organized by outsiders which gave some local residents access to
money and power. We have already suggested that many Muslims of
Ayodhya used to see the temple movement in instrumental terms but,
now, the thousands of pairs of footwear Muslims made for the Paduka
Pujan movement, the character certificate that Munnu Mia gave to
Paramhans, and even the participation of some Muslims in the
204 Ayodhya s ‘F irst’ R iot

karseva on 6 December seemed to belong to another age. When one

local Muslim karsevak was killed by the other karsevaks, we were
told that his neighbours refused to participate in his funeral or read
the namaz e janaza.
The Muslims of Ayodhya see the events of 6-7 December as part
of a continuing process of this new divide. They are afraid and angry,
and many of them feel let down by the local Hindus. They are now
convinced that, in at least some cases, their neighbours have been
willing partners in the atrocities committed against them. It is this
sense of betrayal rather than the death of more than a thousand people
in riots all over India after December 6 that seems to occupy their
mind. Abdul Sattar has made up his mind to move to Bombay, where
his son has a tailoring establishment. Abdul Hafiz is waiting for the
curfew to lift and for the others to return before leaving.
A group of small boys, roughly eight to ten years old, are equally
determined to stay on. Said one of them, who saw the destruction of
his mohalla from a nearby garden where he had hidden, ‘We will
learn how to use guns and fight like the Palestinians.’ What did he
know of them, we asked. ‘I know that many powerful people have
been trying to wipe out all traces of the Palestinians for many years
but have failed. Because they have aswered back bravely with the
gun. We shall do the same.’ The other children nodded in agreement.

Sehanawa
A few miles outside Faizabad, on the road to Sultanpur, lies the vil­
lage of Sehanawa. It is a village with roughly the same number of
Hindus and Muslims. The majority of them earn their living from
agriculture or related occupations. On the face of it, there is nothing
that marks out Sehanawa from the countless other sleepy villages of
eastern UP. As it happened, prior to the first assault on the Babri
masjid by karsevaks, in 1990, one of us had accidentally gone to
Sehanawa, while travelling with a documentary film crew, to get
some random insights into the mood of Muslim villagers in rural
Faizabad and near Ayodhya. But the nondescript village had been
clean forgotten by its casual visitor though, as we later found out,
the villagers had not forgotten the visit.
The reader may also remember that Nrityagopal Das had, in the
course of a conversation, mentioned that the Babri mosque could
have been taken to Sehanawa, since the local Shias had themselves
 Creating a Nationality 205
offered to shift the mosque to the village as a solution to the conflict
at Ayodhya. According to him, Mir Baqi, the builder of the mosque
in 1528, was buried in the village and his descendants still lived
there. Ramchandra Paramhans, too, had once said more or less the
same thing.
Towards the end of one of our last visits to Ayodhya, on a sudden
impulse we decided to visit Sehanawa, merely to see how the des­
cendants of Baqi—that formidable medieval warhorse and ultimate
‘Hindu-baiter’—had reacted to the trauma of Ayodhya. We thought
that visit might help us to round off our story.
We reached Sehanawa after sunset, and asked one of the villagers
to take us to the house of Baqi’s descendants. The man, obviously a
Muslim, readily—in fact enthusiastically—agreed, for he remem­
bered the earlier visit of one of us. He jumped into our car and led
us to a house on the outskirts of the village and went in to talk to
the family. Soon a bare cot was taken out of the house for us to sit
on. After a few minutes, a quiet, elderly man—tall, fair and blue­
eyed—emerged from the house to greet us in the local dialect. He
did not look like a grandee in disguise but a very dignified peasant.
We were sure that he was the householder and the main person to
whom we were going to be introduced.
We had barely asked him whether what we had heard in Ayodhya
about Sehanawa and the family of Baqi was true when, before our
host could respond, a large number of men, some returning from the
fields and some from a mosque nearby gathered around us. A couple
of elders in the crowd shouted that all this talk about the descendants
of Baqi was rubbish. ‘We have nothing to do with Mir Baqi. He
never came here and he certainly did not die here. If he had, would
there not be a tomb or something to mark the grave of such an im­
portant person?’ asked one of the elders firmly. ‘Now you will go
and write all these things and there would be attacks on the village.
