Situating the field

Tucked away behind Delhi's Outer Ring Road, which girds the city, the Wazirpur Industrial Area houses thousands of workshops, factories, and informal settlements. The posh banquet and function halls on the Ring Road camouflage the grim conditions that mark the industrial zone. Wazirpur grew as one of the many designated industrial zones created by the Delhi Master Plan of 1966.Footnote ⁸ These early attempts at urban planning by the Indian state involved the acquisition of large tracts of agricultural land from the city's peripheries, which were transformed for urban use. The city was, thus, zoned with spaces designated for industrial, commercial, and residential use. By the late 1960s, the Delhi Development Authority was attempting to relocate industries from the inner core of the city to the outlying designated industrial zones, such as Wazirpur.Footnote ⁹ These planning measures, which rested, in part, upon directing and managing urban industrial growth and settlements, unsettled older sites of industrial production and built new ones.

Though a designated industrial area, the majority of factories and workshops in Wazirpur operate illegally. The area had been demarcated for the production of what were called “group I” industries, mainly textiles and wood and paper products. However, more than 80 percent of industries in the area produce steel utensils and electronic parts, activities that do not have the requisite clearances.Footnote ¹⁰ The workshops and factories proliferated, and the industrial workforce in the area now far exceeds, what was accounted for in the plans. The working population—a majority of whom were migrants—settled in the shanties and slums that grew adjacent to the factories. These worker neighborhoods were built on vacant public land, mainly owned by the Railways and the Delhi Development Authority, and as such, its residents were under a perpetual threat of eviction.

At present, Wazirpur is home to an estimated twelve hundred industrial units, employing about fifty thousand workers. Information regarding the exact numbers of industrial units remains vague—no official statistics exist on the either the workshops or of those who work in them.Footnote ¹¹ Industrial activity in this area is dominated by the steel industry—the hot and cold rolling mills, the pickling and cleaning units, the cutting and polishing workshops. The steel industry orients the rhythms of both the economic and social life of the neighborhood. For instance, it engenders a range of activities that stem from steel manufacturing—transportation (the cycle carts, in particular, that ferry materials from unit to unit), production of steel cleaning products and packaging material. The cycles of business at the small shops and other local establishments such as money transfer facilities, dhabas, and the food stalls, are governed by the rhythms of the steel units, doing brisk business around payday, or the time when the shifts change or on Wednesdays, the weekly day off.

The steel factories similarly shape the sensory character of the locality. The steady noise of the workshops, the clang of the metal sheets as they are worked upon, the buzz of transport trucks loading and unloading goods, and the loud music that workers often play contribute greatly to the aural experience of living in the neighborhood. In fact, when work dwindled following demonetizationFootnote ¹² in November 2016, the most common refrain I heard (apart from the fact that factories were closing down) was about how quiet Wazirpur had become. The pollution and environmental degradation that mark the everyday lives of the area's residents—their health problems, the contaminated water supply, and so on—is in large part a product of the steel industries. The sanitation and sewage systems, which were unable to cope with the excessive industrial development in the area, disgorged much of the polluting waste around the nearby residential areas. With soil and groundwater contaminated, this already insecure habitat was subject to additional risks to health and hygiene. Pollution and the controls against it pose a dual threat to workers/residents in the area. On the one hand, there are considerable bodily risks that surface due to the negligent enforcement of environmental controls. On the other, the periodic attention that these industrial units receive from the Delhi Pollution Control Committee spells possible factory closures and the loss of jobs.

Walking through Wazirpur, one notices how enmeshed the spaces of work and those of the home are. Architecturally, there is hardly any separation—workers’ homes are built around the workshops, sometimes, even in the same buildings. A large number of men in the area labor in the steel factories, the hot and cold rolling mills, the ancillary industries of polishing or acid work, while some women work in steel pressing, producing utensils, and others work in cleaning and packing steel products. Many work in the smaller hosiery industry in the area, in transport, as domestic workers, or own small businesses.

Thus far my fieldwork has been concentrated in Block A, a small part of this sprawling industrial complex. Block A is a warren of narrow streets, overrun with exposed cables, flanked by overflowing drains. Two bigger roads—lined with factories, small shops, and workers’ houses—bracket the neighborhood. The interior of this neighborhood and its incredibly dense concentration of houses remain permanently in the shadows, with barely any space in which to maneuver. These inner lanes, where the houses are flimsy and fragile, stacked precariously upon one another, look as though they are continuously under construction. The houses appear unfinished, like they are being constantly built and re-built. The outer parts of the block, while relatively less congested, nevertheless, appear similarly unstable. The buildings, painted blue, green, and pink, are huddled together and the upper floors are accessible only through rickety ladders or very narrow staircases. The population in this part of Wazirpur is largely from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. A vast majority belongs to the lower castes and to the minority Muslim community.Footnote ¹³

The settlement of Wazirpur has left very few documentary traces because the process of building and acquiring homes was done primarily through informal means. When working-class residents moved into this area in the 1980s, attracted by the jobs in the nearby factories and the cheaper rents, this part of Wazirpur was still a “jungle.” MayadeviFootnote ¹⁴ recalls when she and her husband first moved into the neighborhood in the late 1980s:

Marital mobility in Wazirpur

Mayadevi's trajectory echoes that of several older women in the neighborhood, many of whom followed their husbands who moved to Delhi in search of work.Footnote ¹⁵ These patterns of migration were neither unilinear nor stable. The workers in Wazirpur maintained strong ties to their villages, moving back for long periods of time and shifting between industries and locations across the Delhi metropolitan region. The move from the village to the city cannot be seen as simple transition from tradition to modernity or from oppression to freedom. Rather, these oral narratives from Wazirpur point to often contradictory experiences of migration. The following excerpts from life histories illustrate some of the hopes and anxieties linked to migration and marriage.

