In her work on early 20th century Hindi popular media, historian Charu Gupta talks about how the new, cheap mass media of print magazines and novels brought into public view, diverse accounts of transgressive love-elopements of inter-caste/faith love
Illustration/Uday Mohite
In her work on early 20th century Hindi popular media, historian Charu Gupta talks about how the new, cheap mass media of print magazines and novels brought into public view, diverse accounts of transgressive love—elopements of inter-caste/faith love, bhabi-dewar love and same-sex relationships among them. Bestselling among the public, they also aroused moral panic among some elite Hindu men. As Gupta writes, “Here, romance, elopements and conversions easily slipped into the rhetoric of abduction… a proliferation of popular inflammatory and demagogic appeals, as never before, based on stories of atrocities against Hindu women, ranging from allegations of rape, aggression and abduction, to luring, conversion and forced marriage by Muslim males.”
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The newly passed ‘anti-conversion’ law in UP, is similarly, the climax of a wild-eyed propaganda campaign featuring anti-Romeo squads and love jihad; a conservative, fundamentalist desire to suppress and control a growing openness in intimate and social life, which constantly bursts forth on the new medium of our times—the Internet, including the now banned Tik Tok.
The law is in continuation with the increasing institutionalising of Hindu right wing ideology, but its core suspicion of heterogeneity and mixing have always been part of our system, even that which seems liberal. Why else would the Special Marriages Act, which provides for court marriages rather than religious ones, require those wishing to marry under the Act to notify the registrar 30 days before? This notice is then publicly posted to ensure no one has an objection (much as the current UP law requires anyone wishing to convert to notify the government so they can verify that the conversion is not forced).
What is the relevance of an objection to the marriage of consenting adults whether within the ambit of religious frameworks or outside them? If the idea is to protect people from fraudulence—say bigamy—then should that not be a requirement for all marriages? A skepticism about autonomous private life runs through marriage laws—as if those who are choosing to leave the boundaries of conventional norms cannot be trusted, while what happens within norms is not to be questioned.
We are endlessly told that if we stay inside the Lakshman Rekha of identity and personal choices—we will somehow be protected from the evil ends that await those who transgress these boundaries. Yet the long list of matrimonial betrayals and family violence belie this propaganda. It is tempting to counter the rhetoric of love jihad with examples of inter-faith unions, but we must question if this binary of traditional versus progressive is enough.
Those who wish to dominate us always find ways to censor and control our private life. Some do it by making our desires subservient to law and tradition. Others, even in love and chosen relationships, through emotional control and personal betrayals. The inability, or rather unwillingness, to accept another person’s autonomy is rooted in gender and caste inequality and also helps to maintain it, across the board.
But, despite everything, human beings resist these oppressions when they persist in following their hearts. This points us to a radical new political language shaped by the domain of desires. This is a politics of equality where individuality does not subsume community, nor community trump individuality. The coexistence of these two facets of ourselves, holds a key to many other kinds of coexistence.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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