Marriage and its discontent

This article deals with current urban transformations through the prism of debates around love and marriage, which from the nineteenth century onwards, have served as markers of middle-class lifestyles and sensibilities.Footnote ⁶ My own research is based on fieldwork undertaken from 1995 onwards in Calcutta, later Kolkata, where I initially worked with Bengali-speaking Hindu middle-class families in a rather conservative, heterogeneous, and centrally located neighbourhood, and later on with a wide range of women belonging to middle-class families across the city, in particular a number of families settled in southern, affluent neighbourhoods.Footnote ⁷ Around the time when I started my first fieldwork in the mid 1990s, debates about globalization and post-liberalization reform featured love and marriage as interrelated themes, which were closely associated with the discursive construction of an alleged Indian orientation towards the family. Mothers, fathers, and young adolescents would quote rising divorce rates, cite new sexual mores including premarital affairs, and the proliferation of ‘love marriages’ as indicators of social change. While earlier enthusiasm about self-chosen partners had been the preserve of a small, liberal upper-middle-class elite, in the decade to follow, it appeared that many of my more conservative interlocutors embraced choice and consent as part of matchmaking. And although alternatives to arranged marriages were often not entirely self-chosen marriages, but what has come to be known as ‘arranged love marriage’, or ‘marriage by introduction’, love marriages were definitely seen as a sign of the times and fervently endorsed by young men and women alike.Footnote ⁸ The pros and cons of either form were often discussed in the course of extended conversations I had with mothers and their young daughters, grandmothers, and mothers-in-law, many of them middle-aged housewives living in joint families. Over a cup of tea while we were watching one of the endless soap operas portraying family breakdown, mothers did their utmost to explain to me the concept of ‘love’ and its role in relation to marriage. There are two different kinds of love that were of great importance to my interlocutors, namely love as prem, which is associated with sexual desire and lust (kam), a strongly hierarchical form of relationship, and love associated with the egalitarian values of friendship, bhalobhasa. Love marriages are therefore not per se associated with just sexual desire, and in the view of many of my friends and informants they provide potentially more fulfilling conjugal relations than the more hierarchical forms of love or arranged marriages.Footnote ⁹ It is the latter type of love that is not only sought in marital relations, which many women described as companionate, but should ideally also form the basis for love marriage. Thus, they distanced themselves and their nominal, if not active, acceptance of self-chosen matches from the common representation of love marriages in terms of elopement. While the latter were seen as the preserve of lower-class youths, love marriages among middle-class Bengali men and women were conceived in terms of the companionship a spouse selected by oneself would be able to provide. However, at the same time, problems with love marriages were pointed out. Not only were such unions often—though by no means always—marked as less stable, they were discussed in the context of the quotidian aspects of family life, especially the norm of patrilocality.Footnote ¹⁰

Interestingly, while love marriages were then, and are now, seen as a sign of the times, they need to be interpreted not solely as signs of modernity, but as narratives about changing social landscapes. As such they feed into the plethora of surveys that suggest marital patterns and conjugal relations are changing, but which only provide insights into attitudes and snapshots of ideas, rather than much information on social transformations. Along these lines, my interlocutors often link the notion of the assumed rise in love marriages and their disruptive potential to wider issues in their lives. Among them is the anxiety middle-class parents share about the influence of youth culture and consumer identities, and fears of abandonment in old age. And while they differentiated between how a wedding came about, successful matches of various denomination, and tragically mismatched spouses, they elaborated on how these wider developments turned love marriages into a threat to ‘Indian culture’. The mothers’ narratives regularly centre on the ideology of the ‘joint’ family, which is based on patrilocality and the primacy of arranged marriages.

The conversations with the older generation stood in stark contrast to the verve with which young women discussed their desire for a self-arranged match. Irrespective of whether they later agreed to an arranged match, which a minority of them did, talk about love and marriage provided an opportunity to present an ideal persona in an environment that traditionally deprives women of any say in spousal selection and infantilizes young women through rituals of submission. The first of two ways of presenting ideal selves in the context of marriage promoted by young women was the ‘traditionalist’, a ‘good girl’ who would prefer to live in a joint family no matter how the match came about. The second variation, the ‘independent’, styled herself as a fervent supporter of choice and love marriage. Given the very high number of love marriages in the Bengali middle-class families I worked with and in particular in the Central Kolkata neighbourhood, the way members of different generations spoke about marriage was not surprising. In fact, during the early stages of my fieldwork attitudes to questions about love and marriage among my middle-class interlocutors appeared to be markedly homogeneous, with most elders acknowledging the element of serendipity in matchmaking and the unpredictable ways of the young. The views of Sonali's mother, whose daughter was 19 and near completion of her studies when I first met them both, were common; ‘love finds its way’ and ‘you can't do anything if they fall in love’ were her comments.

Our conversations reflected not only my increasing comprehension skills and privileged status as an outsider, but facilitated debates about emerging class-based lifestyles. During my initial fieldwork my alleged expertise on love marriages and Western lifestyles was often the reason for women belonging to various castes and different religious communities sharing accounts of intimate relationships. Even retired housewives in their seventies were sometimes eager to speak about love and marriage, often based on their own experiences. First conversations would match closely with the clear-cut distinction between love marriages and arranged marriages found elsewhere,Footnote ¹¹ and the enlightened approach to such matches expected from Bengali middle-class persons of both genders. However, when I got to know such respectable ginnis (mistresses of the home) more closely, the picture became more complex. When I began to work without local assistants, they would gradually speak more frankly about inappropriate liaisons, especially inter-caste and inter-community matches. In addition, such in-depth conversations would also often bring up affairs that did not lead to marriage, hinting, but never explicitly mentioning the possibility of premarital sexual relations. Like many others, Sonali's mother, who I worked with for almost two years, turned out to be sympathetic to the idea of love marriage in theory, but a very stern believer in arranged marriages where her own son and daughter were concerned. Like others, she argued fervently in favour of the longevity of arranged marriages, based on parental choice, as the optimal solution to what she and others saw as a serious test for the whole family. In her view, such matches were based on more pragmatic decisions and not only attraction (Mrs Das’ ‘mere looks’), involving a range of stakeholders. Marriage, unlike love, was a serious matter and decisions related to it needed to be primarily orientated towards the greater good of the family. In her words, the short-term, emotional and sexual fulfilment that the couple alone gained from the impulsive decision to have a love marriage was ultimately much more risky a proposition than the long-term planning and negotiation that facilitated arranged marriages. Not surprisingly, given that such matches are considered to be monogamous and are difficult to dissolve, arranged marriages were infinitely more desirable. Like most others, Sonali's mother felt that there was more mileage to be gained from letting mature adults take such far-reaching decisions. She assumed, as did most mothers, that patrilocal residential patterns would prevail among the young and therefore it was considered vital for a daughter-in-law to be chosen by her future affines, as she had to ‘fit in with the culture of the house’. Conversations with mothers of other unmarried children confirmed that Sonali's mother was not alone in her belief that brides would move in with their in-laws and that the ‘joint’ family would prevail.

