Carceral domesticities and the geopolitics of Love Jihad

Abstract

Religious conversion and marriage across communal lines have long been contentious in India. The contemporary debate on ‘Love Jihad’ – the Hindu Nationalist conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of waging a religious war by seducing and converting unsuspecting Hindu brides – exemplifies the simultaneously geopolitical and biopolitical anxiety that religious conversion inspires. In this paper, I focus on the case of Hadiya, a young woman from Kerala, who, in 2016, found herself remanded first to her university’s hostel – as dormitories are called in India – and then to her parents’ home as various courts debated on the authenticity of her conversion to Islam, and her marriage to a Muslim partner. Through an examination of media discourse and court records in this case, the paper argues that in ‘Love Jihad’, the domestic and the carceral are rendered inextricably intertwined through an affective politics that presents desire outside the bounds of caste and religion as geopolitically misoriented. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on the phenomenology of orientation, I focus on the intimate geographies of the hostel, which I argue exemplifies a site of carceral convergence between nation and family, in the management of the affective disorder associated with religious conversion.

Introduction

In January 2016, KM Asokan filed a petition in the High Court of Kerala in Southern India for the writ of habeas corpus (“Asokan.K.M vs The State Of Kerala,” 2016). He alleged that his daughter, Akhila, then a 24-year-old student, had been illegally detained in the home of two of her Muslim friends (“Asokan.K.M vs The State Of Kerala,” 2016). Habeas Corpus petitions are widely used in India by families who seek the return of daughters, who leave home in contexts of domestic conflict: for instance, when they seek to marry men outside their religious or caste community (Baxi, 2006). Akhila, it transpired, had converted to Islam, and was now known as Hadiya. In the two years that followed, Hadiya would become a household name in India, as the case of her conversion to Islam and eventual marriage to Shefin Jahan, a Muslim man of her choosing, made headline news. Her ordeal also brought renewed attention to the Hindu Nationalist conspiracy theory of ‘Love Jihad’: the idea that Muslim men are waging a religious war by seduction: converting and marrying naïve Hindu women (Tyagi and Sen, 2020). In this paper, I focus in particular on Hadiya’s detention at her family’s home by court order, to ask how the domestic and the carceral converge on anxieties to do with the misorientation of affect – directed and attached wrongly – attributed to religious conversion and marriage (Gupta, 2016). In this, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological work (Ahmed, 2004b, 2006, 2010), prominently her reading of ‘orientation’ as an embodied expression of alignment (Ahmed, 2006), to ask how an affective politics underlies the normalisation of carceral domesticities in Hindu Nationalist India.

Hadiya was never accused of a crime; however, at different times, she was held in court-mandated custody at her family’s home and at two different hostels: boarding houses or residence halls that accommodate single working women and students. Hostels typically uphold norms of caste respectability by enforcing carceral conditions – strict curfews, rules of conduct and dress, surveillance in common areas through CCTV cameras – even on residents who have chosen to reside in them (Krishnan, 2016, 2019). The Indian state has a long history of using such institutions as temporary remand homes for non-criminal women and juveniles (Agnes, 1992; Govindan, 2013; Sunder Rajan, 2003). In this role, the carceral domestic function of the hostel – as a home-like space that enforces respectable domesticity through prison-like conditions – is rendered spectacularly visible. Hadiya’s confinement in her parents’ home against her wishes by a Kerala High Court order that also temporarily annulled her marriage, further indicates the conditional terms on which consent is available to adult women whose desires register as misoriented (Ahmed, 2006).

Using Hadiya’s case and the anxiety around Love Jihad as a lens, this paper asks how carceral domesticities in Hindu Nationalist India index ‘home’ as an intimate site of geopolitical containment. By ‘carceral domesticities’ I refer in this paper to the rendering of the home – and of the home-like space of the hostel – into a securitised site of enclosure, immobilisation, and affective reorientation. Hindu Nationalist demographic anxieties have undergirded projects of sexual discipline since at least the early 20th century in India (Gupta, 2016; Sarkar, 2018). The 20th century articulation of upper-caste and middle-class respectable womanhood was rooted in an affective politics: a “narrative of injury” (Ahmed, 2004b: 33) cast Muslim men as potential predators: liable to take advantage of the sheltered naivete of Hindu women, force them into religious conversion, and marry them (Gupta, 2001). The contemporary discourse of ‘Love Jihad’, which has circulated over the last two decades, builds on this history, whilst also invoking a global security anxiety that stigmatises Muslim men as predatory, sexually deviant, and geopolitically threatening (Bacchetta, 1999; Puar, 2007; Rai, 2004). Within this context, non-criminal custodial detention is presented as protective: an enmeshment of care and control that seeks to bring back in line misdirected desires.

