“How to make Muslim women Hindu cock whore—Conquer, Humiliate, Breed”—r/Hindudom
1This was the text of a meme found on scrolller.com, an image aggregation platform, in the r/Hindudom discussion thread. The meme asks the question “How to make Muslim women Hindu cock whore” in bold white lettering with a huge font size against a black rectangular block with three separate sequenced images of a woman. In the first image, she is dressed in an off-white shalwar kamiz and headscarf with the text “conquer” imposed on it; in the second the woman is in her undergarments with “humiliate” written across the image, and the third is a naked close up of her face and breasts and the word “breed.” Innumerable such memes along with pornographic images and videos appeared on the different online platforms to discredit the Muslim women who led the Anti Citizenship Amendment Act (Anti-CAA) protests at Shaheen Bagh, a small neighborhood in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar area, in 2019 and 2020. Many protesting Muslims and allies felt a pressing urgency, experiencing the potential loss of citizenship as akin to the occurrences in Assam after the state-wide National Register of Citizens (NRC) process. These protests highlighted the assertion of religious identity while also advocating for equal civic and legal rights, rejecting the notion of second-class citizenship (Reyaz, Laskar, and Ameen 2022). The protests challenged entrenched stereotypes and disrupted traditional power dynamics, amplifying the visibility of marginalized voices in the public sphere.
2However, this visibility also made them targets of concerted efforts to delegitimize their activism. Disinformation campaigns sought to portray the protests as anti-national or driven by external influences, rather than as grassroots movements advocating for democratic rights and social justice. Amidst the various narratives surrounding the Shaheen Bagh protests, members and supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s right-wing ruling party, engaged in misogynistic targeting of women protestors. Explicit content—in the form of memes, fabricated images, and videos with false contexts—was being shared on a variety of social media platforms. Several of these messages also included links to external websites which were personal blogs, user generated article sections of Hindi newspapers, other social media sites, and pornographic websites. Dedicated smartphone applications were also created to target Muslim women. The Sulli Deals app in July 2021 and the Bulli Bai app in January 2022 posted altered photos of Muslim women activists and journalists, who criticized Hindu nationalism in India, presenting them as if they were being auctioned off . Several scholars have documented the extent of the hate speech, Islamophobia, anti-Muslim behavior, and misogynistic attacks on Muslim women during and after the Anti-CAA protests on these platforms (Saeed 2024; Sen and Jha 2024; Udupa and Gerold 2024).
- 1 While I have mentioned AI art and memes separately, I see memes as art too, agreeing with artivists (...)
3As a scholar of digital media, a media literacy trainer, a factchecker, and a former journalist, I have been closely monitoring various online portals and social media channels since 2017 and have continued to do so into the present. I entered the pornographic sites out of personal curiosity as a journalist in 2020 to see the related trends and I stayed on as a scholar. Turning the online erotic spaces into the site of my research in 2023, several alleys led me to social media sites, visual aggregators, and pornographic sites where user-generated content, shared fantasies (of Hindutva and eroticism), and creative expressions overlapped in an interactive frame. The meme I start my article with, along with hundreds of others with a more overt political agenda that are circulating on the internet are a doorway to my article that relies on digital ethnography of the usually hidden online precinct of pornography. My digital ethnographic explorations (Pink et al. 2016; Young, Pinkerton, and Dodds 2014) focus on explicit sites only—not social media. My data consists of images (including art created using artificial intelligence), memes,1 videos, comments and discussions posted by users—the creators and consumers of the content. Several of the posts that I came across during the protests in 2020 had been removed or deleted or I had lost access to them. I am therefore relying on the data (in the form of images, video clips, and links) that has survived in the web archives for three years or more and my own reflexive observations (Wilkinson and Patterson 2014) during the protests in 2020, as of the time of this writing.
4My aim is to understand the imaginaries in which different distinct pursuits of engaging in sexual activities online (voyeurism included), using sexual innuendoes in political discussion and full blown politically motivated misogynistic attacks on women converge to sustain an affective ecosystem. This article, thus, attempts to understand first, to what extent there is a politicization, particularly an ethnicization, of sexual desires and fantasies within the context of Hindu-majority India. Second, the article investigates in what ways the two forms of sexual representation—online sexual abuse and pornography consumption—intersect within the broader framework of the power-pleasure matrix. After mapping out the existing scholarship in the field, I will discuss the cases of the “fake” videos on pornographic sites and the comments, the images aggregated by the scrolller.com website from three threads—r/Hindudom, r/Hindu, r/HinduCocks, r/MuslimBullvsHinduSlut—to argue that sexual fantasies have merged with the ideas of a Hindu nation and Hindutva supremacy where Muslims must be subdued.
5At this point, I should also clarify that I have only focused on Hindu fantasies (and objectification) of cisgender, heterosexual Muslim women. In this article, the pornography has been used to identify all kinds of visual texts that are suggestive, erotic, explicit, and may not depict a sexual act but indicate as much. This article neither takes a reductive view of the act of watching pornography, nor does it attempt to establish a straightforward or simplistic causal relation between watching porn and sexual violence. Meaning is created at the confluence of the text and the viewer, rather than by either of them alone (Ghosh 2009). In fact, my article attempts to position itself at the intermediary point of tension between two contradictory anti and pro-pornography feminist traditions.
