Unravelling a Hindu Woman’s Desire for a Muslim Man: Exploring Identity in Inter-faith Intimacy

Abstract

Erikson and Kakar’s work on identity development has illuminated the interconnectedness of individuals and communities. This study examines the relationship between prohibited desire and identity in inter-faith intimacy, using Erikson’s negative identity paradigm. Society often rejects mixed identities resulting from inter-faith relationships. The paper examines Kakar’s impact on group identification and considers Erikson’s concept of negative identity. Through Karuna, a young Hindu introduced to Islam by her family, her intimate relationships with a young Muslim man are explored. India is huge and diverse, and Hindus and Muslims have lived together for generations. Unfortunately, Hindu-Muslim unions are illegal now. The politicisation of Hindu-Muslim love as Love-Jihad perpetuates the myth that Muslim men actively pursue Hindu women. This paper looks at a Hindu-Muslim relationship through the eyes of Karuna, who was introduced to Islam by her family. As Karuna grew older, her love for radical Islam resulted in her choosing Muslim men as her love objects and eventually being disowned by her family. Using Erikson's conceptualisation of the negative identity, which focuses on what happens when you identify with everything that is forbidden by your community, we focus on understanding Karuna’s desirous self.

Keywords

desire group identity Hindu-Muslim intimate relationships Love Jihad mixed identity negative identity

India is a large and diverse country and Hindus and Muslims have coexisted for centuries. Moreover, in its history, interfaith marriages between Hindus and Muslims have existed and been quite successful. Unfortunately, in contemporary times, such alliances are forbidden. The notion of a Hindu and Muslim being in love are negatively politicised as Love-Jihad, which reinforces the fantasy that Muslim men are forcefully coveting Hindu women. This paper looks at a Hindu-Muslim relationship through the eyes of Karuna, a young, Hindu woman who was introduced to Islam by her family. As Karuna grew older her love for radical Islam resulted into choosing Muslim men as her love objects and eventually being disowned by her family. Using Erikson’s contribution of the negative identity (Erikson, 1968), which focuses on what happens when you identify with everything that is forbidden by your community, we focus on understanding Karuna’s desirous self. The negative discourse of love-jihad reinforces the negative identity elements and forecloses any democratic engagement with an intimate Hindu-Muslim bond. Although democracy so to speak gives us the freedom to choose our love object, how this gets integrated into the social, familial and inter-personal fabric has not yet been investigated. This paper draws us into the search for a psychosocial space (Erikson, 1968) needed by a Hindu-Muslim intimate bond for it to be given its own meaning and thereby forge a new interpersonal identity.

In urban, educated, middle-class India, we are taught to be secular, to learn from different faiths and appreciate diversity. Tasting the food of different communities, knowing and participating in their festivals forms the fabric of our cultural ethos. As compared to individualistic societies, there is lesser indifference for the culture of other communities. Being a part of a heterogenous collective influences one’s understanding of the individual. However, while this level of integration and curiosity exists, in the secular imagination, when the desire to integrate and become part of another community deepens, it often leads to conflicts. The desire becomes more difficult to comprehend when the relationship between the communities has been fraught with tensions historically. This unsettles the individual’s identity vis a vis his group identity. In India, however, relationships also exist within the larger cosmos of faith, which often blurs boundaries between the individual self and his community. What happens when the desire for the faith becomes a part of one’s own soul? What happens when the desire for the forbidden becomes a part of you? What happens to identity formation when your community doesn’t recognise your desire?

The Dialectics of Rupture: From Mythic Narrative to Constitutive Subjectivity

The history of Hindu-Muslim relations persists as a volatile intersubjective field where harmony and conflict exist in a state of dialectical tension. Following Akhtar (2005), the foregrounding of specific historical facets serves as a hegemonic intervention, shaping the collective’s defensive narrative. These narratives function as “foundational myths” (Lévi-Strauss, 1968) that organize collective interpretation and delineate the boundaries of the “allowable self” within the nation-state.

These communal myths are not merely external historical data; they are internalized introjects that form the scaffolding of the South Asian subject. Sudhir Kakar (2007) observes that in the Indian psyche, the awareness of the communal “Other” facilitates a psychic transition from the individual “I-am” to the collective “we-are.” This suggests that the ego-ideal is inextricably bound to a communal narcissism. Kakar posits a fundamental ontological asymmetry in this constitutive process:

“It seems a Hindu is born only when the Muslim enters. Hindus cannot think of themselves as such without a simultaneous awareness of the Muslim presence. This is not so for the Muslim, who does not need the Hindu for self-awareness. The presence of the Hindu may increase the Muslim sense of identity but does not constitute it.” (Kakar, 2007).

Kakar’s (2003) conceptualisations of self and identity encompass mental representations of bodily existence and primary familial relationships, as well as representations of one’s group and its culture, specifically the group’s beliefs regarding humanity, nature, and social relations, including perceptions of the Other (Kakar, 2003).

Kakar and Volkan also show us that segregation into the good and the bad (me-not Me) representations begins early in child development. I am all good and the Other is all bad is a much-needed development. First projected to inanimate objects and animals and later to people and other groups—the latter often available to the child as a preselection by the group—the disavowed bad representations need such “reservoirs”, as Vamik Volkan calls them.