Feminist scholars writing on India have widely noted that since the late 19th century, women’s sexual consent in South Asia has been shaped by projects of nationalist domestic modernisation, which, in India, took a Hindu Nationalist flavour by the late 19th century (Das, 2007; Jayakumari Devika, 2005; Sarkar, 2001; Sreenivas, 2008). Hadiya’s family belongs to the Izhava caste in Kerala, an untouchable community in the 19th and early 20th centuries that is now classified as an “Other Backward Class”. This shift was the result of a project of social modernisation in the early 20th century, founded on a radical rejection of untouchability, which also reorganised Izhava domestic life and gender relations to centre practices of respectability typically associated with higher castes (F. Osella and Osella, 2000). Simultaneously, Izhava communities have come to identify with a narrative of future-oriented modernity that ultimately excludes communities and practices typically identified with a lack of modernity in the modernist narrative of Indian postcolonial statehood (McDowell, 2011; C. Osella and Osella, 2006). This attachment to modern futurity – elaborated in later sections of this paper in dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s work (Ahmed, 2006) – is also, a national orientation, refracted through identification with elite Hinduism. The coding of high-caste Hindu domestic modernity as secular and Indian articulates a boundary of the familiar (Ahmed, 2006) for the community of the nation-state that excludes Muslims and communities who are imagined to lag behind in the temporal hierarchy of the modern (Ramberg, 2016). This analytic also illuminates the emergence of Kerala, an ostensible bastion of secularism, ruled by a Communist government, as a central site for anxieties about Love Jihad.

The domestic further diagrams a relationship between the intimate and the geopolitical. Hadiya’s case emerged in 2018 as a spectacular rendering of this phenomenon: her attachment to Islam and her Muslim husband read by her family, the courts, and the press as affective misorientation through the prism of a 21st century security anxiety about terrorism, as geopolitical misdirection. In the texts of the trials and media discourse alike, the anxiety is of Hadiya turning away from national womanhood, amidst rumours that she was likely to be trafficked to Syria if left without the protective shroud of carceral domesticity (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). The home’s carceral function engages the slippages between ‘domestic’ as a dwelling-place and the security infrastructures of the nation-state (Vasudevan and Smith, 2020).

In her phenomenological work on orientation – the turning of the body towards an object of attachment – Sara Ahmed (2006: 62) draws attention to the possibilities of subversion inherent in attachments that are out of line: “something other than the reproduction of the facts of the matter happens”. For Ahmed, this possibility of misorientation carries a geopolitical valence: affective misalignment is often read as cartographically turning away from a national community, towards a different geography of belonging. To be oriented towards an object is to be aligned with it: it “involves the intimacy of coinhabiting spaces” (Ahmed, 2006: 111): being at home. In forcibly keeping Hadiya at home – with her family and in hostels where she was detained – I argue that Hadiya was subject to a project of corrective reorientation. It is worth noting here the language of ‘ghar wapsi’ – homecoming – in which Hindu Nationalist discourse frames conversions from Islam to Hinduism. Ghar wapsi stages in the 21st century an early 20th century narrative of Hinduism as the ‘original’ faith of the subcontinent (Gupta, 2001, 2016), casting Muslims as having been led astray towards other less homely (G. Patel, 2004) geographies.

The research for this paper draws on an analysis of the judgements in Hadiya’s case, and two similar cases from the same state, Kerala. I also draw on the media coverage around these cases. In this, I build on previous ethnographic and historical research on educational hostels and young womanhood in Chennai, conducted between 2012 and 2018. This initial work interrogates the carceral potentials of hostels, and the terms on which families, educational institutions, and the state shape women’s capacity for sexual consent (Krishnan 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). In the sections that follow, I locate the arguments in this paper within debates on home, nation, and religious conversion in feminist geography and South Asian Studies, before introducing the carceral domesticity of hostels. In the final two sections, I examine legal cases in Kerala that address Love Jihad, culminating in a discussion of Hadiya’s ordeal.

Home, nation, religious conversion

The domestic has had a complex life within the study of the geopolitics that is illustrative of the slippages inherent in this term. It has been used on the one hand in classical geopolitics as the opposite of ‘foreign’, denoting ‘home’ territory. Within feminist geopolitics, ‘domestication’ has been examined through practices through which “geopolitics is rendered familiar, sanitised, embodied and enacted” (Carter and Woodyer, 2020: 1046) in the intimate spaces of everyday life. Problematising any distinctions between a public world of geopolitics, and the private sphere of home, this scholarship takes seriously the potential of affects, mundane acts, everyday forms of speech, and embodied acts to shape and reproduce geopolitical discourse (Brickell, 2012a, 2012b; S. H. Smith, 2009). This scholarship draws attention to the ways in which practices at home such as marriage, sex, and childbearing come to be suffused with geopolitical meaning, and act as tools for the articulation of geopolitical discourse (Culcasi, 2019; Little, 2020; Sharp, 2022; S. Smith, 2020). Home, as Veena Das (2007) has shown, is necessarily repeatedly remade in the everyday work of social reproduction, re-drawing borders both geopolitical and intimate.

In India, this rendering of home and nation as tense bedfellows is further complicated by the project of postcolonial modernity, which has iterated home as a site of nationalist claim away from the public world of colonial subjugation (Chatterjee, 1989). Feminist historians complicate this ‘nationalist resolution of the woman question’, not only for its centring upper-caste and middle-class womanhood as paradigmatically national, but also by drawing attention to the reification of Hindu cultural nationalism writ on the bodies of women in the privileging of ‘home’ within nationalist discourses (Jayakumari Devika, 2005; Gupta, 2001; Sarkar, 2001). In making sense of women’s agency in this context, feminist historians draw attention not only to women’s resistance against this positioning but also to histories of complicity between upper-caste women and Hindu cultural nationalism, historically and in the present (Banerjee, 2003; Kosambi, 1998; Mani, 1987; Nair, 1994; Sarkar, 2001; M. Sethi, 2002).

