The Stealing of Skin

Love Jihad, Abducted Women, and Hindutva

The Indian past has never been more political. The Parallel Campaign is a fortnightly newsletter that questions the traditional (male, Hindu, upper-caste, ‘secular’) orthodoxies presented in Indian schools’ history curricula. We investigate historical narratives by consulting sources and perspectives outside established media, and we review some of the most interesting academic books and articles currently languishing behind university paywalls.

There are no definitive answers here because we want to invite as many people as possible to an alternative conversation—on what it means ‘to do history’. If nothing else, we hope to convey that history matters, and to spark our readers’ interest in undertaking historical enquiries of their own.

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A content-warning about this week’s newsletter: some of the historical interpretations and perspectives we discuss contain extremely explicit incitements to sexual assault, as well as crude statements about the blameworthiness of survivors of such experiences. 

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“Even now we proudly refer to the noble acts of Chhatrapati Shivaji... when [he] honourably sent back the daughter-in-law of the Muslim governor of Kalyan... But is it not strange that when [he] did so, [he did not] remember the atrocities and the rapes and the molestation perpetrated by Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori, Alla-udin Khilji and others on thousands of Hindu ladies and girls…

The souls of those millions of aggrieved women might have perhaps said ‘Do not forget, O Your Majesty…the unutterable atrocities and oppression and outrage committed on us...Let those sultans and their peers take a fright that in the event of a Hindu victory our molestation and detestable lot shall be avenged on the Muslim women….’ 

[But] it was the suicidal Hindu idea of chivalry to women which saved the Muslim women (simply because they were women) from the heavy punishments...”

V. D. Savarkar, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History (tr. S. T. Godbole, 1971)

It may be an old cliche that all is fair in love and in war (and in parliamentary procedure, if you’re the current government in the monsoon session)—but we in India have been taken beyond that distinction, and taught that, sometimes, love is war. 

“Love jihad”—an alleged organised campaign of Muslim men targeting women from non-Muslim communities, tricking them into falling in love, and deceiving them into converting to Islam, only to violate and cruelly mistreat them—has animated national discourse for years now. This conspiracy theory (and it has repeatedly, repeatedly been proven to be one) has been around since 2009, and has been peddled by various non-Muslim religious groups, not just Hindu ones. 

But it has only truly come into its own in the hands of Hindutva groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the Sri Ram Sena—and the BJP, always reliably in the run-up to elections. Campaigning for the 2014 Lok Sabha election, current Home Minister Amit Shah spoke of Muslims as “those who violate our women”, while before the 2020 Delhi Assembly elections, BJP MP Parvesh Verma claimed that the Shaheen Bagh protestors would “enter your houses, rape your sisters and daughters”. 

Source: Sri Ram Sena

In the last month alone:

• police in Assam ordered a two-month ban on an Assamese TV serial in which the protagonists are a Hindu woman and Muslim man—because it had “outraged the religious sentiments of certain sections of society”. The order followed protests by the Hindu Jagaran Mancha and the All Assam Brahmin Youth Council, amongst others, that the show promoted “love jihad”. (The lead actress of the show has faced rape threats online, presumably from people who have no sense of irony.)  

• the Kanpur police formed a Special Investigation Team to look into “love jihad”, following meetings between members of Hindu organisations and the Inspector-General. 

• it was reported that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, has asked officials to formulate a strategy, and bring an ordinance if required, to “prevent religious conversions in the name of love.”

Perverse Love-Rackets of Venomous Fanatic Animals

“Love jihad”, and the language of violation surrounding it, bears a striking resemblance to 20th century discourses of Hindu women being “abducted” by Muslim men in medieval and early modern times. The two concepts are not entirely the same—Charu Gupta points out (in this article, you can register and read for free) that the understanding of “love jihad” today is conditioned by post-9/11 fears of Islamic terrorism, and that it emphasises romance and women relinquishing their logical faculties, rather than simply being apprehended against their will. But there are enough resonances for us to comfortably argue that they are connected, and that love jihad’s notions of ‘losing’ Hindu women come in large part from abduction discourses. 