These reservoirs—Muslims for Hindus, Arabs for Jews, Tibetans for Chinese, and vice versa—also store successive rages and destructive impulses with no apparent target. Most “bad” representations in children come from social condemnation of their “animality”—aggressivity, dirtiness, and chaotic sexuality—which a civilised self must disavow and place in the reservoir group. According to Kakar, the child assimilates these images of family and group members which strengthens the identification with the group and its rituals and traditions.

As Kakar deconstructs the Hindu identity, as needing the Muslim identity for affirmation, his emphasis unfortunately is on the Muslim being a negative presence. Thankfully, many do not share Kakar’s point of view. In contrast to Kakar, the famous Urdu writer, Intizar Hussain expressed in an interview: “I am a Muslim but I feel there is a Hindu inside me” (Bhalla, 2006). Hussain’s expression was born out of living in both India and Pakistan, of experiencing the Partition of India, and he experienced inhabiting both Hindu and Islamic mythical and cultural worlds. Such expressions which retain the composite history between two cultures are getting eroded¹. Akhtar (2005), has eloquently captured many areas of confluence between Hindus and Muslims in India’s political and cultural history. Truschke (2016) has described the deeply syncretic relationship that developed between the Mughal rulers and Hindus around the study of Sanskrit.

In Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968), Erikson conceptualizes negative identity not merely as a failure of development, but as a proactive—albeit desperate—psychological maneuver to achieve ontological security. He posits that when an individual’s ‘inner means’ are insufficient to reconcile the contradictory demands of socially sanctioned roles, they may undergo a “total identification with that which [they are] least supposed to be” (p. 176). This ‘vindictive choice’ functions as a mechanism for regaining mastery over a fragmented self-image. By embracing a role defined by communal or familial disapproval, the subject replaces a paralyzing ‘identity diffusion’ with a coherent, if stigmatized, sense of reality. As Erikson observes, the perceived ‘life and strength’ of the self are often projected onto the forbidden ‘other,’ while the prescribed path is experienced as a site of ‘decay and danger’ (p. 173). In the crucible of cross-communal intimacy, the adoption of a negative identity may thus represent a radical reclamation of agency against a social fabric that offers no viable positive synthesis.¹

Erikson brought to psychoanalysis the presence of the social order coexisting with intrapsychic development from early in life. He writes, “The first demonstration of social trust in the baby is the ease of his feeding, the depth of his sleep, the relaxation of his bowels.” (Erikson, 1963) Rather than viewing the social environment as being prohibitive, it was seen as granting conditions for the child’s survival. Erikson’s work takes us towards the nature of identity development in the absence of ideal conditions, warning against the creation of negative identities if there was an absence of positive identity elements in the society. His contribution of negative identity (Erikson, 1968) Furthermore, he emphasised the emergence of these issues in youth. Erikson (1950) talked about the special conflicts in youth, especially adolescence, highlighting the perils of an “all or nothing totalistic quality of adolescence, which permits many young people to invest their loyalty in simplistically over-defined ideologies'' (p. 204). This all or nothing perception of the world prevents the young person from a necessary exploration of themselves and others, blinding them perhaps to objective truths of the world. Winnicott (1984) too focussed on how society and culture supported the individual so that the instinct of the individual can flourish in that environment. A breakdown in these containing provisions in society leads to antisocial tendencies (See Peltz, 2006) thereby pointing towards the salience of social containers in individual identity formation.

As the negative identity becomes predominant, there is a loss of “we-are’ and the individual loses the curiosity of and for his community. This erases the possibility of asking oneself questions such as ‘How did I become how I am’, a question young people may often struggle with under ordinary conditions. The absence of identifications within one’s community creates alienation and a lasting search for a newer identity. With this lack of imagination, the split off selves of the internal world get a free reign, creating fragmentation between intellect and emotions, body and mind, education and religion and so on. Layton (2006) alerts us to ‘split-off’ parts of the self in which certain aspects of human experience are projected and displaced onto another community. In this paper, I explore whether a Hindu falling in love with a Muslim (or vice versa) adopts a negative identity in the absence of other identity choices. What are the different ways in which the negative identity appears in Hindu-Muslim intimate relationships? I focus on the split-off desire for a Muslim in a Hindu family (Karuna’s) which identifies with secular ideals but not with secular desire. Even though political democracy allows us to choose who we desire, the translation of this freedom of desiring the other within the Indian social and familial fabric needs imagination.

Within psychoanalysis, the ‘cultural’ school was represented by Fromm (1941, 1962), Sullivan (1965), Horney (1937), Thompson (1964). Later, the effect of the social context on individuals was developed by Layton (2004), Altman (1995), Gutwill (2006), Hollander (2006), Samuels (2006), Peltz (2006), Dimen (1994) and others. Their writings develop the interpenetration of subjectivity with the socio-political order (Layton, 2006). For instance, Layton emphasises that individuals in Western societies are un-linked from their socio-historical contexts. Altman (1995) has questioned the model of the neutral analyst and shown how racial attitudes and prejudice can exist within the analytic relationship. This shift in perspective—recognizing that the individual psyche is never truly separate from its environment—provides a necessary lens for examining how specific political narratives in India actively disrupt personal agency and communal harmony.

