Towards Sociology of Indian Elites: Marriage Alliances,Vulnerabilities and Resistance in Bollywood

Revival of Alliance-based Marriages

Much like other movies on the elites, the central plot of these two movies is also a specific kind of spouse selection that is concerned with building alliances for expansion of business and other financial gains. However, while in earlier movies, the ‘right spouse’, more often than not, was envisioned in ‘traditional’ caste or class terms, these movies use the language of neoliberalism and transform children who are of a marriageable age into business assets that are primarily perceived to advance monetary interests. Moreover, the parents appeal to this marital union not simply through the language of promotion of business interests but by cashing on the vulnerabilities of their children. These vulnerabilities, which further fragmented their elite identities, were manifested in various forms that include but are not limited to their unfulfilled professional desires, under confidence of physical beauty, and/or inability to convert a romance into a conjugal bond. In other words, while the appeal to alliance-based marriages in the earlier movies was wrapped in the language of tradition and continuity, these two movies provide another, a darker and a more bold perspective, where these alliances are persuaded by the crude exposure of vulnerabilities and anxieties of the elites.

In Dil Dhadakne Do, Kamal Mehra (Anil Kapoor), the patriarch who runs a business named ‘Ayka’, and his wife, Neelam Mehra (Shefali Shah), come to believe that the only way to keep their business from bankruptcy is by suggesting a marital alliance with the rival business family, the Soods. In order for the fruition of this strategy, they invite the Soods, with their daughter Noorie (Ridhima Sud), to join the celebrations of their thirtieth wedding anniversary on a cruise. Kabir Mehra (Ranveer Singh), son of Kamal, whose marriage is being planned with Noorie, is however, appalled at this strategy. At first, Kabir’s parents explain that the marriage alliance is most crucial to maintain their stake-hold in Ayka. When Kabir, who is shown to have little interest in his father’s business, is unconvinced with the rationale of the economic benefit, Kamal draws out Kabir’s passion for flying airplanes, explaining that Kabir will only be able to pursue his expensive hobby with this alliance.

Similarly, though with a satirical twist, Shaandaar depicts two business families, who are both on the cusp of bankruptcy, hoping to redeem their financial situation by entering into a marriage alliance with each other. Here, the matriarch grandmother of the Arora family, dadi (Sushma Seth), proposes the marriage of her overweight granddaughter Isha Arora (Sanah Kapoor) with the brother of the business patriarch, Mr Fundwani. Unlike Kabir Mehra, however, Isha Arora is keen at this prospect as she has internalised and embodied her weight as a disadvantage and a definite deterrent in making her an attractive choice of spouse. The burden of not matching up to the standards of physical beauty along with a concern to maintain the family honour allows Isha to accept an alliance with an obnoxious prospect, Robin (Vikas Verma), who constantly shames her for being overweight.

At a time when Bollywood is more concerned in understanding the contemporary love, these movies have brought attention back to alliance-based marriages. Interestingly, this turn speaks to the trends in scholarly works as well where the focus in the past decades has shifted away from marriage strategies of alliance. Marriage strategies have been important sources of analyses in other disciplines like that of political science and history as well, which have shown that marriage was an important medium of political and geographical expansion not just for royal political lineages but also for monastic orders (Chatterjee 2013). The discipline of anthropology too began with a keen interest in alliance theory to trace relations between kin and clans. However, in the past decades, more attention has been devoted to mapping social transformations in India. This has led to a shift away from kinship theories and most findings pertaining to the realm of marriage practices have overwhelmingly focused—one might even think exhausted—on the artificial analytical binary of ‘love’ and ‘arranged’. In order to redeem from the ennui of these binaries and also due to the popularity of works on the middle class in India and the interest in unravelling India’s relation to modernity, practices of spouse selection are increasingly being explained through the categories of ‘arranged-cum-love marriage’ (Uberoi and Tyagi Singh 2006), ‘companionate marriage’ (Fuller and Narasimhan 2008) and ‘family-based individualism’ (Titzmann 2013). These focuses have, however, overlooked the continued presence, or one might boldly claim the increased desire for alliance-based marriages, which are often simplistically limited to the Dumontian kinship analysis.

Complex Elite Subjectivities: Resistances and Strategies

In both these movies, the sole aim of the parents is presented as a matter of furthering their economic interests by targeting the anxieties and vulnerabilities of their children. However, these movies do entail a ‘redemptive’ turning point—a moment where the parents realise that supporting their children’s desires and wishes is far more significant than strategising within the simple framework of alliances and expansion of business interests. Before these aspects are revealed, these movies go much further to outline and explore the strategies adopted by the young elites to resist these alliances. Usually in movies, resistance is depicted in the rejection of money in the backdrop of enabling pure love. This love is shown to provide the perfect balance to free the individual from the shackles of capital and also to keep intact the core ideals of a family.5

