SACRIFICE, AHIMSA, and VEGETARIANISM: POGROM at the DEEP END of NON-VIOLENCE Volume I
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SACRIFICE, AHIMSA, AND VEGETARIANISM: POGROM AT THE DEEP END OF NON-VIOLENCE Volume I A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi January 2006 ©2006 Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi SACRIFICE, AHIMSA, AND VEGETARIANISM: POGROM AT THE DEEP END OF NON-VIOLENCE Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, PhD. Cornell University 2006 This dissertation explores the relation of ahimsa (non-violence) and vegetarianism to sacrificial logic in post-independence Ahmedabad. It follows the transformation of ahimsa--from a protection of the sacrifier against the revenge of the animal victim; to a doctrine of renunciation, self-reform, and prohibition of animal sacrifice; to Gandhi’s famous tool for nonviolent resistance to colonial domination; and finally, to the ritualization of violence itself in the organized persecution of minorities in a secular state. Central Gujarat is often called the “laboratory of Hindutva.” Hindutva offers an interpretation of “Hinduism” as a historical subject threatened by Islam and Christianity. It portrays Hindus as victims of Muslim barbarism, slaughtered and humiliated, butchered and raped, and demands a response that redefines the relation of violence to ahimsa. Its electoral success can be traced to a claim to unify Adivasi, lower, and intermediary caste groups with the Savarnas (high castes) as “Hindus” in opposition to Muslims and Christians, who are positioned as foreigners. As ethno-religious identifications have become integral to representation in a secular democratic system, traditional practices relating to diet and worship are simultaneously reconfigured. This research investigates the embodiment and experience of disgust among members of upwardly mobile castes, who are encouraged both to externalize their own low caste practices and to distance themselves from Muslims and Christians in new ways. In the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Ahmedabad, an event around which this dissertation turns, I witnessed a mimetic reversal of Hindutva’s claim. Violence returns as legitimate punishment of Muslims. The contemporary conjuncture of sacrificial language, beef prohibition, and vegetarianism makes explicit a subliminal criminalization of the dietary practices of minorities positioned permanently outside Hindutva identity. Most criminalized among these groups is the unabashed meat- consuming Muslim. The excessive expenditure of phantasmatic projections onto the Muslim is expressed in a mélange of culinary and sacrificial idioms. The putatively excessive sexuality, violence, and power of the Muslim are themselves transformations of the symbolics of food and ingestion. The pogrom and reactions to it reveal how a notion of nonviolence becomes implicated in violence that has a sacrificial character. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi was born in West-Berlin, in a divided Germany, and spent early childhood in Montreal, Paris, and Berlin. In 1986 he graduated from Priest River Lamanna High-School in Idaho as a foreign exchange student, and in 1988 completed his Abitur at Schiller-Gymnasium in Berlin. In 1998 he obtained a Magister in Ethnologie, Soziologie and Religionswissenschaften from the Freie Universität Berlin. He received an M.A. in socio-cultural anthropology from Cornell in 2000, and a Ph.D. in January 2006. He conducted language study and fieldwork in Gujarat in 1995/96, 1999, 2000, 2001-2003, and 2005. iii “The Brahminy bull looks every inch a Hindu; and the goat, to accustomed eyes, has no less decided a Muhammadan air.“ John Lockwood Kipling, 1892 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation advisors--James T. Siegel, Benedict Anderson, David Lelyveld, Bernd Lambert, and David Holmberg--for their academic guidance and intellectual enthusiasm over many years of graduate study. They have never failed to astonish and thrill me with their thoughts and criticisms. I also want to thank those persons not on my thesis committee who took the time to comment on sections of the dissertation: Billie Jean Isbell, Isabelle and Jim Clark-Deces, Scott Long, Tak Watanabe, Zia Mian, Kate Jelema, Smitu Kothari, and Ken MacLean. I express a special thanks to the guidance I received in Gujarat by professors, activists, and scholars, including Rajkumar Hans, Raymondbhai Parmar, Iftikhar Ahmed, Arvindbhai Bhandari, Yogendra Vyas, Nilotpala Gandhi, Anand Bhatt, Jaisheree Trivedi, Harsha Hegde, Mr. Bandukwalla, Makrand Mehta, Cedrick Prakash, Mr. Pathak, Trupti and Rohit, Johannes and Nandini, Shivji Pannikar, and Bharat Mehta. I particularly thank Veena, Rakesh Sharma, Rumana Mansuri, and Jehangir Modi for encouragement, especially important