Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-thh2z Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-18T22:16:47.089Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘For how Long can your Pīharwāle Intervene?’: Accessing natal kin support in rural North India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2019

SHRUTI CHAUDHRY
SHRUTI CHAUDHRY*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh Email: Shruti.Chaudhry@ed.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Uttar Pradesh, this article contributes to debates on married women's relations with their natal kin. It compares women in ‘regional’ marriages (which conform to caste and community norms with a relatively small marriage distance) with women in ‘cross-regional’ marriages (those that cross caste, linguistic, and state boundaries, and entail long-distance migration). A focus on cross-regional marriage demonstrates how geographic distance cuts women off from vital structures of support. At the same time, even for regional brides, natal kin support is complicated and relative proximity does not guarantee support. Factors such as caste, class, poverty, the gender of children, notions of honour and shame, and stage in the life-course work together in complex ways to determine the duration and kind of support available. By focusing on marital violence, marital breakdown, and widowhood, the article demonstrates both the presence and the limits of natal kin support. The opportunities to draw on natal kin support vary for women, but its significance must not be understated as it alone provides women with the possibility of leaving their marriages, even if only temporarily. The article focuses on one form of women's agency, one that is constrained and highly dependent on relationships with others (mainly male kin). In such a context of economic and social dependency, natal kin support is an important—and perhaps the only—resource available in situations of marital crisis, and its absence leaves women in a particularly vulnerable position.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 5 , September 2019 , pp. 1613 - 1645
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The fieldwork on which this article is based was carried out as part of my doctoral research and was supported by the University of Edinburgh College Research Studentship and Edinburgh Global Overseas Research Scholarship. I am grateful to Patricia Jeffery for discussion and her careful reading of several drafts of this article. I am also thankful to Rajni Palriwala, Kaveri Qureshi, and Mary Holmes for their valuable suggestions on earlier versions of this article as well as to three anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive comments.

References

1 Palriwala, R. and Uberoi, P., ‘Exploring the links: Gender issues in marriage and migration’, in Marriage, Migration and Gender, Palriwala, R. and Uberoi, P. (eds), Sage, New Delhi, 2008, p. 28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Barampur is a fictitious name and the names of all informants have been changed. I use ‘regional marriage’ to describe what is referred to in the literature as local/normative/traditionally arranged marriages. I will define regional and cross-regional marriages in the pages that follow.

3 Jeffery, P. and Jeffery, R., Don't Marry Me to a Plowman! Women's Everyday Life in Rural North India, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1996Google Scholar; Raheja, G. G., ‘Crying when she's born, and crying when she goes away: Marriage and the idiom of the gift in Pahansu song performance’, in From the Margins of Hindu Marriage: Essays on Gender, Religion and Culture, Harlan, L. and Courtright, P. (eds), Oxford University Press, New York; Oxford, 1995, pp. 19–59Google Scholar.

4 Bourdieu, P., ‘The forms of capital’, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, Richardson, J. G. (ed.), Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1986, pp. 241–258Google Scholar.

5 Kandiyoti, D., ‘Bargaining with patriarchy’. Gender and Society, vol. 2, no. 3, September 1988, p. 274–290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Palriwala, R., ‘Transitory residence and invisible work: A case study of a Rajasthan village’. Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 26, no. 48, November 1991, pp. 2763–2777Google Scholar.

7 Lamb, S., ‘The making and unmaking of persons: Notes on aging and gender in North India’. Ethos, vol. 25, no. 3, September 1997, p. 290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Trautmann, T., Dravidian Kinship, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1981, p. 291Google Scholar. See also Karve, I., ‘The kinship map of India’, in Family, Kinship and Marriage in India, Uberoi, P. (ed.), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1994, pp. 50–73Google Scholar.

9 Dyson, T. and Moore, M., ‘Kinship structure, female autonomy and demographic behaviour in India’. Population and Development Review, vol. 9, no. 1, March 1983, p. 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Jeffery, P., Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah, Zed, London, 1979Google Scholar.

