Part of the Khabar Lahariya long-form series “Sound Fury & 4G” ♦
Zarina* saw Abhishek* for the first time in the music room of her school in Kanpur. She remembers the exact date in 2012, because it was Teacher’s Day and she was wearing a yellow suit instead of her uniform. He was thin and scrawny, with long hair swept up, and he was holding a guitar. But she wasn’t impressed. “He looked like a flirt,” she says, “the kind of boy who talks to every girl.” Girls weren’t supposed to talk to boys at the co-ed school, and as a new transfer to the 12th standard, Zarina had already missed three months of her board year and had no time for flirting.
When Surajkali met Amin in 2007, it wasn’t love at first sight either. He had joined a women’s rights collective where she works, as a driver. When she discovered that he was the brother of a close friend, they started chatting. Sometimes he’d be out of town somewhere and they would stay in touch—“he’d write me letter,” Surajkali says. “I still have those letters, addressed to ‘Kiran’ … he still calls me that.” After he started writing, “I realised he was in love with me. I didn’t give any answer.” He wrote again, asking if he had overstepped, “Or do you think you can’t love me?” Surajkali thought about it, but didn’t reply to any of the letters. Anyway, both of them were married and she had children.
For both women, the religious difference wasn’t much of a factor in the first meeting. In Uttar Pradesh, as well as other parts of the country, the injunction against interfaith and inter-caste relationships is so strong that for most people it’s an unquestionable reality. When it comes to romantic relationships, religious boundaries are nearly unbreachable walls. Even in urban areas, interfaith marriage is uncommon. According to a Lok Foundation-Oxford University survey, in 2018, only 5 percent of urban respondents were related to someone who had married outside their religion.
The divide is even starker in rural UP, the state with the largest share of hate crimes towards minorities and Dalits, according to the National Human Rights Commission. It has also seen its share of the rampant lynching across the country since 2014. In 2016, a survey found that 75 percent of Hindus and 70 percent of Muslims interviewed opposed marriage between their religions. Since becoming chief minister in 2017, Yogi Adityanath has diligently tended the fire of communal mistrust, appearing in Delhi recently to fan the flames. His latest speeches about bullets and biryani were in tune with earlier vitriol about the dangers of “love jihad”, and the institution of anti-Romeo squads in UP.
In this scenario, when mixed relationships—particularly interfaith ones—do make headlines, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. A couple in Dadri, UP was refused a marriage registration for at least six months, apparently because a registrar was afraid it would incite riots after the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq. Last year, a woman was killed by her brother in Bareilly district for her interfaith relationship. But sometimes, love finds a way to cross the religious divide even in the most unlikely places. For both Surajkali, who is from Manikpur, with roots in Harijanpur; and Zarina, who is from Mahoba and now lives in Delhi, long-term relationships with men from different religious backgrounds have been a source of great strength. The two have different stories, but both offer a secular, feminist India, in which love without fear can win hearts and change minds.
For both women, love took root in friendship rather than romance—and both relationships involved other people from the start. Zarina actually orchestrated Abhishek’s previous relationship. “I stepped to the side, because he was just a friend to me,” she says. “I couldn’t have considered dating him myself because, first, he wasn’t from my religion. And I also felt that he wasn’t husband material or boyfriend material. But then they broke up, and I became a supportive friend.” Zarina was impressed by the depth of his feelings about his ex, and realised he might be boyfriend material after all. When her friends pointed out that her own feelings might have gone beyond friendship, Zarina realised she was in love. “I was beyond thinking about caste, religion, and most of all my own self-respect – because everyone knows it’s not good for girls to propose to boys,” she says. She went ahead anyway, and eight years later they’re still together.
Zarina says she had no prejudice personally about Abhishek’s religion, but was nervous about the potential consequences of getting involved. “It’s always said that Muslim and Hindus cannot get married, cannot have a relationship. You have to marry within your own community. People who’ve tried to cross this line have often been thwarted, even killed. I was scared of this … seeing the way society is, I’m scared even today.” She still wonders how she will balance family, friends and love, and doesn’t want to sacrifice any of them. “It’s as difficult to leave either side. I know I’ll have to face these difficulties. I face them sometimes already.”
For Surajkali, it was her relationship with Amin’s sisters that drew the two together. “His sister got very sick, so we both went together to her house—that was our moment, I think. I didn’t feel like I was going to a stranger’s house. I felt like I was part of the family, the way people spoke, they seemed exactly like family members. I didn’t feel different at all. So slowly I started coming and going from his house more often. We became closer.” When she fell in love, “I had no qualms at all” about the religious difference. “We didn’t consider it at all. And we became involved, thinking whatever happens next, we’ll see.”