- 2 The manosphere describes male reactionary networks (online and often offline) against Feminism. It (...)
6Earlier academic inquiry on sexually explicit content in social media makes somewhat polarized arguments. Udupa and Gerold (2024) dispute Zuckerman’s argument (2014) that porn is a fuel that keeps the engine of digital activism running and reveal, in their study, that online porn and political activity are co-constitutive of one another. Scholars of manosphere (Johanssen 2022) in the west and in India have also signaled the enmeshed nature of sex, race, and politics online.2 My project reverses the perspective. Instead of looking at how porn infiltrates political discourses, I am looking at how politics (Hindutva) infiltrates erotic imaginations. This reveals something that is perhaps unique in the Indian case—while imaginations and fantasies (erotic or not) have always been racial and political, they have seldom been as overt or committed to a specific political party and the ideology it espouses. The remainder of the article will discuss this different kind of political pornification (Neville-Shepard and Neville-Shepard 2021; Segarra and Anderson 2019) and use ethnographic evidence to refine it.
7Most of the existing literature on pornography in online Hindutva circles looks at it as either a discursive tool (Basu 2015; Pande 2022) or a weapon against Muslim women and bodies (Dasgupta 2019; Saeed 2024; Sen and Jha 2024; Udupa 2017; Udupa and Gerold 2024). There are also some discussions about imaginaries—political subjectivities and symbolic violence against women (Pande 2022) or about gendered platformization (Shah 2023). Few studies examine the intersection of erotic fantasies and fetishes, the political self-imagination on Indian pornographic platforms, and the influence of contemporary politics on our most private realms. Studies on Indian porn are also somewhat insulated within their disciplines and discuss intimacies and screen cultures. As Paasonen (2011) points out, individual manifestations of desire and arousal might be influenced by pornographic imagery or words.
8Such imagery frequently functions as a stimulus that elicits subjective reactions that are influenced by the cultural, social, and individual circumstances of the spectator. A one-sided manner of engagement is reinforced by the fact that these visuals are usually seen passively, without any direct involvement or dialogic conversation. While pornographic consumption in India is still understudied, porn scholars elsewhere have argued how such sharing or exchange of erotic content forms an intimate bond or solidarity with the sharer (Paasonen 2017; Paasonen et al. 2015) and they create transgressive “leaks” in which matter from one space spills into another, allowing one dimension to blend into another (Baishya 2017).
9Many of Manuratne’s findings (2015) reveal the racist consumption patterns of war pornography, which often depicted violence aimed at asserting dominance over racialized or marginalized groups. The language of domination observed by Manuratne in user comments on these forums was frequently steeped in sexualized tones. Continuing from Manuratne’s analysis of war pornography, Varghese (2020) explores the ubiquity of videos showing caste and religion-based violence in modern India. Varghese draws comparisons between the aesthetics of these movies and Indian MMS erotica, noting that both types of content include an element of voyeurism. He thus poses questions that go beyond nationalism and right-wing violence, investigating how the visual representation of such violence arouses deeply rooted memories of past trauma and the politics of otherness in South Asia. He discusses the relationship between the vast diffusion provided by online platforms and the power of virtual mediation, even though his immediate focus may not be on traditional forms of pornography like sex-films or magazines. He explores how this unconscious materializes in violent portrayals as well and the focus points (and possibly goals) of this discourse’s climax are blood, semen, the digital device, and the online virtual world. Manuratne’s and Varghese’s analyses align with my research on the ethnicization of sexual fantasies in Hindu-majority India by exploring how violence and voyeurism in media, particularly war and caste-based content, intertwine with sexualized narratives of dominance. Both studies show how racial, and caste dynamics are eroticized through visual media, reflecting the power-pleasure matrix in political contexts, which resonates with my study on the broader politicization of sexual imagery in nationalist frameworks of Hindutva politics.
10Hoek (2014, 2020) has also questioned the complexities surrounding the documentation of a specific historical moment, particularly regarding the shifting nature of pornography across various media platforms. The transition of cut-pieces from small town cinema halls to online spaces created by internationally dispersed Bengali communities alters both the audience and the context of reception drastically. Previously embedded within the action movie narrative in cinema halls, “cut pieces” now find themselves integrated into online chat sites alongside other forms of Bengali and international pornography, often viewed on private computer screens or in internet cafes, Hoek reveals. This transition brings forth a newfound visibility of the racial and ethnic dimensions of the imagery. While pornography, in general, can delineate cultural boundaries, as Kipnis (1998) argues, the specific boundary delineated by a particular pornographic artifact cannot be predetermined solely from its representational content. Hoek shows that as the cut-pieces moved between celluloid and digital versions and were presented in radically diverse contexts for reception, their meaning underwent a profound transformation. In the case of newer forms of pornographic texts produced on Muslim women, the people who share them and in what context, changes their meaning. The materials are layered with newer meanings and associations with each account that shares it, the visual and linguistic markers with which they are shared and the times in which they are shared. I explain later through ethnographic evidence that even if different fetishes and imaginations in pornography and political activism online are distinct forms of performative and discursive acts, they operate within an affective ecosystem and at a time when the state has been effectively mobilizing political ideologies within cultures, identity and representation of personal selfhood (Basu 2020; Purohit 2023). It is well accepted that pornography that uses race or class to elicit physical reactions from its viewers does so by utilizing bodies that are marked in certain ways, particular mise-en-scène, and specific vocabulary (Kipnis 1998; Penley 2004; Williams 2014). Abujad (2021) argues that fetishized forms of religious symbology invite the epistemic violence of the imperial gaze, as they do with their facilitation of the male gaze. Pornographic images and film equally exploit the violent Muslim man trope and its converse, the emancipated Muslim woman trope, to perform submission for the non-Muslim consumer and to subjugate Muslim bodies, minds, and labor, she writes.