We want to be left alone,’ he added. The others nodded in agreement,
urging us to disbelieve the lies that the local VHP leaders were
spreading so that the visiting karsevaks could direct their wrath
towards Sehanawa and destroy the entire village. They said they had
already organized vigilance bodies for 24-hour guard duty and the
entire Muslim community in the village lived in constant panic,
fearing an attack at any time from outsiders. They produced before
us the two young gandsons of the last imam of the Babri mosque
whose parents had been killed in the riots of 7 December; both
206 Ayodhya s ‘F irst ’ R iot

of them looked traumatized and had swollen, red eyes, obviously

from weeping.
We sat for a while with the group and one of us promised to send
the villagers a video cassette of the documentary that had been partly
shot in the village. But it was obvious that any further attempt to
trace the family of Baqi and their response to the chain of events at
Ayodhya would be futile. As we prepared to leave, one of the local
shopkeepers, the most articulate of the lot, took us aside. He told us
that a couple of years ago, the Hindi magazine Maya had carried a
story on Mir Baqi’s association with Sehanawa based on con­
versations its correspondent had with some villagers. According to
the shopkeeper these men just wanted to feel important; the fact that
they would feature in a popular magazine led them to say many things
that were false. ‘It is because of their lies that we are suffering today,’
he added. Obviously we were not the only ones who had come to
Sehanawa, chasing the legend of Mir Baqi. The villagers also told
us that several Indian and foreign journalists, television producers
and even an American university professor had visited them. ‘We
told them all the same thing.’
It was already dusk. As we were leaving the village the thought
struck us that, whatever Mir Baqi might have been, his descendants
were not a part of any aristocracy sired by a conquering general but
were part of the ordinary peasantry of Avadh in an ordinary village
of eastern UP, sharing the fears and anxieties of a besieged com­
munity.
 IN D E X
Advani, L. K. 35, 40-1, 47, 51, 70, 100,
107-10, 113, 123, 129; 132-3, 172,
187, 188, 192, 193n, 194
Agrawal, Devaki Nandan 95
Agrawal, Satish Chandra 127
Ahmedabad 104-5, 110-21
three Ahmedabads 110-11
Ahmedabad Ekta 108n
Akbar, Mughal Emperor 55
akhadas 2, 83-A 131, 135
Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyaithi Panshad 81, 96
Anderson, Walter 81, 82n
Anushilan Samiti 82
Arya Samaj 41, 58, 65, 81, 83, 87, 92n, 107
as a source of Hindu nationalism, 48n
Aryan/Aryanizabon 58, 86
authoritarian personality 10
Adorno, T. W. 10
Avaidyanath 95, 161-2, 192
Ayodhya:
culture of 1-3, 27, 49, 51, 169
Avadh, as an ecumenical state 3;
communal amity in 2-5, 171—
5, 177-80; contributions of
Muslim artisans to temples 3;
patronage of temples by the
Nawabs of Avadh 2-3; prasad
to Muslims 171; temples at 1
