Intimate Desires: Dalit Women and Religious Conversions in Colonial India

Abstract

Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste ideologues, cartoons, and police reports from colonial north India. It particularly looks at the two sites of clothing and romance to mark representations of mass and individual conversions to Christianity and Islam. Through them, it reads conversions by Dalit women as acts that embodied a language of intimate rights, and were accounts of resistant materialities. These simultaneously produced deep anxieties and everyday violence among ideologues of the Arya Samaj and other such groups, where there was both an erasure and a representational heightening of Dalit female desire. However, they also provide one with avenues to recover in part Dalit women's aspirations in this period. R ELIGIOUS CONVERSIONS HAVE BEEN one of the common expedients of those at the bottom of caste hierarchy in India, to improve their position, reject hierarchies, reconfigure social boundaries, and as acts of protest and assertion

Carceral domesticities and the geopolitics of Love Jihad

“…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.…”

Sound Biting Conspiracy: From India with “Love Jihad”

“…In the 1920s, the discursive focus was still primarily on abductions rather than on romantic love relationships. Granted, the possibilities of female romantic attraction and sexual desire were acknowledged in cases involving young upper-caste widows and Dalit women (see Gupta 2006Gupta , 2014. Yet in most other cases, the shame of having a daughter who had willingly eloped with a Muslim, made it more tempting to frame her disappearance as an abduction, which in turn meant that no questions of allurement applied.…”

Religious conversions in forced migration: Comparative cases of Afghans in India and Iranians in Turkey

“…In India, despite communal clashes and efforts in re-conversion to Hinduism, religious minorities like Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians are recognized under the Constitution and they enjoy the right to exercise their religion freely. Hindus, especially the lower caste Hindus, have converted in the past to Islam and Christianity to get rid of the stigma of their low status (Eaton, 1985; Gupta, 2014; Misra, 2011). The egalitarian discourse in Christianity and syncretism allowed by many Sufi orders in the subcontinent compelled many to accept these religions thinking they would discard rigid caste divisions once and for all after conversion.…”