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.

Highlights

  • Rakshasa is popularly known in India as a demonic, enemy race of Hindu mythology.1 Not commonly known is that the Sanskrit term doubles as a legal concept taken from the famous Manusmriti (Manava-Dharmashastra, or “Laws of Manu”), usually dated to the second century CE

  • Rakshasa marriage was identified with the demon Ravana, who abducted Sita in the epic Ramayana, and with Hindu nationalism’s Muslim enemy

  • Mayne’s influential translation of 1878.2 In its first translation in the pioneering effort towards the codification of Gentoo Laws in 1776, rakshasa marriage is styled “Ràkhus, so called, when a Man marries the Daughter of another, whom he has conquered in War.”3 Other texts within the ancient ethical and legal Dharmashastra genre treated rakshasa,4 but it Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core

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Summary

Introduction

Rakshasa is popularly known in India as a demonic, enemy race of Hindu mythology.1 Not commonly known is that the Sanskrit term doubles as a legal concept taken from the famous Manusmriti (Manava-Dharmashastra, or “Laws of Manu”), usually dated to the second century CE.

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