Browsing for Bridegrooms: Matchmaking and Modernity in ...

Browsing for Bridegrooms:Matchmaking and

Modernity in Mumbai

MUKTA SHARANGPANI

This article demonstrates how a traditional cultural practice such as the arranged

marriage system is given a modern meaning by young women in urban India. Through

young women’s narratives on love, marriage and careers, it highlights how neo-

liberalisation and its resultant culture of consumerism has offered them a vocabulary

through which they articulate and resolve the continuing tension between traditional

notions of family-making and modern desires of individual growth. These young

women’s strategic deployment of arranged marriage practices points to various shift-

ing configurations of power; it allows us to understand women’s resistance beyond

dichotomies of absolute complicity and complete opposition and provides us with an

example of how an alternate modernity might be imagined and lived.

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 249–276SAGE Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/097152151001700203

Mukta Sharangpani has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University and iscurrently Commissioner on Santa Clara County’s Domestic Violence Council andPresident of MAITRI, a domestic violence intervention agency in the USA.E-mail: [email protected]

Acknowledgements: This article is part of a larger dissertation on urban middle

class women and modernity. I am grateful for the intellectual and financial support

provided by the Stanford University, the Wenner Gren Foundation and the

Clayman Institute for Gender Research. I am indebted to my informants who

shared their experiences and feelings so generously. Miyako Inoue, Linda Hess,

Sylvia Yanagisako, Barbara Voss, Akhil Gupta, Purnima Mankekar, Renato Rosaldo

and Carol Delaney helped me finesse the arguments presented in this study. This

essay morphed from dissertation chapter into article through astute comments

and feedback from Shilpa Phadke, Aradhana Sharma, Kristin Monroe and Tiffany

Romaine. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewer of IJGS and the IJGS editor

Leela Kasturi for her keen and incisive eye.

at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 16, 2016ijg.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://ijg.sagepub.com/

250 • Mukta Sharangpani

Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 17:2 (2010): 249–276

The room was packed to capacity. There were about 40 peoplesitting there that morning, many visibly uneasy, strained and ner-vous. Above them, the fans whirred sluggishly and noisily, offeringlittle respite from the still summer morning. The room, until a fewhours ago, had served as the manager Mrs Lele’s living room. Now,the sofas were pushed against the walls and on them were seatedsome of the older, arthritic mothers, fathers, uncles and aunts. Someof them were feverishly scribbling notes into small diaries, justlike the rest of the people seated on the bamboo mats on the floor.Every few minutes, a couple of long ledgers would be passedaround, followed by a few photographs loosely bundled togetherwith a shoelace. A clock in the room next door struck twelve. Sud-denly, the focused, intent quiet of the room was broken by MrsLele’s sharp comment, ‘Who is holding up the foreign boys’ file?Pass it on. It is not your personal property! There is a queue linedup for that file! Come on now. Which one of you has the F21 file?’

Mrs Lele manages one of the oldest marriage bureaus formiddle-class and upper-middle-class families in Mumbai. The F21file referred to the file folder that contained information abouteligible young migrant bachelors (mostly residing in either theUK or USA) who had been registered at the bureau by their fam-ilies. The Lele bureau is an intermediary matchmaking agency witha mission to help families arrange satisfactory marital alliances.The majority of its clients are primarily Marathi-speaking, middle-and upper-middle-class Hindu families. Many live in the state ofMaharashtra itself (mostly Mumbai and Pune) and those who liveelsewhere register through the help of family members or friendsin the Mumbai–Pune region. Almost every ethnic community boastsof at least a few such intermediaries, specialising in connectingfamilies who seek alliances for their children. As more and morepeople move away from their ancestral villages and hometowns,either by migrating to larger Indian towns or abroad, their kin-ship networks weaken. Marriage bureaus and matrimonial inter-mediaries become a useful site from which to connect with othersin their communities. In spite of print-based (newspapers andmagazine advertisements) and online matrimonial services (suchas matrimony.com or shaadi.com), marriage bureaus such asMrs Lele’s are still in high demand.1 While Mrs Lele utilises the



Browsing for Bridegrooms • 251


agency’s revenue to support charitable organisations, most otherbureaus and intermediaries are profit-making enterprises, gen-erating a healthy source of income from this venture.

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of arranged mar-riages among young urban middle-class Hindu women inMumbai.2 Specifically, it is an inquiry into how certain culturalpractices discursively and materially inhabit and speak to thelarger framework of modernity and class-making (Appadurai1996; Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu 1984; Giddens 1992; Liechty 2003;Rofel 1999). It highlights the ways in which traditional practicesare invoked, appropriated and reproduced for very contemporarypurposes. Finally, it suggests that the prevalent consumerist culturein urban India plays a key role in texturing women’s ideas aboutmarriage, family and personhood and provides them with a newvocabulary to articulate their domestic dreams and desires.

Arranged marriages can be generally defined as those maritalalliances ‘arranged’ by the elders and extended family membersthrough their own social networks or with the help of marriageintermediaries. Couples are either introduced to each other and/or are shown each other’s photographs or videos and allowed tocommunicate via phone or letters (and more recently, via e-mails).Give or take a few variations, it generally plays out thus: Parentsor relatives of eligible men and women solicit proposals, scan thereceived data on the basis of their requirements and set up meet-ings among themselves before introducing their sons/daughtersinto the mix.

Once the elders are comfortable with the suitability of the alli-ance, a meeting between the couple is arranged. The couple meetsin the presence of family elders and is allowed or sometimes en-couraged to spend some time getting to know each other. Thismight mean an hour or two in the verandah or the dining roomwhile the parents make small talk in the living room. Or, it couldbe a short trip to the local barista, a walk on the building terrace,or in the case of the wealthier, a coffee shop of a luxury hotel.Horoscopes are generally exchanged, and once the couple con-sents, the elders take over discussion of the nitty-gritty details ofthe wedding preparation: Who will bear the costs of the wedding?How much jewellery will be given to the bride? What presents





will be gifted to the groom’s family? What consumer items will begiven to the young couple to help them set up their new home? Awedding date is fixed, and venues, caterers and priests booked.Long engagements are generally frowned upon for no one wantsto risk a break-up, especially the bride’s family; a broken engage-ment would sully their daughter’s reputation and jeopardise anyfuture possibility of a suitable alliance.