11Several scholars have delineated gender representations and identities within the frame of offline Hindutva. Their insights help us understand the right-wing online space, similar to the manosphere (Johanssen 2022) in the West. Bacchetta (1994) has explored representations of Muslim women in the discourse of India’s most extensive non-party Hindu nationalist organization, the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The portrayal of hegemonic masculinity in these narratives reflects the aspirations of Hindu men to reinforce patriarchal dominance, maintain political and economic superiority over Muslim men in public spheres, and assert sexual dominance over women in private realms, Dasgupta (2011) argues. Even during pre-internet times, the relationship between Hindu males and Muslim women was portrayed as triumphant, romantic, and under control, showcasing Hindu heroism and masculinity (Gupta 2009, 2011). Hindu masculinity was not a stable category but was responsive to its cultural, historical, social, and political embeddedness. Notions of masculinity were intertwined with nationalism and Hinduism, often at the expense of portraying Muslim men as inherently violent (Butalia 2000). This representation, labeled as Hindu orientalism (Ahmad 2023; Alam et al. 2021), reflects a broader trend of stereotyping and marginalizing Muslim communities, perpetuated through colonial discourses and power dynamics. Citizenship accounts in post-liberalization India frequently focus on how the state and its agents shape people into individualized citizens—such as consumers (Lukose 2009), technological workers or social media volunteers (Philip 2016; Radhakrishnan 2011), or adventurous entrepreneurs (Irani 2015; Udupa 2018) whose primary responsibilities are to develop their own capacities and pursue their own interests. However, Strohl (2019) offers a more nuanced discussion of citizenship in current India when he argues that right-wing advocates think that preserving the patriarchal Hindu family is in the best interest of the country, whereas classical liberal philosophers and neo-liberal regimes favored, in contrast, individualized political subjectivities.
- 3 Arab is a major category on pornographic websites while hijab is a sub-category.
12Since coming into power in 2014, the BJP government has consistently pursued the Indian government’s agenda to prohibit pornography. A significant action took place in 2018 when over 800 websites featuring pornographic material were blocked. Nevertheless, data disclosed in 2020 by pornhub.com, one of the world’s leading adult content platforms, indicated a surge in pornography consumption in India and within the most viewed categories of porn was “Arab” (Man’s World 2018).3 Most of the videos in this category featured obvious Muslim markers such as a hijab or an abaya. In their study of hijab pornography, Mirzaei, Zare, and Morrison (2022) found that in contrast to male faces, female faces were the conspicuous focal point of the performances. The focus was not just on women’s features, but rather on their “face while wearing hijab,” objectifying the hijab or, more broadly, the female performer’s purported status as a Muslim woman. The use of the hijab in fetish imagery and pornographic movies encourages viewers to indulge in their colonial fantasies and to view Muslims through the lens their religion. In India, the trend of accessing pornography through online platforms is relatively recent. Previously, pornography circulated predominantly through physical media such as books, VCR films, CDs/DVDs, and pen drives; and later non-physical and fluidic MMS clips exchanged directly between individuals or within private messaging groups. Numerous studies examining the content shared on messaging platforms have consistently highlighted the prevalence of pornographic material as one of the largest categories of messages circulated within political WhatsApp groups (Agarwal et al. 2020; Basu 2019; Saha et al. 2021). Cheap data and smartphones penetrated the Indian markets in 2015 when media literacy in India was even lower than it is today. So, even though the pornographic sites existed, someone savvy with website searching had to download the clip and then share it with other people who may not have known how to download it. BJP’s banning of pornographic websites made pornographic clip sharing from one platform to another more desirable, as observed during my study, increasing people’s reliance on such networks for access, strengthening affective bonds and creating opportunities for people seeking content for sexual pleasure to meet people participating in political work digitally. Several studies reveal how banning a form of media leads to pirate networks and turns an otherwise ordinary object into a niche around which different kinds of sub-cultures form (Larkin 2008; Thornton 1995). In the contemporary Indian context, the fetishes about Muslim women feed into the larger political narrative, vocabulary, and expression.
13With impunity from the ruling regime for online harassment of women (unless public outrage arose), once-hidden images from sub-cultural spaces have become mainstream, weaponized against outspoken Muslim women. These texts now serve as powerful tools of intimidation. Most of the women adult industry actors in the pornographic films and photographs distributed under the name Shaheen Bagh (as I discuss later) or explicit images stolen from pornographic websites and published publicly on social media sites that led to both sexualizing the political and politicizing sexual fantasies were not even Indian. And yet, the blurry, pixelated films and photographs that only featured the hijab as a distinguishing feature were projected as being about the Muslim anti-CAA protesters.
