This talk focuses on inter-caste-religious marriages among young people in India. These have been generally interpreted through the lens of romantic love and individual choice. My paper seeks to complicate these narratives by situating such marriages within their specific regional context and its embedded social and structural practices. Drawing from an ethnographic study in a rural district of Karnataka, southern India, this paper discusses the multiple reasons that drive adolescent girls and young women to leave home and enter into inter-caste-religious marriages in rural India. By focusing on the act of ‘leaving home’, the paper argues that such a decision is not always prompted by affective motivations, but instead emerges within the spatially restrictive rural social order and is shaped by larger structural forces, including the norms of compulsory marriage, and of sexual respectability, and the performance of gender and caste. Foregrounding the various factors for ‘leaving home’, the paper problematises understandings of inter-caste-religious marriage as choice and illustrates how young women are often compelled into marriage. At the same time, the paper also examines the forms of agency they exercise and negotiate within existing structural constraints.

Speaker Bio

Disha K R is a Commonwealth visiting research scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is pursuing her PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), India. Her doctoral research focuses on Inter-caste-religious marriages, families and kinship in India. She is exploring how these marriages are been formed, practised and sustained in rural India.