It was assumed that modernisation would bring about women’sempowerment and subsequently more autonomy for women,which would naturally imply a reduction in arranged marriages,especially among the educated middle class. However, in spite ofmodernisation and a high value for girls’ education, the arrangedmarriage system retains its popularity (Chawla 2007).3 Even today,over 90 per cent of Indians, including the middle classes, chooseto marry through the arranged marriage system (Mullatti 1995).This article is a move towards understanding the enduring appealof arranged marriages among the urban modern.

Marriage strategies, as classed and gendered cultural enact-ments offer us a glimpse into some of the ways that people mightbe/come to be ‘modern’. As such, arranged marriages provide aparticularly useful arena within which to observe the tension be-tween traditional notions of family-making and modern desiresof individual growth. However, even as they collide, it is here thatthese seemingly polar opposites are reconciled. This article asksthe following two crucial questions: First, how might a patriarchalcultural artifact intended as a controlling and disciplining mechan-ism be seen by some of its users as freeing, empowering? Second,how is one to understand agency 4 within such a discourse? Dothese agentive actions have the power to fundamentally transformthe structure within which they are produced or might they un-wittingly reify and reproduce the very structure that agents believethemselves to be free from?5

For women in India, marriage implies a change from the statusof kanya or kumarika (unmarried girl) to suhagin (married woman).This change involves an ideological change too, from belongingto the natal home to fitting into the marital home (Skoda 2002).This change of position is largely hypergamous; families makeevery effort to marry their daughters to those of a higher social





status (Das 1993; Dumont 1966; Uberoi 1993). Such marriages areoften accompanied by the giving of dowry by the wife givers tothe wife takers—the practice of gift giving by the wife givers thatbegins at the time of marriage and continues well beyond the actualwedding (Kishwar 1999). These transactions among wife takersof higher status and wife givers of lower status give rise to skewedpower dynamics and subsequent exploitation of the less en-franchised. Women entering their married homes generally havevery little power until they themselves become mothers of sonsand eventually mothers-in-law.6

Scholarly work reveals how families through the giving andreceiving of women establish and maintain their place in the socialstructures of caste, class, kinship, community and nation (Irigaray1985; Rajagopal 1999; Rubin 1975). Furthermore, this traffic isheavily reliant upon the complicity of women. So what of womenthemselves? Do they have no active part to play in this traffic?Might not their beliefs, thoughts and actions be influenced by newand emerging discourses of modernity, womanhood and rights?Do these new contemporary ways of thinking disrupt this trafficin women? Do they create ruptures and tensions in patriarchalpatterns of giving and receiving? As the ethnography in this articlereveals, indeed very much so, and in unexpected ways.

While the notion of marriage as a means of upward socialmobility is neither novel nor uniquely Indian (Hilowitz 1976; Miles1999), what is new and exciting is the way many young womenappropriate the arranged marriage system in order to accomplishtheir own personal objectives. While family unity and harmonyare important motivations, personal happiness too is a crucial con-sideration. This article outlines some of the factors that constitutewomen’s notion of personal happiness, such as professionalgrowth, an enhanced lifestyle or the welfare and class maintenanceof other family members. The ethnography presented here high-lights two significant points—first, that personal happiness mightitself be understood through one’s position as a family member,hinging on one’s ability to bring happiness and well-being in thelives of other family members, second, and more important, thatthe women who choose arranged marriages do indeed invoke theidea of personal happiness! They recognise and seize the personal





opportunities made possible by such alliances and in so doing, re-concile the notion of ‘social’ choice with ‘personal’ choice. In fact,as my informants reveal, contrary to popularly held notions of ar-ranged marriage as obligatory, restrictive or even oppressive, manyyoung women perceive the system of arranged marriage as eman-cipatory and empowering.7

On the basis of over 16 months of fieldwork in Mumbai, I ex-plored how gender and family in urban India have been shapedwithin the context of neo-liberalisation. Data for this study werecollected during two separate field stays in India, the first lasting4 months in 2002 and the second lasting for 12 months in 2004–2005. A total of six focus groups, 100 surveys and 85 semi-structuredinterviews were conducted during these periods. These includedinterviews with four marriage brokers, two marriage bureausand 30 matrimonial service clients. Informants were chosen as‘middle class’, based on their own identification as such. No eco-nomic definitions were used to categorise this group. Informantswere selected through random sampling and snowballing andprovided ethnographic accounts of many aspects of family, mar-riage and community such as dowry, son preference and variousforms of physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

Marriage and intimacy are intensely private issues and researcharound it carries high ethical and practical barriers. As such, itposes methodological challenges to a study that is grounded inethnographic data and relies heavily on narratives and oral his-tories. Having worked as a domestic violence/rape crisis coun-sellor for over 10 years, I was well equipped to deal with thesechallenges and could maintain an atmosphere of trust and safetyat all times. My own subject position as an Indian woman bornand raised in Mumbai and married through the arranged marriagesystem too contributed greatly to my informants’ feeling of easeand comfort.

Arranged Marriage

The practice of arranged marriage is frequently understood as anoppressive patriarchal mechanism, which in direct contrast to lovemarriage,8 subordinates women’s personal/individual choice and





freedom in favour of parental and community choice (Ahearn 2004;Béteille 1991; Mody 2006; Uberoi 2006).9 Popular media in India(films, television serials, talk shows, online discussion boards andlifestyle magazines) is constantly rife with debates on the prosand cons of arranged versus love marriages. In these discourses,women who have their marriages arranged by families are largelyperceived as traditional and conservative, whereas women whochoose their own partners are viewed as modern, progressive andindependent. Popular accounts about arranged marriages usuallyrevolve around issues of filial duty, obedience to elders, trust inparents’ judgement of their children, acceptance of destiny and soon. In these accounts, arranged marriages are perceived as morelikely to be exploitative and oppressive than love marriages.

Age played a big role in my informants’ perspectives on thesubject. Most of my older (50–75) and middle-aged (40–50) infor-mants had arranged marriages and their perspectives privilegedtradition, custom, the ‘Indian way of doing things, the Indian wayof life’. I knew from prior conversations that many of them hadexperienced varying degrees of control and abuse from their hus-bands and in-laws. Discussions about their own arranged mar-riages almost invariably evoked tales of humiliation and derision,as incident after incident illustrated the ways in which their fam-ilies were socially shamed, publicly chastised or taunted for dowry.

