Living With Violence

An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life

Roma Chatterji, Deepak Mehta

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000084139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book gives a detailed account of the 'communal riots' between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in 1992-93. It departs from the historiography of the riot, which assumes that Hindu-Muslim conflict is independent of the participants of the violence.

Speaking to and interacting with the residents of Dharavi, the largest shanty town in the city, the authors collected a wide range of narrative accounts of the violence and the procedures of rehabilitation that accompanied the violence. The authors juxtapose these narrative accounts with public documents exploring the role language, work, housing and rehabilitation have on the day-to-day life of people who live with violence.

1 Nation, State and Violence in Dharavi

In what may be no more than a lack of conceptual rigor, violence between Hindus and Muslims in India has been framed under the term communal riot. While scholarly writing engages with the protocols by which the riot is materialized, it seldom discusses the modalities in which violence is represented. In this book we engage with the communal riot and its aftermath—a history written between the polarized identities of Hindu and Muslim, as well as modes of rehabilitation and procedures of governance that both precipitate and follow the riot. Leaving aside the vulgarity of violence, we focus on how it becomes a part of the continuity of lives of those who have experienced it. The processes that this book documents show that the communal riot is woven into the fabric of everyday life; it is both particular and general, visible and hidden, sometimes spoken of in ritual and dramatic terms, occasionally caricatured. Yet, the riot exists side-by-side with a world that is being continuously crafted, a world that often demands the skill to learn the rules of survival as it does the ability to build it anew. In this way, violence and the mechanisms of coping highlight the problematic and redemptory nature of personal agency and political will. They allow us to pose the question: what is at stake for a life lived in negotiation with violence? We describe this violence as an event that bears a singular relation to existence and time. In its passing, the event inflects and is dispersed across those arenas of quotidian life where the presence of violence is not immediately obvious. Beginning with an exploration of how violence is posed in language, this book charts the event in the everyday world of work, housing and the emergence of new public spaces. A second theme that the book engages with is the way in which the event of violence and the work of rehabilitation is framed within practices of governmentality. State documents such as police records and commissions of enquiry dealing with the riot have created a geography of the riot but even quotidian documents such as ration cards and voters lists, enter into new circulations in the processes of which the violence is actualized. The work of rehabilitation, contrarily, localizes and disperses the state into various practices through which compensation to the victims or their relocation to safer places occurs. A third theme that intersects with the first two shows how everyday life is fashioned in the face of rehabilitation and violence. We focus on specific non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and chart how they contest certain state practices while cooperating with others.

Framing the Event

Collective violence in India has evoked considerable academic attention and its signature, the communal riot, is one of the most important ways of thinking about civil disorder in urban India (Tambiah 1996, Engineer 1995, Nandy et al. 1995, Varshney 1993, Kakar 1995, Van der Veer 1984, 1996). With few exceptions (Das 1990) this literature either deals directly with HinduMuslim conflict or focuses on it as its main reference under the rubric of communalism. First, the emphasis is on historical causation (Freitag 1990, Rao 1994) and its link with structural factors (Engineer 1995), such as unemployment, illiteracy and poverty, in precipitating violence. The attempt is to arrive at a general explanation of communalism. Second, when sectarian violence is placed within local communities (Das 1990) we see its impact on the lives of survivors as it shapes their experiences. Scholars are at pains to portray voices telling stories drawn from a storehouse of individual and collective memory. Their concern is not with establishing causalities but in documenting how violence unfolded in its impact on individual and collective lives. In this way the dynamic of violence and its pervasive and persuasive hold over those touched by it is charted. Such experiences emerge from the narrative accounts of survivors (Kakar 1995; Das 1990) and are in more elliptical ways seen in the re-organization of daily life. Re-organization entails a relationship between the local and the national, one that is asymmetric and often contradictory. Both the historians and phenomenologists of the riot assume that after violence has run its course individuals and communities will return to normal life. This is often interpreted as the sign of the resilience of traditional Indian community life (see Nandy et al. 1995). Das (1990), in a sensitive paper on the survivors of the Delhi riots (after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984) shows the pathos of this movement. The recovery of the everyday is a coming to terms with the fragility of the 'normal'. Taken-for-granted notions regarding community solidarity become deeply problematic when it is one's neighbours who are the perpetrators of violence, as was the case in the slums about which Das writes. Her paper makes it clear that there is a gap between the end of the riots and the resumption of everyday life. This study is located precisely in this gap. In seeing how people ravaged by violence resume everyday life, we establish links between collective disorder and rehabilitation work. In the process we see how local communities are re-fashioned. What remains after the riot is not a coherent moral and local world but a multiplicity of fractured communities, each charting, through rehabilitation work, its strategies of survival and coexistence. As stated above, this view runs counter to that proposed by Nandy et al. (1995), who argue that local communities are well-bounded moral wholes corrupted from the outside, in this case nineteenthcentury European ideas of state and nationalism. This corruption, they argue, is stoutly resisted by the vibrant everyday life of local communities.

