On February 21 this year, I saw one of the most moving images of loss captured in the contemporary media. It was an image published on the news portal, Scroll.in, of the demolished Sher Ali Baba Mazar in Uttarakhand’s Ramnagar tehsil, with its caretaker, Ashraf Ali, standing and praying before the empty space. The article told us that the mazar had been demolished in May 2023, notwithstanding an initial confirmation that its documents were all in order. Outside the barbed wire fence surrounding the emptiness that threatened entry as illegal and punishable lay a collection of incense sticks, sweets, clay lamps and sacred cloths, invoking the ghost presence of the demolished mazar. It was clear that locals still visit and pray at the site.
For a moment, it took me back to an image captured by Ismael Mohamad of United Press International, of Palestinians in Friday prayers near the ruins of a mosque destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. It was an image at once heart-breaking and terrifying, of people absorbed in prayer next to the shambles of the mosque. God is forever absent, but people seek to etch structures marking traces of divine presence that bring communities together. The gaping hole left by the demolition of such a structure leaves a lacuna larger than the absence of god.
Regimes of vindictive intolerance are destroying physical structures of community lives around the world. But if you think this destruction is merely the destiny of vulnerable and marginalised communities, you have been living in a dream with flickers of a nightmare that have already haunted you.
The demolition of homes and community religious venues of certain minority populations has become a predictable administrative strategy in some Indian states, with Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand at the forefront of the onslaught. But the destruction of private and communal spaces belonging to the minority community is also a metaphor for a far more pervasive and insidious violation of which all of us, including those of us whose homes feel safe so far, must take notice.
We’re entering an epoch where political control is not merely limited to the management of elections, the abrogation of state rights, or unexpected kinships between discrete organs of the government. Walls around the domestic space of the home are now more porous and permeable than ever, and the mandates for personal behaviour, private kinship, and individual code of ethics have started to come, quick and heavy, from a centralised repository of moral values. The demolition of homes that belong to the living and the dead is a reality for the minority community. For those who feel they live within secure walls, the demolition is both a metaphor for invisible invasions already underway and an omen of larger invasions gathering storm on the horizon.
Strange strings of control are playing out over the sexual lives of citizens. Admittedly, this is the aspect of private life that has repeatedly come under State control, particularly for developing nations whose population has threatened to overpower its citizens. Both communist China and Congress-led India have tried to monitor their citizens’ reproductive functions, with a limited child policy leading to desired population control in one instance and a compulsory sterilisation programme creating a rebellious disaster in the other. But now we have an Indian State, which requires couples living together to register their relationships. It’s a moment of reckoning with the fundamental role of the State in relation to private bodies and lives — this time, no longer related to reproduction and its impact on population. The law requires the registration of cohabitation, but only between a man and a woman — “in a shared household through a relationship in the nature of marriage.” But what is the venue of this relationship? Is the bed or the kitchen or the bathtub or the bank account the heart or the groin of the matter? The vigilance over such relationships is clearly moral and ideological rather than rooted in the economic concerns over population. It is a watershed moment when the State wishes to mark non-productive relationships of intimacy and domesticity. With the neighbourhood uncle replaced by your local magistrate, this is a terrifying move in a direction that will pull the rest of the nation like gravity.
When the defining identity of a regime is rooted in the ideology of an identity shaping private and communal lives, private relationships between individuals can never be left out of the realm of public politics for long. Administrative activism against conjugal relationships between certain communities is already rife in some parts of the country, accelerated by an imagined horror of a demographic shift. But the moral repository of values-in-command straddles gender and communal identity alike: according to a recently surfaced notification published by the Union ministry of housing and urban affairs, a woman who wishes to use her maiden name must either furnish a copy of her divorce decree or a ‘no objection’ certificate from her husband. While the legal grounds of such a requirement appear to be shaky to jurists, the notification by the Union ministry reveals the ideology that seeks to control the private, and particularly the conjugal, lives of its citizens, inevitably restricting women’s freedom in the process.
When you instal something as intimate as a beloved story from a religious epic in what is nothing short of a State-sponsored shrine, you inevitably take away the rights of private citizens to imagine their own idiosyncratic versions of the story, including scattered strands of it that they might have grown up with, in nooks and crannies of their families, communities, and localities. Such a shrine, bolstered with media and celebrity fanfare and blessed by the State leader, is sadly tantamount to the demolition of private shrines in the hearts and minds of millions of citizens. The making of the official version is also the destruction of the aesthetic, the private, and the idiosyncratic that define a widely beloved myth. The fortified temple, too, is a shrine demolished.
Saikat Majumdar is a novelist and a literary critic