Abduction, in its 20th century telling, was a one-sided, and explicitly genocidal, affair—medieval Muslim conquerors violently stole women, Hindus were too ‘polite’ and ‘chivalrous’ to retaliate, and through the unimaginably brutal sexual degradation of these stolen women, a deliberate conspiracy to annihilate Hindu society was carried out over several centuries, because these women were lost forever. 

Fringe viewpoint? Not quite, as you will see. Easy target? Well—they’re *asking* for it.

Take A.S. Altekar—prominent historian of his era, interlocutor of Gandhi. In 1938, he published an influential text titled The Position of Women in Hindu Civilisation. In it, he argued that Indian attitudes toward women had changed for the worse following the advent of Islam on the subcontinent. The classical ancestors of modern Hindus, he said, had always made a point of readmitting women who had been abducted or sexually abused back into the social fold of their communities. But this generosity died out in South Asia by the 11th century with the establishment of the new millennium of ‘Muslim rule’.

In particular, Altekar charged medieval Hindus with departing from scripture and innovating ‘new notions of [sexual] purity’. Women who were abducted, he argued, were now given to understand that “their fate was sealed forever, the moment they had fallen into the hands of their enemy. No return was possible: they had to adjust themselves to their captors and new surroundings.” 

Altekar’s reasons for making such an argument are quickly made clear: then, as now, many leading Indian thinkers were full of ‘demographic anxiety’ about the relative numerical strength of their communities.

“Were the doors always kept open for women overtaken by misfortune to return to their families and society,” Altekar wrote, “the Muslim population in the once-undivided India would not have risen to nine crores. Hindu society has paid heavily for its narrow orthodoxy; it is high time that we should now take a rational view of the whole situation and cease to penalise women for their misfortune.”

This claim is unsupported by citations, references, or evidence. 

V. D. Savarkar—a man who is considerably more famous, and who continues to have mainstream credibility in many quarters today (the BJP manifesto from the 2019 Maharashtra elections vowed to propose him for a Bharat Ratna award)—echoed Altekar’s telling, in considerably less polite terms: 

“One side-issue of the Muslim religious aggression, which caused a continuous drain on the numerical superiority of the Hindus was the diabolic Muslim faith that it was a religious duty of every Muslim to kidnap and force into their own religion, non-Muslim women...To hesitate to acknowledge this hard fact under the guise of politeness is simply a puerile self-deception.” 

Like Altekar, Savarkar cites nothing to support this “hard fact”. The publisher’s note to the English translation of Six Glorious Epochs states that the books quoted in support of Savarkar’s claims were in fact added in later by the translator, Godbole. In his note, Godbole says: “A book of this type had to be substantiated with proofs...basic references were...an unavoidable necessity...but the author...could not be expected to stand the rigour of pin-pointing his references”. Okay, then. 

Anyway, in the vein of Altekar, Savarkar continues confidently on: “under the illusion of preserving the purity of their own caste and religion, the Hindu Society of the Islamic era began to enforce, as their religious duty, the bans on exchange of food, on inter-caste marriage, and other bans, even when they were harmful to the society.” On account of these very bans, Savarkar argues, “thousands of our Hindu ladies kindled the fires of johar [ritual immolation], century after century, in order to avoid violation at the hands of the Muslims”—it’s not like they could return, if abducted. 

A page from the Amar Chitra Katha comic Padmini, about the famous queen who committed jauhar to evade the Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khilji. Source: Exotic India

One way to avoid this “tremendous numerical loss”, in Savarkar’s view, would have been for Hindu rulers, whenever they were victors on the battlefields, to “pay the Muslim fair sex in the same coin...by conversion even with force”.

