The South Asian phenomenon of arranged marriage has received attention in a host of literary and visual texts in recent times. Hence, this is a timely book that takes a fresh look at marriage in colonial Bengal, with the express aim of demonstrating the modern constitution of a system deemed traditional. Rochona Majumdar inscribes the social, legal, and aesthetic history of this key familial institution in her monograph. In doing so, the author argues that the contemporary form of Hindu marriage must be placed in the context of colonial modernity and related to particular kinds of refashioning of the individual and the community during the period. Majumdar's monograph adds a refreshing new chapter to the scholarship on gender on the Subcontinent—one that undoubtedly will clear ground for further debate. In its scope and argument, the book will appeal to historians of South Asia and to gender specialists, in particular to those who are interested in rethinking gender from a postcolonial perspective.
This book consists of a set of six essays divided into three sections, each addressing a different aspect of modernity. The first section is built around the idea of the marriage “market.” The author demonstrates how the logic of the free market influences marriage negotiations in colonial Bengal, resulting in changing perceptions of what was desirable in prospective brides and grooms. The demand for educated, urban, salaried grooms and for domesticated brides reduced the importance of traditional marriage brokers, whose expertise lay in maintaining family histories. This space was taken over by matrimonial journals and advertisements that were seen as being objective, confidential, and wide reaching (chapter 1). Majumdar locates the rise in dowry demands to the increasing commercialization of marriages in the period; paradoxically, though, these demands were seen in contemporaneous debates as a blot on the reformist character of Bengal, spurring a demand for marriage reform (chapter 2).
The second section of the book deals with the introduction of new sensibilities of taste and aesthetics to Bengali weddings. These served to extend the liberal paradigm of reform by curbing the excesses of ritual performance and expenditure in weddings. Interiority, in the form of “heartfelt sincerity” and “spirituality,” was emphasized as the core of Bengali marriage (chapter 3). On the other hand, social and ritual reform of the marriage ceremonies, in effect, led to the consolidation of a new patriarchy wherein the role of women in marriages was severely disciplined and the married couple was inscribed as an essential component of a nationalist joint family (chapter 4).
The last section of the book investigates two legal controversies in defining Hindu marriage and family. Majumdar contends that the act of 1872 that legitimized Brahmo marriages despite their nonadherence to legally accepted religious forms of marriage must be seen as the first civil marriage legislation in India, which sought to free the institution of marriage from the binds of caste and community. However, matters of identity continued to frame public discussions on marriage until after independence, making civil marriage a rather fraught issue (chapters 5 and 6). Majumdar examines the debates around the Hindu Succession Act in postindependence India to show how Indian lawmakers accepted the joint family as the preferred unit of legal consideration in matters of succession rather than the bourgeois, propertied individual of liberal discourse (chapter 6). In doing so, Majumdar is able to “demonstrate the difficulty of de-linking marriage in modern India from questions of community or familial identity … [T]he persistence of the family or the community in marriage matters,” she argues, “is not about the persistence of the traditional; rather … the imagination of modern marriage in late colonial and early postcolonial India was inextricably linked to changing norms of the extended family and to community identity” (p. 167).
Majumdar mines the social history archive admirably in her work, extending its usual scope (mostly confined to literature, journals, and auto/biographies) to include objects of everyday life such as photographs, wedding cards, jewelry catalogues, menus, and wedding poems; some of these receive additional attention in her appendices. This allows the author to chart a history of taste, aesthetics, and family values, thereby elucidating some nodal points in the construction of bhadralok subjectivity. In this context, it is pertinent to note that the author does not intend to recover women's agency or the “female voice” in her work. Her work takes the bhadralok (educated, middle-class, Bengali male) and his domestic world as its object of enquiry rather than the bhadramahila (his female counterpart). This is an important theoretical dimension that runs throughout her work, but remains implicit in the treatment of her subject matter. The strength of Majumdar's argument lies in its ability to demonstrate how Western liberal values, deemed to have a universal grammar, evolve differently in the colonial context (p. 242). In her conclusion, Majumdar makes her own theoretical location within postcolonial feminist scholarship clear—a gesture that would have benefited from being included in the introduction.
On the whole, Marriage and Modernity effectively imbricates liberal institutions such as the free market and law in the formation of a thoroughly modern and nationalized patriarchy. The author competently demonstrates both the appeal and the limits of liberal notions such as the bourgeois individual, companionate couples, and love marriages in the colonial and postcolonial contexts—the historical field from which, in effect, emerges a reconstituted Hindu joint family, based on a selfless married couple, bound together through an arranged marriage, and continued through a lineage of male heirs.
