Rakshasa is popularly known in India as a demonic, enemy race of Hindu mythology.Footnote 1 Not commonly known is that the Sanskrit term doubles as a legal concept taken from the famous Manusmriti (Manava-Dharmashastra, or “Laws of Manu”), usually dated to the second century CE. According to Manu, the seventh of eight forms of marriage contract, universally “disapproved” yet permissible for the Kshatriya (or “warrior”) caste alone, rakshasa is the “[m]arriage by seizure of a maiden by force from her house, while she weeps and calls for assistance, after her kinsmen and friends have been slain in battle or wounded, and their houses broken open,” as rendered in John D. Mayne's influential translation of 1878.Footnote 2 In its first translation in the pioneering effort towards the codification of Gentoo Laws in 1776, rakshasa marriage is styled “Ràkhus, so called, when a Man marries the Daughter of another, whom he has conquered in War.”Footnote 3 Other texts within the ancient ethical and legal Dharmashastra genre similarly treated rakshasa,Footnote 4 but it was the Dharmashastra attributed to Manu that was reified as the major, supposedly authoritative source of Anglo-Hindu personal law. An idiosyncratic colonial invention, the “personal law” of religious communities allowed Britons to rule Indians through the fig leaf of nonintervention in marriage, inheritance, caste, and religious matters.Footnote 5 Yet having revived rakshasa marriage in a modern legal context in the first place, the British proceeded to criminalize it. Following the Indian Penal Code of 1860, a consensus of court cases,Footnote 6 legal thinkers,Footnote 7 Indian politicians, and political thinkersFootnote 8 declared rakshasa an “obsolete” form of marriage, invoking this exact phrase with remarkable invariance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 9 Manu's legal definition of rakshasa marriage now constituted any of the criminal offenses of enticement, kidnapping or abduction, and rape, where applicable.
This article traces rakshasa marriage as an explicit concept of gendered conquest in Indian political thought. The conception of a distinctly Kshatriya-mode of marriage as generative of sovereignty developed in tension with the brahmanization of marriage that was contemporaneously codified into Hindu law.Footnote 10 Its significance transcended the law and India. Rakshasa marriage entered global sociological and political theorizing in the nineteenth century as the primitive “marriage by capture.” It was identified with “exogamy” and the capture of women as booty in war. In rakshasa marriage, the Kshatriya’s triumphant exogamy displaces the Brahmin’s endogamous purity: a deliberate crime against law, patriarchy, and caste.
Historians of India have remained unconvinced that the modern state confined women to a “private sphere” set against and excluded from a “public sphere” of politics, which motivates feminist projects of recovering women's voices.Footnote 11 The reason is that from its very outset, British rule in India targeted the supposedly private sphere of women in order to push into Indian society (beginning with the Abolition of Sati Act of 1829 and the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856).Footnote 12 Women and the home in turn became the site of a native potentiality for sovereignty, which colonialism excluded from the “public” business of politics.Footnote 13 That sovereignty should be gendered, usually as male, and that women or feminized bodies should be fundamental to its operations, speaks from newer work on the nexus of colonialism, sexuality, and race,Footnote 14 and (still marginal) feminist histories of political thought alike.Footnote 15 If these accounts are concerned with the gendered foundations of sovereignty either established or establishing, this article is concerned with their breakdown. To be sure, gendered consequences of the breakdown of a gendered sovereign order are well theorized in the context of war and genocide, where sexualized violence targets women as national or group symbol,Footnote 16 battlefield,Footnote 17 ethnomarker,Footnote 18 booty,Footnote 19 and womb.Footnote 20 Uniquely, rakshasa marriage provides an explicit genealogy in the history of political thought linking war over sovereignty to the capture of enemy women. As such, rakshasa marriage contributes to the important work of historicizing (and exorcizing) the only universal, natural-seeming links between gender and power.Footnote 21 Rakshasa sheds light on the process of naturalization itself as in nineteenth-century social theorizing; it designated no less than the state of nature. This article will be of interest to scholars of Hindu nationalism and communalism in India; the social and sexual contract in and beyond South Asia; and the historiographies of gender, sovereign violence, and global political thought.
Rakshasa marriage designates the dissolution of father’s power and of the existing moral and sovereign order. Usefully in this context, Schmitt and Agamben define sovereign power through its ability to transcend the legal order.Footnote 22 The sovereign power of (violent) transgression against the gendered sovereign order, usually in the interest of maintaining this order,Footnote 23 lies with the white colonial and slave master,Footnote 24 with dominant groups, and in India with the upper castes. Recent scholarship has shown how Brahmin supremacy is maintained through policing upper-caste women’s sexuality, while forcing access to Dalit (untouchable) women's sexuality.Footnote 25 An economy of sexual assault down the descending hierarchy of caste doubles the sexual economy of caste as rooted in marriage, kinship, and exchange.Footnote 26 These insights into the gender–caste nexus should serve to cast doubt on framings of intercommunal (Hindu–Muslim) abductions and rapes as attacks on the enemy community’s purity, which fail to convince where rapes pollute the perpetrator along with the victim. Rakshasa marriage in fact allows us to radically reconsider the gendered nature of communal violence especially during the Indian Partition, beyond ubiquitous brahmanical notions of purity, endogamy, patriarchal exchange, and the control of female sexuality as the vestige of community purity and “honor” (izzat).Footnote 27 In the event of exception in 1947,Footnote 28 rakshasa marriage was deliberately employed to break the existing gendered moral and sovereign order. As rumor of rapes and abductions marked the beginning of the exception in towns and villages across India,Footnote 29 rakshasa marriage simultaneously announced that sovereignty was in contestation and served as means to decide the contest.
The logic of rakshasa marriage was deeply embedded in Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, by the time of the Partition that witnessed mass slaughter and mass migration along with women's abduction, rape, forcible marriage, conversion, and suicide. Working abductions that crossed religious lines into the logic of a full-blown civil war between Hindus (including Sikhs) and Muslims, Hindu nationalists endorsed rakshasa marriage to mirror purported Muslim actions that were coveted as well as reviled. For, by the 1920s, the Muslim enemy stood accused of forcefully abducting and converting Hindu women,Footnote 30 likely drawing on an older Indian Muslim controversy over the Quranic legality of taking war captives, and female slaves as concubines.Footnote 31 Hindutva's architect, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1967), unambiguously made rakshasa marriage with Muslim women the key to vanquishing the Muslim enemy. In so doing, Savarkar asked Hindu nationalists to adopt a persona that combined the Hindu Kshatriya and the enemy Muslim “Rakshasa,” or demon, no less. Whereas we know that women's protection from the rapist/abductor who is invariably cast as “other” justifies violent, reactionary projects in the past and present,Footnote 32 this article uniquely illuminates the ideological effort involved in transforming the self into the other as sovereign. To vanquish the Muslim enemy, Hindus had to become like them by stealing women and breaking caste.
