The human face of fundamentalism

Unlike the docile wife, a patriarchal showpiece, the docile husband is a comic creature evoking all-round mirth.

Indeed, the cuckold has been a popular literary character down the ages""from Shakespeare to Chacha Chaudhri closer home, the little man chased around by his caricature rolling pin-wielding wife. That is also the image Amitava Kumar invokes with the title of his latest endeavour Husband Of A Fanatic .

From hotel lobbies to lounges and waiting spaces in general, wherever I have carried the book along, the reactions to the title have always been the same: an indulgent half-smile.

You could read Husband Of A Fanatic as a tale of woe but turn the pages and the face might contort, but not into a grin. What Kumar delineates is the contorted face of an ugly polity where anyone with a particular surname is branded a fanatic, if not traitor.

At the height of the Kargil War in 1999, Kumar, who teaches English at Pennsylvania State University, married a Pakistani Muslim.

The result: He now views issues such as the Hindu""Muslim relations within India not from safe academic distances, a "pseudo-secularist" viewpoint as many would say, but through the prism of personal experience.

The fanatic in the book is certainly not Kumar's wife, who does not even make an appearance. Instead, the term signifies the stereotype, the idea of the "enemy within" actively propagated by hard-liner Hindus, vested interests, who have usurped for themselves the position of the quintessential Insiders in a distorted nation, where the Taj Mahal was once supposedly a Shiva Temple!

In the unique position of The Outsider who isn't quite""or The Insider who isn't, depending on where exactly you stand""Kumar travels from Gujarat, post-Godhra, to Wagah, Bhagalpur to Kashmir, Karachi to New York, tracing deep fissures between Hindu and Muslim societies, ripping off masks of genteel civilisation and middle-class ordinariness, exposing the violence and, indeed, evil""for it must be that, dark and unrelieved, nothing else""inherent in extremist stances.

Husband Of A Fanatic is a deeply disturbing book. It is a chronicle of violence, sub-human brutality, perpetrated in the name of religion, sometimes by the agencies of the state.

Kumar writes: "It was at the Shah-e-Alam camp (the biggest relief camp in Gujarat) that six women members of a fact-finding team had asked small girls if they understood the meaning of the word "balatkaar" , the Hindi word for rape.

A nine-year-old wanted to give a reply to the visiting women. She said, "Mein bataoon, Didi? Balatkar ka matlab jab aurat ko nanga karte hain aur phir use jala dete hain" (shall I tell you, Didi? Rape is when a woman is stripped naked and then burnt).

There's much worse. In Logain, a village in Bhagalpur, which witnessed riots in 1989, only one Muslim family remains. A hundred and seventy Muslims had been killed in the village about 15 years ago by a Hindu mob from neighbouring villages.

"The killings had gone on for nine hours. The attacks were directed by the police officer who was posted at the thana there." Some of the corpses had been dumped in wells.

"Later, when the stench became unbearable, they were pulled out and buried in the adjoining fields. The killers had planted cauliflowers in the soil above the decaying cadavers."

When Kumar revisits the site, he finds a lone Muslim villager who will not farm his land anymore. "It didn't have the appearance of a cemetery but that is what it now was."

Kumar steers clear of bleeding heart reportage. Despite the fact that the author is obviously not claiming journalistic detachment, the tone remains matter-of-fact.

There is no sentimentalising of tragedy, just cold facts as seen by the academic. And they more than speak for themselves. In fact, this is also the essay's biggest strength.

Barbarism and violence become more immediate and therefore more threatening because of the very ordinariness of Kumar's protagonists, the people he interviews, the perpetrators.

In New York, Kumar interviews a man called Jagdish Barotia, affiliated to the RSS, also belonging to an overseas right wing propaganda group called Hindu Unity.

Barotia receives the author at home, where his niece makes tea for him. He then even buys Kumar some lunch "urging me to try the different dishes, putting bits of warm naan on my plate". A picture of civility. But the man being interviewed is obviously a fanatic. His group has posted Kumar's name on its "hit list" amongst other "enemies of Hinduism" and his discourse is littered with violence and obscenity targeted against Muslims""this, despite the fact that many are ironically his neighbours at Elmhurst, one of the most diverse zip code areas in the US.

Barotia, for all his caricature, ungrammatical English, could be your friendly, middle-aged neighbour. Scratch the surface and the bigotry and hatred explode in your face.

But Kumar's is not a preachy kind of a text, some kind of secular moralising. The author will often pause to examine his own motives.

"It is true that while reading the Newsline report about the treatment of Hindus in Pakistan I had felt threatened and more than a little diminished. I had felt this way even though I have never identified myself primarily or only as a Hindu," Kumar writes of an experience in Pakistan while spending time with his wife's family.

But in admitting that he has never identified himself primarily as a Hindu, Kumar exposes the one weak link in this otherwise honest account. As a man who has never been of faith, he cannot truly understand the mind of the believer, he cannot empathise, certainly cannot be and therefore the picture must always be one-sided.

Which is why a reader is plagued by these doubts: Is he reading too much into the dynamics of hate? Is he giving too much importance to Barotia & co., the rabble rousers?

Is he harbouring too much insecurity, the kind many of the country's Muslim intellectuals are often accused of? What is the Hindu mind? How much of it is influenced by such extreme thought? These are questions that need to be addressed.

And, finally, are all believers so obsessed by the idea of the enemy within that sectarian violence becomes part of our intrinsic social character? For our sakes, I hope the answer is no.

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HUSBAND OF A FANATIC

Amitava Kumar
Penguin
Price: Rs 295
Pages: 328