But even as most of my older informants agreed that marriagewas unavoidable, they also spoke about it as a not-so-pleasant,albeit inevitable rite of passage. During interviews, they wouldoften remark that it was not as if they had a love marriage; thusdifficult husbands and bullying in-laws were to be expected. Manyconfided that they now encouraged their daughters to choose theirpartners themselves rather than letting their families choose forthem.10 Indeed, some of my older informants were rather sus-picious of arranged proposals. ‘You never know why the fellowhas agreed to marry you’, one informant remarked. ‘It could bethat his parents are forcing him or that he has some other chakkar(intrigue) and wants to cover it up. Vyavastheet chaukashi karaavee(one must investigate these proposals very carefully)!’ Such sus-picions were not unjustified; stories about young men’s familiesarranging dowry-based alliances abounded, as did stories about





young homosexual men whose parents forced them into marriagein order to ‘cure’ them of their homosexual desires. There werealso several examples of young men working in Western countrieswhose parents would pressurise them to marry a girl of their choiceto pre-empt him from marrying a non-Indian woman.

But in spite of encouragement from their mothers to find theirown mates, many young women were increasingly turning to theirfamilies to help arrange their marriages. It seemed rather surpris-ing to me that when given a choice, women would opt to have anarranged marriage. My older informants attributed the persistenceof the arranged marriage system to the social structure, specificallyto the continual financial, emotional and cultural dependence ofyoung women on their families and control of daughters by theirfamilies before marriage. For example, an aunt told me ‘Girls gostraight from their father’s house to their husband’s home. Wherewill they meet the boys? In college, these things remain crushesand dreams. To have real opportunities to meet your future partner,you have to be in the same profession, or work in the same officeor something. Only then can you actually spend time with eachother and know if you like one another for the long term!’ Suchnarratives suggested that with the social, educational and financialemancipation of young women, such encounters would becomepossible and real, subsequently facilitating a distinct shift awayfrom parental control over choice of marriage partners.

Yet, I found that that was not necessarily the case. What I dis-covered was that many young urban middle-class women whowere in a (social, cultural and financial) position to choose theirown marriage partners still turned to the arranged marriage sys-tem, letting their parents help them find a suitable match. Wasthis an instance where modern ways of being were eschewed infavour of tradition and custom? Was there a return to the traditionalfold of marriage-making happening here? Or, was it possible thatthe arranged marriage offered these young women somethingnovel, something more than self-made marriages?

I contend that it did indeed offer some unique opportunitiesfor many young women, particularly the freedom to mandate cer-tain crucial qualifications in the men they would marry.11 Thesewomen associated falling in love with a loss of power; one had no





control over the kind of person one might fall in love with. As oneinformant told me ‘You don’t fall in love by choice. Ho jata hai (Itjust happens). Then you have no choice, if he is rich or poor, Hinduor Muslim’. Arranged marriages on the other hand, provided abetter chance to select their own life partner, to get ‘what we wantin a man’.

Interestingly, what these young women ‘wanted in a man’ hadmuch to do with the possibilities this marriage opened up for them,which of their desires they could imagine being fulfilled throughmarriage to him! While opinions/views on romance and love werearticulated, desires concerning professional aspirations werevoiced frequently. For example, women would often tell me thatthey really wanted to marry someone who would allow/encouragethem to work, who would not force them to stay at home and‘waste’ their lives. Their ideal man must earn enough so that theywere not obligated to work, but could do the work they wanted todo without worrying about the income they generated. Hence,proposals that specified ‘working’ women were not as highlyvalued for they signified the inability of the men to support theirfamilies on a single income.

While they recognised that they had the power to choose, theyalso recognised that they too would be ‘chosen’ out of a large andfairly competitive pool of eligible women. As a young informantcynically commented ‘We are all fish swimming in the same smallpond. Every once in a while someone bites the bait. If they are notcaught, they are back in the pond swimming until the next hookgets them!’ The question then became how to ‘bite the bait’, makeoneself more viable, a stronger candidate?

Some young women achieved this through educational quali-fications. For example, an informant told us that she was now mar-ried to a man whose family had rejected her the first time aroundon the ground that her educational qualification was unsuitable(a bachelor’s degree in English). They had wanted their son tomarry a woman with an engineering degree so that she could finda job soon after marriage and migration to the Silicon Valley in theUS. Two years later, now armed with a short course in computerprogramming, she was reviewed again and, this time, was joyfullyaccepted into the family fold as his wife. Her dream to live abroad





and his hope for a dual income lifestyle were effectively realisedthrough her educational endeavours.

Even as young women such as the informant above fortifiedtheir ‘wifely’ resumes thus, many other young women were dis-couraged from appearing too ‘career oriented’ during marriagenegotiations. Voicing their professional aspirations might markthem as ‘too interested in furthering their own lives’ and thusineligible as a candidate for the post of ‘good wife’. Some of myinformants shared with me the language they were trained to useduring bride-viewing and reviewing sessions. With a few varia-tions, it went somewhat like this: ‘I would be happy to work ifneeded. It would be nice if I can devote time to the home and thenfind some time to do something meaningful. Whatever work I do,I will make sure that it doesn’t clash with my first priority whichwould be my family and my home’.

Such contradictions in presenting and representing offer aglimpse into the fraught and highly charged nature of genderedsocial imagination. Later in the article, I highlight some of theethnographic accounts of some of my young female informants,aged between 19 and 27 years, who were dealing with exactly suchissues during my field research.

