BARGAINING RELATIONSHIPS AMONG SPOUSES IN URBAN INTERMARRIAGES IN INDIA: A QUALITATIVE EXPLORATION OF THE INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER, ETHNICITY, CASTE AND CLASS BY SONALI GHOSH DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Assata Zerai, Chair Associate Professor Moon-Kie Jung Assistant Professor Keera Allendorf Doctor Catherine Kenney ABSTRACT This work is a qualitative study that explores how spouses in urban intermarriages in India negotiate for resources within the household as they navigate their way through varying norms that come with the different class, castes and ethnicities that they draw from. It examines negotiation with specific reference to (i) wedding expenses and wedding rituals (ii) division of labor within the household (iii) financial decision-making) (iv) maintenance and transmission of language and diet and (v) residential pattern. The paradigm of intersectionality which sees gender, class, race and other social categories as inextricably linked forms the backbone of the approach as it explores how gender, caste, class and ethnicity emerge and submerge in different contexts of the bargaining process for the couples in the study. In doing so it reveals how women in the study, exercise their agency in the intersection of these manifold and often ambiguous structures that leave the meanings of rules and norms of these multiple structures open for interpretation. It draws an agency continuum based on the innovation that the actors display in their exercise of choice. At one end is circumscribed agency in which choices are made within the extant possibilities contained in the multiple structures, without creation of new rules or norms. At the other end is transformative agency wherein new norms are created by transposing existing rules to new structural contexts thereby creating new parameters of choice that were hitherto not present. In between lies exercise of choice that does not fit neatly in either category. The study brings to attention how individual character traits steer choices within the compass of multiple structures. It establishes a continuum where in one end is women who most successfully assert agency and negotiate for resources. They associate themselves with assertive character traits like being “confident” or “strong willed”. At the extreme end are women least successful in negotiation that associates themselves with character traits like “being too soft”. Most women fall in the middle that have reasonable if not excessive success in asserting agency in negotiating within their marriages. They associate themselves with more temperate character traits like “calm” or “not too pushy”. The fieldwork was conducted in New Delhi, India between December 2007 and February 2009, and the work in the field spanned a period of twelve months that included recruitment and data collection. Case studies of sixteen couples in intermarriages are used as analytical data for the study. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Heartfelt thank you to Ms. Julie Woolsey, Ms. Shari Day and Ms. Maggie Metzger Chappell for helping me navigate the graduate school administration smoothly all through my years of study at the University of Illinois. I give special thanks to Shari who has many a time gone an extra mile to help me during administrative contingencies. I will always remember her with gratitude. I will remain indebted to my committee members, Professor Assata Zerai, Professor Moon-Kie Jung, Professor Keera Allendorf and Dr. Catherine Kenney for the invaluable guidance and direction they provided to my writing. Thank you for critically examining my work and asking compelling questions that helped me collect my ideas and give them shape. I cannot express in words what Professor Zerai, my mentor and advisor, has meant to me over the last few years. She has provided me with immense moral support and encouragement through the dissertating process. I could not have had a better advisor. I thank all the women and men in my study that let me into their lives and homes. Through understanding you, I understand myself better. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: METHODS………………………………………………………………………36 CHAPTER 3: EMERGING AGENCIES WITHIN MULTIPLE STRUCTURES..............................................................................................................................49 CHAPTER 4: SUBVERTING GENDER: BARGAINING AT SINGLE POINT HEIRARCHY AND MULTIPLE POINTS OF DIFFERENCE...................................................79 CHAPTER 5: SUBVERTING GENDER: BARGAINING AT MULTPLE POINTS OF HIERARCHY......................................................................................125 CHAPTER 6: DISCERNING THE BROAD TRENDS IN NEGOTIATION…………………………………………………………………………….149 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………183 REFERENCES:...........................................................................................................................192 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Studies of intermarriages in India have placed close attention to inter-caste marriages, as the traditional marriage structure in India centered around caste endogamy, that is, it was arranged between men and women belonging to the same caste. One of the earliest studies focused on the trends and incidence of inter-caste marriages and reached the verdict, that in spite of the urbanization and modernization which provide young men and women the opportunity to interact freely across caste lines, the frequency with which they chose to defy caste lines is very small, and young people still hold dear mate selection through arranged marriages where caste endogamy is the norm (Cormac 1961). A more recent study (Saroja 1999) also reached the same conclusion in the rural Indian milieu, saying that under the circumstance of large scale dowry and severe competition for jobs, young people try to keep their caste affiliations, which can help them advance in life, and therefore prefer strict caste endogamy. A study of matrimonial advertisements of highly educated urban Indians, including those who seek education and job opportunities in the United States revealed their preference to marry inside their caste (Sharda 1990). However the most recent work on inter-caste marriage within the urban educated middle class (Chauhan 2007), which undertook a content analysis of matrimonial advertisements of three years, 1950, 1970 and 1990 indicates that caste is not as important a factor in finding a suitable match anymore, and people are willing to cross caste lines as long as they find mates of similar class status. Lack of surveys, past or current, and the absence of stringent requirement of marriage registration in India accounts for the discrepancies that studies reach in the incidence of inter-caste marriages and makes it difficult to ascertain the real numbers in inter-caste marriages 1 at present. However there is sufficient anecdotal evidence that young people, in the twenty first century, in large urban cities are increasingly marrying not only outside caste, but outside their class and ethnic boundaries as well. For the purpose of my study, intermarriage is viewed not only as inter-caste union but marriages that may also permeate the boundaries of class and ethnicity as well. One such study, Kaur (2008) has been made in the rural Indian context, which studies intermarriages across caste and ethnic divides as well. Kaur’s (2008) main focus is to study the impact that adverse sex ratios have on rural marriage patterns and in her working paper states, that adverse sex ratios among certain ethnic groups like Punjab and Haryana force them to look outside their caste and ethnic boundaries for brides. Shortage of women due to practice of sex selective abortions lead to a shorter supply of women of marriageable age for these ethnic groups. As a result they bring in brides from Bengal, Assam and other ethnic groups where sex ratios are not as adverse as among ‘Punjabis’ or ‘Haryanvis’. The men who seek such brides often have little or no agricultural land and are lower down the social and economic order, as the more well placed men prefer to marry within their own ethnic and caste groups. Similarly women who enter such marriages also come from destitute families whose parents are willing to arrange such matches for them, as they entail no dowry. Kaur asks how women in these marriages adjust to a new cultural environment and states that for women in these marriages in rural India, a ‘cultural forgetting’ takes place where that of the husbands replaces their own rites, rituals, language, food and dress. My study explores intermarriages in urban India. Unlike Kaur’s study where the marriages are propelled by adverse sex ratios and were arranged by the parents’ of the bride and groom, in this study the marriages are self-choice marriages, popularly known in India as ‘love marriages’. Men and women in large metropolitan cities in India are often thrown together at the 2 schools, universities and the work place and are often the milieu from where they find their spouse in these self-choice marriages. My study looks at intermarriages across, caste, ethnic, as well as class divides and explores intra household bargaining within such inter marriages. It looks specifically