Muslim leadership in 50-1
riots in 27-8, 163, 196-204
Shaurya Divas at 156-60, 163
Shraddha Divas at 156
see also Babri Masjid
Azad, Chandrashekhar 32, 52
Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam 161
Babar, Mughal Emperor 2, 53, 131-3, 159,
161, 172
Babri Masjid 6, 25. 35, 38-9, 46, 51, 94-
5, 97-9, 131, 140, 143, 161-2, 169,
171, 173-4, 181, 183, 195
attack on 24-32
demolition of 30-1, 192-7
icons in 52n, 173
Mir Baqi and 5, 46, 172, 205
Babri Masjid Action Committee 51, 97,
141, 158, 185, 202
Badrinath, Chaturvedi 68n, 69n, 84, 85
Bajrang Dal:
cultural profile of 95-6
political profile of 22, 95, 156, 164-5,
182
see also Katiyar-, Vinay
Baneijea, Krishna Mohun 64
Banga Bhanga movement 64
Banias 69, 101-3, 106, 128
Baxter, Craig 66n, 67n
Bharati, Uma 53, 134, 161-2, 164, 167,
193, 195
Bharatiya Jan Sangh 65-6, 69, 71-4, 115,
127, 132,
see also Mookeiji. Shyama Prasad
Bharatiya Janata Party 66, 69, 71-4, 115,
127, 132, 181
changes in political strategy of 72
electoral performance of 71-4
electoral policy of 69-70
factions in 167
opinion poll on 182-3
see also Advani, L. K.; Vajpayee, Atal
Behari
Bose, Shankar 71
Bose, Tapan 12n
Brahmins/Brahminization 57-8, 63, 65
Brahmo Samaj 58
Buddha/Buddhism 56, 58n, 107, 161-3
208 Index
Chandra, Bipan 3, lOn, I4n, 79
chariot, symbolism of xiv, 40n
Chattopadhyaya, BanIdmehandra 68
Chaudhan, Amarsingh 108
Chinmayananda, Swami 45, 88, 95
Christianity 56-8, 59n
Qtizen’s Tribunal on Ayodhya 43n, 194a, 197
Colonelganj 44, 170, 173-5
colonialism, see communal politics; Hindu
nationalism
communal politics 40n, 100, 106-7, 147
colonialism and vi-ix, 18, 85
crime and 17-18, 111-13
cnumerativc/competitive politics and
18-19
media and 33-7, 43-4, 143, 161-4,
167, 174
see also riots
conversions:
Christian evangelism 56-7, 92n
of Meos 124
mosques into temples 104, 137, 197
paravartan (reconversion) 92n
shuddhi movement 92n
criminal connection of politics 26n, 112—
13, 120-1
Curzon, Lord 65
Dalai Lama 88
Dalits 102-3, 105-6, 142-3
Dalmia, Vishnu Hari 89n
Damle, Shridhar D. 81, 82n
Daniel, V. 62n
Das, Nrityagopal 45-6, 49n, 161-2, 202, 205
Datta, Pradeep K. 25n, 33, 40n, 53n
Davies, Merryl Wynch ix, 12, 20
Dawoodi Bohras 131
Deoras, Balasaheb 166
Deoras, Bhausaheb 166
Derozio, Henry 64
Deshmukh, Nana 8 In
Deshpande, G. P. x, 67n
Dharmendra, Acharya 189, 192, 194, 196 Govind Singh, Guru 62
Dikshit, Shrish Chand 26, 28, 3 In, 95
Durga Vahini 81, 86
electoral politics 17-18, 39, 43, 48n
see also Bharatiya Janata Party
Elst, Koenraad 5n, 68n
Engineer, Asghar Ali x, 10, 13, 14n, 16,
18. 2 In. 13In
Faizabad district 37-8, 44-5, 49-50, 74
Finch. William 4
Gandhi, Indira 34. 70, 84, 93, 101-2, 115,
191
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 32, 59-
60, 65. 80, 88n, 100-3, 108, 112, 115,
117, 171, 191
assassination of 88n
Gandhian socialism of the Bharatiya
Janata Party 71
marginalization of upper castes by 65-6
see also Hindu nationalism
Gandhi. Rajiv 38-9, 173, 191
