Studying Genocide After Fifty Years
On the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, Ashis Nandy initiated a project to study the nature of violence in the massacre of the partition of India into two different nation-states. The project seeks to reconstruct the nature of the violence and its consequences both through detailed case studies of individual survivors and a larger survey of those who experienced it.
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can’t forgive me.
I am everything you lost. Your perfect enemy.
Your memory gets in the way of my memory.
— Agha Shahid Ali [1]
It is nearly twenty-five years since I first read Arvind Kala’s column on S.I. Khan.[2] A newspaper column can tell only a skeletal story and I hoped that fuller details would allow me to weave a part of the story of Partition around the damaged life of the likes of Khan. Many families, like his, were torn asunder during the random, decentralized violence of Partition. Soon after Khan’s story unfolded, two Sikh brothers discovered each other, after sixty years. Partition had separated them.[3]
The partitioning of British India was an ill-planned, almost casual affair, apart from being gory. It was the story of a tired Empire giving up because it no longer, after winning a global war at enormous cost, had the required will power and coercive energy to rule over an increasingly defiant people. They left India in what political historian Stanley Wolpert calls a ‘shameful flight’.[4] Parts of Indian society too dutifully imploded at that moment. The future rulers of India and Pakistan bargained for territorial gains with more verve than they discussed how the aftermath of Partition could be handled without bloodshed and ethnic cleansing.
Khan, I learnt from Kala’s account, was a Pakistani doctor who worked as a practitioner of sports medicine. He was for a while the official physician of one of Pakistan’s national teams. He also ran a school for disabled children in Karachi. Despite these details, Khan proved elusive. Kala told me that he had already returned to Pakistan and when I phoned his family there seemed to be a slight reluctance to talk about him. The verification of Khan’s identity was not complete. And though Khan himself was certain that he had found his family, Kala says, the family was only 80 per cent sure.[5] I shall come back to that part of the story. Let me first tell the known details of Khan’s life.
Khan—I never came to know his full name—was born a Hindu in Montgomery district in West Punjab. His name then was Jagdish. When he was three years old, Partition happened and his parents, Gopal Das and Rukmini Devi, found themselves caught on the wrong side of the border. They tried to escape by boarding a train to Karachi (on their way to India) on 22 August 1947 with Jagdish, his eight-year old sister and the younger brother of Gopal Das. At the time, killing trainloads of Hindus escaping Pakistan and Muslims escaping India had become a blood sport. While the train was running towards Karachi, a rumour spread among the passengers that a Muslim mob was waiting to kill all the Hindus in the train farther down the rail track. As a result, in the very next station the family hurriedly got down. But before they could take out Jagdish, the train restarted and steamed off.
How Jagdish became Dr. S.I. Khan, the columnist does not say. It must have been a long process. We are only told that he lived at several homes, ‘sometimes wanted, sometimes not.’ He was also adopted by a Muslim couple and he probably was brought up, my later attempts to trace him suggest, as a Bahai. But Khan did remember that his name had been Jagdish and that he had been left behind in a train.
When he grew up, his search for his lost family was based on these two fragments of memory. He began to go to Hindu temples and Sikh gurudwaras to ask people if they knew a couple who were looking for a lost child called Jagdish. Over the years he had met at least three Indian visitors in Pakistan, to request them to look for a family in India that had lost a child called Jagdish during Partition. In addition, he had told a number of Hindu families in Pakistan his original name during his frantic search for his parents. He was willing to produce the families as a proof of his authenticity.
Throughout his life, Khan ‘had a void in his heart’, he told Kala. Sometimes, after working from dawn to midnight for the school he ran, he would wake up in the middle of the night, to go to the seashore and sit there for hours. He avoided people and became careless about his looks. After more than forty years, the search ended in September 1989. Khan saw a small news item in the well-known Urdu newspaper of Pakistan, Jung, in which Gopal Das and Rukmini Devi at Delhi still pined for their lost child Jagdish. Khan rushed to Delhi.
