Negotiating Marriage: Examining the Gap between Marriage and Cohabitation in India

Two connected observations often loom large in discussions about marriage in India. The first is that marriage for women on the sub-continent often occurs at a relatively early age, and this is cause for concern because early marriage is thought to disempower women by reducing their access to education and thrusting adult responsibilities on them early in life. The second observation is that marriage in India is more or less universal, making the first issue all the more pressing. This paper argues that in concert with examining the corporate family as an embodied actor, paying particular attention to the performative dimension of gender offers a useful means of studying marriage patterns in an Indian context.