Gandhi, Ramchandra x, 5n
gods/goddesses:
Durga 36, 55, 157, 175
Durga puja 157; Vijaya Dashami
108-9
Ganesha 108, 129
immersion celebrations 109
Hanuman 36, 88, 95-7, 104-5, 120,
171
Krishna 3
Lakshman 88, 171, 185
Ram 24-5, 29, 36, 40-1, 44, 51, 79,
88, 95. 157, 167, 180
attitude of RSS towards 99;
metamorphosis of 99; use in
mass mobilization 107-8
Shankar 2
Godse, Nathuram 32
Gold, Daniel 1, 8 In
Golwalkar, Madhav Sadashiv 84-5, 86n,
88-9, 99
critique of Hindus 83, 85-6
Gopal, S. IOn, 61
Gould, Harold 4n
Gujarat:
Avamas won over by Hindutva 103-4,
105-6, 108
Hindutva as a Savama ideology 101 —
2, 104
 Index
KHAM (electoral combine) 102
mobilization of the middle class 100,
104~5n
mobilization through yatras 107-9
struggle for political power in 100-1
Hanumangarhi 2, 4, 26, 28, 36
Hazrat Shis 171-2, 174
Hegdewar, Keshav Baliram 65, 82-5
Herder, Johann Gottfried von 79
Hindu/Hinduism:
attempt to redefine as a ‘proper’
religion 56-8
as ideology and as faith 57-8
modernization of vii-ix, 62-3
origin of the term 56-7n,
semiticization of 57, 68-9, 85
traditions/sects:
Aghorpanthis 41; Dashanami
Nagas 3; Shaivism 107; Shak-
tism 107; Tantricism 67; Vaish-
navism 1-3, 41, 107
vernacular 58n
see also Hindu nationalism
Hindu Mahasabha 66-7
see also Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar
Hindu nationalism vii-viii, 19, 56-8, 58-
9n, 64. 66-9, 124
Adivasis and 86n, 94n
colonialism and 65, 85
criticism of Hindus by 63, 83, 85-6
devaluation of little cultures and 58,
86
Gandhi and 59-60, 65, 80, 191
growth of 77-80
Hindutva as an ideology 58, 59-60
as a new concept 56-7; origins of
57-8; Hindu critique/ rejection
of 5. 59-60, 71-4, 152-3; as a
Savama Parana 101-3
history and 22, 61-2
ideas of Hindu nation/nation-state, 57,
59, 63, 67-9
masculinizing the Hindu 39, 60-1, 68,
83, 85
modernism and 62-3
territorialization of 67-8
urban support for 126-7
209
see also Bajrang Dal; Hindutva;
Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh;
Vishwa Hindu Parishad
history as consciousness 22, 61-2
Indian Muslim League 67
Iqbal, Mohammad 45
Islam 56, 69n, 85
Islamic groups:
Islamic Sevak Sangh (ISS) 185
student groups 148
Jamat-i-Islamia, youth wing 148
see also Babri Masjid Action Commit­
tee
Jain, Girilal 159
Jainism 107
Jaipur 123, 125, 131, 134, 146
economic interdependence of Hindus
and Muslims in 123, 126
Ganesh procession in 129
social fabric of 123-5
yäträs in 128
Jinnah, Mohammad. Ali 50n
Joshi, Murli Manohar 76, 187, 192-3
journalists/media 33-7, 43-4, 174, 195
communal hatred and 143, 161-4, 167
Jugantar Samiti 82
karsevaAarsevak 5-6, 24-6, 30, 133, 156—
7, 160, 162, 164, 181-2, 184, 186-8,
190-6
attack on media by 195
BJP/VHP bid to control 162-3, 189-
94
clinical psychology of 191, 194n
concept of 39
dalits as 187
loss of control over 162, 188-90, 191—
4
Muslims as 184
opinion poll on 182-3
police and 24-31. 49, 53-4, 181-4,
185, 190-2
Rajasthan Karseva Samiti 133
screening of 182. 186-7
