The Right Spouse, Isabelle Clark-Decès's provocative refiguration of South Indian marriage patterns, is a kinship lover's delight. She focuses on the close-kin marriage preferences at the center of South Indian kinship models. She has two primary aims: to explore the motivations for and emotional experiences of close-kin marriage, and “to interpret [these marriages’] decline through the point of view of subjective perspectives” (p. 163). Clark-Decès carried out her fieldwork in periods between 2007 and 2011, first briefly in a village near Pondicherry, and thereafter in and around the city of Madurai.
Clark-Decès devotes much of her text to challenging multiple common understandings about South Indian kinship. These probing challenges begin with her discussion of contam (literally, “mine”), the term used for close consanguineous kin. (More distant relatives are anniyam, “other.”) She found that people discursively define contam not in terms of shared bodily substance, but in terms of rights to one another's property, so that “what my kin have is mine” (p. 40). Marrying contam, however, is not simply about retaining rights to resources, nor even about remaining with people who are familiar (the most frequent local explanation), but about avoiding the years of competitive reciprocity between families that accompany marriages with anniyam. With contam, one is among people who are said to be equal.
And yet one is not among equals. Contam in practice are divided into hierarchies based on birth order. This ranking determines individuals’ access to material and emotional resources, as well as to a murai (right) spouse. A first-born child whose parent was also a first-born son or daughter has rights in certain cross-cousins. No other siblings have such automatic rights.
Uncle-niece marriage, the most preferred type of all, is especially restricted. According to Clark-Decès, in every Tamil caste other than Kallars, a woman's younger brother is entitled to marry the sister's oldest daughter. She argues that such marriages, rather than celebrating the brother-sister bond—that most vaunted dyad of Dravidian kinship—instead advantage the mother of the groom and the mother of the bride (that is, mother and daughter). Both women will have urimai (rights) in the new household, thereby able to visit and partake of the son's/brother's resources at will. While he is “superior to all other men” (p. 167) in terms of his marital rights, the brother “sacrifices” himself to the power of women, relinquishing the opportunity to create affinal alliances with other men and to receive a significant dowry.
Clark-Decès's research also uncovered a number of disadvantages in any type of contam marriage. Women often feel taken for granted by their husband because as brides they offer none of the gloss of an outsider; they also, Clark-Decès reports, have less recourse to natal family support should their husband abuse them. These observations will startle those familiar with—and often invested in—scholarship from the 1950s onward that maintains that South Indian marriage preferences make both daughters and wives more valuable and therefore better treated relative to the village-exogamous marriages in most of North India.
Indeed, Clark-Decès contends, kinship is often violent. For example, having automatic “rights” in others can produce emotional and physical violence rather than closeness, as can being denied a right spouse. Those who feel wronged harbor anger that spawns retaliation or equally agonistic “life-long feelings of self-depreciation and resentment” (p. 118). Or they may practice the ultimate form of retribution: suicide that is intended to injure, in the most painful and shaming way, those relatives who have placed them in an untenable position.
In the latter quarter of The Right Spouse, Clark-Decès rather suddenly reminds readers that close-kin marriages have declined significantly in Tamil Nadu. Although she resists a simplistic causal link with “modern” individualism or an association with “progress,” the timing and causes of the decline are left vague. Here Clark-Decès stakes her argument that changing social patterns are best grasped through subjective experiences, and she examines kinship shifts through the accounts of three young people. I found this discussion, while vivid, to be thinly supported and sometimes contradictory. These youths’ narratives are meant to suggest that young people today prefer the “newness” and “freedom” of anniyam, and that consanguineal bonds are commonly becoming eclipsed by conjugal bonds. And yet the two young men, both recently seared by the pain and discombobulation of romantic love, fiercely desire their parents to arrange their marriages with contam.
Clark-Decès's compelling closing argument, however, encompasses all of these circumstances. She concludes that while the old preferential forms of marriage are waning, their emotional forces—hierarchy and status, sacrifice and violence, and the entangled meanings of relatedness—abide in contemporary conjugality, perhaps more than ever. With anniyam, brides’ families especially have no “rights” and may receive little respect. Such marriages require greater emotional and financial sacrifice, and yet these affines must work to mask their suffering. Clark-Decès's provocative analysis of the nature of relatedness and its consequences in South India is certain to spur new directions in studies of kinship, family, marriage, and belonging.