Mayadevi, the daughter of landless agricultural workers in Bihar, was married at the age of fourteen to twenty-year-old Raghubir. According to customary practice, there is a lag between the ritual marriage and the gauna, which is when the woman relocates to her marital home and marks the start of conjugal relations. Thus, Mayadevi remained at her natal home while her newly-wed husband moved to Delhi to do what, she did not know at that time; all she knew was that he had moved to the city to “earn money.” This was in September 1984. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated on October 31, 1984, Delhi witnessed widespread violence, primarily against the Sikh community. Meanwhile in Bihar, with no word from Raghubir, Mayadevi and her in-laws were growing anxious. A part of the blame for this unfortunate coincidence, the riots erupting soon after Raghubir moved to Delhi, was placed on Mayadevi. Perhaps she was the unlucky influence, it was implied. After two months, they finally received a postcard from him; at the bottom, was one line asking his brother to check on his bride. When Raghubir returned to the village, Mayadevi moved to her marital home. Within a few months Raghubir set off for Delhi again; this time, Mayadevi knew that he was going to work at a hosiery factory in Wazirpur. She spent an unhappy two years with her in-laws. Much of the domestic tension was centered on the fact that two years had passed since her marriage and she had not yet fallen pregnant. When speaking of the longing and anxiety that Mayadevi felt when her husband was away in Delhi, she falls back on tropes that have historically found expression in folk songs and ballads. She did conceive soon after and when her eldest daughter was a year old she followed her husband to Delhi.

The difficulties of adjusting to the marital home, the quotidian conflicts with the in-laws, and the anxieties of conjugal separation were motifs that resonate in other narratives. Zulekha— similarly married before attaining puberty, to a man that she later realized was a sharaabi, a “drunk”—spent years at her in-laws’ village in Bihar before moving to Delhi. Her gauna, she recalled, happened soon after Indira Gandhi's assassination. Like Mayadevi, Zulekha relied on a major historical event around which to weave her own personal story:

Zulekha's husband was already in Delhi with his father when Indira Gandhi was assassinated in October 1984, and in the midst of these troubles, her grandfather-in-law escorted her to her marital home.

The unhappiness and irritation that has marked most of her married life began early on. While she waited for her husband to return from Delhi, tensions soon surfaced with her mother-in-law over the division of household labor: the rhythms of cooking in the common kitchen, the daily routines of fetching water from the neighborhood well, and the agricultural work that she had to undertake. Zulekha recalled the early years of her marriage with bitterness:

After a few years of domestic tension, Zulekha came to Delhi to join her husband. Life in Delhi, too, she said, was “useless.” Nothing much changed. She would wait for him to return home to their jhuggi in Budh Vihar, Rohini, and he would, as she remarked, “come home drunk and leave home, drunk.” She bore all the “tension” of life in the city, the everyday stresses of maintaining a house, providing for their children: “the whole day, my mind would be whirring … and what would happen when there is tension all the time? … I will fall sick, my BP will go low … that's what.”

While the move to Delhi had removed her from the direct control of her in-laws, urban living introduced a new set of anxieties. For many of the older women from Wazirpur, their first impressions of Delhi were far from pleasant. Mayadevi recounted her first encounter with the city:

While Delhi afforded her a certain degree of freedom, she nevertheless found life in the city demeaning. The lack of privacy, the crowded settlements, the routine struggles over water and sanitation disturbed her. Both Mayadevi and Zulekha entered the labor market after their move to Delhi as informal workers in the ancillary steel industries. In this, they confirm to broader South Asian trends of labor force participation in which women tend to enter the labor market after marriage and childbirth and remain more heavily concentrated in informal employment.Footnote ¹⁷ Unlike in the case of domestic workers presented by Sen and Sengupta, marriage did not present an interruption or a hiatus in their work lives.Footnote ¹⁸ Rather, it was the particular mobility that was tied to marriage and the pressures that accompanied urban living that prompted their workforce participation.Footnote ¹⁹

In contemporary Wazirpur, the ties between the city and the village endure and are fortified through marital connections. For most families, the search for eligible partners for their children is conducted through a wide network of kin and caste fellows and is, to a great extent, directed at the mother's natal village.Footnote ²⁰ While marriage-based mobility is inherently gendered in patrilocal contexts, this has specific implications for marital alliances in Wazirpur. As Vatuk, in an earlier study of migration and kinship in urban North India, and Grover, more recently, in her monograph on marital relations in low income neighborhoods of Delhi, observe, for those marriages forged in geographical proximity, the spatial, affective, and institutional distinctions between the natal and the conjugal spheres are gradually blurring.Footnote ²¹ However, in my (admittedly small) field of research, we see that aside from “love marriages,” there is a strong preference for seeking eligible partners from within their rural caste and community networks. Partly, the reasoning for this can be found in what Osella terms “economic-pragmatic” considerations.Footnote ²² The most eligible grooms would be those in government jobs or those who own (or have claims to) property. Insofar as Wazirpur is concerned, at this point, the most eligible matches for young women are in the villages.Footnote ²³ The most suitable brides—and here, my observations echo those of Grover's—are young women from the village, for they are considered to be more docile and subservient than a “Delhi girl.”Footnote ²⁴ Thus, in Wazirpur, we find young women from the area often moving to their husband's rural homes and those from the villages moving to Delhi after marriage.