‘Yaar, shaadi to karni hai hi! (Marriage is inevitable, buddy)’

I first met Roopali at the bureau, where she had accompanied hermaternal aunt. Roopali had already been introduced to a fewsuitors, but none had met her expectations.12 For the past twomonths, her family had focused their efforts on one particularfamily. The young man Rahul was still in the US and scheduled tovisit his parents during his vacation. Roopali and her parents hadalready visited his home several times in the past few weeks andmet various members of his family. ‘First I met his mom and dadand sister, then the next time, they said, come over, his grand-parents are visiting, then they called and said his aunt wants tomeet me . . . on and on and on. I mean I’ve met eight members ofhis family before I’ve even met him. Of course, each time, naveenkapde, naveen daaginey (new clothes, new jewellery). . . . But mummasays that’s a good sign. That they like me, or else why would they





bother meeting me again and again? I suppose that’s true. Besides,better to meet everyone before, rather than later, no? After all,you’re marrying the family, not just the boy! Except it is such abore to dress up every time and mind your p’s and q’s in front ofall those oldies. Plus you have to keep making excuses to yourboss for not showing up at work!’

This astounding narrative reflecting the notion of marriage asbeing about two families rather than two people was not excep-tional. Roopali was already beginning to imagine herself as partof Rahul’s family. I wondered how she would react when she metRahul. Would he pass muster? Would he exceed her expectations?Or, would she make herself believe in his suitability because shehad already invested so much in the idea of being with him? Inthis realm of elastic kinship networks, stretching to absorb newfamily members with their own dreams and hopes, where did lovefigure, that universally understood sentiment of intimate bonding?How also could one appreciate that this narrative of repeated bride-viewing might (in no small measure because of its sheer candour)at first hearing be mistaken for a series of job interviews?13

Patricia Uberoi observes that, ‘Whatever the other changes inIndian society, matchmaking still remains the prerogative of familyelders, not of the two persons involved’ (Uberoi 1993: 36). How-ever, even though the family elders were involved, Roopali andRahul were clearly central to the decision-making, and their opin-ions were highly valued. Rahul could turn her down if he did notlike her. Roopali too had enough social privilege and family sup-port to voice her dissent this time as she had with previous pro-posals. However, she had noticed that the pressure was mounting.Young women paid a higher price for being picky than youngmen. Roopali’s parents had already warned her of the hazards ofrejecting too many proposals; she would be labelled as difficultand wilful and eventually would remain unmarried.

Roopali enjoyed spending time with Rahul’s family. She hadbefriended his sister and cousins and found his parents warm andconsiderate. If his family was any indication, she was confidentthat when she met Rahul, they would approve of each other. Ap-proval and acceptance from Rahul’s family members was as im-portant and vital as getting along with Rahul. In fact, as her mother





had remarked, Rahul’s acceptance of her might well have beencontingent on his family’s approval of her. While the couple’s com-patibility was essential, a major factor in this compatibility wouldbe parental approval and compatibility between both families. Thiswould ensure domestic harmony and thus a good beginning to anewly married life, even though the couple would live in the USand would only see the extended family about once every year.

Diverting her energies towards these multiple interactions wasnaturally resulting in Roopali’s declining commitment to her job.Family meetings required considerable effort in terms of trips tothe salon for a facial and a hair styling session, shopping for clothesand accessories, working on becoming increasingly more enticingin dress, manner and conversation. Other informants have sharedwith me, on occasion, their own anxieties about their appearanceand attractiveness at bride-viewing ceremonies, and I am certainRoopali too was concerned about these things.

Cognisant of the cultural coding of her clothing, Roopali variedwhat she wore, donning saris and salwar-kurtas when she visitedhis grandparents, choosing jeans or skirts when she met his cousinsand aunts. She made a concerted effort to embody the perfect bal-ance between traditional and modern, in dress and manner. Shehad begun to dabble in cooking his favourite dishes, listening tomusic that he enjoyed. She loved the informality of life in his par-ents’ home and envisioned a similar life for herself, different fromthe strict and disciplined atmosphere of her parents’ home. Herinvestment in nurturing her relationship with this family stemmedfrom her belief that this was ‘the right’ proposal for her. She lookedforward to migrating to the US and partaking in a new way of lifeas Rahul’s wife and member of his family. Even though she hadnot yet met or spoken to him, she believed that his family was awindow to his world and knowing them meant knowing quite abit about him.

As sociologist Margaret Abraham states, ‘as opposed to the West,the assumption in South Asian culture is that as long as the largerfamilial issues are covered, love will develop after marriage asthe couple negotiates their relationship’ (Abraham 2000: 19). Thenegotiation had already begun in Roopali’s case with her cheerful





participation in Rahul’s family. She was convinced that her lovefor Rahul would come about from her affection for his family.

By now, Roopali had informed her manager of her future plans.Upon hearing these plans, he had withdrawn his mentorship ofher and picked a male colleague in her group to take over the nextproject. When I asked Roopali why she was jeopardising herlucrative job even before she had met Rahul, she reasoned thatshe did not see much of a future in a job like this. She could do itfor some pocket money, but it was by no means a permanent pro-fessional endeavour. Then, shrugging her shoulders, she claimed,‘Yaar, shaadi toh akhir karni hi hai. Ek na ek din, boss ko batana hi padega(Hey buddy, after all marriage is inevitable; one day or another,the boss will have to be told).’

In Roopali’s mind, marriage was a non-negotiable certainty. Itwas as much a socially imposed requirement as an internal motiva-tion. Much of her identity stemmed from a sense of her future as amarried woman. However, within these parameters, Roopali wasjudicious in the decisions she made. The proposals she had initiallyturned down would have necessitated her to compromise her per-sonal and professional ambitions. Rahul provided the perfect back-drop to her plans for the future. His modern and loving family inIndia and his own upper-middle-class life in the West all fit verywell into the happy future she had imagined for herself.

Sandhya Smiles, Gently Twisting a Straw betweenHer Fingers. ‘I Don’t have that much Time Left.My Younger Sister is Turning 24’

Sandhya and I were sitting cross-legged on a parapet at Juhu Beach,sipping coconut water from tender kernels. I had returned from along day of interviews and she was on her way to work, nattilydressed in a Nike T-shirt and trendy blue jeans. On that evening,barefooted and willowy Sandhya looked very young, hardly outof college herself! Sandhya worked night shifts at a BPO/call centreand loved her job. A few weeks ago, we had started chatting aboutdating and office romances, and this was our third meeting. Inour previous meetings, she had confided in me about a senior col-league whom she had fallen quickly and quite madly in love with





and dreamt of marrying. About four months into their relation-ship, she had discovered that he was already married. His wifeand children lived in the Middle East, where his wife worked as afinance executive. With a very heavy heart, Sandhya had forcedherself to end her relationship with him. She confessed that shemight not have been able to, had she not seen her best friend gothrough a similar situation a few years ago. Her friend was unableto sever ties with her lover and still hoped that one day he wouldleave his wife and marry her. Sandhya was convinced that herfriend was hoping for something she would never get and hadtried to talk her friend out of the relationship but to no avail.