Love-Jihad and Its Resulting Complications

In India, fundamentalist forces view intimacy as love-jihad (Krishnan, 2019). Love-jihad represents the threat to the sense of ‘we-are’ (Kakar, 2007) which is an essential part of one’s identity. Krishnan emphasises that media reports also reinforce this when Hindu-Muslim couples have married willingly. Gupta (2009) has shown how love-jihad has historically allowed Hindu fundamentalist movements to mark the Hindu woman’s body as a site of purification and as a marker to sharpen communal boundaries. In response to Love Jihad, a re-imagination and a re-writing of Hindu-Muslim identities is needed. As globalisation and modernity allow the adoption of fluid identities, and mixed identities (Volkan, 1997) Love Jihad propels us backwards into rigid interpretations of tradition and history. This forecloses an engagement with the hardening and loosening of one’s religious identity in intrapsychic, interpersonal, familial and socio-political contexts. Again the translation and transformation of political and religious identities in the context of inter-faith intimacy loses imagination within such discourses. Hindu-Muslim couples in India are forced to define themselves vis a vis love-jihad. In response to Love- Jihad, a re-imagination and a re-writing of Hindu-Muslim identities is needed.

Kakar states an organic differentiation between Hindus and Muslims, and sees the Other as always being consciously recognised as an Other. This paper imagines a different origin without a clear definition of the Other. In contemporary India, romantic love between a Hindu and a Muslim receives a negative social sanction (Goode, 1959). As the individual identifies with everything that his/her community opposes, there is alienation and exile that the individual suffers. One way of falling in love with a Muslim could be for the Hindu to completely forget that s/he is a Hindu, with such an intense identification with Islam that they stop being a Hindu. The use of negative identity is a curious disavowal of prejudiced ways of perceiving a Muslim- ‘I will not see what my Hindu family hates about Muslims, in fact I will only see its attractions’. I reckon that this new consciousness is currently psychically and politically homeless as it is far removed from the community’s preconceived perceptions of the Other.

Lacan (2015) pithily described love as something that one doesn’t know how to give and the other doesn’t know how to receive it. I extend this to Hindu-Muslim intimacy and wonder what are the inter-personal and cultural resources from where a Hindu and a Muslim engage with these questions? In the current social context, from where does a Hindu find the resources to love a Muslim and from where does the Muslim find resources to receive it (and vice-versa).

For the benefit of this topic, it may also be helpful to say a few words about love and lovers. For Freud love was about finding and re-finding an object. He drew similarities between love and psychosis, where the ego surrendered itself completely to the object. Although for Freud the object was a significant person, in this paper we see that the object can also be the faith. Similarly, Andre Green (2005) indicates the passion and fusional bond that creates a romantic relationship and also makes it fragile. For Green, love is a mutation, in which the lovers feel like they knew each other from before. Love carries a fusional hope of something new to be created while it glosses over previous failures. He writes,

The lovers are predestined for each other, having waited a very long time to find their other half (Plato). A constant impression is not only that the encounter is perfectly harmonious but, in retrospect, must necessarily have happened. The love couple is said to have a fusional relationship: two bodies, one flesh. The couple is a new unity, unbreakable. Even when some ambivalent feelings remain from a previous pathological clinical picture, the new bond is experienced as stronger…symbolisation is a derivative of a love relationship (two broken halves that are joined together to form a third) (Green & Kohon, 2005, pp. 6–7).

Amidst this passion and ego-surrender, how does identity come to be shaped? How do we choose love objects without fusing with the lover? Is it possible to retain one’s personhood while choosing love objects, especially when the partner carries with their name unconscious remnants of prejudice, hatred and complexity? Since a Hindu-Muslim bond is enmeshed with the predetermined knowledge of the past between the two communities, how does the couple deconstruct and unlearn that knowledge? Where does the individual go in that journey and what does s/he become? Being in love does not always lead to knowledge. Now I turn to Karuna’s tale to look at these questions in a lived life context.

Karuna’s Beginnings and Familial Milieu

Thirty-four-year-old Karuna was born in Durgapur, West Bengal’s industrial city. The city was owned by landlords, and Karuna’s father belonged to a family of landlords, who owned half the city. My first interview with her impacted me with a deep curiosity, sadness and amazement. I introduced myself as a psychoanalytic therapist and researcher, who was exploring the experience of couples or individuals who were in a Hindu-Muslim relationship. In the interviews, I followed her lead.

Karuna introduced me to her life by speaking about her father. For her, he was an eccentric man. She was encouraged by her father to learn Urdu (the language spoken by Muslims). She remembered being introduced to a liberal environment that appreciated differences and diverse cultures. She had no restrictions being a female. For me, this was enigmatic. It was an invitation to enter another world, in which a Hindu was introduced to Islam at a young age, when the mind is most impressionable. It was a world where questions did not arise and memories withstood the force of time. Her way of narrating was inviting, appearing like a fable that grew on me. As her interviewer, this reverie of a ‘fable’ made me sense parts of her life that had not been put into words by her. (Holmes, 2019; Ogden, 2009).

