Looking Inside Marriage: Lived Experiences, Notions of Love and Kinship Support Amongst Working Women in New Delhi

Abstract

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. Against the backdrop of economic survival, the forms of emotional and material support that natal kin provide to their daughters in these conjugal unions are centrally investigated. Kinship in north India has long been associated with a negative image of long-distance marriages, alienation from natal kin and women’s restrictive marital agency due to lack of durable support structures. This article offers an alternative insight into everyday marriage relations, into notions of love and kinship support in north India, which demonstrates close post-marital bonds, strong mother-daughter ties and intergenerational reliance. It illustrates how the type of marriage a woman enters into is crucially significant to her entitlement to post-marital support, which strengthens her fall -back position within marriage.