Love as understanding: Marriage, aspiration, and the joint family in middle-class Pakistan

In middle-class Pakistan, marriage is the prescribed future for all women, but premarital contact between the sexes is discouraged. To find the right partner, then, without visibly flouting social norms, requires a skillful balancing act between private interests and aspirations, and between public representations and collective concerns. Young women often navigate these conflicting demands by developing what they call an understanding: a secret premarital relationship that they normalize by involving family at a late stage to orchestrate an arranged marriage. Firmly enmeshed within the social life of joint families, understandings are an instance neither of defying patriarchal norms nor of pursuing self-cultivation within them. Instead, they offer a window into how young women live and explore new possibilities within the vestiges of normative structures. [love, marriage, desire, morality, consumption, joint family, Lahore, Pakistan] “Y es, you could say that I already had a spy in that household. It made it easy for me to make my decision,” Samra said, jokingly, as she recounted how she had met and married Sherafghan.1 A few years earlier, her elder sister had married his brother, and the wedding events and continued relations between the families had provided Samra and Sherafghan with ample opportunities to meet and get to know each other. She had liked Sherafghan from the moment she saw him, but in accepting his advances and allowing the courtship to develop, she had also been mindful of other matters. Through visits to her sister’s married home, she had learned that her in-laws were openminded people, allowing the daughters-in-law of the house considerable freedom and movement. “One has to be careful when making an understanding with a boy,” Samra confided. “I knew I never wanted a life where I was not allowed to go anywhere and everyone watched my every move. ” At the same time, her sister had been able to reassure Samra of Sherafghan’s sincerity. “My sister would tell me things like ‘Don’t worry, he is not playing with you. I have not seen him on the phone with other girls . he is hardworking, goes to work on time. He will keep you well. ’” Their courtship developed over a year, almost entirely in secret, and it eventually culminated in his family’s sending a formal marriage proposal to her family, the typical way to initiate marriage proceedings in urban Pakistan. In an environment where marriage is the prescribed future for all women, but premarital contact between the sexes is discouraged, finding the right partner, without visibly flouting social norms, requires a skillful balancing act between private interests and aspirations, and between public representations and collective concerns. How young women navigate such concerns is both constrained and informed by wider pressures and practices among Lahore’s upwardly mobile and “new-middle-class” groups (Maqsood 2017; see AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 93–104, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. © 2021 The Authors. American Ethnologist published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.13000 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. American Ethnologist Volume 48 Number 1 February 2021 also Maqsood 2014). More specifically, economic precarity and desires for consumption are both growing and have combined, in a pattern noticed globally (Donner and Santos 2016). This combination has strengthened the norms of joint family living in Pakistan’s aspiring middle class. The pooling of resources, through joint living, reduces risk and everyday costs, facilitating greater spending on the luxuries and pleasures associated with middle-class status. The practicalities of joint family life sit uneasily, however, with young women’s romantic desires, which evoke a future centered around the pleasures of nuclear life. Yet joint family living also opens up space for pursuing individual romantic interests. Young women like Samra use their kin and family connections to find the right match, and they draw on their emotional connections with elders to orchestrate a socially sanctioned marriage, or, as it is termed in academic discourse, a “love-cum-arranged” alliance (Donner 2002; Fuller and Narasimhan 2008). The play between individual desires and collective concerns in the lives of my interlocutors relates directly to current debates on love in postcolonial contexts. In these debates marital and intimate practices have been used as sites to question older anthropological assumptions (Thomas and Cole 2009; Venkatesan et al. 2011). With regard to South Asia, recent scholarship has disrupted the common division, in academic and popular discourse, between arranged marriages, as reflecting traditional and collective pressures, and love marriages, as reflecting individualized choice and agency. On the one hand, ethnographies of love marriages have problematized the assumption of agency as individual autonomy (Abeyasekera 2016; De Neve 2016; Mody 2008). On the other hand, ethnographic and historical work has challenged the depiction of arranged alliances as “traditional” (Majumdar 2009) and described the space that the institution gives to personal dispositions and emotions (Shaw and Charsley 2006), as well as to notions of companionship and affection (Donner 2008, 2016; Fuller and Narasimhan 2008; Osella 2012). Taken together, these works critique, both implicitly and explicitly (De Neve 2016; Donner 2016; Donner and Santos 2016; Osella 2012), the mapping of arranged and love marriages on opposite ends of a “world-historical telos” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 267). Here, “modernity” represents a shift from collective and traditional obligations toward the individual autonomy of “pure relationships” (Giddens 1992). The ethnography that follows builds on this critique, drawing out the limitations of such dichotomies in understanding the presence of joint family arrangements. Presented as a symbol of “traditional” values, joint family living has been strengthened and revitalized by, and facilitates the consumption of, “modernity” in middle-class settings. My main aim, however, is not to evaluate the “modernity” of joint families but to draw out the space and opportunities they provide for romantic pursuits. The ethnography here bears more squarely on love itself, centering on the experience and what it enables. The local notion of understandings, used to talk about premarital relationships, offers a window on the way love introduces “new conditions of possibility” (Faier 2007, 150). That is to say, it opens up new potentials and avenues, in which women can self-make and build toward a future of financial security and emotional fulfillment in an environment of limited options and considerable patriarchal control. Following Lieba Faier (2007), I take love to be a “cultural discourse and a self-making term” (150) through which my interlocuters lay claim to “modern and cosmopolitan personhood” (149). At first glance, love-cum-marriages appear to be a curious place to begin a discussion of new possibilities. Usually, and especially in the literature on South Asia as well as the Muslim world, scholars focus on love marriages and elopements that openly flout (patriarchal) norms and the limits of community lifeworlds (Das 1995). They are viewed as opening new, if ambivalent (Mody 2008), potentialities. Meanwhile, love-cum-arranged marriages, with their insistence on family acceptance and, in this case, use of kin connections, suggest an upholding of restrictive structural norms. Yet it is precisely through exploring such actions that we can glimpse a form of desire and agency, one that neither opposes patriarchal norms nor fits or pursues selfcultivation within them. It instead points us toward a new way of thinking about self-making, in which women use the very kin connections and family arrangements that otherwise inhibit them from imagining and building toward a new future. Love, desire, and agency In liberal theorizations and in “Western” assumptions about the person, desire, much like agency, is often viewed as valorizing the individual. In this respect, agency works against or, at the very least, despite structural or normative constraints. Although this perspective has been problematized, especially in feminist theory, what needs to be underscored here is that desire represents a certain degree of individual autonomy. In contrast, recent ethnographic writing centered on nonliberal, predominantly Muslim contexts has emphasized that desire is relational, situated in and articulated through normative social forms. For instance, Suad Joseph (1993, 2005) has argued that desire—understood as either an erotic or nonerotic yearning, longing, or wish—is learned, taught, and practiced through relational pedagogies and is constantly relearned and retaught with age and changing status and relationships. Rather than stand for an individual autonomy situated outside normative structures, desire is “assimilated into and claimed by the matrix of relationships in which it is constituted” (Joseph 2005, 81). Perhaps the most influential rejoinder, in this regard, has come from Saba Mahmood (2001, 2005), whose exploration of the Egyptian mosque movement emphasizes a form of individual agency that does not reflect a desire for freedom