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.

Carceral domesticities: An introduction

“…Antona’s paper further draws attention to the ways in which Singapore’s labour-migration regime and economic functioning hinge on the rendering of the middle-class home into a securitised space, in which the domestic worker is contained and confined: their labour extracted through this carcerality. In this, it shares an interest with Sneha Krishnan’s (2023) work, which examines young Indian women’s carceral containment at home and in the home-like spaces of hostels when they convert to Islam and marry Muslim men of their choosing. In these readings, the carceral is rendered domestic both in its ordinariness – it exists at the heart of the neoliberal fantasy of futurity, rather than at its margins – and in its disciplinary role in rendering its inhabitants into figures who reproduce racial capitalist, nationalist, and global imperialist futurities.…”