In 2024, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad moved a state high court in a case involving two lions sharing a cage. An Akbar, it pointed out, could not keep house with a Sita. As a first step to avoid hurting majoritarian sentiments, a name change for the lioness was considered. Next, the zoo officer responsible for the naming was suspended by the state government.
You may greet this example, right at the beginning of law professor Sameena Dalwai’s book, with a hoot. Or you may approve the state’s punitive action. For both these reasons, Love Jihad a feminist retelling (Penguin) is worth a read, as it may be useful to see ‘love jihad’ from inside a home—Dalwai is the child of one.
At the outset, Dalwai peels back what ‘jihad’ actually means – an inner struggle towards the true and the right – and its eventual hitching to love by the Hindu Right. (In 2009, the Islamophobic phrase first gained traction when the VHP and Ram Sena began to claim that the Muslim youth in Kerala were luring women of other faiths into marriage to convert them to Islam.) The book is her attempt to turn the tables on this concerted stereotyping by foregrounding the layered reasons underneath.
Dalwai’s mother Shama Dalwai belongs to a Saraswat Brahmin family, her father Husain Dalwai is from a reformist Muslim family; neither converted after marriage. Both met in the ’60s as members of the Yuvak Kranti Dal, a Gandhian-social democratic socio-political movement and organisation in Maharashtra. Dalwai, an academic at OP Jindal University with an activist background, does not paper over the challenges of such unions.
Family testimonials
In Love Jihad…, Dalwai presents an autoethnographic account of her family and shows the adjustments big and small that members of the immediate and extended family need to make to transcend the differences in the culture of the ‘other’. For example, she seems to note with a cackle the horror of her paternal aunts on visiting homes on the maternal side where deities holding skulls and weapons are framed on the wall, making the former fearful of the “violent home” they had walked into.
The book also points out the increase in religious conservatism in all of India’s communities over time. Love Jihad records the first reaction of a Christian father, “to sword” Dalwai’s male cousin on learning that his daughter was to marry the man, and the father’s eventual putting down of the metaphorical sword to becoming his son-in-law’s morning-walk partner.
The book also reveals how children of mixed marriages and their parents negotiate the world outside the home, take the heat or resist it. Dalwal blithely says that her childhood friendships were mostly with “chandals” – children like her from inter-caste/inter-religious unions – and the more interesting lives she and her brother have had because they inhabited the political world of her activist parents.
School, though, was a battleground. For instance, she was nearly denied the first prize in Sanskrit because of her surname. The matter ended neatly and Dalwai went home with the prize when it was discovered that she is “a Pandit from her mother’s side”.
Rage is not part of the book, dry humour is. Humour, she suggests, is what the “last samurai” brings to the barricades, in adverse situations.
The real targets
Dalwai’s hit at the pillars of the love jihad propaganda is effective because she has placed stories from her home alongside case studies from her NGO work; stories of her mohalla with legal cases across the nation. She has shown the micro and the macro picture and how caste is the dirty secret of all kinds of sexual, social, economic and religious control.
“The myth of the conniving Muslim man, the glorious lives of Hindu women, and the Muslim woman who is also a victim of the Muslim man” – these three, she says, are the hyper-visibilised categories of the love jihad propaganda. What is actually invisibilised in this propaganda is the caste system, she says.
“The fear of consensual unions that disregard the social order – that is the original target of the love jihad propaganda. Two things are new now. One, replacement of the Dalit man by the feared Muslim man. Two, the denial of the existence of caste. The aim of the book was also to show what the life of a Hindu woman was before the so-called intervention of the ‘conniving Muslim man’, who has spoiled everything for her. I also wanted to look at his education, his employment prospects, the violence he faces, where he is placed in current India….”
Love Jihad…explores Hindu women’s lives in the context of marriage – from Bollywood’s fanning traditions like Karwa Chauth into a romantic fantasy and marriage of nakusa (unwanted) girls in rural areas, forced, in one instance, to stay married to the village idiot with no hope of support from her family to dowry deaths and the Jalgaon sex scandal of the ’90s in which hundreds of young women were trapped in sex rackets and videotaped. Dalwai asks why “nobody calls this love jihad”.
Munawar Faruqui, the Muslim comic with Hindu friends, a pain to the orthodox on both sides; Bilawal, the jeep mechanic continuing his father’s profession and forever outside formal education and employment; a Bohra Muslim man whose wife a Gujrati Hindu is always ‘the face’ in rental negotiations to S M Mushrif, a former IG of Maharashtra police who examined 2006-2013 cases including the German bakery case and the Mumbai suburban train serial blast cases, and insisted that “Muslims are being caught in the game of blasts” – these are some of the sketches that we meet in Dalwai’s book where Muslimness is asserted or in hiding, depending on the risk an individual is willing to take.
Repeating history
Dalwai wrote the book on a Humboldt Fellowship for experienced researchers during 2023-2025. She says she was reminded of the situation in India when encountering Holocaust memorials in Berlin. She brings up the “Never Again” vow, first chanted as a slogan by liberated Jewish prisoners at camps like Buchenwald as a pledge to stop fascism and state-sponsored genocide. “And yet we know what Israelis are doing to Palestinians in Gaza. So never again for whom? For them….” History is a repeat offender of even its most gruesome mistakes. Those on the offensive also claim to be the victim, she adds.
As she winds down her conversation with TMS, we ponder how the incidents she has detailed now have an air of the everyday. So far, 13 states in India have passed anti-conversion laws often called Freedom of Religion Acts. “Love jihad is nothing unique, it’s in the list of everyday horribles that we accept without batting an eyelid,” she says. “What I have said in the book should have been spectacular, but it is not.”