By the time Kala met him, he had been to Delhi twice. His family had given Khan a warm welcome during both his visits. There was some talk of medical tests to ensure that there was no error in identification on either side. But the two daughters of Gopal Das and Rukmini ruled that out. Their parents had accepted Khan as their lost son and grown rather fond of him. If the medical tests disproved the identity of Khan, the daughters felt, their parents might not survive the shock. Gopal Das was 80 and Rukmini Devi 72. As for Khan, he felt relaxed. He said to Kala,
For the first time in my life I am tasting food. I have just one wish. That my parents could stay with me. That will be difficult. They are old and cannot shift to Pakistan. In which case I could come to Delhi several times a year, find some work, and live here. What can a man want if he has a family?[6]
Apparently, Jagdish and his parents were fortunate. There is in their story a touch of completion. Kala’ did mention that the family as a whole were going to meet ‘to discuss their mixed-up emotions’ and decide what their relationship with Khan should be. I never found out what happened in that meeting and whether it took place at all.
Kala felt that there was a vague feeling of disappointment in Khan. Khan had been searching single-handedly for his parents and siblings all his life. There was desperation in his search and the search had given him a cause and a meaning in life. His parental family, on the other hand, had survived as a family; they had each other. The family had missed their son and longed for him, but that experience lacked the touch of loneliness, desperation and the touch obsession in Khan’s search. They could not match Khan’s thrill, delirious joy and sense of fulfilment on finding his family. The family had managed to cope with the loss of a son better. Khan’s suffering had gone, in this sense, partly unrequited. This, Kala felt, was sensed by Khan and there was in him the pain of being let down.
***
Khan went back to Pakistan to resume his life and after those two visits. He did not get in touch with Kala. Nor did his family. My efforts to locate him in Pakistan, despite the help Pakistani friends gave me, also failed.
In the meantime, the relation between Khan and his family had taken a new turn. In his column, Kala himself had written on how effusive Khan’s parents and sisters were towards him. Khan stayed with his younger sister at Delhi who worked in a bank. He was overwhelmed by her hospitality. He told Kala that he had to merely mention what he loved to eat and the very next day it would be on the table. Now, the relationship showed some vague signs of strain.
Kala suspects that Khan’s natal family had probably unwittingly communicated to Khan some of their latent middle-class fears and anxieties. Forty years had passed since Jagdish was lost. His elder sister was very young then; his other sister was not even born. During those forty years, Jagdish had become a mythic figure and part of family history. His two sisters had married and their husbands, children and in-laws were not prepared to meet their long-lost relative in real life, that too as a Pakistani Muslim. The eager acceptance by Gopal Das and Rukmini Devi of Khan might have triggered vague discomforts in the younger generation, brought up on packaged stories of Muslim atrocities and the indirect responsibility Muslims bore for the loss of a child of the family. That child had now come back and done so with his entitlements.
Families uprooted during mass violence are often not the most secure and trusting. There is a feeling in many of them that the world had once betrayed them and may do so again. What often makes them successful entrepreneurs and achievers also make them aggressive in interpersonal situations, even within their own families.[7] Their caution can often be a cover for deeper fears, suspicions and anxieties.
I
This then is the incomplete, elusive story of Dr. S. I. Khan, blurred by time and bereft of a proper ending, his life available to us only through a haze of memories and filtered through a young journalist’s casual, transient interest. In this sense, Khan represents others of his kind, a damaged life held together by intense, single-minded search for lost connections and for a sense of closure. Yet, this is the way many of these stories begin and end—with ambiguities unsorted, relationships unresolved, and the emptiness in most cases persisting till death. Indeed, Jagdish and his parents were in some sense fortunate. There is in their story at least a touch of imperfect closure.[8]
Khan’s case captures the unending, often fruitless efforts to write the saga of Partition. Writers, historians and social scientists often tell me that the story of Partition is an unwritten epic that can someday be recovered from its weary witnesses. Khan’s story reiterates that Partition is not merely a fragmented epic strewn in the memories of millions, waiting to be stitched together by coming generations of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. It is perhaps a partly-lost epic that can never be configured into a single, coherent narrative—a story with a beginning, middle and an ending.[9] I too can only supply you with a few segments of it, that too after struggling for years with my inner demons and with masses of data, often internally inconsistent, impossibly chaotic. I cannot even promise that I shall not come back to you with another version of the story, if I get a life long enough.
Khan’s case raises larger issues that transcend his own sense of loss. Archived or museumized records of a genocidal event and private memories of it impact public life differently. The former, once they seep into public awareness—through education, socialization, monuments and museums— seek to freeze the past and make it authoritative. They no longer remain only a specific narrative but become a shared virtual memory for many. They assume the duty of identifying victims and perpetrators and tunnelling memories to conform or defy the dominant sentiments in society.
