Three Tales of Three Houses

Abstract

The house has stood empty since Partition. Its Muslim family abandoned their Bihari village in India for a new life in West Pakistan, 1,300 kilometers distant. Unlike most other homes left behind by emigrants, this one's doors still open to its owner's keys, since his brothers remained in their homes nearby. One of those brothers follows invitations across north India preaching the Tablighi Islamic revival. In conversation, he demonstrates little interest in the religious traditions of the Hindu majority of his large village. Two decades ago, his son, Farhad, opened one of the first private schools in the area, anticipating the surging demand for education that has overtaken India. Some of the first classrooms built had brick walls pierced by concrete screens decoratively depicting a Quran, crescent moon, and star. Most of the school's students and many of its teachers are Hindu.

From these bare facts, one could contrive images of communal mutual exclusion: partition-emptied homes in a neighborhood with an interfaith-disinterested preacher and his son's Islamic symbol-bedecked school. Or, one might spin visions of Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai (fraternity), if not sorority: two brothers who so valued their lives in India that they decided to stay, raising among their children one son who built a school serving the area's children regardless of religious identity. Beyond a lesson in hermeneutics, the multiplicity of possible perspectives reflects the complexities apparent throughout India—indeed, throughout South Asia—in regard to religion, culture, and politics. This general inconclusiveness nevertheless suggests at least one conclusion: narratives portraying India's communal differences as either essentially divisive or essentially inconsequential to the nation's foundations require such a willful exclusion of evidence as to discredit themselves as a matter of course. However, this has not hampered various activists, journalists, and scholars from promoting such simplicities over the centuries, right up to the last edition of the Journal of Asian Studies.

Putting aside the easy dismissiveness of blaming mere ideology or self-interest as motivation for all these depictions, one realizes that they offer the opportunity to unpack, understand, and transcend the misleading assumptions that have long plagued the academic study of the subcontinent's religious dynamics. Gerald James Larson's recent reflection in this journal on partition as a religious event demonstrates many of these dynamics, most notably the reification of religions and their classification according to Christian and scientific categorical paradigms.¹

Larson's claim that “Islamic religion . . . focuses on . . .”—at which point he provides six elements—throws the first flag of suspicion toward his argument.² His subsequent delineation of what “Hindu religion” focuses on immediately throws the second.³ Describing a religion as a singular actor fails to work even as metonym, given the demonstrated disparity among Muslims and Hindus in their practices, beliefs, and sentiments. The essays collected by Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld in their edited volume Lived Islam in South Asia have demonstrated this all too well for South Asian Muslims, as many anthologies on subcontinental Hindus likewise have offered.⁴ Nor do depictions of “Islamic religion” and “Hindu religion” acting as agents work any better if meant to allude to some religious leadership, given the lack of anything approaching universal recognition for any one set of authorities. Even though fifty years have passed since Wilfred Cantwell Smith made his argument against reification (and offered an equally problematic alternative), this mischaracterization remains too common in scholarship.⁵

This personification of more than a billion Hindus and Muslims as two collectively coordinated entities has depended upon categorical assumptions that have been central in much of Christian theology and Western-originated science. To wit, not long after the establishment of the first churches, ecclesiastical authorities frequently emphasized the need to definitively distinguish Christians from Jews and pagans. Centuries later, they began to apply the same to Muslims. The Spanish Inquisition demonstrated the insistence on categorical purity as the Roman church violently scrutinized conversos (Jews formerly converted to Christianity) suspected of believing and acting outside orthodox and orthoprax definitions of “Christian.”

This exclusionary Christian anthropology relied on Plato and Aristotle for a classificatory paradigm that viewed every category as defined by a unique essence. Aristotle's influence proved particularly significant, given his allowance for only one identity per individual item or subject. This only reinforced earlier Western Christian rigidities regarding singular religious identities. Hence, conversos had to prove their Christianity by definitively eschewing their Jewishness, since identification as “Christian” disallowed identification with any other religion. Not coincidentally, the coalescing sciences of the Enlightenment relied on the same classificatory logic in their bid to identify and understand the new plants, animals, landforms, climates, cultures, and religions that European exploration and empire encountered. Hindus and Muslims proved as categorically paradoxical as platypuses (a mammal that lays eggs?), given plentiful instances of Hindus attending Sufi tombs and Muslims watching Ram Lilas or celebrating Diwali. The unofficial reports of British officers repeatedly expressed their frustration with such categorical indefiniteness, even as the official reports confidently expressed their conclusions in terms of “Hindu” and “Muslim.” Indeed, even that most classificatory of efforts—the Census of India—struggled with matters of identity. For instance, the census of 1881 listed “Satnami” and “Kabirpanthi” as independent religions, but afterward assumed both into “Hindu.”⁶ Meanwhile, in the new century, Hindu political groups sought to have “Sikh,” “Jain,” and “Buddhist” absorbed as well, despite protests from many who identified as such. Larson recognizes some categorical messiness when he allows for “cultural (nonreligious)” commonalities between Hindus and Muslims,⁷ but, like most former officials, he does not allow for these discrepancies to foil his pure religious categories despite the mounting scholarship demonstrating how insufficient these are for describing contemporary India.⁸