The ideas that young adults expressed about their own preferences with regards to finding a spouse were markedly different. While the older generation focused on the prospect of a good match, mostly by discussing problems encountered by acquaintances and relatives in arranging a marriage, their daughters gave examples of friends who were involved with a boy and planned on having a love marriage. For the latter, the consent of parents was a crucial part of all discussions, as even love marriages could be integrated by getting parental consent through a proper wedding ceremony and, crucially, by living jointly after the wedding. Today, almost two decades later, such younger interlocutors are much more likely to hint at the possibility of premarital relationships, but even now premarital sex is not discussed openly and cohabitation and marriage without parental consent are not seriously considered. Although premarital sexual relations are certainly a concern for parents, and practitioners including doctors and psychologists have confirmed that the number of youngsters having sex has risen over the last two decades, such activities were never revealed to me and are still seen as a taboo, even in otherwise intimate conversations.Footnote ¹² Whether or not the desire to engage in legitimate sexual activities is a driving force behind love marriages is impossible to ascertain, but silence about the subject and the fact that most interlocutors are acutely aware of the lack of privacy couples in joint families experience, suggest it is not overtly important to women.

In Kolkata as in other settings, as Twamley's very recent work with young couples in Baroda shows, arranged marriages are considered a desirable norm by the vast majority of young women. Love marriages are becoming more common, but are discussed within the parameters of this normative institution.Footnote ¹³ In other words, although the possibility of a self-chosen match and talk about the relative advantages of such matches are important markers of a suitably modern middle-class identity,Footnote ¹⁴ the sociological reality suggests that most matches in Kolkata middle-class families are still arranged. In the literature on globalizing forms of middle-class families and marriages much emphasis is put on the ideology of companionate conjugality that has spread and brings with it a strong desire for choice and consensual matchmaking based on romantic love.Footnote ¹⁵ As much anthropological research has shown, a desire for choice and romance has by now captured the imagination of many communities and in Ahearn's study of rural Nepal, prolonged courtships may make elopement a popular option.Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, Parry, among others, suggests that love marriages can actually represent an institutionalized second match, which is socially acceptable provided an earlier, arranged marriage occurred at a very young age.Footnote ¹⁷ Thus, careful ethnography shows that contrary to common narratives about modernization and marriage, the normative character of arranged marriages can be as contentious as that of self-chosen matches.

What matters in the current setting is the identification of love marriage with modernity, but with emphasis on an orientation towards the greater good of the family which demands that parental consent and patrilocality are valued above individual fulfilment. In order to retain the modern outlook but embrace ‘Indian’ family values, a degree of choice and the consent of the candidates are increasingly becoming part of the long, drawn-out process of marriage negotiations, especially where parents pre-select a potential candidate.

Thus, as first reported for South Asian communities in the United Kingdom, studies of how matches come about assert that within the framework of love versus arranged marriages degrees of agency by the prospective spouses can vary considerably. Furthermore, mixed forms of matchmaking, promoted in part through online resources, whereby younger family members find possible matches or parents pre-select candidates for their children to check out, are now common.

However, the ideal of patrilocal residence limits the choice, though some couples might migrate. Patrilocality is therefore seen by almost all interlocutors as desirable and shapes the way marriages come about, matches are negotiated, and coupledom is experienced. The fact that arranged marriages are chosen over love marriages because of the emphasis placed on the values associated with joint living is borne out by my ethnographic evidence regarding the real-life choices among my informants. More importantly, these ethnographic findings are supported by quantitative data on attitudes and matches among a representative sample drawn from middle-class citizens in Kolkata, which brings the fact that patrilocality is expected and the joint family thriving, into sharp focus.Footnote ¹⁸

It is also apparent that there were different versions of the idealized selves presented here, and each deserves attention in its own right. Thus, young women like Reka, when interviewed at home, agreed that romantic love did not often lead to a fulfilling conjugal relationship. Today, these young people are not only citing the alleged rise in marital breakdown but even threats like HIV/Aids to show that marriages are too serious to be based on emotions alone. Furthermore, while some members of the younger generation professed a preference for arranged marriages in the 1990s, it is important to note that arranged marriages are positively embraced by a sizeable number of younger people even today. Earlier, daughters often argued that they themselves grew up in a joint family, and that they preferred to marry into a similar environment. All younger interlocutors were keen on having a say in the choice of spouse, and while consent is too strong a word for what they implied, I regularly heard that the wish to meet a spouse and have a period of getting to know each other was preferred to a full love marriage.

