Marriage and modernity
Subtitle: family values in colonial Bengal
By: Rochona Majumdar.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Durham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 343
ISBN-13: 9780822344629; 9780822344780
Subjects: Arranged marriage -- India -- Bengal -- History -- 19th century; Arranged marriage -- India -- Bengal -- History -- 20th century; Marriage -- India -- Bengal -- History; Family -- India -- Bengal -- History; Marriage (Hindu law)
Description: An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, "ancient" social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an "Indian" tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced "traditions"--The extended family and arranged marriage - entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new "marketplace" for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Looking for brides and grooms; title: Snehalata's death: questions of dowry; title: Marriage and distinction: new critiques of vulgarity; title: The not-quite bourgeois: the couple form and the joint family; title: A nineteenth-century debate: law versus rituals; title: Nationalizing the joint family: the Hindu code debate, 1955/56.