Love Jihad: Tracing the narrative's historical roots and politics

Sameena Dalwai's book offers a sobering reflection on love and the kind of activism needed to counter the forces behind the 'love jihad' bogey

Love Jihad: A Feminist Retelling

By Sameena Dalwai

Published by Penguin Books

201 pages  ₹599

  Few trends in India deserve as much urgent academic attention as the fear and panic surrounding “love jihad”, or the conspiracy theory that Muslim men are systematically seeking to marry Hindu women with the sole agenda of converting them to Islam and forcing them to raise Muslim children. The success of movies such as The Kerala Story (2023) and, more importantly, the laws targeting alleged forced conversion in place in many Indian states, make Sameena Dalwai’s latest, Love Jihad: A Feminist Retelling, the need of the hour.

 

The book utilises data, academic research on caste, gender and their intersection and the author’s family history and experiences to illustrate the changing socio-cultural landscape of India.

 

In a particularly moving anecdote, Ms Dalwai describes how the Konkani Muslim community, from which her father’s family came, has slowly lost its sense of syncretism. “The exposure to the Arab world and the dogma of Wahabi Islam has pushed Konkani Muslims towards conservative religious doctrine,” she explains, presenting an opportunity for readers to reflect on how their own communities have changed over time, with religion and conservatism coming to occupy a more central position. “It is not religiosity itself but the growing culture of religious consumption on all sides that has made factious relationships between religious communities inevitable,” she adds.

 

Ms Dalwai’s tone is usually sarcastic, irreverent and even flippant — but at certain points it becomes poignant, reminding the reader that the author is talking about her own experiences, which cannot always guarantee authorial detachment.

 

Another interesting aspect of the book is its attempt to situate the fear of “love jihad” in pre-Independence history. Ms Dalwai cites historian Charu Gupta, whose work on United Provinces (today’s Uttar Pradesh) in the 1920s depicts the outrage of upper-caste Hindu communities in response to Dalit women marrying Muslim men and converting to Islam, “be it for romance or escape from their painful lived reality”. Additionally, Census data from the late 19th century revealed the actual numbers making up different castes and communities, shifting perspectives towards power and unity in the subcontinent.

 

Ms Dalwai then discusses how the Hindutva project seeks to create a singular Hindu identity through inter-caste marriages, which under traditional Hindu society were frowned upon and punished. This relatively new trend can also be traced back to the early decades of the 20th century, when there were instances of the Hindu Mahasabha conducting marriages between Dalit women and upper-caste men to keep the former in the Hindu fold.

 

Through this, the reader is made aware of how the “love jihad” narrative is old wine in a new bottle — the spectre of a Hindu woman marrying beneath her caste has simply been replaced by the bogey of her marrying the dreaded Muslim with the power of “triple talaq”. According to Ms Dalwai, the original “love jihad” propaganda was “the fear of consensual unions that disregard social order”, or the caste hierarchy. “Two things are new in the love jihad propaganda. One, the replacement of the abhorred Dalit man by the feared Muslim man. Two, the denial of the existence of caste,” she writes.

 

Ms Dalwai’s preoccupation is with unpacking the two words that make up “love jihad”. She goes into some length to explain what “love” is in India — “a forbidden pleasure and an illicit activity” — and comes to the conclusion that it is indeed a battle, “as it takes effort, anguish and perseverance”. She also describes the concept of “jihad” in Islam and how it means “total surrender” to god. She explains the theology in an accessible manner, and shows how religion can’t be judged by its worst proponents.

 

In fact, she concludes the book with this: “We all come here for only one reason, even though our paths and expressions vary — and that reason is to learn how to love and how to receive love. That is our true essence as human beings.” This is a moment of sober reflection, one that is devoid of manufactured optimism. It reminds the reader that there is always a higher cause worth fighting for, and that should be the foundation stone for every kind of activism.

 

And it is activism that she prescribes as a solution to the madness engulfing Indian society today. According to her, grassroots activism needs to replace keyboard activism, along with charting out a space for Bahujan intellectuals in the mainstream. Only then, she believes, do we have a chance at countering the forces behind the “love jihad” panic.