Such housebroken memories over time generate a historical sensitivity from which human subjectivities have been neatly excised. History in effect trumps memory in the civilized world; the memories that survive are the ones defanged by history.
This is a trait history shares with its acknowledged conscience-keeper, archives, and with other official accounts such as reports of enquiry commissions and legal proceedings, even when the politics of the scholars researching mass violence and the state differ radically. It is no accident that, during the last three hundred years, modern states have increasingly relied on history to sanction their hold on ‘un-contestable’ and ‘manageable’ pasts. The more modest, extra-historical pasts—less accessible, undisciplined or filtered through human subjectivities—survive in the interstices of society outside our control.[10]
These extra-historical constructions of the past have a larger presence in societies where history is still not the decisive voice of the past and the past remains an arena of perpetually contested, radically diverse constructions. The contest, however, is mainly in the eyes of the beholder, for in societies that host thriving communities, the diverse constructions are usually seen as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ prerogative of communities.[11]
From this vantage ground, we felt we had only two options. We could concentrate on case studies with a modest touch of depth psychology, which psychoanalysts might find shallow but which other social scientists, with some training, could handle. Or we could encourage the survivors to tell their story in their own way and supply their own explanations and build upon them our story.
We had in mind something like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. It was official but did not try to make official history, though it may eventually end up doing so. It sought to forge a common ethical frame and a shared public awareness of injustice and cruelty by integrating within its proceedings the traditional Zulu concepts of crime, punishment and justice.[12] The Commission’s work ensured the birth of a new epic that crossed a whole range of boundaries—political, cultural and religious. Such an epic can be limited, perhaps even flawed by the standards of rational-legal norms of modern jurisprudence, but it always carries the promise of being an enduring cultural-psychological vector in society.
This is a round-about way of admitting that working through genocidal experiences is not merely an intellectual and political act, but also self- confrontational. It challenges one’s ideas of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ and threatens to redefine dominant culture of common sense. Not only by reconstructing the past but also by promising to reshape the present and the future.
We have already said, the mass violence that we are talking about may seem too distant to have any impact on the contemporary politics of the three states that witnessed the violence—India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—yet, it is the underside of the cultures of politics and international relations of all three countries. When we embarked on the study, we knew we were not a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, though a few of us wanted to believe that we were serving as a research secretariat of a future commission of that kind, which we would not see launched in our life time.
There were other formidable issues of method. But in such a research, any concern with method was bound to be an over-concern. We had a precedent. Reminding us that Hannah Arendt considered methodological discussions to be ‘self-indulgent and irrelevant to real political problems,’ Lisa Disch says,
From her early writings to her unfinished lectures on judging, Arendt sustains the belief that political theory can be understood as a kind of storytelling. Its purpose is not to make a descriptively accurate report of the world but “to transcend the limitations of facts and information” to tell a provocative and principled story.[13]
Arendt also felt that, when confronting a radically disjunctive experience of evil that could not be fitted within existing experiences and available categories, storytelling became even more relevant. Neither of these formulations is unknown to communities that have lived with genocide but never had the temerity to lay down the conventions by which respectable studies of genocide in our times should abide.
We knew we had to flout both disciplinary boundaries and disciplinary canons, but could one do both within an analytic frame that would make sense to the researchers, the subjects and the readers? How could one cross the barriers of languages and dialects? And what might be the status of the data on an event that had taken place in distant past? After starting work, we faced a more serious issue: If, following Arendt, we concentrated on telling a good story when researching dark times, what could be our ethical frame or frames? Could we defy Arendt to enrich our story with a larger survey?
When we received a more generous support, we planned such a survey of survivors. Our study had begun with a small grant and a team of five. Now the team comprised around thirty-five persons of diverse scholarly backgrounds. It was not possible to set up a team comprising well-trained psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychologically minded anthropologists, sociologists, and oral historians—to interview hundreds of people belonging to diverse language-groups, dialects and cultures. Yet, we knew that this was almost certainly the last chance of studying the violence of 1946-48 through the eyes of those who had walked through the fire.
