Reorienting bodies

In a short essay titled ‘Reminiscences’, published in Women's Christian College's annual ‘Sunflower’ magazine in 1965, Soma Samarasinha recalled her old roommate, Mercy Azariah (Samarasinha, 1966). Soma and Mercy started College in 1918, at a time when Mercy's father, Azariah was gaining a growing reputation as a vocally anti-caste Anglican leader in Southern India (Harper, 2000). Soma herself was Buddhist and had moved to Madras (now Chennai) for university from Kandy in Sri Lanka. Soma and Mercy's friendship grew from their mutual love of books, and theological contemplation. In her essay, Soma is careful to emphasise that neither Mercy nor her family ever attempted to convert her. Rather, the two girls became kin to each other, spending holidays in each other's homes, and sharing a philosophical journey that bonded them intimately. This was, however, cut short when Mercy suddenly died, leaving Soma bereft. In the years that followed, she converted to Christianity – an act of intimacy with her friend that fundamentally transformed her life and reoriented it geopolitically and affectively. At odds with her family over this choice – Sri Lanka had in that period, an emergent national imaginary that hinged on Sinhala Buddhism (Jayawardena, 2009) she returned to Madras to teach at her old college, and when she married in the chapel of campus, it was Mercy's parents, who attended to support her. Her new connections to a global Anglican world drew Soma to Cambridge, where she studied, before eventually returning to Sri Lanka. In her writing, Soma emphasises the ways in which border crossings were also affective and spiritual reorientations – to make kin was also, as Sara Smith shows in her book ‘Intimate Geopolitics’, to (re)make borders.

In this review essay, I pick up on an aspect of the book that doesn’t make it to its title, and yet remains a central thread: that of religion, and the circulations of the secular in the politics of home in South Asia. Patel (2004: 134) writes that in postcolonial India, ‘violations of the home articulate as shifts around homeliness, which are marked as secular even as they resonate with explicitly communal practices’. As the far-right in India seeks to restrict religious conversion and inter-marriage through an ever-proliferating range of laws, the horizon for practices of making kin across lines of faith is narrower every day. Sara Smith's book intervenes in this urgent context, by drawing attention to how religion and the intimate work of family-making are figured together in the everyday ways in which Muslims and Buddhists inhabit India's Northern Borderland in Leh. In this essay, I bring Sara Smith's work in dialogue with Sara Ahmed's writing on orientation – which is cited, but not developed in the monograph (Smith, 2020: 74) – to ask how we might think of religious conversion as a locus of simultaneously affective and geopolitical reorientation. In doing so, I think Smith's writing about how borderlands are made, like skin, in the moment of the encounter: ‘demographies’ to borrow Ahmed and Stacey's term (2001), for demographic politics.

Skin/Border

When I first began to hear of hostel conversions in 2012, I heard them as accompaniments to stories of lesbian love: no one was conflating the two, rather, both were presented to me as results of a kind of emotional disorder of youth. A sex-educator working across different educational institutions in Tamil Nadu described young women to me as lacking a sense of rootedness: the simultaneously discursive and geopolitical fixity that Patel (2000) attributes to adult women in the national imagination. Rather, they were liable to go astray in the intensity of their attachments: to friends, to possible lovers of any gender, and to systems of belief whether to communism, or a religion they were not raised in. Thinking with Ahmed (2002), I came to imagine growing up as growing skin: enacting a boundary that accorded with the socio-historical terms on which young women are positioned relative to lines of separation between religious and national communities. Ahmed (2002) writes of skin as that which touches the other: it is the point of contact, and the place where we come to be vulnerable and exposed to each other. It is also where we come to establish the difference: the boundary of one body against another.

Skin, whilst not elaborated in those terms, iterates a locus for a geopolitical boundary in Smith's writing. Bodies, she writes ‘are sticky, fleshy-messy, dancing, kissing entities; they clump together; they spin apart; they cry in empathy; they spit in anger’ (Smith, 2020: 15). In Leh, where the national boundary is palpable in the fleshy everydayness of intimate life, this sense of skin exposed, broken, rubbing up against other skin is ever-more heightened. Religion runs through this context as a site of both skin-making and exposure: family memories of a time when these boundaries were more porous index vulnerabilities that feel like a luxury no one can afford in the present political moment. Friendship and intimacies shared among neighbours of different faiths, and the practicing of more than one religion in a family all engage bodies in acts of touching skin – edging across boundaries – whose danger is heightened in the present moment of Hindu Nationalist demographic anxiety. Who is ours and who is theirs – how skin forms against the other as a line – is important, as Smith richly shows, to questions of who has babies, who votes, and who is a majority community. For the young people, whose lives are often the focus of the book, growing skin – as in the hostels I worked on in Chennai – is a matter of growing up in the right direction, that is, with the right geopolitical and affective orientations.