Religious conversion and marriage have long been central loci at which debates on gender, nation, and home have converged in India. The British colonial state both cultivated a secular public culture through anglicised education and regulated religious personal law through a policy of equidistance from all religions (Newbigin, 2013; Viswanathan, 1998). Talal Asad argues that modern secularism as a practice of equidistance comes to stand in for “the essential freedom and responsibility of the sovereign self in opposition to the constraints of that self by religious discourses” (Asad, 2003: 16). This reading resonates in the terms on which India’s colonial past leeches into its present in naturalising Hindu cultural practice as secular and Indian, whilst othering Islam. To put it in the terms of Sara Ahmed’s phenomenology (2006), everyday upper-caste Hindu cultural practice gathers to itself connotations of the nation-as-home, whilst Islam is a site of disorienting defamiliarisation. Conversion to Islam engages geopolitics in that it is a subversion of this Hindu norm coded as secular: in converting, the citizen becomes simultaneously a subject of a religious geography of belonging, thus undermining her containment within the secular nation-state (Viswanathan, 1998).

In colonial India, religious conversion often offered women a means to escape the control of family through marriage across religious lines (De, 2010; Gupta, 2014). The territorial anxiety that women’s religious conversion indexes was most prominent in the aftermath of the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Thousands of women on each side were ‘returned home’ by mutual agreement between India and Pakistan, to their families. This process sent Muslim women to Pakistan, and Hindu or Sikh women to India, regardless of whether they had been kidnapped or had moved voluntarily, and without heed to the work they had done to build home where they had arrived (Butalia, 2017). Many such women indeed did not return to their family homes – or were rejected – choosing instead to make home in the ashrams or shelters where they had been brought (Menon and Bhasin, 1993). This project of return also reiterated a homology between the boundaries of the nation-state and of home: fixing women in place, even as they made home in settings rendered unfamiliar by a violence simultaneously geopolitical and intimate (Das, 2007).

These debates continue to be echoed in the present. Questions around secularism in contemporary India frequently circle the debate around the continued existence of separate personal laws for members of different religions in India and demands for a uniform civil code (Fernandes, 2011). As scholars of personal law have noted, these debates tend to present Hindu civil law as effectively secular in its content, in that it is seen as the product of a modernising reform project in the early 20th century (Newbigin, 2009; Sunder Rajan, 2003). Muslim personal law, on the other hand, is presented as distinctly religious and at odds with the secular promise of the Indian nation-state (De, 2009). Within this logic, religious conversion – particularly to Islam, which is presented as radically anti-modern within contemporary security discourse (Puar, 2007) – registers as incommensurable with both the time of secular modernity, and with agency directed towards the materialising of liveable futurity. In this context, inter-religious marriages are complex, particularly when opposed by the families, due not only to societal pressure but the role of the police and legal structures in liaising with families, and even ‘returning’ young women – typically Hindu and upper-caste – to their parents’ homes against their will (Bhandari, 2020; Mody, 2008).

Within these debates, Kerala – the Southwestern State that is home to Hadiya – occupies a somewhat unexpected position. On the one hand, it has been argued that Kerala’s modernity is distinctly transnational: formed through its trade with the Middle East and North Africa, and by the contemporary mobilities to those regions that allow for substantial remittances into the state (J Devika, 2012). The Izhava community, from which Hadiya comes, have been central to this narrative both of 19th century international trade, and of contemporary migration (C. Osella and Osella, 2006). This is, however, complicated by the growing Islamophobia in Kerala that has taken root as anxieties about Muslim upward social mobility have grown increasingly pervasive, shaping practices of gendered respectability (J Devika, 2020). Home, in this context, is made through practices of domesticity that ally Izhava communities with high-caste groups like Nairs (J Devika, 2020), in the process othering Muslims and non-elite castes more sharply. Homemaking here constitutes an attachment to the modern temporality of the nation-state, which in turn is imbricated with global neoliberal time (G. Patel, 2000).

“Acts of domestication” Sara Ahmed (2006, 117) writes in her work on orientation, “are not private; they involve the shaping of collective bodies, which allows some objects and not others to be within reach.” Orientation, for Ahmed (2006) is as much about recognition as it is about direction: in being appropriately directed, objects become familiar, at home with the logics through which they are refracted. Potentials for queering, in Ahmed’s thinking (2006) lie in the misorientation of affect. Whilst this paper is not about same-gender desire, scholars like Paola Bacchetta (1999) draw attention to the queering – as defamiliarizing, rendering odd – inherent in the Hindu Nationalist stigmatising of Muslim sexuality. Bacchetta (1999) argues that Hindutva is founded on the reification of sexual normativity – equally caste-endogamous marriage, and heterosexism – and the iteration of subversive sexual attachments as not only socially out-of-place, but geopolitically dangerous: anti-national, and exiled from the national family. In the contemporary moment of global Islamophobia, this narrative resonates with the concatenation of “monster-terrorist-fag” (Puar, 2017): a homophobic stigmatising of Muslim sexuality in the post-9/11 geopolitical landscape that sits alongside the pinkwashing discourse that presents Islam as homophobic, against queer acceptance in the Hindu and Christian-secular West. Carceral domesticities materialise here in the containment of young Hindu women within the familiar enclosure of home, keeping them knowable within the logics of national womanhood, against this geography of sexual disorder accrued to the bodies of Muslim men.