These experiences had left Sandhya extremely wary of the menshe met at work. Even though she still missed him, she knew shehad done the right thing. ‘They only want one thing’, she had saidto me, ‘And just because you work in call centres and wear Westernclothes and laugh and chat they think you are fast! Better to stayaway from men at work’. The hectic pressures of working at aBPO left Sandhya with very little time to meet men outside herprofession. Her family consisted of three women—herself, hermother and sister. Her father had died when Sandhya was four,and her mother14 had worked very hard to ensure a good educa-tion and a respectable lifestyle for her daughters. Having studiedat an all girls’ school and college, neither Sandhya nor her youngersister had male school friends. Her sister was as quiet, reticentand shy as Sandhya was outgoing and bubbly. There was no doubtthat unlike Sandhya, who could have/would have chosen her ownmate, her sister would require her family’s help in arranging amarriage for herself.

Sandhya realised that the choices she made would have seriousimplications for her sister’s life. The evening that we met, underthe orange pink glow of the setting sun, Sandhya told me that shehad finally acquiesced to her mother’s pleas to meet her friend’sson (who lived and worked on a tea plantation in Northeast India).His background sounded suitable and interesting and althoughthey had never met, Sandhya was certain that the match would befinalised. She knew that people viewed her as a very attractive,articulate and quietly self-assured young woman. She also knew





that marriage to him meant giving up her job and moving far awayfrom an urban lifestyle. She joked with me that given the natureand location of his job, he would have seen so few urban womenthat he would gladly marry the first one he met.

Since her break-up, Sandhya had begun to feel betrayed by herown lack of judgement. Increasingly, she had begun to trust in themaxim that her family knew best, that she was incapable of makingthe right decisions and that she needed their help. ‘In arrangedmarriages, everyone is working to make your marriage successful.Your family knows you in and out, knows what will make youhappy, who will make you happy! When you are young, you getfooled in love. In arranged marriage, no one plays games. Everyoneis upfront. You know just what you are getting into’. This wassuch a completely opposite view to those of my older informants!To Sandhya, arranged marriages were a transparent transaction.The terms of the contract were definitive and left no room formisinterpretation or misrecognition.

Sandhya’s self-doubt spoke of a growing angst and uncertaintyamong many young Indians, struggling with the dramatic social,cultural and political transformations presently occurring in thecountry. Gender ideologies were crucially connected to these trans-formations (Mankekar 1999). Urban middle-class communitieswere only just becoming accustomed to the idea of women in pro-fessional jobs. Many young women in Sandhya’s generation hadbeen raised in households where mothers stayed at home whilefathers earned the livelihood. Gender roles, distribution of labourand equality in decision-making played out differently in thesehouseholds. These young women were now confronted with thequestion of how to resolve materially, logistically and ideologicallythe home–work balance.

Dorinne Kondo aptly points out, ‘identity is not a unified es-sence, but a mobile site of contradiction and disunity, a node wherevarious discourses temporarily intersect in particular ways’(Kondo 1990: 47). My informants too perceived themselves throughmultiple registers not only as individuals with individual goalsand desires but also as members of families and extended kinshipnetworks. Sandhya’s narrative privileged her duty as daughter





and sister. Her experience with finding her own partner had endeddisastrously, leaving her mistrustful of her own ability to judgeand decide wisely. Thrust into a workplace where young men andwomen worked in close proximity, Sandhya, who had verylittle experience in dealing with men on a regular basis, felt ill-equipped, and her confusion intensified. Life at the BPO was likea fantasy, a bright and blurred kaleidoscope, a frenzied jumble ofunnatural, de-contextualised and displaced modes of working,thinking and being. The days were spent catching up on sleep,and the nights were bright and vigorous. Graveyard shifts drastic-ally reduced contact with family members and friends outside ofthe BPO world. In this air-conditioned, fluorescent surreal work-space buzzing with new accents and cultivated speech, easy moneyand young and youthful interactions, it was easy to forget that theworld existed outside this space. Sandhya had begun to find herselflosing her grip on her ‘real world’, feeling uprooted and displaced.

Other informants too had voiced a similar uncertainty and un-easiness about the world that was rapidly modernising aroundthem. Changes in the public world resulted in disorder and turmoilin the private world. Jobs in the private sector increasingly in-volved heavy interaction between men and women, late workinghours, outstation travel and overnight hotel stays on work tripswith male colleagues. The exciting work opportunities challengedhitherto restrictive social mores for girls and young women, result-ing in increased domestic conflict and a heightened confusion.Women’s efforts to stake their claim in the public realm of theworkplace clashed with their domestic obligations, filial respon-sibilities and social expectations. Sandhya and some of my otherinformants found in an arranged match a solution to this clash ofworlds, a means to recover a modicum of control and a way tonail down a peg in a swirling storm of change.

In that salt-scented twilight, Sandhya’s optimism was poignantand unnerving. She insisted that the choice she was making wasnot just a sacrifice for the sake of her sister; it was also the rightchoice for her. Negotiating the delicate tightrope walk betweenher dreams for herself and for her natal family had long becomeintrinsic to Sandhya’s life.





‘If One Can have the Best of Both Worlds, Why Not?This Way, I Can Work and be Married’

Meghna and I sat chatting on a bench in the Nana Nani Park.Meghna’s backpack, loaded with books on the latest innovationsin fibre-optics lay at her feet. Meghna was a few months awayfrom graduating with a basic degree in electrical engineering andplanned to apply to universities in the US. Meanwhile, her parentswere frantically searching for US-based Telugu Brahmin men shecould marry and settle down with while simultaneously pursuinga higher degree. Meghna was completely open to the idea. ‘Whynot? If one can have the best of both worlds, why not? Life abroadis lonely. Besides, if he is an engineer, he’ll be able to guide me,show me the ropes. And his parents won’t mind because they’llbe Brahmins!’