11 Eglar, Z., A Punjabi Village in Pakistan, Columbia University Press, New York, 1960CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Jeffery, P., Jeffery, R. and Lyon, A., ‘When did you last see your mother? Aspects of female autonomy in rural North India’, in Micro-Approaches to Demographic Research, Caldwell, J., Hill, A. G. and Hull, V. J. (eds), Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1988, pp. 321–331Google Scholar; Jeffery, P., Jeffery, R. and Lyon, A., Labour Pains and Labour Power: Women and Childbearing in India, Manohar, New Delhi, 1989Google Scholar; Jeffery and Jeffery, Don't Marry me to a Plowman!

13 Jeffery et al., ‘When did you last see your mother?’, p. 324.

14 Kapadia, K., Siva and her Sisters: Gender, Caste and Class in Rural South India, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1995Google Scholar; Rao, N., ‘Marriage, violence and choice: Understanding Dalit women's agency in rural Tamil Nadu’. Gender and Society, vol. 29, no. 3, June 2015, pp. 410–433CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vera-Sanso, P., ‘Dominant daughters-in-law and submissive mothers-in-law? Cooperation and conflict in South India’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 5, no. 4, December 1995, pp. 577–593CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Jeffery, P., ‘A uniform customary code? Marital breakdown and women's economic entitlements in rural Bijnor’. Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 35, no. 1, February 2001, pp. 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Qureshi, K., Marital Breakdown among British Asians: Conjugality, Legal Pluralism and New Kinship, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Jeffery and Jeffery, Don't Marry Me to a Plowman!; Madan, T. N., Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2002Google Scholar; Raheja, G. G. and Gold, A., Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1994Google Scholar; Sharma, U., Women, Work and Property in North-West India, Tavistock, London and New York, 1980Google Scholar.

17 Jacobson, D., ‘Flexibility in North Indian kinship and residence’, in The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia, David, K. (ed.), Mouton, The Hague, 1977Google Scholar; Palriwala, ‘Transitory residence and invisible work’, p. 2763.

18 Jacobson, ‘Flexibility in North Indian kinship and residence’; Jeffery, ‘A uniform customary code?’; Jeffery and Jeffery, Don't Marry me to a Plowman!

19 Vatuk, S., ‘Trends in North Indian urban kinship: The “matrilateral asymmetry” hypothesis’. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, vol. 27, no. 3, Autumn 1971, pp. 287–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Grover, S., Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India, Social Science Press, New Delhi, 2017 (revised edition), p. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Qureshi, Marital Breakdown among British Asians, p. 300.

22 Grover, Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support, pp. 60, 63. See also ibid., pp. 123–124.

23 de Neve, G., ‘The economies of love: Love marriage, kin support, and aspirations in a South Indian garment city’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, April 2016, pp. 1220–1249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 For example, T. Blanchet, ‘Bangladeshi girls sold as wives in North India’, in Marriage, Migration and Gender, Palriwala and Uberoi (eds), pp. 152–179; Davin, D., ‘Marriage migration in China and East Asia’. Journal of Contemporary China, vol. 16, no. 50, March 2007, pp. 83–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Qureshi, K., ‘Shehri (city) brides between Indian Punjab and the UK: Transnational hypergamy, Sikh women's agency and gendered geographies of power’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 42, no. 7, May 2016, pp. 1216–1228CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Abraham, ‘Domestic violence and the Indian diaspora in the United States’, in Marriage, Migration and Gender, Palriwala and Uberoi (eds), pp. 303–325; Williams, L., Global Marriage: Cross-border Marriage Migration in Global Context, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke; New York, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaur, R., ‘Across-region marriages: Poverty, female migration and the sex ratio’. Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 39, no. 25, June 2004, pp. 2595–2603Google Scholar; Qureshi, Marital Breakdown among British Asians; Schein, L., ‘Marrying out of place: Hmong/Miao women across and beyond China’, in Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia, Constable, N. (ed.), University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2005, p. 62Google Scholar.