Significantly, marriage was, first, not negotiable and second, ideally not something that was just ‘going to happen’ to them. True to the idiom of choice and self-assertion, they wanted an active role in it, and if this meant having a love match, so be it, but to choose a partner in no way implied ‘elopement’ or dispensing with parental advice and consent. On the contrary, as Amrita, a 20-year-old student pointed out: ‘If I am seeing someone that is only possible if he is also acceptable to my parents.’ Quite clearly, desire and wishful thinking were interpreted in the light of long-standing debates about conjugality, emotional fulfilment, and the family, by both generations. Furthermore, class-based lifestyles and values, in particular the association of elopement or ‘Kalighat marriages’ with lower-class culture, pushed young middle-class couples to attempt to gain the consent of their parents.Footnote ¹⁹ In practice, the primacy of joint family life and the reality and direct experience of patrilocality makes the binary opposition between arranged and love marriages persuasive and prevents it from being watered down, as is the case with young, second-generation migrants in the United Kingdom. As Twamley found in her study of Gujarati-speakers, most couples argued that love marriage was supported by neolocality and vice versa. Though I would caution against overgeneralizations based on what is essentially a group of self-selected informants who are speaking confidently to a relative stranger about their intimate lives, it appears that choice and living separately are, in the narratives at least, directly linked to the educational and professional status of the couples concerned, which clearly indicates middle-class status.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, while young UK-based couples preferred to move out and could afford to do so because both spouses were financially independent and landlords would not necessarily judge the marital status of their tenants, it is clear in the work by scholars working with different South Asian migrant communities that class and religious affiliation as well as recent migration from South Asia enforce, rather than weaken, the exclusive status of arranged marriage.Footnote ²¹ It is often therefore the Gujarati community in the United Kingdom—or the Tamil Brahmins Fuller and Narasimhan interviewed, who were highly educated IT workers in India and who saw love marriages and (initial) neolocality as the norm—with whom these changes fit in well.Footnote ²²

In the given context, rather than debating different types of union or ideal types theoretically as Derne's male Varanasi informants seemed to be doing,Footnote ²³ my interlocutors drew extensively on the experiences of their own relatives and friends with love marriages. In the discussions we had, it appeared that both generations focused on the need to make every individual match compatible with the numerous demands of multi-generation households. Referring to the role that a married daughter-in-law had to play, mothers would emphasize the infamous ‘orientation towards the family’ and the ability to ‘adjust’, as pre-conditions for a fulfilled marital life in the home of affines. Among the younger generation, not surprisingly, coupledom and conjugal relations were the priority, with talk about ‘choice’ often standing in for images of idealized, blissful relationships. In line with their position in the life cycle and expectations for the future, the older generation showed great concern about their children's potential matches. The way a daughter-in-law would fit in with existing constellations and power relations was paramount, while happiness—even of one's own son—clearly took a backseat over the management of affinal relationships. This is not to say that the pursuit of happiness did not constitute a goal in matchmaking, but it was one among others. Thus, mothers like the conservative mum of Sonali were opposed to the privileging of ‘modern’ ideas. Quite a number mentioned or had experienced premarital courtship (though usually in the form of coy letter-writing and occasional glances), and some had self-chosen their partners. Others had experienced prolonged periods of romantic courtship after they had agreed to an arranged marriage, and were keen to point out that their experiences represented the ideal, Indian ‘modernity’ the middle class claims to have created. But, and this was the case generally, courtship did not preclude parental consent, while choice of a suitable boy or girl was not limited to the older generation. For daughters, on the other hand, the post-millennium period brought the possibility of premarital affairs out into the open. Clearly, such liaisons had existed before, as the many love marriages that had occurred earlier testified.Footnote ²⁴ But, while far from being exceptional, courtship and affairs have only recently become widespread and acceptable. Furthermore, even where love marriages took place and were accommodated by the respective families, parents were usually upset about the behaviour of their son or daughter, even if nobody else found it particularly exceptional or problematic. It is this perpetual indignation which suggests that parental authority is really the main value violated in most love marriages, which is serious in contexts where patrilocality remains the norm.

In the two decades since I started to work with Bengali middle-class families, love- or self-arranged marriages and premarital courtship, have become a hallmark of ‘modern’ urban culture. While earlier generations of middle-class women in these families may have had love marriages, they were adamant that nobody ‘bragged’ about choosing their own spouse. Today, on the other hand, young women (and men) are under immense pressure to come up with a suitable storyline regarding ‘modern’ love and marriage, especially where they agreed to an arranged match. As important narratives of the self focus on a rhetoric of ‘true companionship’ and choice, and romantic love and courtship are increasingly related to self-assertion and financial independence, these discourses have to be reconciled with the claimed ‘Indianess’ of arranged marriage and the ideal of the joint family. This tension brings marriage as a pivotal institution in the discourse of Indian modernity to the fore again, this time in a thoroughly competitive and consumerist setting.

What's love got to do with it?

In many respects marriage itself, rather than love marriage, has changed the way Indian middle-class families function today. My friends and interlocutors, as did those reporting back to the survey conducted by Jadavpur University,Footnote ²⁵ emphasized that the fundamental difference between the expectations that had marked traditional marriage and their own expectations of affectionate bonds and emotional fulfilment did link the generations. However, whether or not emotions should govern spouse selection was contested, and with few exceptions my interlocutors insisted that modern companionate marriage can be realized after a match has been arranged. In the accounts of the older generation, as well as the speculation about cause and effect that younger participants engaged in, the question of patrilocality loomed large, as this nuanced account of a marriage that took place in the 1950s shows:

The narrator, Sushmita, at the time I met her a very agile 70-year-old mother of two sons, had been married as a young girl of 16 to a much older man of 28. Sushmita was extremely open with me, and compared her arranged marriage with her son's ‘own’ marriage. Central in her account was that both were ‘modern’, as ideas about love and companionship played a part in the way conjugal relations developed. She was eager to point out that in this sense her own marriage was very ‘modern’. However, she also insisted that the single most important point to consider where marriages are concerned is a strong sense of filial duty, and a commitment she expressed in the words ‘the family comes first’, which would in both scenarios be expected from young women, who were to make the best of the situation. Sushmita acknowledged that many young wives of her generation had a hard time when they first entered their sasur bari (in-laws’ house) and counted herself lucky as her husband's postings outside Calcutta worked in her favour. Her account reflects the conflicts that are associated with the relationship between a daughter- and a mother-in-law in a joint family, which is just as affectively charged and in the past was often closer than that of a husband with his wife. Her account also testifies to the deep impact that the idea of emotional fulfilment had on the institution of marriage in middle-class Bengal before liberalization. However, she also points out that the lived experience of love and intimacy in marriage are embedded in the actual life cycle of the joint family. In this context, regardless of a woman's modern outlook on marriage, the demands of the couple have to be weighed against, and ultimately subordinated to, the needs of the wider family—its past and future generations. Interestingly, my own research on the impact that the discourse on love really has on actual marriages fits in with the findings of Sen et al., who affirm that while love marriages are a stated aim and preference among their unmarried subjects, existing matches in middle-class Kolkata are overwhelmingly of the arranged variety.Footnote ²⁶ Thus, the fact that young men and women across India state their preference for love marriages does not necessarily imply the demise of arranged marriages.Footnote ²⁷ Rather, if, as Wardlow and Hirsch point out, love is often ‘seen as a trope through which to assert a modern identity’ in a globalizing world,Footnote ²⁸ then this trope is powerful across generations but only sometimes guides spouse selection. Moreover, emotions and different forms of love are also involved in a range of other relationships, for example in the family, and thus one type of love, namely that associated with parents and filial duty, a selfless love, can be played out against another—that which is associated with choice and individual friendships.

