Love, Sex and Social Reforms: Exploring the pedagogical impulses of Hindu Right’s Love Jihad Narratives on X
In India, the narrative of love or sexual jihad has become an important rallying point for the adherents of Hindutva (the political ideology espoused by the Bhartiya Janata Party, currently in power in India) to curb what they believe is a cultural war waged by Muslim men to sexually lure and marry Hindu women as part of their religious duty to convert them.
Love jihad narratives have exploded on X or Twitter in the recent past, followed by offline instances of violence against inter-religious couples, pointing to a definitive and progressive loss of personal liberty under the current right-wing regime amidst an unsubstantiated fear of a ‘demographic takeover’ by Muslims. Other inclinations that have accompanied this right wing narrative include increasing moral policing, containment and erasure of transgressive love, the control of female sexuality and the crippling criminalization of Muslim men.
While all these issues have found some resonance in recent scholarships around the topic, this project departs from these tropes to explore the pedagogical impulses engendered in these narratives. Using digital ethnography and Twitter API, this project will adopt a novel trope of reform, as one of the understudied impulses behind such narratives beyond mere propagation of hate and mis/disinformation initiated by the adherents of the Hindu Right on X or Twitter.
The politics of reforming the Hindu society as a strong motivation behind the love jihad narrative is not new. I argue that its foundations lay in colonial India when India struggled to fight the British, create a new identity for itself while reforming its ‘backward society’. Two strong reformist ideas circulated then – one more modernist and forward looking that wanted to ‘bring up’ India to the western standards and the other that urged Hindus to go back to their ‘golden past’. The project will explore how and in which ways do these two contesting reformist logics converge or diverge in the existing Love Jihad narratives on X.
Main Research Interests
- online political mobilization
- somatic nationalism
- Hindutva
- hate speech
- online religious subjectivities
Curriculum Vitae
- 01/2024-12/2024 – Associate Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KWI), Essen, Germany
- 04/2023-12/2023 – International Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KWI), Essen, Germany
- 09/2020-01/2023 – Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen, Germany
- 09/2018-08/2020 Marie Curie COFUND Fellow, Max Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt, Germany
- 09/2016-04/2018 – Assistant Professor, St. Joseph’s University, Bangalore
Publications and Presentations
- Roohi, S. 2024. Against #CoronaJihaad: Somatic Hindu nationalism on Indian Twitter during COVID-19. Special Issue article for ‘eFaith: Rewiring the house of God’, Journal for Religion, Media and Digital Culture. https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-13021247
- Roohi, S. et. al. (first author). 2023. Transnational Giving and Evolving Religious, Ethnic and Political Formations in the Global South. Ethnography. 24 (3): 303-315.
- Roohi, S. 2023. Love in the times of Hindutva: The sexual politics of religious nationalism in India. Part I and II. KWI Blog.
- Roohi, S. 2023. The elite as the Political Adversary: Neoliberalism and Cultural Politics of Hindutva. In The cultural politics of anti-elitism: ‘Against the elites!’, edited by Morritz Ege and Johannes Springer. Routledge: UK.
- Roohi. S. 2010. Minority within Minorities: Muslim Women in Kolkata. In S. Bhaumik ed. Counter Gaze: Media, Migrants, Minorities, Frontpage Publication: Kolkata.