Capturing brides, breaking father's power
Criminalized in 1860, rakshasa marriage nevertheless survived in Indian legal discourse. Textbooks continued to cite it,Footnote 33 and aspiring Indian civil servants and legal practitioners continued to scribble it into their notebooks and revise it, as did one British law student in the late nineteenth century who later became an Indian High Court judge.Footnote 34 This state of affairs continued into the twentieth century,Footnote 35 and remains unbroken in India's postcolonial history.Footnote 36 Yet rakshasa marriage was more than an academic exercise in colonial India. It continued to have real legal effect, in matters of inheritance where a wife's personal property (stridhan) devolved on her own kin instead of her husband's only if her wedding took one of Manu's four “disapproved” forms.Footnote 37 In such case she failed to become one with her husband's body and legal personhood.Footnote 38 Rakshasa marriage even mitigated the criminal offense of rape, as in a court case in Nagpur in 1927 where the recognition of a supposed tribal “custom” of marriage initiated through abduction and rape weighed against standardized, brahmanical Anglo-Hindu law and, ultimately, against fourteen-year-old Phula, who had refused to marry her rapist.Footnote 39 Finally, rakshasa marriage continues to be invoked in contemporary India, where family opposition muddles the line between nonconsensual abduction and socially transgressive elopement.Footnote 40
Perhaps most striking about the conceptual history of rakshasa marriage in the almost hundred years from its criminalization to the early years of Indian independence is its simultaneous ubiquity and silencing. Attempts were made to domesticate rakshasa in line with what historian Samita Sen calls the “legal and ritual brahmanisation of marriage.”Footnote 41 This was where it, like the approved forms, was held to become legally binding only with the subsequent performance of the brahmanical marriage rites (especially the saptapadi or “seven steps”), rather than with the prior acts of abduction and sex.Footnote 42 Invoking the legal concept of “consummation,” sex was contentious even beyond its forced or illicit forms, as Indian jurists disagreed over whether it was the marriage ceremony, usually celebrated in childhood, or consummation celebrated at puberty that established Hindu marriage. Rejecting that sex legally constituted marriage, scholars Priyanath Sen and Pandurang Vaman Kane opined, in 1909 and 1941, that for the ancient Hindu lawgivers, the “wronged” girl would have remained legally a “virgin,” and as such eligible for proper marriage.Footnote 43 Commentators such as P. R. Ganapathi Iyer, an advocate at Madras's High Court, in 1915, invoked British alongside Manu's contract law to argue that force or fraud voided all contracts, including that of marriage.Footnote 44 Rakshasa marriage, which arose from force, could be no marriage.
Another popular strategy of silencing rakshasa was its conflation with gandharva marriage, the sixth and likewise disreputable form of marriage that Manu nevertheless permitted to Kshatriyas. This was based on mutual attraction—“love marriage” in today's parlance. For example, colonial courts largely recognized the supposedly customary “dagger marriages” (khanda lagan, or katar marriage) of Rajputs, Rajahs, and Zamindars who pretended to Kshatriya status, as a valid (albeit inferior) marriage rather than concubinage, contracted with slaves and women of lower class and caste.Footnote 45 While an early colonial account of a sword representing the groom at a Maratha wedding ceremony interpreted this as a ritualized way around the prohibition of intercaste marriage,Footnote 46 subsequent legal discussion exaggerated the presence of the sword into an emblem of Kshatriya power and sovereignty wielded over an inferior wife. Jurists nevertheless identified the ritual with gandharva rather than rakshasa marriage.Footnote 47 Rakshasa's erasure was final and complete where only the gandharva form appeared as historically permissible to Kshatriyas.Footnote 48 A third strategy was implicit reference, an example being Rai Bahadur Pandit Kanhaiya Lal, a retired High Court judge who served as member of the Age of Consent Committee that paved the way for the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act.Footnote 49 He invoked the concept to argue for an exception to any legal age of consent, which would allow a “marriage in the disapproved form”—a seduction or worse—to be solemnized by a subsequent marriage in the girls’ own interest.Footnote 50 Yet only comparison with the cited legal source makes the reference to rakshasa marriage overt.Footnote 51 Rakshasa marriage embarrassed and offended, but its true significance was that it seduced the nationalist imagination. It did so because it completely unshackled the Kshatriya idiom from brahmanical, legal, and moral restraint.