The importance of such distinctions was highlighted when I looked at my conversations with Tanu, who was 20 years old when we first met in the mid 1990s. At the time, she lived in a joint family, comprising of her parents, grandmother, and her uncle's family in a decaying ancestral home in the city centre. Their lifestyle was modest and geared towards keeping the joint family together, the inevitable tensions of such an arrangement notwithstanding. Tanu was studying biochemistry, and had done exceptionally well in a subject that is not only oversubscribed but promises employment and, indeed, a career. Marriage was still not on the cards, though her parents had begun to look for a suitable groom so that they could arrange for her wedding by the time she finished her degree in 2003. Tanu herself told me repeatedly that her problem would be that she was not a ‘modern type’. Like her younger cousins, she had been raised in a joint family, and living ‘separately’ after marriage was not an option that appealed to her. Her explicit desire to marry into such a set-up made her a bhalo meye (good girl) in the eyes of her parents and the all-important community of family, friends, and neighbours. It did, however, also restrict her career choices. It was clear that affines with similar ideals would not accept a daughter-in-law who worked in a laboratory and had a career. As it turned out, she found a compromise, which was somehow daring but within her reach. She found herself a boyfriend from a joint family, and they married with the consent and support of both families.

However, after their wedding things became rather difficult for this self-professed ‘good’ daughter, who desperately wanted to marry into a traditional setting. She struggled to come to terms with the fact that her affines, and in particular her husband's mother, were extremely demanding and at times commandeering. When we met two years after her wedding, she showed me the photos taken on her honeymoon in North Bengal, an occasion for the young couple to enjoy the privacy and intimacy generally associated with newly-weds in ‘love’. Tanu recounted their short trip, the only time during their marriage in which they spent more than an afternoon or evening on their own, but depicted the rest of her married life so far as miserable and longed for the bond she and her husband had earlier established.

Subsequently, she took a job as a part-time teacher in one of Kolkata's most prestigious colleges, gave birth to a daughter, and moved back in with her parents during the week. While this arrangement was officially to cut the time she spent travelling to work and her daughter's nursery, it was no secret that she found living with her parents much more relaxing and had limited her considerable duties as a daughter-in-law to visits during the weekends.

Such complex arrangements, whereby young women, who are more often than not single children, organize their marital relationships around the needs of two sets of parents are becoming more common.Footnote ²⁹ Here, as in other cases, the tolerance towards a daughter's love marriage has also meant that her obligations to her parents continued after marriage. As has been pointed out by feminists again and again, it is the proximity to a natal family and the constant reaffirmation of bonds with her parents and siblings that often allow a married woman to carve out more time and resources to fulfil individual desires. However, in the middle-class families I worked with, women increasingly did so by embracing the joint family ideology, redefining it as a matter of parental authority rather than merely the patriline. In practice this kind of acceptable love marriage demands extensive negotiations as well as a committed husband who is not afraid to stand up for his wife. These modern love lives look distinctly Indian and unite love, choice, individualism, filial duty, and adherence to a traditional imagery in redefinitions of how affective ties are linked to gendered and class-based identities.

It is tempting to look at South Asian histories and assert that the discourse on ‘love’ as affective ‘attentive individualism’ is certainly not of recent or exclusively Western origin.Footnote ³⁰ But as Wardlow and Hirsch point out, it is also ‘primarily these [European, companionate] models of love and marriage that have been, and are being, globalized through missionarization, through mass media’.Footnote ³¹

Given colonial histories, these models shaped what is today understood as Indian marriage, and as work on Indian legal discourses on marriage suggests, these models have become intertwined with the norm of heterosexual, lifelong, monogamous unions.Footnote ³² It is, however, equally important to acknowledge that companionate marriages are not so much European as modern—how else could they be realized in widely different contexts? Furthermore, while the notion of companionship in marriage is premised on ideas about egalitarian relationships and affection, which were not that prominent in the case of hegemonic notions of high-caste unions, diverse sexual and marital practices existed and are certainly prominent in specific contexts today. Thus, aside from the new possibilities brought about by queer rights campaigns, a range of alternative marriage arrangements and interpretations of love and marriage coexist, often at the margins of earlier hegemonic cultural formations in South Asia.Footnote ³³ In this sense, the ‘traditional’, ‘Indian’ arranged marriage as it is presented today is as much a modern phenomenon as ‘love’ marriages, and the discursive construction of this opposition gained its ontological status in the course of the colonial encounter. As Stoler has shown, concerns about marriage and intimate relationships lay at the heart of colonial productions of racialized subjects and gendered bodies across the empire.Footnote ³⁴

Marriage as modernity

As is apparent in the case studies above, discussions about marriage in these middle-class families reflect global desires which increasingly determine the meaning of ‘love’ and ‘marriage’ in relation to ideals of modern selves more generally and the way these are crafted by individuals.Footnote ³⁵