Indeed, this is the context in which Savarkar issues that rare critique of his beloved Chhatrapati Shivaji, which we quoted earlier. He argues against “misplaced chivalry to enemy women-folk” and states that, in fact, “the Hindus of the pre-Islamic era never interpreted chivalry to women in this anti-national silly way”. (Yes, the man to whom the BJP wanted to give a Bharat Ratna was arguing that not mistreating Muslim women was anti-national.) 

Whenever Altekar and Savarkar refer to the harm of abduction in terms of purity and pollution, they read a modern notion of rape— insurmountable humiliation and contamination, which makes return impossible—into past scenarios of abduction. Both are advocating certain historical lessons for Hindus, which you can see playing out in the theory of “love jihad”: 

One, it’s clear that being taken from your community is de facto equivalent to being raped, which in turn is de facto equivalent to having to become a Muslim. Two, Muslims have deliberately conspired to do this, generation over generation, for centuries, because they’ve never had to face consequences. Three, Hindus must accept the return of women for the greater good of the religion. 

(In the modern context of “love jihad”, where women are hoodwinked into loving Muslim men and therefore choosing to leave, this can be, and apparently is, understood to mean that Hindus must violently compel such a return if necessary, even if the woman they seek to return resists. This lesson has been well-taken, as in this excellent and chilling profile from April of a small-town Bajrang Dal anti-love-jihad enforcer, Vivek Premi.) 

And, from Savarkar, a fourth lesson: Hindus must rape Muslim women, as a form of vengeance and remembrance, if that is what it takes to make Muslims stop. Any other course of action makes them weak.

(Perhaps this line of thinking goes some way to making sense of the explicitly sexual nature of communal violence in South Asia, particularly during Partition.) 

Savarkar. Source: Scroll.in

But, without any evidence, the accounts of these Hindu nationalist men are just a story, not history. And it is exactly “in the telling of rape-as-story, in its different versions, its shifting nuances”—as the famous classicist Mary Beard mused in an account of her own rape—“that cultures have always debated most intensely some of the unfathomable conflicts of sexual relations and sexual identity.”

Certain stories allow bodies to be strategically imagined as violable, victimisable, avengeable, and for such violations to extend to community, to past and to future, as lessons ingrained in the collective self. Rape isn’t just an act: at this point, particularly in India, it has become an inexhaustible imaginative resource for anyone who wishes to cite injustices in the past in order to fuel resentment in the present. 

Chattel and Charisma(tic genealogies)  

But in a medieval/early modern understanding of South Asia, rape was not the fulcrum of humiliation or redemption for either individual women or the community to which they belonged: this is a fundamentally modern idea. The vast majority of women in medieval and early modern times, whatever their religion or origin, were more or less considered chattel; a rare few elite women were chattel-but-with-diplomatic-value. 

As Miranda Chaytor has argued, the concept of ‘rape’ only develops in the 17th century after there is a shift towards ideas of consent. If rape is sex with a woman without her consent, you have to first acknowledge that women have the capacity to consent.

Abduction is an earlier term that implies theft of another man’s belongings—which is what women were considered to be. Indeed, that is part of the conceptual difference between abduction and rape, which communal retellings of history tend to blur for heightened emotive value—it’s difficult to get people as worked up about theft as it is rape. 

In any condition of warfare or a vacuum of power, then, as Lisa Balabanlilar writes, “Princesses of the royal blood became valuable bargaining chips and spoils of war, not simply as victims of rape, but as carriers of charismatic, legitimizing genealogies.” In most cases where women were ‘taken’ from one side and handed over to another, this happened as part of diplomatic negotiations that were seen as an ordinary way of doing politics by both sides. It may have rankled, but practically any prince at this time was highly unlikely to see this as the irrevocable loss of legitimacy that we do. For instance, Akbar’s Rajput wives were part of this understanding of diplomacy and treaty-making, not women abducted to claim a religious victory.