Her father introduced her to radical thinkers like Nazrul Islam. He was a 20th century revolutionary poet and dramatist, whose poetry upheld Indo-Islamic renaissance. Known as the national poet of Bangladesh, Nazrul Islam was a Muslim, who married a Hindu lady, and their sons’ names carried pairings of Hindu and Muslim names. Karuna was also taught by a Qazi (an Islamic priest), who taught her the Quran. On Guru Nanak Dev’s birthday, she would also sing hymns at the Gurdwara (a temple of the Sikh community). She said, “I don’t know how it became a life’s mission to appreciate diversity.” As a young girl, she grew up with Kashmiri Muslim tenants. They were traders from Srinagar, and one of the sons of the tenants was training to be a militant. For Karuna, he was friendly and skilful in making carvings out of apricot wood.

Karuna found in Nazrul Islam a critique of radical Islam. She shared that Islam was one of the first religions to talk about women’s rights when securing property, and in seeking a divorce. She said that instead of talaq, (in Islamic law divorce is effected by the husband’s enunciation of thw word ‘talaq’) ( which is more well-known, traditionally the man had to ask the first wife’s permission before marrying again.

Karuna’s parents were inspired by prominent social reformers like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Raja Rammohun Roy who were advocates of women’s rights and opposed child marriages. Her mother opposed women donning white sarees to mark widowhood. She did not let her grandmother do that or eat only vegetarian food. Born to parents who questioned tradition and practices, Karuna’s life had to carry on a similar quest in a different vein.

Karuna hardly spoke of her mother. Her mother was an athlete in school. Karuna’s grandfather got her married at sixteen. Karuna’s mother had to give up her education. However, Karuna’s father insisted that his daughter would continue with her education.

Karuna’s First Love: Do You Love the Faith or the Person?

For Karuna, her father was a radical feminist. “He deterred me from wearing a dupatta^2,³ and salwar kameez³. I would be in frocks and dresses, and skirts and pants.” She remembered being brought up on fidelity, chastity and lady hood. Her father would encourage her to travel in shorts and t-shirts on the train even though she wasn’t comfortable. Karuna wouldn’t reflect on these memories but I would wonder, Why would he make her aware or unaware of her body at a young age?

As Karuna was introducing me to significant male figures in her life, she spoke of Wazir, her first Muslim friend. She fell in love with him when she was fifteen. He belonged to a different class and section of society, very different from her lineage. Wazir came from Uttar Pradesh (another state in India) to work in Durgapur. Her younger sister thought that this relationship was suicidal. Her mother told her that she was free to choose her partner but she was too young to be in a relationship. Her father began giving her the silent treatment, sarcastically mentioning Mir Jafar (a Mughal emperor responsible for the spread of British Imperialism in India), and referring to Pakistan to show his disapproval about her choice. Karuna was confused that although her parents had introduced her to Islam they were against her relationship. She was surprised that her father, who was well read, had made her question the Hindu sacred text Ramayana (“never forgive what Rama did to Sita” (referring to doubting Sita’s chastity after being enslaved by Ravana, and asking her to undergo a trial by fire- ‘agnipariksha’,), he said) had such a conventional and undemocratic side.

While she remained confused in her relationship with her parents, conflicts in her relationship to Wazir began to appear. She saw that Wazir could become violent. His brothers were part of the CPI (M), the communist part of India, and one of his brothers had left Islam to join the CPI (M). Karuna found out that her mother was trying to access his brother to sabotage their relationship. Karuna felt confused that she had been exposed to a liberal upbringing and yet her mother was interfering with her relationship. Karuna secretly continued to meet Wazir though gradually she became uncomfortable with his anger. Gradually she realised that they came from different backgrounds. He belonged to a rustic and more rural background and did not share in her interests. His need to talk about physical intimacy would make her uncomfortable. Eventually she ended her relationship. Over time Wazir, became obsessive and even tried to hurt himself. This scared Karuna and she moved away. As she reflected on her relationship, she felt she had fallen in love with the faith rather than with the person. This first relationship introduced her to several aspects of her life that were confusing and complex. Though passionate it was also connected with a feeling of being lost and feeling chaotic and distraught.

Looking back, it was Wazir’s recklessness and possessiveness that attracted her, and his interest in physical intimacy that drew her away. As he expressed sexual desire for her, she didn’t know how to respond. Wazir exemplified the fantasy of what it meant to be faithful to her. Freud (1912), in his seminal paper, ‘The Dynamics of the Transference’, talks about transference as being an enactment of a person’s preconditions of falling in love. With the transference, Freud was discovering the range of feelings the patient could feel towards the therapist that belonged to another part of the patient’s life. Like the therapist, who introduces a patient’s needs to the patient through himself, the lover in his enactments and actions introduces us to what love means to us. We become more aware of ourselves by the demands we place on others and the way they behave—others reveal to us the nature and demands of our desires. I am using this dimension to access Karuna’s inner world and its unknown fantasies. Her recollections of Wazir echoed the remains of a relationship that hadn’t ended for her. He was still unmarried. This relationship was a moment of reckoning in her life. The father, who wanted her to learn the poetry of Nazrul Islam, and the father, who didn’t approve of her attractions, seemed like two different people (split-selves). Maybe Karuna’s attraction to Wazir was so strong that she could never see it herself. What does attraction become when because of its strength it cannot be held within for a recognition? It was hard for Karuna to think about her attraction to Wazir but there was something within that wouldn’t let her give it up. Karuna’s life drew from this strength in the directions it took. Her love for the faith and for its radical interpretations along with the devotion and commitment she needed and found, in her relationships, seized her. These views were completely divorced from the orthodoxy that Islam is also known for.

