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Literary Review
The fire every time
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Names have an effect on cities and Bombay and Mumbai evoke very different images. The transition from one to the other also marks the rise of a politics of hatred, says DOM MORAES, reviewing a book on violence in the city.
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SOMETIMES a simple date, cold and dehydrated though it looks in print, can acquire a symbolic value beyond words. "1066" has its own significance to an Englishman. Recently "9/11" became a synonym for a colossal American tragedy. These units of time have become symbolic of events that changed the nature and history of an entire country. In India "December 1992" should similarly carry many resonances. It was in this month that the Muslims of India lost their faith in secular democracy forever, and Bombay went up inflames.
But Indians as a people are not very interested in history. Those who are currently in power want the masses to accept Hindu myths as received knowledge. They have twisted and deformed historical facts to serve their own purposes. In this atmosphere, any writer who attempts to document and record the truth becomes a version of Sisyphus. Thomas Hansen is a social anthropologist attached to the University of Edinburgh. He has written a realistic examination of the Shiv Sena and the peculiar domination it has achieved over Mumbai.
In the 1990s, Hindu fundamentalism as represented by the BJP acquired terrible power across the country, and December 1992 changed India. In 1996 the Shiv Sena changed the name of Bombay to Mumbai. Hansen finds this significant. Since then two more Indian cities, Madras and Calcutta, have acquired new names. In spite of Shakespeare, names have some effect, at least on cities. The name "Bombay" once brought images of affluence and culture to the mind of the person who heard it. "Mumbai" does almost exactly the opposite.
Indeed, the city could be said to have had two entirely different lives: as Bombay and then as Mumbai. Hansen talked to many committed Sena workers in Mumbai, and later to as many Muslims, the community worst affected by Sena violence. Personally, he says, he preferred the company of Muslims. Most people would. But he does not allow his preference to cloud a shrewd and austere mind. His prose style is at times impenetrable, but his conclusions are impeccable. The only complaint I have against this book is the way it is written.
I take a sentence at random. "My proposition, which will be preposterous to some, is that categories and logics derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis and elaborated by the work of Slavoj Zizek may be helpful in the endeavour." If someone were to say this to me, which is unlikely, the only reply I could think of would be, "Really?" It is a pity that so much valuable literature written by academics can only be read by other academics. The language they use defeats its own purpose; it ensures that you can't see the wood for the trees.
Nevertheless Hansen has produced a sensitive and worthwhile book. He has examined medieval Maratha history, and traced its trends down to the foundation of the liberal Samyukta Maratha Sabha in 1939. One of the founders was K.S. Thackeray. The Shiv Sena is the brainchild of his son. It has brilliantly exploited a blend of localised patriotism and paranoia to attract two different generations of Maharashtrians. Its initial rather parochial aspect caused its decline in the 1980s. It came back as a Hindutva party that hated Muslims.
Hansen achieves a scrupulous fairness in his analysis of the Shiv Sena as a historical necessity. This must be difficult for a western liberal if one considers that the Sena excels not only in "the politics of public spectacle" but also in the politics of genocide. He explores the methods by which it exploited a dislike and suspicion of Muslims that was common (though mostly hidden) in Maharashtra. He discusses the riots of 1992-3, the Muslim retaliation, the very dubious role played throughout this time by the Bombay police, and the Srikrishna report.
The change of deprived village boys to urban quasi-gangsters, the development of mindsets capable of genocide, does not happen only in the Shiv Sena, Mumbai, or Maharashtra. As Hansen points out, these are "possibilities always folded into India's unique experience of modernism and democracy." They happen all over India. Scholars of the past may have misread the nature of Indians completely when they called them gentle and tolerant. They weren't in Mumbai in 1992, nor are they in Gujarat now. And where will the fire be next time?
Urban Violence in India: Identity Politics, `Mumbai', and the Postcolonial City, Thomas Blom Hansen, Permanent Black, p.269, Rs. 550
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