The spread of the iconography of romantic love and coupledom, Hindi films celebrating a range of arranged marriages, ‘Western’ rituals and representations of lavish Indian weddings, as well as the contractual reading of marriage in modern nation-states, are all part of the picture.Footnote ³⁶ These factors feed into discourses around marriage, the family, and intimacy and established marriage as constituent in debates about modernity and India's role in processes of globalization. In his first extended analysis of globalization, Giddens argued that intimate selves play a major role in imagining modernity. He also suggested that among the most significant transformations that globalization has brought about are those affecting the institutions of marriage and the family. His analysis takes the rise of formal marriage contracts involving the state as its point of departure, which, supported by a culture of coupledom and a unified discourse on affective engagement, freedom of partner selection, and the importance of sexual identity, emerges as a marker of a global modernity. In the course of these transformations, the individualistic tendencies modern societies foster make partner choice and sexual relations a prime focus of modern selves. Intimate relations become a major component of who we are; sexual relations in particular become a site of self-realization, and partner choice a site for crafting selves. But Giddens and others claim that eventually such modes of being oneself lead to the abolition of marriage as the main institution within which such relations are contained.Footnote ³⁷ This narrative is promoted by anthropologists as well, thus Povinelli interprets the tension between love and marriage in public discourse in Australia as resulting from colonial trajectories. She asserts that the emergence of modern identity politics privileges sexual relationships over marital status in the creation of modern selves. Thus, formal arrangements associated with group-based identities and the institution of marriage are expected to give way to ‘chosen’ relationships based on affect. In this scenario, intimate bonds created through sexual relations represent the most significant location for notions of gendered agency, and therefore for liberal selves to emerge.Footnote ³⁸

There can be no doubt that a ‘culture of coupledom’, either within companionate marriage or more broadly intimate relations, has indeed been shown to constitute debates on modernity and global lifestyles in South Asia, and it is clear that far from being abandoned or disconnected, the institution of marriage has a wide currency here. Thus, I would argue, modernity, love, and marriage are so closely related in public discourses that it is almost impossible to disentangle them. Much of the literature on emerging modernities in South Asia seems to assume that social relationships evolve in a kind of linear fashion, with free choice, individualism, sexual identities, and citizenship based on contracts like marriage homogenizing a varied field. Laura Ahearn's ethnography of the impact of literacy on young rural Nepalese shows how modernity in South Asia is often imagined through narratives about love and marriage, in her case love letters that lead to elopement. This matches accounts from around the globe, which demonstrate that debates about modernity and ideologies of what it means to be suitably modern are increasingly conducted in the global idiom of intimate recognition and vice versa.Footnote ³⁹

Yet, we also need to acknowledge that the modernity of romantic object choice can coincide with a revival of ‘traditional family values’, which cannot simply be attributed to ‘backward’ thinking. Ahearn, for instance, speaks of such bonds as simultaneously created by sexual desire and the notion that they allow for modern selves to emerge, but within marriage.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this, as well as other ethnographies, like Puri's work based on interviews with middle-class women in Delhi,Footnote ⁴¹ women in particular seem to distinguish between (hetero-)sexual desire, experienced as intimate and enhancing personal well-being, and the purposeful organization of marital lives, located in the realm of kinship and therefore wider society. Mark Liechty, who is one of the few ethnographers working across generations, confirms the findings presented above, namely that for middle-class subjects in Kathmandu a ‘modern’ attitude’ implies that affectionate conjugal relations are highly valued, and choice and consent are built into marriages that are considered modern. However, as in India, Nepali reconfigurations of marriage imply that proper citizens obey ‘tradition’ and seek parental consent, even if this is only done in retrospect.Footnote ⁴² Like my Kolkata middle-class interlocutors, his informants suggested a process whereby the question of individual fulfilment and choice led not so much to romantic love and affairs as to reformed conjugal relations and the de facto streamlining of what constituted multiple meanings and institutional arrangements realized within the family.

Marriage, Indian marriage, and ‘Indian’ marriage

Unlike in China, and a number of other globalizing contexts, the relationship between love and marriage in India fed into the broader discourses by which an emerging middle class constructed an ‘authentically’ ‘Indian modernity’ under conditions of colonial domination. Within this framework the multiple layers of reform (in the home, in courts) emphasized that new arrangements and legal codes were rooted in tradition, and produced a class-based discourse on marriage from as early as the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴³ In this setting the ordered Indian family home was opposed to its hedonistic ‘Western’ counterpart, but also the pluralistic ‘customs’ of uneducated, backwards internal ‘others’ like lower castes and the working class. For the middle classes, arranged marriage was not only a guarantee of the reproduction of actually existing inequalities through alliance and strategic hypergamy, but represented an important discursive site to establish modern, class-based identities and inter-class relations. Anthropologists have only just begun to deconstruct the way straight oppositions between arranged and ‘love’ marriages actually break down in the face of a much more complex reality. They do so by focusing on the discursive links between love and romance, and alternatives to the traditional arranged match between strangers, which may nevertheless be guided by the ideal of hypergamy and endogamy.Footnote ⁴⁴

In the light of a growing interest in middle-class lives, marriage in upwardly mobile, globalized, and fully urban communities has been studied with special reference to ideas about love marriages after economic liberalization took hold.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, it has taken social science considerably longer than the ‘informants’ to realize that the rigid rules governing the organization of caste and community through endogamous marriage do not provide much insight into what marriage means in the lives of an increasing number of middle-class urbanites.

In urban middle-class Bengali families, as is increasingly the case elsewhere, the relationship between love and marriage is still very much discussed around the trope of ‘modernity’, which makes love matches sound problematic, as they are not considered ‘traditional’. Thus, talk about different kinds of marriage feeds into constructions of difference—of race, ethnicity, religious community, or caste, as much as the global lifestyles reproduced by class-based identities. Following the reform of (Hindu) family life that commenced in the nineteenth century, marital age among the urban middle classes soared and the age gap between spouses decreased.Footnote ⁴⁶ Soon marriage and modernity became fields that conjured up whole debates, inside and beyond India itself.

My ethnography testifies to the persuasive power that the opposition between stranger marriage/parent-arranged/Indian/traditional marriages and love/other/consent/self-chosen marriages still holds. Furthermore, media representations perpetually address the tension between individualistic desires and the demands of the family through depictions of a wide range of relationships before and after marriage. What these debates have in common is an insistence on the cathartic effect of family-arranged marriages, because such matches allegedly represent Indian values.Footnote ⁴⁷ Whether or not individuals had a love marriage, the acceptance of the normative value of arranged marriage plays a crucial role in discussions between and among members of different generations in India. As Twamley's comparative work shows, it is precisely the hegemonic character of arranged marriage that can make self-chosen matches a defining feature of diaspora communities.Footnote ⁴⁸ Here, as in India, parental consent is associated with the need for endogamy, broadly defined. Not surprisingly, inter-community marriages in India and the diaspora are marked as ‘true love’ marriages, and can be seen as problematic.