Young womanhood and the ordinariness of carcerality

A growing scholarship also shows that anxieties about women’s sexual agency outside the bounds of caste and community in India often materialise in restrictions on their mobility (Krishnan, 2021; Parikh, 2017; Phadke et al., 2011). Parents and families, educational authorities, and even judicial processes frequently seek to ‘protect’ young women from their own desires – imagined to be wrongly oriented (Ahmed, 2006) – by immobilising them within the home, or in the home-like spaces of hostels, where it is imagined that they will change their minds and reorient themselves towards liveable futures that are commensurate with national and neoliberal projects (Krishnan, 2019; V. Patel, 2017). For young women who belong to communities that are seeking to establish themselves as respectable, these pressures are often heightened (Krishnan, 2022; Twamley and Sidharth, 2019).

Founded from the 19th century, hostels for women across the colonial world were rooted in the gendered and racialized afterlives of colonial social reform (Demian, 2017; Gaitskell, 1979). These institutions were established to train young women into responsible citizenship, both through formal projects of education, and through the experience of living together. The project of reforming the home and making national futurity was sited not only in the ‘home science’ curricula that colleges taught (Hancock, 2001) but in the spatial politics of removing women away from their homes to be made modern (Krishnan, 2017). In this, they bear the marks of the intimate, and normalised violence of the history of domestic reform as an upper caste and imperialist project of ‘uplift’. In building hostels, reform-minded educators sought to construct oases of modernity, civility, and safety in cities that were seen as improperly modern (Krishnan 2017, 2019). These days, hostels are typically privately-run establishments offering dormitory-style accommodations for college-going and working women. Naming the carceral function these institutions perform is, in the aftermath of the Pinjra Tod (break the cage) movement’s agitations on this issue, far from unusual today (Lochan, 2019; Roy, 2016). Yet, in cities to which a growing number of women move for education and employment, they are still widely considered the safest form of accommodation for unmarried women. ‘Safe’ in this context is a slippery term, denoting both protection from sexual and other dangers, as well as respectability (Krishnan, 2016, 2019).

In 2013, Dhamini, the daughter of a prominent Tamil filmmaker, Cheran, was reported to have left her home to move in with her boyfriend, whom she intended to marry (Krishnan, Forthcoming). This young man belonged to a lower caste than Cheran’s family, who were unhappy with Dhamini’s decision and went to court to have her returned to them. The court remanded Dhamini to her former school principal’s care: a move that symbolically undid her adulthood, putting her in the place of a schoolgirl again, whilst also placing her under carceral control. Dhamini’s case did not provide the vindication for sexual agency that Hadiya’s did. Dhamini chose to return to her parents, and the rumour in college circles was that she had done so after watching Aadhalal Kaadhal Seiveer (2013, ‘And so you shall love’), a film told as a cautionary tale that warns young women against the dangers of youthful passion. No one I met in Chennai was surprised at this turn of events – indeed, this was often the fate of ordinary elopements. Further, being ‘gated’ in the hostel for having tried to ‘escape’ its carceral confines with a sexual partner was a remarkably common experience. In its bare bones, Hadiya’s case is, if anything, banal, as much as it is spectacular in its articulation of the public secret (Baxi, 2014; Mookherjee, 2015) of complicity between an ostensibly secular state and the upper-caste Hindu family that undergirds the regulation of consent in young women’s lives.

Arguably it is this ordinariness of carcerality – which a significant majority of women who attend institutions of higher education in India experience – that allows for the spectacular carceral domesticities in cases like Hadiya’s. The arguments made in favour of such ordinary carcerality by state actors explicitly name the problem of affect misdirected. Speaking in 2017 in response to demands to repeal curfew rules at state colleges in New Delhi, Maneka Gandhi, the then Minister for Women and Child Development, noted that young women were likely to have “hormonal outbursts” that might lead them down disreputable paths if they did not have curfews (Staff, 2017).

Carceral Domesticities bring into view enclosure as a central aspect of homemaking within the normative paradigm of the nation-state. Scholars drawing on Foucault’s reading of carceral society have drawn attention to spaces of containment that exist in the form of the prison, but also within other institutions and geographies of immobilization – including hospitals, asylums, and orphanages (Disney, 2017; Hodges, 2005; Pandian, 2008; Philo, 2014; Sen, 2005). When the carceral and the domestic have been brought together in the scholarship, it has tended to be focused on how communities in and around prisons make ‘home’ and engage in forms of social reproduction (Haley, 2013; Nieftagodien, 2017). My work shifts the focus to the home as the site of immobilization and reform, within a liberal paradigm of care. Through enclosure and immobilisation, carceral domesticities return their subject – the young woman – to homeliness (G. Patel, 2004), i.e., to being the still figures around whom national fantasies of geopolitical dominance, morality, development, and consumption circulate. For Geeta Patel (2004), the stillness of the woman as the central subject around whom myths of nation and community are woven suggests not only immobility but unchangingness: recalling the bourgeois nationalist resolution of the woman question (Chatterjee, 1989), in its relegation of the woman to an interior unchanging site of tradition within the home. If misorientation occurs, as Sara Ahmed (2006) writes, in the disruption of the work of social reproduction, then containment in the domestic space of the home or the hostel forces the young woman to stand still, reorienting her towards reproducing respectable national womanhood.

