The rumours of beef being eaten, the murderous rage evoked and the public lynching in September 2015 of 58 year old Muslim man Aqlakh in Bisada village next to New Delhi, the capital of India compels psychoanalytical gaze. Whether the meat was in fact beef is irrelevant and steps taken by the investigating agencies like sending the meat for forensic analysis can only feed into the notion that killing and murder of residents of a house in which beef is found is acceptable. We traverse from the manifest to the hidden.
The cow is revered as Mother by a sizable section of upper caste Hindus. That the announcement by the priest from the temple in the village that beef was being eaten in the house of the victim evoked anger in the predominant community of the upper caste Thakurs in the village is in the realm of the comprehensible. However, the explosion of murderous fury leading to the lynching of Aqlakh and the beating to near death of the son Danish is indicative of tapping into emotions whose roots may lie deep.
At the conscious level the strong mother-son relation characteristic in North Indian culture is simple: The son loves the mother and the mother loves the son. Even viewed from this angle at times we want to incorporate our loved ones and tell small children – “we will eat them up”. In a sense the giving up of mother necessary for individuation appears to be a traumatic process. The internalization through the process of introjection and incorporation akin to eating up and having a little mother inside, aids in dealing with the distress and trauma of separation from the mother.
The imago of the mother takes many forms. The quintessential protective mother to the son is emotion laden. Simultaneously, the mother to be protected by the son is a powerful motif too appealing at subliminal levels. Prior to the last parliamentary elections in India there were posters in Delhi like – “29 aktoober ko Bharat Mata ka sher dahedega” (trans. “On 29th October the son of Mother India will roar”) announcing a public rally to be addressed by the Prime Ministerial candidate Modi. This in turn was contrasted with an emasculated Man-mohan Singh (the then Prime Minister) and the image linked to a rural village woman. This tapping into the grandiose- virile self protecting the mother, paid rich dividends and Modi won with an overwhelming majority.
In parallel with the strong ‘lion’, there may be the little boy with feelings of being overwhelmed by the mother. Freud (1931) observes “For this germ appears surprising, yet regular, fear of being killed (? devoured) by the mother. It is plausible to assume that this fear corresponds to a hostility which develops in the child towards her mother in consequence of the manifold restrictions imposed by the latter in the course of training and bodily care and that the mechanism of projection is favoured by the early age of the child’s psychical organisation” (p.227). The use of the phrase ‘her mother’ rather than ‘his mother’ is not evidence of Freud turning feminist, but of confining it to the mother-daughter relationship. However, there appears to be no reason to confine it to the mother-daughter relation and it seems equally applicable to the mother-son relation.
Similarly, Freud’s (ibid) further elaboration can be read as equally applicable to the little girl and the little boy: “We find the little girl’s aggressive oral and sadistic wishes in a form forced on them by early repression, as a fear of being killed by her mother – a fear which in turn, justifies her death-wish against her mother, if that becomes conscious” (p.237). Klein (1946) takes us further “From the beginning the destructive impulse is turned against the object and is first expressed in phantasied oral-sadistic attacks on the mother’s breast which soon develop into onslaughts on her body by all sadistic means. The persecutory fears arising from the infant’s oral-sadistic impulses to rob the mother’s body of its good contents, and the anal-sadistic impulses to put his excrements into her (including the desire to enter her body in order to control her from within), are of great importance for the development of paranoia and schizophrenia” (p. 99). Freud (ibid) continues “(Hitherto, it is only in men that I have found the fear of being eaten up. This fear is referred to the Father, but it is probably the product of the transformation of oral aggressivity directed to the mother. The child wants to eat up its mother from whom it has had its nourishment; in the case of the father there is no such obvious determinant of the wish)” (p. 237).
In India at the other end of the spectrum of the nurturing milk mother is the blood thirsty Goddess-Mother Kali with a foot on the prostrate corpse-like body of her consort Shiva. Shukla (2014) writes “In addition to the threat of castration, the anxieties of the male may spring from deeper primal fears of annihilation, being devoured, swallowed and eaten up. In the Indian context powerful imagery of the Mother Goddess Kali, commonly depicted dancing nude with a garland of human skulls, hands gripping various weapons and decapitating encapsulates the male anxiety of castration and annihilation”(p.186).
The primal fears of annihilation, being devoured and eaten up may evoke murderous fury and rage towards the mother. Sudhir Kakar (1982), writing of exorcism of ghosts at Balaji temple near Ajmer in Shamans, Mystics and Doctors relates the story of Panditji, a Brahmin vegetarian priest, who periodically gets possessed by a Muslim bhuta (ghost) who demands to eat kababs (p.63). Rage, anger as well as many of our desires and wishes which we find intolerable get split off and projected on to the bad ‘other’ in intra-psychic processes at the unconscious level. The rampant sexual abuses like mother******; sister****** and daughter******* seem to be a common example of unacknowledged split off incestuous wishes dumped onto the other.
The rumour which evoked the fury and lynching of Aqlakh was not that a Hindu mother had been killed; but that a cow had been slaughtered. The puzzle of the killing of a human being for a cow adds another layer to the conundrum. It is likely that the murderous rage at the loving mother was felt to be so abhorrent a feeling that it required a further displacement before it could surface even as a split off part projected on the other. This step seems to have been displacement on to the cow. The suppressed emotion exploding in a volcanic eruption at the rumour of the killing of the cow, along with feelings of abandonment and rage at the taking away of the nourishing mother giving us milk, adding the extra killer edge to the intensity of the anger and fury culminating in the public lynching.
References
Freud S. 1931. Female Sexuality. Standard Edition XXI.
Kakar S. 1982. Shamans, Mystics and Doctors. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
Klein, M. 1946. Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms1. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 27:99-110.
Shukla R. The Rage of Angels: Anger, Fury, Brutal Rape, Protests, Police Action. Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 11: 184–187 (2014).