This was the second instance in her life when she was introduced to her body. Wazir, after her father, made her more conscious that she had a body, which could be desired. He also brought fear and a sense of threat to her consciousness. In her evocation of her relationships, the other was more committed than she was. Wazir’s need to become self-destructive was not induced or evoked by her, and it was baffling. By doing this, a part of him had become an Other again. Recognition of what transpired between them remained incomplete as awareness about her own desirous self could not be assimilated in her young and confused mind. The body and its interiority remained an unexplored area, which aroused interest and an equally intense movement away from such a realization. I wondered what Wazir was fulfilling for Karuna through his actions and commitment? What did he sense that she did not articulate? Karuna was unaware of her own needs.

The initial interviews with Karuna revealed how certain figures in her life had drawn attention to her physical body, perhaps in a manner that was confusing, conflicting and unattainable for her at that time. Perhaps in her exposure to the Quran and the Islamic scholars which engaged her mind she avoided the conflicts that she could not understand that involved her body. Faith, as a part of her identity, resolved an internal conflict that she could not explore or understand at that time.

Shoaib: Her Second Love

Gradually, Karuna spoke of her current relationship with her husband, Shoaib. They met during her post-graduation. She was twenty two years old and he was twenty eight years old. Shoaib was mobilising young men in a slum and harnessing their energies for constructive activities. They spent a lot of time in the field and became close to each other. Later, they established a NGO which focuses on strengthening Hindu-Muslim harmony in the youth by bringing them together to work collectively on issues such as environment, sports and reproductive health.

Shoaib was only eighteen years old when his brother and him were picked up by the police for suspicious involvement during Bombay, Hindu/Muslim riots (1992). They were false convictions. She remembered that he still had some scars. He was confused about why this happened to him. She thought that if she was in his shoes she would have picked up guns. He channelized his energy into setting up a youth group, comprising a mix of Hindus and Muslims, girls and boys. Their bond became stronger as she sensed him to be “ sensitive and soft-spoken”. Shoaib introduced Karuna to his mother and did everything to cement their bond.

As their love grew, Karuna supported Shoaib as he got back on his feet. Their long courtship was filled with travel and companionship. Intimacy was expressed through food, and Karuna described how Shoaib shared food with her and with no one else, not even his parents. They loved travelling and discussing social issues, and shared a common love for Urdu and music.

After 8 years of courtship, Karuna and Shoaib got married in 2010. Although they wanted her parents’ approval, Karuna’s parents did not approve of her choice. Karuna’s mother attempted suicide twice during this eight-year period. Shoaib wanted her parents’ approval before getting married. Her parents have never met him. When I heard this, I admired their commitment and felt some sadness for Shoaib. After they were married, Shoaib’s family tried to impose some conditions on Karuna.

Karuna’s sister-in-law tried to make her pray five times a day, change her name and urged her to give up her job. Shoaib however stood by Karuna’s side. After the birth of their child, Karuna’s parents’ attitude towards her marriage changed and they became supportive. When she was delivering her first child, Shoaib was scared and nervous and Karuna’s mother was a big support. She was constantly soothing Shoaib.

As Karuna recounted the birth of their son, she shared something disturbing. Before her marriage, Karuna was diagnosed with a gynaecological condition called endometriosis. It could be treated by removing the uterus or by giving birth to a child, which her doctors had predicted was not possible. Her menstrual cycle needed to stop for her to get the necessary treatment. Four days after knowing about this condition, she discovered that Shoaib was in a sexual relationship with a girl, eighteen years younger to him. He didn’t deny it. He didn’t want to leave her. He thought that Karuna loved him so much that she would adapt to his relationship. Karuna had already conceived by then.

Karuna was shocked because Shoaib had built this other relationship while he was with Karuna. Rather than experiencing the violation fully and wanting to move away, Karuna remembered Shoaib’s fragility, loss and confusion. She felt she had become a mother to him but wanted to be his steady companion.

And he said, I was hiding this from you like I would hide it from my mother. He was actually crying through it, most of the time,

As I inquired if they spoke about this again, she said he doesn’t want to communicate and has become uncommunicative about this relationship. She said earlier she would call him several times but now she doesn’t. As a reaction to his infidelity, she would search Facebook frantically but now she had given up. It took her time to stop herself from doing this. She eventually became cold towards him. Being with her son, and Shoaib’s extremely caring attitude towards her helped her. Shoaib had been with her throughout and he didn’t want to leave, which was very important for Karuna.

Karuna’s memories of this phase of her life weren’t memories of isolation. Shoaib was a constant presence. Her self-image was full of fragments and confusions about herself, him, him and his other partner. She thought it would have been easier to leave him if he had been abusive.

He wanted to have a second marriage soon after they got married. The girl he wanted to marry came to their house and said he was stalking her and she didn’t want to be with him. She wondered why she continued with him, and attributed it to their son Kabir. She didn’t want him to have a broken home. At the same time, she lamented that they had been physical only thrice after marriage. She shared that he would let her make all the decisions and he was always around. She would share his predicament and say that he was divided and that he couldn’t let go of Kabir and Karuna, and he would also imagine himself to be with the other woman.

