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.

The Human Development Report for 1995 published by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) made a striking revelation that there was not a single country where women enjoyed equality with men.

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.