In a Pew Research poll, “Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation,” the majority of Indians say they have respect for all religions; is interfaith tolerance more than sufficient? Yet, is it not necessary for major religious groups to intermarry in order to live together as one nation?
Intermarriages across faiths are not very common in India, except in Bollywood stories. Only 1% of Indians say they are married to someone who currently follows a different religion than their own. Nearly all married people (99%) report that their spouse shares their religion.
This includes nearly universal shares of Hindus (99%), Muslims (98%), Christians (95%), Sikhs and Buddhists (97% each). (Not enough Jains were sampled.)
In this context, Ashis Roy, a practicing psychoanalyst, has written an interesting book about the inner lives of couples locked inside Hindu-Muslim marriages in India.
Often romantically portrayed in Bollywood as escape fantasies, such elopements may be popular in Bollywood yet are rare in the rest of India, going back to the 1957 film Mother India, which famously witnessed two mega-stars marrying after the completion of their film, namely Sunil Dutt-Nargis affair.
DS: How did you come to this book project on Hindu-Muslim relationships?
AR: Over millennia, Hindus and Muslims in India have been united and divided. Various narratives have emerged and been concealed throughout history. This study explores the complex relationship between the two cultures and the loving Hindu-Muslim couple. The pair’s psychological interiority forces us to rethink social and cultural phenomena like ‘otherness,’ ‘identification,’ and desire. The unconscious holds contemporary society’s unspoken conflicts between the two communities. This study explores the sufficiency of love and the things that sustain a couple’s connection. This allows the couple to define their identity independent of religion. Psychoanalysis, interviews, psychobiographies, literature, and theory, are used to explain identity and desire in interfaith partnerships. Fluid identity conceptions are in crisis in a climate of continual conflict between democratic liberal principles and a revival of fundamentalist interpretations. Instead of taking extreme positions, the author used psychoanalysis to explain contradictions. Rediscovering love in the Hindu-Muslim couple who reject extremism was crucial. For the author, this meant maintaining and reassessing internal contradictions.
DS: What theories did you rely on heavily, besides Kakar, Freud, Green, Winnicott, and others?
AR: Erikon’s work on Identity formation was crucial in creating a framework in which both the group and the individual identities could be located. Neil Altman’s conceptualisation of the social third was integral for envisioning a psychoanalytic framework that included the individual, the dyad and the third person representing the social context. Fakhry David’s writing on the internal racist helped me develop a more nuanced understanding of dehumanisation of the Other and otherness. Lacan and Andre Green helped in formulating a crucial paradox and conundrum in which the Hindu Muslim couple find themselves—from where does a Hindu find a way of loving a Muslim, and from where does the Muslim find a way to receive it? Equally from where does a Muslim find a way of loving a Hindu and from where does the Hindu find a way of receiving it?
DS: What did you discover that you think readers may not know (mostly therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists) about the inner lives of couples struggling with interfaith, inter-religious marriages?
AR: Psychologists and psychoanalysts must be attuned to the alienation experienced by couples with mixed identities, as their aspirations for acceptance within the other community are frequently unendorsed by their own. The tension between fulfilling one’s desires and relinquishing them generates instability in the internal dynamics of such marriages.
DS: How is the multicultural situation in India where these issues—Hindu-Muslim marriages or interfaith relations—can be further resolved?
AR: The national mourning efforts required to heal the scars of the Partition necessitate focus. The affection between Hindu-Muslim couples is a progression towards grief, allowing us to envision a sense of unification and amalgamation. A lot more awareness about the syncretic past of Hindus and Muslims needs to be created. Individuals and intellectuals need to re-examine their own personal positions regarding this issue so that the hatred towards the other is not other-ed.
DS: Why do you think psychoanalysis (Kakar, Erikson, etc.) is the best way to deal with these issues? Why not political theories, or sociological and anthropological theories, might be better deployed?
AR: Psychoanalysis’ exploration of desire, identity, otherness, and the negative renders it particularly adept at addressing interpersonal circumstances where political realities may constrain the imaginative potential of love, which relies on the permeability of these borders. While politics compels us to engage and choose a stance, psychoanalysis instructs us to defer action and contemplate more liberally.
DS: How do you explain Bollywood’s obsession with Hindu-Muslim love stories, while demographically the numbers are very small or shrinking?
AR: I wouldn’t call it an obsession. Bollywood does time and again create narratives that help us imagine this love. The award winning film All That We Imagine as Light does carry a sensitive portrayal of a Hindu-Muslim love relationship where sexuality and love are explored freely without any fuss about their religious identity. Such a possibility is so important to think of a space where a Hindu-Muslim bond can explore being neither exclusively Hindu or Muslim.