Shoaib’s father was an orphan and a self-made man. Shoaib stayed with his father, three brothers and mother. His eldest brother had died of cancer and worked with one of his younger brothers. They established a business together, where he was exploited; Karuna helped him get out of that situation. At that time, Shoaib’s life was in a mess. There was no discipline and Karuna helped him in regaining confidence and encouraged him to find a job.

Karuna remembered that Shoaib was a ladies’ man. He had affairs before he got married. He would start liking someone and want to marry them, and then find someone else attractive. That’s how he met Karuna. Karuna was so much in love with him that she overlooked this part of him. When the two of them drew closer to each other, he was about to get married to someone else. Karuna made him apologise to the girl’s family. Each person in his family had a different perspective. Shoaib’s father told him to leave the house. One of his brothers condemned his action and the other supported him. For his mother, being in two relationships at the same time was the norm. Karuna wished to reform him.

Wanting more clarity, I asked, “How did you understand this part of him? I think, at some level, by choosing to be with him, you chose to understand it.”

Karuna didn’t have an answer. She said he promised he would never leave her. For Karuna, as we have witnessed, constant devotion and commitment meant a lot. This was both her strength and her weakness because even though Shoaib had left, he had also stayed.

For her parents, Shoaib was an ideal husband, who allowed their daughter the liberty she deserved. Karuna had to stand by their organization that symbolised her core values of inter-faith harmony. It was important to prove her parents wrong and advocate social change. Although the trauma of betrayal lay in her own words, “I have become dead.”

Phillips (2007) writing on desire’s convoluted predicament makes us rethink exclusiveness and the existence of a non-exclusive space is difficult. His writing amplifies Karuna’s predicament.

One begins desiring on one’s own, and then one discovers that the object of desire is not on her (on his) own. I was on my own desiring someone or something that I took to be on their own; and then I discovered that I was on my own desiring but my object of desire had other options (p 63).

In spite of knowing that her husband desired someone else, there was something in their bond (and perhaps within her) that wouldn’t let Karuna and Shoaib separate. Shoaib’s reparative gestures were also alive and touched Karuna in a way that she remembered them. He was constantly in touch with her even if she didn’t have a phone. For Karuna, this seemed to be his need to stay connected. On one particular evening when Shoaib was not able to contact her, he had a breakdown and had to be taken to the psychiatrist. Karuna narrated this without concern. I was alarmed; for her, however, it was an ordinary incident. Shoaib couldn’t find her and had a panic attack. His angst and panic was an otherness that couldn’t find any recognition in her mind. I recalled her puzzlement at Wazir obsessively trying to possess her. Although the circumstances in her life were different, the pattern of feeling detached and attached was similar. She needed to be obsessively needed. However, this obsessiveness only generated passion and did not provide sustaining commitment and stability.

Projective identification is a way of relating, originating from the earlier years of life that is experienced in the clinic. It involves putting unconscious parts of the self’s experience and making the other person experience it, while losing all degree of contact with what is being put (Ogden, 2019). Karuna seemed to have lodged something in Shoaib’s self—a confusion, an unarticulated need or expectation. Shoaib’s panic attacks reinforced Karuna’s need to take care of him. Later, she described how he finally travelled alone, which was very difficult for him. Karuna’s narrative carried a lot more of his vulnerabilities. Barring her hospitalization, she never spoke about her breakdown, only somatised her pain. Most of it was wordless.

When she wanted to choose a Muslim man as a partner, her family rejected her choice. Her desire, introduced to her at home, was made homeless once she decided to follow her calling. But was it her desire or her father’s or Wazir’s or Shoaib’s ? In Karuna’s articulations, it was difficult to grasp that it was her desire. Karuna’s unacknowledged pattern of commitment involved the other person undergoing and enduring a crisis in spite of her absence. She couldn’t feel concerned for what was happening to them. Her lovers suffered her angst but without her knowledge. The quest was how to make it hers, owning and claiming it as part of her own self?

Intimacy in Need of Identifications

In the Indian context, the porous ontological boundaries between the individual and the collective ensure that an intimate bond—like that of Karuna and Shoaib—cannot exist in a vacuum. When a Hindu-Muslim union attempts to transcend communal endogamy, it encounters a profound systemic resistance that enacts a form of symbolic erasure. By refusing to validate their mixed identity, the surrounding social matrix renders their intimacy “homeless,” divesting it of social belonging and forcing the couple to inhabit a “negative identity” (Erikson, 1968). They are often driven to anchor their sense of self in the very attributes—such as radical religious or political commitments—that their communities have most violently repudiated.

This psychic displacement is amplified by the contemporary landscape of India and Pakistan, where divisive politics leave the “broken halves” of a shared history in a state of perpetual conflict. In the absence of a shared symbolic “Third” space to mourn and process the trauma of Partition and communal discord, the individual is forced to carry the weight of a fragmented history alone.

For Karuna, this fragmentation manifested as a deep emotional distance from her family, who failed to introduce her to the Islam she eventually sought. Her internal world, yearning for attunement, became a repository for alienated identifications. To preserve the radical meanings she had gathered, she had to overlook normative bonds of exclusivity and fidelity, effectively silencing her own pain of betrayal. In this sense, the “broken halves” of the collective find their mirror in the fractured internal world of the individual, where the secret self becomes a site of both refuge and profound alienation.