Rakshasa marriage came to designate an idiom of sovereignty in the political grammar of nationalist India. More precisely, it became a cypher for Hindu men's assumption of sovereignty through an act of gendered violence. This was sovereignty by “‘acquisition,’ specifically conquest,” as Thomas Hobbes would have it.Footnote 52 What Nancy Hirschmann's feminist reading in particular asserts of Hobbes's war of all against all in the state of nature strikingly resembles what nineteenth-century thinkers drawing on rakshasa marriage, like the banker, archaeologist, and Darwin supporter John Lubbock (1834–1913), have asserted of the primitive war of enemy groups: that it is the act of choosing to leave the female captive, whom one might have killed, alive that conditions—in cruder versions, establishes—male dominion.Footnote 53 The decisive difference between these accounts of humanity's origin in war is that where Hobbes viewed individuals, theorists of rakshasa marriage viewed social groups (clans or tribes) as the combatants and basic units of human society. While Hobbes's war is indiscriminate, only groups have a precise and thus real capacity for enmity. I will come back to this point. Rakshasa's overwhelming, if not necessary, condition was war. In 1916, one commentator in Calcutta's leading journal, the Modern Review, even went so far as to present rakshasa along with another two of Manu's disreputable marriage forms (paishacha, by rape of someone unconscious; and gandharva, by mutual desire) as the ancient Indian sages’ solution to the very modern problem of “war babies.”Footnote 54
In order to assume, through rakshasa marriage, the kind of power and indeed sovereignty that was based on sheer violence, one had to climb down the civilizational ladder to a previous, barbaric stage. It was to this conjectured stage that mid-nineteenth-century social theorists turned as ethnographic accounts of the aberrant sexual customs of “primitives” began to erode Victorian beliefs in the naturalness of patriarchal, monogamous marriage. For thinkers ranging from the Swiss comparative jurist and misappropriated feminist milestone Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87)Footnote 55 and anthropologists John Ferguson McLennan (1827–81)Footnote 56 and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81)Footnote 57 to Herbert Spencer,Footnote 58 Engels,Footnote 59 and Nietzsche,Footnote 60 patriarchy now appeared as the last and perfected stage of human social, political, and legal evolution. Its least perfected stage was a pattern of wife capture between warring tribes, which only ended in the first dawn of civilization with primitive polyandry (female polygamy), followed by matriarchy, and finally patriarchy.Footnote 61 In his Dissertations on Early Law and Custom (1883), the architect of liberal empire and theorist of India's failed evolution from kinship to contract,Footnote 62 Sir Henry Sumner Maine (1822–1888), had to address but showed himself unconvinced by this newfangled theory of the origin of civilization in unregulated wife capture, which challenged his patriarchal theory of Ancient Law (1861).Footnote 63 Manu's term rakshasa marriage served as both prototype and proof of this most ancient stage of “marriage by capture,” as practiced by ancient and contemporary “primitives” alike. It could thus designate an ancient Germanic form of marriage in nineteenth-century tomes,Footnote 64 and was observed among the ancient Semites and Bedouins of the Sinai in the twentieth century.Footnote 65 There was certainly no escaping rakshasa marriage for sociologists interested in the incest taboo, once McLennan derived it from the command of capture. Claude Lévi-Strauss criticized this derivation,Footnote 66 while Edvard Westermarck (1862–1939) regarded rakshasa as the, though legal, wartime exception rather than the norm of primitive marriage.Footnote 67
The anthropological assumption of a universal pattern of primitive “marriage by capture” coincided with the quest for original Indo-Aryan law, thought to be better preserved in the most ancient Indian than in the later Roman and Greek sources. Rakshasa's generalization in turn served to reframe the legal source itself, the Laws of Manu, into which the primitive “marriage by capture” was reinscribed. Thus one reads in Mayne's Treatise on Hindu Law, “The Rakhshasa form is simply the marriage by capture, whose existence, coupled with the practice of exogamy, Mr. McLennan has tracked out in the remotest ages and regions.”Footnote 68 The reference was to the pioneering theorist of rakshasa marriage, the Scottish anthropologist McLennan, who fantasized in 1866, “Race after race has told the same tale. ‘With us there was at first no marriage but the Racshasa [sic]. There was neither wooing, nor love, nor pity; and the wife knew not even to bow her head as she followed her lord over the dead bodies of her kinsmen.’”Footnote 69 More benevolent forms—consensual elopements and purely ritualized abductions as part of wedding ceremonies—succeeded it, but crucially, for McLennan, rakshasa marriage was the opposite of “caste.” The man who enshrined himself in the foundations of social anthropology by coining the opposite marriage patterns of endogamy and exogamy revealed in a footnote in Primitive Marriage (1865) that he had initially considered naming the principle of intra-group marriage “caste.” Only the term's baggage of confusing connotations had made him opt for “endogamy” instead.Footnote 70 The “caste principle” of marriage was based on paternal consent, as was possible only among fellow group members.Footnote 71 Its opposite was “exogamy” or rakshasa marriage, the capture of wives from enemy tribes with whom there was and could be no consensual, patriarchal marriage exchange.
On 1 August 1887, a large number of concerned upper-caste/-class Hindu men had assembled in a crowded Calcutta palace hall. Speeches were made, cheered and discussed. The topic of debate was child marriage and the threat to paternal authority represented by attempts at that time to legalize gandharva, or “love marriage.”Footnote 72 Only the last speaker, a Dr R. Mitra, criticized the conservatism of the prior speakers that entrusted girls to fathers’ authority, as both ahistorical and “contrary to ‘the supreme law of nature’.”Footnote 73 He reasoned: “It may shock your sensibility to be told so, but forcible abduction was the usual form of marriage among your remote ancestors [the Aryans], and old Manu, while denouncing it as bestial, was obliged to admit when he wrote that it was a form of marriage and not rape.”Footnote 74
Rakshasa marriage, for this almost certain reader of McLennan and Spencer, was associated with “exogamy” that did not originally carry the stain of miscegenation.Footnote 75 Brahmanical caste endogamy was not the earliest dispensation.Footnote 76 Rakshasa marriage was for this reason often associated with India's “cannibal Dravidian aboriginal inhabitants,” whose primitive marriage rite in this way still peeked through the more civilized Aryan ones that supplanted it.Footnote 77 Alternatively, it was associated with the Aryans themselves, in this case naming the custom that had enabled their biological colonization of the subcontinent.Footnote 78 The Census commissioner for Madras Presidency in 1871 even went so far as to blame the Aryan Kshatriyas’ custom of rakshasa marriage for the irresponsible amount of interbreeding with the Dravidians that had led to their own downfall and the extraordinary victory of the priestly over the warrior caste, in this variant of the trope of the Aryan degeneration in India.Footnote 79
It is this powerful trope of martial exogamy breaking through brahmanical restraint that should serve to qualify framings of rapes and abductions in communal riots, including in the Indian Partition, as attacks on the (caste) purity of the enemy community, for they ultimately assume a brahmanized, patriarchal speaking position.Footnote 80 In this literature, rapes that are an integral instrument of communal violence are framed through the register of “retaliation” against the real or presumed violation of one's “own” women by the enemy community.Footnote 81 This is misleading in so far as retaliation implies, first, that rapes and abductions are always secondary reactions to perceived prior actions. Second, it implies a measure of reciprocity, if a particularly perverse one. Yet what the act of rakshasa did by definition was to spurn permission and patriarchal consent (both the father's and the community's) that is the basis of patriarchal reciprocity. Rakshasa marriage was a nonreciprocal, unilateral act of force, which at least potentially announced a claim to sovereignty. If more rapes and abductions were the stakes in a war for dominion, this did not actuate a logic of exchange. For reciprocal exchange defines brahma marriage, the first and most meritorious form of marriage according to Manu. This is the father's gift of a girl, decked and adorned, to a husband of his choice. More literally still, exchange defines the only other type of marriage that, though condemned, Anglo-Hindu law did not consider “obsolete” in modern times, namely the asura or sale of a bride.Footnote 82 (In its modern transcription, brahma marriage implies dowry, asura marriage the giving of bridewealth.) From both the classics of social anthropology and the feminist critique of marriage, we know that the gift of a girl establishes kinship, political community, and patriarchy.Footnote 83 The reciprocal gifting or selling of brides defines the boundaries of the group(s) within which marriage and thus friendship are possible: in India, caste and religion.Footnote 84 Only the Kshatriya, the quintessential warrior, could rebel against this patriarchal order.