These movies have nuanced the motivation to acts of resistance. The young elite’s strength of resistance is drawn from their desire to actualise their dreams and fantasies that include their professional ambitions, ideals of marital compatibility, quest for recognition of self and embrace of their physical being. For instance, while Kabir gets involved in a romantic encounter with a dance trouper Farah (Anushka Sharma), on the cruise, his resistance to his marriage alliance is not only based on his love for Farah but emanates from his general displeasure at the lack of intimacy in his nuclear family. He is particularly unhappy with the way his sister, Ayesha (Priyanka Chopra), is treated by his parents, with the infidelity of his father and the pretense of a happy marriage by his mother. Ayesha, who entered an alliance-based marriage, provides a delayed resistance to the marriage by insisting on a divorce. This decision, however, is not a direct result of her rekindled love with an ex-lover (whom coincidentally she met at the cruise), but stems from her exasperation and exhaustion from the construction of herself as a good wife, good daughter and good daughter-in-law. The potential bride-to-be, in Shaandaar, Isha Arora, too is able to call off her wedding not because she found love in a more understanding partner but in order to actualise her desire to lead a more autonomous life without the regimes of physical disciplining.

Both these movies do not locate acts of resistance in the social actors’ complete rejection of money and status. Instead, resistance is presented as a combination of many strategies (de Certeau 1984) and coming together of realms of desires and aspirations (Appadurai 1996; Moore 2011). This depiction speaks to other scholarly works on understanding of agency and resistance (Gold and Raheja 1994; Jeffery and Jeffery 1994; Thapan 2009), which though based on different class and cultural fields of India, are all the same able to highlight that resistances are not always geared towards an overthrow of structure but exist within small pockets of these structures (Scott 1985). Both movies have, somewhat successfully, avoided presenting elites as either passive recipients of social pressures (as greedy and morally corrupt) or overly individualistic and, therefore, entirely dismissive of familial bonds.

In presenting such nuanced renditions of expectations and resistances, they have provided a glimpse into the complexities that constitute elite subjectivities. These movies have not crudely reduced the elite’s process of self-fashioning to money and the morality attached to it. Instead, they have reflected subjectivities as constituted out of concrete experiences of vulnerability and misrecognition. One character that captivatingly communicates this richness of complexities is that of Ayesha Mehra (Priyanka Chopra). The movie begins by depicting her vulnerable position in both her natal and post-marriage home. Her parents refuse to add her name to the invitation cards for their wedding anniversary celebrations reinforcing that she no longer belongs to their family, while at the same time her mother-in-law constantly accuses her of being too professionally orientated and devoting less time to her domestic responsibilities in her ‘new’ home. She is shown to feel great constraint and disconnect in her conjugal bond not because her husband is promiscuous or physically abuses her but for the other many reasons which leads her to feel he is not a compatible partner. She also relates to her sexual life more as a domestic obligation and resists motherhood (by taking a contraceptive tablet). These experiences of self finally allow her the courage to demand divorce. The scene where she is surrounded by pressurising family members, who seek to convince her to honour the marital unity, depicts beautifully the changed self-image that Ayesha has of herself. Ayesha’s character, therefore, is not presented as a bored rich housewife desiring to seek recognition only through professional achievement but builds on her anxieties and vulnerabilities stemming from unfulfilled dreams and endurances of constraining role performances.

Towards a Sociology of Indian Elites

It is possible that the neglect to study alliances taking place amongst the elites might have to do with the general apprehension to study specific social gestures of the elites. This might be motivated by the ideological dominance—if not hegemony—of the ‘subaltern studies’ project and the recent obsession with understanding the Indian middle class. In either case, stories of the elites are glaringly missing from the narrative of post-liberalisation India. It is interesting, however, to note that socio-historical scholarship in the United States of America and the United Kingdom has ascertained this lacunae, and scholars are working towards filling the gap, for example, by explaining the role of education institutions in the reproduction of the elites (Khan 2010) and tracing the history of being an elite and the contemporary lifestyles of the elites (Savage and Williams 2008). It would, therefore, be timely to explore and analyse the changing sociological rhythms and diverse discourses of self-making that are taking place within Indian elites. For a change, these movies that form the object of analysis in this essay have shed some light, however dim, on several nuances that go into the construction of elites’ subjectivities.

The elites have, more often than not, been painted with the same materialistic brush, that is to say that their experiences and ways of self-fashioning have primarily been analysed through the meaning they give to (or their relationship with) capital and money. In this brief essay, I have suggested another oeuvre into the study of elites’ lifeworld. Drawing from a schematic analysis with all the necessary warning of a ‘work in progress’, I have suggested that recent cinematic depictions are signalling a changed perception of the elites and the possibilities for a more nuanced linkage in understanding emotional stages that seem fundamental in the upkeep of both self-image and what we may call ‘subjectivity’. In this way, the study of the elites can open new windows and, more importantly can link sociological studies of capital to sociology of affect. This is not to say that the scholarly endeavour is from the beginning tainted with a desire to victimise the elites by stressing the scarring emotional experiences that they confront and seek to escape. In contrast, my sense is that one should not shy away from analysing the discourse of structural forces that weigh upon social acts, relations of power to unfulfilled ambitions, unlived fantasies, cultural pressures or performative aspects of gender. I think that such an approach will help us draw out, in a nuanced way, and unsettle the imagery of elites’ subjectivities.