Materialising a rumour: Love Jihad

With the electoral success of Hindu Nationalism, geopolitical anxieties attached to inter-religious marriage have intensified. Moral panics in contemporary India circulate through messaging platforms like WhatsApp, domesticating a far-right discourse, and translating it into the intimate spaces of everyday life (Williams et al., 2022). ‘Home’ that is, becomes a site at which borders materialise, through affective orientations that accrue in everyday practices of social reproduction. By 2014, when the BJP had a resounding victory in the Parliamentary election, bringing Narendra Modi to Prime Ministership, the conspiracy theory of ‘Love Jihad’ was widely circulated in right-wing circles, and the promise of anti-Love-Jihad laws was part of the electoral landscape (Gupta, 2016; Tyagi and Sen, 2020). In this period and since, vigilante violence against Muslim men who are thought to be engaging in relationships with Hindu women has escalated, in addition to legal cases that centre on the issue of ‘Love Jihad’ (A. Sethi, 2015).

Despite the lack of evidence for ‘Love Jihad’, courts, legislative bodies, and politicians alike have repeatedly treated this phenomenon as a valid threat, indicating the intimate reach of the geopolitical threat of ‘terrorism’, and writ on the bodies of young Hindu women, figured in this discourse as vulnerable and incapable of making sound decisions for themselves. Rumour inscribes a material geography of anxiety here, marking continuities between Muslim youth – particularly men – and a narrative of geopolitical terror, sexual violence, and trafficking that runs from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia.

The terminology of ‘Love Jihad’ emerged in the early years of the 21st century. Veena Das (2010) writes about a pamphlet circulated by members of the far-right student group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in 2009, that referred to a Malayalam-language newspaper in Kerala having reported on the phenomenon of a religious war by seduction: Love Jihad. In that same year, a court in Kerala had directed the police to investigate whether a conspiracy of ‘Love Jihad’ – i.e., forced conversion by seduction – was afoot, and whether any foreign organisations were involved in funding (“Shahan Sha A vs State Of Kerala,” 2009). In a judgement on the case in question, the court notes that police investigations yielded no evidence of any organisation or conspiracy to seduce and convert unsuspecting women to Islam, and no foreign involvement (“Shahan Sha A vs State Of Kerala,” 2009). This rumour mill was, nevertheless, compelling enough for the police report to note that it would continue to investigate Muslim groups on university campuses in Kerala that were believed to be directing forced conversion and inter-religious marriage in the state (“Shahan Sha A vs State Of Kerala,” 2009). Truth, Sara Ahmed (2003) writes hinges on a politics of containment: keeping in check the people and feelings that might question a rendering of the true that is aligned with what feels correct. Collectives, as she argues elsewhere (2004a) are formed through such circulations of affects that feel true. Even with no proof, Indian courts have repeatedly found it plausible that Muslim groups are engaging in forced conversion and other ‘anti-national’ activities.

The report mentions the Popular Front of India (PFI), a Muslim student group that has a presence mainly in Southern India, and which has come under significant scrutiny for its ‘radicalism’ and suspected connection with forced conversions (“Shahan Sha A vs State Of Kerala,” 2009). The PFI was banned by the Indian government in September 2022 from continuing its activities for at least five years, after raids carried out by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Enforcement Directorate, who have argued that the organisation is radicalising youth, towards violence (Natarajan and Ali, 2022). Crucially for this paper, the PFI has been widely linked within popular Hindu Nationalist discourse with a concerted programme of ‘Love Jihad’. Islamic education centres associated with the PFI in Kerala, including the Sathya Sarani in Malappuram were investigated by the NIA in 2017, when the Supreme Court ordered an investigation into allegations of ‘Love Jihad’ in Hadiya’s case (“Shafin Jahan v. KM Asokan and others ”, 2018). Hadiya herself had attended the Sathya Sarani for a time and was associated with various others who had also attended the institution. While the NIA found that the PFI was involved in facilitating at least 11 inter-religious marriages – the PFI contributed funds to Hadiya’s legal defence – the agency found no evidence of any concerted plan of seduction, and conversion (“Shafin Jahan v. KM Asokan and others ”, 2018).

Indeed, a 2017 Kerala High Court judgement in a case where the parents of a Hindu woman alleged Love Jihad when she married a Muslim man notes the court’s alarm at the growing number of such allegations, “even if there was platonic love between the spouses” (“Anees Hameed vs State Of Kerala,” 2017: 7). The court in this case decided for the young woman, writing

We applaud the extraordinary courage shown by Sruthi to live up to her conviction and decry the attempt of her parents to deflect the course of justice by misleading litigations…she cannot be detained against her wishes either at her parental home or in the Yoga Kendra. (“Anees Hameed vs State Of Kerala,” 2017: 7)

The Yoga Kendra – a Hindu spiritual centre – was the residential institution in which Sruthi’s parents had forced her to live, after she and her husband Anees Hameed were forcibly separated by police (7Anees Hameed vs State Of Kerala,” 2017). Sruthi alleged that she had been subject to Hindu reconversion – ghar wapsi – procedures at the Yoga Kendra, and even that the institution had published false notices that claimed to be authored by the PFI, announcing that she was to be trafficked to Syria or Yemen (“Anees Hameed vs State Of Kerala,” 2017). Much as in Hadiya’s case, here as well, the anxiety around converted women becoming Jihadi brides shapes the geopolitical logic of Love Jihad, justifying and materialising domestic carceralities as corrective and caring. Even though Sruthi had not actually converted to Islam here, the affective logic of Love Jihad as a moral panic reads her as aligned with a Muslim geography beyond India.