Considerations of reputation and social and economic status structure marital negotiations, as a move to Delhi is often presented by the boy's family as a marker of upward mobility. For new brides in Wazirpur, the promise of the life offered in Delhi, remain at odds with the actual experience of migration. For instance, Renuka's marriage and her initial shock of encountering Wazirpur has become a subject of much mirth in the neighborhood and is routinely retold as “joke.” When Renuka came to Wazirpur in the early 2000s after her marriage, she walked straight towards the sole concrete structure in the neighborhood. Her confusion was entirely understandable, her friends tell me; she had been told that her husband's family lived in a three storied house in Delhi. Her ensuing despair, too, was familiar, for many of the women in Wazirpur had sent equally distraught missives to their families, alternately blaming and appealing to them. Like Mayadevi, Renuka continued to stay with her husband's family in Wazirpur. In these cases, conjugal stability coalesced with residential stability, as both women, initially dissatisfied with life in Delhi, in the end, remained in the city.

For many others, however, both forms of stability have been more ambiguous. Women and men, across generations in Wazirpur have formed intimate attachments other than that of their primary marriage, “de-coupled” and periodically “re-coupled.” Similarly, the currents of migration have not solely been uni-directional. The mobility that was made possible for Mayadevi, Zulekha, and others—through marriage and then subsequent relocation to Delhi—is now being reversed in the case of their daughters. The return to the village for Wazirpur's second generation of women is fraught with tension and for many young women, the move to the village not only enforces new codes of public behavior and social respectability but also ruptures women's access to education and participation in the urban labor market. Take, for instance, the case of Aarti, who was married to a painting contractor from Bihar at the age of seventeen when she was studying in Class 11. Her mother, who has since passed away, used to run a small stall selling samosas and kachoris, vegetables and sundry daily essentials, and her father, after working in a hosiery factory in Wazirpur, drives a tourist taxi. Aarti had been suggesting that this was a marriage that she had not consented to, and she was apparently having some difficulty in adjusting to it. Her behavior in her husband's home in Hajipur, her manner of speaking, her way of dealing with the extended family, was far more guarded than it was in Delhi. She had dropped out of school, having decided that all future formal education would no longer be useful for her. She returned from her husband's home after about a month and stayed in Delhi for several months. After her mother's death in April 2017, Aarti was made to reluctantly return to her husband's home. While for Aarti, her marital home, specifically, and the village, more generally, represents a space of restriction and regulation; a very different narrative emerges from Feriha's story.

The “love story”

During my conversations with Feriha, she often asked if I had finished writing her “love story.” She would then gleefully declare that “I could write a whole book on it … or maybe, it could even be made into a film!” underscoring the intensity and emotional weight that she assigns to this relationship. Twenty-one-year-old Feriha is a Masters student in Political Science, one of the rare young women from the area to graduate. She teaches extra classes, part-time, for some of the neighborhood school children, earning some money of her own. Her mother, Zulekha (whose interviews we have referred to earlier in this paper), now works at a steel utensils packing factory in Wazirpur, and her largely absent and occasionally violent father (who has recently passed away) worked for a fruit ripening company. He used to drive an auto rickshaw, but the vehicle was repossessed when he failed to pay off his debts. Feriha is the first of seven children to graduate from college; her elder siblings having left school at a young age. Over the years, Feriha and her sisters have combined their schooling with paid domestic work.Footnote ²⁵ A few years ago, on trip to her maternal grandparents' home in Bihar, Feriha met and fell in love with Emir. They are both Muslims from different castes. Their love story, mainly conducted over WhatsApp, has endured much parental opposition.

That trip, her first solo trip, was in her words a “transformative experience.” For Feriha, the village appears as a space of freedom. The village is a bucolic romantic ideal, which allowed her the possibility of forging a consensual romantic bond. The details of her courtship have emerged over several conversations and the bare bones story fleshed out in sparkling detail in every retelling. In the winter of 2013–14, Feriha exchanged glances with Emir soon after arriving in Motihari, her mother's natal village. Her uncle, who received her at the railway station, dropped her at a P.G.Footnote ²⁶ where some of his friends were staying, while he ran some errands.

The courtship was carried out over a period of two weeks, when Emir would loiter in Feriha's vicinity, playing badminton, smoking cigarettes, driving a motorbike. Intermediaries were mobilized by both parties to make inquiries and phone numbers were exchanged. The mobile phone quite early on was the primary instrument of flirtation. Clandestine phone calls were made, messages of friendship were exchanged, and plans were made to meet. Feriha's cell phone presented both the promise of romance and the anxieties of social shame. Being the only one with a cell phone in her grandmother's house, her phone was very attractive to her aunts and cousins, and she had to resolutely guard it. The proposal came on New Year's Eve, in a field behind her grandmother's house, where Emir got down on one knee and serenaded her with a popular Bollywood love song. The relationship was “formalized” for the both of them—shifting from “friendship” to coupledom—at this point, with declarations of love articulated in English, exchanges of greeting cards, and a rose.Footnote ²⁷ The material artefacts of this courtship (the card and now the dried rose) were handed over to friends for safekeeping.

