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- Convenors:
-
Anna Lindberg
(Lund University)
Rajni Palriwala (University of Delhi)
Ravinder Kaur (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi)
- Location:
- C405
- Start time:
- 26 July, 2012 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This Round Table discussion will examine various aspects of marriage and its implications for gender relations in South Asia. Papers may address issues such as age at marriage, religious concerns, caste relations, marriage payments and the transfer of wealth, mobility, legal and state interfaces.
Long Abstract:
The panel welcomes researchers who study varied aspects of the institution of marriage and its implications for gender relations in South Asia. Papers may address issues such as age at marriage, religious concerns, caste relations, attitudes toward love, marriage payments and the transfer of wealth, marriage and mobility, legal and state interfaces. The panel will also discuss theoretical concerns that arise due to the variety of marriage practices in the region during the late colonial, post-independence and contemporary periods.
The session will be organised as a Round Table discussion. Participants are urged to send their papers to the organisers who will then extract certain key issues that concern all papers. This will allow us to include several papers and to have a comparative approach on theoretical questions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Justyna Wiśniewska-Singh (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how a changing social situation in the late colonial northern India influenced issues related to marriage. The most controversial matters were: proper age at marriage, ritual concerns, marriage expenses as well as side effects of child marriages and immature widow problem.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to present how a changing social situation in the late colonial northern India influenced issues related to marriage. The most controversial matters, also reflected in Hindi literature of the time, were: proper age at marriage, ritual concerns, marriage expenses as well as side effects of child marriages and immature widow problem.
The paper draws mainly on Hindi novels by Ayodhya Singh Upadhyay and Kishorilal Goswami published at the beginning of the twentieth century. For the most part conservative and didactic in their outlook, they put forward interesting postulates concerning disputable matters. Some of the ideas, like reducing the unnecessary expenses, are worth considering even today. The analysis of literary sources also reveals what were the expectations of future brides and grooms and by what means they were to be found. The attention paid by Hindi writers to a number of marriage practices confirms the status of marriage as one of the most important social institutions.
Anna Lindberg (Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
Marriage payment from the family of brides to bridegrooms is a severe gender related problem in contemporary India. This paper discusses people's own explanations for the shift from "women's wealth" to "women's marriage fee" in Kerala over the past 70 years.
Paper long abstract:
Whether paid to the bride, the groom, or their relatives, marriage payments and their rationale have differed over the past century among various communities in Travancore and Malabar. While the nature have changed, dowries continue to be paid and received in Kerala. Even more conspicuous, however, is their appearance among groups who never had this practice. By examining a seventy-year historical record and focusing on the life stories and explanations of the people involved, a complex picture of dowry emerges. We find elements of historical traditions, class, gender, and education issues at work in how people sanction the behaviours that constitute "modern" dowry. The political economy and cultural context of the surrounding society also play a strong role in the sometimes contradictory and irrational reasons people give to justify their practices.
This paper is based on archival materials, fieldwork, and interviews conducted in Kerala from 1997 to 2010. A preliminary survey of the varying hypotheses for marriage payments over the years is followed by an examination of secondary and primary historical sources, an analysis of interviews addressing the nature and rationale of dowry, and some concluding remarks on how one might account for the shift from "women's wealth" to "women's marriage fee".
Miguel Loureiro (Institute of Development Studies)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the continuing changes in attitudes towards love before and during marriage in rural Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It looks in particular at how male migration to the Gulf and the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake played a role in redefining premarital and marital choices.
Paper long abstract:
Pakistan-administered Kashmir (PaK) witnessed several events in its recent past that created and recreated cultural, social and economic changes. Of these, the migration to the Gulf since the mid-70s and the 2005 earthquake impacted directly and indirectly marital choices and relations.
In rural PaK marital choices are often a parents' prerogative, with preference for maintaining endogamy within the family, kinship and caste. As migration impacted demographics, social stratification and education levels, it also played a role in younger generations' quest for bringing the concept of love into marital choices. As a result, the youth has become more assertive and vocal in terms of whom to date and marry.
High levels of Gulf migration also impacted marital relationships. Male migrants and their remittances are usually the main source of income for families. As the house becomes an arena for bargaining, contestation and manipulation over resources, competition frequently arises between the women who have the closest relation to income-earning males - the mothers and wives. Of the many relationships within the house, the saas-bahu dyad is the most visible and the one through which others are enacted while competing to exert control over male migrants. This competition intensified during post-earthquake housing reconstruction, with wives' pleas for separate housing.
This paper analyses the continuing changes in attitudes towards love before and during marriage in rural PaK. It looks in particular at how male migration and the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake played a role in redefining premarital and marital choices.
Nida Kirmani (Lahore University of Management Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
Muslim women's rights activists in India and Pakistan frequently face opposition on religious grounds particularly with relation to marriage and personal laws. This has led activists to strategically engage with religious discourses and actors in order to secure women's rights. This paper will explore the effectiveness of using 'woman-friendly' nikahnamas (Muslim marriage contracts) as a means of securing women's rights without offending religious sensibilities in India and Pakistan. Drawing on primary research, this paper will question how far this approach can go in challenging entrenched patriarchal structures of power.
