“Jab pyar kiya toh darna kya” : Love Marriage, Gender, and Citizenship in an Indian Muslim Neighbourhood

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in multi-caste Muslim urban neighbourhoods in North India, this paper looks at young Muslim people's lives in relation to ideas of love foregrounded by the challenges of Hindu Nationalism, neo-liberalism, and social change. Specifically, I look at how young people’s narratives and experiences of love in the neighbourhoods both progressively and regressively reproduce norms around gender, nationalism, citizenship, religion, and identity. In doing so, I build on critical feminist and queer scholarship, looking at bodily and affective states as socio-politically mediated and structured. Various scholars have noted that the rise Hindu nationalism has resulted in the marginalisation and othering of Muslims in India through state, media, and vigilante groups. The campaign against "love jihad"—a moral panic against a supposed "conspiracy" by Muslim men to seduce, marry, and convert young Hindu girls, has been one of the prominent ways to achieve this. Hindu nationalist-led state governments have enacted laws that make interreligious marriage more challenging and have allowed vigilante violence, most notably in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh where this study is based. While interreligious love has been increasingly weaponised to target Muslim men since 2014, the moral panic over love is not new in India. Both the Indian state and society have regulated the ideas of love, marriage, and citizenship coercively and discursively. Contemporary anxieties around love and marriage are also underscored by neoliberalism, urbanization, and changing gender dynamics. Amidst these anxieties, many young people are reproducing social norms around patriarchal control and violence. Nonetheless, many young people are also increasingly falling in love, engaging in online intimacies, navigating families and getting married for love. As navigating these changes first-hand, young people's experiences are critical to this study. In this context, this paper asks how Muslim young people living in urban neighbourhoods in the city of Saharanpur are negotiating ideas and anxieties around love. Specifically, I look at young people’s critiques, reproduction, and strategies related to love and companionship. I argue that taking love as an entry point into the political, social, and normative helps us understand marginalised young people's relational bodily and affective agencies in a “transforming terrain”. Furthermore, by focusing this study in neighbourhoods as social spaces, I show the impact of young people’s affective practices on their broader discursive environments.