The romance was staged (or at least, retold) cinematically. Woven into the story she told me was another more formulaic one. Her personal account of desire and longing was punctuated by an emphasis on the social codes of respectability, while another intertwined narrative told the story of star crossed lovers, of a wager made over her wooing, whispered entreaties for her to turn back, of secret meetings in moonlit fields, of love winning over parental opposition—relying on motifs that are heavy with the symbolism of Bollywood romances. The village, in her braided narrative, is the fertile ground where her romance blossomed, much like in the Bollywood movies of late 1990s, where the (sanitized) social worlds of rural India appear as both the glue for and the backdrop to epic romances.Footnote ²⁸ In subsequent trips, her attachment to her mother's natal village (and what might possibly become her own marital village) has grown. In her fantasies about her life after marriage, it is always in Motihari that she sees herself and Emir living.

Love and marriage

It is a fantasy that is infused with fear, for the central factor in realizing this dream—her marriage to Emir—hangs in the balance. What if she is not allowed to marry him? Their early courtship had not remained a secret, and rumors circulated about their relationship. The talk surrounding Feriha's relationship made its way to Delhi through relatives and acquaintances that moved between the two places. It formed a way of connecting the social worlds of Wazirpur and that of the village. Emir's family, according to Feriha, had accepted their relationship and was ready with a marriage proposal. Feriha's mother, Zulekha, on the other hand, despite (or maybe because of) old associations with Emir's family, refused to consent to their marriage. The reasons offered for this are multiple. One possibility is that the marriage would be an inter-caste one. Another is that she had been influenced by gossip in the village that painted Emir as a “flirt,” and therefore unsuitable for marriage. Yet another is that the mother was against love itself. Feriha tells me that she is determined to marry Emir, and has employed various stratagems to convince her mother.

While in Feriha's mind, her relationship is “pure” and deserves the respect and social acceptance accorded to a “true love,” there are mechanisms that would necessarily have to be employed in order to reinforce its “righteousness.” The most important appears to be managing the social perception of the relationship and minimizing its transgressive potential. In Feriha's narrative, and in the discourses of marriage in the neighborhood, a distinction is made between “love marriages” and “arranged marriages.” While this division remains crucial at an ideological level, in practice it is porous.Footnote ²⁹ The opposition between love and marriage has been quite durable historically, with conventional views in Northern India regarding marriage more in terms of duty and reproduction rather than that of the emotional bond between the couple.Footnote ³⁰ Deeper conjugal intimacy is posed as a threat to the integrity of the joint family.Footnote ³¹ Nevertheless, Uberoi shows that the tension between love marriages and arranged marriages has been resolved with two conjugal configurations: the “love cum arranged marriage” and the “arranged cum love marriage.”Footnote ³² In the first, the romantic couple is granted social approval with a parentally organized wedding, and the second refers to the romantic love that grows after marriage.

For Feriha, a legally registered marriage would not be legitimate unless it was buttressed by the weight of social approval.Footnote ³³ This is why she has so far resisted what seems to her to be a thing of great shame—a court marriage. A civil marriage or a registered marriage under the Special Marriages Act of 1954 is colloquially known as a “court marriage” and is viewed with some degree of mistrust.Footnote ³⁴ While Emir has been attempting to persuade her to choose the legal route to sanctify their union, she has mounted an untiring struggle to sway her mother.Footnote ³⁵

The uneasy relationship between a civil or a “court” marriage and a “social” marriage is visible in a variety of sources. They are discernable in conversations about romantic relationships and their denouement as well as in judicial discussions of intimacy. In this paper, I limit my analysis to oral narratives from Wazirpur, but it is nevertheless, worth highlighting the competing registers of intimacy that emerge in the “kidnapping”/“abduction” cases that have been filed in the area.Footnote ³⁶ In such cases, the shame of an elopement, the validity of court marriages, and the legitimacy of a (previous or contemporaneous) “social” union, are addressed through legal means and negotiated in court. The social legitimacy accorded to a marriage formalized only legally remains incomplete. The partial social acceptance of a court marriage appears to center on two anxieties. First, a civil marriage (especially one that is preceded by an elopement) implies the intrusion of the state into private affairs. Second, as Mody also highlights, a “proper” marriage must be a public event and be accorded social sanction by the community.Footnote ³⁷

The Indian state has historically attempted to intervene in the family. Apart from the various government schemes centered on the low income household, the period of the National Emergency (1975–1977) witnessed a short lived but violent attempt to regulate reproduction in the working class family.Footnote ³⁸ In present day Wazirpur, the state with its agencies and its functionaries are pervasive. They regulate employment benefits, legal entitlements of workers, the disbursement of social welfare schemes, civic services and issue regular threats of factory closures, demolition and eviction. However, very few (arranged) marriages in Wazirpur are solemnized by the state.Footnote ³⁹ Often, women marry very young (before they finish high school) in social and religious ceremonies. A registered (court) marriage, in such cases, would only be necessary if the marriage was inter-religious or if the couple was marrying against the wishes of their families.

