Sultanpur: a brief introduction

Historically, the state of Gujarat in western India has constituted one of the primary mercantile gateways between the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, Europe, and West Africa, as well as the place of origin of the far-reaching Gujarati diaspora now dispersed throughout India as well as much of the rest of the world. More recently, the region has come to be seen as synonymous with the current Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, who served as chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 until his success as the prime ministerial candidate for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the national elections in 2014. During his tenure in Gujarat, the state rose to national and international prominence for the horrific anti-Muslim violence that took place over several months in 2002 as well as a fervent pro-development orientation committed to encouraging foreign and corporate investment as a means of boosting the local economy.

Sultanpur, the site of the research, is located in central Gujarat and has a population of approximately 31,000 (according to the 2001 census).Footnote ⁷ Dating back to the fifteenth century, Sultanpur today acts as an administrative hub for the subdistrict (taluka) which bears its name, functioning as a commuter town for professionals and day-wage labourers and a commercial centre for the surrounding villages. The town is relatively wealthy, with ‘housing societies’ thriving away from the old bazaar areas. Most inhabitants maintain connections with non-resident Indians living in the United States, United Kingdom, or South Africa.

While locals often speak of Sultanpur as a miniature version of the nearby city of Ahmedabad, in reality it differs significantly from surrounding urban areas in both its size and the general lack of overt Hindu–Muslim tensions and polarization. In particular, religious differentiation is interlinked with other social divisions such as caste and class in dictating social hierarchies. In the past, and arguably even today, inter-religious political and economic alliances were common, especially among the elite of the town, although these also existed at other levels of social life. A third of the town's population is Sunni Muslim, while the remaining population is Hindu along with small pockets of Christians and Sikhs. The Muslim Sunni Vohras,Footnote ⁸ in particular, constitute a sizable portion of the local Muslim population; as members of a business community which traditionally specializes in the selling of cloth, they maintain strong relations with local Hindu business families. Within the Hindu community, merchant communities such as Vanias as well as Patidar Patels and Brahmins (both of which are also generally involved in business activities) constitute the most politically and economically powerful castes.

Close interaction between many Hindus and Muslims in Sultanpur has for a long time been a regular and expected occurrence in many spheres of everyday life. In the past, alliances and family friendships revolved much more around caste and class divisions than communal factors and, to a certain degree, this was still the case at the time of the research. Local schools in particular demonstrated the level to which the social stratification in Sultanpur continued to exist very much along class and occupational lines: while the children of the more wealthy and educated generally attended the private English-medium school or the local government school, children from villages in the surrounding areas, as well as those from poorer local families, were generally more likely to attend one of the less-renowned schools which receive government funding but are privately run. Unlike many of Sultanpur's larger urban counterparts, there were no private trusts or schools built specifically for the Muslim community: while most Muslim children attended one of the local madrasas, they would also often be sent to one of the local government (or privately run) schools. In a similar way, while ‘housing societies’ in the town had become increasingly segregated across community and class lines over the previous decades, there remained many spaces in which local Hindus and Muslims met on a regular basis, including beauty parlours and the bazaar as well as weddings and other social celebrations.

While cities, especially nearby Ahmedabad, have a long history of communal riots, the 2002 violence differed from previous violence in that it spread into more rural or provincial parts of the state which were without a history of tension or strife. During this period, Sultanpur experienced religious-based violence and destruction levelled against both Muslim and lower-caste Hindu neighbourhoods for the first time that locals could remember. Over the space of a few weeks in March 2002, attacks specifically targeted Muslim businesses and property and led to five deaths, two of which were the result of police firings. An approximate total of Rs 33 million in damages was suffered over the course of the next two weeks by local Muslims, according to the Sultanpur Taluka Muslim Relief Committee Trust. Areas of the bazaar with a significant number of Muslim-owned businesses were targeted as well as more elite Muslim housing societies on the peripheries of the town. In addition, seven local dargahs (Sufi shrines) in the town were attacked, along with one of the Muslim cemeteries. While the Muslim community in Sultanpur no doubt suffered the worst of the violence which followed the burning of the carriages in Godhra, low-caste Hindus were targeted in a backlash initiated by Muslims in April 2002 in which Hindu businesses and several houses were destroyed.

