Abstract
This ethnographic study of marriage and cohabitation in a low-income neighbourhood in the Indian capital city of Delhi engages with questions of kinship, love and courtship, intimacy, women’s agency, gender politics, marital conflict and breakdown, women’s labour and employment, and caste in an urban context. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book is a valuable addition to the existing literature on family, kinship and marriage in India and would be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, scholars of Asian Studies and Gender Studies.
The book is divided into six chapters. In the two chapters following the introduction, Grover focuses on the nature of a woman’s ties with her natal kin after marriage. Here she makes one of her central arguments about conjugal stability by discussing parental arranged marriages and love or self-arranged marriages. She demonstrates that arranged marriages, as the socially sanctioned form of marriage in India, allow women to seek refuge at their parental homes during periods of conflict with husbands and affinal kin. In contrast, women in love marriages cannot avail of natal kin support. She argues that while access to natal kin support places women in a powerful position to negotiate with husbands, extended periods of refuge may hamper a woman’s adjustment in her marital home and thereby destabilize the marital tie. Contrary to the argument advanced by some scholars, she thus concludes that love marriages that leave women with no exit options are more stable than marriages that are arranged. Chapter 4 discusses secondary or consensual unions, that is, unions formed following widowhood or the breakdown of marriage. The factors that make these unions more permissible, also based on the assertion of choice like love marriages, are explored. The subsequent chapter focuses on the role of informal women’s courts in settlement of marital disputes. Through her case studies, the author demonstrates that these women’s courts are ‘transforming marriage’ by securing better treatment for women (p. 202) while at the same time upholding patriarchal and caste norms.
In assessing which form of marriage is most democratic for women, in the concluding chapter Grover argues that, in all forms, women’s experiences of marriage or cohabitation are shaped by similar conflicts related to suspicions of infidelity, violence, alcohol-related abuse and so on. Yet, women have the weakest position in love marriages and are placed most favourably in arranged marriages as they ‘can just walk out’ (p. 110) of their conjugal homes when domestic arrangements become difficult.
A body of the scholarly literature has shown how difficult it is for women to leave marriages, often emphasizing, as Grover herself points out, women’s economic situation or earning capabilities (p. 205). Her findings on the crucial role of natal kin support are particularly significant for reflecting on women’s position in conjugal relationships and the coping mechanisms available to them. However, all the case studies she presents support her argument that parental refuge destabilizes the conjugal relationship. One wonders, did Grover find no cases where parental refuge enabled women to negotiate a better situation for themselves, or simply recoup and return to their marriages?
Grover’s conclusion is based on her case studies in the neighbourhood as well on those that were brought to the informal women’s courts from neighbourhoods across the city of Delhi for dispute settlement. The latter include arranged, love and secondary alliances, but it is not clear how her data enabled her to draw conclusions regarding the stability of love marriages in contrast to arranged marriages. Is this based on her finding that the majority of couples who approached the informal courts were those who had arranged marriages (p. 194)? If so, does this not have as much to do with the fact that the number of love marriages remains far fewer relative to arranged marriages in India? Or is it to do with the specific caste-class-urban formation of her informants, such that their marriages follow a very different trajectory from the stories that abound of families that insist their married daughters remain in their marital homes only to have their marriages end with their suicide or murder? And what about the secondary alliances, which are based on choice and breakdown, which she also discusses?
Despite these problems, Grover’s study has raised some significant questions in need of further exploration. In keeping with many other studies, one of her key findings is that women’s economic independence and the ability to exercise choice in establishing and terminating relationships (as the chapters on courtship/love marriage and secondary unions demonstrate) do not necessarily make relationships between partners egalitarian. Thus, the question that emerges is not only the quality of the ‘stability’ of love marriages, but what will in fact result in democratization of marital relations?