This article presents in-depth ethnographic evidence of women’s lived experience of arranged marriages and love marriages, their agency and constraints in a working class neighbor hood of New Delhi.

Reproductive health [1] practices among Muslim women in India have been little researched perhaps because of the widespread notion regarding the tight Islamic control over sexual behaviour and the sanctions against contraceptive use.

While talking about law and homosexuality, I am reminded of a story of a washerman and his donkey. The donkey refused to move with the heavy bundle of clothes on his back from his house to the pond. The washerman nailed a carrot to a stick, which was tied in front of the animal's mouth.