While immediately following the violence newfound unity was forged among previously opposing factions within the local Muslim community, this dissipated in the years that followed. As I have written elsewhere, the narrative voiced by both communities following the violence was that the 2002 attacks in Sultanpur had been levied by outsiders and that ‘peace’ between local Hindus and Muslims had once again been established.Footnote ⁹ Although the legacy of the violence did take a toll on communal relations in certain respects, there remained many spaces in everyday life in which inter-community life continued unabated. As I show in the following sections, one such example lay in the romantic relationships between young Hindus and Muslims in the town.

Intimate relations: Hindu–Muslim affairs and religious nationalism in Gujarat

Intimate relations between Hindus and Muslims are often viewed as problematic in their defiance of normative marriage rules around endogamy but also in light of long-standing Hindu nationalist narratives depicting Muslim male sexuality as a dangerous threat to both the honour of Hindu women and the wider Hindu community and nation (‘Hindustan’).Footnote ¹⁰ Such moral anxieties characterize Muslim men as particularly virile and having a dangerous sexuality, which if left unchecked, will lead to the prolific reproduction of the Muslim community in India and the eventual annihilation of the nation's Hindu community.

In recent years, this narrative has become particularly visible in media coverage and rhetoric by activists of the Hindu right alleging that Muslims have launched a new campaign, referred to as ‘love jihad’,Footnote ¹¹ to assert political supremacy in India by seducing and marrying Hindu women who are then forced to convert to Islam. While the specific language of ‘love jihad’ has gained currency only in the past few years, moral anxieties predicated on transgressive intimacy and desire between members of different religious communities have a long history within religious nationalist discourses in India.

Within the context of Gujarat, well-known Hindutva and Bajrang Dal activist Bapu Bajrangi set up an NGO which, among other activities, set out to ‘free’ Hindu girls who had supposedly been ‘abducted’ and ‘forced’ into marriage by Muslim men.Footnote ¹² Although many of the cases featured couples who had eloped together (and therefore had married consensually), Bajrangi reportedly claimed to have kidnapped Hindu women and forced them to divorce their Muslim husbands and abort unborn children prior to his arrest and conviction for his participation in the 2002 anti-Muslim violence.Footnote ¹³

Media coverage of campaigns against love jihad and cases such as Bapu Bajrangi suggest that romantic relationships between Hindus and Muslims could be outright dangerous, and marriage may be impossible. Given the wider atmosphere in Gujarat at the time of my research, there was cause for concern among the young Muslim men whom I met and who had relationships with Hindu women. Yet, I found no cases in which extreme violence was levelled to prevent or end inter-religious relations. In Sultanpur young middle-class people of different religions come into regular contact through schooling, employment, mixed neighbourhoods, and (particularly in larger cities) social gatherings. That romance often follows in these spaces is unsurprising, but how young people deal with these contradictory messages is discussed in more detail in the following section on everyday life in Sultanpur.

Love in a small town, love as a global aspiration

The forms of love and the languages through which it is expressed in different geographies and historical periods in South Asia is immense, as recent works on the subject such as that by OrsiniFootnote ¹⁴ attest, showing love as a form both of affect and of sociality within a range of cultural repertoires including Sanskritic, Perso-Arabic, British colonial, and indigenous oral traditions. These continue to interact with more recent notions of ‘modern’ romantic love, propagated by Bollywood films and popular serials which often feature portrayals of love-struck couples who defy the many obstacles which stand in the way of the consummation of true love.

Such representations of love prevalent in the media and popular culture more often than not differ significantly from the actual experience of relationships and affairs, but even more so the norm of arranged marriage. For many young people in Sultanpur, romantic attachments and intrigues form a dominant topic of conversation, reflection, and yearning. Relationships are initiated and realized through stolen glances, love letters, and ‘missed calls’, particularly in smaller towns and villages where very few opportunities to spend time in private with a non-related member of the opposite sex exist. Premarital relationships between young men and women are, as is more widely the case in India, discouraged, and when they do occur, they are conducted on a very discreet basis. Such ‘relations’, as they are referred to using the English word, are highly variable in intensity and do not necessarily involve sexual intimacy. In their most basic form they are limited to secretive glances exchanged when meeting in the neighbourhood. More advanced relationships might, on the other hand, involve speaking regularly on mobile phones or giving one's beloved a ‘missed call’ if pocket money is scarce.Footnote ¹⁵ In some cases, couples might even meet occasionally in one of the nearby cities, away from the prying eyes of neighbours and kin. Such meetings could be difficult to arrange, however, and always carried the potential threat that an acquaintance might see them, and that word would get back to one's family and neighbours. This was of particular concern to young women, given that allegations of spending time alone with non-kin men is often seen as harming not only their own reputation or honour (izzat), but that of the entire family.

