Abstract
The Census of India shows that in 2011, 98 percent of women had married by age 35. What can a book that chronicles the life of the remaining 2 percent of women who are single tell us about gender in India? A great deal, it appears. By focusing on the life stories of 54 women ages 35 to 92 who remained single, either by choice or by circumstance, Sarah Lamb lets us glimpse what gendered norms mean from the vantage point of women who are looking from outside the box that frames social life for most Indian women. Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility sets out to understand why Indian society erects so many obstacles and deterrents to being an adult unmarried woman. Yet, in the process, it ends up interrogating the institution of marriage and the way in which gender inequality is intertwined with marriage in Bengali society.
Lamb argues that “positioned outside the norm on roads less traveled, never-married single women are able to recognize and speak penetratingly about their society's broader social-cultural values and structures—offering what could be considered a queer critique of prevailing systems of gender, sexuality, kinship, pleasure, propriety, respect, social class, and social belonging. In so doing, the book offers a theoretical exploration of how gender subjectivities are forged and rich ethnographic insight into the conditions of everyday life in contemporary India, making singlehood for women both challenging and increasingly possible” (p. 6).
Lamb and her research assistants elicited life stories of single Indian women through penetrating questions coupled with empathy and a keen appreciation of their own positionality. As a result, these narratives carry both the authenticity of their voices and far greater reflexivity on the part of both respondents and researchers than casual conversations would have elicited. Take, for example, Narayani, whom we meet in the book’s opening pages. Unable to care for their large brood, Narayani's parents brought her to Kolkata to work as a domestic servant. This transplantation left her hanging between two worlds. She was too modern to be an acceptable bride in her native village; and although her employers treated her as a member of the family, when the biological daughter of the family began to feel Narayani was usurping her place, she was left out in the cold. This tale of displaced identify features Narayani's financial obligation to her biological family, her obligation of care to aging members of her employer's family, which she mistakenly thought was her adopted family, and an uncertain social location that made it difficult for her to find a partner.
If poverty pushed Narayani into singlehood, upward mobility led Medha to singlehood. Coming from a poor family, Medha's quest for higher education led her to a PhD and a professorship. However, when it came to marriage, she was not an eligible bride for her privileged colleagues, nor was she willing to settle for marrying someone who shared her social background but did not share her educational achievements. Not all of Lamb's informants found themselves unmarried due to circumstances. For example, Rinku, a teacher in an elite school with an MA obtained in a British university, chose singlehood, as she articulated: “because of the cultural differences and my strong antichauvinist feelings, I could not find any boys or men I admired enough to choose to marry on my own” (p. 124).
Nonetheless, only about 30 percent of Lamb's participants purposefully chose not to marry. The rest remained unmarried due to a variety of reasons, including responsibilities for parents and family, getting too educated to find a suitable match, and being disabled or perceived as being unattractive.
The book goes on to explore the lives of single women interviewed by Lamb and her team, documenting regrets, stigmatization, sexual harassment, and loneliness. In a social fabric shaped by ties of marriage, parenthood, and kinship, single women find themselves floundering. Lamb portrays their challenges through an analysis of the living situations of single women. About half of her respondents continue to live with natal kin in parental homes. The rest struggle to find a home on their own and often end up living in working women's hostels or old age homes under restrictive conditions. Contending with social ideologies surrounding the dangers of unattached female sexuality forms an immense challenge for single women among Lamb's respondents.
Social class features large in this narrative. Financial need and status inconsistency often lead to singlehood. Singlehood, in turn, reduces access to social and financial safety nets, creating a potential for financial vulnerabilities for single women. Caste, another major stratifying feature of Indian society, does not feature in this narrative, as acknowledged by Lamb. The small sample size and close correlation between caste and class make it difficult to study caste independently. However, this is an omission that deserves greater attention in future research.
Experiences of single women recounted in Singlehood in India shine a light on the social fabric in India. While the importance of social networks in India is well recognized, the centrality of families in navigating these networks is often overlooked. A single woman's connection to society is often mediated through her family of origin, but the family changes over time. As parents get older and families reconfigure themselves to revolve around brothers, sisters-in-law, and their families, single women often find themselves left on the margins. Unsurprisingly, these challenges push most Indian women to marry, making singlehood rare.
This book stands in stark contrast to the narrative of modernizing India, where economic growth and rising education create opportunities that encourage women to make choices that do not include marriage and childbearing. A vast quantity of global demographic and sociological literature assumes that educational expansion and incorporation into the global economy will bring with it an ideational transformation in which the centrality of the family in individuals’ lives will decline, diminishing the importance of marriage (Goode 1963; Lesthaghe 2010; Thornton 2005). This, in turn, would lead to rising singlehood and a focus on self-actualization rather than an emphasis on conjugality and family formation. Lamb's analysis of factors resulting in singlehood and its consequences for individuals suggests that for very few women in modern-day India, being single is a deliberate, conscious choice. Many women are pushed into staying single by social constraints, and even women who make that choice early in their life find it to be a mixed blessing. Ironically, the conception of independent choice valorized in modernization narratives seems inconsistent with some of the responses given by Sarah Lamb's protagonists, who found themselves left out of the marriage market due to a lack of interest or inability of their parents to find a suitable match.
Nonetheless, India remains poised on the brink of a major economic and social transformation. The challenge posed by changing demography to the phenomena chronicled in this book should not be overlooked. Fertility has fallen sharply in India over the course of the twenty-first century, with many parents opting to stop childbearing with a single child, even if she is a girl. These parents invest heavily in their daughters’ education and often rely on daughters to provide old age care and financial support. Will this lead to a change in marriage patterns, and might we see increasing prevalence of singlehood in India? Only future research will be able to answer this question.