Modern ideas about love and marriage, which are closely related to group-based histories of upward mobility, often just reflect how close-knit communities reorganize exclusive marriage patterns in the modern world. This is most obvious in the case of Tamil Brahmin software engineers, whose embrace of self-chosen matches reflects their identification with modern values, but whose social life centres around Tamil Brahmin spaces.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the case of multicultural Kolkata, historically defined boundaries between local communities and thus love and marriage as possible transgressions, figure prominently in exclusionary tales and practices which confirm ethnic and religious affiliation and/or class at the level of the family.

A last important marker of Indian marriages is the expected patrilocality, which sits uneasily with Povinelli's assertion that in modern societies sexuality and nationalism substitute for the site provided by contractual marital relationships and interdependency within the family. It is clear that in India, the need for the middle class to become modern by reinventing tradition at the same time saw a reformulation of existing patriarchies. Here, as elsewhere, companionate marriage and consent (in that order) gradually emerged as an aspirational ideal, but patrilocality and joint family life remained to provide the structural and ideological framework within which this was to be realized. With regard to the joint family, Uberoi rightly emphasizes that it is an important moral institution even where it does not constitute the permanent pattern of residence.Footnote ⁵⁰ Rather, it is this tension between a rigid ideal and the modern desires and possibilities for self-centred affective ties that determines modern gendered constructions of the self and consequently modern Indian middle-class marriages.

Marriage, courtship, and affairs

As I recounted above, I was surprised when I saw couples holding hands in public during a recent visit to Kolkata: ‘God, we have been away too long’ seemed to sum up how I felt. Visiting after two years, the pace of the changes the city was undergoing was truly astonishing. But apart from the new locations associated with youth culture and romance, conversations about romance and marriage still inevitably took a predictable turn: young people would launch into a rant about how everything was possible in modern metropolitan India, and how they were different from their parents’ generation in their mixing, mating, and marriage patterns. Most of those I met then and earlier would also swear that in their case a love marriage was the only option, as Chandra, a 19-year-old volunteer for an NGO put it, when we were having lunch during the first few months of my fieldwork in the mid 1990s:

Often, as with my then 20-year-old assistant in earlier years, these exchanges ended with a concrete example and, sure enough, the revelation that the young woman had fallen in love or had at least been flirting with a male classmate or neighbour. Regularly, young women would tell me that they definitely would choose a partner themselves, or share details of a secret relationship. In the case of my assistant, who had helped me with numerous interviews on love and marriage, our conversation confirmed that she was actually falling for a classmate at college. She confided in me out of the blue while we were having tea:

For parents, co-education was largely responsible for the rise in love marriages, but today, with new spaces for leisure and consumption mushrooming, young Kolkatans no longer rely on college to meet up. However, we should not overstate the impact such new sites have, as this is still an environment in which couples who marry against their parents’ wishes are unable to rent a flat and where police or party officials frequently intervene in affairs on behalf of parents. This happened in at least two families I worked with, and as the much-publicized case of the inter-community love marriage between Priyanka Todi and Riznavur Rahman, which ended violently, shows, is closely associated with inter-community matches.Footnote ⁵¹

While talk of love and romance was quite common, mothers framed these debates entirely in terms of the opposition of arranged marriages and self-chosen or love marriage, and made their preference for the former very clear. During my earlier fieldwork, most did not see affairs or romance as a possibility one's children would openly pursue, and the concept of parental consent to courtship before marriage, common in some diaspora communities and often referred to as ‘marriage by introduction’ at the time, was entirely alien, though informal courtship is common today. Earlier, there were also very few actual places for middle-class youths to meet, and dating was largely restricted to specific semi-public spaces like a few cultural centres, on campus, or the cinema. Consequently, the majority of young women in these households were still, in the 1990s, not allowed to visit cinemas and cultural performances unaccompanied, and parents would frequently not even allow a bright young woman to join a college or university deemed too ‘progressive’, a code for co-educational institutions. Even among students in these institutions only the most brazen ones would join married couples and ‘office goers’ in search of some privacy and meet in public places, and apart from those belonging to well-known liberal families, few young women went around boasting about the details of their affairs.

Love and its other

When discussing the emerging youth culture, it appeared obvious to mothers that the problem with young people dating before marriage was one of long-term and short-term perspectives and the opposition between individual gains and collective strategies. In our conversations arranged marriages in India were contrasted with ‘Western’ marriages, which encompassed choice of a partner, courtship, and a trial phase, as well as the possibility of divorce. ‘Indian’ marriages were therefore not defined by love or its absence, but by the acknowledged authority of elders, who initiated and authorized them. Western unions were, on the other hand, those in which parents and the wider family had no say until they were presented with a fait accompli, which denied parents the authority and power of legitimation they rightfully demanded. Thus defined, talk about idealized Indian marriages was not a refusal of love as attachment and intimate, mutual recognition, but a refusal of love as the main basis of marriage. Love, as I have discussed elsewhere, was not so much spoken of in terms of sexual desire (prem) versus bhakti, selfless devotion, but described in terms of bhalobasa, a mutual, egalitarian relationship associated with popular devotional cults.Footnote ⁵² Careful ethnographic research has also shown that the idea of a ‘true’ love marriage may be employed in different ways, with Twamley's informants in Baroda emphasizing companionship, while her interlocutors in London saw mutual sexual attraction as equally important.Footnote ⁵³

In Kolkata, love marriages were clearly defined as self-chosen with no parental involvement whatsoever, and therefore mothers, among whom many had had love marriages themselves, tried to guard their children—especially girls, but also boys—against such unions. They argued that matches that were solely determined by the couples’ feelings for each other had a negative impact on other kinds of socially important relationships. For mothers, as well as their daughters, marriage presented a sacrosanct ‘Indian’ institution defined through its link with the joint family ideal, and arranged marriage was seen as its most sociable form.

