What is it like to be a Hindu married to a Muslim or a Muslim married to a Hindu in a country like India where families are deeply involved not only in wedding ceremonies but also in the everyday life of the newlywed couple? Why do they choose to marry each other in a sociopolitical context that often frames Hindu identity and Muslim identity as oppositional, even incompatible? How do children raised by such couples negotiate their parents’ religious affiliations and determine their own relationship to faith
If you are interested in these questions, Ashis Roy’s book Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships is worth reading. Roy is a psychoanalyst, and his approach is shaped by his academic training at the Department of Psychology, University of Delhi, and the School of Human Studies, B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi.
The research is based on multiple interviews with couples from the urban middle class. Roy’s line of enquiry seeks to understand and illumine the “psychological interiority” of these couples as they process “unspoken conflicts that exist between the two communities in these times”.
Intimacy in Alienation
A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships
By Ashis RoyYoda Press Pages: 220Price: Rs. 599
The book is stitched together using “psychobiographies”, or richly detailed “life-historical accounts”, about the individual participants in his study—who are between the ages of 35 and 45—and the history of their relationships. Unlike prime-time television debates that view such couples only through the limiting and hostile lens of the so-called “love jehad,” this book examines “the dialogue between the external familial-social life surrounding the couple and the internal life of fantasy and desire that mould the couple”.
The damaging claims of the ‘love jehad’ discourse
Roy’s findings deftly challenge toxic generalisations that foment mistrust and hatred. Intimacy in Alienation points out that the love jehad discourse makes baseless and damaging claims through the circulation of patriarchal beliefs that construct Hindu women as “asexual and without desire” and depict Muslim men as “barbaric”, “hypersexual”, and “predatory”, and also how these prejudiced notions prevent us from recognising that marriage between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man can be rooted in a love “born of willingness and agency”.
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The research presented in this book emphasises the willpower and effort it takes for Hindu-Muslim couples to protect their fragile bond from the external forces that are rooting for their marriage to crumble. More often than not, their parents and siblings are the ones who create obstacles. In this book, we meet a Hindu woman named Sunaina whose family severed ties with her when she married a Muslim man called Qasim. When Aseem, a Muslim man, married Renu, a Hindu, his mother told him repeatedly that he had become less of a Muslim.
This concern with retaining purity by not marrying outside the religion appears several times in the book. Couples are able to withstand such pressures when they are deeply committed to each other. As Roy notes: “[I]ntimacy and love take many forms—from the all-consuming passion of romantic love, the non-sexual platonic love, and a love built on intellectual affinity. Identity and love are continuously informing one another, and deepening their contours.”
Roy’s findings deftly challenge toxic generalisations that foment mistrust and hatred.
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The analysis based on Roy’s interviews with couples appears fairly late into the book. The initial chapters are devoted to articulating the theoretical and methodological framework that Roy used to carry out his research and make his conclusions. He draws from the work of psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Vamik Volkan, Sudhir Kakar, Fethi Benslama, M. Fakhry Davids, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Christopher Bollas, Julia Kristeva, Otto F. Kernberg, Adam Phillips, André Green, Thomas Ogden, Luisa Passerini, Jacqueline Rose, Alan Roland, Salman Akhtar, and Honey Oberoi Vahali.
Roy also casts the intellectual net outside his own discipline and builds on the work of the anthropologist Veena Das, the journalist Ghazala Wahab, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, and the historians Audrey Truschke and Urvashi Butalia to theorise Hindu-Muslim relations in India. However, such an extensive literature review might come across as exhausting to readers outside academia who are not accustomed to prose that is so densely packed with ideas.
That said, this book ought to be lauded for the critical rigour it injects into a discussion that can easily slip into sentimentality when people speaking out against Hindu majoritarianism and Islamophobia put Hindu-Muslim couples on an unnecessary pedestal. These individuals are human beings, after all; some of their actions are difficult to fathom.
“The love jehad discourse prevents us from recognising that marriage between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man can be rooted in love ‘born of willingness and agency’.”
For instance, the book introduces Shoaib as a Muslim man who was picked up by the police during the riots in Mumbai after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and later found not guilty. Rather than grow bitter, he channelled his energy into setting up a cricket club for Hindus and Muslims to set aside their religious differences and play together. Shoaib is married to Karuna, a Hindu woman who runs an NGO along with him to foster interfaith harmony.
This idealised picture of Shoaib is complicated by the fact that Karuna found out that Shoaib was simultaneously in a relationship with a girl who was 18 years younger than him, only to have him tell her: “I was hiding this from you like I would hide it from my mother.” He did not want to end this relationship and hoped that Karuna would understand.
‘An intergenerational context’
We also meet a Muslim man named Asghar whose great-grandfather was a Hindu priest who converted to Islam in the presence of a Sufi saint. Asghar is against the display of any religious symbols in their house, but this feels oppressive to his wife, Rachana, who was raised in a Hindu household. Unlike other interfaith couples interviewed by Roy, who allowed their children to participate in both Hindu and Islamic religious observances, Asghar wants to keep his daughter away from religion as it “contaminates the psyche”. Even Rachana is not permitted to keep any idols or perform pujas in their house.
Roy writes: “Rachana would feel palpably threatened by the way her daughter was being kept away from her and her beliefs. On the contrary, when Asghar’s parents would come visiting, they would read the namaaz.” These double standards hurt Rachana. Roy adds: “Rachana felt that no matter what Asghar maintained, their daughter was being exposed to religion all the same, just not her religion.” Asghar’s insistence on having his way was experienced as violence by his wife. Thankfully, the author probes into the reasons behind Asghar’s actions, without justifying them, and brings out the vulnerability that he lives with as a Muslim man.
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Asghar’s perception of risk and danger is evident in this outburst: “If there are riots in this city, in this very colony tomorrow, what will be my child’s identity, my wife’s identity, for the looters, the losers, the rapists? Answer me. You are a psychoanalyst.” Asghar views religion as an affliction that needs to be wiped out. He considers himself a threat to his wife’s and daughter’s security because of his Muslim identity. He even tries “very hard to not take Allah’s name”. The author’s nuanced writing about Asghar paints him in shades of grey instead of making him out to be either a hero or a villain, a victim or a perpetrator.
Roy also touches upon the experiences of children born to interfaith couples. Some children gravitate towards either of the two religions, while some wish to adopt aspects of both. Others want to carve out an identity that is neither Hindu nor Muslim. However, this book focusses on the couples rather than their children, so Roy looks at how the couple’s equation with their parents altered with the birth of grandchildren.
As a self-aware researcher, Roy takes responsibility for the gaps in his research and admits that “interviews with parents of the participants would have added an intergenerational context to their choices”. More importantly, he notes how his own identity as a Hindu researcher might have influenced and affected the responses of the Muslim participants. Acknowledging the subjectivity at work is certainly a mark of academic integrity.
Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist, and book reviewer.