ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on devotes to an exploration of what Patricia Uberoi has called 'the critical institution of marriage' in Indian kinship and the family, with a special focus on how it is transformed through new ideas about love, conjugality and global images of intimacy. In this chapter the author, not so much concerned with love and marriage as revealed in debates around nationalism, but as sites where gender and class-based hierarchies are challenged and reproduced. It examines on discussions about love and marriage are not only prime sites for subjectivities to emerge, but also how their experience is framed by wider discursive formations and collective histories which are not contained within the context of sexuality. The chapter exposes the different discourses on marriage in contemporary India and has revealed the tensions between a modern, liberal view of love and marriage and the demands of joint family life.