14Against the backdrop of the scholarship on porn and politics and on Hindutva’s masculinist tropes, this article is positioned between two extreme viewpoints—one that seeks to bring pornography and hate speech in the same analytical framework and the other that sees them as separate. This literature review makes sense if we were to study the online public spaces where pornographic material was used to perpetrate symbolic violence against the vocal Muslim women activists or journalists. However, the focus of this article is to understand how political tropes enter private spaces of sexual fantasies and fetishes and thus problematizes ideas that bring hate speech and pornography into the same analytical frame, even if that helps understand implicit forms of violence faced by Muslim women and that go unpunished. Worse, one set of scholars must exhaustively justify the seriousness of this form of violence to another set of stoic scholars who do not consider the virtual to be “real.” In the next section, drawing from my ethnographic data, I explain how sexual desires, fetishes, fantasies, and imaginations have become politicized in Hindu-majority India and then discuss the points of intersection between these politicized fantasies and online sexual abuse against Muslim women.
- 4 The women protestors were called lionesses for their courage against state repression.
15Innumerable pornographic videos and images, falsely claiming to be of the Muslim women protestors of Shaheen Bagh, were circulating on various social media sites in May 2020. Some of these videos and images were fact-checked, while others did not have a clear, verifiable claim and they kept circulating on different platforms stating that specific blurry, pixelated videos were from Shaheen Bagh. I have clarified how I began my explorations into porn sites as a fact checker and media literacy trainer. A keyword search of “Shaheen Bagh” on some of the popular pornographic sites such as xhamster.com, pornhub.com, xvideos.com, and xnxx.com came up with lists of videos that claimed they portrayed the women protestors of Shaheen Bagh. For this study, I revisited xhamster.com and searched for the keywords Shaheen Bagh again. I also searched for other word variations such as “Shahin Bagh,” “Shaheen Baug,” and Shaheen Bagh in Hindi or Devanagari script. The videos that came up were titled—“Shaheen bagh ki sheranee ko hindu mard ne choda part 1” (Shaheen Bagh’s lioness fucked by Hindu man part 1), “Shahin bagh ki sherni” (Shaheen Bagh’s lioness), “Shaheen Bagh ki mulli” (Shaheen Bagh’s Mulli—mulli is a derogatory word for Muslim women) and “Desi sakina bhabhi after Shaheen baug I fucked her hard” (Indian Sakina after Shaheen Bagh I fucked her hard).4 Among the countless videos on the themes of interreligious sex between Hindus and Muslims (involving both Hindu men with Muslim women, and Muslim men with Hindu women), I have picked these specific videos because they had “Shaheen Bagh”—a political protest by Muslim women—in their title. All four videos were posted by users who flaunted their Hindu identity and created the account around the same time, as revealed in their account information on the site, in 2020 when Shaheen Bagh protesters were being vilified by vicious disinformation campaigns. The political purposiveness of the title and the use of tags such as “brutal sex,” “Hindu,” “Muslim,” “sex,” and “sexing” helps take us closer to my argument that intimate spaces of sexual fantasies are becoming politicized. The variety of the tags and the different versions they are used in reveals the different kinds of representational relationships with the content (and the inherent message) that users form while producing, repurposing, searching these tags and consuming these materials. In these comments, I have also found users presenting themselves as Bangladeshis or Pakistanis, indicated by the emoji of the country flag beside their usernames, but I have focused only on Indian users.
16The first video—Shaheen Bagh’s lioness fucked by Hindu man part 1—is 24 mins long. It appears old and grainy with glitches. It shows a man wearing a shirt and trousers meeting a woman in a burqa. They talk for a while and then have sex. The video does not have any audio. By 1st October 2024, the video had 1.9 million views, 5288 likes, 34 dislikes, and 41 comments. The person who posted the video—the original poster—has an image of a man wearing a saffron tilak (signifying his Hindu religious identity) and a woman wearing a burqa leaning on his shoulder. His profile name is “Hindu02,” and all 47 videos on his xhamster.com page are titled Sex between Hindu Men and Muslim Women. The user had 5500 followers and 1600 friends on the platform. However, these videos were not original recordings but reposts of videos, possibly collected from other social media sites, and it cannot be said if the videos are of inter-religious sex. Nonetheless, all videos, with thousands of views, appear to be home recorded in India and have low resolution either due to amateurish production or quality loss due to repeated transmission between different kinds of devices that compress and compromise the videos’ clarity. The unpolished aesthetics of directness, authenticity, domestic intimacy, and rawness are often linked to the allure of amateurly produced pornography (Chalfen 2002; van Doorn 2010; Hardy 2009; Hofer 2014; Paasonen 2017). In the comments, the interaction between the person who has shared the video and page visitors typically revolves around abusing Muslim men, even if they like his video. These comments—from the video claiming to be Shaheen Bagh—reveal the different forms of viewers and their motivations—and not all have the same agenda.
