Unions that dare to transcend community boundaries, a relatively more common phenomenon nowadays compared to a century ago, are at risk of being outright criminalised for the first time
Asaf Ali and Aruna Asaf Ali, who married in 1928; Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Syud Hossain, whose union shocked the former’s family. Pic/X
Former diplomat T C A Raghavan’s Circles of Freedom studies the national movement from the perspective of Asaf Ali, a Muslim leader of some standing in the Congress. In doing so, Raghavan provides an insight into the society’s response to the inter-faith marriages of Asaf Ali and Aruna Ganguly and Syud Hossain and Sarup Kumari, later known as Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. The conflicting emotions these two pairs generated suggest a century of continuity in India’s conservative attitude towards Hindu-Muslim marriage, and which has now been weaponised as love jihad, a vicious term coined today to claim Muslims fake love to marry Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam.
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Asaf was already a rising Congress leader when he met Aruna in January 1928, through a mutual friend in Allahabad. He was 40 years old, she just 18 and under considerable pressure from her family to agree to an arranged marriage. He proposed marriage to her; she agreed. They were married in September through an Islamic ceremony, for which purpose she opted for what sociologists today call ‘conversion of convenience’ and took the name Kulsum Zamani. They subsequently went through a registered or civil law marriage in Delhi, Raghavan writes.
The reaction to their marriage was sharp enough for Aruna to characterise it, decades later, as an explosion of political opposition. The Hindu Mahasabha threatened it would kill the “Brahman woman.” Madan Mohan Malviya would turn his face away from Aruna during Congress meetings, unable to bear the thought of a “Bengali Brahman girl marrying a Muslim.”
The Times of India featured press reactions to the Aruna-Asaf marriage, which the paper itself saw as a “bold step in practical national unity.” Lala Lajpat Rai’s Milap claimed Asaf had married Aruna to garner Hindu votes in the hope of reversing his defeat in a 1926 election, and predicted this method of forging Hindu-Muslim unity would fail.
Another newspaper, Sandesh, was vitriolic: “If social relations with Musalmans increase, every Hindu must…feel anxious about his daughter or sister.” Denying Aruna any agency, the paper said when even Muslim nationalists like Asaf engage in a treacherous, vile act, it is natural for Hindus to regard every Muslim as a “red lamp, as a danger signal.” Another publication blamed the English education for the craze among girls to marry Muslims. These utterances are being echoed in 2024.
The marriage infuriated Urdu publications as well, with a Khilafat editorial, attributed to Maulana Shaukat Ali, saying, “The Hindu is a creature that knows how to destroy others when they are sleeping.” The Aruna-Asaf wedding prompted Medina to sarcastically write, “Shout Hindu-Musalman marriage ki jai.” Riyasat, by contrast, congratulated Asaf and claimed marriage was one among many methods of uniting Hindus and Muslims.
This was the point Gandhi too made to Aruna, whose riposte was that she married Asaf not because he was Muslim but because of their shared interest. Gandhi’s position was a reversal of his opposition to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, nee Sarup Kumari, daughter of Motilal Nehru and sister of Jawaharlal, eloping and marrying Syud Hossain, Asaf’s friend from his university days in London.
When Motilal decided, in 1919, to publish a newspaper from Allahabad, the Bombay Chronicle loaned Syud, a gifted journalist with impeccable nationalist credentials, to edit it. Syud was housed in the Nehrus’ sprawling Anand Bhavan, and he and Sarup were, within months, deeply in love. N S Vinodh’s A Forgotten Ambassador in Cairo, a biography of Syud, vividly describes the ceremony in which he and Sarup were hurriedly married by a maulana. The Nehrus reeled in shock.
Gandhi, the nation’s veritable conscience-keeper, stepped in. He severely admonished Syud and Sarup. The two were separated. Due to accompany a delegation to London, Syud was advised to stay behind in Europe for a few years. He did not return to India for over two decades.
Sarup was banished for a few months to Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad. In a letter to Sarojini Naidu’s daughter Padmaja, Sarup claimed Gandhi told her that her affair with Syud had “shaken his belief” in all Muslims, and scolded Syud for making love to a Hindu girl whom he should have looked upon as his sister. In the same letter, Sarup mocked Gandhi for writing in Young India, in February 1920, that Hindu-Muslim marriage would “seriously interfere with the growing unity between Hindus and Mahomedans.” Not too different from the Hindu Right’s reaction to the Aruna-Asaf marriage.
By 1928, Gandhi had changed his opinion on inter-faith relationships, as he did on so many other issues. Yet it is also true, as Raghavan suggests, that the political implication of a Nehru marrying a Muslim was far more serious than Asaf marrying Aruna.
The past of Hindu-Muslim marriage shows the Hindu Right has not significantly altered its position on it. With interfaith weddings no longer confined to the elite class, the Hindu Right has now deployed its power to enact laws holding out the threat of criminalising the love that dares to transcend community boundaries, as the pairs of Aruna-Asaf and Sarup-Syud did a century ago—and a few still do. Love Jihad, indeed, symbolises the nadir of social regression.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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