ABSTRACT

Madhu Sarin was born in a well-to-do family in Chandigarh. While a cousin and her elder sister quietly made difficult adaptations to life after arranged marriages, she was clear in her mind early on that she wanted to support herself. Aloof to social pressures of the time, she resisted all efforts by her well-meaning extended family towards finding her a groom. For this free-willed young woman, such matrimony was out of the question because of its inbuilt inequality for the woman. She concluded that power relationships, like those in traditional arranged marriages of the time, were complicated and not suited for her personality. She wanted to be in total control of her life and saw professional education as the key to her independence. Sarin’s father was a lawyer, but she did not see herself cut out for that profession. Architecture seemed a softer field compared to engineering and got the least resistance from the family which led Sarin to the newly established Chandigarh College of Architecture (CCA) in 1962.