Ballukhan: shaheen bagh ki kutiya.
Hindu02 to ballukhan: Shaheen bagh mai tum musalmano ki muslim mulliya ko bhut pela ham hinduon ne.
Ballukhan to Hindu02: main toe khud unko sherniya nahi balki kutiya bula raha honn … lagta hai tujhmay samajh ki kami hai.
Hindu02 to ballukhan: To kya kru mai.
[Ballukhan: The bitch of Shaheen Bagh.
Hindu02 to ballukhan: We Hindus really screwed the Muslim women of Shaheen Bagh.
Ballukhan to Hindu02: I am calling them bitches, not lionesses… looks like you lack understanding.
Hindu02 to ballukhan: So, what should I do then?]
Abdul5632: in logo se nhi krwana chahye hmari sherniyo ko.
Hindu02 to Abdul5632: Tumhari muslim mulliya ham hinduon ki hi rakhel bn kr rahegi.
[Abdul5632: We should not let our lionesses be fucked by these people.
Hindu02 to Abdul5632: Your Muslim women will end up being kept as mistresses by Hindus.]
Wisdomdanish: Ye sahin bhag ka nhi hai …. afwaah hai …. waise mandir sex dekha hai 😆
Hindu02 to Wisdomdanish: Saheenbagh ka hi ye video hai jab waha prr protest chal raha tha 2020 mai tab ki bt hai tab waha prr bhut sari muslim mulliya chudai krwati thi hindu mard se 500 leke.
Hindu02 to Wisdomdanish: Sahi Bagh ka nii hai to kaha ka hai.
[Wisdomdanish: This isn’t from Shaheen Bagh… it’s just a rumor… by the way, have you seen temple sex 😆
Hindu02 to Wisdomdanish: This video is indeed from Shaheen Bagh during the 2020 protest. Back then, many Muslim women were having sex with Hindu men for 500 bucks.
Hindu02 to Wisdomdanish: If it’s not from Shaheen Bagh, then where is it from?]
kattarHinduSherni: bhai ye toh bas ek hi mulla ko pela… hm hindu sherni toh kaafi mullo ko pelte hain… unka lund lekr chod dete unhe… maza aata bhai … tu v chudwale kisi mulla mard dekhkr. tujhe v maza aayega. mullo ka lund kadak hota bhai.
[kattarHinduSherni: Bro, this is just one mullah who got screwed… We Hindu women screw a lot of Muslims. We take their penis and leave them after… It’s fun, bro… You should try it with a Muslim man too, you will enjoy it. Their manhood is hard, bro.]
Style1980 to Hindu02: ABKI BAAR TERI BAHAN KA BOOR ME TEL LAGAKE READY RAKHNA AAYENGE HUM CHODNE. TEL JARUR LAGANA NAHI TO MERI CHODAI KE BAAD USKA ANTIM SANSKAR HO JAAYEGA, SAMJHA MATHERCHOD.
Hindu02 to Style1980: Maderchodo dek ke hosh mai aja ki kaise ak katter hindu mard teri muslim mulliya ko chod raha hai.
Shahida517 to Hindu02: Meri chut le lo.
[Style1980 to Hindu02: This time, get your sister’s vagina oiled and ready, we’ll come to screw her. Make sure to apply oil, or after I’m done, you’ll have to perform her last rites. Got it, you motherfucker.
Hindu02 to Style1980: Motherfuckers, watch and learn how a true Hindu man screws your Muslim woman.
Shahida517 to Hindu02: Take my pussy]
A15R15: ऊपर बुर्का अंदर सीता वह????????️??️?
Celticcult to A15R15: बुरका के अंदर खदीजा है और उसका शौहर पिंचर साट रहा है और बेगम कुदरती बिरयानी खाने आयी है??
[A15R15: Burqa on the outside, Sita inside, huh?
Celticcult to A15R15: Under the burqa is Khadija, her husband is fixing a cycle tyre puncture, and the lady has come for some natural biryani??]
17While this conversation can be seen from the prism of hate speech and violence, my research focus requires me to look at it from the lens of sexual role playing. The participants adopt pseudonyms that signal certain aspects of their online personas: Hindu02, kattarHinduSherni, Abdul5632, and Ballukhan invoke religious and gender identities that are central to the conversation. The names of the users have not been changed because none of them are real and they have been created by the users to maintain anonymity and yet reflect their identity, rather than reveal it. The usernames also suggest an interest in inter-religious dynamics, which can be understood as part of a fetishistic framework in this setting. KattarHinduSherni presents a hyper-feminized yet dominant persona, claiming power over religious and sexual boundaries, reflecting BDSM themes of domination and control. Ballukhan and Abdul5632 take on Muslim identities, which in this space become part of a role-play involving inter-religious sexual domination and submission. The conversation is marked by power dynamics that are common in BDSM culture, where domination, submission, and control are central themes. However, here these dynamics are layered with religious identities, which transforms the traditional roles of dominant and submissive into a more complex interplay of cultural and political power. Hindu02 and others describe scenarios where they dominate Muslim women or fantasize about sexual conquest, while kattarHinduSherni adopts a female dominant persona, suggesting a reversal of traditional gender roles within a fetishistic frame. The repeated references to Hindu-Muslim relations through sexual acts suggest an eroticization of inter-religious boundaries. In this context, the portrayal of sexual encounters between Hindus and Muslims reflects a fetish for the “forbidden” or the “other,” which is a common theme in certain sexual subcultures. Rather than being rooted in real-world communal violence, the conversation may be an expression of taboo-breaking fantasies where participants derive excitement from crossing religious and social lines through sexual acts. This role-play allows individuals to explore fantasies of power and submission that might not align with their everyday identities, but which gain legitimacy in the context of online fetish forums. The extremity of the language used can be seen as part of an exaggerated performance of power, common in adult forums that cater to BDSM or fetish communities.
