ABSTRACT
All love-marriage biographies involve degrees of ‘success’ and ‘failure’, arising from a mediation of the principles that bind community and defi ne not-community. This chapter explores the extent to which ‘success’ and ‘failure’ for love-marriage couples is determined by the compromises they make as regards their personal or individual desires when these come into confl ict with social norms and the determinants of ‘community’. This process of compromise, as detailed in the previous chapter, is described as a negotiation between community and not-community, and it is this negotiation which I will utilise to posit an analysis of agency for love-marriage couples. Agency is often mistakenly interpreted as implying a combination of freedom and effi cacy, without the allimportant counterpart of accountability. An anthropological analysis of love-marriage biographies points towards the conceptualisation of agency as a double-edged sword: in Delhi, persons are viewed as both agents of self, and agents of groups. This allows us to see how actions aren’t just unmediated acts of ‘individuality’, but are simultaneously actions of persons-as-accountable to groups to which they are assumed to belong.