The event of violence that we study occurred in a shantytown called Dharavi in Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995).¹ It began on the day of the demolition of the Babri mosque (6 December 1992) in Ayodhya, a town in eastern Uttar Pradesh, some 2,500 kilometers northeast of Bombay. The violence continued till the third week of January 1993.² Some commentators argue (Padgaonkar 1993, Patel and Thorner 1997) that the 'riots' were in two distinct phases. The first, starting on 7 December 1992 lasted for about a week, and was the outcome of Muslim anger over the demolition of the Mosque. The second beginning early January and continuing for about three weeks, was the outcome of a Hindu backlash aided by the police force. It seems that while the violence of December 1992 was spontaneous, that of January 1993 was orchestrated and planned, the result of political machination. We treat this violence as one continuous event—it had its own rhythms where December 1992 and January 1993 were collapsed into a seamless now, revoking durational time and with it the tradition of a meaningful past.

Babri Masjid

A voluminous literature documents what is known as the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi Controversy. It details the origin of the conflict and shows how the landscape of Hindu-Muslim relations has been vitally affected by the destruction of the Mosque. Situated in the temple town of Ayodhya, the Babri Masjid was built in 1528 by Mir Baqi, a noble of the Mughal emperor Babur (1526-1530). Sectarian conflict over this mosque dates back to at least the eighteenth century (Van der Veer 1984, 1996) with reports of intermittent clashes between Hindus and Muslims. In Independent India the controversy is dated to 1949 (Rao 1994). The details of that troubled history are not part of this book. Suffice it to say that since 1949 the Babri Masjid has been a site of national concern, with Hindus, Muslims, and the nation-state actively engaged in determining whether the Mosque was built after razing a Hindu temple, purportedly the birthplace of the Hindu God Ram. In 1990 members of 'ultra Hindu' organizations³ claiming that the Masjid was built after desecrating an ancient Ram temple, succeeded in partially damaging it by performing what they called karseva (religious work as service). Two years later (6 December 1992) more than two hundred thousand karsevaks (religious workers) congregated at the Babri Masjid and demolished it. This congregation, the result of careful planning, came from every region of India. Mass mobilization was complemented by the orchestration of political passions (see Nandy et al. 1995). Following the destruction, mobs of karsevaks in Ayodhya killed Muslim men and children, burned their homes, and damaged mosques (Nandy et al, 1995). This destruction was patterned: the mobs knew which houses to burn, almost as if they had access to voters lists; the local police force and the provincial armed constabulary actively aided the rioters; and in some cases Hindu neighbours identified Muslims houses. Less than twenty-four hours after the demolition large parts of India experienced communal violence.