As we spoke, I was stunned at how Meghna’s narrative so effort-lessly flowed between old fashioned and new ideas. I was strug-gling to reconcile her status as an ambitious engineering studentwith her easy, unapologetic willingness to meet suitable youngmen chosen by her parents. And yet, what made her narrativeinteresting was not the obvious dichotomy between the traditionaland the modern but that each enabled, supported and in fact but-tressed the other. Indeed, what Meghna presented here was a pro-foundly modern discourse of tradition.

In Meghna’s narrative, notions of tradition and modernity werecurrently produced from her position as a member of the urban,upper-class and upper-caste privileged group. Meghna perfectlyexemplified the new Indian woman; modern but non-Western,embodying the ‘Indian virtues of modesty, tradition and duty’while pursuing modern values of education and career. Femaleliteracy and empowerment through education is a highly priorit-ised political goal of the Indian nation state. However, this em-powerment is carefully weighed in against women’s traditionallyrecognised role allowing for a ‘sufficient modernity’ (Rajan 1991)without jeopardising the status quo. Even as they are included indiscourses of equal citizenship, subtle ideological pressures andreal public dangers help sustain their exclusion from the publicspaces of modernity (Chanana 2003; Rajagopal 1999; Rajan 1991).





It is along these insidious and shifting spaces of the contemporaryscenario that urban educated women like my informants experi-ence the ‘sexually ordered’ social world (Bourdieu 1998: 95).

For upper-caste Hindu women, marriage was the last stage oflife (Harlan and Courtwright 1995).15 Caste itself was genderedand required an implicit acceptance of male domination.16 Womenwere seen as the means through which men fulfilled the variousstages of domesticity, which included being married, producingoffspring and finally renouncing life as householder (and this in-cluded renouncing one’s role as husband and father).

Caste was a crucial regulatory category in marriage strategies.The questionnaires in all the marriage bureaus I visited (and onlinematrimonial sites) specifically asked for information about theapplicant’s caste and subcaste.17 While many clients were reluctantto consider any intercaste alliances, some were willing to discountcaste in favour of socioeconomic likeness. For example, businessfamilies preferred marrying their daughters into similar familiesrather than ‘day job’ professionals or people in government ser-vice. Caste often came to be conflated with class; just like class,caste too could provide clues to a family’s lifestyle, standard ofliving and ethical and moral viewpoint.18 Just like Meghna invokedher future in-laws’ value for education based on the know-ledge that she would marry within her caste, many other infor-mants too invoked caste frequently while speaking of attitudes,value systems and daily living habits. For example, I would oftenhear comments such as, ‘Brahmins can’t be good businessmen,they are too honest’ or ‘My daughter isn’t raised to think like abaniya (trader caste)’, or ‘People from lower classes don’t evenhave a bath everyday’. There remains a strong resistance towardsinter-caste marital alliances even today, as caste continues to bereferenced when making career choices, choosing friends, busi-ness partners and/or life partners or buying homes in specificneighbourhoods.

Meghna occupies that privileged position in terms of education,class and caste where her educational qualifications increase hercapital as both a potential wife as well as a professional. Meghna’sdecision to marry a non-resident Indian for all the reasons shementions, speaks of the ability and interest of the bourgeoisie to





establish and maintain their social position through their invest-ment in education as well as cultural practices (Bourdieu 1984:122). But evident in her narrative is the strain of middle-classwomanhood, or to borrow Mankekar’s words, ‘the tension be-tween the expectation of a good daughter and middle class com-pulsions to enter the labor force’ (Mankekar 1999: 123).

Young adults are often the means through which their familiescontinue to maintain their place in the quicksand of class mobil-ity. Families stake much of their income on educating their chil-dren, for it is understood that the success of the children ensuresthe success of the family. Young men and women, through a goodeducation and a well-paying job, can potentially pull the entirefamily up the social ladder (Dickey 2002; Papanek 1989). Childrenbecome a way for families to sustain/improve their social standing.While children can facilitate their families’ upward mobility, theycan also take their families on a downward spiral. While parentsmight invest heavily in the education of their sons, they mightspend equally and generously on their daughters’ weddings. Thecost of marrying daughters often is the single largest expense afamily endures, and this expense could send a family spirallingdown the class ladder. Yet, marriage is a means of social and gen-dered validity. The primary duty of ‘good parents’ still remainssecuring the best marital alliance possible for their daughter.

Bourdieu (1984) suggests that through practice, the social orderis naturalised, internalised and reproduced and that in the processof continuing practice, individuals or groups negotiate and ex-change various forms of capital in order to gain value for them-selves. When such a habitus has been fully integrated into the socialorder, the dominating class does not need to be directly involvedwith the reproduction of the social structure. Meghna’s wish tomarry must be seen in the context of this self-perpetuating, hegem-onic nature of habitus. Meghna’s parents were hesitant to let hergo abroad unaccompanied. They had already insisted that sheapply only to colleges in cities where their relatives lived. Meghnaknew that eventually the pressure to marry would be too strongto resist. Migration through marriage offered a solution to thehurdles facing her professional goals. For Meghna, marriage wasa means to an end and not simply an end in itself.





‘Arranged Marriage Lets You Choose. See… Howwhen You Come into a Store, You Don’t Just Buythe First Thing You Spot? You See if You Like it,if it Fits You, if the Price is Right’

I had met Ruta, a journalist, through my cousin and had taken animmediate liking to her. She was spunky, charming and well read.Because of her father’s job postings, she had opportunities to studyin various schools in India, the Philippines and Australia. Duringour third meeting, Ruta told me about her plans to meet a youngman whose family her mother had contacted through the bureau.Since I had met Ruta, this was the third proposal that she wasconsidering. She had turned down the first; while the boy ‘wasn’tbad’, she was not particularly impressed with the family’s standardof living and lifestyle. Her parents had gently informed the fam-ily that the horoscopes did not match—a ubiquitous excuse thatfamilies offer when they have to refuse a proposal; it helps every-one save face. It was unclear what happened with the second pro-posal. I suspected that this time it was she who had been turneddown for when I questioned her about it she was unusually vagueand had quickly changed the subject. She had answered my quer-ies in monosyllables, her expression dejected, her gaze soft anddowncast.