Rakshasa marriage, absorbed into global legal, sociological, and political theorizing from modern Indian thought, presented the potentiality of a violently enacted, gendered social contract. The Kshatriya's sovereign act of bride capture challenges and violently overthrows patriarchy as commonly understood, namely as the father's (or community's) “dominion” over the daughter, which he transfers to the husband, as the inescapable Mayne himself noted.Footnote 85 Paradoxically, then, rakshasa marriage, which marks an extreme of violence against women, in fact topples the existing patriarchal order. With patriarchs unseated, patriarchalism, the theory of the state in which fathers scale up to the sovereign, disintegrates. Disorder directly follows the moment of capture, before a new order has time to emerge. Any new order would likely also be patriarchal, but crucially it would cohere under a different (set of) patriarch(s). Whereas the lens of women's subordination has warranted second-wave radical feminists’ metonymical treatment of women “given in marriage” and those “taken in battle,”Footnote 86 with ownership and rape constituting their alleged commonality,Footnote 87 the lens of rakshasa reveals these types of marriage as radically distinct, even opposed, events. Rakshasa marriage in fact voided patria potestas (over children, slaves, and wifeFootnote 88) as originated only in a much later stage of human social evolution, though Golapchandra Sarkar Sastri (1846–1915), a vakil at Calcutta's High Court and a prominent legal thinker who gave the prestigious Tagore Law Lecture in 1888, anticipated their feminist identification.Footnote 89 The trope of rakshasa marriage thus cuts against the nineteenth-century emergence of increasingly monetized and marketized forms of arranged marriage in India.Footnote 90 It militates against the Indian iteration, if one so wills, of what Carole Pateman has famously dubbed the “sexual contract.” For, in rakshasa marriage, the warrior deposes the father as king.
Krishna and Ravana
Kshatriyas are the designated kings (raja) of Sanskrit political theory,Footnote 91 historically prompting de facto kings to seek admission into Kshatriya caste (varna) status.Footnote 92 Associated with ancient kshatriyahood, rakshasa marriage gestured towards courtly practice in precolonial north India, where females acquired as captures as well as gifts and purchases were absorbed into the polygamous royal zenana, whose size reflected the grandeur of the kingdom.Footnote 93 The association between wife capture and warrior aristocracy was a strong and abiding colonial trope. It was duly observed among the Rajputs, India's most successful claimants to Kshatriya status in the present age, to the point where “Rajput” even came to appropriate the meaning and assimilative function of “Kshatriya.”Footnote 94 Extensive marriage networks and a continuous state of war buttressed the power of the Rajput clans who had risen to power in medieval Rajasthan.Footnote 95 In the monumental Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han (1829–32) that did so much to mystify them, colonial officer and historian James Tod (1782–1835) wondered at the Rajputs’ failure to advance beyond the rude laws of war that allowed victors to carry off and forcibly marry their opponents’ women, which “both Moses and Menu [sic]” sanctioned and only Christianity and medieval chivalry eradicated.Footnote 96 Under the circumstances, the Rajputs developed a unique method of preserving their honor even in defeat. This was the women's self-immolation, johur.Footnote 97 In the Punjabi context, in 1911, Census commissioners explained traditional wedding processions that staged the mock assault of the mounted and sword-wielding bridegroom's party on the bride's defenders as a popular emulation of royal wedding rites. These were in turn “remnants of the marriage by capture (Rákshasa)” that would have once been “largely prevalent amongst the warrior classes.”Footnote 98
The problem was that medieval Brahmin orthodoxy had declared the Kshatriya varna to be extinct in the present Kali Yuga, or Dark Age. Tussles inevitably ensued between rulers and the Brahmins who alone could recognize them as Kshatriyas and consecrate them as Hindu kings.Footnote 99 In 1876, a British judge presiding over an inheritance dispute at Bombay’s High Court played on the trope of the extinct Kshatriyas in a curious way. In his judgment, Mr Justice Green remarked that had the ancient Kshatriyas really been obligated to obtain a “lawful wife” exclusively in the rakshasa manner, this “would of itself account for the supposed extinction of this class.”Footnote 100 The judgment established the brahmanical norm of brahma marriage (the gift of a girl, or kanyadan) for all Hindus.Footnote 101 Specific caste “custom” would no longer be recognized.Footnote 102 Green justified this by assuming the eventual sanskritization of all social and religious customs towards the brahmanical ideal, in this case towards Manu's preferred brahma marriage.Footnote 103 His reference to rakshasa marriage that imperiled Kshatriya reproduction in this context may not have been altogether serious, but it was influential. The redefinition of rakshasa marriage as “allowable” though “not obligatory” even for the ancient Kshatriyas permitted Indians like the author of The Position of Women in Hindu Law, in 1913, to sanitize the past of Hindu marriage.Footnote 104 At the same time, Green positioned rakshasa marriage exactly in its proper context as I see it, namely as a trope pointing towards kshatriyahood as a lack in modern India, and as the constitutive lack of Hindu nationalism.
Rakshasa marriage signified a violation of both law and dharma (meaning not only “religion” but “morality” or “law”) for all modern Hindus, who no longer possessed the prerogatives of the ancient Kshatriyas. Constituted around the lack of true Kshatriyas whose dharma of action could counter Vedantic quietism, Hindu nationalism launched its ideological effort to again transform Hindus into warriors.Footnote 105 This entailed a radical transvaluation of values. It necessitated the elevation of the Kshatriyas’ svadharma (their caste-specific dharma) that committed them to violence, over the traditional hegemony of brahmanical svadharma whose virtue was nonviolence (ahimsa).Footnote 106 Emulation of brahmanical patriarchy was the traditional route to social mobility (sanskritization).Footnote 107 But beginning in the late nineteenth century, not only Dalits claimed to be déclassé Kshatriyas.Footnote 108 Hindu nationalism's overwhelmingly Brahmin luminaries, too, adopted a Kshatriya identity. They particularly sought to emulate the Kshatriya mode of usurping patriarchy. For rakshasa's most violent theoretician, the founder of Hindutva, V. D. Savarkar, Partition violence itself staged a war in which the capture of enemy women spelled victory.