Containing misorientation

Questions of borders, boundaries, and skin also speak to the practices of everyday discipline to which bodies are subject. Smith's arguments resonate with an ongoing struggle over the conspiracy theory of ‘Love Jihad’ – the idea that Muslim men are waging a crusade by seducing and marrying unsuspecting Hindu women. The timeline of the infamous ‘Love Jihad’ revolving around Hadiya, a young woman from Kerala, between 2016 and 2018 is in some ways nonsensical. Whilst Hadiya's parents alleged that she was a victim of ‘Love Jihad’, Hadiya had converted to Islam well before even meeting her husband, Shefin Jahan. Indeed, based on court documents, whose timeline neither party has contested, Hadiya's conversion occurred because she was drawn to Islamic teaching in the company of the friends with whom she was living, whilst at university. Hadiya reports many hours spent in theological debate, listening to lectures on Islam, and questioning her own faith. If ‘genuine’ conversions are permissible by the law, such an onerous process would seem as authentic as it could be. But her theological debates with her friends – I was struck by the similarity with Soma – and philosophical interest in Islam did not register in either her family's narrative or indeed the courts. What was significant was that by marrying a Muslim man, she had cemented a border crossing: her reproductive body now counted for another community. She had, in some sense, broken skin.

And so, Hadiya was repeatedly portrayed by family's lawyers as gullible: an easily influenced young woman, who was now at risk of being trafficked to Syria as a Jihadi Bride. Notwithstanding that Hadiya had no passport, and indeed Shefin Jahan had no connections with Syria, the Kerala High Court annulled her marriage and forced her to return to her family. When this annulment was ultimately overturned, it was after a two-year ordeal, during which Hadiya was held in custodial detention against her will at her university's hostel, a private shelter for women, and in her parents’ home despite never having committed a crime. This containment, it would appear served not only the purpose of a bodily holding but also forming a geopolitical boundary: in detention in her ostensibly secular home – her father repeatedly noting that he was an atheist himself – Hadiya's reproductive body was held within the nation-state.

Hadiya's case – and its resonances with the demographic politics of late colonial India (Gupta, 2016) – draw attention to the ways in which the practices of border-making that Smith describes in her book enact themselves in places that aren’t typically imagined as borders. In their inscription on the body, borderlands and sites of containment are thus brought into the intimate recesses of everyday life: turning homes into detention centres, and the body itself into a site of potential geopolitical transgression. Inter-religious marriage and conversion serve – as Smith elaborates in the intricately woven stories she tells – to reorient bodies in ways that are disciplined not only sites of biopolitical anxiety but also as loci for geopolitical trouble. The ‘Love Jihad’ anxiety is centrally driven by demographic anxieties that position upper-caste women's bodies as sites of national injury – geopolitical aggression, writ on the reproductive body – triggering retaliatory action (Gökarıksel et al., 2019). Putting Smith's work in dialogue with Ahmed's, we might read this then as the containment of misorientation. Bodies that do not accord with geopolitical boundaries are turned away forcibly – through conditions that become increasingly hostile, or in legal cases like Hadiya's – towards futures that are constructed as liveable within the terms of nation and community.

Conclusion

‘Intimate Geopolitics’ presents, above all, an extraordinarily well-narrated story. The form of the book – its palpable emotionality, the struggles between ethical commitments to religion and the constraints of economics and body it grapples with on every page – conveys with exceptional clarity the project's stakes for feminist geopolitics. In this, the story it tells is necessarily ongoing, not easily tied up, and left to gather meaning in the daily-developing story of religion, geopolitics, and intimate life in India. In concluding this essay, I want to draw attention to the ‘geopolitically-charged’ bodies of young people that Smith discusses in the book: bodies given heightened geopolitical meaning by their imbrication within nation and religion (Smith, 2020: 121). The geopolitical charge that young people's bodies hold is, for Smith, an active site where futurity is negotiated and made. Speaking in terms of the dialogue with Sara Ahmed on which this essay has focused, we might argue that this is a matter of how the body is turned towards forging liveability: whether on the terms that are legible to religious and national communities or not. What is at stake in the imbrication of bodies in the making of borders is how the past and future weigh on the present, turning them towards objects of attachment.