Many explorations of this theme, which often took on a patronizing air, were conducted by married women for my benefit, as Mrs Das’ exasperated remark cited above, shows. The mother of an old friend, she was concerned about my apparent ignorance and wanted to ensure I really got the significance of arranged marriages. In her view this difference was located in the foundation of partner selection, which could not possibly be based on sexual attraction. Reiterating a well-worn trope, European marriage was associated with individualistic, short-term, and superficial attraction that facilitated personal, single-handed, spur-of-the-moment decisions by young couples. ‘Love’ in this context was constructed as tainted by sexual desire, which for young women in particular was not an adequate basis for action. ‘Indian’ ideals and, more to the point, realities, were in her view based on rational planning, detailed research, and a process of matching that took a long-term perspective to conjugal life. Inevitably such discussions would lead to the subject of rising divorce rates in India, a theme which would just provide more evidence for general claims made about cultures of love and marriage. However, holding seemingly contradictory views, the same interlocutor—in this case middle-class housewife Mrs Das—also rallied against putting too much pressure on children to marry a partner their parents had chosen. In her view, irreconcilable with her self-image as a ‘modern’ Bengali woman (as opposed to ‘Muslims’, the ‘lower classes’, and ‘Marwari’ business families), forced marriage presented a backward and despicable custom. Thus, like many others I spoke to, she blamed parents in ‘other’ communities—usually this included all of the above, but particularly North Indian business communities—for ‘selling their daughters like cattle’, an expression other interlocutors used as well. Consequently negotiating consent has become a very delicate issue, one which can only be inadequately discussed by means of ethnography.

Significantly, the preferences expressed by Mrs Das were only partly a result of her desire to dominate her daughters’ lives, although this was clearly a possible motivation for her, just as it had inspired Sonali's mother. Her preference also presented a vision for her family, driven by the ideal of having a married daughter living with her elderly parents. With demographic change and the position of middle-class women in the labour market shifting (although I would argue, the latter might have less influence than is commonly assumed), parents are increasingly prepared to compromise over an only daughter's match if this guarantees she will stay with or near them. So as Mrs Das asserted her right to suggest suitable candidates and be consulted, the privilege of having a say in her daughters’ marriages was as important to her identity as an Indian mother as it was to her concern about the future. Like the men interviewed in Derne's earlier study of Varanasi traders’ approaches to love and marriage,Footnote ⁵⁴ or the majority of Twamley's informants, given the role of marriage in the future of the family, marriage was cast as a serious responsibility and this shaped the way arranged and love marriages were discussed.Footnote ⁵⁵ But unlike the case of Derne's middle-aged male and caste-conscious informants in conservative Varanasi, the naturalized distinction between ‘Indian’ and ‘Western’ matches did not shape my conversations with women as clearly. It certainly did not reflect the multiple meanings and experiences of marriage recalled by the women in the course of my extended periods of fieldwork. Rather than providing an underlying logic or way of thinking about young people's passions in terms of the West and its other, such a binary distinction justified parental authority by emphasizing a long-term perspective. In conversations, the shift between marriage as a stage in the life cycle and marriage as a long-term strategic decision usually went unnoticed. Thus, it is not surprising that love and choice were not what was on the mind of mothers, and courtship and romantic involvement—which are in many societies (including non-Western ones) fairly institutionalized—could not hold their own as relevant, meaningful referents or a stated preference.Footnote ⁵⁶

However, it is in this mode of structuring stories about love and marriage, as much as in actual matches, that transformations can be traced. If we agree that, as Wardlow and Hirsch assert, courtship and self-selected unions enable the ‘crafting of a more modern gendered self’,Footnote ⁵⁷ debates about love and marriage bring inter-generational conflict to the fore. It appears that the ontological status of such ideas has to be established within a much broader context of social relations than those constituted by a couple. As Povinelli shows, women belonging to an indigenous Australian community used love and marriage to discuss change and argue on various occasions about the meaning of marriage, kinship, and sexuality, drawing with ease on local idioms and translocal/global discourses as kinship comes to be linked to other facets of new social identities.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this context debates about legitimate matches draw on a history of cousin marriages, and stranger sociality enters into local discourses as a main trope of change linked to identity formation. But, ‘thickening one set of social relays, [and] thinning others’ it also provides the site for conflict and new aspirations—imaginations of kinship become discussions of future possibilities.Footnote ⁵⁹

A comparably powerful rhetoric around affective ties and intimacies has emerged in India in debates about love and arranged marriage, and although the practices and values involved in matchmaking have always varied considerably between different communities, new identities are tested in and through these debates in public discourse. The fact that identity formation has become intrinsically linked to idioms of ‘love’ and ‘choice’ may go some way in explaining the surprising conformity characteristic of the views and practices among middle-class families in Kolkata.

Returning to Mrs Das and our conversation about love marriages, it is important to note that—unlike Serena Nanda's informants, who apparently claimed in the 1990s that middle-class children in India lacked opportunities to meet with members of the opposite sex—she was not naive.Footnote ⁶⁰ To her and all others I met, falling in love (prem pora) was an inevitable part of young people's lives, and given the massive influence of media templates for modern romantic love, which initially ranged from Hindi movies to Santa Barbara, a scope that broadened considerably in the decades since, they were given ample opportunities to identify with lovers and their stories. However, at the same time, young people are habitually constructed as liminal and vulnerable, prone to emotional upheaval through love and its consequences. Thus, while in theory many of the mothers I spoke to were as laid back about self-chosen unions as the North Indian small town residents surveyed by Corwin in the 1970s—who tolerated ‘love’ marriages that did not ‘come into direct conflict with other concepts involving social stratification and family structure, which are characteristic of upper- and upper-middle-class Bengali society’Footnote ⁶¹—the realities of multi-generation households prevented the same approach from being applied to their own children.