In a much-loved story in the epic Ramayana that is as ubiquitous in South and Southeast Asia as is the story of the Nativity of Jesus in the West, Sita, the god-king Rama's wife, was abducted by the demon-king Ravana, who desired her as his wife and carried her away to Sri Lanka. Sita was rescued, but had she remained faithful to Rama during her captivity? As subsequent trials actually prove her purity but fail to convince her doubting spouse and his subjects, the long-suffering heroine begs her mother, Earth, to swallow and remove her from this misery. And so the model of virtuous, ill-treated wifehood, Sita, vanishes in one version of the story.Footnote 109 The recovery of Sita from Ravana's captivity, as Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, and Urvashi Butalia's groundbreaking works on women's experiences of Partition have suggested, became a potent rhetorical foil for the repatriation of abducted Hindu and Sikh women living in Muslim families in Pakistan to newly independent India.Footnote 110 As Veena Das has persuasively argued, the bilateral recovery operation itself ended the state of exception of civil war in 1947, inaugurating law and sovereignty in both countries.Footnote 111 The Indian (and Pakistani) nation-state emerged as a patriarchal order that grounded the social contract in the sexual contract, as violence committed in the state of exception was ended and folded into the new order through the restoration of Sita.Footnote 112
The issue with Das's analysis is that it literally upends the story (though I believe it to be correct in its implications for postcolonial sovereignty). Das takes recovery as foundational but not the foregoing abduction of Sita. Yet it was the event of the exception—openness, rather than a closed political orderFootnote 113—that captivated the nationalist imagination and founded “the political” in India, as Shruti Kapila has shown.Footnote 114 Kapila argues that violence and power, which Hannah Arendt disaggregates into opposites,Footnote 115 fall into a more intimate arrangement in the Indian case, where fraternal violence of an almost unimaginable scale shaped the making of the postcolonial nation-state.Footnote 116 The state of exception, being war, could indeed be reframed as a descent into the state of nature with seductive, if misleading, ease, as Darwin more than Hobbes haunted the nineteenth- and twentieth-century theorists of rakshasa.Footnote 117 It follows that what the Indian patriarchal state “remarkably quickly” “sutured”Footnote 118 after 1947 was the chronologically and conceptually prior exception that was rakshasa marriage. Hindu nationalist political thought in the lead-up to civil war rendered rakshasa not only imaginable but indeed lawful during the exception. It is this discourse of force that I am concerned with here, and Krishna was its hero.
Without a doubt the major Hindu nationalist deity before independence, Krishna counsels his friend, the hero Arjuna, to do his duty as a Kshatriya and fight, even kill, his own kin and friends in the central episode related in the epos Mahabharata, the Bhagavad Gita. Its early twentieth-century retelling, as Kapila has shown, founded the Indian political as fraternity and fracticide (between Hindus and Muslims), with a deliberate yet unspecified gesture towards the Indian Partition.Footnote 119 Yet Krishna not only counseled Arjuna to fight in the Kurukshetra War, but also to walk the way of a warrior in amorous matters. Strikingly, both appealed to a Kshatriya's duty (dharma) in the pioneering historicization of Krishna by Bengal’s foremost novelist in the nineteenth century, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–94), titled Krishnacharitra or “Character of Krishna,”Footnote 120 and published between 1886 and 1892.Footnote 121 Meriting Bankim's reputation as a Hindu revivalist and (proto-)Hindu nationalist, Krishnacharitra endeavored to counter the Hindus’ historical deficiency of action and militarism that had made them prey to Muslim and British rule, by forging them into agents in the image of Krishna.Footnote 122 To this aim, Bankim insisted that again acting on Krishna's counsel, Arjuna had gained Subhadra as his wife without her love, invitation, or consent, by rakshasa marriage based on foregoing harana (Sanskrit: “capture,” “theft”).
Before showering moral judgment on the harana of Subhadra, Bankim requests his reader to “kindly forget whatever he might have read” of this episode in popular literature or “heard from the rhapsode of his grandmother.”Footnote 123 In popular tradition, Subhadra falls head over heels in love with Arjuna at the mere sight of him.Footnote 124 It follows that Subhadra's abduction is staged and the marriage by capture in reality a case of the girl's own choice of a husband, or swayamvara (usually by a staged contest), corresponding to the gandharva form of wedding. Yet Bankim insists that Subhadra's was not a case of a lady engineering her own abduction by her lover. For, instead of Subhadra, it was Arjuna who was “bewitched” by Subhadra, whom he has glimpsed without her notice.Footnote 125 It is none other than Krishna, Arjuna's confidant, who dismisses the option of swayamvara as unreliable for Arjuna's purposes, as no one could predict the girl's heart and choice. A nod to the Dharmashastra subsequently reveals the only other “praiseworthy” course of action for a Kshatriya like Arjuna to be abduction by rakshasa marriage. Unlike Justice Green, Bankim not only regarded rakshasa and gandharva marriage alone as appropriate for Kshatriyas, but insisted that rakshasa was to be preferred, as gandharva's motivation by sexual desire would have offended Krishna's and Arjuna's supreme moral sensibility. It followed for Bankim that rakshasa marriage was truly the only marriage rite befitting the ancient Kshatriyas.Footnote 126
To further complicate matters, Subhadra, whose abduction he unscrupulously plotted, is Krishna's own sister. Not only that, but Krishna himself married by capture. Thus, Bankim informs us, Krishna won his chief consort Rukmini, Arjuna won Subhadra, and the celibate hero Bhishma won three princesses of Kashi for his brother, by harana and subsequent rakshasa wedding. This did not mean that they had committed an “outrage” (atyachar).Footnote 127 In Krishna and Rukmini's case, there was mutual attraction. The same unsparing textual criticism that stripped Krishna of some 16,000 wives even allowed Bankim to consider the story of Rukmini's abduction and Krishna's subsequent battle with her brother Rukmi, if not the conflict surrounding the marriage, as a later insertion into the original Mahabharata.Footnote 128 But Subhadra's harana not only belonged in the original epic but was essential to it, even more so than Draupadi's famous swayamvara, as it was Subhadra's and not Draupadi's descendants that became the line of kings.Footnote 129 Now, Subhadra’s feelings for Arjuna were entirely unknown and unconsulted.Footnote 130
The obvious resemblance of the epic haranas and rakshasa marriages to the modern legal offenses of “abduction” and “kidnapping” produced problems for nineteenth-century Hindu elites that were best solved by reference to their “romance” and legality at the time.Footnote 131 Abductions perpetrated by gods and heroes are deeply ingrained in the Hindu tradition, though discomfort with Krishna's history of abduction may be as old as the ninth-century Bhagavata Purana. Footnote 132 While the older Vishnu Purana still left no doubt that it was in the rakshasa manner that Lord Krishna wed his beloved Rukmini before following this up with due Vedic ceremonial, subsequent scriptures tended to embellish the latter ritual and drop the uncouth signifier rakshasa.Footnote 133 The nineteenth and twentieth centuries adopted legalism and romance as strategies of whitewashing. A famous twentieth-century exponent of this tendency is the great Sanskrit scholar, advocate, and authority on ancient Hindu law to this day, Pandurang Vaman Kane (1880–1972). Kane's History of Dharmaśāstra, published in five volumes between the 1930s and the 1960s, cites Arjuna and Subhadra's case as a famous example of the gandharva form of marriage “that was very much in vogue among royal families.” Its “mixture” with rakshasa marriage was sanctioned in cases where the girl loves the boy, who can only obtain her by fighting her disapproving parents.Footnote 134 Senior legal authorities like Jagannanth Raghunath Gharpure in 1939, let alone popular Hinduism, agreed with Kane's position on Subhadra's love for Arjuna.Footnote 135 The notable archeaologist and historian of ancient India at Banaras Hindu University, Anant Sadashiv Altekar, offered a third way in his 1938 book The Position of Women in Hindu Civilisation, cited in the Hindu Code debates in 1945.Footnote 136 Though agreeing that Subhadra loved Arjuna, Altekar unambiguously classified their marriage along with Krishna and Rukmini's as a “Rākshasa,” “Kshātra,” or “Kshatriya marriage.”Footnote 137 “[W]arrior mentality” at the time of the Mahabharata, he explained, had rejected the brahma and asura forms of marriage as dishonorable. But rakshasa marriage had subsequently fallen into disrepute even among the Kshatriyas.Footnote 138
