Paper short abstract:

Ethnographically mapping the frayed intimate worlds of three women, in ‘pre’, ‘present’ and ‘post’ marital heterosexual relationships in India, the paper shows the experience of managing private violence as centrally the work of managing gendered kinworlds, and attendant hopes of marital becoming.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork in the fast ‘modernising’ city of Gurgaon, India, this paper proceeds through an ethnographic exploration of the love, affliction, and violence experienced by three women – an upwardly mobile young professional, an urban-rural housewife and a bottom-end professional worker – in their heterosexual relationships with their boyfriend, husband, and estranged husband, respectively. Through its changing forms of living, sociality, leisure, consumption, and work, the city provides the moral and material backdrop for these relationships. All three relationships are defined by the hope for an ‘ideal marriage’ – indexed by one’s personal transformation into ‘good womanhood’ and the pair’s transformation into 'good domesticity' appropriate to the changing urban context. Marriage features as anticipation in the first case, a daily contested reality in the second and as the site of ruin and collapse in the third. Each case is animated, for the women, by the desire to secure respectable social membership and realize full marital personhood and endure violence in bargain. Ethnographically mapping the frayed intimate worlds of three women, in ‘pre’, ‘present’ and ‘post’ marital heterosexual relationships in urban India, the paper shows the experience of managing everyday interpersonal violence as centrally the work of managing gendered kinworlds and the socially constructed hopes of marital becoming. The paper examines the ways in which these hopes are reconfigured in the light of failing conjugality and the creative ways in which marital personhood is re-imagined outside the bounds of conjugality, by engaging adjacent kin networks or other social tactics.