Mothers and children

If there is one reason for love marriage to play a significant role in debates about new middle-class identities, the experience of social stratification surely provides an explanation. The changing nature of Indian middle-class culture brings about heightened anxieties around intimate relationships, including marriage. Van Wessel has shown how inter-generational relations are major sources of such tensions, and that a consumerist youth culture is perceived as a threat to ‘family values’.Footnote ⁶² The same theme of cultural pessimism plays an important role in Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase's exploration of ‘social change’ in Bengali middle-class families.Footnote ⁶³ In relation to marriage, the general tolerance towards love marriages displayed in interviews and the experience of such matches within families sat uncomfortably with mothers’ increasing desire to control their children's every move and parents’ aspirations for social mobility through education and occupational choice. Thus, mothers in particular and society at large employed a host of measures that emphasize the dangers of being ‘distracted’, of which falling in love, especially for girls, was often cited as the major example. Fears that a young woman might be lured into starting an affair with an unsuitable young man made parents paranoid and ensured daughters in particular were discouraged from forming friendships in their peer group. Among my older interlocutors, love letters labelled ‘invitations to love’ by Ahearn, were widespread, and stories about neighbourhood courtship through letters and the odd chance meeting on the way to school were retold with glee.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, modern technology has changed the way contact is maintained and how such relationships are cultivated, even where they remain relatively chaste in nature, as Heitmeyer's discussion of the ‘missed call’ suggests.Footnote ⁶⁵

Mrs Das was not the only one who was concerned about prolonged courtship, which could certainly ruin the name of even the most respectable family. In her view, Indian youths, unlike Westerners, needed to distinguish between infatuation and marriage, as they had to ‘wait for love’ to develop within marriage. Until the right arrangements were in place, they needed to be kept preoccupied with family affairs and educational pursuits. Ideally, mothers like Sangita (aged 38) told me, her 18-year-old daughter would find that the candidate chosen by her parents met the requirements of the future couple and the family involved. This would then allow her to realize her own expectations, and, if anything, would reaffirm the respect parents could expect from their children. It would also enhance her chances of realizing a modern, but essentially ‘Indian’, family ideal based on sharing of resources and a residence with the husbands’ parents. Lastly, such a successful match would provide a positive environment for bringing up future grandchildren, an aspect that seems to have become more important in the last two decades.Footnote ⁶⁶ Here, as in Derne's earlier study with men, marriage was represented as a function of joint family life, but unlike in his sample, the focus was on the relationship between parents and children, not co-habiting brothers. In this context, ‘joint’ family life today means patrilocal residence, and sometimes even uxorilocality.Footnote ⁶⁷

In many conversations it appeared that media representations were seen as a threat to parental authority, and films in particular were interpreted as promoting globalized notions of romance as available and desirable. Mothers, on the one hand, were extremely anxious about the influence of media images and the surrounding ‘culture’; yet young girls were generally encouraged to watch television, as it kept them at home. It was therefore not so much the consumption of films, but the sociality going on around a visit to the cinema, that fuelled maternal worries. Just as families had earlier on invested in video cassette players to rent and share a film in a family setting, parents now shared visits to the mall or multiplex with their children.

Furthermore, while the emotional effect of what was actually shown on screen (with the exception of nudity) was never problematized and discussed in the context of love and marriage, the imagery of consumerism, often targeting young audiences quite directly, presented an ongoing point of contention.Footnote ⁶⁸ In my own work noticeable shifts appeared in the discourses about media from the 1990s onwards. Earlier, conversations about explicit sexual content and ‘immoral’ femininities were solely associated with Western productions like The Bold and the Beautiful, or at least the opposition between homemade soaps and Hindi films. At the time such concerns were only addressed in extraordinarily frank phone-in radio shows and in the agony pages of Bengali-language women's magazines, but an inter-generational discussion is now possible. In the intervening years, vernacular television has brought ‘issues’ into the circuits of representations accessed by my interlocutors. Thus, discussions of the family and marriage would often draw on news items, but also the way that social themes like abortion among schoolgirls, sexually transmitted diseases, and premarital relationships were depicted in the ubiquitous soap operas and talk shows.

However, even where novel themes are discussed, Uberoi rightly concedes that there is an obsession with family breakdown which has been a theme in media representationsFootnote ⁶⁹ that my interlocutors found to be very pervasive. Confronted with a popular culture that borrows freely from global discourses on love and romance and constructs liberal ideologies in conjunction with the promotion of youth consumer culture as progress, parents felt the need to engage with these issues and integrate them into their representation of the sacrosanct domain of the family in middle-class lives.Footnote ⁷⁰ They did so through the old trope of the dissolution of the joint family.

In many modern films, the separation of courtship from love, of marriage from arranged marriage, and of intimacy from coupledom, has made the encompassment of affective recognition and ‘modern selves’ within the institution of marriage seem possible. But in real life, this requires serious adjustment of expectations of marital life, which makes stranger marriage difficult. Nevertheless, thus most mothers publicly subscribed to the view that meetings before marriage and even self-arranged matches ensured that modern marriage would be tolerated as a way to ensure fulfilled marital lives. However, the same mothers would admit in private that they would not hesitate to arrange such a match for a daughter should the need arise. While marriages arranged between strangers are presented as old-fashioned and indeed are looked down upon, they have gained a new lease of life in the form of work permits and green cards. In a number of instances parents arranged for their daughters to ‘get engaged’ to an American citizen or student and, to avoid any association with old-fashioned stranger marriages, encouraged internet contact between the prospective spouses. These matches were nevertheless the ones within which young women had the least say, as the groom usually appeared only once before the wedding and then for the actual event, and sometimes even only on the latter date. As parents in such households engaged in elaborate and costly strategies of matchmaking and usually chose such matches because of their potential for prestige and upward mobility, more pressure was exerted to elicit consent. Such matches were particularly popular among lower-middle-class families, who were hard hit by disinvestment in state institutions and limited public sector employment. The parents of such young, well-educated women from less affluent backgrounds often have their heart set on a professional migrant groom working either in the Gulf or the United States. In one such case a young woman of 22 years was coaxed by her girlfriends to reveal that she was ‘engaged’ to a green-card holder, with whom she had only been in touch via email and Skype during the preceding months. This match, like others of the same kind, was arranged solely on the basis of meetings between the parents involved, and she was expected to return to the United States with her husband after the wedding.