If Bankim, who had domesticated the historical romance in Bengali,Footnote 139 barred the escape route of romance in Krishnacharitra, he deliberately turned against his contemporaries’ moral sensibilities, explicitly including his own. Why? Because Bankim aimed a blow at the Westernized “reformer.” A reformer, wrote Bankim, might believe himself to be the “the ideal man,” and if Krishna was an ideal man, “then he ought to have been a reformer,” who took action against rakshasa marriage.Footnote 140 Bankim had himself been something of a reformer of women's rights, but recanted as he converted to Hindu revivalism in the 1880s.Footnote 141 Written after this hiatus, Bankim's agenda in Krishnacharitra was still not to base gender relations on rakshasa marriage.Footnote 142 Instead, it was to free Krishna from centuries of effeminizing distortions that had made him the butter-stealing child or great lover of cowherdesses (gopis) of Bengali folk devotionalism.Footnote 143 Replacing this sentimental picture with one of Krishna's warrior mentality and morality as an ideal for modern Hindu men required Bankim to transcend brahmanical patriarchy. As Bankim made explicit, this required his readers to drop the standard of nineteenth-century morality that would condemn, and the law that would prosecute, Krishna.Footnote 144 The only standard that readers should apply was the eternal, universal law of dharma, which would exonerate Krishna and the entire affair of the Subhadra-harana. It was Krishna’s dharma to give Subhadra to the worthiest suitor, Arjuna, as it was Arjuna’s to obtain his wife in the way of a warrior. Force was justified in this case where it ensured compliance with Kshatriya dharma and universal welfare.Footnote 145 In demonstrating the historical growth of supposedly eternal Hindu mores, Bankim revealed the sheer dynamism and power of the Kshatriyas of yore. As a Kshatriya, Arjuna, though preemptively asking his own kin for consent,Footnote 146 was not bound by reciprocal patriarchy. It is this shared Kshatriya ethos that, for Bankim, ultimately convinces Subhadra's and Krishna's clan, the Yadavas, to abandon their desire for waging war on Arjuna. Again, it is Krishna who advises them that Arjuna has not dishonored their clan. He has not insulted them by paying bride price, nor has he injured his own honor by begging the girl's hand from her parents. In abducting Subhadra, he has instead acted as a true Kshatriya, thereby conferring prestige on his chosen bride and in-laws.Footnote 147 If channelled through the Kshatriya idiom, self-willing power rather than paternal consent lent itself to the social contract. This social contract was explicitly gendered, and (at least potentially) violently rather than consensually founded.
What are we to make of this situation in which Krishna, beloved god and hero of the Mahabharata, endorses the same practice that is condemned as that of Ravana, the enemy in the Ramayana? Bride capture often appeared as that which the “other” did: the Dravidian, in an article of 1921 in the weekly Young India edited by the theorist of nonviolence, Gandhi himselfFootnote 148—the primitive, the enemy, the Rakshasa. It followed that the homonymy between rakshasa marriage and the Rakshasas with a capital R could be no coincidence. For Kane, the wedding “[wa]s called rākṣasa because rākṣasas (demons) are known from legends to have been addicted to cruel and forceful methods.”Footnote 149 Rakshasa marriage indexed the prevalent form of marriage among the Rakshasas, for Chintaman Vinayak Vaidya—an influential Marathi historian,Footnote 150 a Tilakite, and former chief justice of the princely state of Gwalior—in a book titled The Riddle of the Ramayana (1905) and dedicated to the Maharaja of Baroda,Footnote 151 as it did for McLennan in Primitive Marriage, written almost half a century earlier.Footnote 152 Identifying rakshasa marriage with Ravana's tribe in ever tighter intertextuality, a 1909 translation of the Ramayana of Valmiki even hosted a discussion of Manu's eight forms of marriage and the (im)propriety of rakshasa marriage in its extensive commentary.Footnote 153 Yet intriguingly, for Vaidya, the fact that Sita's abduction followed the Rakshasas’ customary form of marriage only served to prove her chastity, as it would have also been these demons’ “custom” to delay intercourse for one year to allow the wife abducted from her living husband to “reconcile herself to her situation.”Footnote 154
No such allowances were made where the aim of vanquishing one's enemy came to require nothing short of a full identification with Ravana, the villain of Hindu tradition. None other than the arch-Hindu nationalist “Veer” Savarkar drew this requirement to its logical conclusion when he deliberately appropriated the ways of Ravana, who had become synonymous with the figure of the sexually rapacious Muslim.Footnote 155 A Maharashtrian Brahmin drawn early in life to the violent revolutionary brand of Indian nationalism, which earned him fourteen years in prison, Savarkar coined the ideological core of Hindu nationalism in his 1923 treatise Essentials of Hindutva.Footnote 156 Later as leader of the Hindu nationalist party, the All India Hindu Mahasabha, and implicated in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, Savarkar spent his life fanning the flames of violence like no other. With devastating consequence and consistency, Savarkar's Hindutva that is entirely couched in the exception of war commanded Hindus to become Kshatriyas by quite literally becoming rakshasa-practicing Muslim “Rakshasas.” Savarkar's project of Hindu dominion emulated India's so-called conquerors, as even before the Muslims, the British had been accused of raping the Indian motherland and its women rakshasa-style.Footnote 157 To inspire such transformation, Savarkar deliberately strewed rumors of Muslims abducting, seducing, forcibly converting, and marrying Hindu women, all with the aim of increasing their numbers and overpowering Hindus.Footnote 158 In 1925, Savarkar dropped one such rumor on the crucial locale of Kohat, where communal violence had just forced the first mass evacuation of one community, the Hindus.Footnote 159 In an article titled “The ‘Suffering’ Muslims of Kohat” published in the newspaper Mahratta on 1 March 1925, Savarkar claimed nothing less than that the Quran permitted sex with an enslaved female.Footnote 160 He was joined in this view by the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami and one of the major theorists of Islamism, Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi (1903–79).Footnote 161 Crucially, Savarkar drew an explicit connection between war and the capture of female slaves. The Quran, he insisted, allowed “capturing [a woman] as an article of the booties of war.”Footnote 162 If Muslims had religious sanction to fill their harems with Hindu mistresses captured in their war with Hindus, then the war strategy that presented itself to Savarkar was for Hindu males to practice like for like. Savarkar's grotesque identification with his enemy thus overtly made Muslim women's bodies the battleground and booty that they—as women of all “communities”—indeed became during the Indian Partition.Footnote 163 The specificity of Hindutva's social contract in the crucial decades leading up to Partition was its rejection of brahmanical patriarchy and ideologies of purity. Weaponizing rakshasa marriage, Savarkar's Hindutva sought to gain victory and sovereignty through the violent dispossession of Muslim patriarchs and appropriation of Muslim women.