Karuna couldn’t separate from Shoaib. She chose to be with him, endured a life-threatening pregnancy to preserve their relationship. The negative identity elements in her personality made her intensely identify with Islam as a radical faith, protecting her mind from the stereotypical images of Muslims. Faith was Karuna’s way of exploring everything, with all the shades, and rejecting what was expected of her as a Hindu woman (to hate and be afraid of Muslim men).

When Karuna and Shoaib fell in love the discourse of love-jihad was absent. However, in the contemporary, Hindu nationalist construction of love jihad, Karuna could be framed as someone who had been exploited by a Muslim man. Her life story would be mis-read as one of seduction and betrayal by her husband, whom the state had already convicted. Her story, if told in its entirety, would be of unarticulated pain and loneliness. The contemporary discourse on love-jihad further strengthens the negative identity elements as it doesn’t allow the existence of any positive image for inter-faith love. When the promise of wholeness of identity development is compromised, negative identity further ossifies. Entrenched in a discourse of fears – fear of immigrants, fear of Islam, fear of Blacks, fear of Untouchables, fear of economic uncertainty, we are witness to a social and cultural aversion to the Other.” Indeed, Erikson (1975, p. 21) had appropriately noted that some historic periods lacked social processes for many to forge positive identities.

Erikson had argued in his day, that three conditions – fears aroused by new information; anxieties prompted by the decay of existing ideologies; and the dread of an existential abyss devoid of spiritual meaning lead to the shortfall in tolerance and appreciation of a social Other, such as we see in the discourse around love-jihad.⁴. It negates the intricately woven cultural complexity that existed between Hindus and Muslims, something that Erikson posits in his three conditions mentioned above. Ignorance of contributions of Mughal rulers like Dara Shukoh who envisioned interlinkages in the Hindu and Islamic sacred texts is one such example (Kakar, 2010). This cultural and social shortfall forces the Hindu-Muslim couple to adopt a violent and polarised historical narrative that may not be theirs. As it forces an aggressive push it overlooks the libidinal push towards inter-faith intimacy that we witness in this paper.

As noted earlier, Erikson describes negative identity as a strong identification with everything that is disavowed by your community. Erikson (1968) writes,

The history of such a choice reveals a set of conditions in which it is easier for the patient to derive a sense of identity out of a total identification with that which he is least supposed to be than to struggle for a feeling of reality in acceptable roles which are unattainable with his inner means. p 176

Since identity is not established in a vacuum, but developed in a cultural context passed through parental and familial relations, negative identity also carries within it familial and parental parts of the parental generation that are split and dissociated. Disavowed aspects of the parents’ self and the unexpressed wishes are perceived with intense clarity by the offspring unconsciously, with a resulting stubborn wish to not resemble it. Kakar (1989) has also shown that men can be a reincarnation of a woman´s negative identity and become the container of her forbidden sexual self which allows her to keep her purity intact. These alienated, disavowed fragments and self-states create an orphan-like semi formed identity in the individual’s psyche. Perhaps, Karuna’s staunch (even though incomprehensible) wish to stay with Shoaib despite his failings was an unavoidable identification with the parental perception that “Muslims are bad”, at the same time a severe reaction against this perception. This was another expression of the negative identity element in her.

The negative identity retains the homeless self as it extends to another forbidden community. It contains self-images that are present and are not clearly identified with any community. No one is responsible for the creation of these self-images. Karuna lived out her father’s fascination with Islam, with a commitment that could not find a home. Upon further reflection it would appear that, the negative identity elements in Karuna did not allow her to see her first lover Wazir, her Kashmiri tenant, or Shoaib as individuals who could be harmful (stereotypically seen by others in the community as being hypersexed, dangerous or promiscuous). A state of fusion led to a strong identification with the religious Other. Being able to realistically evaluate what was in her best interests or ‘ego -identity’ did not appear to be available to her at that time. Instead, she operated with passion and disregarded her family’s fears of the ‘Other’ something that withstood the forces of time.

Where would Karuna’s resolve to uphold confluence between two communities find a witnessing space that would look up to it, idealise it, and give it its due? It is hard to understand this loneliness, shielded by intellectual prowess and a commitment to a larger goal at a cost to oneself. Karuna’s choice was also preserving the future of her son. Karuna spends a lot of time with Kabir, but also experiences a sense of abandonment, (why?) is part of the future that preserves the bond between Shoaib and Karuna. He is the carrier of this unity and is loved by both families. The desire which had become latent with Shoaib had now been transferred to Kabir where it grew and flourished. In her love and emotional attachment towards him, she found the outlets she needed for her repressed sexuality. Kabir never sensed what had happened between his parents. I wondered what would happen once he knew the truth.

Many aspects of Karuna’s sojourn needed containers and identifications. Fragments in her life awaited interpersonal and social recognition - a giving back to oneself by being recognised through the other, without which she felt alienated from some parts of herself (Ogden, 1977). Outside of her family, she had conquered death, given birth to a baby and done everything to secure her relationship with Shoaib, knowing and not knowing that he wouldn’t commit to her. None of this had a home except in what she had created for herself, which was both tragic and extraordinary. Shoaib’s unthinkable anxieties, felt while being away from Karuna, evoked primitive experiences in him. Winnicott has described this as “the mouth grappling for the breast in an infant who is consumed by timelessness and chaos.” The loss might be that of certain aspects of the mouth which disappear from the infant’s point of view along with the mother and the breast when there is a separation at a date earlier than that at which the infant had reached a stage of emotional development which would provide the infant with the equipment for dealing with loss” (pg. 221) Winnicott, 1963). A Muslim mouth grappling for a Hindu breast. This too didn’t have a home or a container. For a Hindu researcher, it was hard to imagine the degree of anxiety a Muslim man would feel in separation from his beloved, who belonged to the Other community.