In its decision, the court notes as a reason for its belief that Sruthi can make sound decisions, her physical appearance – the sindoor or red mark of marriage that is traditional to Hindu women on Sruthi’s forehead – that indicated that she had never converted to Islam, though she had indeed married a Muslim against her family’s wishes. She also swore to the court that she would never convert (“Anees Hameed vs State Of Kerala,” 2017). Whilst the judgement in this case is held up as progressive in comparison to the same court’s annulling of Hadiya’s marriage in the same year, I demonstrate in the next section that the two share a logic. Sruthi was deemed capable of making decisions for herself because she had completed her postgraduate degree, and not chosen to convert to Islam even when she married a Muslim man. Her desires – whilst colouring outside the boundaries of community – remain commensurable with the project of reproducing neoliberal social mobility, and modern national womanhood. Characteristically, Sruthi’s sindoor and her statement of allegiance to the Hindu religion are not read as an excess of religiosity: as I have suggested above, a substantial scholarship shows that Hindu faith and personal law are widely seen as compatible with secularism in India.

Hadiya, on the other hand, is depicted as gullible and lacking intellectual capacity (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017) because of her attachment to religious conversion and religious learning, through a PFI-affiliated institution, over an interest in completing her academic degree and establishing herself professionally. This seeming failure to act in her own interests – i.e., in a mode that would keep her in step with national and neoliberal temporality identified against Muslim backwardness – justifies, in the court’s logic, the enactment of carceral domesticity to contain and reorient her attachments. Ironically, as I elaborate in the next section, the court expresses concern that Hadiya seems uninterested in her studies, even as it attributes her conversion to the influence of friends or a romantic partner against her insistence that religious study had brought her to Islam (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). The study of Islamic scripture fails to register to the court as a legitimate form of learning legible to its modern and ostensibly secular sensibilities.

Hadiya: Materialising the carceral domestic

Hadiya’s ordeal began with her first attempt to convert to Islam in 2015 and early 2016. Hadiya was at the time a medical student in the town of Salem in Tamil Nadu. She had lived on campus in her first year and subsequently moved to a rented home she shared with five students, including her Muslim friends, Jaseena and Faseena (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). During the legal proceedings of 2016 to 2018, KM Asokan’s lawyers argued that the atmosphere of this home had caused her conversion (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). Hadiya, for her part, noted that she had not been comfortable telling her parents about her conversion because her father had made derogatory comments associating Islam with terrorists (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). The Supreme Court, when overturning the High Court’s ruling that incarcerated Hadiya at home, notes also that KM Asokan and his wife, Ponnamma, were in fact familiar with Jaseena and Faseena, who had visited Hadiya at home, and stayed with her parents (“Shafin Jahan v. KM Asokan and others ”, 2018).

A series of events escalated from late 2015 to early 2016, drawing her family’s attention to Hadiya’s religious doubts. According to the Supreme Court’s narrative, in late 2015, Hadiya showed reluctance to participate in the Hindu rituals surrounding her grandfather’s death (“Shafin Jahan v. KM Asokan and others”, 2018). Subsequently, KM Asokan reports having received a phone call from a classmate of Hadiya’s to inform him that she had come to classes wearing a ‘parda’ – as veils worn by Muslim women are commonly called in Kerala and Tamil Nadu (“Shafin Jahan v. KM Asokan and others ”, 2018). The court notes that Hadiya’s parents then attempted to bring her back home, first telling her that her father was unwell, and then that he would kill himself if she did not return (“Asokan.K.M vs The State Of Kerala,” 2016). Such suicides, relating to young women’s transgression of communal boundaries, are not uncommon. In the case of a young woman, Divya, who married her Dalit boyfriend Ilavarasan in Tamil Nadu in 2012, Divya’s father killed himself, setting in motion a series of violent events that ended in Ilavarasan’s lynching (Arivanantham, 2013). Not unlike ‘honour killing’ – in itself a glossing of different forms of violence that discipline women’s desires within boundaries of caste and community (Srinivasan, 2016) – such suicides mark the violent boundaries of carceral domesticities.

In Hadiya’s court testimony in 2016, she also clarified that her reasons for converting were theological: they were not to do with friendship, or even having fallen in love (“Asokan.K.M vs The State Of Kerala,” 2016). She was yet to meet Shefin Jahan in early 2016. Hadiya had found herself having doubts in Hindu religious practice after she went to university, and had been drawn to Islam, whose theology she engaged in deeply, by listening to sermons, and seeking religious lessons (“Asokan.K.M vs The State Of Kerala,” 2016). Following her court appearance in 2016, Hadiya took up residence in Manjeri in the home of a Muslim social worker, Zainaba, and attended classes in Islamic theology at the Sathya Sarani, an institution that is, as explained in the last section, associated with the PFI. In August 2016, Hadiya’s parents filed a second Habeas Corpus petition, this time alleging that she was likely to be trafficked to Syria or otherwise taken out of the country (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). Much as Hadiya was not at this time – or anytime – accused of a crime, the Kerala High Court first placed her under surveillance, and then attempted to push her to return to her parents’ home in August 2016 (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). Hadiya refused, asking instead to return to Zainaba’s home. She was then remanded to the SNV Sadanam Hostel – a privately-run women’s institution – by the court (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). In September 2016, Hadiya objected to the carceral conditions under which she was being held, noting that she was being isolated despite having committed no crime (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). She wrote that she was unable to meet her friends, pursue her studies, or live her life as she wished to, all because her father objected to her making decisions for her own life as an adult (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). The court then allowed her to reside where she wished, noting its preference that she complete her education, and live at the women’s hostel attached to her university (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). That Hadiya was pursuing an education, albeit in Islamic religious teaching, was not material to the court. Here, the court makes it clear what it considers to be appropriate social reproduction towards producing respectable middle-class futurity, noting its appreciation for KM Asokan’s wish that his daughter should cease with her religious exploration, and return to her secular studies (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017).

