Is a circumcision, for example, an exterior mark? Is it an archive?

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

The terrible spectacle of Muslim sites, viz. a home, a shop, a mosque, besieged by a motley crew of police personnel and civil servants like the ruthless army of the past times, ready with their JCB bulldozers—a metaphor for the battering rams of the imperial armies of yore, sums up the Indian state’s relationship with the Indian Muslims. This relationship is in keeping with the violent history of the bulldozer. During the Reconstruction Era in US, the term bulldoze (or bulldose) meant a heavy “dose” of flogging or whipping. It was applied to a “Negro.” And the person who was charged with bulldozing was called “bulldozer.” Over time the “machine” replaced the “person.” However, the multiple connotations that it embraced is as relevant today as it was then. In contemporary India the device has come to embody “masculinity, heroism, and patriotism,” which is inextricably linked with the public humiliation, torture, and subjugation of Muslims. The hunted state of affairs has now plunged down to this low that even the Muslim cemeteries and shrines are not being spared. Of late, a graveyard, besides a 600-years old mosque and a madrasa, was bulldozed by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) in Mehrauli (New Delhi). Around this time last year, the Hindutvadis had triumphantly launched a rocket cracker towards the gate of a shrine of Malik Rehan Mira Saheb in Vishalgad in Maharashtra. Such attacks on Muslim cemeteries and shrines have been reported in-between these occurrences. Stated differently, the state-backed Hindutva discourse has given rise to a “culture of clearance” wherein the device is literally making space for a Hindu India by clearing the Muslim sites. Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher, in his popular essay Theses on the philosophy of History had appositely remarked: “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemies if he wins.”

In India, the Hindutva with a fetish for the Mughals has always portrayed Indian Muslims as “Babar’s progeny” (Babur ki aulad). Babur (r.1526-30), in the aforementioned Hindutva phraseology, stands for the founder of the Mughal Empire, and it categorically symbolises a “criminal foreigner.” It also displays a spectrum of connotations which encompasses raids, plundering, iconoclasm, and so forth. Such a conceptualisation of Indian history owes much to the Hindutva “archive,” and the very logic of the order of things in this archive entails deliberate omissions and silences. So, one cannot spot: Ilbari Turks who had come to north India much before Babar; Amir Khusrau (d. 1324)—the brilliant scholar and poet—who called himself a “Hindustani Turk,” and penned a panegyric poetry titled Nuh Sipihr (lit. Nine Skies) that recounts India’s contribution like chess, the Panchtantra, the numerals to the world; Ka`b bin Zuhayr’s Baanat Su`ad—an ode to the Arab prophet Muhammad which was liked by the Prophet when Ka`b had recited the ode to him—wherein the poet has likened the historical Muhammad to an Indian sword, and others. Considering the obsession with the Mughals, it can be said that the face of “Angelus Novus,”—Walter Benjamin’s “angel of History”—is not only “turned toward the past” in today’s India, but also stuck in a time warp, and is “fixedly contemplating” the Mughal Empire. Put differently, the necessity of making an Other is central to the making of a Hindu nation, which is tied up in an umbilical relationship with the Hindutva archive. And the effect of this archive involves production of both history and memory, in which a Muslim constitutes a racialized Outsider, in terms of the dogma and the ancestral land as well.

Jacques Derrida traces the trajectory of the arkhē (archive) by stretching it back to the Greek archeîon—the abode of archon (“the superior magistrates … who commanded”) in Archive Fever, and informs us that an archon was primarily responsible for the maintenance of official documents. It would not be wrong to think India to be a Hindu archeîon wherein the power to interpret the archive—just like archons of Greece—is the sole domain of Hindu archons. While the Hindutva narrative deliberately omits Muslims from the archive, the Muslims in the literate, educated narrative are largely conspicuous by their absence. A. K. Ramanujan’s essay “Indian way of thinking” is a classic case of this erasure. The esteemed scholar engages with Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain “way of thinking” and renders them to be “Indian,” but completely fails to consider Muslims in his otherwise excellent analysis of the varied thought processes. Manan Ahmed’s disquiet on the essay is precise: “If there are Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu ways of being Indian, is there no Indian way of being Muslim and no Muslim way of being Indian?”