When love doesn’t find interpersonal and inter-generational objects, and it is confronted by the absence of a positive psychosocial space which can give it sanctity and recognition, it remains impersonal. Green and Kohon (2015) paraphrase Lacan’s definition on love, captures this - “To love is to give something one does not have (possess) to someone who doesn’t want it (the loved one) (pg. 17.” Love exists in between, on an impersonal landscape. Where, in their contemporary surroundings, that erase histories of democratic love do a Hindu and Muslim find the resources to love each other? A Hindu-Muslim relationship is enclosed in this conundrum of not having the resources to summon love for another community, and when one does, not knowing the effect it has on the one that you love.

Kakar’s essay ‘Intimacy and Beyond’ sheds light on the absence of identifications that every couple needs in India where the transition from joint to nuclear families is on the rise. He observes that the couple needs parental figures to mediate and separate identity confusions. Although Kakar’s writing isn’t about Hindu-Muslim couples, it helps me see Karuna and Shoaib as a parentless couple. All couples have to experience violence, hatred and boredom, which inhabit intimate relationships. For Karuna and Shoaib, a space where they could take these psychic parts is absent. Peltz (2020), and Gerson (2009), emphasise the need of a ‘live social third’, a psychological cultural space - a positive affirming cultural narrative that processes their confusions, avoids imposing pre-determined meanings and grants continuity. In a socio-political climate that can reinforce negative identity processes, such a psychosocial space is needed for Hindu-Muslim couples.

To understand Karuna’s predicament of being with Shoaib, I turn to the psychoanalyst Gohar Homayounpour’s portrayal of Tereza’s predicament in Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera, 1987). In the absence of identifications that mirror Karuna’s life, this text acts as a mirror. Homayounpour clarifies the difference between the sexual and the erotic in individuals, who are desirous and wish to have more than one partner. She clarifies that the erotic is object seeking and in sexual pursuits seek pleasure (Homayounpour & Kiarostami, 2012). Erotic relationships are less narcissistic and carry more awareness of the other but in pure sexuality the individual is unaware of the object.

Homayounpour uncovers the unconscious dilemmas in women involved in polygamous relationships. Tomas, Tereza’s husband, has multiple relationships. Tereza aided my imagination about Karuna’s life. She writes that, through Tereza, one can see how castration is necessary to come to one’s own desires. She writes, “Tereza like many neurotic women has confused submitting oneself to castration and submitting oneself to the other.”⁵

Much like Shoaib, Tomas is extremely loving towards Tereza, drops everything and is present for her. Homayounpour’s writing reveals Karuna’s crisis. In Kundera’s novel, Tereza is still in love with Tomas, defending him and not allowing others to enter their relationship, which is sacred for her despite the ongoing betrayal that she is facing. Tereza does not pursue other erotic objects and neither does Karuna.

Although in contemporary times, liberal Indian women are free to explore their sexuality, they are often the first in their families to do so. Young women in India struggle to find an identification in their mothers’ sexual subjects. Karuna’s mother became a wife at 16 years and she was rarely present in Karuna’s narrative. This lack of an internalised maternal figure didn’t allow her to see parts of herself that needed caring and inhibited her from owning her dependence. Even though her father and other men introduced her to desire, perhaps her own self didn’t have identifications of maternal and feminine sexuality. It’s possible that there was a narcissistic hurt of her father turning away from her emotional self that Karuna was repairing by holding the love of Islam as a faith as an ego-ideal (Blos, 1974).

Conclusion

Broken halves can emerge from different religions and socio-economic strata. In India, since the Partition, Hindus and Muslims are like broken halves in search of a space for mourning. The absence of mourning doesn’t allow positive identity elements to emerge in inter-faith intimacy. Unlike the Other being needed to confirm the identity of the Hindu Self (Kakar, 2003), this narrative introduces us to an intimate other who represents our disavowed needs and faith as an Other. The negative identity gets manifested as the religion and faith of the Other seizes the mind. We see that the love object and his religion are both enticing and evoke desire. Our parental objects can entice us into the faith of the Other and entice us by not supporting us. This paradox can inform life with an impersonal sojourn.

Desire unfolds through significant love objects lodged in our psychic history. Desire also conceals the Otherness within the Other. Understanding Hindu-Muslim intimacy in the interpersonal context needs close examination of the layers of desire invested in significant figures through whom faith and religion are translated and imbibed. This desire is in search of positive familial and social recognition so that it can give birth to a new Hindu-Muslim ‘mixed’ identity.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Ashis Roy

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Ashis Roy (PhD) is a Psychoanalyst. In his clinical practice he works with adults and couples. He was Faculty at Ambedkar University Delhi and is presently faculty at Chinese-American Psychoanalytic Alliance (CAPA). He is interested in clinical and cultural psychoanalysis. His book Intimate Hindu-Muslim Relationships: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of the Self and the Other (Yoda Press) was published in 2024.

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