The destruction of the Masjid is an event of national importance in two related ways. First, the controversy raises the past as heritage, tradition, and history so that it transcends local geographies, local problems and communities (Van der Veer 1984). Since 1985, Ayodhya signals Hindu nationalism and locates Hindu identity in a public and political space. Following the destruction of the mosque, most representations of riots in the rest of India, regardless of local specificities, are cast within a frame that privileges nationalist concern (Engineer 1995, Van der Veer 1996). In this way, the national constitutes the local under its shadow.⁴ Second, the writing of communal riots is predictive. Depending upon one's political persuasion this writing constitutes a grid of representation (see Engineer 1995, Van der Veer 1984, Vandv et al. 1995), which allows the riot to surpass the exigencies of the political. Thus it becomes possible to show the mimetic character of violence occasioned by Ayodhya. The inscription of the riot and the construction of a past are unified in their conception of the local. Is the violence of 1992-93 in Dharavi, a notorious slum and a product of urban squalor, a repetition of the carnage in Ayodhya? Before we address this question we take a slight detour to describe briefly how the riots in Bombay were dealt with in the public domain.

There are at least two reports on the Bombay riots by two separate Commissions of Inquiry that also document efforts at rehabilitation and offer suggestions for the improvement of Bombay's administrative machinery (see Srikrishna 1998, Daud and Suresh 1993, Bharatiya Janawadi Agadhi 1993). Since these reports have been influential in crystallizing the discourse on the Bombay riots in the public domain, a brief discussion of the scope of the inquiry and its relationship to the government is important.

The Report of the Indian People's Hitman Rights Commission, which was published in July 1993, was the product of a people's tribunal presided over by two retired judges of the Bombay High Court, Justice Suresh and Justice Daud. The tribunal held hearings in most of the riot-affected areas of Bombay and collected first-hand accounts from victims. Based on these accounts, the Report was presented as a testimony of the people of Bombay. Apart from eyewitness accounts of victims, the Report also recorded activities of various citizens groups and rehabilitation committees, which had been set up after the riots. The Report of the Indian People's Human Rights Commission was seen as the right and responsibility of the Indian citizen in creating avenues of legitimate access to knowledge in the face of government censorship on the event.

Soon after the riots in January 1993, the State Government of Maharashtra instituted its own Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice Srikrishna, sitting judge of the Bombay High Court. The Coalition Government of the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), commonly perceived as Hindu nationalist parties which succeeded the Congress (I) Government in Maharashtra in March 1993, decided to extend the scope of the investigation of the Commission to include the serial bomb blast that occurred in the aftermath of the riot and was commonly perceived as the work of aggrieved Muslim gangs of the Bombay Mafia. In January 1996, the Srikrishna Commission was disbanded on the grounds that it had taken too long to release its report, which would at this stage only serve to 'reopen wounds'—(see Srikrishna 1998: 3 and Chapter 2 of this book). The public outcry against this decision prompted the BJP national government to persuade its ally in Maharashtra (the Shiv Sena) to revive the Commission, which was duly reconstituted in May 1996. Its Report was presented to the state Assembly in August 1998, but the Assembly rejected its findings because they implicated the Shiv Sena in the instigation and organization of riots. It was then privately published and circulated among the wider public. Paradoxically, the inclusion of evidence from unofficial reports published shortly after the riots made the Srikrishna Commission's Report (SCR) suspect in the eyes of the government.

It is interesting to note that the intertextuality of these various documents not only helped to crystallize a particular discourse of the Bombay riots in the public domain but also participated in the metanarrative of the 'communal riot' that was formed in the colonial period (see Pandey 1990). The policy of investigating riots as a problem in public order goes back to the colonial period—a discussion of the genealogical linkages of contemporary instances of collective violence to the colonial construction of the category of the communal riot is discussed in the second chapter. We return to the specificity of Dharavi and the way we carried out fieldwork.

Our neiaworic in unaravi began in i vva. Residents wno live in chawls in four colonies of Dharavi provided data: Mukund Nagar, Social Nagar, Central Area, and South Area. A chawl is a segment of a colony. It consists of anything from 70 to 200 dwellings usually single room tenements. It is not surprising to find more than three conjugal units staying in one room. Of the thirtyeight areas ravaged by violence, we have information of sixteen. Respondents' accounts are in the nature of first-hand testimony. In all the cases they saw the violence as it occurred around them.