18Yet the mention of the Shaheen Bagh protests, a key symbol of Muslim resistance, introduces a politically charged element into a typically fantasy-driven space of sexual fetishes. By invoking a real event tied to religious and political tensions, participants intensify the power dynamics of their fantasies, turning a moment of genuine resistance into a fetishized scenario. The inclusion of such a video shifts the context from abstract fantasy to the appropriation of real struggles, blurring the line between consensual role-play and the commodification of political movements, altering the entire interpretive framework. These conversations take place on an adult site, a space that often serves as a playground for exploring sexual fantasies, including those considered taboo or controversial in real life. The language used is explicit, inflammatory, and aggressive, but within the context of such forums, these expressions might not be literal but rather part of a shared fantasy culture that draws on themes of power, submission, and forbidden desires. However, these comments mark a shift in the way interaction occurs on fetish videos. Users are typically found re-enacting the fantasy or engaging in sex-chat in other forms of fetish videos. Even if users engage in sexual aggression in the comments, they do so with the aim of participating in the same fetish, by writing supportive messages, offering alternate scenario or giving suggestions about how the video could better achieve its goal. For instance, when user Shahida517 says, “take my pussy,” she is participating in the shared inter-religious sexual fetish by performing the role of a submissive Muslim woman. However, most of these comments on the specific video claiming to be from Shaheen Bagh, the interaction is confrontational and re-enacts political conflict where the aim of the chats and comments deviate from aiding in the performance of a sex fantasy about Muslim women.
19The interaction between the user who originally posted the video (Hindu02) with other Muslim men who either try to “factcheck” the video, contradict him for claiming the video was from Shaheen Bagh or even support him indicates that the sexual fetish is not just about Muslim women, but the role of the women and the subject of the fetish is situated in relation to Muslim men. Interaction on this and other videos create a confusion—whether the posters fantasize about having sex with a Muslim woman because of their interest in inter-religious erotica or if they fantasize about inter-religious sex because they hate Muslim men. This confusion problematizes the notion that these videos belong to porn subcultures and the genre of inter-religious sex or even revenge sex because the focus of the fetish is not the woman anymore. Rather, she is seen in relation to the Muslim man who a Hindu must hate.
20A seemingly harmless fetish video then turns into a weapon of symbolic violence because such videos are never trapped in the bubble of the specific online gallery, they belong to. They travel from one platform to another, are remediated from one platform to another, layered meanings and connotations endlessly added. This also means that the popular genre of “Hindu Muslim sex” changes its context and meaning in specific spatial and temporal registers. The politics of archiving online content, especially in adult video galleries, is significant because the way these videos are categorized and preserved can recontextualize otherwise isolated fantasies. By archiving a video with such a title, the platform effectively transforms the gallery into a site of political discourse, intentionally or unintentionally shifting viewers’ perceptions of the other videos as well. The politics of archiving (Chadwick and Vermeulen 2020; Derrida and Prenowitz 1995; Steyerl 2008) significantly influences collective memory and cultural narratives, showing that what is preserved and categorized in digital spaces can reshape our understanding of both the content and its cultural importance. A single politically charged video can affect the interpretation of the other 46 videos in the same gallery, which depict Muslim bodies in subdued roles with political implications. The comments on these videos, purportedly from Shaheen Bagh, reflected similar themes. This pattern was evident even in videos unrelated to Shaheen Bagh or any political context, focusing solely on Hindu-Muslim inter-religious sex. As seen in the section, pornographic videos framed as sex between Hindus and Muslims, with titles referencing Shaheen Bagh, provoke aggressive and sexually charged discussions in the comments section. These discussions extend beyond sexual fantasies to conjoin with political and symbolic violence against Muslim women and men.
- 5 Motherless.com is an online platform primarily focused on adult content, like other user-driven por (...)
21Hindu-Muslim fetish content is not confined to pornographic sites but spills over into various other online platforms, creating a complex web of image-based content that circulates across multiple spaces. Through a Google reverse image search on the profile pictures of four users who uploaded videos to xhamster.com, I found similar content on additional platforms such as scrolller.com, motherless.com, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook (or Meta).5 The reverse search of the profile images also revealed a network of users on these platforms—explicit (scrolller.com and motherless.com) and non-explicit public sites like X and Facebook who shared the visual and textual vocabularies in their online sociality to articulate their sexual and political imaginaries. This section examines a selection of memes from scrolller.com to highlight how pornographic material moves between different platforms, linking explicit content from adult sites to broader public online spaces. Using Google reverse search functions, I found a gallery on Scrolller titled r/Hindudom, which contained explicit images depicting the sexual domination of Muslim women by Hindu men.