Karsevakpuram 156, 163, 190
Kashi Vishwanath Temple 92, 94
2 10
Katiyar, Vinay 26. 95-7, 161, 165, 182,
188-90, 192
Kaviraj, Sudipta 18
Kaw, Sanjay 186-7
Kipling, Rudyard 64
Kothari, Rajni 18, 21
Krishna, Gopal 6, 8, 10, 14, 17
Krishnajanamabhumi 31, 94
Lai, Vinay 22n, 6 In
Laldas, Swami xi, 33, 47-9, 74, 76n, 169n
Latif, Abdul 112
Lifton, Robert J. x, 125
Lutgendorf, Peter 87n
Madan, T. N. 13n
Mahabharata 40, 46
Malkani K R. 8 In
Mandat Commission 72, 158
Manimala 43n
Manor, James 76
Maurya, Chandragupta 62
Mazzini, Giuseppe 79
Menon, V. K. Krishna 66
Mitra, Chandan 117, 193
Modi. Narendra 109-10, 113
Mookeiji, Shyama Prasad 65-6
Munje, Balkrishna Shriram 82-3. 85
see also Hindu Mahasabha
Munnu Mia (Anwar Hussain) 170-2, 204
Muslims 2-5,91,98, 141. 158, 163, 171-
5, 177-80, 184-5
ghettoization of 118-20
Meos 124
polygamy and 79n
see also Islam
Naqvi, Mukhbar Abbas 35
Narayan, Jayaprakash 70-1
Narendra, K. 26
Narsimha Rao. P. V. 185
Nasir Sahib 50
national ¡culture, mainstream of 19. 77-
80
Navnirman movement 102
Nayar, K. K. 52-3
Nehru, Jawaharlal 66, 121
Norberg-Hodge, Helena 22
Index
Obeseykere, Gananath 58n
opinion polls
on demolition of temples 168
on government policies 182
on karseva 186
Pandey, Gyanendra 85-6
Paramhans, Ramchandra 46-9, 172, 184,
189, 191, 202
Parmar, Ramesh Chandra 112
Patel. Chimanbhai 110, 114
Patwardhan, Anand 52n
People’s Union of Civil Liberties 2 In, 43,
I32n,
People’s Union of Democratic Rights 21 n,
41. 42, 44n
Prabhu, Hemlata 21 n
Prakash, Indra 67n
Press Council of India 43n
puranas 101
Rahnema, Majid 58n
Rajgopal, P. R. 7, 8. 9-10, 16n
Ramayana 171
Ramchuriimanas xii, 87n
Ramjanmabhumi mandir 5, 160, 181
multiplicity of 5, 51, 93
Ramchabutra 20n, 30, 51, 64
Ramjanmabhumi movement 76-8
burning of High Court judges’ effigies
184
courts and 1, 184-5
Ramjanmabhumi Mukti Yajna Samiti
93
suicide squads 182
see also karseva, Vishwa Hindu
Parishad, yatras
Rao, P. V. Narsimha I59n, 160, 185
Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh 38, 48.
77, 81, 85, 156, 185-6. 189-91, 194
attitude to Ram 99
Brahmanic origins of 82
colonialism and 82-3
cultural and political profile of 81-6
Ray, Satyajit 3
Raychaudhuri. Tapan 22
riots, communal 110-22, 125, 175-80,
197-204
 Index 211

attack on the liveihood of Muslims Roy, Ashim 124n

15-17, 141-2 Roy, Ram Mohun 69
Ayodhya citizens and 27-8, 163, 184
distribution of 120 Saakshi Maharaj 161-2
Gujarat riots, summary of 122; as Sadbhavana rallies 42
an urban phenomenon 13, 65- Sahani, Kedamath 195
9; violence-prone stales and Sampoomanand 89
cities 6- 8, 15-17 Sampradayikta Virodhi Samiti 129n
electoral politics and 4, 18, 65 Sardar, Ziauddin ix, 12, 20
ethnic self assertion and 16, 19-20 Sarkar, Jadunath 61
Hindu religious processions through Sarkar, Sumit 12n
Muslim areas 175 Sarkar, Tanika 12n
ideology, faith and 9-12 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 32n, 59n, 60,
local reactions to 46, 47-9, 50, 158, 63, 65-8, 81, 83, 85, 99
