Indian Identity by Sudhir Kakar

Author:Sudhir Kakar [Kakar, Sudhir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184750737
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

1

The Setting

The face of the two-year-old girl has come to occupy a permanent corner of my mind. Every now and again it rises to the surface of my consciousness. Some of these occasions are predictable. There is little mystery when the disfigured face flashes across an inner screen while I am reading about, or seeing on television, episodes of violence between racial, religious, or language groups in different parts of the world. I can also understand, even as I resent, the little girl demanding attention whenever people talk of Hyderabad, whenever they are praising its old-world charm and the deliciousness of its cuisine or lamenting its lost feudal glories. The connection of the face with other contexts is more obscure. Why does it suddenly bob up when a man in therapy is telling me of a painful encounter with his boss at work or a female patient weeps as she recalls memories of her humiliation at the hands of an elder sister? I know I will have to go through a long chain of association to lift this veil of obscurity. I am rarely in the mood to make this effort since the girl is not a welcome tenant. She is a squatter.

I first saw the face in the newspaper photograph accompanying a report on the Hindu-Muslim riots in Hyderabad in December 1990. When I finally began this study in the following year, I encountered this particular photograph again and again in newspaper and magazine clippings. It had become the dominant image of that particular carnage. I do not know whether the girl is a Hindu or a Muslim, although a Telugu paper, championing the Hindu cause, identifies her as a Hindu. What you see in the photograph is the unkempt hair, matted with dust, of a child from the slums and then, shockingly, the deep gash of the scythe across the top of her face. The wound, not yet healed into a scar, starts at the right temple, cleaves the corner of the eyeballs and the bridge of a rather flat nose, to peter out in the sands of the left cheek. The stitches are not the careful job of a well-paid professional. They bespeak a harried resident doctor trying to cope with an overflow of the wounded and the dying in the emergency room of a run-down government hospital. The stitches are uneven crosses across the face, hasty scrawls of someone anxious to get over with a silly game of noughts and crosses. One arm of the girl is around a cushion, seeking comfort without finding it. The right side of the face and and the injured eye rests against the edge of the cushion as she looks out through the left eye at the camera, the world, and, if I am not careful, at me.

There is an unfathomable numbness in her expression, the aftermath of a cataclysm that has shaken the little body and soul to a depth unimaginable for me. I try to look through the

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