Book Reviews 215

modernity and in the continuation of social stratification in colonial

and postcolonial contexts.
This book would be useful for sociologists, social anthropologists
and social historians working on the issue of social inequalities in the
practice of sciences. Moreover, this book will prove to be an instrumental
articulation in the self-proclaimed value-neutral world of science.

Jyoti Sinha
Visiting Scholar
MIT, Women and Gender Studies
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Cambridge

Samita Sen, Ranjita Biswas and Nandita Dhawan (eds),

Intimate Others: Marriage and Sexualities in India. Kolkata,
India: Stree, 2011, 465 pp., `450.00, ISBN: 81-906760-1-6
DOI: 10.1177/2393861715574419

Sen, Biswas and Dhawan’s edited volume is a welcome contribution to

the field of sexuality, marriage and intimacy in South Asia. Running into
450 pages, this volume brings together a diverse collection of articles
dealing with the theme of intimacy and marriage in India. While some
chapters are based on the analysis of historical records and secondary
texts, others rely more on ethnography and surveys. The contributing
authors are a good mix of anthropologists, historians, sociologists,
economists, social workers and activists. The chapters offer wide-
ranging accounts of marriage practices and conjugality from colonial to
contemporary times. However, the book is heavily weighted towards
east India, particularly Bengal (both colonial and contemporary) which
is the focus of eight chapters out of 17. Two chapters each are based on
north (Punjab and Haryana) and south India (Kerala).
The volume is divided into four sections: ‘Historicising Marriage’,
‘Contextualizing Marriage’, ‘Representing Marriage’ and ‘Recasting
Marriage’. The first section, extremely rich in content, places marriage
in its historical context, tracing how Hindu marriage was reinvented
as a codified structure. Chakraborty’s discussion of kulin polygamy in

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nineteenth-century Bengal, Sen’s account of convict marriage systems

in Andaman and Bandyopadhyay’s chapter on elopements in Bengal, all
reflect on the anxieties of the colonial state and social reform movements
around topics of conjugality, heterosexuality, sanctity of the family,
women’s sexuality and agency.
The section on contextualising marriage places marriage in
contemporary times and examines how marriages are affected by social,
economic, demographic and legal processes. Three out of six chapters
are based on findings of an ambitious research project, undertaken by
the Jadavpur University, dedicated to exploring gender relations in
marriage in Kolkata. Mukhopadhyay’s chapter brings to the forefront
the notion of agency as expressed in marital choices of both men
and women. It complicates our understanding of love and arranged
marriages as essentially dichotomous by showing how arranged
marriages are given a gloss of romantic love in the courtship period by
engaging in ‘performative behaviour’—going out on dates, exchanging
gifts and flowers. Dhawan’s chapter illustrates how legal regulations
and social norms intertwine in different ways in the lives of working
class and middle class women to constitute different versions of what
is ‘legitimate’ in marriage. In this process, they often render invisible
the ways in which gender injustice prevails. Both Chowdhry and Padhi
discuss the ‘burden of patriarchy’ as experienced by men and women
albeit in different contexts. While Chowdhry’s chapter elaborates on the
social marginalisation of males who fail to get married in the sex-ratio
imbalanced state of Haryana, Padhi focuses on the burden of running the
household as experienced by widows of those farmers in Punjab who
committed suicide under pressure of the agrarian crisis.
The third section elaborates on the visual and print representations of
marriage and conjugality. Abraham’s nuanced study of wedding videos and
albums of the matrilineal Thiyyas community shows how the cameraman
as the new actor not only records customs but also invents them, often at
the cost of wiping out caste specific practices. Biswas’ chapter analyses
Bangla pornographic fiction and argues for shifting focus away from the
victim imagery of women to the vulnerability of the men, who turn to
pornography as a masculine fantasy to hide their inadequacies.
The final section on recasting marriage reminds one of Borneman’s
(1996) assertion that the hegemonic institution of heterosexual marriage
often marginalises those categories of persons who fall outside its realm—
the unmarried, divorced, homosexual and widowed—and attention must
be paid to the ways in which marriage contributes to such reification
and marginalisation. As much as the chapters in this section are about

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Book Reviews 217

marriage, they also speak authoritatively about non-marriage and the

implications that non-marriage has on sexuality in contemporary India.
This focus has allowed the contributors to explore alternative forms
of intimacy rather than privileging conjugality within the heterosexual
marriage. Whether it is Ghosh’s discussion of the ‘difficult figure of
prostitute-mother’ or Pappu’s chapter on ‘the unmarrying, unmarried
woman’ or Mokkil’s moving account of lesbian suicides in Kerala, all
successfully move beyond the secure domain of intimacy within the
normativised heterosexual marriage, and explore a world of alternate
intimacies and life practices, thereby problematising the conventional
and the normal.
The essays in this collection look behind and beyond the institutional
framework of marriage to critique the structures of everyday lives and
to explore new horizons and possibilities in the study of the domain of
the intimate. Most chapters are based on in-depth research and literary
analysis and offer a nuanced understanding of the notions of conjugality
and intimacy. The volume would have definitely benefitted more by
spreading out geographically rather than being heavily focused on
one region. Lacking also is an engagement with other recent works on
intimacies like that of Grover (2011), Mody (2008) and Chowdhry (2007).
However, the book is a valuable contribution, worth recommending to
anyone with a professional or personal interest in the field of marriage,
intimacy and sexuality in India.

References
Borneman, J. 1996. ‘Until Death Do Us Part: Marriage/Death in Anthropological
Discourse’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 23 (2): 215–35.
Chowdhry, P. 2007. Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Grover, S. 2011. Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences
of the Urban Poor in India. New Delhi: Social Science Press.
Mody, P. 2008. The Intimate State: Love-marriages and Law in Delhi. New
York: Routledge.

Paro Mishra
Research Scholar
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology
New Delhi

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