(The Times of India
July 25, 2006)
The Significant Other
by Namita Devidayal
It would be easy for the optimistic liberal to conclude that Mumbai is still at heart, 'Bombay', a cosmopolitan city devoid of bigotry. The Hindutva parties were relatively muted in their reaction to the train blasts.
Muslim organisations came out and condemned the attacks. And no one burned any buses. But even if the city opted out of the violent route, there is a growing rhetoric of violence that is silently seeping into people's psyche, like chemical waste into the soil, and no one knows when and how its effects will be felt.
The rhetoric is evident in drawing-room discussions, over SMS messages, and in unspoken words and glances. Right after the July 11 blasts, a series of creepy SMSes and e-mails started doing the rounds, posing loaded questions like: "We agree that every Muslim is not a terrorist, but why is every terrorist a Muslim?"
One e-mail bludgeoned its mass-recipients with the same tired cliches about how the minority community is growing exponentially, and will soon out-populate the majority.
On the flip side, one also heard of rabble-rousing pamphlets being distributed in certain minority ghettos. The rhetoric of violence may be almost as dangerous as overt physical violence because it eventually constructs, what psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar calls, "Cultural memory — the imaginative basis for a sense of cultural identity".
The memory is based as much on imagination as on actual events. For instance, stories about the violence of Partition often become fiercer and fiercer as they get orally transmitted from one generation to the next.
The sense of loss, anger and bereavement become a part of the collective consciousness. Stereotypes about the 'enemy' get reinforced because they are not based on real encounters or experience. The reason this is more disturbing today is because Mumbai is changing.
More and more residential buildings discriminate on the basis of religion, and they can now do so with the sanction of a Supreme Court verdict that permits housing societies to be formed along community lines.
Contrary to the utopian era of Amar Akbar Anthony, that wonderful allegory for religious amity, today it is less likely that your child will have a neighbour or a 'building friend' who is from another community — someone whom he can identify with purely as a playmate, share snacks with, maybe even take him one day to his place of worship.
The withdrawal is happening on both sides. Over the years, fuelled by a growing sense of alienation with the mainstream, a number of well-heeled Muslims have set up their own schools that are just like convents, but also offer religious studies.
Mumbai may not be Ahmedabad, where children from different communities no longer study together, but it is inching its way there. The danger of not interacting enough with different people is that you then rely on homogenised stereotypes, instead of individual identities.
According to Kakar, "In a period of rising social tension, social identity dominates, if it does not entirely replace, personal identity".
Researchers working on a Gender and Space project at PUKAR, an NGO, were horrified by the findings of a series of focus group discussions it has held recently in Mumbai.
Women — from the lofty precinct of Malabar Hill to the smelly bylanes of Dharavi to the neon-lit conclaves of Lokhandwala — were asked to describe what they thought were unsafe areas in the city.
The answers, almost uniformly were: Minority areas. Had they ever been there? No. Did they know anyone who had been there? No. Their reasons for feeling that way? The men have beards and look dangerous and aggressive. Did they think they may be prejudiced? No.
There wasn't even an attempt to be politically correct or to question the stereotype. It is stereotyping that led to racial profiling and the kind of irrational violence that once prompted two white cops to beat senseless a black man, leading to one of the worst racial riots in LA.
Only recently in Mumbai, a 'dangerous bearded man' was detained for an unjustifiably long period of time at the international airport. The irony is that he had flown in to attend the funeral of his brother who had died in the train blasts.
He was a victim, not a perpetrator. But stereotypes are beyond reason. They are reductive and create 'us' and 'them' cognitive states. Sweeping statements affect individuals as well as larger events.
For instance, cocktail party chatter today raises mind-numbingly simplistic questions: "Why is it that wherever there is conflict, it involves Islam?"
Hardly anyone takes the time to discuss the complex history of Israel which is perpetrating its own kind of terrorism, or dwell on America's double standards. Arguments are devoid of political analysis or historical context.
For instance, few give a thought to India's role in the issue which may arguably be a motivating factor for the blasts: Kashmir.
There needs to be consensus on the part of schools, the media, civic bodies, grass-roots organisations like mohalla committees to initiate dialogue and send out messages to celebrate individuals rather than demonise groups.
Otherwise, as Kabir pointed out: "When the arrow of separation hits, there's no healing/ Sobbing and sobbing, you live dying, and rise groaning".
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