Among the young people I met in Sultanpur, romantic love was a serious and passionate issue, not unlike elsewhere in the world.Footnote ¹⁶ In line with prevalent discourses on modernity, many of the young people talked to me guardedly about their hopes to marry for ‘love’ despite the prevalence of social and familial pressures to consent to an arranged marriage. In public discourse, both within and outside of India, self-arranged marriages (‘love marriages’) are posed in opposition to endogamous marriages arranged by parents (‘arranged marriages’) according to caste, class, and religion. In actuality, however, scholars such as DonnerFootnote ¹⁷ and GroverFootnote ¹⁸ show that this opposition represents ideal types which serve as normative models rather than an accurate portrayal of lived experience. Donner suggests that, for example, it is not uncommon among the Bengali middle class in Calcutta for a young couple to ask their respective families for permission to marry, and once everyone has agreed the families carry on as if the match had been arranged. Another common match prominent in contemporary India is ‘marriage by introduction’, whereby a family presents a young woman or man with details of candidates, followed by a chaperoned meeting with a select few. In Sultanpur, many young people of marriageable age often exerted a fair amount of choice over the range of marital candidates to whom they were introduced and, apart from scenarios in which offers were particularly limited, it was generally understood that for a marriage to last the consent of the prospective spouses was needed.

Despite fluid boundaries between these two ideas in practice, on a discursive level many people in Sultanpur (and, I would argue, in India more generally) often represent idealized notions of love (prem) and love marriages as posing a stark opposition to more conventional arranged marriage practices. Thus, this binary between ‘love’ and ‘arranged’ marriages remains extremely powerful in establishing discursive categories and structuring wider debates around a host of topics associated with modernity, ranging from individualism to sexual moralities and filial duty. Love and love marriage are clearly associated with valued attributes of modern personhood, including individual fulfilment, freedom, and/or defiance of imposed collective bonds and obligations. Talk of love among young people is therefore also an important way of articulating the tension between existing power relations within the family and community and the demands of ‘suitably modern’ selfhood.Footnote ¹⁹

Beyond this abstract usage, idioms of love were also associated with personal despair and grief, as relationships were thwarted by family elders or romantic feelings went unreciprocated. In such cases, food and eating were commonly used as a means through which emotional pain was communicated. As described in the beginning section of this article with reference to Imran, the young man whose romantic aspirations had been thwarted, young lovers would often refuse food and become thin through heartbreak-induced weight loss. In one case, a young married woman who had been having an affair with a local man told me that she had been so upset since the relationship had ended that she would eat only a single chapatti per day. In more extreme cases, threats of suicide were pronounced (for example, by ingesting rat poison), although these were rarely acted upon. Such displays of unfulfilled love, however, were generally performed selectively for the small circle of friends already cognizant of the affair (and the beloved) and hidden from family members and elders opposed to premarital intimacy.

In Sultanpur, cultivating and maintaining intimate relationships was in fact seen as a high stakes enterprise which, at its most extreme, might result in being socially ostracized by one's family and community. Yet, in contrast to studies of love marriages in India such as those by Perveez Mody and Prem Chowdhry, there were no cases of violent retribution against couples who were discovered to be engaged in romantic liaisons or who had eloped.Footnote ²⁰ During my research I came to know about a number of so-called ‘love marriages’ that involved elopement. Usually these matches involved a couple from the same neighbourhood who had known each other for many years and, once love developed, eloped together with the assistance of a third party such as a friend or cousin.Footnote ²¹ As scholars such as Donner (this volume), Parry, and AhearnFootnote ²² have noted, while elopement is often seen as extremely disgraceful in many parts of South Asia, there is often the possibility of later reintegration of the eloped couple into previous kin networks and relations. The degree to which the union is accepted by the families varies significantly according to the background of the prospective spouse. In cases in which the couple come from the same caste or community, the marriage is generally reluctantly accepted by their families; however, when the members of the couple belong to different castes or, in the case of Muslims, different endogamous status groups (jamaats) there is considerably more opposition. Given that in many middle-class families a woman's caste or religion is dictated by that of her husband, perceived hypogamy was a cause for concern. Thus, even marriages between members of different Muslim jamaats are seen as problematic, depending on differences within the local religious community. It is not uncommon for the parents of a daughter involved in such a ‘love marriage’ to completely cut ties with her, although this can also be a matter of public display in which the parents and daughter maintain a more discreet relationship, communicating periodically by phone while maintaining the outward appearance of a complete break.