This third meeting was a month later, and Ruta was back to herusual self—chirpy, funny and full of laughter. A staunch proponentof the arranged marriage system, she had spent the earlier hourenumerating its advantages in response to my sceptical comments.In her opinion, arranged marriages were all about crafting the per-fect match. Where else could you decide all the parameters youwanted in a partner, she asked me. ‘The right height, the rightfamily background, the right job’ She even joked (although I wasbeginning to feel it was not really a joke) that one could even choosea family where there would be no mother-in-law and thus, ‘nomother-in-law issues’.

Ruta was a dream informant. She used catchy phrases and hada way of cutting to the chase quickly and brutally and in a tongue-in-cheek manner, which I found very intriguing. Yet, I was taken





aback when she concluded her point about arranged marriagesby saying it was like shopping for clothes. Knowing how vul-nerable women become in the arranged marriage system, as theyare paraded back and forth to be viewed and reviewed, Ruta’sremark was revelatory; it opened up the idea that some womendid actually view this space not as one of humiliation and rejectionbut of choice and possibilities, not from the vantage point of objects,but rather as consumers themselves, as people who had the free-dom to select and acquire something they desired.

Could this novel self-assured woman be a sign of coming times,a sign of the changing status of women? Giddens suggests that ‘ina post-traditional order, the narrative of self has to be continuallyreworked, and lifestyle practices brought in line with it, if the indi-vidual is to combine personal autonomy with a sense of ontologicalsecurity’ (Giddens 1991: 75). Could Ruta’s comment be viewedthen as a strategic deployment by modern Indian womanhoodthat has used narratives of development and modernity to imaginea new future for itself, indeed to create a new modernity itself?Did she really ‘believe’19 in the empowered and empowering im-agination that her narrative produced?

Conjugal life in India and elsewhere is rife with inequalitiesand marriage implies a huge cost to women. Most women investfar more in their conjugal lives than in their professional endeav-ours. They often inherit less than their male siblings do, dependfinancially on their spouses and spend a large part of their livesout of the workforce to raise their children. An investment in agood marriage insures a woman’s social capital, for as de Singlynotes, when a woman ‘becomes involved in marriage and familylife her capital undergoes a devaluation in relation to the labourmarket, but also retains its value by being reinvested in the mar-riage market’ (de Singly 1996: 23). In Ruta’s upper-middle-classworld, her cosmopolitan upbringing, worldliness and charmingpersona honed by the privileges of an elite lifestyle will accrueenough cultural capital to allow her to be in a position to chooseher husband from among a very eligible pool of wealthy youngmen. It is almost certain that she will find a more eligible suitorthrough ‘browsing’ at the bureau than if she were to meet someoneon her own at her workplace.





Concluding Remarks

Even though the focus of this article is not about the differencesbetween the marital experiences of women in arranged versus lovemarriage, it is important to make a few clarifications. Marriage ingeneral has been recognised, historically and culturally, as a siteof extreme gender inequalities, masculine domination and vio-lence. It is through the institution of marriage that ‘patriarchalcontrol is exercised over a woman on the basis of her multiplesubordinate statuses as wife, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law andmother and here that men dominate, exploit and demand vari-ous rights and privileges as husband and son-in-law’ (Abraham2000: 22). Indeed, as past studies have shown, the experience ofmarital exploitation and oppression is not limited to ‘arrangedmarriages’; women in self-made marriages are equally susceptibleto it. As one informant who had eloped with her boyfriend20 years ago said to me somewhat dejectedly, ‘After you get mar-ried a wife is a wife!’ Once married, many face similar treatmentat the hands of their in-laws. In fact, older informants in love mar-riages confided that in times of crisis they could not expect thesame kind of support from their natal families as they would havehad their marriage been arranged. Parents who had arranged theirchildren’s marriage felt much more responsible for the success oftheir children’s marriage, thus playing a much bigger role as inter-mediary during marital conflict; when the marriage floundered,they rushed to aid, help, support and maybe even rescue. Womenwho had chosen their own partners strongly felt this lack of sup-port. ‘My parents kept off when we fought’ one informant toldme, ‘My parents told me directly—you made your bed, now golie in it. If things went wrong, it was my fault, they were washingtheir hands of the affair. I had to ask my friends for help, to talk tohim, to make him see sense’.

On the other hand, most of my older informants believed thatchoosing one’s own partner made for a happier and more com-patible married life. The skewed power inequity inherent in ar-ranged marriages predisposed women to exploitation, oppressionand violence. The arranged marriage system is a patriarchal artifact





invested in maintaining caste purity, class privileges and gen-der hierarchy. Thus gender asymmetry (due to hypergamy andexogamy) is an inherent feature of arranged marriage; its usersare by no means valued equally; men are privileged more thanwomen, upper caste more than lower caste, the rich more than thepoor.

In light of this, might young women choosing the arranged mar-riage system fall into the same trap, or could they benefit from theopportunity that they imagine possible? Might their potentiallysubversive enactment of a traditional script simply end up beinganother failed performance or might such subversion really befacilitated? Could the arranged marriage system function at thevery least as a site for struggle, for fissures within which womenmight find opportunities for resisting hegemonic discourses ofwomanhood? Or would they simply be the product of a new patri-archy formed along the intersections of class, caste and discoursesof modernity?

I suggest that the key to understanding this phenomenon isto recognise the multiplicity of slippery meanings within thisdiscourse. What I have tried to convey in this article is my ownambivalence about this matter. At one level is my intellectual excite-ment at being able to instantiate how seemingly traditional culturalpractices might be deployed towards achieving modern goals,altering the structure they work within, creating unique oppor-tunities and possibilities for their users. At another level, I wondersomewhat fearfully if this might also be an instance of paradoxicalagency—where seemingly agentive actions themselves replicateand reify the structures of domination.

The ethnography in this article provides a wonderful exampleof an alternative modernity by highlighting young urban middle-class women’s perceptions of agency and personhood. Throughtheir ethnographic accounts, one sees how they are able to viewan age-old practice in a new light and via this new perspective en-vision empowering and enabling possibilities that might otherwisehave been unavailable to them. In this manner, they are able toreconcile traditional notions of family-making with modern desiresof individual growth. The practice of arranged marriages throughwhich members characteristically marry within their own caste





and class also provides a fine example of how the domestic realmis deployed in the project of class-making. Its connection to theproject of class maintenance makes the study of arranged marriageeven more pertinent in the context of urban India’s rapidly chang-ing social order.

