Carceral domesticities and the geopolitics of Love Jihad

Religious conversion and marriage across communal lines have long been contentious in India. The contemporary debate on ‘Love Jihad’ – the Hindu Nationalist conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of waging a religious war by seducing and converting unsuspecting Hindu brides – exemplifies the simultaneously geopolitical and biopolitical anxiety that religious conversion inspires. In this paper, I focus on the case of Hadiya, a young woman from Kerala, who, in 2016, found herself remanded first to her university’s hostel – as dormitories are called in India – and then to her parents’ home as various courts debated on the authenticity of her conversion to Islam, and her marriage to a Muslim partner. Through an examination of media discourse and court records in this case, the paper argues that in ‘Love Jihad’, the domestic and the carceral are rendered inextricably intertwined through an affective politics that presents desire outside the bounds of caste and religion as geopolitically misoriented. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on the phenomenology of orientation, I focus on the intimate geographies of the hostel, which I argue exemplifies a site of carceral convergence between nation and family, in the management of the affective disorder associated with religious conversion.