Mapping the Debate on Marriage

While marriage is recognized as a crucial and life-changing event for most Indian women, their experiences of conjugal relationships, love, commitment, and intimacy have only recently begun to attract scholarly attention. Previously, anthropological and sociological research in South Asia concentrated almost exclusively on the formal structures of kinship rules and relations, ¹ ignoring the fluidity, diversity, and dynamism inherent in everyday practices pertaining to marital relations. ² Patricia Uberoi, who has been instrumental in voicing the need for a theoretical shift, correctly notes how: ‘The sociology of Indian family and kinship has focused more on kinship norms than on pathology, deviance and breakdown. For this reason it has largely failed to inform or to confront the practical challenges of social activism and public policy intervention’ (Uberoi 2000: 1). Remarking on another type of lacuna in social activism that does privilege women’s experiences, Mary John (2005: 721) observes: ‘Entering the domain of marriage, 2beyond questions of violence and law, is a journey we have barely begun in the women’s movement.’ With marriage being critically understudied, preconceived notions, often lacking ethnographic validity, have been allowed to pervade academic writing, social activism, and the popular imagination.