Muslim men, Hindu women: transgressive and everyday liaisons

Many young Muslim men with whom I became acquainted in Sultanpur spent much time and energy trying to discreetly establish contact or some form of communication with their particular love interest, often a Hindu woman. Several of these young men had been in the past, or were currently, attached to a Hindu woman and, in fact, a significant proportion of the inter-religious affairs and marriages that I encountered were specifically between a Muslim man and a Hindu or Christian woman. On the other hand, I came across few liaisons between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman.

The higher prevalence of inter-community relationships between Muslim men and Hindu women was often explained to me by my Muslim interlocutors in Sultanpur through discourses which branded Muslim men as more sexually attractive and ‘masculine’ relative to their Hindu counterparts. Local idioms therefore did not rely on similar tropes as the pejorative stereotypes of Muslim men propagated by the Hindu right, but inverted the attributes of Muslim masculinity into positive traits. For example, while meat consumption is widely condemned on a religious level by most Hindu Gujaratis as ritually impure and as a political marker of minority status within the region,Footnote ²³ my informants offered this up as a central reason to explain Muslim men's greater sexual attractiveness and virility in contrast to their vegetarian Hindu counterparts. This was especially true for beef, a meat which is particularly taboo for the majority population given the sacred status of the cow in Hinduism. According to one of my female Muslim informants, beef was key to Muslim men's virility and, more generally, should be consumed only by men because of its high potency (in contrast, other types of meat such as fish, chicken, and mutton, according to her, were appropriate for consumption by both sexes). In a similar way, the aggression that Hindutva discourses associate with Muslim men was also reinterpreted by my informants, who argued that Hindu women are attracted to Muslim men because they were able to protect their families, while Hindu men were seen as effeminate and would abandon their families if threatened. Within this framework, Muslim men were cast as more chivalrous, thoughtful and reliable lovers than Hindu men. As Rashida, a young Muslim woman, pointed out, even where a Muslim man had little money, he would borrow from a friend in order to demonstrate his affection. Implicitly, Hindu men were cast as uncaring and unromantic, unwilling to make sacrifices for the sake of their beloved.

Such characterizations can easily be seen as a repudiation of wider social discourses, particularly prevalent in Gujarat at the time but common across northern India, which depict Muslim masculinity and sexuality as a threat to the social order. But, importantly, such stereotypes present close emotional attachment as a major difference between Hindu and Muslim masculinities, affecting men's involvement in love affairs. On a broader note, none of the young people with whom I discussed these questions viewed such liaisons as particularly problematic or surprising in and of themselves, suggesting that they were more common than might be expected despite the wider taboos around inter-religious intimacy. Mumta, a young married Muslim woman in her twenties, told me that finding true love was more important than complying with the rules of ‘society’ (samaj). At the end of the day, she said, people will always criticize you no matter what you do and, while it was true that being with someone with different traditions and culture will create problems, she still believed in the ultimate triumph of love.

One of the more serious of such relationships that I encountered was that between a local man, Rafiq, and a Hindu girl from a nearby town. Rafiq, a MalekFootnote ²⁴ Muslim man in his mid twenties, lived with his mother, two sisters, and brother in one of the Muslim sections of the town. Similar to other men I knew who had become involved with Hindu women, Rafiq met his Hindu girlfriend, Sunita, as a student in Ahmedabad on a postgraduate course. Based in the nearby city Nadiad, Sunita worked as a writer for a small local magazine and at the time of my research had begun to collaborate with Rafiq on various small publishing ventures. Rafiq and Sunita spoke on the phone at least once a day (through a special mobile phone scheme) and met up regularly in one of the nearby cities in which they were less likely to encounter acquaintances or relations who might report back to others. Rafiq had cautioned me not to speak to anyone about their relationship, suggesting that it could create problems given the current political situation in Gujarat, although Sunita had visited his family on a few occasions and his mother and sister were aware of the relationship (this, however, was not the case with Sunita's family). In this sense, his concern that the relationship might become public knowledge was more predicated on a fear of retribution by Hindutva activists and politicians than members of the local Muslim community. On a number of occasions, Rafiq expressed his desire to have a love marriage, and the couple planned to get married once Rafiq became more established in his career and his elder sister had married. He stated that after the wedding Sunita would convert to Islam and would have to ‘adjust’ to her new family by adopting their habits, including a non-vegetarian diet, the preparation of meat dishes, and agreeing to wear a burqa (although none of the women in his family did so). Much of my knowledge about their relationship came from Rafiq himself. While I met Sunita on two occasions, these were brief and I was unable to get her perspective on their history and its challenges. As I was to find out, a few years later, after the end of my fieldwork, Rafiq and Sunita eventually married and went to live in a nearby city.