In December 2016, the court noted its dismay that Hadiya had not only not followed what it considered to be her best interests but had married Shefin Jahan. The court at this point began to question Hadiya’s capacity to make appropriate decisions, and suggests that now that she was married “to a stranger” (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017: 15), Hadiya could indeed be trafficked to the Middle-East. It writes:

This Court has on the said occasion recorded the fact that since she was not possessed of a Passport, there was no likelihood of her being taken to Syria. The question that crops up now is whether the marriage that has been allegedly performed is not a device to transport her out of this country. (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017: 15)

Jahan’s iteration as a “stranger” here is not insignificant to the affective politics underlying this case: for Ahmed (2006) the uncanny rendering strange of what is familiar is central to the work of (dis)orientation. As Hadiya’s new religious practice is reinforced by her marrying someone who shares her faith, she is rendered strange to her family: more firmly placed outside their grasp by her marriage to someone beyond their pale.

In the pages that follow, the Kerala High court offers its now historic verdict, annulling Hadiya’s marriage, writing that although Hadiya was 24 years old, and well over the age of majority: “as per Indian tradition, the custody of an unmarried daughter is with the parents, until she is properly married” (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). The court then goes on to note that in its opinion, her marriage was not proper, as it was not attended by her relatives, but only by her new Muslim friends and his family. Crucially, they note, that Hadiya’s having decided not to return to university when advised by the court to do so earlier that year, but instead to proceed with her religious studies and then marriage “cannot be accepted as the normal human conduct of a girl aged 20 years” (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017). This interest in religion over professional advancement, the court argued, indicated that Hadiya was acting under undue influence, and not in her own interest. To the court, she is in this moment, out of step with the modern time of the secular nation-state, at risk of falling behind into a backward temporality (Ramberg, 2016). In this reading, futurity is foreclosed within the logics of the neoliberal nation-state, and the paradigmatically Hindu middle-class families at its heart.

Geeta Patel (2004: 134) writes that in India, “violations of the home articulate as shifts around homeliness, which are marked as secular even as they resonate with explicitly communal practices.” KM Asokan, Hadiya’s father, repeatedly emphasised that he himself was an atheist and did not care about his daughter’s personal faith: rather he saw conversion to Islam, a religion he saw as associated with terrorism, as a sign that she was not acting voluntarily (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017; “Asokan K.M. vs The State Of Kerala,” 2016). He has consistently held that Shefin Jahan, against whom the NIA found no evidence of participation in terrorist activity, is a “terrorist”, with whom his daughter is not safe (“Shafin Jahan v. KM Asokan and others ”, 2018). In communist-ruled Kerala, this associational practice – citing a secular security discourse that associates Muslim with terrorist – evinces the shared ground between a broader project of liberal modernity, and Hindutva’s overtly communal agenda. It also iterates the centrality of an affective politics to the management of the anxieties that accrue to religious conversion: affinities that gather among disparate objects, the Muslim, the terrorist, and the spectre of Syria gather in a geography of otherness against which the young woman must be contained in the familiarity of the domestic.

The court then contended that Hadiya’s marriage was a ploy to take her “out of reach of this Court and her parents”(“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017: 33). To bring her back in line – to reorient her, towards the “service of her motherland” (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017: 32) that the court believed Hadiya was committed to before she married Shefin Jahan – the Kerala High Court then remanded her to the custody of her parents. Reorientation is here, the work of bringing the wayward object back within reach: into the fold of secular modernity. The court writes: “She shall be cared for, permitted to complete her…course and made professionally qualified so that she would be in a position to stand independently on her own two legs” (“Asokan K.M. vs The Superintendent Of Police,” 2017: 36).

In actuality, for the next year, Hadiya was held at her parents’ home, and allowed no contact with Shefin Jahan, or any of her friends (Singh, 2022). She was not allowed to speak with the media, or to leave her home. In videos made by an activist acquaintance, who visited her family’s home under the pretext of getting all sides of the story, Hadiya made an impassioned appeal, and spoke of being physically abused. Sitting against a wall on a bed, she says: “You have to get me out of here. I will be killed soon – I feel sure of it. I can see that my father is angry with me. He pushes me down and kicks me” (Varier, 2017). Whilst KM Asokan sought legal remedy to have the video removed from the public domain, claiming that it misrepresented him, Hadiya’s anxiety about being killed is not hyperbolic within a context where murder – glossed in legal explanation, and journalistic reportage as honour killing (Srinivasan, 2016; Still, 2017) – is often what lies at the limit of the project of affective reorientation inherent to carceral domesticities. In the very month that Hadiya’s ordeal ended, March 2018, another young Izhava woman, Athira Rajan, was stabbed to death, allegedly by her father, to keep her from marrying a young Dalit man she had fallen in love with (Varier, 2018). Those who remain stubbornly attached to desires that are rendered unliveable within the fantasy of national family life and neoliberal social mobility find themselves facing death at the limits of the biopolitical logic of carceral domesticity.