25 In their work on cross-regional marriages, Kukreja and Kumar argue that, while cross-regional brides lack familial support, ‘local’ brides, in contrast, can ‘call family at a moment's notice to their aid’ and can ‘walk out of an abusive marriage…instead of suffering their lot silently’. Kukreja, R. and Kumar, P., Tied in a Knot: Cross-Region Marriages in Haryana and Rajasthan: Implications for Gender Rights and Gender Relations, Tamarind Tree Films, New Delhi, 2013, pp. 48–49Google Scholar.

26 Grover, Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support.

27 The Domestic Violence Act was enacted in India in 2005. This important legislation widened the definition of domestic violence but, more significantly, it provided economic rights, including maintenance and compensation, and secured a woman's right to safe housing. In Barampur, there is no knowledge of this Act and it is unlikely that women would be able to access courts and the law when in crisis, even if they did.

28 Duncan, S., ‘Women's agency in living apart together: Constraint, strategy and vulnerability’. The Sociological Review, vol. 63, no. 3, August 2015, p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Census of India, Primary Census Abstract, Baghpat, Office of the Registrar General, New Delhi, Government of India, 2011Google Scholar.

30 Sahay, G., ‘Dominance of Jats is unabated: Caste and dominance in the villages of western Uttar Pradesh’. Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 49, no. 2, June 2015, pp. 216–249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See, for example, Deccan Herald, ‘Brides Purchased and Exploited in Haryana’, 24 February 2019, https://www.deccanherald.com/exclusives/brides-purchased-and-exploited-720025.html, [accessed 16 April 2019]. Hindustan Times, ‘When Women Come Cheaper than Cattle’, 23 March 2014, http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/when-women-come-cheaper-than-cattle/article1-1199052.aspx, [accessed 28 January 2019]; Tribune, ‘Bought Brides of Punjab Face Societal Wrath’, 17 August 2003, http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20030817/main1.htm, [accessed 28 January 2019].

32 Studies on urban, particularly middle-class, Indians, in contrast to this rural context, point to greater agency for young people in negotiating marriages. See Donner, H., ‘Doing it our way: Love and marriage in Kolkata middle-class families’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, April 2016, pp. 1147–1189CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fuller, C. J. and Narasimhan, H., ‘Companionate marriage in India: The changing marriage system in a middle-class Brahman subcaste’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 14, no. 4, December 2008, pp. 736–754CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Dumont, L., Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implication, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980 (complete revised English edition), p. 117Google Scholar.

34 Vatuk, S., ‘Gifts and affines in North India’. Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), vol. 9, no. 2, July 1975, pp. 155–196CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Mody, P., ‘Love and the law: Love-marriage in Delhi’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, February 2002, pp. 223–256CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See S. Chaudhry, ‘Lived Experiences of Marriage: Regional and Cross-Regional Brides in Rural North India’, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2016. See also Kaur, ‘Across-region marriages’ on why this categorization is problematic, and Constable (ed.), Cross-Border Marriages for a discussion of the categorization of women in cross-border/transnational, commercially mediated marriages as mail-order brides, commodities, or trafficked women.

37 Kukreja and Kumar, Tied in a Knot, p. 5.

38 Kaur, ‘Across-region marriages’, pp. 2595–2596.

39 Darling, M., The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, Manohar, Delhi, 1977Google Scholar; Jeffery and Jeffery, Don't Marry me to a Plowman!; Raheja, G. G., The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village, University of Chicago Press, Chicago; London, 1988Google Scholar.

40 Chaudhry, S. and Mohan, T. D., ‘Of marriage and migration: Bengali and Bihari brides in a UP village’. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, October 2011, p. 312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Kaur, ‘Across-region marriages’, p. 2595.

42 Mishra, P., ‘Sex ratios, cross-region marriages and the challenges to caste endogamy in Haryana’. Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 48, no. 35, August 2013, pp. 70–78Google Scholar.

