My dissertation explores the transforming patterns in marital relations of North India through an exploration of the trend of elopements and choice-based marriages or ‘love marriages’ that purportedly stand in opposition to family-arranged matches. Through ethnographic evidence from the state of Haryana and its capital, Chandigarh, I outline the existence of a burgeoning form of civil union called ‘court marriage’, which encompasses ideas of both a normative, ‘respectable’ union reserved for marriages based on kinship rules, and non-normative, choice-based ones popularly known as ‘love marriages’. As part of this doctoral project, I conducted 16 months of ethnographic and archival research in the North Indian state of Haryana, its capital Chandigarh, and New Delhi. In particular, I focused on the Chandigarh-based Punjab and Haryana High Court as a site where many eloping couples from the region converged to seek legal validation for their weddings. Archival research was conducted at the Indian Parliament Library in New Delhi where I studied parliamentary debates that led to the passage of the civil union law, Special Marriage Act, 1954. The parliamentary records have helped me understand the qualitative data from Haryana in relation to marriage laws that create both subjectivities and opportunities for citizens. My ethnographic chapters explore the political and social conditions in North India and, in particular, Haryana that have led individuals to aspire for alternate marital arrangements and communities to reify the idea of state/legal validation in private and public lives. With my dissertation, I wish to make a theoretical intervention on the topic of sexual assaults and rape in South Asia by discussing the concept of sexual consent not just through cases of its lack. Through the narratives of eloping couples, I discuss how the idea of sexual consent is understood, articulated and exercised in this region.
Srinivasan, Rama,
"Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in Post-Agrarian North India"
(2017).
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0NS0SCB
