Teaching Political Violence: Experiences from a South Asian Classroom

Framing an Anthropology of Violence

While there is a long history of engagement with political life in anthropology and sociology, the interest in violence started much later. As Malesevic suggests, early twentieth century sociology was marked by a tendency to avoid an engagement with collective violence and war (2010, p. 17). It was during the post-colonial period when research began to be conducted on a much larger scale in the new nation-states and on their accompanying social and cultural formations, especially on topics such as ethnicity and nationalism, that an interest in violence emerged. Anthropology was especially criticized for the role early figures played in the time of European colonialism (Asad, 1973; Clifford & Marcus, 1986). Nevertheless, Western anthropological research on violence as a theme gradually gathered steam. A collection of essays published in the 1980s, edited by David Riches (1986), remains an important beginning, featuring a range of cases and situations of violence—from crime to tribal warfare and even religious ritual. By the 1990s, anthropologists made a tremendous contribution to violence and human suffering, showing how violence is a destructive and creative force, embedded in everyday life (e.g., Bourgois & Scheper-Hughes, 2004; Das et al., 2000). What distinguishes anthropological work is its framing of violence as both productive and a product of cultural understanding and its ability to shape and be shaped by local social relations, local cultural experiences and the larger political economy (Kleinman, 2006, p. 228).

The anthropology of violence in India is a response to Indian political life. Much of this work has dealt with nationalist and communal violence though there is an interesting body of work on movements associated with violence such as Maoism (e.g., Shah & Pettigrew, 2009). A closer look at the corpus of research indicates a range of themes in relation to violence that have been especially studied such as ethnicity, religion, urban space, the role of political parties and everyday politics in events of violence and the riot. If we extend the view to South Asia, there is an emergent body of work on militarization from Sri Lanka and Kashmir (Duschinski, 2009; Thiranagama, 2009). As Jonathan Spencer points out, violence in South Asia is not ‘a departure from the flow of the political, but rather should be analysed as a heightened and intensified continuation of normal politics’ (2007, p. 120).

While violence has been discussed with regard to the challenges posed to researchers (e.g., Daniel, 1996; Das, 1990; Sen, 2004), the other side of the coin for anthropologists is this: How does one teach an anthropology of political violence? What categories do we draw upon when we present our research as classroom materials? Where do we begin? As Michael Taussig (1984) suggests, violence in fact shows the limits of social theory and scholars, teachers and students should begin from the ‘epistemic murk’ and perhaps be open to other modes of thought such as the art world (Taussig, 2011, pp. 7–9). Hence, the challenge for a teacher is to take a diverse set of ideas, studies and approaches together in a way that provokes students to think about political violence as a socio-cultural phenomenon, that is a part of human life and which can be explored in many ways.

Framing a Course

The starting point I present to students is this: Violence is not an aberration but a part of everyday human life. The course is then presented to the students in two thrusts: first, exploring categories with which we think about violence beginning with the body, to structural violence and framing of subjects through violence. Second, the course then looks at themes such as ethnic and communal violence, genocide and war with reference to the South Asian context. Teaching follows a mix of conventional lectures and discussions on key readings from cases around the world. One pedagogical tool I have found useful has been visual media in the form of film and graphic novels as they enable students to take a step back and see a visualization of a situation of violence and the people involved. Films become especially useful when South Asian students explore topics in a non-South Asian setting such as the Holocaust or when they read about political violence in Northern Ireland through research that throws up questions of universal interest.

The classroom at the SAU is somewhat unusual. As per the university’s mandate, the class is composed of students from all South Asian countries. Hence, I have taught students ranging from those who come from middle-class Indian families to first generation university students from Afghanistan, small town Bangladesh and Pakistan. This composition has proven to be challenging as we teach students with different educational backgrounds and who share different histories which may clash with other national histories. ² Drawing from my experiences in teaching this course since 2012, I shall begin with one of two major themes in the next section.

Taking Sides

One day during the semester beginning in 2017, I walked in to the room to teach my class. The whole class was yet to assemble but students who were present had already taken their seats. As I glanced at my lecture notes and while other students trickled in, I heard a murmur and then a throat clearing. When I looked up, I saw one of my Bangladeshi students who smiled and said:

‘Sir, do you know, O_(a Pakistani classmate) cannot believe the reading you set for class today.’