43 Chaudhry, S., ‘Now it is difficult to get married: Contextualizing cross-regional marriage and bachelorhood in a North Indian village’, in Scarce Women and Surplus Men in China and India: Macro Demographics versus Local Dynamics, Srinivasan, S. and Li, S. (eds), Springer, Cham, 2018Google Scholar.

44 Davin, ‘Marriage migration in China and East Asia’; Min, H. and Eades, J. S., ‘Brides, bachelors and brokers: The marriage market in rural Anhui in an era of economic reforms’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 29, no. 4, October 1995, pp. 841–869CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lee, H., ‘Political economy of cross-border marriage: Economic development and social reproduction in Korea’. Feminist Economics, vol. 18, no. 2, April 2012, pp. 177–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Global Marriage.

45 Dube points out that concerns around caste purity and paternity in patrilineal societies make policing the sexuality of unattached women—unmarried, divorced/separated, and widowed—a priority. In Barampur, the remarriage of widows was permitted across castes and was explained by anxieties about their sexual availability. The relationship between Sarla's husband and his chāchī was brought up by several informants who commented that women formed ‘inappropriate’ relationships when unattached. See Dube, L., ‘Seed and earth: Symbolism of biological reproduction and sexual relations of production’, in Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development, Dube, L., Leacock, E. and Ardener, S. (eds), Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1986, p. 22Google Scholar.

46 Vatuk, ‘Trends in North Indian urban kinship’; Jacobson, ‘Flexibility in North Indian kinship and residence’; Palriwala, ‘Transitory residence and invisible work’; Jeffery and Jeffery, Don't Marry me to a Plowman!

47 See also Mirza, N., ‘South Asian women's experience of abuse by female affinal kin: A critique of mainstream conceptualisations of domestic abuse’. Families, Relationships and Societies, vol. 10, March 2015, pp. 1–17Google Scholar.

48 See also Jeffery and Jeffery, Don't Marry me to a Plowman!; Jeffery, ‘A uniform customary code?’.

49 Blanchet, ‘Bangladeshi girls sold as wives in North India’; Jeffery et al., Labour Pains and Labour Power; Chowdhry, P., ‘Crisis of masculinity in Haryana: The unmarried, the unemployed and the aged’. Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 40, no. 49, December 2005, pp. 5189–5198Google Scholar.

50 Chaudhry and Mohan, ‘Of marriage and migration’; Kaur, ‘Across-region marriages’; Mishra, ‘Sex ratios, cross-region marriages and the challenges to caste endogamy in Haryana’.

51 D. Davin, ‘Marriage migration in China: The enlargement of marriage markets in the era of market reforms’, in Marriage, Migration and Gender, Palriwala and Uberoi (eds), pp. 63–77.

52 Abraham, ‘Domestic violence and the Indian diaspora in the United States’, p. 314.

53 Schein, ‘Marrying out of place’, p. 62.

54 Ahlawat, N., ‘The dark side of the marriage squeeze: Violence against cross-region brides in Haryana’, in Too Many Men, Too Few Women: Social Consequences of Gender Imbalance in India and China, Kaur, R. (ed.), Orient Black Swan, New Delhi, 2016, pp. 197–219Google Scholar.

55 Lambert, H., ‘Sentiments and substance in North Indian forms of relatedness’, in Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, Carsten, J. (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 78Google Scholar; Raheja and Gold, Listen to the Heron's Words.

56 Basu, S., ‘Haklenewali: Indian women's negotiations of discourses of inheritance’, in Dowry and Inheritance, Basu, S. (ed.), Women Unlimited, New Delhi, 2005, p. 153Google Scholar.

57 Abraham, J., ‘Why did you send me like this?: Marriage, matriliny and the providing husband in North Kerala, India’. Asian Journal of Women's Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, January 2011, pp. 32–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Jeffery and Jeffery, Don't Marry me to a Plowman!; Jeffery, ‘A uniform customary code’?, p. 18.