Elopements are not rare in Wazirpur. Every such event generates its own lore and enters into collective memory, resurfacing occasionally as cautionary tale and social precedent. Such scandals (for they are initially seen as such in the neighborhood) offer a prism through which to view the conflicts and negotiations over conjugal relations. In these incidents, or rather in the conversations, discussions, and gossip around them, gradations of public, social, and private behavior appear.

In all my conversations with Mayadevi regarding her children, which ranged over many aspects of her children's marriages, she never mentioned that one of her daughters had a “love marriage.” This, I gathered from my conversations with the rest of her family, her younger daughters in particular, and from other residents of the area. Like many of her contemporaries, one of Mayadevi's most pressing preoccupations revolves around the marriage of her two youngest daughters, both of whom are still underage. Her two older daughters, she told me, are married into “good homes” and similar matches would be highly desirable for her younger ones. While her silence around her elder daughter's marriage of choice could, perhaps, signal a desire to keep the transgressions secret or indicate a willful misremembering or simply a wish to not reveal this information to me, Mayadevi's younger daughter, Roopa recalls the incident with almost gleeful exuberance:

Roopa remembered her mother yelling into the telephone, telling her sister to come back home and without any of the trappings of a married woman—“I was young but I remember this, she was shouting at didi and saying come back exactly as you left home, no sindoor, nothing … ” Rekha came home the next day, Roopa emphasized, “the very next … not a few days later,” and in defiance of her mother's instructions, dressed like a bride.

Declaring Rekha's love marriage to be a “success,” her sister points out that despite the “drama” that unfolded over her elopement, Rekha was accepted back into the parental fold. Partly, she suggests that this was because Rekha's husband was of the same caste and from her naani's village, and therefore the marriage, while undermining parental authority, had not transgressed caste or community boundaries. He was educated and at that time, had good prospects for employment. Secondly, though the marriage had been conducted in secret, the public spectacle of the event was relatively short. In other words, it was not a long drawn out process involving an extended elopement, police investigations, and a court marriage. Rekha had returned to her natal home soon after her marriage, and her new husband had attempted to soothe tensions and consolidate the affinal relationship by exchanging gifts. As Roopa announced, “If any of us have a court marriage, we would not be allowed to step foot in this house again.” Of crucial significance here is the performative aspects of respectability. The loss of social honor that stems from an elopement is gradually repaired through public displays of family approval.

A few years later, a similar incident occurred in Feriha's family. Her seventeen-year-old sister, Ayesha, began a secret relationship with a young man from Wazirpur. The man was also Muslim from the same caste but from a different region. The social distance was wider than in Rekha's case. Faced with her parents’ obdurate opposition to this relationship, Ayesha eloped with her boyfriend. This incident not only caused a public scandal in the area but also brought the police and the Juvenile Courts into their home. When the two lovers were found and Feriha's father brought Ayesha home from police custody, a fair bit of domestic violence followed. Soon after, she left home again, lived with her boyfriend until she came of age, and has sincesevered ties with her family. The estrangement has been an extremely public one. Ayesha presently lives in a neighboring jhuggi and it is common knowledge that her relationship with her family is strained. Yet, there are small private concessions. On Eid, for instance, Zulekha would send over some food to her daughter's house, or Feriha or her sister might chat with her in the street.

This incident seems to have had a deep impact on Feriha and colored her notions of social and personal shame. The public embarrassment of the elopement, the humiliation that she felt her father endure at the police station, the local gossip that circulated about her family merge to shape her public comportment. Underlying this is a more interior sense of shame—the fact that she was also complicit in the violence against her sister. Thus, for Feriha who is herself at the cusp of disrupting familial and social norms, this incident offers both a sense of possibility and a cautionary tale.Footnote ⁴²

While the workers’ settlements of Wazirpur have not witnessed “honor killings,”Footnote ⁴³ caste and community norms are nevertheless maintained through customary forms of marital alliances and proscriptions on those who breach them. The need to maintain caste hierarchies and by association parental and community authority remains (at least publicly) significant, though considerable latitude may be allowed in the practices of conjugality. While the obsession with female (especially unmarried women's) chastity may be less pronounced than in the middle classes as other scholars have demonstrated, there is nevertheless considerable investment in Wazirpur in managing social reputations.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to many of the younger women, romantic relationships have flourished in Wazirpur, and “one could find a ‘love marriage’ in every galli.” Yet, almost simultaneously, other statements are made suggesting heavy social regulation. For instance, “even if our parents accept, ‘samaj’ wouldn't … they won't stop talking, they won't let you live … they will kill you while you are still alive … and who wants their parents to be shunned?”Footnote ⁴⁵ These contradictions between public posturing and the pragmatics of conjugality are critical, pointing to the ways in which dominant codes are enforced and contested. The social legitimacy of a marriage remains unstable, premised as it is, on a range of contingent factors. In a recent piece, Dhawan demonstrates how class differences are articulated over the legal definition of marriage, with middle-class women placing great weight on the legal legitimacy of a marriage while for working-class women, the legal sanctification of marriage was unimportant.Footnote ⁴⁶