Paper long abstract:
Religiously-framed approaches to women's rights advocacy, which include those that utilise religious discourses or work through religious leaders and institutions, have increasingly been adopted by a variety of actors, particularly in Muslim contexts including, to some extent, in South Asia. Although 'Islamic feminism' has not gained wide support in India and Pakistan, Muslim women's rights activists have strategically engaged with religious discourses and actors in their struggles to secure women's rights, particularly with regard to marriage and family laws. One of the strategies employed by advocates of Muslim women's rights in India and in Pakistan has been to popularise the notion that women can write their rights into their own nikahnamas (Muslim marriage contracts), particularly in terms of inserting clauses that will secure their rights within marriage. Muslim women's rights activists have proposed the idea of a 'woman-friendly' nikahnama as a means of protecting women's rights without challenging the system of separate personal laws in India, and without challenging religious conservative forces in Pakistan. However, little research has been conducted as to whether this approach has been successful in actually securing rights for women on the ground. This paper will draw on primary research conducted in both contexts to explore in depth whether the nikahnama has been an effective tool in protecting women's rights within marriage and after divorce without raising religious-based objections, or whether it is ineffective in actually challenging deeply entrenched patriarchal structures of power.
Juhi Sidharth (University of Cambridge )
Paper short abstract:
This paper is chiefly concerned with the processes through which 16-22 year old Dalit women make choices related to love, sex and marriage in the context of the liberalization of sexual culture in urban India. It draws upon data collected through in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation for my doctoral research.
Paper long abstract:
Norms related to gender and sexuality are in a state of rapid transition in urban India today. This transition is being chiefly driven by the spread of liberal sexual culture through television, films and internet. Furthermore, the foray of young women in the job market and institutions of higher education has opened up spaces where they can explore their sexuality. This change, however, is fraught with dilemmas, contradictions and risks especially for young Dalit women living in slum areas that are marked by violence, poverty and unequal gender relations. This paper examines the complexity of processes through which these young women define, understand and experience love, sex and marriage in their lives. In the socio-economic environment of slums, meanings of love and marriage are deeply intertwined with poverty and violence. It also discusses how they are using their agency to accept and challenge traditional meanings of love, sex and marriage. Although anthropologists have researched the ways in which caste and religion shape gender and sexual norms and practices In India, young women's actual experience of these ideologies in their everyday lives has received insufficient attention. Drawing on the qualitative data collected for my doctoral research, this paper offers insight into the lived experiences of love, sex and marriage among young women living in the slums of Mumbai.
Fritzi-Marie Titzmann (Leipzig University)
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper looks into the diverse forms of engaging with online matrimonial media in India. An analysis of the matrimonial profiles offers a remarkable insight into the changing concepts of marriage, love and gender roles and challenges the dichotomy of arranged versus love marriage.
Paper long abstract:
For centuries Indian families sought help from relatives, marriage brokers and later newspaper advertisements to marry their sons and daughters off. They relied on kinship and caste networks, on marriage bureaus and on "word of mouth". However, the global media age has opened up a whole new world of possibilities and renders a new dimension to the Indian matrimonial market's medialisation. The first India-based websites dedicated to matrimonial matchmaking appeared on the World Wide Web in the late 1990s and the number of users has increased ever since.
The process of matchmaking undergoes crucial changes in times of growing medialisation and thus impacts society at large. Matrimonial websites provide a picture of the complexities of young Indians searching for life partners. An analysis of the matrimonial profiles offers a remarkable insight into the changing concepts of marriage, love and gender roles. Concepts like arranged and love marriage are put into question by the way how many young Indians engage with matrimonial media. In this paper, I would like to challenge the existing dichotomy of love versus arrange marriage which is still widely applied in societal, individual and academic discourses. The practice of finding a suitable match is being transformed by young users into "self-arranged" marriages blending traditional criteria such as religion or caste with individualistic expectations like personal compatibility. Simultaneously, traditional patterns persist. Parents appropriate new media as well in the process of fixing their children's marriages.
Ravinder Kaur (Indian Institute of Technology Delhi) Rajni Palriwala (University of Delhi)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the shifts and continuities that characterize marriage in a globalizing South Asia, a context marked by changing economies, demographics, dislocating politics, and new imaginings of love, conjugality, and gender relations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the shifts and continuities that characterize marriage in a globalizing South Asia, a context which is marked by changing economies, demographics, dislocating politics, local and international migration, and new imaginings of love, conjugality, and gender relations. It draws on the post-nineties literature on marriage and recent ethnographic studies. Through this material, it explores the shifts in sociological focus from structures, rules, norms, and patterns to the practices of marriage in relation to locations such as work, internet matchmaking, family courts, ideas of same-sex marriage, divorce and remarriage, political conflict, and activist initiatives such as the recasting of widows as single women. The new dynamics and meanings of apparently ongoing regularities such as 'arranged' marriage, age at marriage, marriage payments, and patrilocal post-marital residence are brought out. It argues that in the face of, or even because of, new stresses at the micro and macro levels, marriage remains an important institution, structurally and in cultural values and assertions.