To position the practice of arranged marriage simply as a patri-archal relic would be to ignore the empowering prospects andopportunities it presents to many. The arranged marriage systemhas much to offer its users: an opportunity to enhance professionalaspirations, a chance to migrate and a means to improve the livesof other family members.

By manoeuvring their positions within a patriarchal frameworkrather than outside it, women are able to negotiate through situa-tions of potential and real oppression and reposition themselvesvis-à-vis the family, the community and society at large. In thusimagining new ideas of being and belonging through conventionaland traditional practices, they are able to both complicate dialecticsof individuality and the collective and articulate new modes oflonging and belonging.

Notes

1. This demand is due to the personalised service that onsite bureaus canprovide. Many not only help fix the marriage alliance but also offer supportservices such as references to invitation card printing companies, weddinghalls and venues, caterers and access to travel and transportation agencies.This is particularly helpful when families host marriages away from theirhometown, or when weddings are organised at short notice.

2. Because of space limitations and because a large majority of Indians are Hindu.I restrict my analysis to middle-and upper-middle-class Hindu families.

3. Studies conducted in the 1970s revealed that an overwhelming majority ofcollege students disapproved of arranged marriages then. Two decades later,in the 1990s studies show a reversal of this trend (See Chawla 2007; Chandakand Sprecher 1992; Rao and Rao 1975).

4. Understood here as the culturally constrained capacity to act.5. To a large extent, this project is undergirded by Bourdieu’s study of structure,

habitus and class in the formation of society. I want to push this analysis fur-ther to see how it can apply to the institution of marriage, a specifically chargedsite where gender, caste, class and nationhood collide with and impact eachother. What other factors intersect the social categories of class? race? gender?





How can one unravel these in order to understand the possibilities and con-straints of a Bourdieuan analysis of social formations? How can this modelaccommodate different social formations that are complicated by more thantheir economic and cultural positions (I’m thinking here of political, racial,religious circumstances that create diverse and often conflicting identitiessuch as the postcolonial subject, the lower caste upwardly mobile immigrant,the postcolonial Indian aristocracy).

6. Traditionally, it was believed that women obtained power in the married homeonly after their sons married. In many cases, the cycle of power and controlcontinued because women who had felt previously disempowered were nowin a position of authority over their daughters-in-law. The ‘sandwich gen-eration’, where the cohort of women informants were between the ages of 50and 70, bemoaned the changing domestic space in which they were now sand-wiched between their domineering mothers-in-law and intolerant moderndaughters-in-law. The changing world of women, replete with new domesticviolence laws and new notions of womanhood had left them neither here northere. As one informant said to me, her ‘time never came’. For a wonderfulaccount of contemporary arranged marriages, contextualized within the largerhistory of Hindu marriage refer to Devika Chawla (2007).

7. I do bear in mind that such notions are necessarily reliant upon the culturalcapital that these women’s social positions allow them to acquire.

8. Madhu Kishwar suggests that we call them self-made marriages. However,for the purposes of my argument I often use the popular term ‘love marriage’.

9. Scholarly research has echoed this notion, identifying it as a site that repro-duces social inequality.

10. I was surprised on hearing these views, for like other scholars I had suspectedthat ‘most Indian parents do not approve of their children having love mar-riages’ (Medora 2003: 219).

11. These included specifications such as caste, class, educational qualifications,occupation, place of residence, age range, height, colour of skin, backgroundof parents, lifestyle (such as whether he lived with his parents or by himself,whether he lived in a rented apartment or owned his home and the like). Ofcourse, men, to a much larger degree could also specify exactly what kind ofwife they were looking for. It is interesting to see the ways in which the femalebody, as a site of reproduction plays into these specifications—for example,whether the girl wears glasses (has weak eyes), what her family’s medicalhistory is and so on. The male body, on the other hand is not formed in thismanner. In fact, popular discourse explicitly claims that a bride’s capital liesin her physical appearance and upbringing (bodily hexis being an importantmanifestation of this), while a man’s lies in his character, his profession andhis economic viability.

12. Bourdieu, in Distinction analyses ‘taste’ in French society and suggests thattaste is part of a struggle for social recognition and status in which lifestyleplays a key part. He also reiterates that taste is largely defined by the dominantclass so that the bourgeois aesthetic becomes the cultural capital seen as beinginherent in the bourgeois rather than being learnt or acquired.





13. I do not mean this facetiously, but in fact I want to trouble the still largely

prevalent notion: the distinction made between home and work, public and

private, outside and inside.

14. To supplement their savings and her late husband’s insurance fund, Sandhya’s

mother had begun conducting tuition classes from her home, coaching stu-

dents from Grade 4 through 8 in Mathematics and English.

15. For Hindu men on the other hand, the last stage of life was the renunciation

of marriage/domesticity (Harlan and Courtright 1995: 13).

16. It helps here to look at Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence as a way in

which the domination of women comes to be reproduced through discourse

and practice.

17. Historically, marriage has been the institution within which caste was reiter-

ated. Like one’s sex, caste too was literally inscribed on the body. Ideas about

purity and community within discourses of caste naturally implicated the

body as a carrier of purity or pollution. Incredibly, not just the body, but its

manifest externalities, such as its shadow, carried with it, meanings of purity

and pollution. For example, members of the lower caste had to walk away

from Brahmins in a way that their shadows did not fall upon the higher-caste

Brahmins. In case they did, the Brahmins were required to take a purifying

bath and the lower caste member was liable to public flogging or other similar

forms of punishment.

18. People believed that same-caste alliances would ensure similarities of lifestyle

and value systems—their outlook on education, women working outside the

home, cultural development (such as an interest in the fine arts, music, litera-

ture and so on), their treatment of women and the elders, dowry giving and

receiving practices and so on.

19. I use the word ‘belief’ in a de Certeaurian way, to acknowledge her ‘investment

in the act of saying and considering it true’ (de Certeau 1984: 178).

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