59 Qureshi was told by her Pakistani informants in Britain that when a daughter leaves her parents’ home on her wedding palanquin, the parents say, ‘This is your dead body leaving the house’, so that she never thinks to return. Qureshi, Marital Breakdown among British Asians, p. 127.

60 K. Charsley, ‘Vulnerable brides and transnational ghar damads: Gender, risk and adjustment among Pakistani marriage migrants to Britain’, in Marriage, Migration and Gender, Palriwala and Uberoi, (eds), pp. 152–179; Jeffery, ‘A uniform customary code?’.

61 See also Grover, Love, Caste and Kinship Support.

62 Grover noted that cautionary discourses about remarriage were widespread in Delhi and secondary marriages often meant more peril for women. See ibid.

63 See Qureshi, Marital Breakdown among British Asians.

64 S. Wadley, ‘No longer a wife: Widows in rural North India’, in From the Margins of Hindu Marriage, Harlan and Courtright (eds), p. 4.

65 See Das, V., ‘Indian women: Work, power and status’, in Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity, Nanda, B. R. (ed.), Vikas, Delhi, 1976, pp. 129–145Google Scholar.

66 Grover, Love, Caste and Kinship Support.

67 Chowdhry, P., Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy in Northern India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007Google Scholar.

68 Qureshi, Marital Breakdown among British Asians, pp. 102, 124.

69 Ibid., p. 95.

70 This resonates with Grover's study where men whose wives had gone back to their natal homes complained that their in-laws were treating their daughters as an economic resource and overlooking their daughters’ long-term interests in their sasurāl.

71 Grover, Love, Caste and Kinship Support. See also Parry, J., ‘Ankalu's errant wife: Sex, marriage and industry in contemporary Chhattisgarh’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 4, October 2001, pp. 783–820CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Abraham, ‘Domestic violence and the Indian diaspora in the United States’, p. 315. See also Qureshi, Marital Breakdown among British Asians.

73 Doron, A., ‘Mobile persons: cell phones, gender and the self in North India’. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol. 13, no. 5, November 2012, p. 426CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Chen, M. A. and Drèze, J., Widows and Well-being in Rural North India, Development Economics Research Programme, Suntory-Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines, London, 1992, p. 4Google Scholar.

75 Ibid.; Lamb, S., ‘Aging, gender and widowhood: Perspectives from rural West Bengal’. Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.), vol. 33, no. 3, October 1999, pp. 540–570CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wadley, ‘No longer a wife’.

76 Across castes, bhāt gifts were provided by a regional bride's brother at her children's weddings. It was seen as the support extended by a woman's natal kin for the marriage of her children.

77 Chowdhry, P., The Veiled Women: Shifting Gender Equations in Rural Haryana, 1880–1990, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1994Google Scholar; Kolenda, P., ‘Widowhood among Untouchable Chuhras’, in Concepts of Person: Kinship, Caste and Marriage in India, Ostor, A., Fruzzetti, L. and Barnett, S. (eds), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 172–220Google Scholar; Pradhan, M. C., The Political System of the Jats of Northern India, Oxford University Press, London, 1966Google Scholar.

78 Wadley, ‘No longer a wife’, p. 97.

79 K. Mand, ‘Marriage and migration through the life course: Experiences of widowhood, separation and divorce among transnational Sikh women’, in Marriage, Migration and Gender, Palriwala and Uberoi (eds), p. 290.

80 Chen, M. A., Perpetual Mourning: Widowhood in Rural India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi; New York, 2000Google Scholar; Lamb, ‘Aging, gender and widowhood’.

81 Davin, ‘Marriage migration in China and East Asia’; Schein, ‘Marrying out of place’.

82 Chaudhry, ‘Lived experiences of marriage’.

83 Kabeer, N., ‘Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women's empowerment’. Development and Change, vol. 30, 1999, pp. 435–464CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Jeffery et al., Labour Pains and Labour Power; Jeffery and Jeffery, Don't Marry me to a Plowman!; Jeffery, ‘A uniform customary code?’.