Hindu kingdoms of this period saw non-elite women as chattel too—even kingdoms that Hindu nationalists consider to be historical examples of ideal rule, such as the Maratha Confederacy and the Rajput kingdoms of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Sumit Guha’s and Uma Chakravarti’s analysis of Peshwai slave records confirm: nine out of ten times, women aren’t stolen from their families. They are sold—either by families themselves, or by the state—and they don’t get to choose where they will go. 

A desolate woman. Source: British Museum

Guha and N.K. Wagle, in a separate study, show that Peshwai kotwali or magistrate’s archives also do not record any cases of the inter-religious kidnapping of Hindu women. Similarly, in the sanad parwana bahis of many early modern Rajput kingdoms such as Jodhpur and Marwar, crime against women (when recorded, which is mostly in cases involving upper-caste women) is overwhelmingly intra-communal—women are subject to violence by men of their own families, not by ‘abductors’. 

In these Rajasthani records, as Nandita Sahai and Divya Cherian have also pointed out, there isn’t even a word for rape: sexual misconduct is recorded as chaamchori, the ‘stealing of skin’, implying no more than a property loss for a head of household who owns a victimised woman. 

When it comes to the sexual politics of the distant past, calling an act ‘rape’ without having any desire or ability to understand the motivations of the actors involved, as Altekar and Savarkar did, is to uncritically single out some sex as destructive, vindictive, and having effects greater than any individual’s wants or desires. The right to power and justice is crucially entangled with the condemning of an act as rape, even if there’s no way to know exactly what happened. As a kind of ace card of gendered symbology, the concept of rape is constantly available as a metaphor for the political questions of a given time. In 1920s India, this metaphor proved particularly potent.

The Calculations of Cow Protection

The 1920s in India were a period of intense communalisation, in which the tying of religion to gender relations played an important role alongside projects such as the creation of modern Hindi. While different, local stories played out in regional press, there was an all-India pattern of using the Hindu woman’s body to command communal mobilisation. It was on the basis of this political context that Altekar and Savarkar set out their eventual accounts. Theirs were not fringe, extreme positions, but a veneer of ‘historical’ validation for dominant political propaganda. 

Charu Gupta notes that the period “witnessed a flurry of orchestrated propaganda campaigns and popular inflammatory and demagogic appeals by a section of Hindu publicists and [the] Arya Samaj against abductions and conversions of Hindu women by Muslim goondas”.

This campaign deployed newspapers pamphlets, meetings, handbills, posters, and novels, exerting such effective control over information sources that it created a near-monopoly over the representation of a communalised situation that it claimed was an everyday reality. In so doing, it went a long way to creating that communal ill-will in the first place. 

Although the discourse targeted Muslim goondas, the charge was extended—in a sort of guilt by association—to all Muslims. The novelist, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya, another figure highly-regarded in today’s India (especially for his work Devdas), went so far as to state that Islamic culture was supportive of abductions, and that Muslims who did not abduct Hindu women simply lacked the courage to do so. 

An extract from Gupta’s translation of Shiv Sharma Mahopadeshak’s Women’s Education, 1927. Source: Gendering Colonial India

What political purposes did this obsessive focus on abducted women serve? 

First, it enabled the formation of a Hindu collective identity. In particular, the propaganda focused on poor, low-caste women—enabling upper and lower castes to be part of a shared project.

As Pradip Kumar Datta puts it in the context of Bengal, “it elided two very different kinds of vulnerabilities: the middle-class condition could be equated with the poverty of the low castes by the simple expedient of demonstrating that the women of both were defenceless [against Muslim oppressors]. It could further be proclaimed as an attack on the home itself, and its control over it by the male.” In this, it tied consciously (if in a limited manner) into the project of Hindu reform by denouncing notions of gender and caste purity, on the grounds that they could ultimately cause Hindu society to go out of existence.