170, 173 Scindia, Vijaya Raje 48, 195
loot as a motive in 148 secular/secularism 13, 20, 21, 63
media collusion with 33-7, 143-8 critiques of 13-15, 17, 19, 20
and middle classes.complicity of 13- fundamentalism as a response to 12,
14, 18, 104, 105n, 116-18 20, 28
modernity and 12-13 riots as a secular sphere 13, 14, 17, 21
mutual help transcending communities self/selfhood xi, 63
149, 150 Hindu nationalism as self-hatred 57
police indifference and connivance in 59, 62, 63
25-31, 87, 136, 138, 144-5, 147, plurality of self vii-viii, 58
148, 178, 193, 198-200, 201-2 Vedantic self, primacy given to 58, 63
preparatory propaganda and 51-5 Shah, Ghanshyam 2 In
resistance to 13, 129n, 149-50, 173-5, Shah, Wazid Ali 141
177, 199, 203 Shahbuddin, Syed 38n, 39-41, 163
rumours, spreading of 135, 176 Shamshi, Haji Mohammad Kalim 172-5
secular causes of 13, 17-18, 150 Shekhawat, Bhairon Singh 127, 133, 137
as secular politics 38-40, 46, 149n Sheshadri, H. V. I88n
spontaneity of 123, 137 shilanayas 38, 44
survivors of 125, 148-54 Shiva, Vandana 22
targeting of women and children in Singh, Bhagat 32, 52
114, 176-7 Singh, Gurudutt 53
technology of: Singh, Jaswant 166
inflammatory speeches 156-63, Singh, K. Suresh 5n
195-6; slogans and songs 29- Singh, Kalyan 197
30, 131, 136-8, 141, 195; cas­ Singh, Rajendra 185-6, I86n, 190, 194
settes of fiery speeches 53-4, Singh, Master Tara 88
163; cassettes of religious bhajans Singh, V. B. 71
based on popular songs 98, 163 Singh, V. P. 12-13, 72, 76, 158, 161-2,
victims of 113-14, 116-22, 132, 137, 26, 94, 159
175-7, 199-201, 204 Singhal, Ashok 26. 28. 45. 183-4, 188n,
youth participation in 120-1 192-3, 195
see also communal politics Somnath temple 40. 107, 109-10, 132,
Ritambhara, Sadhvi 164, 188. 193, 195-6 158
Robert, Michael 58n Srivastava. Rain Sharan 28, 49
212
statism vii-viii, 62-3, 85, 169
of Hindu nationalists, 62-3, 77-80
Subba Rao, C. V. x, xi, 43
Sudarshan, K. S. 188n
survivors 148-54
Sushil Kumar, Jain Muni 88
Tagore, Rabindranath 20n, 64
tantricism 41
Tarte, Narayan Rao 88n, 9On
Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act
119
Thapar, Romila lOn
Tibrewal Commission 82n, 13In, 134n,
135n, 136n, 137n, 138n, 14ln, 145n,
147n
Tod, James 61
Upadhyay, Brahmabandhav 58n, 59n
Upadhyaya, Deen Dayal 84, 99
Vajpayee, Atal Behari 38, 47, 70, 76, 133,
187-9
Index
van der Veer, Peter 2, 4n
Vedanta/Vedantic 57-9, 62-3
Vikramaditiya, King 5, 53
Vishva Hindu Parishad 26, 38-9, 86-92,
115, 137, 156-7, 160, 182, 186
branches/conferences 90-1, 92, 94
conversions and 92
culture of 86-90, 93
Dharma Samsad 91-2
Marg Darshak Mandal 89, 188-9
Sanskritic Hinduism and 90
Vivekananda Swami 67-8
Wodeyar, Jaichamraj 88
Yadav, Mulayam Singh 37, 42-4, 48n, 76,
157, I58n, 161-3
yajnus, politics of 45, 93-5, 156, 163
Yajna Samiti 45-6, 49n
yatra s:
politics of 40, 42-5, 93-4, 104, 107-9,
128-32, 166-7, 175, 186
mobilization by 104, 107-9, 123, 133
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