Women, Violence, Sovereignty: “Rakshasa” Marriage by Capture in Modern Indian Political Thought
Sabastian, Luna (2022) Women, Violence, Sovereignty: “Rakshasa” Marriage by Capture in Modern Indian Political Thought. Modern Intellectual History, 19 (3). pp. 757-782. ISSN 1479-2443
Abstract
Nineteenth-century colonial jurists, sociologists, and Indian nationalists revived the ancient Indian legal concept of rakshasa marriage by bride capture after vanquishing her kinsmen, which the Hindu “lawgiver” Manu condemned but permitted to the warrior caste alone. Only the Kshatriyas, India’s designated sovereigns, could break patriarchal and brahmanical authority in this way. But rakshasa marriage was also identified with the demon Ravana, who abducted Sita in the epic Ramayana, and with Hindu nationalism’s Muslim enemy. Preoccupied with the loss of kshatriyahood, Hindu nationalism uniquely premised sovereignty on the power to dispossess enemy Fathers of their women: from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s celebration of epic hero Arjuna and Krishna’s own rakshasa marriages, to the appropriation of this supposedly Muslim method by the architect of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1967). Transcending the “sexual contract” in the Indian case, rakshasa marriage’s association of bride capture and miscegenation with sovereignty sheds new light on gendered Partition violence, beyond brahmanical notions of (defiled) purity and honor.
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