Rakshasa Marriage Astrology in India

Rakshasa marriage is a type, in which the groom fights battles with the bride's family, overcomes them and carries her away and then persuades her to marry. This is not considered as the right kind of marriage as this is forced marriage.

This was a marriage by capture. Primitive tribes regarded women as prizes of war, part of the plunder in a fair fight. This form was common in many other ancient civilization. It appealed to the warrior instinct of the Kshatriya, and was sometimes practised by them. Hindu scriptures describe this form of marriage as forcible abduction of a maiden from her home, while she cries and weeps, after her kinsmen have been slain or wounded and their house broken. Women, thus, caused many fights and battles in ancient times.

When a girl is forcefully taken and marriage is done, it is also not admitted by learned persons and is not religious.

In this, the girl is forcefully kidnapped from her house after her family either died or suffered injuries. The groom abducts the girl and forces her to marry him. Such forms of marriages have now been banned.

• Rakshasa marriage is the marriage of a maiden involving her forcible abduction from her home after her kinsmen have been slain or wounded.
• The groom will force battles with the bride's family, overcome them and carry the bride away to convince her to marry him.
• This is condemned in the Manusmriti as a base and sinful act.

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. 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 purity and honor.

Rakshasa marriage - Rakshasa marriage is the marriage of a maiden involving her forcible abduction from her home after her kinsmen have been slain or wounded. The groom will force battles with the bride's family, overcome them and carry the bride away to convince her to marry him.

Rakshasa is popularly known in India as a demonic, enemy race of Hindu mythology. Not commonly known is that the Sanskrit term doubles as a legal concept taken from the famous Manusmriti usually dated to the second century CE. According to Manu, the seventh of eight forms of marriage contract, universally "disapproved" yet permissible for the Kshatriya (or "warrior") caste alone, rakshasa is the "arriage by seizure of a maiden by force from her house, while she weeps and calls for assistance, after her kinsmen and friends have been slain in battle or wounded, and their houses broken open," as rendered in John D. Mayne's influential translation of 1878. 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."Other texts within the ancient ethical and legal Dharmashastra genre similarly treated rakshasa, but it was the Dharmashastra attributed to Manu that was reified as the major, supposedly authoritative source of Anglo-Hindu personal law. An idiosyncratic colonial invention, the "personal law" of religious communities allowed Britons to rule Indians through the fig leaf of nonintervention in marriage, inheritance, caste, and religious matters. Yet having revived rakshasa marriage in a modern legal context in the first place, the British proceeded to criminalize it. Following the Indian Penal Code of 1860, a consensus of court cases, legal thinkers, Indian politicians, and political thinkers declared rakshasa an "obsolete" form of marriage, invoking this exact phrase with remarkable invariance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Manu's legal definition of rakshasa marriage now constituted any of the criminal offenses of enticement, kidnapping or abduction, and rape, where applicable.

This article traces rakshasa marriage as an explicit concept of gendered conquest in Indian political thought. The conception of a distinctly Kshatriya-mode of marriage as generative of sovereignty developed in tension with the brahmanization of marriage that was contemporaneously codified into Hindu law. Its significance transcended the law and India. Rakshasa marriage entered global sociological and political theorizing in the nineteenth century as the primitive "marriage by capture." It was identified with "exogamy" and the capture of women as booty in war. In rakshasa marriage, the Kshatriya's triumphant exogamy displaces the Brahmin's endogamous purity: a deliberate crime against law, patriarchy, and caste.

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