It became soon obvious that neither the intensive, detailed interviews nor the shorter survey interviews would conform to the established conventions of clinical research, ethnography, oral histories or attitude surveys. First, all the interviews were done more than fifty years after the event. Those who had seen the violence as adults were already in their late seventies or eighties. Many were in their nineties. Even those who had experienced the violence as children or teenagers were in their seventies. Given the average life expectancy at the time, most of those we wanted to interview were already dead, their death often hastened by the physical and psychological stress of the violence and the uprooting. Thus, coverage was important. We wanted to listen to as many persons as possible.
Second, we knew that the chances of talking to the respondents on a one- to-one basis, without occasional interference from attendants or other family members, were slim. And, indeed, family members frequently came in to check if the respondent was handling well the stress of the interview, to administer drugs, or to make sure that the respondent was not exhausted or thirsty. In 45.3 per cent of the cases (N=1334), someone or other was present during the interview. For, even when the respondents were in their seventies, they were considered old in a society where life expectancy then was in the sixties.
Finally, memories do not remain static. Age-specific changes in personality are bound to reconfigure the psychological scars of violence. In some, memories of more recent riots and pogroms, such as the anti-Sikh pogrom (1984), the Bombay riots (1992-3), and the Gujarat pogrom (2002) got intertwined with the memories of the genocide we were studying. Also, the problems some researchers faced, while handling their relationships with the survivors carrying their own psychological baggage, did interfere with the data. Even the continuous engagement with the gory details of the violence and the company of survivors not at the peak of their psychological wellbeing left their imprint on the study.
II
The Partition riots were frequently Dionysian orgies of murder, rape and plunder. Revenge, fear and greed played an important part in them. Systematic, dispassionate, bureaucratized, centrally organised, machine violence was not a part of the story. As a result, the violence did not impartially cut across economic and social status in the targeted communities, as in some other cases of genocide. The poor and the powerless suffered more. This also cast its shadow on our study. Most respondents did not have spare rooms or the privacy to satisfy the demands of a conventional survey or clinical enquiry. In any case, it was doubtful if the idea of privacy that goes with the use of one-to-one interviews enjoyed any intrinsic legitimacy for many of them.
Second, though we did try to get as much life history material as possible, given that many respondents were not in exemplary physical or psychological health, we had very few clinicians in our team. We took recourse to frequent workshops and group discussions to ensure some internal consistency. Nevertheless, some researchers terminated the interviews when faced with serious instances of breakdown or when they got entangled in impossible interpersonal problems. One respondent, otherwise an the apparently well- adjusted elderly man who had seen much violence, went and squatted in a vacant plot in front of a well-known hotel near Delhi airport. When his family, after much effort, located him, he refused to budge, saying that the interviewer had told him to wait for her there. The family contacted the interviewer and she had to go and convince the respondent to return home. In another case, when a person was telling how they had to flee from their home, his wife suddenly burst into the room and screamed, ‘Do you think that he is telling you the whole truth?’ She later apologetically told the interviewer that it was a moment of madness and she had lost of self-control. But the interviewer did come away with the feeling, from her outburst and her husband’s story, that while crossing the borders, she probably was sexually exploited as the price of her life and held her husband responsible for her humiliation, since she had to cross the border singly. [14]
**
At the end, one was inclined to look at the entire set of interviews as points of contact, in varying contexts, between two persons, one of whom had experienced life-changing violence, the other listening empathetically and trying to make sense of the experience. If one was lucky and the chemistry was right, the encounter produced a story in Hannah Arendt’s sense.
I hasten to add that this is not as much of a methodological innovation as Disch believes. Storytelling has been an established means of grappling with experiences beyond imagination. Epics, myths and sagas in many cultures can be thought of as responses to such experiences. This is acknowledged in the casual formulation ventured elsewhere in this book, that Partition is the last great, unwritten epic of the Indic civilization, the way the Nuremberg trials were, according to literary critic D.R. Nagaraj, that of the European civilization. This epic called Partition will perhaps be complete only after future generations of South Asians come to terms with the actual events through their creative, cultural efforts.
Disch defends Arendt by saying that her storytelling was not ‘an anachronistic or nostalgic way of thinking but an innovative approach to critical understanding. Arendt’s storytelling proposes an alternative to the model of impartiality defined as detached reason.’[15] In large parts of the world such defence is unnecessary. Arendt’s return to storytelling, when facing totalitarianism ‘as a climax of secular evolution’ and as an experience beyond the reach of detached reason’, does have psychological parallels with the ‘primitive’ and the ‘anachronistic’ in the Southern hemisphere, were millions still struggle to express their suffering through stories that cannot but look to many a form of nostalgic self-indulgence and romanticism of the weak.
