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This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester] On: 15 January 2012, At: 12:32 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20 Surviving Violence, Contesting Victimhood: Communal Politics and the Creation of Child-Men in an Urban Indian Slum Atreyee Sen a a University of Manchester Available online: 15 Jul 2011 To cite this article: Atreyee Sen (2011): Surviving Violence, Contesting Victimhood: Communal Politics and the Creation of Child-Men in an Urban Indian Slum, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 34:2, 276-297 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2011.582672 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, n.s., Vol.XXXIV, no.2, August 2011 Surviving Violence, Contesting Victimhood: Communal Politics and the Creation of Child-Men in an Urban Indian Slum Atreyee Sen University of Manchester Abstract This paper explores the emergence of violent child identity politics in a communally sensitive urban slum in Hyderabad, a city in southern India. My ethnographic landscape is Sultanpur, a Muslim-dominated ghetto in the northern quarters of Hyderabad, which has been marked by decades of hostilities between local Hindus and Muslims. These tensions had everyday and extreme manifestations (ranging from quotidian expressions of symbolic violence to rioting, looting and bomb blasts) which increased the vulnerabilities of Muslim male children in the slums; the latter being humiliated by ordinary passers-by in times of peace, and at other times being attacked by rioting mobs. To counter their victimhood and organise their own retribution, sections of local boys in Sultanpur, aged between 9 and 14 years, co-ordinated themselves into child squads (bacchon ke fauj). These child vigilantes patrolled the slum borders and common public places, constantly establishing a disciplinary control over fragile aspects of ghetto life. For example, the male child squads not only aggressively prevented members of other communities from entering the slum, they also monitored the movement of Sultanpur-wallahs, often Downloaded by [The University of Manchester] at 12:32 15 January 2012 physically assaulting local women who were caught having affairs with Hindu men. In my paper I show how the power, presence and practices of these child squads upturned traditional structures of male and female authority, contested conventional notions of male childhood in a volatile urban space, and sustained This is a revised text of a special Australia India Institute lecture on South Asia delivered in Adelaide on 7 July 2010 at the 18th Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA). My thanks go to the Australia India Institue, ASAA and the South Asian Studies Association (SASA). I am also grateful to the British Academy for funding my fieldwork in Hyderabad through their Small Research Grants scheme. I would like to thank Rubina Jasani, Filippo Osella, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Nilanjan Sarkar, and members of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures, University of Manchester, for their comments on this article. ISSN 0085-6401 print; 1479-0270 online/11/020276-22 Ó 2011 South Asian Studies Association of Australia DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2011.582672 SURVIVING VIOLENCE,CONTESTING VICTIMHOOD 277 nascent masculinities within the moral and social economy of impoverished Muslim male children. Keywords: City, slums, communalism, violence, child vigilantism Introduction They called me a whore, they called me a witch, I remained silent, but when they grabbed my wrist and slapped me in front of everyone, I wailed and said ‘Someone return my small sons to me, they have become my husband, my father’. Now my relationship with my sons is like my association with that crow. That bloody bird comes to me for food and drinks, has no loyalty, no love, just fluffs his scruffy, grey neck and gives me dirty looks. Salima (who had been abandoned by her father at an early age, and later by her husband) and I were both sitting on the steps of her slum home in the scorching Hyderabad sun, gazing at the mean crow perched on her asbestos roof. The scavenging bird blinked back at us with an equal measure of distrust. *** This paper explores the effects of poverty and communal tensions on child identity politics in an urban slum. My ethnographic landscape is Sultanpur, a communally-sensitive Muslim-dominated slum in the northern quarters of Hyderabad, a city in southern India, which has recently witnessed the emergence of armed vigilantism among male children. Large numbers of the local boys aged between 9 and 14 years had co-ordinated themselves into child squads (bacchon ke fauj) to patrol the slum borders and establish disciplinary control over certain aspects of slum life. For example, the child squads not only prevented members of other communities (nationalistic Hindus, peace Downloaded by [The University of Manchester] at 12:32 15 January 2012 mediators, Hindu NGO workers, secular Hindus desiring access to the local dargahs, etc),1 from entering or passing through the slum, they also acted as deliverers of social justice by organising public beatings of Muslim women like Salima, who was accused of having a ‘love-alliance’ with non-Muslims. In this paper I argue that the power, presence and practices of the child squads have upturned, however temporarily, traditional structures of male and female authority, and have contested conventional notions of boyhood in a volatile 1 The children even chased away unfamiliar Muslim ‘outsiders’. 278 SOUTH ASIA urban space. I show that social, sexual and physical attacks on the ‘muted male- ness’ of a poor Muslim community, and the everyday deprivations faced by slum children, gave birth to discourses around nascent child masculinities; the latter were sustained within the moral and social economy of impoverished male children, and the boys justified the adoption of violent collective identities to compensate for the loss of male pride in the adult-child world. Most of the literature, academic and non-academic, on the impact of sustained and symbolic violence on children in South Asia remains focused on child labour, the challenges of child marriage, children’s health, nutrition and educa- tion, foeticide and infanticide, legal studies, delinquency and child crime, and street children and rehabilitation, psychoanalysis and child abuse, which has led to a proliferation of child studies and child-focused NGOs in the region.2 These studies build primarily on the framework of child vulnerability, and introduce empowerment debates into ‘reform and remedy’ strategies for poor children. Violent and armed male children are found in the chronicles of war zones. The analysis of child soldiering in Sri Lanka (in the LTTE), Burma (in the National Army) and Nepal (in the Maoist movement) highlights the loss of psycho-social and sexual innocence among male children.3 This genre of research brings forth experiences of male child initiation into hyper-masculine discourses, and explores why children take up arms to protect themselves or provide for their 2 M.Lall, ‘Educate to Hate—The Use of Education in the Creation of Antagonistic National Identities in India and Pakistan’, in Compare, Vol.38, no.1 (2008), pp.103–20; Sarada Balagopalan, ‘Memories of Tomorrow: Children, Labor and the Panacea of Formal Schooling’, in Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol.1, no.2 (2008), pp.267–85; Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery and Craig Jeffery, ‘Investing in the Future: Education in the Social and Cultural Reproduction of Muslims in UP’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Living with Secularism: The Destiny of India’s Muslims (New Delhi: Manohar, 2007), pp.63–89; Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery and Craig Jeffery, ‘When Schooling Fails: Young Men, Education and Low-Caste Politics in Rural North India’, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol.39, no.1 (2005), pp.1–38; Patricia Jeffery, Roger Jeffery and Craig Jeffery, ‘From Sir Syed to Sachar: Muslims and Education in Rural Bijnor’, in Indian Journal of Secularism, Vol.11, no.2 (2007), pp.1–35; Pinki Virani, Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000); Myron Weiner, The Child and the State in India: Child Labor and Education Policy in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Jaya Downloaded by [The University of Manchester] at 12:32 15 January 2012 Sagade, Child Marriage in India: Socio-Legal and Human Rights Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and S. Sudha and S.I. Rajan, ‘Female Demographic Disadvantage in India 1981–1991: Sex Selective Abortions and Female Infanticide’, in Development and Change, No.30 (1999), pp.585–618. 3 Pushpa Kanagaratnam, Magne Raundalen and Arve E. Asbjørnsen, ‘Ideological Commitment and Posttraumatic Stress in Former Tamil Child Soldiers’, in Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Vol.46, no.6 (2005), pp.511–20; Brandon A. Kohrt, Mark J.D.

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