The Time of Kali: Violence between Religious Groups in India

Social Research, Fall, 2000 by Sudhir Kakar

Moralities of Violence

The large scale replacement of personal identities by a communal identity in the time of Kali does not mean that people are now in some regressed, primitive state where the violent side of human nature is bound to be unleashed when they collect together in a procession or a congregation in demonstration of this identity. This essentially Freudian postulate needs to be seen in the context of a particular period in histroy--Europe between the two World Wars--when extremist ideologues of the Left and Right were creating mass movements imbued with messianic fervor. Building on the classic notions of crowds described by Gustave Le Bon (whose own ideas, in turn, were framed by the dread French upper classes felt in relation to revolutionary masses), Freud's reflections on mass psychology were not free of the ideological concerns of his time, namely the liberal fear of the loss of individual autonomy in a collectivity and the socialist concern with how to make a desired collectivity tolerable and tolerant.

The replacement of personal by communal identity only means its refocusing; the individual now acts according to the norms of the communal Hindu or Muslim group. For instance, in the time of Kali, there is a very different code of morality--not its absence--that governs the actions of both Hindus and Muslims. In both groups, arson, looting and killing men of the other community are no longer the serious transgressions they would be in times of peace. Yet, among both Hindus and Muslims, there is a consensual condemnation of rape and killing of women of the other community. Even in the time of Kali, the two communities in Hyderabad shared in common the commandments "Thou shall not kill ... a woman" and "Thou shalt not rape", although the intensity of outrage associated with the transgression of these commandments varies with and within the communities (Kakar, 1996, 169-182). Both communities view a riot as a battle exclusively between men in defense of the honor of their "nations". Although regrettable accidents may occur, the women are noncombatants. Weak and vulnerable, they are entitled to protection, even by men of the enemy host.

In Hyderabad, then, the tradition of violence between the religious communities (an almost annual blood-letting) has developed certain norms which strongly disapprove of rape as a vehicle of contempt, rage or hatred that one community may feel for the other. Moreover, unlike some other ethnic/religious conflicts, such as the one in Bosnia, Hindus and Muslims still have to live together after a riot and carry out minimal social and considerable economic interaction. Rape makes such interactions impossible and turns Hindu-Muslim animosity into implacable hatred. Like nothing else, it draws impermeable boundaries between the groups, separates them in an enmity where there is no longer a bridge between the two.

Not that there are no rumors or even stray incidents of sexual violence. Accounts of sexual violence during a riot, though, are almost always highly exaggerated. They seem to be necessary heralds of Kali's birth. Beside the shared expression of moral outrage that strengthens the identification with the community, the rumors of sexual violence (especially of gang rape and sexual mutilation of women) also serve for the release and vicarious satisfaction of sadistic impulses. The time of Kali gives men permission to fulfill the fantasized urge to utterly subjugate a woman, to reduce her consciousness to a reactivity of the flesh alone.