The terror of true love

TRUE love has always terrorised conservative societies. The legends of Heer and Juliet and their ill-fated suitors have spawned a gamut of narratives in diverse cultures. As another year draws to an end, a lasting image it leaves behind for me is that of a young Pakistani Muslim man dancing away at an upper caste Aiyer Brahmin wedding in Bangalore. A bevy of beautiful Hindu women surrounded him, one of them his wife. I don’t believe any India-Pakistan peace conference can ever be meaningful where a throng of these cross-border lovers, deemed cultural terrorists by their powerful and influential detractors, are not given centre-stage. The cross-border couples represent the truest grit, an absolute must to overcome the many insurmountable challenges of mistrust and fear as also of physical violence that unconventional and trans-geographical love faces. The detractors are not always worked up about the wrong nationalities involved in the fray. They are in fact often more busy being a menace at home. And they usually belong, both in India and Pakistan, to the cultural milieu that supports “honour killings” of women in their respective medieval confines. They target in particular those women, and also men, who question the family tradition of taking a spouse they did not know or want. I have watched the terror-stricken faces of low-caste Jatav men and women in Barsana, the village of Lord Krishna’s fabled consort, Radha, where two of their boys were lynched with a Jat girl who had eloped with one of them. All three were hanged from a tree. Then they were slowly disfigured with torches before their bodies, still warm in spite of the ebbing of blood within, were thrown into a common pyre. A Jat kangaroo court had taken the decision, which usually is of a higher currency than the state’s supposedly secular writ. The ropes dangled from the banyan tree for months after the collective crime that terrorised the far corners of the Jat-dominated region. Pakistan’s problems with honour killings are probably as incorrigibly entrenched as its non-Semitic variant flourishing across much of India. There is a difference though. In India those who instigate violence between sects of men and women who love or marry outside their prescribed format have a powerful political voice in the street and in parliament, via rightwing religious revivalism. Much of the modus operandi involves rumour-mongering, instilling fear and mistrust followed by outright violence. In a recent article in the Economic and Political Weekly, Charu Gupta closely analysed the issue of ‘Love Jihad’ or ‘Romeo Jihad’, coined recently by activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh to target Muslim boys who mingle with Hindu girls. The implicit allegation in both the terms is that Muslim men are wooing Hindu women as part of a religious campaign to convert them to Islam. What the propagandists of this poisonous canard deliberately ignore is the fact there are about as many Muslim women attracted to Hindu men. Last week I enjoyed the wedding of a young man whose mother bears a Muslim name, the father a Hindu. There is of course no certainty at all that these cross-cultural marriages will last more than others, if at all others last. (On the other hand Shia and Sunni couples were having a great time in Iraq, as they do elsewhere in the Middle East, before American troops arrived and wrecked their lives, injecting an untenable sectarian identity which most Iraqis would otherwise shun.) The issue of fomenting fear and mistrust by using women as a tool in a poisonous propaganda blitz to polarise communities is not new. Charu Gupta, in her analysis, cites a tract published in 1924 from Kanpur which “dwelt on the catastrophic decline of Hindus due to increasing conversions of Hindu women to Islam”. It claimed that a number of Aryan women were entering the homes of yavanas and mlecchas (terms used for Muslims in such writings), reading nikah with them, producing gaubhakshak (cow-killers) children and increasing Muslim numbers. A poem written in 1928 and later banned, called Chand Musalmanon ki Harkaten, stated: ‘Tadad badhane ke liye chal chalai, Muslim banane ke liye scheme banayi.... Ekkon ko gali gaon mein lekar ghumate hain, parde ko dal Muslim aurat bethate hain’ (Muslims are making new schemes to increase their population and to make people Muslims. They roam with carts in cities and villages and take away women, who are put under the veil and made Muslim — Charu Gupta’s translation.) Pro-Hindu organisations in 2009, too, have claimed that forced conversions of Hindu women in the name of love are part of an international conspiracy to increase the Muslim population. “The issues at stake here are not only to construct a picture of numerical increase in Muslims but also to lament the supposed decline in Hindu numbers and to mourn the potential loss of child-bearing Hindu wombs, and thus exercise greater control over women’s reproductive capacities to enhance Hindu numbers. Both the campaigns construct an image of the Muslim male as aggressive, and broadcast a series of stereotypes and repetitive motifs, creating a common ‘enemy’….” The luring of Hindu women by Muslim men is stated to demonstrate the “lack of character” of the lustful men, violating the pure body of Hindu women. In the 1920s, many Hindus came to perceive abductions and conversions of Hindu women as a characteristic Muslim activity. Such constructs had even older historical roots. Gupta quotes noted Hindi writers like Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850-85), Pratap Narain Misra (1856-94) and Radha Charan Goswami (1859-1923) as often portraying medieval Muslim rule as a chronicle of rape and abduction of Hindu women. “The first generation of popular novelists in Hindi — Devakinandan Khatri, Kishorilal Goswami and Gangaprasad Gupta — who started writing in the 1890s, depicted similar prejudices. Lecherous behaviour, high sexual appetites, a life of luxury and religious fanaticism were seen as the dominant traits of Muslim characters. These stereotypes of licentious Muslims were strengthened, with new contours added in the 1920s. It was claimed that now ordinary and all Muslims were indulging in such practices.” We shall not let it pass without comment that all the insidious poetry cited by Ms Gupta had mushroomed only after the last Mughal emperor and his primarily Hindu supporters were vanquished by a virulent colonial response to their jointly conducted revolt against foreign rule. The “terror of true love” has mutated in our region according to the political exigencies it faces. It took the form in Germany of Nazi drive to exterminate homosexual lovers. The reactionary response to unbridled love is always virulent.