in those dark days of 2002. In the US very special thanks go to Anne Boehm, Stefania Pandolfo, Anne Berger, Lawrence Cohen, David Ludden, Andrew Willford, Lisa Malkki, Abdellah Hammoudi, for listening to what I had to say at different stages of this project. I am equally indebted to many people who made academic life better by infusing it with warmth, wine, and passion for thought, as well as many other things, including Frederic, Lisa, Constantine, Eric and Isabella, Christophe, Aditya, Allison, Cabeiri, Nancy, Brenda, Elana, Sasha, Felix, Anna, John, Farhana, Tarek, Mona, and especially Leo. I owe many insights to friends, acquaintances, and informants in Gujarat, including Dasharath and Mahesh Yadav; Shamalbhai Solanki, Chandulal Joshi, v Ashokbhai Vaghela, Salimbhai Pathan, Swamiji Dearamdasji, Manojbhai Goswami, Pir Hydayat Ali Bapu (Varsi Bapu), Ramesh Yadav, Manvarkhan, Rajubhai Shah Fakir, Rituben and Praragbhai Kenkarre, Gokalbhai Rabari, Sikander Shah Fakir, Kapilbhai Dave, Pinkyben Shah, Yusufbhai Pathan, Pravinbhai Yadav, Zakir and Imran, Mahesh Langa, Shubrati Shah Fakir, Iqbal Mansuri, Pinnakin, Jearambhai, Pravinbhai Rathod, Altaf Husein, Matuben Topliwalla, Sakunaben, Mr. Kamalbhai Qureishi, Mr. Jatinbhai Shah, and Bhavinbhai. I am equally indebted to my German teachers: Helene Basu, Dieter Haller, Lukas Werth, and Georg Pfeffer, anthropologists who initiated me to intense field work and anthropological theory many years back. A big kiss to Helga, Stefanie, and Vanessa for believing in me, and Anja Mayer for holding the sail in spite of me for so many years. My fieldwork in 2005 was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. My language training and preliminary research in 2001- 2002 was supported by the Social Science Research Council, and I received a travel grant in 1999 from the South Asia program and the Peace Studies program at Cornell University. My research also benefited from the generous support of the Sage Fellowship at Cornell University as well as the Endowment Fund of the department of Anthropology. I want to thank the Department of Anthropology at Cornell for their patient guidance and support all through the confusing graduate student years, the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley for intellectual vibrancy, and the Department of Anthropology at Princeton for their warm welcome. The person I feel indebted to the most is John Borneman, without whose love, support, and sometimes tough insistence, this dissertation would quite certainly never have been brought to completion any time soon. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME I BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.........................................................................................iii DEDICATION ..............................................................................................................iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................................................................. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................viii LIST OF FIGURES......................................................................................................xii Chapter 0.0: Introduction................................................................................................ 1 0.1 Questions ...................................................................................................... 1 0.1.1 Sacrifice......................................................................................... 8 0.1.2 Transformations of ahimsa.......................................................... 15 0.1.3 Violence and Hindutva................................................................ 18 0.1.4 Relation of research to existing literature.................................... 29 0.1.5 Methodology and ethnography.................................................... 30 0.1.6 Spelling, language, and English words........................................ 33 0.1.7 On the footnote............................................................................ 35 0.2 The city and its bridges............................................................................... 36 0.2.1 Bridges that keep apart ................................................................ 41 Chapter 1.0: Sacrifice ................................................................................................... 47 1.1 Vedic sacrifice............................................................................................ 47 1.1.1 Some preliminary remarks .......................................................... 48 1.2 Transformations of sacrifice, I-VI ............................................................. 50 1.2.1 I. Agonistic phase: circulation of death...................................