‘Which one?’ I asked.

‘The “Nayanika essay”. He said it is impossible! Nothing like that happened. But I told him it is the truth!’

The essay my student referred by Nayanika Mukherjee (2006) deals with experiences of sexual violence faced by Bangladeshi women during the 1971 war. This is an article I draw on as it brings together themes of nationalism, war and gender in a South Asian setting. When I finally began the class when everyone including my Pakistani student had arrived, an argument began. The Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis disagreed on the case being discussed while the Indians and Afghanis looked on. While the Afghani students remained quiet, in the past, I have encountered Indians who would remark that Bangladesh became independent because of India, denying any agency to Bangladeshi activists and insurgents. This case in fact raises one major challenge in our university: How does one teach about an event of violence and conflict such as the 1971 war or for that matter the Indian partition where students are otherwise caught in processes where sides are taken?

While this is just one situation in one university, I feel it raises a conundrum we face in many classrooms. In a country and for that matter a region that has been affected by political violence, whether in the form of catastrophic events like riots and civil wars, to more latent forms of structural violence such as the daily humiliation of caste violence, our classrooms are often populated by students who are implicated in violence as witnesses, victims, perpetrators or as inheritors of violent legacies. Our classrooms are set in a region where all participants in the university, from students to faculty to support staff, are often forced to consider taking sides on some kind of political conviction or very simply on the basis of one’s identity.

The academic ideal is to introduce students to all perspectives to provide a balanced view. This becomes important in regions like South Asia where most groups have been in conflict with each other at some point in their histories and where histories of hurt and victimhood exist alongside everyday lives of survival and endurance. Cushman (2004) argues that this need not result in the tendency to force experiences of violence as equal. Rather what really matters is to locate histories of power and access to power. If this is important for scholars, how do we take this to the classroom?

In my experience, I have found it useful to try and show the different sides to any topic of study. Rather than forcing a presumed balance, I find it more useful to encourage students to relate readings in terms of their experiences and ideas in a dialogue with others and within themselves. This dialogue pertains to cases, histories and also critically to categories through which we think through violence such as the body, gender or structural violence as it is through conceptual categories that we can establish points of relating across time and space. For example, structural violence could enable students to at least begin a conversation on similarities and differences between cases seemingly distinct such as caste-based violence in western India and histories of racial violence in the American South.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Apart from the anthropology of violence, one of the courses I teach is an introduction to anthropological theory and ethnography. Students begin by reading the classics such as Malinowski’s (1920) famous work on the Kula, which is a system of exchange and trade. ³ As part of the course, I have often assigned, either as an examination question or as the class essay, a question asking students to describe the Kula and then to see whether they can relate it to their own society. The students I have taught over the years from Afghanistan and Bangladesh would take this exercise with special interest. While Bangladeshi students describe cases of gift relations during festivals in rural Bengal, the Afghani students invariably related the Kula to barter exchange that existed in the time of the war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. I am often struck by how a practice documented from the early twentieth century from a distant island resonated with students who have experienced war half a world away and almost a century later.

Hence, the reaction of students to particular readings raises another issue: How do students react to each other’s experiences of violence and conflict especially if they share different histories? While events like the Partition and the 1971 war connect Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, the experiences of Afghani and Sri Lankan students seem different as the students from those countries I have taught have lived through war, whereas for some other students violence is in the past. Hence, the classes I have taught have involved students engaging with other students who have experiences that may set them apart.

Anthropology is a discipline that was traditionally set in the study of the ‘other’ by scholars from the Western world. Indian and other non-Western anthropologists subverted this by studying their own societies often on the claim that the diversity that exists in their countries made it easy to find the other. While the dichotomy between native and non-native is an old debate in anthropology (Fabian, 1983; Narayan, 1993; Srinivas, 1997), the ‘other’ remains a contentious category, especially in terms of its construction and how a student of anthropology relates to the other as both a subject of study and as a human being. This is important when violence in all its forms renders even those seemingly familiar as an ‘other’, especially for those who may not live through some forms of violence such as war.