Surajkali’s husband left her and took their four sons with him. She fell ill—for about six months she couldn’t work. “My condition had become so bad that he [Amin] used to put me in his lap or pick me up to take me to hospital, to feed me milk, fruit… He took such good care of me that I felt the whole world could disappear, but our relationship would endure.” Once her divorce went through, members of Surajkali’s family tried to pressure her to get married again, but to a Hindu. “Why are you marrying a Muslim when there are good boys in our community, educated, with good jobs?” From his side of the family, she heard things like “She is from a Chamar community, he has just kept her like that…”
For a long time, they didn’t get married at all, living together instead. “People like us are a danger to society,” Surajkali says, “because we don’t care about religion and caste. The boundaries of religion, caste are being broken. Still people that are independent can live on…” She lived in Banda for two years, where Amin visited her—“I had a lot of trouble renting a place.” Then they lived in Naraini, a town 36 kilometres away from Banda, for four years. Eventually it was due to pressure from her landlords, that the two decided to marry in 2014. “I kept thinking that is marriage really important? But I felt pressured into it if I wanted to live in society.” Her children used to have to meet her secretly, so she hoped the marriage would bring her closer to her family—and eventually, there was a reconciliation.
In Delhi, Zarina and Abhishek live separately, and are waiting until he finishes his degree and finds a job before putting any marriage plans in place. Back home, most people know only that they are friends; even in Delhi Zarina only tells those she knows won’t judge her. Though some of the members of her family know about the relationship, not all of them do, and they “won’t like it if I so openly show my love story about being with someone from another religion. That’s the reason I don’t want to come on camera,” she says.
Meanwhile, she says “when we go out to eat or whatever, people can’t make out whether we’re Hindu or Muslim. And we avoid going to religious sites—we are social and secular, and we avoid going to places where we might face discrimination.” Secularism for both Zarina and Surajkali goes beyond mere tolerance; it involves active participation and inclusion in two religions. Both of them feel that their thoughts about their own religions were the same as they always were. “If you grow up in a certain community, certain things are always part of you,” says Zarina. “I could try and leave Islam, but Islam would always be inside me. And I don’t want to leave it. My relationship is on one side, and my religious beliefs on another.”
She adds, “If I prayed occasionally before, I do the same now; if I fasted before, I do the same now. It’s just that I now have a stronger relationship with another religion as well—I’m not just this, but I also account for another religion. I expect the same from my partner– when I keep roza, he tries to send me iftar, or wakes me up for sehri.” Sometimes she says “Allah hafiz” to sign off on the phone with Abhishek, and sometimes she says “Om Namah Shivay”.
Surajkali, who also adopted the name Fatima Khatoon, actually started keeping roza before she became involved with Amin. Ever since she took a trip to Delhi about 16 years ago, with one of his sisters during Ramzaan, she’s kept a four-day fast in solidarity. “There’s never any pressure—no compunction,” she says. Earlier, she practised religion by rote, following what she was told. “Where I’m from, there weren’t many Muslims. I would see some women sometimes, and think who knows what’s going on with them, wearing black from head to toe. I’d say something like that. And I didn’t make much of an effort. Now Islamic beliefs and other religions are more clear. If one the one hand I keep vrat, I fast for my children, my husband. And on the other hand, if I keep roza or do namaaz then I do it for my own difficulties.”
With one more layer of uncertainty about the future, finding strength in two religions can be helpful. Even those who accept Zarina and Abhishek’s relationship tell her she’ll probably have to cut ties with her family or her partner in the future. “People say that if you do this your family will leave you, and you might get into trouble because we hear of a lot of cases of Hindu-Muslim inter-marriage where somebody killed them or they got murdered, got burnt or hanged. In my heart, I fear all this.” Thinking about the current political situation, Surajkali says “I panic… Families that are simple”—one religion—“they will get by. But multi-religious families will face a big problem.”
But in both stories, “love transcends all religion, caste and class,” as Surajkali says. “You become friends, and society objects, spreads rumors and people voice their various opinions. But if you love each other, stay together. Your story will give strength to people to do the same.”
It’s not just romantic love at work—for both these brave women, the idea of friendship and equality in a relationship is paramount. More than conventional ideas of love, there’s a great deal of empathy involved in these long-term relationships, sometimes bringing people together across faiths, beyond just the couple. Sometimes communities can be strengthened by those who challenge them, defying their edicts. As Zarina says, “We believe we should set an example for the changes we want to see happen in society.”
*Zarina’s and Abhishek’s name has been changed on request