The significance of the “social” sanctification of marriage in Wazirpur appears in the simmering tensions over Aarti's wedding. Her hurried marriage, she told me, had been prompted by the circulation of a series of rumors regarding a supposed abortion. She implied that some neighbors and her uncle, who works in a steel factory in the area, wrote a letter to the kumhar Footnote ⁴⁷ caste panchayat in her village in Bihar detailing her alleged transgressions. As a result, there was considerable difficulty in finding an eligible groom and when that had been settled, in having a socially acceptable wedding. Even though she had a social ceremony and not just a court marriage, the fact that many of her caste elders boycotted the wedding tinged the event with a considerable bit of dissatisfaction. Since she has returned to her natal home in Delhi, she has had to face taunts and jibes about whether she has even had a socially sanctified wedding at all. Her anxiety over “what people say” was not limited to the event of the wedding but extends also to the more public displays of conjugality. Her return to Delhi, unaccompanied by her husband, prompted another series of rumors in the neighborhood. She insisted that she would only return to her marital home when her husband comes to escort her back. Whether this is factually valid is not of great significance. Rather, the telling of this story is important as an account of the desires, disappointments, and fears that surround intimate relationships in the area. The social legitimacy of the conjugal union is, thus, predicated upon a range of practices that center around the “arrangement” of the marriage, the event of the wedding, and married life.

The possibilities afforded by and the embarrassments associated with the involvement of the state agencies in intimate life are reflected similarly in some of my conversations with Aarti, her mother, and her relatives. Aarti contends that she was underage when she got married and it was under immense social pressure that she agreed to it. In one of the more tense moments that I observed between mother and daughter, Aarti's mother sharply told her to be grateful for good fortune at having found an eligible husband, and that even if she had gone to the police to allege a child marriage, it would have come to no avail. At a later time, Aarti told me that her parents’ hurry to formalize her marriage stemmed not merely from the rumors that were circulating about her alleged abortion, but also from an inter-caste relationship that she was involved in. Her boyfriend, who belonged to a lower caste, was a neighbor and worked in one of the steel factories. As she was faced with both physical violence and social pressure to acquiesce to her “arranged marriage,” she had indeed considered two possible legal recourses. One, was to employ the law to forestall the unwanted marital negotiations; the other, was to elope and formalize her relationship with her boyfriend through a court marriage.Footnote ⁴⁸ She eventually followed neither of the two possible legal paths and has, since her marriage, continued the clandestine relationship with her boyfriend. As it happens, this, too, was discovered by her mother. The threat of a court marriage was brandished again—as a possible escape, as an enabler of individual agency. Disregarding the fact that she was already socially married, Aarti gathered two possible witnesses who would attest to her civil marriage. As far as I am aware, she has not yet followed through with this possibility. Between the moral pressure exerted by her family and the admittedly daunting act of elopement, Aarti's view of her extramarital relationship shifts somewhat unevenly between two narrative poles. At times, she appears prepared to end her marriage and pursue a legally legitimized relationship with her boyfriend. More frequently, however, dissolving her marriage or eloping with her boyfriend does not seem to appear as a viable possibility to her. These would be very public acts that could invite social censure or shame for the family. The social security and respectability for her and her family that is linked to her marital status is too precious to disturb, at this point. Her inter-caste romance, she says, would never translate into marriage; instead, she vowed to truly love him till death and expected him to reciprocate this love even if he married someone else.

The idiom of “true love” is deployed to stress the legitimacy of their relationships. As Perveez Mody argues in her study of love marriage in Delhi, couples in socially transgressive relationships, while radically defining the parameters of “Indian” morality and marriage, do so not so much by explicit rebellion but rather by rearticulating their romantic bond in terms that are socially acceptable. The moral opprobrium associated with love marriage is countered as these couples see their actions, not so much as breaking tradition but rather transcending it.Footnote ⁴⁹ For young women from Wazirpur, “true love” offers a way of resolving the contradictions between individual desire and social strictures. For Aarti, it allows a willful disobedience of social codes of behavior. For Feriha, “true love” lends a more powerful charge to her struggle to marry a person of her choosing.

While there is great ambivalence when it comes to everyday conjugal practices, there appears to be an increasing ideological stress on emotional and physical compatibility, among the young women of Wazirpur.Footnote ⁵⁰ Ideas of romantic love govern, at the very least, the fantasies of conjugality. The significance of popular repertoires of romance and courtship in orienting the local discourses, practices, and fantasies of marriage and married life must be emphasized.Footnote ⁵¹ For instance, on being asked to choose a pseudonym for this research, Feriha settled upon the names of the protagonists of a dubbed Turkish TV drama that was wildly popular across South Asian metropolises. In the same neighborhood, Aarti would write out in her diary entire scenarios based on two Hindi TV shows, Love by Chance and Yeh hai aashiqui. The desire to marry one's boyfriend, the hope that he will be handsome, and that their relationship will be passionately romantic, surface repeatedly in conversations with younger women. The issue of romantic love as the basis for conjugal life is a delicate one in Wazirpur. There are many like Aarti who state that they do not “love” their husbands, but the fantasy remains that romance will blossom within the conjugal relation. This desire is not conceptualized in terms of the indissolubility of the “jodi,” or pairing, as Kakar contends, but more in terms of sexual chemistry that is hoped will develop between the couple.Footnote ⁵² While Aarti has “adjusted”Footnote ⁵³ to her marriage and harbors some hope that eventually sexual attraction will materialize, she also appears quite content to keep the realm of romantic love separate from the domain of conjugality. Indeed, romantic love is accorded its powerful emotive charge precisely because it lies outside of the acceptable social practice. In contrast to Feriha, for whom premarital intimacy is then expected to be transformed into a socially recognized conjugal union, Aarti's amorous encounters destabilize the dominant codes of female sexuality in Wazirpur.