Hindutva spearheaded the framing of a Hindu woman's conversion and marriage to a Muslim, as all conversions to Islam, as forced and fraudulent by definition. This was in keeping with a long Anglo-Indian legal tradition that embedded women in the patriarchal family, producing, amongst other things, a confusing proliferation of legal ages of maturity for girls.Footnote 164 Infringement against patriarchy was framed as “abduction,” “kidnapping,” “seduction,” or “enticement” away from the “lawful guardianship” of a father or husband, to whom, like property, it warranted restitution: from nineteenth-century Indian women's escapes from domestic tyranny and work migration,Footnote 165 with notable similarity of rhetoric and phraseology to the restoration of women abducted during the Indian Partition—a point that has remarkably gone unnoticed. Force affecting consent rendered “sacramental” Hindu marriages “voidable” even in early drafts of the controversial Hindu Code Bill.Footnote 166 In the wake of Partition, it was the assumption of force in “abducted” women's marriages and conversions that allowed India and Pakistan's recovery operations to declare them void and repatriate (or reabduct) the women.Footnote 167
Signposting women's removal from family control, references to rakshasa marriage dotted the controversy over the reform of Hindu personal law that jolted through legislatives from the 1920s onwards and on to the final passage of the Hindu Code Bill only after independence, in 1955–6. Ventures into India's past and epic traditions allowed reformers within the Legislative Assembly to undermine the conservative defenders of marriage “tradition.” The Mahabharata in particular could be construed as a time before the “evolution” of the same sacramental marriage that Hindu conservatives posited as eternal and defended from reformist meddling on this basis:Footnote 168 ancient India had historically known rakshasa marriage, polygamy, and divorce. Foremost among the reformers was Hari Singh Gour (1870–1949), a distinguished legal mind and, from 1921 onwards, an untiring social reformer within the Legislative Assembly, which he pushed to consider civil marriage and raise the age of consent (in India meaning the consummation of marriage) for girls.Footnote 169 Gour's important summary treatment of The Hindu Code of 1919 framed the Laws of Manu as an archive of objectionable practices of a bygone age unjustifiably elevated into “unchangeable” legal authority. Having denounced ancient Hindu society's Brahmin supremacism and rampant female infanticide, he turned to the definition of rakshasa marriage as to a triumphant conclusion: “After this who would doubt the legality of the rape of the Sabine women?”Footnote 170 In other words: after this, who could accept the lawgiver who legalized rakshasa marriage?
On 18 September 1951, Narhar Vishnu Gadgil (1896–1966), a veteran freedom fighter and social reformer, urged the Constituent Assembly that acted as interim parliament to pass rather than stall the Hindu Code Bill, before the upcoming first general election might impede it altogether. Insisting that the Code's provisions did not in fact violate “dharmic” or “sacramental” Hindu marriage, as his fellow parliamentarian and, prior to independence, Savarkar's rival for the control of the Hindu Mahasabha, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–53), alleged, Gadgil argued somewhat cheekily,
There [in the Hindu Code] is free scope from the Dhushyanta Shakuntala type of marriage to Prithviraj Samyugita type of marriage, namely from Gandharva to the Rakshasa type and all the eight forms can be practised by any Member of this House or by the public outside. This Code does not prevent love-making, it does not prevent eloping with bride’s consent even against the consent of the parents. So far as eight forms of Hindu sacramental marriage are concerned, they are not affected in the least.Footnote 171
Shakuntala and King Dushyanta, and Princess Samyukta and King Prithviraj were among the most famous lovers in India's literary tradition. For Gadgil, rakshasa was simply an elopement.
Unlike politicians seeking to legalize deviant love, Savarkar did not conflate rakshasa marriage with consensual love where there could be none because there must be none: between communities designated as enemies. In 1878, John Mayne already defined the difference between gandharva and rakshasa marriage as one of social context. The former marriage was only possible in “a society in which a friendly, though perhaps stealthy, intercourse was possible between man and woman before their union, and in which the inclinations of the female were consulted.”Footnote 172 This assumed (the potential of) friendship between families. Bankim agreed: a harana accorded with dharma only where the captor could eventually be reabsorbed into the girl's family, as was the case with Subhadra and Arjuna.Footnote 173 For Bankim, the true enemy remained beyond the pale of harana. Savarkar weaponized harana to cross the pale. What makes Savarkar unique as a modern theorist of rakshasa marriage is that he espoused it in all its violence, thus ending the long history of its ambiguous slippage into gandharva marriage which, in Savarkar's own time, even fueled a romance genre of intercommunal “abductions.”Footnote 174 This most unexpected champion of intercommunal marriage, Savarkar, did not mean love.