This can be seen in a series of cartoons published in the then United Provinces (today’s Uttar Pradesh), in Chand—the most famous Hindi magazine of the time. The cartoons focused on the conversions of Dalit women to Islam, and specifically admonished upper-caste Hindus for treating Dalit women badly. The argument went something like this: the cruelty of Hindu society, due to its fixation on purity, was forcing Dalit women to convert, and therefore, they would produce cow-killing Muslim children (no, really). 

Another magazine also in UP, Abhyudaya, said this (translation by Charu Gupta): 

Many of our Hindu women, whom we consider outcastes, are going into the hands of Muslims and Christians. How can these women, whom we treat so badly, become protectors of cow and worshippers of Ram and Krishna?....We should make all efforts to prevent our outcaste women from converting. It is imperative so that the number of cow-protectors does not reduce.

An illustration from Vyanga Chitravali, Kanpur, 1925. Source: Charu Gupta

Second, women in India gained enfranchisement throughout the 1920s, giving them a political significance they had not previously possessed—as well as a new level of self-activity and self-direction as a constituency. The Indian National Congress tended to be at the forefront of this kind of mobilisation of women—for instance, in Bengal in the demonstration against the Prince of Wales’ visit to Calcutta in 1921. As Datta notes, however, this mobilisation largely “extended rather than disturbed gender roles. Women were included in the procession so that they would become a potent rallying point if hurt by the police.” 

Hindu communal parties had lagged behind the Congress in this regard, so they tried to win over this new constituency by emphasising the abduction issue. They inspired women to some physical activity—self-defence classes in the Women’s Protection League (classic, of course, to get women to protect themselves instead of sorting out men)—but mostly relied on making the woman’s body a source of fear to herself as the basis for her political mobilisation.

“Such fear tended to circumscribe the political interests of women to self-protection alone,” Datta writes. “By locating women in a tight dialectic between their sexual vulnerability and physical self-protection, they were discouraged from situating themselves in the context of other political issues, that is, from seeing themselves in relationship to roles other than their simple sexual being.”

However, unlike other symbols of communal differentiation, the position of women is far too complex, and enmeshed in social hierarchies, to be the fixed sign of a rigid narrative. How long could an abduction discourse emphasise the oppression of women before it became impossible to ignore the role of men in doing the oppressing? 

Not long, it turned out. To take just two examples, the Women’s Protection League in Bengal began in the 1930s to extend the idea of ‘oppression’ beyond abductions to include dowry, the personal property laws that excluded women from inheriting, and constraints on widow remarriage. And women like Begum Rokeya Hossein produced wonderful literature that responded to the communalisation of gender relations by reframing the issue through critiques of the patriarchy. 

If Hindu nationalists today are drawing on this past to push new narratives of fear and mistrust, perhaps we can take heart that we have a history of women’s resistance to draw upon as well. 

Postscript

Instead of linking out to cool stuff like we usually do, we wanted to draw your attention to a few recent political developments that are all too closely related to some of what we’ve discussed in previous issues:  

• The chargesheet filed by Delhi police against the jailed PhD student and anti-CAA activist Sharjeel Imam includes the fact that Imam read Paul Brass—a widely-respected University of Chicago-trained political scientist—as evidence of his ‘terrorist radicalisation'. We cited Brass’s Language, Religion and Politics in North India just last fortnight as a classic on the Hindi-Urdu question. 

• The day after that post on language and national identity, Brass, and the denial of history that ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’ requires, Home Minister Amit Shah insisted that a country’s “biggest identity” is its language, and repeated the false claim that Hindi was a “unifying force for the whole nation for centuries”.  

• We named this newsletter The Parallel Campaign to mock, like Robert Musil did, the idea that culture can be encapsulated by committee. Cue the government’s convening earlier this month of a 16-member committee, comprised of doddering upper-caste north Indian men, to conduct “a study of the origins and evolution of Indian culture dating back to around 12,000 years ago”. Seriously.

If you enjoy our usual postscripts, follow us on Twitter! We tend to do mini-threads on topics we find interesting but which don’t always make it to our posts, like this one on Parsi history.