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Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India, Prem Chowdhry, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, 347 Pages
Pooja JUYAL & Shagun MATHUR
Prem Chowdhry's well-researched book Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India discusses the dynamics of power arrangement in Haryana's complex, stratified and deeply patriarchal society, within a changing context that is affected both by interventions made by the post colonial state as well as the forces of globalization. The book highlights how issues pertaining to marriage choice, which operate at the intersection of caste, class and gender, are implicated in the interplay of power politics and vested interests of traditional bodies and communities. It illustrates the subtle nuances of power negotiation by various social actors at the micro-level in a rural society.
Chowdhry belongs to the region she has perceptively written about and has taken an "insider-outsider view." This is an interdisciplinary study based on extensive field-work interviews, official documents and archival material. She explains that the institution of marriage stands at the heart of the kinship system that gives the caste system its basic structure and keeps alive the sense of a common ancestor, which has been the basic premise that preserves the social fabric of rural society. Kinship linkages provided by marriage and relations established through marriage, give a caste group its strength, recognition, and leverage in wider society and polity. She discusses why marriages become contentious and highlights two major conditions within which they are to be contracted and any compromise or breach of rules result in contention and discord. These two conditions are village and clan exogamy and caste endogamy in settling marriages. However, arranged marriage within the caste not only strengthens and fossilizes the caste system but provides continuity the customary practice of dowry-giving, which militates against women's equality and citizenship.
The book is an interesting and insightful study into the complex rural reality of caste stratified Haryana in a process of change, following social legislation initiated by the post-colonial state, which in turn has impacted the caste and gender distribution of power. The success of the Green Revolution1 has also impacted the rise and polarization of economic classes. The old entrenched feudal composition of society is threatened by...