 The Civility of Indifference, based on an original work by F.G. Bailey. The British left India in 1947. Children of freedom were nursed through the partition of the country. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs wounded and killed each other in the largest movement of people in history. The story usually goes that violence and religion have been conjoined in the national imagination ever since. Let me let you for a moment. No serious student of violence considers it to be natural or primordial. Violence might be born of poverty, rivalry or being misunderstood, but these conditions on their own do not lead to the wounding or death of others. It takes something else to make people cross that line. For civility to become incivility and indifference to become the passion for which one would wound. But what does it take? The darkness of this room is the past. The room has been filled with air from the 1950s. It is good air, good for the imagination, good for thinking. What prevents you from killing? Please do not shrug off my question. It is a good question and awkward. I ask again. What stops you? I imagine this question runs against ideas so deeply held that you do not readily know what they are. The story you are about to hear is my attempt at answering these questions. I will use the tools of social anthropology and explain what I am doing as I go along. I will take you below the big events of history and into the daily life of Eastern India. At least as I knew things to be when I stayed there. I, along with my wife and children, lived in a village called Bisipara, population 700. It is 1953, a very long time ago, another world almost. The tale is about the powerful and unspoken ideas that kept people from killing each other, violence that never was. It was just a few years after partition, but there was no tangible trace of it in villages such as Bisipara. Anthropologists often study invisible things called social relations. They do so in the belief that how we relate to one another can help explain who we are and what values we hold. My story is also about threats. For anthropologists, making a threat is a form of social relation. Threats suggest possibilities and futures. Threats live on in the exchange of a glance or a sack of rice. Threats, especially of violence, can make new worlds become real. My big question then is why were the people of Bisipara not genocidal enthusiasts? Bisipara people were normal, for want of a more humane word, with the usual compliment of good and evil more tolerance than bigotry. Had they been able to imagine genocide, they would have judged it a disastrous indulgence, a stupidity and a way to destroy themselves. Moderation and chaos as clear alternatives were never articulated. What I am claiming of the Bisiparans is my own take on them as an anthropologist, a summation of all they told me, all I saw, as well as of all that they did not explicitly tell me and try to keep from me. The rule that required them to show self-restraint was, so to speak, subliminal, part of their collective consciousness, but unspoken and apparent to me, more now than then, only in the way they conducted themselves. Ritualised politeness shaped their public discourse. They displayed careful attention to the etiquette of status. Sometimes they slipped and tempers showed. Bystanders indicated this was bad form. However, they were not all equal. Far from it. They had a system called caste, in which people were hierarchically ordered and substantially different at different levels of the order. For them, humans were not all the same. They also had people who ranked lower than the castes. They thought of these people as untouchable, too polluting to be touched. Untouchables had their own wells, residential quarters and ways of doing things, quite separate from those of caste Hindus. In 1949, the government of the region, and in accordance with Gandhi's wishes, passed an act making it an offence to bar untouchables from temples. Significantly, the act implied that untouchables are in no essential way different from other people. In places like Bisipara, this was a radical new idea. The untouchables of Bisipara, Dalits they would be called now, were known as the Panos. They made a bid to enforce the act in the village, a protest against customary discrimination. The occasion was a major festival, probably the celebration of the deity's birthday. The untouchables arrived all together, as they did every year, attended by musicians and demanded they be allowed to enter the temple. This confrontation was done in a manner that had become the approved political style in India. Notice of confrontation was given to those likely to oppose the move. The response of the caste Hindus was to mount a guard of men armed with battle axes around the temple. But the Panos had taken a further step and informed the local authorities. The result was the unhurried arrival in the village of the local equivalent of a riot squad consisting of a sub-inspector and two police constables on bicycles. The Hindus did not directly dispute the law but said that they were merely the trustees of the temple, not its owners, and while they themselves would stand down and permit the Panos to go inside, they could not in good conscience do so without consulting all the other Hindus for, as everyone knew, the temple in question belonged not to the village of Bisipara, but to the region. The Panos stepped down