- 6 Reddit is a website where users can share and discuss news and content in different communities cal (...)
22The gallery had been a discussion thread on Reddit but was banned from the platform, though its content continues to be archived on Scrolller.6 The selection of the title Hindudom for this gallery is significant, as it reflects a broader ideological project that goes beyond political domination and delves into cultural hegemony—capturing the essence of Hindu supremacy across all spheres of life, including sexual fantasies (Goradia 2021; Savarkar 1937). This movement of content—from highly explicit pornographic platforms like motherless.com to more public discussion spaces like Reddit, and then into archives on Scrolller—reveals the existence of a sprawling, informal database of image-based pornographic and suggestive material.
23Once hosted on Reddit and archived by sites like scrolller.com, this content spreads to platforms like Twitter and Facebook, demonstrating how fetishized ethnic content fluidly travels between niche pornographic sites and mainstream public platforms. This network of spillages also shows how the boundaries between private sexual fantasies and public political discourse intersect, allowing such content to permeate everyday digital spaces. While the themes mirrored those on xhamster.com, the images were identical to those found on the pornographic site motherless.com, but more memetic in nature, often created using artificial intelligence. Notably, these images also referenced the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Bajrang Dal, and other Hindutva workers, adding a political dimension to the content. One such meme (figure 1) depicted a burqa-clad woman kissing a man wearing jeans, referencing the abrogation of Article 370—a political move by the Indian government to revoke the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. In the meme, the burqa-clad woman, Yasmeen, symbolizes Kashmiri Muslim women, while Kunal, her Kashmiri Pandit boyfriend, represents the Hindu male. The “benefits” of the abrogation are perversely depicted as sexual conquest, suggesting that political control over Kashmir equates to the sexual domination of Kashmiri Muslim women by Hindu men. This meme reflects an ethicized fantasy where political power and inter-ethnic sexual relationships are conflated, reinforcing Hindu dominance and the subjugation of Muslim identities.
24Another meme (figure 2) portrayed a violent fantasy of sexual dominance set against a backdrop of communal conflict in which the man, portrayed as a “Hindutva leader” represented Hindu nationalist ideology, while the “freshly widowed ammi” (Urdu for mother) conjures images of Muslim women as the spoils of war. The meme is captioned, “after defeating the Musalmans, the Hindutva leader Pratap Rathod paying a visit to your freshly widowed ammi and compelling her to become a sanskari wife at your Muslim father’s funeral.” The expression “sanskari wife” signifies the expectation for a Muslim woman to adopt Hindu customs, representing not just sexual domination but also cultural and religious assimilation. This visual and textual representation fetishizes sexual conquest as a means of political and ethnic victory, intertwining sexual fantasies with themes of communal violence and subjugation.
Figure 1
Meme found on r/Hindudom thread of scrolller.com.
Figure 2
Meme found on r/Hindudom thread of scrolller.com
- 7 Link to the meme on scroller.com that portrayed Muslim women activist being urinated on: https://sc (...)
25Memes on Muslim women activists are more explicit than the others where the main message revolved around punishment with humiliation and even death. One such meme dehumanizing Muslim women activists was a collage featuring UAE princess Hend bint Faisal Al-Qasimi and another woman crouching near a toilet seat, with people urinating on her face.7 In this meme, the princess’s image has been used to depict a Muslim woman, irrespective of her social or political status. The accompanying text read: “From being a fierce advocate for Muslim rights to being relegated to a urinal for Hindu men to relieve themselves. Muslim activists have come a long way under Hindu Rashtra.” The reference to “Hindu Rashtra” adds a political overtone, portraying the Hindu nationalist agenda as not only politically defeating Muslims but also reducing Muslim women to objects of humiliation. This sexual imagery, closely tied to the ethnic identity of Muslim women, reinforces the idea that Hindu dominance is asserted through the degradation of Muslim women, politicizing sexual fantasies in a profoundly communal and violent manner. Several images found on motherless.com depicted Muslim women and underaged girls being groomed into sexual slavery in Hindu rashtra (nation). The memes are presented as a political warning to the Muslim women rather than as a mere expression of sexual desire. Even if this were to be seen as role playing and fetishization, as often happens with actresses or notable personalities in porn-subcultures, the symbols of Hindu nation emphasize how political and sexual imaginations have presently coalesced. Another meme (figure 3) that mentions BJP MLAs (members of legislative assembly) illustrates the sexualization of Muslim women within a political context, suggesting that Muslim women exchange sexual favors for political gain, reinforcing the narrative that their sexuality is exploited by BJP leaders. Referring to the targeting of Muslims during the Covid-19 pandemic, another meme (figure 4) depicts a scenario in which a Muslim man gets arrested for paying namaz during quarantine restrictions and his son prepares for his mother to sexually submit to Bajrang Dal members. All these memes are replete with political symbolism, images and imaginations of Muslim bodies in a Hindu nation. While the fantasies are centered around a female body, they call for the subjugation of Muslims.