How does one then regard violence experienced by those as unlike oneself? Can an Afghani student relate to studies of Hindu-Muslim conflict in India or can an Indian student relate to studies of the Afghan war? If so how do they relate to each other? The most significant challenge I have faced in this regard takes place during the teaching of a unit on genocides where I draw on readings from Cambodia, Rwanda and especially the Holocaust of European Jews during the Second World War. While other genocides have taken place, the Jewish Holocaust remains an event that provides a vocabulary and imagination of large-scale, inexplicable catastrophic violence that is universally recognized.

Choi (2016) writes about holocaust education in South Korea and how students may react positively by relating an event that took place in Europe to Korean experiences even if those experiences reflect different historical trajectories. My students also tried relating the readings accordingly to South Asian experiences, most notably the Indian partition. The unit on genocide begins with the Holocaust and texts by Rafael Lemkin and Primo Levi and then proceeds to readings of recent genocides. The readings on Rwanda and Cambodia, especially the work of Taylor (2009) and Hinton (1998), are especially effective as they situate those genocides in colonial history, ethnicity and social structure, which make sense in South Asian settings as well. However, the readings on the Jewish Holocaust raise an interesting set of problems, which perhaps emerges out of the tendency to regard that event as exceptional in scale and its setting.

Sarukkai argues that the anthropological other, while based on difference, is also marked by an ethical relationship, which calls for acknowledging the other as a human being, rather than as a mere object (Sarukkai, 1997, p. 1406). The ethical imperative that Sarukkai raises forces us to pay attention to how we can relate to another. Researchers are often forced to engage with the question of ethical practice in relation to their respondents. The classroom setting however provides an interesting site to consider ethical imperatives especially of how teachers and students respond to the materials and cases they engage with. When reading about the holocaust, we are engaging with an experience of catastrophic violence and suffering about another people in another time and place. We in turn inhabit a different context and face different political challenges, which may complicate our responses. On one occasion, I was shocked when two students told me that ‘Muslim societies’ can only see the Holocaust in relation to contemporary Israel and the politics of 9/11. These students were admittedly aware of the concern with anti-semitism. Moments like this have also made me concerned as to whether this would pit my classroom into those who are responding to a particular political context with those who remain seemingly quiet. Nevertheless, moments like this also force us to think harder about violence and its effects.

Conclusion: The Importance of Contexts

In this article, I address some of the challenges I have faced as a university teacher while running a course that engages with political violence in a diverse classroom. While there is more that can be written, I have drawn on two themes which I have faced continuously: first, the problem of taking sides and second, the challenges of helping students engage with the experience of violence and pain of others. There are no convenient solutions available to deal with these challenges. The students I teach come with experiences and histories of their own. Many have witnessed or even experienced violence based on their ethnic, religious and national affiliation and gender. Yet like students anywhere, they are also concerned with deadlines, grades and future employment. If teachers of a topic as contentious such as political violence can use the classroom to enable students to engage and reflect on their position, learn from teachers and classmates (and teach their teachers a thing or two), much of a task that is inherently uncertain and incomplete is nevertheless achieved.

I will conclude with the importance of context. My university offers a fairly unique classroom. However, if we consider regional university classrooms anywhere in India or any other South Asian country, the challenges I have discussed remain relevant as teachers and students are engaged in a range of contexts: The contexts from which academic knowledge, texts and other materials are made available and the contexts of political and social life teachers and students themselves come from. Imagine a discussion on caste by taking the case of the Khairlanji killings in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra where the class will most probably consist of students who deal with caste-based violence and discrimination on an everyday basis and are located on clearly demarcated sides of a political fence. Similarly think of a classroom in Uttar Pradesh which is discussing Hindu-Muslim violence in the aftermath of Muzafarnagar riots or the ascendency of the Hindu nationalists to the state assembly. The classroom clearly becomes the point where these different contexts are brought together. The ultimate challenge teachers face is to take their students through all discourses and experiences, tounderstand those experiences and issues with empathy and yet to not drown in them.