Abstract
After a long hiatus, there has been a welcome increase in sociological writings on the topic of marriage. Srimati Basu and Lucinda Ramberg’s volume closely follows on the heels of two other volumes on South Asia and particularly India (Kaur and Palriwala 2014; Sen et al. 2011). Between them, they cover much new ground, shedding light on the interconnected domains of gender, marriage and sexuality.
This collection offers a rich set of articles on diverse themes pertaining to ‘conjugality’, a term the editors prefer, as they find it ‘less burdened with meanings’. Perhaps it is also the case that the term marriage is itself going out of fashion and, as a concept, no longer captures the broadened domain of intimacies to be dealt with after the feminist and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) movements, as well as the rise of gender and masculinity studies. Many of the earlier discussions of the ‘definition of marriage’ and its forms and features are now understood as the product of a historical period in which sociology was shaped by evolutionary and functionalist concerns and the colonial encounter that entailed making sense of the ‘other’ or theoretical concerns such as the structuralist method which looked for meaning in structure across cultures. Beginning with Schneider (1984), the ethnocentric assumptions of kinship and marriage studies have been destabilised while gender and feminist studies have queried the structuralist perspective of seeing marriage as an exchange of women paralleling the exchange of goods and meanings. Newer concerns about margins, voice and agency are interrogating the field in new ways.
Hence, in line with such concerns, the volume ‘troubles’ conjugality by querying it from various theoretical angles. In doing so, it reveals the complexity of what lies beneath the surface presentation of marriage as normative, homogenous, monogamous and heteronormative or as essentially a stable field of social life.
This review comments on the various chapters in the book in terms of various thematic or conceptual links. Thus, two essays examine the effects of the colonial rule and the social movements it spurred. Mytheli Sreenivas analyses how the introduction of modern contraception shaped discourses about conjugality and female sexuality among Tamils. More importantly, she discloses that the Dravidian Self-Respect movement was far ahead of its time in raising feminist questions about marriage and women’s sexual autonomy. Condemning sexual violence and oppression of women in marriage, it saw contraception as necessary for men and women to enjoy a degree of freedom. The second essay, by Eliza Kent, on Indian Christian marriage reveals the embroilment of the effects of colonial rule, governance, conversion and the negotiations between ideals of Christian marriage and the resistance of converts to the imposition of wholly western Christian norms.
Issues of the transactional nature of marriage and of sexual economies surface in several essays; thus, Sarah Pinto’s essay disrupts all notions of normative marriage by finely parsing the case of Lata, a psychiatric patient, whose intimate relationships defy fitting into socially acceptable frameworks. She points to the intertwining of marriage and sexual economies and explores the value women find in marriage. Lucinda Ramberg queries the same in her chapter on the devdasis in Karnataka. In a return to a full anthropological analysis in which meaning of practices is key to a nuanced understanding, she explores the association of normative marriage with ‘respectability’ and that of the devdasi’s marriage with ‘auspiciousness’. While doing so, she weaves in the political economy of the devdasi’s marriage, which is connected to support of the natal family, and also to a local economy of food redistribution. Standing up to feminist readings of the traffic in women, she agrees with Strathern that women’s circulation as gifts does not alienate them from themselves as persons and does not leave them without agency. Also dwelling partially on the question of value, Srimati Basu points out that ‘marriage itself is a form of property at stake in rape, in that women rely on being married for security’ (p. 87). Rape means either the loss or the potential loss of access to property and other economic resources. Analysing legal discourses about rape and marriage in India, she asks, ‘[C]an rape law risk recognising women’s sexual agency beyond the vulnerable, victimized body, and see violence as a specific transgression of consent and bodily integrity?’ (p. 77).
Taking feminist perspectives into account, Gopika Solanki’s essay examines the pros and cons of registering marriage. She reveals that while the intention to federalise marriage registration is to safeguard women and allow them to claim their rights under marriage, in effect, given the diversity of marriage practices and laws in India, the Bill in its current form ‘institutionalizes heterosexual marriage, generates conflict between existing state laws and religious family laws, consolidates religio-customary patriarchy in some instances, and provides little legal relief to women’ (p. 220).
Underlining the importance of historicising our study of marriage, Janaki Abraham’s fine essay raises fundamental points around the need to situate caste and its relationship with endogamy and patriarchy historically. Through case studies of communities in the south and the north, she demonstrates that the enforcement of endogamy, rather than being an unshakeable article of faith, has actually been quite contingent. This contingency demonstrates that the ‘control of women’s sexuality is not so much about the “purity of caste blood” as about maintaining privilege and power, or asserting caste pride’ (p. 166).
Two essays step outside the normative and focus on divorce and the question of same-sex marriage. Thus, Sylvia Vatuk’s article looks inside the institution of marriage among Chennai and Hyderabadi Muslims from the perspective of ‘what went wrong’. She reveals that the complaints and negotiations between husbands and wives are framed by ideals of Muslim marriage against which the warring couple measures each other.
Reflecting fissures within LGBT movements that lead to the asking of fundamental questions about the relationship of sexuality with everyday life, Nithin Manayath’s essay makes the point that the ideological discourse of the LGBT community, by planting itself within a rights discourse, does damage to the chequered reality of non-normative sexualities and marriage in India. He examines how this discourse affects the hijra community that has had long-established customary modes of kinship, marriage and property transmission. An additional critique that Manayath makes of the LGBT discourse is that it sanitises its demands of what lies at the heart of sexuality—different forms of erotic desire—resulting in a forced separation between erotic and non-erotic domains of sociality.
Thus, overall, this is an excellent volume that will be useful to both specialists and generalists in reflecting upon issues around unpacking conjugality in several domains. My eye fell upon a couple of proofing errors on page 215; these and any other inadvertent ones (if there are more) could be corrected in a future edition.