Dharavi: State, History, Public Spaces

Dharavi is situated in central Bombay. It is commonly known as the largest slum in Asia but a precise estimate of its geography and population figures is not available. To an outsider Dharavi appears to be strikingly homogeneous in its appearance. Its inhabitants occupy spaces that are not immediately visible. The paths of access within Dharavi fulfill multiple functions: they are simultaneously roadways, garbage dumps, routes carrying sewer water, and extensions of the private space of the household to the outside. From the inside, however, each area of Dharavi is marked by the lived experiences of its inhabitants, rather than by spatial divisions available on a map. Each neighborhood is a welter of fluid, intersecting boundaries. Rather than catalogue such fluidity in its myriad details, we walked through the meandering lanes and byways of Dharavi as we spoke with our respondents within a setting that had experienced the violence of 1992-93.⁵

Census figures provide an approximate idea of the size of Dharavi—it falls within the Dadar census ward. The slum does not have a center; it is not bounded on its northern and western sides. For example, one is not sure whether parts of Dharavi like the Matunga Labor Camp, constructed by the British in the 1930s, falls within the slum. Similarly, we found in 2000-2001 that a new slum, Rajiv Gandhi Nagar, was emerging on the Mahim Creek. Technically, it is outside Dharavi but contiguous to it. Its residents have already started to stake a claim to being part of Dharavi since rumors of a policy to legalize property rights began to circulate. With the help of local politicians they have also started to negotiate with various agencies of the state to obtain electoral and ration cards. Finally, residents of Rajiv Gandhi Nagar have established networks with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in Dharavi with the hope that they will help them obtain basic amenities.

Periodic surveys initiated mainly by NGOs, produce housing figures. A survey carried out by the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) in 1986 enumerated the various groups that lived in Dharavi, but the composition of such groups changed from respondent to respondent. Depending upon where the boundaries were drawn, Dharavi covered between 175-200 hectares. From the estimates of NGOs such as SPARC and Peoples' Responsible Organization for a United Dharavi (PROUD), the number of inhabitants in Dharavi ranges from 700,000-1,200,000. Of these, about 30 per cent are Muslim and 65 per cent Dalit. Jim Masselos (1995) estimates that Dharavi is situated on 432 acres of land and houses 600,000 people of which Muslims constitute about 40 per cent of the population. The population density for Dharavi is estimated at 187,500 people per square kilometer, while for the city the figure is 19,676 (Masselos 1995: 211, Mehta and Chatterji 2001: 205). These figures should be read with caution since estimates of the size of the slum vary.

Significant landmarks, such as the Sixty-foot and Ninety-foot Roads, identify Dharavi. Places of religious congregation located within Dharavi, such as the Bari Masjid and the Dhareshwari Temple are often mentioned in the narratives of residents, as are the old fort of Kalakilla, Parsis Chawl and Peela Bangla. Together with chawls and/or cooperative housing societies, Dharavi appears to be a mid-sized township, characterized by multiple linguistic groups, work styles and occupations, religious communities—Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Zoroastrians— and dispersed settlement histories. According to Fuchs et al. (2002) systematic in-migration can be dated to the end of the 19^th century. The original inhabitants were Koli fishermen when Dharavi was largely the backwaters of the Arabian Sea (Most settled land in Dharavi has been reclaimed from the sea). What is established is that tanneries were set up by the end of the 19^th century and continued to function till the 1980s when they were frrrrhH tn rlncf* rlnwn rm o-mnnHc:

Dharavi is one of the centers in India for the production of finished leather goods. Mos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Nation, State and Violence in Dharavi
• 2. Documents and Testimony: Violence, Witnessing and Subjectivity in the Bombay Riots, 1992-93
• 3. Boundaries, Names, Alterities: The Riot in Dharavi
• 4. Communal Violence, Public Spaces and the Unmaking of Men
• 5. Plans, Habitation and Slum Redevelopment: The Production of Community
• 6. Governmental Technologies and Institutional Practice: NGOs and the Slum-dwellers’ Voice
• Bibliography
• Index