I believe that the encounters, between the interviewer and witnesses in this study, enriched both. The roughly fifteen hundred conversations between two human beings from two different generations constitute a baseline and an archive of another kind. Those who find in them incomplete ethnographic or clinical details are advised to approach it as an ill-organized storage of research notes many travel writers and novelists use these days.
*** entertainment centres for senior citizens, community dispensaries, temples and gurudwaras. She found the tip useful and met most of her urban respondents in the four places. Such innovations paid dividends. We could not ensure a representative sample, but we ensured geographical spread and cultural diversity.
There was enormous wastage of time and effort. Many respondents described by their friends and close relatives as mines of information and with first-person experience turned out to be, false trails. A little scrutiny showed their accounts to be partly imaginary, picked up second-hand. One respondent, who bragged about having killed many Muslims, broke down after a few interviews to say that it was all imaginary: ‘We were running away to save our lives, hungry and fearful. How could we kill anyone?’
The capacity to spot witnesses varied from investigator to investigator. So did their tolerance for the details of the violence. Some were obviously more disturbed by what they heard or deduced. Others found the responsibility too onerous. Two of them, after months of interviewing, could not write them up and wiggled out of the responsibility offering embarrassingly flimsy excuses. In some cases, we were ourselves surprised by the way some witnesses entered our study. In West Bengal, we discovered dilapidated refugee camps that were still functioning more than five decades after the event and there were in them old inmates, burdened not only by frayed memories but also by poverty, their distant trauma aggravated by the real-life problems of survival and the neglect of their relatives.
We had to redefine the goals of the survey. We decided that, given the generational differences between the respondents and the investigators, the first task of survey should be to ensure a face-to-face, humane encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee. The researcher should bring to the encounter the skills of a good listener, an empathetic journalist and, if possible, the ability to collect some quantifiable data. This encounter, we hoped, would give the respondent a compassionate listener and make the interviewer feel that he or she had entered to some extent the life-world of the respondent.
We have continued to call these encounters interviews and the entire exercise as a survey, but both these terms are misleading. The interviews
Though we developed a convention of presenting the cases in occasional workshops to raise questions and get feedbacks, many interviews remained unsatisfactory. I have already mentioned the way the interviews were coloured by recent experiences of other disasters and traumata. The Sikh survivors of 1947 violence were burdened by memories of the anti-Sikh pogrom in 1984 and the two sets of memories ran into each other and often got conflated. In Gujarat, the earthquake of 2000 and the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 reshaped the experiences of 1946-48. So did the memories of decades of intermittent ethno-religious violence and the Bangladesh genocide of 1971. They reshaped but also deepened the memories of 1947.
At the end, we decided to do a survey, taking advantage of more generous support to the project. For this, we now rethought our approach. We knew that most survivors were dead and the rest were old and incapacitated. Even some of those in our case studies had died during the study. Time was running out.
The design for a feasible survey was itself a major issue. First, we did not have any precedent. Practically all studies of genocide focusing on the inner life of the victims or killers had depended on open-ended interviews, whether done by psychologists, sociologists or journalists. Second, statistically speaking, the universe of witnesses was vast, dispersed and partially enumerated. There was no way one could draw a representative sample; interviewers had to depend on their ingenuity to locate witnesses and had to be prepared for false trails and ‘wasted’ interviews.
Thus, a few investigators went at dawn to some of the localities of Delhi known as refugee colonies and contacted newspaper vendors to find out the families that subscribed to Urdu newspapers. He knew that elderly refugees from West Pakistan usually knew Urdu in Arabic script and not Hindi in Devanagari or Punjabi in Gurmukhi scripts. In another instance, a lifelong member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS, advised an interviewer to look for elderly men and women in four types of places: community parks, were conversations organized around a remembered self and memories of distant violence and uprooting. We had neither any means of verifying the data nor rendering them more reliable. The results of the survey, therefore, do not give us ‘the truth about Partition violence’ but glimpses into lives that intersected sudden violence and collapse of a familiar world. Sometimes the respondents allowed us to participate in that life, sometimes they tried to keep us out, and sometimes they went out of their way to pull us into their problems and some of the interviewers, surprised and unprepared for the experience, recoiled and tried to distance themselves from the experience. Some respondents even sought complicity and participation in their skewed or damaged inner world.
