[khan]

V. Purity and Violation

Now we begin to be in a position to approach Gujarat again, offering a richer analysis of what we find there. All human beings experience disgust, and all use disgust to construct boundaries between themselves and their own animality. And yet some societies, and some groups within societies, learn to make disgust more central to their lives than other groups do.

For example, disgust at sexual fluids, bodily waste, and so forth is probably more intense and more ubiquitous among males than among females; at least it does a better job of explaining the structure of sexual relations on the male than on the female side. Men, moreover, differ greatly in the degree to which their relations with women are colored by disgust. Similarly, disgust plays a powerful role in explaining homophobic hatred and violence in the United States, but we also know that many people utterly lack such motivations. Moreover, some societies strongly inhibit the projection of disgust onto vulnerable people and groups, while some actively encourage such projections. (Indeed the most serious flaw in Dworkin’s analysis is her failure to consider these societal and individual variations and her consequent representation of disgust misogyny as ubiquitous and inevitable.) Walt Whitman imagined that a democracy might exist without disgust and therefore (he believed) without racism, misogyny, or homophobia. He movingly imagined such a society, bits and pieces of which are real. In contrast, some societies seem in general more structured around disgust and contamination than other societies. One might see post–World War I Germany, for example, as such a society: Klaus Theweleit’s remarkable M#228;nnerfantasien has shown the extent to which disgust at the female body is a motif underlying a great deal of the political life of that era, with its impossible fantasies of men made out of metal, uncontaminated by any fluids or blood or stickiness or stench.

In my earlier essay on Gujarat, I argued that much of the rhetoric and political culture of today’s Hindu right is appropriated from National Socialism in Germany, and plays no role in traditional Hindu understandings of identity and nationhood. The founders of the Hindu right in the 1930s had studied Nazi culture closely and openly expressed their sympathy with German ideals of racial purity, and even German antisemitism. Although admiration for Hitler went underground after World War II, textbooks written today by the Hindu right still portray his achievement in admiring terms.

Whatever the origin of such ideas, a very similar, and similarly paranoid, idea of male purity has taken deep root in the culture of the Hindu right, in a way that is unconnected to authentic Hindu religious and cultural traditions. To be sure, there are sources in the Hindu tradition on which one could draw for the portrayal of the Hindu male as pure, lacking in lust, and uncontaminated by femaleness, and (especially in the Laws of Manu) for the portrayal of the female as dirty and potentially contaminating. But virtually any human tradition includes such sources. And the current Hindu-right construction of the Hindu male is terribly far removed from much that is central to the Hindu tradition historically, with its delight in sexuality, its playfulness, its sensuous enjoyment of the body. Indeed one might think of few traditions in which disgust at sexuality was as notably absent, and the body as joyously present, as the tradition one of whose holy books is the Kama Sutra. Traditionally the Hindu norm of masculinity (rather like its Talmudic Jewish counterpart, as wonderfully reconstructed by Daniel Boyarin in his Unheroic Conduct) is not aggressively phallic, but instead sensuous, playful, artful, and even soft (by contrast to the boring and unsensuous macho stereotypes that abound elsewhere). This is one of the great attractions of that rich religious tradition.

One element of the current Hindu-right understanding of masculinity is a sharp rhetorical opposition between the pure, chaste Hindu male, who respects women and does not have lustful desires toward them, and the lustful Muslim male, who sees women as objects for use and domination.18 The famous television production of the Ramayana in 1987–88—watched by some 90 percent of Indian households with television sets and instrumental in constructing current Hindu-right ideas of the tradition—shows the gods as more or less devoid of sexuality, and babies as sweet little things arriving more or less out of heaven. Even Shiva, a god profoundly connected with sexuality and the phallus, is desexualized in a most bizarre way. The narrator repeatedly insists that the Hindu tradition, unlike other religious traditions, stresses peace and purity—in combination, of course, with militant aggression against the “other,” the enemy.