and staged no more confrontations. That was the time they built a temple in their own street. The clean castes punished the Panos for their display of power by taking away the privilege of making music for their festivocations. Thus, in this symbolic fashion, the clean castes signified that they no longer considered untouchables a legitimate part of the community. Perhaps that interpretation is too extreme. Panos, unquestionably, were of a different essence, a different moral fiber. So was every cast different from every other cast. Nevertheless, despite this perfectly racist sentiment and despite the troubles at that time, there was a strong underlying sense, vague but quite perceptible, that being part of a community was something given, always there, inescapable, a moral inevitability. Why did a foray not escalate as it may have done elsewhere? The main answer was that all of those concerned were accustomed to counting the cost. This habit of mind inhibits moral further. A resolute pragmatism together with a pervasive suspicion that opportunism is everywhere make it hard to be a true believer for whatever cause. But what I witnessed was part of a revolution in which the old orders of power were beginning to be swept away. This shift was very much in Bisipara's public domain. The caste Hindus talked about it frequently and heatedly. They did not take more resolute collective action. They often seemed more like actors in a play than people for whom real power was at stake. They were card players who never cashed in their chips. Not because they wanted to prolong that particular game but because everyone knew that to convert the game into reality would hurt them all. No one was a habitual gormandiser. They did not admire hard physical work. Life was not easy. But they were patient, generally phlegmatic, living mostly from day to day. They were calculators and pragmatists firmly in the habit of working out consequences when they made decisions. They did not theorise. Nor did they entertain themselves by imagining alternative lifestyles or contemplating reforms. They did not question, at least not of their own accord, their customary ways and the shape of their society. They could not imagine them willing to die or to kill for a principle or a cause. The quarrel in Bisipara was less over material resources than about human dignity, about getting people to acknowledge publicly who had control. In this context, to be legitimate means to be accorded dignity, to be recognised as a person having specific rights. One can have power without having legitimacy. In Bisipara legitimacy was by no means a pearl beyond price. The cultural performances that I saw, the political theatre of a struggle for power between untouchables and clean casts were carefully staged and insulated so that there would be no damaging fallout on a style of life so internalised in the village. What I have described are the foundations of social relations in Bisipara, their definition of how the world really worked, something that they all agreed and acted upon and therefore found to be authentic. I began to write this memoir of Bisipara's dip towards incivility in the 1990s, some forty years after I had left that place forever. My concern was to memorialise those people as I saw them in those hopeful and promising years when the world was no longer at war and decolonisation was forging new times. Were there incidences of intercast violence in the time you were in Bisipara? No, lots of threats, lots of noise about it. Lots of stories about Jaya, the headman's son taking the headman's shotgun and threatening the untouchables which was a total lie, total fabrication. It was too sensible and probably too timid to do anything like that. What incidents there were are in the books and I can't remember them now but they are certainly in the economic frontier and certainly in the book about moderation. More talk and I never saw anyone if somebody had been beaten up and so on they would come to the bungalow and ask for a deal or plans or something like that. It had never happened. I later learned that this century had brought terrible mass violence to the region. It meant that the first dip in civility I witnessed in the 1950s had gained the momentum of a full-blown plummet. In 2008, all around Bisipara, Hindus and indigenous people killed Christians sometimes in horrific ways. What made the killers believe they had the right to do so? What made them put aside their indifference? If we follow my original line then these people no longer counted the cost or perhaps more accurately they calculated the rules of the game had changed. They were playing cards for a different sense of community. The kind formed by the sentiments of religious and political chauvinism rather than by the survival of a divided village community. The rise of Hindu nationalism and institutionalized differentiation on the basis of religious and caste lines is the story in the villages of post-colonial India. Hindu organizations worked hard and systematically to reclaim the history of the country and to claim national political space for themselves. In India today, violence has become a political resource really ignited like fire in the run-up to elections creating communities of fear and votes. In villages across the country the rules of the game really have changed since the 1950s. When things appeared black and white we see now the indifference of a new civility.