Many of the older women took the trouble to convince me that theirs were not “love marriages.” This tendency to strip the conjugal bond of any romantic charge is not unusual. As other scholars have observed, the polarization between “marriage” and “love” has much to do with the social conventions surrounding conjugal arrangements.Footnote ⁵⁴ Mayadevi's marriage for instance did not necessarily follow the conventions of many arranged marriages of her social milieu. Her husband, Raghubir, first saw her when he was visiting relatives in her natal village. For long hours he would loiter around her house, drinking country liquor accompanied by his cousins who happened to be distantly related to her sisters-in-law. In her retelling of this moment, she remembers feeling distinctly curious about this attention and approaching her sister for clues. Unknown to her, within a few days of first seeing her, this young man, Raghubir, marshaled his contacts and made tentative inquiries regarding marriage. The cousin, who was the key contact between the two sides, was sent back with a missive. The girl, Mayadevi, was too young and even if she was ready for marriage, the family did not have the resources to pay the dowry required to formalize the union. Raghubir was undeterred. He continued pursuing her, refused other marriage proposals, and was adamant that a “free” marriage (without an accompanying financial transaction) was what he wanted. In two months, a formal marriage proposal arrived at Mayadevi's house and the two were married within fifteen days. She is quick to assert that her own marriage was not born out of personal choice and individual desire but rather through an adherence to social custom.

In contrast to this narrative of conjugal relations as being removed from romantic attachments, the younger women tell a different story. Not only are romance and ‘true love’ accorded a special place in their own lives, their parents’ marriages too are retrospectively being fitted into a narrative of romantic love. For instance, Aarti's mother, who recently passed away, told me that her marriage had been arranged at a young age. She would speak of the domestic drudgeries, the hardships of married life and the routine violence that she would have to deal with. After her mother's death, I was told a different version by her younger daughter. Here, her parents had had a “love marriage” complete with all accompanying tropes—a childhood friendship that blossomed into love, a courtship that grew out of neighborly conviviality, and marital negotiations that were conducted by the couple themselves.

These conversations attest to the centrality of romantic love in the imagination of marriage and simultaneously draw our attention to the shifts in the generational representations of intimacy and conjugality. In Wazirpur, while ideals of romantic love permeate discussions of intimacy, they sit uneasily with acceptable marital unions. Romantic love thus lies, in some cases, not at the center of the conjugal relationship but as its other, while elsewhere it negotiates with and is then eventually folded into acceptable conjugality.

The neighborhood and the city:

In order to understand the ways in which the romantic relationships of the young women in Wazirpur play out, it is important to understand the spatial arrangement of the neighborhood. As in many such areas, the separation between the private and the public is not stark. The home seeps onto the street and the distinction between the two is fluid and shifting. This separation, too, is governed to a large extent by the rhythms of work. On most days, the benches and charpays on the street are occupied by women—some, having returned from work as domestic help; others, going about their household chores. On Wednesdays (the weekly day off in the industrial area), these spaces, otherwise occupied by women most afternoons, are full of men chatting or playing cards. In many conversations with women, the street in general was seen as somewhat unsavory. It was to be used as a thoroughfare, not a space for socializing. For many of the younger women in the area, chatting at the street corner, loitering, or playing are potentially contentious activities, which could lead to family tensions.Footnote ⁵⁵ Wednesdays also are seen as the day when younger women, in particular, have to be more careful. Social honor, so easily invested in the bodies and behavior of women, seems to require stricter defense during holidays.

The comings and goings of workers pattern the rhythms of everyday life in the area. Workers on their break sit outside the factories to drink tea and smoke a cigarette. The spatial layout of Wazirpur ensures that there is a steady traffic of neighbors throughout the day as they move between work and home. Feriha's mother, for instance, comes home at every break in her place of work. This constant circulation of one's family and acquaintances, the clustered houses, the spatial proximity of neighbors guarantees that very little space is left unsupervised.

The romances in Wazirpur require a great deal of subterfuge. The strategies these young people employ point to the transforming technologies of courtship as well as the stratified access to urban social space. For Feriha, whose boyfriend Emir lives in Hyderabad, the smartphone and WhatsApp are crucial tools for forging a romantic relationship. While the figure of the emissary and the support networks of friends remain important, far greater contact between the couple is possible with the smartphone. The virtual space affords more freedoms but is carefully monitored. While status updates and profile pictures emerge as particularly charged indices of romantic love, fidelity, and intentions, they are diligently and prudently deployed. For example, after a spat with her boyfriend, Feriha changed her WhatsApp profile photo to one of Emir's as a show of commitment to him, but only after having blocked all her contacts from Wazirpur and her mother's village. In other instances, she posts dialogues from TV shows and movies to convey affection or irritation with her boyfriend. Furthermore, the smartphone or, for that matter, her WhatsApp is hardly private. As a consequence, all intimate messages have to be regularly deleted. With only one smartphone in the family, it is used by all her siblings; innovative ways have to be found to escape the scrutiny of her family.Footnote ⁵⁶

