Marriage in South Asia:Continuities and Transformations

By-Rajni Palriwala and Ravinder Kaur

Introduction:
This book aims to examine the complexities of changes and continuities in marriage in South
Asia.The weddings of South Asia are getting bigger along with media and with rise in divorce.
Despite new public imaginations of marriage, love/self-choice marriage has not replaced the
arranged marriage nor has divorce replaced lifelong marital unions. Marriage and its gendered
domesticity are significant in individual and familial aspirations for sexual and social intimacies and in
life trajectories. Yet, economic process and globalisation has affected spousal selection, marriage
prestations and the articulations of desire. Marriage and its termination has been a site for state
intervention and the point of entry for concerned efforts at gendered social reform. For scholars
from other disciplines marriage was just a fact rather than the process. This book address the
simulataneity of apparent flux and change with the hegemonic and gendered normativity of
marriage.

The Institution of Marriage: Shifting framework

Fortes(1962) asks if there is anything new to add to the study of marriage other than work on
procedure of spousal selection. The shifts from structural functional to structural and subsequently
to cultural frameworks led to new analytical insights. Schenider's critique (1984) of the biological
premises, ethnocentrism, and implicit 'orientalism' of kinship studies had concluded that there is no
transcultural category called kinship. According to Stone (2001), this account froze kinship studies in
the US academy. This does not, however, explain the apparent dearth of work on the subcontinent,
where many studies remain oblivious of his critique. A quick scan of books published in the 1980s
and 1990s, in which kinship and marriage figure, suggests a trend of extending extant frameworks to
hitherto understudied groups, such as 'tribes', 'remote' communities, and non-Hindus. It could be,
then, that the formalistic and legalistic models which permeated kinship studies, critiqued by
Bourdieu (1977), is more pertinent in explaining the decline in interest. Thus, much work in Pakistan,
particularly as the Islamic character of its society was asserted, tended to focus on issues of state
and religious law or the extent of the prevalence or otherwise of the formal rules of preferential kin
marriage.

Study of marriage had not disappeared but been displaced. The study of kinship practices and
marriage strategies entails intensive framework. As economic growth and population control
became central ideologies in development and state policy, demographic change and reproductive
behaviour became privileged foci of funding. Social demographers explored the correlations
between marital sexual behaviours, reproduction strategies, contraception, age at marriage, and
fertility levels with family patterns, mobility, education, urbanisation and female empowerment.
Family being the assumed site of care and welfare in government policies across most of the
subcontinent, the debate around the 'decline' of the extended family-household is another area in
which marriage enters.

Another steady thread of scholarship, globally, has been through the new focus on women's
voices and on gender, resonating with Yanagisako and Collier's (1987) call for a unified analysis of
gender and kinship. In discussing structures of work, family, and marriage, Jeffery and Jeffery (1996)
narrated how young women looked at their lives. Kapadia (1993) looked at cross-cousin marriage
from the point of view of the bride/wife and the pressures inimical to this practice, while Palriwala
(1991) analysed residential practices focusing on female mobility rather than the permanence of the
patrilineage. These and other studies examined more directly on how the historical entrenchment of
capitalism had favoured patrilocal systems and male inheritance and thereby affected gender
equations in marriage and the domestic sphere. This is also reflected in social and cultural histories.

Fluidity has become paramount with globalisation. Sociologically, whether it is arranged by others or
chosen for love by the individuals to be wedded, marriage is a structured and patterned set of social
relations and practices. It is embedded in norms and values regarding what marriage should be and
is. There are explicit social prescriptions and sanctions by public bodies, the state, religion, and
community. At the minimum, a marriage makes legal and public, even if not always socially
accepted, an intimate relation between two individuals.

A marriage is articulated as more than an ongoing relationship between two individuals. It

establishes a tie between two social groups such as family-households, lineages, or clans and, at
times, reiterates an already existing tie between them. marriage establishes a relationship between
more than just the two in the conjugal pair. In other words, marriage is an alliance in structuralist
and political terms, entailing affinal relations.

Marriage is a social institution in the manner in which it gives social sanction and legal recognition to
the filial tie. Marriage legitimises children of the married couple and thus carries implications for the
continuity and boundaries of these groups; for inheritance and status, access to resources, labour,
care and support. Marriage is an institution to the extent that it remains significant in official value
and in practice as the basis for family-households. The law sees marriage as a fundamental social
institution whose stability is necessary for the care of the young and the aged, for the protection of
women, and for the well-being of society as a whole. Borneman highlights the spectres and
embodied lives of the unmarried, the divorced, the homosexual, and the widowed.
Multiple aspects of the institutional character of marriage indicate the complexity.One commonality
through which this complexity is addressed here is by a focus on practices, social relations, and
agency, with 'official' ideologies and norms either questioned or showing signs of being recast,
forming a backdrop, or being reiterated.

South Asia, of course, the facticity of its geo-politics, with the Himalayas and its passes to the north,
the oceans to the south; the contemporary formation of the South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation (SAARC). There is a long economic history of overland and maritime trade networks
traversing this area. Its one-time centrality in the global intercourse was fragmented by a common
subjugation to colonialism, mostly British. The effects of colonial rule were such that even those
countries that formally remained outside could not remain untouched, with an apparent
introversion that was possibly new to them, such as Nepal and Bhutan.

These geographic, economic, and political contours and passages also made for cultural transactions,
which cut across and made the region. Social groups of varied depth claim cultural uniqueness; that
they follow their own rules in marriage, family, and personal rituals and life.

It is in such historical and scholarly contexts that we relook at marriage across South Asia. One
concern was not to make the earlier mistake of allowing the practices of dominant or visible social
groups to become the implicit exemplar and paradigm on which the analyses would be based. A
second problematic was that in addressing the concerns, neither lose sight of the important insights
and analyses of earlier frameworks and studies, nor get caught in their web. This volume then
represents a shift from earlier frameworks that often erred on the side of assuming the universality
of upper caste and/or elite ideologies and collapsed practices into rules. A third benchmark arose
from our reading of many past studies that tended to look at marriage and family, work and
economics, politics and law in separate essays except when summarising the 'impact of
industrialisation, urbanisation, and modernity'. Rather than assuming unidirectional change or
unidirectional causality, the attempt in this volume is to capture the dialectics of the changing
institution of marriage and the dynamics of marriage practices on the one hand and shifts in
economy, polity, society, and family on the other, all affected by globalisation processes.

Tracing women's voices, gender, and contours of intimacy, rather than the mere fact of marital
or other intimacy are important dimensions of the framework of this volume. Though the
negativities of contemporary marriage for women have been a focus in earlier work, there has been
little work on conjugality itself, on the dimensions of emotion, sexuality, support, and care which the
fact of marriage is taken to frame. The concern of this book is to look simultaneously at the internal
and external processes that make the institution of marriage and it implications for those in and out
of it.