I have already hinted that we sometimes went about our job the way a novelist often ‘researches’ for a book, perhaps with a little more self- consciousness and organization. This does not mean that we have flouted the canons of research in all cases. Indeed, one of the monographs, done by a psychoanalyst, tried its best to be true to the discipline. In sum, the study tried to break out of the known world but neither confidently nor with a bagful of certitudes.
[1] Agha Shahid Ali, ‘Farewell’, in A Country Without a Post Office: Poems 1991-1995 (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 2000), p. 8.
[2] Arvind Kala, ‘Pak Citizen Discovers Hindu Parents’, Sunday Mail, 27 May 1990.
[3] ‘Brothers Reunited 63 Years After Partition’, accessed 28 May 2016.
See also, Harinder Baweja, ‘Bridging the Great Divide’, India Today, 18 August 1997. Accessed 27 May 2013.
[4] Stanley Wolpert, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press,2009).
[5] Kala, op. cit.
[6] Kala, op. cit.
[7] Stephen Keller, Uprooting and Social Change: The Role of Refugees in Development (New Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1975). Despite its limitations, this forgotten empirical study, originally a doctoral dissertation, remains a unique peep into inner world of the refugees, particularly the way in which the experienced violence entered the personal, familial and social life of the refugees.
[8] Many stories end even before they begin. What does one make of the following experience brought to us by two psychotherapists in our team, Shobna Sonpar and Shalini Singh? They had gone to a marriage reception where they ran into an elderly person on a wheelchair. Hearing that they were both working on Partition violence, he right there began to tell his story. Evidently, he was waiting to share his experiences. He said that his family was a victim of partition violence in West Punjab and he was particularly devastated by the abduction of his sister by a Muslim mob. Years afterwards, he chose to marry a Muslim woman and, even fifty years after the event, whenever he went to bed with his wife, he felt he was avenging his sister’s abduction. At this point, the conversation was interrupted. A couple of women from the unknown man’s family had seen him talking animatedly with two women and, perhaps guessing what he was talking about, quickly took him away without any explanation or apology.
[9] Among the myriad works on Partition violence, I have found Ananya Kabir’s book not merely recognizes this, but also builds this recognition into the book’s methodology. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013).
10 See on the subject Ashis Nandy, ‘Memory Work’, Modern Asian Thought Annual Lecture given at Taipei on 14 July 2014, and published in Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, 2015, 16(4), pp. 598-606.
11 In the 1990s, when studying the Ramjanmabhumi movement, that destroyed the Babri mosque, we were surprised to find that the Muslims of Ayodhya, too, considered the city holy. Literally so; the hillock that the local Hindus considered the discarded Gandhamadan hill (the source of the magical drug vishalyakarani in Ramayana that once revived Lakshmana after his fatal injuries), the local Muslims believed to be a remnant of Noah’s Ark, discarded after the great deluge at, of all places, Ayodhya. As long as such parallel sacred geographies survived, the Muslims of Ayodhya had a legitimate place in the city. Once the issue was historicized, the issue of the mosque and the place of the Muslims in the city could only be resolved through chronology, carbon dating and legal acrobatics. And the city in the long run could only become, in the words of Uma Bharati—the flamboyant, Hindu nationalist politician and well-manicured world-renouncer, who played a stellar role in the demolition of the Babri mosque—‘the Vatican of the Hindus.’ In that Vatican there can only be an embarrassing awareness that for hundreds of years, there were in Ayodhya at least six temples—some older residents said at least ten—claiming to be the birthplace of Ram and the devotees revered them all, that there has always been modest contests among these temples for the allegiance of the devotees. As history has made inroads into the city, such low-brow, cultural pluralities have receded.
[12] Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Random House, 2000).
[13] Lisa J. Disch, “More Truth than Fact: Story Telling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt’, Political Theory, November 1993, 21(4), pp 665-94: see pp. 666, 689.
[14] Anindita Mukhopadhyay, unpublished case study.
[15] Disch, ibid.
Ashis Nandy is one of India's most significant thinkers and public intellectuals. His work spans the fields of political psychology, sociology, nationalism, public conscience and culture. He is the author of many books, some of them seminal in Indian thought, such as The Intimate Enemy and The Savage Freud. For many years he was a Fellow and a Director of the Centre for Developing Societies in New Delhi. He was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007, and the Hans Kilian Award in 2019.