Emir is from a slightly more affluent family and lives in a boys paying guest accommodation while studying in Hyderabad. Without much domestic responsibility, he has more time to devote to the more ritualistic dimensions of their romance. For example, he wants to speak on the phone every night, and barring that, an extended WhatsApp chat session. For Feriha, whose daily schedule of college and housework is grueling, this often seems like a chore. Her occasional non-availability or her difficulty in arranging an intimate conversation has often proved to be a source of tension between them, and she has to resort to a range of strategies to balance his demands and the suspicions of her family. She slices out time from her daily routine and calls him in the short window of free time that she has between returning from college and when her mother returns from work. She messages him on her bus rides to college and sneaks away on very rare occasions to her family's half constructed terrace to make a short, potentially dangerous late night call. Nevertheless, tensions persist over the time she devotes to their relationship. He does not, she tells me, understand the demands on her life, waking up at six to get to the public toilets, cooking for the entire family, going to college, returning home to do the evening shopping,Footnote ⁵⁷ and cooking dinner again. He doesn't understand the sheer impossibility of finding a private moment in her one room dwelling.

Her experience of Wazirpur is not uncommon, but it is a gendered experience. Even for Feriha, whose regular trips to college take her outside of the neighborhood, her mobility is ordered and contained to a great degree. As a young girl, she insisted on attending a government school that was a fifteen minute walk away, primarily because she preferred “long distance.” As she put it, “she liked to wander about.” Yet, there are certain things she would not do: She would not, for instance, take a walk alone to the edges of Wazirpur; she would not idle on the streets nor would she go to one of the several food stalls for a cup of tea. This is not to give the impression that women are absent on the streets of the neighborhood. Rather, women are noticeably present. A large number of women run the many small eateries in the area and sell vegetables and other daily essentials; in the evenings, one sees groups of women coming back from work in the factories and as domestic labor; younger girls, returning from their tuition classes fill the streets and lanes; and women crowd the markets doing their evening purchases. Women's public presence then, gives the impression of constant movement, of always being engaged in doing something.Footnote ⁵⁸

Social space in Wazirpur, thus deeply gendered, has also witnessed rather violent contestations in terms of class. In the mid-1990s, a young man from the workers’ settlements was beaten to death for defecating in a public park in a neighboring affluent colony.Footnote ⁵⁹ The memory of this incident surfaces regularly in conversations, and there is a deep awareness of the unequal access to city space. In the recent decades, Delhi has witnessed a great rise in projects of urban renewal and beautification (which nearly always involve slum demolitions), as well as investments in spaces of consumption for the affluent. This has been accompanied by progressive erosion of space available to the city's working poor—not merely their homes but also their places of leisure. The glittering malls, bars, and restaurants that mark Delhi's vision of a “world class city” have minimal room for people like Feriha and Aarti. Through a look at the actual sites of “dating” and the fantasies around it, we can map the ways in which the city is accessed and imagined by working class young women from Wazirpur.

For Feriha as well as for Aarti, these romantic relationships involve not only the couple but also rely on the help and support of a wide range of figures. During Emir's occasional visits to Delhi, another elaborate apparatus of subterfuge and concealment has to be deployed. On the days that Emir is in Delhi, Feriha would tend to stay out later and more frequently. To support this, she would invent more classes, more intense study activities, and so on. Delhi University with its sprawling lawns, cheap canteens, and quiet corners remains the favored place for a “date.” The city's public parks have ,for decades, offered refuge to lovers. In recent years, however, growing vigilante attacks by conservative groups against couples in public spaces has introduced new dangers. Faced with ever shrinking spaces for romance, Feriha now has to find alternatives. One is the Delhi metro. A ride in the air conditioned metro car, where the two of them could legitimately share space, offers a fleeting promise of romance. Other possibilities point to her aspirations. She would have liked to go with Emir to a Starbucks or a Café Coffee Day, if they were more welcoming and not so prohibitively expensive.

Aarti relies on a select and reliable network of friends and cousins to conduct her romance. Unlike Feriha and some other young women (whose primary tool of romantic communication is through the mobile phone), Aarti does not own a smart phone. She does, however, own a sim card.Footnote ⁶⁰ This is inserted into the phones of her friends, whenever she needs to contact her boyfriend. Though he is her neighbor, the possibilities of her interacting with him freely are extremely limited. His breaks from the steel rolling mill rarely ever coincide with Aarti's free time. It is only on rare occasions that she manages to steal away to their rooftop terrace to meet him.Footnote ⁶¹ For other couples in the area as well, the rooftops of the jhuggis are a place for romantic rendezvous. Given the proximity of the houses and the constant circulation of family and neighbors on the streets, the terrace—elevated from this dense spatial mesh—affords some privacy. In many cases, the rooftops are accessible only through ladders, which limits who accesses them and when.

In Aarti's imagination of an ideal date, we glimpse how aspirational spaces appear to working-class women. For Aarti, the one place she would like to go with her boyfriend is a pub in a mall. She has never been to one, but she has a notion of what it involves. First, she tells me, she would need to change the way she dresses. She would have to shed her usual attire of a churidaar kameez and wear jeans; change her sandals for boots with a side zip. She would dance and while others might be drinking, she would not. At this point, she does not own a pair of jeans; so when I asked whether she would buy a pair, she replied that clothes are often rented out in a pub. She would go after finishing her morning chores, at 11:30, after setting out a competent and believable web of lies about her whereabouts.