If one conceives of archive more broadly, one finds that Muslims as “Babur’s progeny,” “infiltrators” (ghuspaithiye), “circumcised” (katua), and so on are imprinted on the tongues of people. Katua, in reality, is a “popular” slur in the Hindutva vocabulary that is often hurled at Muslims, including inside the Indian Parliament. Thus, it would not be wrong to assert that the Hindutvadis peruse the Muslim rulers, and particularly the Mughals, through the lens of “exterior mark,” and a Muslim comes into view as a “criminal foreigner” because the dogma in the soul of a Muslim together with the “exterior mark” is similar to that of Babur’s. Babur, here, is an empty signifier which can mean an iconoclast, a fanatic, a jihadi, and so forth. In other words, there is a dynamism to Hindutva archive which provides it a space for modification. Consequently, the archive not only enlivens and enriches the Muslim history but also keeps alive the collective memory of the unproven (imaginary) wounds on the Hindu body, inflicted by the Muslim kings of a bygone era. By deploying a cluster of bigoted tropes, the wound is triggered to send a sensation of pain in the Hindu body. Thus, the varied (false) narratives masquerading as “truth” help perpetuate conservatism, which emanates from “the experience of pain and the fear of future pain.”

The state-backed Hindutva discourse has not only spawned a “culture of clearance,” but also produced a “martial culture” that has super-masculinised the Hindu youth, that is, they have become “saviour” and “gatekeeper” of the Hindu culture and civilization. The Hindutvadis therefore give this “guardianship” an immediate presence outside a mosque, or a madrasa, or a Muslim locality. A marauding mob brandishing sword, dancing to miya madar chod (“The Muslims are motherfuckers”) make it to a Muslim site; a few young people step forward, climb atop a mosque, hoist a saffron flag, and with a clenched fist in the air, they cheerfully chant Jai Shri Ram (“Victory to Lord Ram”) in unison. It is one of the dreadful, recurring spectacles in contemporary India. Since the Indian version of neo-Nazis in saffron costume enjoys approval of the political dispensation, the anti-Muslim crimes have completely been naturalised. Truth be told, the state itself is producing, what Nitzan Shoshan calls in the German context, “political delinquency.” The GOI’s approval of the early release of Bilkis Bano’s rapists exemplifies this political delinquency. And the exoneration of everyone including Dhananjay Desai by a Pune court in the Mohsin Shaikh’s killing—the very first incident of lynching after the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014—is an instance of the juridical production of political delinquency. The Hindutvadis, just like Germany’s neo-Nazis, are not fringe elements as Indian media keeps on portraying them. They are “constitutively integral to the logic of the contemporary” as they are produced by the current regime.

Following BJP’s coming to power in 2014, noticing a marked shift in Hindutva’s strategy comes easy. It has now changed its focus from “Teaching to Hate,” to use Nandini Sundar’s words, to a praxis which necessitates persecuting Muslims. The state-controlled Hindutva discourse has rendered a Muslim a foreigner in her own homeland, “as if we never belonged here,” to cite a hemistich from John Eliah. And the foreignness of Muslims, it seems, stems from the “exterior mark” in Hindutva’s scheme of things. For “foreignness does not start at the water’s edge but at the skin’s,” said Clifford Geertz. Following the implementation of the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), one prominent BJP leader demanded a “circumcision test” to find out the religion of a male person. It is evident that the effort is to locate difference in the body. And, in doing so, Islam gets pathologized and ritualised in the body, which makes a Muslim an object of suspicion. Put differently, the “skin” with the “exterior mark” is a “passport … epidermal passport” in today’s India, that is being used to draw “interior frontier … of belonging and not belonging.” And this process is seamlessly woven with the making of “stranger in the matrix of citizen and subject formation.” However, the basis of this foreignness is certainly not the skin per se, rather, the Islamic faith. The presence of “exterior mark” on the skin is just an extension of that faith. Fever, in David Zeitlyn’s reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever, has dual meaning: a “disease” and a “desire.” It is certainly a disease for Muslims as they have become sick of the archive, while Hindutvadis, in their search for origins, are making the nation sick for the archive.

In the hierarchy of suffering, the anti-Muslim hate crimes do not merit mainstream media attention. On the contrary, it invisibilizes, or justifies such crimes. The function of this callousness is to prevent mass grievability, which is an effort to render the lives of Indian Muslims dispensable. Alternatively, it is the current regime—akin to Plato, who wanted to ban poets from the Republic—that does not want the mainstream media to reveal the Muslim predicament in India. The poets, in the Republic, were certainly not there just for the heck of it, and also did not belong to, what Benjamin says, the “secular cult of Beauty.” On Plato’s banning of poets, Judith Butler’s reflection is spot on. Butler says: “He thought that if the citizens went too often to watch tragedy, they would weep over the losses they saw, and that such open and public mourning, in disrupting the order and hierarchy of the soul, would disrupt the order and hierarchy of political authority as well.”

The pertinent question is: Can India weep?