The Colours Of Violence

SUDHIR KAKAR The Colours of Violence PENGUIN BOOKS Contents Preface Dedication The Setting The Riot The Warriors Victims and Others: I. The Hindus Victims and Others: II. The Muslims A New Hindu Identity The Muslim Fundamentalist Identity Conclusion: Religious Conflict in the Modern World Footnotes A New Hindu Identity The Muslim Fundamentalist Identity Appendix I Appendix II References Acknowledgements Read More in Penguin For the Best in Paperbacks, Look for the Penguin For the Best in Paperbacks, Look for the Penguin Copyright PENGUIN BOOKS THE COLOURS OF VIOLENCE One of the most widely translated Indian writers, Sudhir Kakar is a psychoanalyst and scholar who lives in New Delhi. His many books include The Inner World, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, Intimate Relations and The Analyst and the Mystic, all of which have been translated into several languages around the world. For Shveta, also because she asked. Preface This book is a psychoanalyst’s exploration of what is commonly known as religious conflict. The hesitations— ‘psychoanalyst’s’ instead of ‘psychoanalytic’, the qualifier ‘commonly known as’—are due to an awareness that such conflicts are complex phenomena, involving the interaction of political, economic, cultural and psychological forces. To reduce their complexity exclusively to psychoanalytic notions is to engage in a psychological imperialism which has been deeply offensive to practitioners of other disciplines—history, political science, and sociology among others— who have traditionally engaged in the study of social conflict. My own aspirations in this book are modest. They are to provide a way of looking at conflict—the psychoanalyst’s way— so as to deepen the understanding provided by other disciplines. To their insights, I wish to add my own discipline’s characteristic way of reflecting on issues involved in religious conflict. Taking the Hindu–Muslim violence of 1990 in the southIndian city of Hyderabad as my case-study, I have tried to bring out the subjective, experiential aspects of conflict between religious groups, to capture the psychological experience of being a Hindu or a Muslim when one’s community seems to be ranged against the other in a deadly confrontation. This means working with a notion of the group aspect of identity which is constituted of a person’s feelings and attitudes toward the self as a member of an ethnic/religious/cultural collectivity. This particular self-image is transmitted from one generation to the next through the group’s mythology, history, ideals and values, and shared cultural symbols. Group identity is an extended part of individual self-experience, although the intensity of this experience varies across individuals and with time. It can range from feelings of nominal affiliation with the group to a deep identification or even to feelings of fusion, where any perceived harm to the group’s interests or threats to its ‘honour’ are reacted to as strongly as damage to one’s own self. I have then tried to describe the ways in which social-psychological forces in a particular period of history bring out latent group identities and turn them to violent ends. With evidence drawn from interviews with men, women, and children, psychological tests and speech transcripts of Hindu and Muslim ‘fundamentalists’, I have sought to analyse the fantasies, social representations, and modes of moral reasoning about the out-groups—‘them’—that motivate and rationalize arson, looting, rape, and killing. Chapter 1 describes the context of Hindu–Muslim violence: personal, social, and historical. After trying to understand the emotional reverberations of the Hyderabad riot of 1990, the central event of my study, I give a brief account of its setting—a social and historical portrait of the city of Hyderabad —