Hadiya’s husband, Shefin Jahan appealed to the Supreme Court in late 2017, against the Kerala high court ruling that annulled his marriage. The Supreme Court then ordered a National Investigating Agency probe into the matter of ‘Love Jihad’. The Supreme Court initially allowed Hadiya to leave her parents’ home but remanded her to a hostel attached to her college in the town of Salem, where she was to continue her studies (“Shafin Jahan v. KM Asokan and others ”, 2018). In an interview with the press whilst awaiting Hadiya’s arrival, the College’s principal noted that Hadiya would have no access to a mobile phone or a TV: he was considering changing the rules to allow no mobile phone use for anyone in the hostel that Hadiya was to live at, due to the ‘sensitivity’ of the case (Janardhanan, 2017). He also added that she was “still Akhila” as far as the institution was concerned: a symbolic undoing of her conversion, and a reiteration of the annulment of her marriage (Janardhanan, 2017). Further, he noted, the only guests she would be allowed were her parents, who were still her “guardians” on the hostel’s records (Janardhanan, 2017). Hostels in India typically require students – even those above the age of majority – to name a guardian, often a parent or a locally-based relative. When I did ethnographic research at women’s hostels in Chennai, hostel wardens typically described themselves as acting in loco parentis in the lives of their institutions’ residents. Acting in accordance with guardians’ preferences allowed the hostel to carry out the carceral domestic function of the home: to contain, and discipline desire towards the reproduction of respectable national womanhood.

In initial hearings, the Supreme Court appeared not to disagree with the Kerala High Court, likening Hadiya’s conversion to participation in the Blue Whale Challenge, a social media phenomenon in which a game allegedly lures young people to kill themselves (PTI, 2017). Desire that is oriented away from the reproduction of caste-endogamous middle-class life is assumed to be self-harming, and unlikely except as a manipulation. However, with the lack of evidence of Shefin Jahan’s participation in any kind of larger conspiracy, in March 2018, the Supreme Court finally ruled that Hadiya had converted and married of her own free will and allowed her to live where she chose. In its final judgement, the Supreme Court (“Shafin Jahan v. KM Asokan and others ”, 2018: 1) described Hadiya’s experience of detention, writing: “it can be said that when the liberty of a person is illegally smothered and strangulated and his/her choice is throttled by the State or a private person, the signature of life melts and living becomes a bare subsistence.” By the court’s own estimation then, Hadiya’s protective incarceration was an act of biopolitical abandonment: albeit at the heart of the fantasy of the good life, in her middle-class home, and putatively for her own good.

Conclusion

Anupama Rao (2001) has noted that the enactment of extreme violence always existed in an uncomfortable tension with colonialism’s claims to liberal imperialism in India. While Rao’s arguments are located in the site of the penal-judicial complex of colonial rule, corporal and carceral punishment have sat in a site of odd discomfort with the claims of liberal rule by the colonial state, and its postcolonial successor alike. While such regimes have been examined widely in the context of prisons and the judicial system, this paper asked how non-criminal women’s containment within home or home-like spaces signals anxieties about community and future that lie at the intersection of bio- and geo-politics. Biopolitical abandonment is materialised here in the work of affective reorientation within the carceral space of the home or the hostel: what is abandoned are the attachments, futurities, desires, and selves that are aligned away from the work of reproducing national futurity, within a global neoliberal paradigm.

It is at this intersection that ‘Love Jihad’ finds expression. As the figures around whom fantasies of nationhood, community, and development accrue, young women’s bodies have long been subject – in late colonial and postcolonial India alike – to projects of pruning, disciplining, and correction. Whilst the present moment of Hindu Nationalist ascendance has significantly heightened anxieties about both national community, and geopolitical security, feminist scholarship on India has long noted the state’s tendency to treat women as subjects of rescue and rehabilitation rather than rights (Baxi, 2014; Sunder Rajan, 2003). Carceral Domesticities materialise in this context within a logic of liberal reform and protection: bringing desires and attachments back in line with national and neoliberal projects of futurity. In states like Kerala – which is often held up as an exemplar in the matter of women’s rights, and against the rapid march of Hindutva – carceral domesticities in response to rumours of ‘Love Jihad’ diagram the geographies of liberal modern anxieties about Islam, as orienting its followers away from the time of progress and self-development.

Since Hadiya’s ordeal concluded, the state legislatures of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Karnataka have passed laws or ordinances that restrict religious conversion, particularly where the convert intends to marry someone who follows their new religion. As Islamophobia gains ground in legislative practice, and a growing range of political positions come to be cast as anti-national and seditious, the horizon of liveable futurity is narrowed ever-more. Carceral conditions, in this context, remain normalised for young women: both in highly visible instances such as Hadiya’s trial, and in the normalised restrictions on mobility that characterise life at university hostels for most women.

As homologies between nation and home are negotiated in the regulation of intimate practice in ever-intensifying ways, questions of affective politics gain significance in the practices through which borders between home and elsewhere, us and them are constructed and policed. As attachments to queer ways of being – here referring not so much to same-gender desires but to the strangeness of misorientation as Sara Ahmed (2006) frames it – become more unliveable, carceral domesticities seek to contain and turn their objects to a happiness that is the effect of biopolitical discipline (Ahmed, 2010). In thinking through Love Jihad with affective politics, this paper has sought to build on the rich feminist scholarship on gender, religion, and marriage in India to ask how intimate practices of discipline mobilise affective practices to materialise practices of bordering and enclosure.