A final, mistaken component of this classificatory paradigm that assumes every category as essentially defined by a singular, exclusive quality is the belief that, for South Asians, religion serves as that quality. There is no denying that today most Hindus and Muslims see themselves (and each other) as such. But most people identify with more than one group, and their self-associations shift according to the context of any particular moment. By projecting religious identity as definitive for individuals' self-understanding, Larson ultimately denies the significance for South Asians of nationalist, regional, local, linguistic, and other group identities. While Larson acknowledges shared artistic, educational, and entertainment realms, he dismisses these as possible counterbalances to inherent, religious antipathies. This proposes a two-dimensionality oblivious to the complex flows and shifts of identity most of us experience.

To appreciate the consequences of Larson's categorical definitiveness, consider how it would alter common perceptions of recent European history. After all, how do the perhaps one million dead from partition compare to the six million who perished in the Holocaust? Could not “the Holocaust,” “Christians,” and “Jews” be substituted for the parallel terms in the sentence “what makes partition an important religious event is the stark antithesis of religious sensibilities between Hindus and Muslims, sensibilities that encompass ideology (and theology), historical understanding, basic values, social organization, and law”?⁹ Although a similar conclusion drove both many European Jews to establish the state of Israel and some Europeans to eschew the ideal of multiculturalism, most Europeans would likely disagree with the suggestion of the political impossibility of secularism and religious pluralism. Somehow a Western self-congratulatory secularism concludes that Europe and North America have contained public religious furies in ways Indians cannot, evidence of continuing anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim sentiment notwithstanding. Meanwhile, despite the spike in Islamophobia post-9/11, reports by American Jews account for more than 60 percent of religious hate crimes reported in the predominantly Christian United States.¹⁰ Does this militate an equally dire, Samuel Huntington-like conclusion regarding the essential incompatibility of Jews and the United States? To argue so would require overlooking centuries of occasional antipathy by mainstream Protestants toward Christian minorities, beginning with colonial Quakers and Catholics and extending to Mormons today.

Hence, arguments such as Huntington and Larson's require the postulation of a world in which certain identities, such as “Hindu” and “Muslim,” always demonstrate an internal consistency that prompts a cohesiveness greater than—and overwhelming of—any competing identity, such as nationalism. In other words, Hindus and Muslims will always be more loyal to other Hindus and Muslims than to their fellow village neighbors, language mates, or Indians. Disproving this argument is as easy as watching a cricket match between India and Pakistan, which commonly defies expectations that Indian Muslims perforce cheer for their co-religionists from Pakistan. Yet, demonstrating their own categorical suspicions, Hindu nationalists often allege exactly this, which in turn has paradoxically prompted some resentful Indian Muslims to defy them by doing what was alleged.

Because of their essentialism, Huntington-like arguments also assume a stasis. In Larson's terms, “Hindu religious sensibilities could not coexist with Muslim sensibilities in a modern, democratic polity.”¹¹ While correctly describing the bloodletting of partition as the result of a change in South Asian political systems, he projects an inherently fixed democratic landscape. While this may accord with the meteoric rise to national power of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 1990s, it accounts neither for the party's inability to promote as narrowly a Hindutva agenda as many Hindu nationalists anticipated nor for its subsequent demise. Whether or not the party's latest champion, Narendra Modi, wins the prime minister's office clearly relies upon his ability to publicly put behind him—at least in the eyes of some constituencies, perhaps the opposite for others—his part in the 2002 Gujarat pogroms. For all its communalist fault lines, India's political landscape continually shifts according to multiple factors, as one finds in most large, heterogeneous, and democratic populations.

For some, the evidence for shared identity must include the absence of tension or conflict between groups. Most communities—indeed, most families—would not meet such expectations for solidarity. Instead, we must consider how communities and nations recognize and manage internal conflict with reference to the ideals, processes, myths, and rituals shared among its members. The litmus test for India's multi-religious democracy cannot be taken as the absence of disagreement between Hindus and Muslims but as the ability of Indians to address the occasionally reopened scars of communalist confrontation and reassert a practiced ideal of mutual toleration. Like the more virulent forms of Hindu nationalism today, the Pakistan movement of the last century included some who had eschewed common ground for an unaccommodating, hegemonic vision of their nation. But as three houses in a Bihari village evidence, neither ideology succeeded in winning more than a minority of its intended audience, given the complex engagements and shared identities that resist such purities.

Acknowledgments

I would thank Christian Novetzke, Farina Mir, Kathleen Erndl, and Richard Eaton for their helpful suggestions.

Notes