Whatever the reasons may be, ‘love’ is what now defines marriage, at least in the Western world. Although there is much to be argued against this, not in the least based on the fact that online dat...

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The IT Caste: Love and Arranged Marriages in the IT Industry of Bangalore

Divorce and Separation in India

The paper considers narratives and experiences of love marriage in the garment city of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, south India. As a booming centre of garment production, Tiruppur attracts a diverse migrant workforce of young men and women who have plenty of opportunity to fall in love and enter marriages of their own making. Based on long-term ethnographic research, the paper explores what love marriages mean to those involved, how they are experienced and talked about, and how they shape post-marital lives. Case studies reveal that a discourse of loss of post-marital kin support is central to evaluations of love marriages by members of Tiruppur’s labouring classes. Such marriages not only flout parental authority and often cross caste and religious boundaries, but they also jeopardise the much needed kin support that youngsters need to fulfil aspirations of mobility, entrepreneurship and success in a post-liberalisation environment. It is argued that critical evaluations of love marriages not only disrupt modernist assumptions of linear transformations in marital practices, but they also constitute a broader critique of the neoliberal celebration of the ‘individual’ while reaffirming the continued importance of caste endogamy, parental involvement and kin support to success in India’s post-reform economy.

The economies of love: love marriage, kin support and aspiration in a south Indian garment city

The digitization of matrimonial matchmaking has implications for work but also subjective notions of family, femininity, parent-child relations, community boundaries which this work relies on. This paper is based on qualitative, ethnographic fieldwork with matchmakers working with middle-class, upper-caste Hindu and Parsi communities in metropolitan India and offering services alongside, or as an alternative to the now widely used online matrimonial services. Through our fieldwork, we found all matchmakers engaged with digital technologies' involvement in the ongoing churn around modern choice. Matchmakers engaged with this wider social discourse through ideas of trust, autonomy and genealogy and in doing so they responded to and re/produced varying imaginations of the future of families, community, individuals. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the digitization of a service as well as make a case for widening the conceptual scope of the future of work debate currently dominated by economistic conceptions of work. By paying attention to the links between the productive and reproductive spheres of life, we follow labor and capital into the families and communities they reside in order to see the variety of moral projects capital can be invested in.

The Moral Orders of Matchmaking Work: Digitization of Matrimonial Services and the Future of Work

This article offers a theoretical excavation of the brown savior, a figure that has taken on a critical role in the newly reconstructed help industries in India. Brown saviors help us to think more critically about the global help industries, an area in which racializing processes have been relatively understudied despite the fact that, historically, nearly all help interventions have focused on previously colonized peoples. I suggest that the brown savior is a figure that reveals the contradictions in the contemporary help economy, which reproduces forms of racialized difference and hierarchy by conscripting new actors who can ascend to the role of savior and, therefore, continue the project of racial capitalist accumulation. I specifically place the category of “brown” in relation to “savior” in the Indian context to draw attention to how a particular class of savarna (dominant-caste) Hindus was historically constituted and actively reproduces colonial-era racialized values through twenty-first-century help economies tethered to their economic, political, and social capital in both India and the United States.

The IT Caste: Love and Arranged Marriages in the IT Industry of Bangalore

Citations

Divorce and Separation in India

The economies of love: love marriage, kin support and aspiration in a south Indian garment city

The Moral Orders of Matchmaking Work: Digitization of Matrimonial Services and the Future of Work

The Making of the “Brown Savior”

Big Brother in New Zealand: Anticipating the Computer

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