[khan]

I believe that something like this paranoia, this refusal of compromised humanity, infects the rhetoric of the Hindu right, and, indeed, may help to explain its continuing fascination with Nazi ideas. But Jünger’s novel does not connect the “release of energy” directly to misogynistic torture and murder, although, as Theweleit shows, other documents of the period amply do so. To explain that connection we need to ask what the idea of man-as-metal is an escape from, what it is denying. As in Jünger, so too in Gujarat: what seems to be denied is human vulnerability itself, the smell, the fluids, the stench of the body. The woman functions as a symbol of the site of weakness and vulnerability inside any male, who can be drawn into his own mortality through desire. The Muslim woman functions doubly as such a symbol. In this way, a fantasy is created that her annihilation will lead to safety and invulnerability (perhaps to “India Shining,” the campaign slogan that betrays a desire for a crystalline sort of domination). The paranoid anxiety that keeps telling every man that he is not safe and invulnerable feeds the desire to extinguish her.

Only this complex logic explains, I believe, why torture and mutilation are preferred as alternatives to abduction and impregnation—or even simple homicide. Only this logic explains why the fantasy of penetrating the sexual body with a large metal object played such a prominent role in the carnage. Only this explains, as well, the repetitious destruction of the woman’s body by fire, as though the world cannot be clean until all vestiges of the female body are simply obliterated from its face.

VI. Conclusion

Beginning with Sarkar’s account of woman as nation and the home as the one remaining sphere of kingly rule for the colonized male, we moved on to a more general account of the male objectification of women. I argued that we need this more general analysis to make sense of how veneration turns into brutality. But to get all the way to the grisly tortures of Gujarat, we need to think about disgust misogyny, about the impossible project of male purity and the underside of violence that accompanies it, and about the connection between exaggerated forms of this project and cultural ideologies.

Why this fantasy for these people in this particular place and time? Why here a particular heightening of the need to be metallic weapons that can kill the body even while they violate it? Why this terrible and murderous vulnerability? In Germany it was easy to connect such fantasies to the devastation of World War I, the loss of a whole generation of males, and a humiliating military defeat. In the case of the Hindu right, with Hindus in India constituting a comfortable majority of 82 percent (according to the 1991 census)27 and Muslims around 12 percent, no comparable catastrophe provides an easy explanation, unless it be the long, cumulative catastrophe of being subjugated for many centuries, first by the Muslims, then by the British, then by the rich developed nations of the world. But one thing seems sure enough: that such actions diminish power rather than augmenting it, creating not an invulnerable Hindu nation but a nation that, insofar as it allows such things to occur unpunished, is a disgrace to its own constitution and to its rich traditions of human acceptance, play, and insight.28


Postscript, May 24, 2004. The grim story has, for now, a hopeful ending. Roundly rejected by the voters for their failure to deliver basic services to the poor and for their alliance with the forces of persecution and violence, the Hindu right has yielded power to a parliamentary government that has emphasized the Gujarat massacre and the need to reinforce mutual respect and the rule of law. In his first speech as prime minister, Manmohun Singh drew attention to this issue: “I do not want to begin my career by accusing the previous government,” he said. “But divisive forces were allowed a free play, which I believe is extremely injurious to orderly development . . . We as a nation must have a firm determination that these things should never happen.<

Martha C. Nussbaum teaches philosophy and law at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law.