Figure 3
Meme found on r/Hindudom thread of scrolller.com
Figure 4
Meme found on r/Hindudom thread of scrolller.com.
- 8 Kapil Mishra, a BJP leader, labeled the protesters as “paid protesters,” suggesting they received ₹ (...)
26The analysis of the memes explores how online sexual abuse and pornography consumption intersect within the broader context of the power-pleasure matrix, revealing how sexual fantasies are politicized and ethnicized in Hindu-majority India. These memes illustrate the convergence of two forms of sexual representation: abusive and fetishized portrayals of Muslim women in online spaces, which serve to reinforce structures of power and control, with pleasure derived from the domination and humiliation of the political “other.” Although this article does not delve deeply into motherless.com, the site—infamous for its problematic moderation and ongoing lawsuits in the U.S. for hosting child pornography—features extensive galleries of images and memes that reflect the status of women in a Hindu Rashtra. I did examine two specific galleries: “Hijabi Slave BDSM Interfaith” and “Hindu Rashtra NSFW Interfaith.” These galleries reveal that sexual fetishes have evolved from mere fantasies into a vision of a Hindu-dominated nation where Muslim women are enslaved. While pornographic sites and memes might seem like disconnected worlds, they are linked by the individuals who navigate both domains, facilitating the flow of ideas across platforms. This connection is evident in the interactions observed under the category tag “Hindu Muslim.” Hashtags such as #Hindudom, #HinduBulls, #HinduBullsForMuslimah, #HinduRashtraNSFW, and #HinduStudsForMuslimSluts further connect users and content across various platforms—ranging from the unmoderated and extreme motherless.com to moderated sites like xhamster.com, scrolller.com, and social media platforms like Meta, X, and Instagram, as well as private messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger. Common phrases used in comments on porn videos, memes, and other explicit materials often echo the humiliation and ridicule directed at the Shaheen Bagh protesters, such as being “sold for Rs 500,” “eating kudrati (natural) biryani,” and “mending cycle tyre puncture.” These phrases, initially articulated by elected members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, have been repeated countless times on social media by party members and supporters, becoming normalized as everyday language to address and ridicule Muslims and delegitimize their causes.8
27This article attempts to explain the politicization of the sexual rather than the mere sexualization of political discourse, arguing that the former carries far more serious consequences. It explores the confluence of eroticism with political discourse, positing that sexual desires and fantasies in Hindu-majority India are deeply politicized and ethnicized against the Muslim “Other.” The analysis reveals how pleasure and politics merge in online spaces, where participants, consciously or unconsciously, engage in emotional labor that aligns with broader political mobilization. The online domains of pornography, political discussion boards, and social media channels form a single affective ecosystem, where religious and sexual identities intertwine. Fantasies of domination and submission map onto ethnic and religious boundaries, reinforcing societal power structures. Within this political framework, Muslim women are depicted as symbols of communal and gendered subjugation, their bodies serving as battlegrounds for both political and sexual conquest. The fantasies of sexual domination are infused with ethnic hatred, reflecting how pleasure derived from these fantasies is inextricably linked to the assertion of Hindu dominance over Muslim identities. This intersection of online sexual abuse and pornography consumption operates within a power-pleasure matrix, where the enjoyment of control is manifested in real-world acts, such as the targeted harassment of activists like Safoora Zargar and the online auctions of Muslim women on platforms like SulliDeals and Bulli Bai. While these forms of violence are facilitated by formal state support from elected BJP officials and informal backing from party digital volunteers, the article emphasizes that politicized imaginations create the affective base for enacting these fantasies in public spaces, allowing Muslim women’s bodies to be treated as arenas for communal and political supremacy. The real-world implications of this political pornification reveal the porous—if not entirely collapsed—boundary between online fantasies and offline consequences.
28Instead of merely examining how porn infiltrates political discourse, this article shifts the focus to how politics, particularly Hindutva, infiltrates erotic imaginations. This perspective yields two key insights. First, ethnicized intimate erotic fantasies are entwined with the vision of a Hindu Rashtra. Second, it explores the affective ecosystem in which non-political users inhabit the same digital space as active volunteers, exchanging engagement metrics like likes and views, thus contributing to the broader vision of a Hindu Rashtra as envisioned by political workers backed by the ruling party. Regardless of their agreement with this vision, these users act as silent bystanders or participants, increasing web metrics through their content interactions. The proliferation of sexually explicit online content fosters increased discourse about sex while simultaneously reinforcing societal power structures that regulate sexual behavior. This paradox, reminiscent of Foucault’s (1977) analysis of the Catholic sacrament of confession, reveals how pornographic sites and discussion forums have become critical arenas for merging sexual fantasies with political ideologies, reinforcing ethnicized power dynamics and normalizing the domination of marginalized identities. Reversing the focus from how pornography impacts political discourse to examining how politics, particularly Hindutva, shapes erotic imaginations reveals that erotic fantasies are not merely influenced by political ideologies but are actively infused with them, reflecting broader socio-political dynamics. It shows the growing entanglement between personal desires and overt political affiliations, where erotic imaginations align increasingly with Hindutva ideology and how political narratives permeate everyday lives, influencing cultural narratives and social behaviors while reinforcing existing power structures.