Choosing the Arranged One, Arranging the Chosen One – Imagining an Indian Modernity: Reconciling Love, Marriage and Family on and Off the Screen
Choosing the Arranged One, Arranging the Chosen One – Imagining an Indian Modernity: Reconciling Love, Marriage and Family On and Off the Screen Riikka Koutaniemi Faculty of Social Sciences Social and Cultural Anthropology Master´s Thesis May 2011 Tiedekunta/Osasto – Fakultet/Sektion – Faculty Laitos – Institution – Department Faculty of Social Sciences Department of Sociology Tekijä – Författare – Author Riikka Koutaniemi Työn nimi – Arbetets titel – Title Choosing the Arranged One, Arranging the Chosen One – Imagining an Indian Modernity: Reconciling Love, Marriage and Family On and Off the Screen Oppiaine – Läroämne – Subject Social and Cultural Anthropology Työn laji – Arbetets art – Level Aika – Datum – Month and year Sivumäärä – Sidoantal – Number of pages Master´s Thesis May 2011 112 Tiivistelmä – Referat – Abstract This is a study on the changing practices of kinship in Northern India. The change in kinship arrangements, and particularly in intermarriage processes, is traced by analysing the reception of Hindi popular cinema. Films and their role and meaning in people´s lives in India was the object of my research. Films also provided me with a methodology for approaching my other subject-matters: family, marriage and love. Through my discussion of cultural change, the persistence of family as a core value and locus of identity, and the movie discourses depicting this dialogue, I have looked for a possibility of compromise and reconciliation in an Indian context. As the primary form of Indian public culture, cinema has the ability to take part in discourses about Indian identity and cultural change, and alleviate the conflicts that emerge within these discourses. Hindi popular films do this, I argue, by incorporating different familiar cultural narratives in a resourceful way, thus creating something new out of the old elements.
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