Lecture 13 - Family, Kinship, and Marriage in South Asia

Why is kinship so important?

• provides organising principles that govern recruitment of individuals into social groups

• obligations and responsibilities of members to each other

• rules, practices, and notions of descent, inheritance, succession, locality, and marriage 

• marriage is a structuralist and political alliance

  • establishes kinship between two family-groups

Fictive kinship

• mimicking blood relationships

  • e.g. woman from birth village in a new one

  • now ‘new kinship’ -> decentring blood relationships

Marriage in South Asia

• marriage is compulsory and universal

  • excludes, marginalises those who fall outside its parameters or never enter it

• marriage is the only familiar path for women to achieve kinship, economic security, respect, sexuality

• marriage is tied to notion of personhood

Homosexuality in India

• currently decriminalised

• marriage still not legal

• cannot adopt as a couple

Arranged Marriage

• the norm, caste/community endogamous, parental control of marriage

  • marriage is an intergenerational contract

    • Mody, 2006: love should never precede marriage

  • North India: you should marry a stranger

  • South India: functionally strangers typically

Deviation and Change

• love-marriage: self-chosen unions

• love-cum-arranged: elements of choice, more common among young middle-class people

• elopement: public declaration of a love affair

Problematising the dichotomy

• Asha Abeyasekera: Making the Right Choice

  • more about representation than choice

  • dichotomy excessively simplistic

Diversity in Family and Kinship

• heterogeneity within South Asia

• within each country: religious, ethnic communities, etc.

Mapping Prestations (5)

• Bride-Price: paid by groom/kin to kin of bride

• Dowry: paid by bride/kin to kin of groom

• Mehr: written into muslim marriage contract, not paid in practice typically

• relationship between two groups: wife-givers and wife-takers

  • wife-givers are always inferior in the cultural imagination

• Dowry and Hypergamy: husband’s family should always be slightly higher status

Dowry

• dowry traditionally associated with higher-caste Hindu groups, increasingly common among others

• dowry -> originally ‘women’s wealth’ to support women in new family, now gifts for groom’s family, price of wedding, consumer goods

Dowry and Inheritance

• increasing trend towards patrilineal inheritance despite legal reforms

  • exclusion of daughters often linked to dowry being ‘her share’

  • women never given land, houses, etc.

  • women tend to not claim rightful share to preserve family dynamics

  • property presented as sons’ compensation for eldercare, whether or not this is present

Diversity in South Asia (3)

• Hindu North India, Nepal

  • Gotra(clan) exogamy, must marry outside village, marriage with relative strangers, oriented towards expansion of affinal network

• South India, Muslims, Sinhalese, matrilineal tribes

  • preferential rules, specific types of cousins, pre-existing ties reaffirmed

• many exceptions, variations, etc.

Tracing Commonalities (6)

• trend towards homogenisation in some dimensions of kinship

• marriage near-universal and parentally arranged

• insistence on intra-community marriage

• caste endogamy reinforced

• dowry increasingly universal

• patrilineal, patrifocality, devaluation of women

Implications for Gender Relations: Dowry (4)

• dowry is an exploitative practice, coercive

• in no sense does dowry belong to the woman post-marriage

• unmet dowry demands may result in harassment, domestic violence, death

• dowry is illegal and discouraged, still done

Implications for Gender Relations: Son Preference

• increased male value, daughter aversion

• ‘northern demographic regime’ enforces this (Dyson and Moore, 1983)

• ‘sex selective child care’ -> poor medical care, distribution of food to girl children

• sex determination via ultrasound is illegal

• highly imbalanced sex ratio in North India

• shortage of marriageable women

  • led to bride trafficking, from East, South, and tribal areas

• 2016, 8,132 cases of human trafficking reported

• massive marriage distance, complete isolation

Implications for Gender Relations: Village Exogamy

• patrivirilocality: requirement to live with or near husband’s family

• women never inherit immoveable property: not long-term security

  • property ownership is a deterrent to marital violence and provides an exit option

• women’s say within marital family is weakened by unfamiliarity with local customs and traditions

• security post-marriage is related to their ability to access support, especially natal kin support