Why The Hindu Becomes Silent When His Temples Are
Desecrated?
“Why
is there silence over the desecration of the temple in Delhi? Forget the media and
intellectuals, why are even the ordinary Hindus not speaking up?” A friend asked
me in a get together. We both said as Hindus it is very painful for us.
“It
is not the desecration of the temple that I find as painful as the silence that
has come to engulf it,” I told him.
The
silence has come to characterize our psyche and one that has remained unchanged
for centuries.
A
question on the mind of many is that is this the way the crowds destroyed
temples in medieval times too? I believe there are uncanny similarities. The violent
crowd then and now had impunity and worked under a religious injunction to do
so. In both the Hindus didn’t retaliate or oppose and remained silent
spectators. It brings to fore the close relationship between trauma and silence.
A
memory comes to my mind. As a psychologist I was testifying as an expert witness
on a number of heinous crimes. In one case the victim was a seventeen year old
girl and the judge believed the accused was framed by police because the girl didn’t
scream, shout or fight but stayed silent. Looking at the report where I had
mentioned psychological assessment showed the girl suffering from PTSD, he seemed
to have disbelieved it and asked if she was truly traumatized why didn’t she scream
and shout but remained silent instead? Why didn’t she try to fight him?
“The
girl remained silent, your honor, not because she was consenting to the accused
but because the very nature of trauma is such that the victim falls silent
under overwhelming threat to life,” I had told him and added that the psychological
studies show the Broca’s area concerned with the production of speech in human
beings slows down with almost very little activity when facing the traumatic
event or traumatic memories are aroused. During the actual event, most victims
are unable to shout for this reason. I quoted Bessel van der Kolk, the psychiatrist
and pioneer credited with this discovery. The judge had listened and asked for more
details which I could provide. I could see his mind towards the accused change after
understanding the inner state of the victim and so did his sentencing.
Later
the judge had called me to his chamber. He told me he wished he had known this relationship
between trauma and lack of speech. He shared that while sentencing, every victim
whom he had found not resisting, protesting or screaming against the
perpetrator during the crime, he had let the accused go free believing the victim
to be lying. “Today, I feel a little guilty of having done so,” and had asked me
to give a talk at National Judicial Academy.
I
wish to make it clear that in genuine cases, an overwhelming percentage of
girls and women find it difficult to give words to their experience of assault,
so overwhelming is the whole experience of trauma.
The
same applies to soldiers on the battlefield, disaster survivors or survivors of
atrocities. Their memory plays hide and seek with them through interfering with
the Broca’s area and silence comes to rule over their memory.
Today,
we know from researches that what applies to memory of individuals also applies
to larger systems. Societies as a whole respond just like individuals. Based on
that when they go through a collective trauma the individual members are unable
to give words to it, sometimes for fear of life.
Perhaps
the deepest trauma for the Hindu society has been the destruction of its
temples and the Hindus have gone through it in silence and preserve their memories
in silence. Is it any wonder then when each time a temple is destroyed, the Hindu
society is unable to raise its voice?
The
language of trauma is silence. For prolonged and overwhelming trauma, the
silence is that much greater, deep rooted and lodged in our psyche. Silence is the
tool by which trans-generational trauma is carried forward as Elie Wiesel said
and is the keeper of our memories. Does that mean then for Hindus regeneration of
their civilization will take place by breaking this wall of silence and need a
healing touch? Till we find and soothe that raw nerve, as a society, will we
find the peace within and the momentum to move forward?
I
wonder how did the early Hindus react to witnessing of the destruction of their
temples? It is not very difficult to imagine. Possibly it was shock and denial in
the beginning that gradually gave away to resignation, a sense of helplessness and
shame. When the number of temples desecrated reached thousands, the sense of what
that led to is not so difficult to grasp. The horror of it would be stored
within similar to discovering the Gulag in Russia, the famines that killed millions
and the holocaust that killed millions in gas chambers.
When
temples were destroyed in Kashmir, the Hindus in rest of India kept silent. I found
no articles, no debates, no intellectuals discussing it. Today, when a temple
is desecrated in Delhi, the silence of it is deafening. The roots of that
silence lie in the trans-generational trauma living in the Hindu psyche described
in my book ‘The Infidel Next Door’.
Today,
we need men of action who will speak with courage about breaking this silence. We
need men who are not afraid of confronting the past but who become the voice of
a persecuted race that reminds them that once they were not slaves but masters
of their fate. We need men who can rouse the sleeping conscience in our people and
create an intellectual minority, however small, that creates a movement
destroying the stagnant society we have become.
Deep
inside our society there is a fault line, an opening that is now coming out in
the open challenging our beliefs. The humiliation that resided deep within now refuses
to be there anymore. The Hindu of today is also a Hindu with a choice who
selects his own leaders, his own government and calls the country his own like he
could never do before in his history. Should he not extend that to his religion
for which he has been persecuted like followers of perhaps no other faith in
human history?
Rajat
Mitra
Psychologist
and Author of ‘The Infidel Next Door’
Contact
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The
book is also available at select book stores like Bahrisons.