Conclusion
Through rakshasa marriage, Indian thought makes explicit what remains buried in the Western tradition: that the conjugal, rather than paternal, relation may be the foundational political relation.Footnote 175 Recall that in India, it was the private sphere of women and the home that was the site of a struggle for sovereign control between colonizer and colonized elites. The irrepressible rakshasa marriage broadens our understanding of the strategies that Hindu elites adopted to become sovereign beyond idealizations of Hindu conjugality past or present.Footnote 176 Hindutva's founding father Vinayak Savarkar's espousal of rakshasa marriage in particular challenges the view that Hindu nationalism ultimately made the less disputed, chaste mother(land)–son and sister–brother relationship and the obligation to protection they invoked its ideological focal point.Footnote 177 Rapes and abductions were not incidental to Hindutva. Rakshasa marriage served as theoretical preparation for the kind of action that was required but only moral during the exception of civil war. Whether the concept consciously played on the minds of Partition-time perpetrators is a question beyond the scope of this intellectual history.
After normalcy was restored, there also ended the need for Kshatriya morality. After 1947, Hindu nationalism regrouped around the figure of the Brahmin, the upholder of righteousness. The treatment of rakshasa marriage by K. M. Munshi (1887–1971), a writer–politician who was Savarkar's erstwhile ally in trying to prevent Pakistan and became a major theorist of post-independent Hindutva, is a case in point. Krishnavatara, Munshi's eight-volume life story of Krishna, is about the restoration of dharma after a time of moral degeneracy that becomes a metaphor for the Partition and Indian independence under Congress rule.Footnote 178 The story frames rakshasa marriage as that which the uncivilized did. It meant “treating [a woman] as a Rakshasi,” it was “prevalent [only] among the Rakshasas,” and it constituted an offense against “Arya Dharma.”Footnote 179 It was most certainly not a permissible marriage for Kshatriyas. But even Krishna's own gandharva marriage with Rukmini, which Manu allowed his caste,Footnote 180 produces moral problems for Munshi's brooding Krishna: “Was that Dharma?” if it had caused pain to Rukmini's kin and made her an outcast?Footnote 181 In Munshi's retelling, Krishna's purpose on earth is to vindicate dharma after its many abuses by Kshatriya kings, including in matters of marriage.Footnote 182 Finally, in perhaps the most popular modern retelling of Arjuna's abduction of Subhadra, B. R. Chopra's iconic Hindi television serial Mahabharata (1988–90), rakshasa marriage again morphed into a consensual, though patriarchy-defying, love marriage. To prove that Subhadra went willingly with Arjuna, Krishna's on-screen version even advises his friend to let his sister steer the carriage that carries both away, saying, “This is not your journey; it is hers.”Footnote 183 This was a story fit for modern Indian women.
In 1923, the monthly journal of the Women's Indian Association, Stri Dharma, featured an article that revealed slavery as the “essence of primitive marriage” and the hidden truth behind the ideal of the “womanly woman” used to counter woman's suffrage in India.Footnote 184 The author was Lotika Ghose, a bachelor's degree holder who had recently made a “spirited defence” of women’s suffrage, and the niece of the revolutionary-turned-yogi Sri Aurobindo and daughter of poet Manmohan Ghose.Footnote 185 She charged, “Under this beautiful motto [of the womanly woman] we faintly see wife-capture and wife-purchase and the institution of serfdom from captives in war which began and went hand in hand with the institution of marriage.”Footnote 186 Arguing that slavery, though it had allowed Hellas and Rome to flourish, had since then exhausted its merits and was now replaced by the new Western standards of democracy and capitalism, Ghose rejected the old form of marriage that was slavery's outgrowth. She advocated a new form of companionate marriage between equal partners who equally divided their labour.Footnote 187 As “man” had evolved from the narrow “selfishness” of the family, clan, and tribe to a greater national or commonwealth ideal, it was now for woman to likewise leave the “narrow domestic sphere” and march out into the world, in service of the nation.Footnote 188 Historian Mrinalini Sinha's history of the event that launched the abstract category of “Indian woman,” the publication of Katherine Mayo's Mother India in 1927, has described the specific antinomy of Indian feminism as that of an “agonistic liberal universalism.”Footnote 189 In addition to the liberal paradox of women’s simultaneous equality with and difference to men that is characteristic of all feminisms, Indian feminism from its inception charged Indian women with being model Indian citizens to bridge the widening gap between Hindus and Muslims. This “double burden” ultimately proved untenable as Indian feminism, too, fractured along communal lines.Footnote 190 Similarly, the trope of rakshasa marriage was only ever superficially about abstract “women,” and really about groups of women as specific as enemies.
The purpose of Lotika's inclusion at this point is not simply to give voice to women—a valuable concern though this is, it should not curtail the gender question in the history of political thought. Rather, my purpose is to point, by way of a conclusion, towards the past and present global cross-fertilization between feminism and patriarchal theorizing.Footnote 191 The resulting unprecedented foregrounding of rape in tackling the ancient problem of power in political thought found in India both its archive and its laboratory. The universalization of their marriage traditions both embarrassed and presented new possibilities for Indians that endure in political thought, popular tradition, and the law. This history is not straightforwardly a history of sexuality. Rather, my reconstruction of rakshasa marriage as a subject of political thought returns to the “symbolics of blood” (of kinship, fathers, death), which Foucault's history of sexuality already presumes superseded by “an analytics of sexuality” (deviancy, populations, life) in modern times.Footnote 192 But this return is not straightforward. Instead, the history of rakshasa marriage in modern Indian political thought attacks sovereignty as derived from what Foucault aptly called the “Sovereign-Father” of classical Western political theory.Footnote 193 What I have sought to uncover is a discourse of power and indeed sovereignty that not only made its foundation in gendered, potentially reproductive violence explicit, but also established itself through the “other” rather than one's “own” women, by breaking the patriarchal hold of its rivals. An offense to fathers heralded by Vinayak Savarkar, the miscegenous discourse of rakshasa emerged as the matrix for Hindutva in its war against the Indian Muslim potentiality of sovereignty. In this sense, Hindutva then and now produced its own mirror image as the feared Muslim “love jihad.”
Acknowledgments
I am thankful to Shruti Kapila, Taushif Kara, Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, Salmoli Choudhuri and Shuvatri Dasgupta for their generous feedback, inspiration, and conversation. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Political Thought and Intellectual History Women's Lunch Seminar, University of Cambridge, in December 2020. The article is much improved by the participants’ comments and that of its two anonymous reviewers. A special thanks to Tracie M. Matysik and the editorial team at Modern Intellectual History.
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