Rafiq's family did not express open opposition to the match, most probably because Rafiq was at the time de facto head of the household, as his two elder siblings had mental disabilities and the remaining elder sister was unmarried. This said, other local Muslims likewise did not present open opposition to the match, which was unsurprising since one of the prominent local Muslim leaders, Abdul, had a second marriage to a young Hindu Patel woman whom he met through his work as a government surveyor. His second wife converted to Islam and worked as head nurse in the local hospital. She lived with her two children in one of the family's two bungalows; in the other bungalow, Abdul's first wife, a Muslim to whom he remained married, lived with her son and daughter. In cases such as that of Abdul, there was relatively little concern among local Muslims over such marriages, and in fact many people whom I asked about Abdul's second marriage were not even aware that it had been with a Hindu woman. Given Abdul's status as both politically powerful and well-established in local networks, it is possible that such a ‘transgressive’ marriage might be more easily overlooked. It is also the case that, as ParryFootnote ²⁵ has noted, there is often greater pressure on ensuring that first marriages comply with kinship and community norms; in contrast, there is greater scope for non-normative arrangements (marrying outside of one's community or caste) in second marriages.

In these cases, as well as romantic relationships such as that described at the opening of the article, the couple was well-matched in terms of education, class, and professional occupation—increasingly important among Indian middle-class families, as shown by scholars such as Fuller and Narasimhan, Donner, and Pache Huber.Footnote ²⁶ Typically, as in other love matches, couples met in educational settings or because they worked in the same office. They shared similar aspirations and lifestyles, and conformed to Hirsch and Wardlow's definition of ‘companionate marriage’ as based on criteria such as ‘a prior romantic relationship, individual choice in spouse, monogamy (as opposed to polygamy), sexual fidelity within marriage, nuclear family households, neolocal residence, the idealization of verbal over instrumental expressions of attachment, preferring the company of one's spouse over familial or same-sex sociality, viewing marital sex as an expression and symbol of attachment . . . and viewing marriage as “the presumptive venue of emotional gratification”’.Footnote ²⁷

On a practical level, the higher number of relations between Muslim men and Hindu women (in contrast to relations between Muslim women and Hindu men) is to be expected. In common with other Indian communities in India, Muslim men were allowed significantly more freedom, while women's mobility was rigidly monitored and limited. Men in these families, while constrained by the responsibilities of work during the daytime, were free to come and go from the house at will. Many young men in Sultanpur spent countless hours hanging out, chatting, drinking tea, and eating snacks, beginning after the evening meal and often lasting until the early hours of the morning. Last-minute, late-night trips to visit friends or a local Sufi shrine were not uncommon and, providing that adequate transportation was available in the form of a motorbike or car, few questions were asked by their family members as long as they returned in time to begin work the next day.

Similarly, young Hindu women in Sultanpur and nearby cities also generally enjoyed a higher level of mobility than their Muslim counterparts, and many of them attended colleges or universities in nearby cities where they came into contact with men their own age from various classes and religious backgrounds. Thus, the opportunities for interaction with members of the opposite sex on comparatively neutral ground were more numerous for men in general and Hindu (and Christian) women than Muslim women.

The two cases described here represent cases in which the couples met in educational and professional settings, shared a similar class background, and were able to formalize their relationship through marriage because of particular family circumstances which gave them more decision-making power over their marital situation (Rafiq had greater freedom because of his father's ill health, and Abdul because he was already well-established in his career and therefore had greater autonomy from kin). Both cases, each of which can be seen as constituting an exception rather than the rule, defied normative expectations in the fact that they were based on love, with a member of a different community, and, most notably given the wider communalist context in Gujarat, with a Hindu woman.

In the next section I argue that such cases in which Muslim men and Hindu women married remained exceptional yet were tolerated in Sultanpur for two reasons: first, because they were not perceived to pose a serious threat to wider religious divisions and, second, because they ultimately upheld middle-class uniformity, which constituted an equally important form of social division in the town.