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.