Showing papers on "Love marriage published in 1977"

Caste, Class and the Love-Marriage: Social Change in India.

Abstract: The present study of a small town in rural West Bengal, India, reveals a number of "love-marriages" involving individuals from castes of distinctly different ranks in the local caste hierarchy. Despite the prevailing rule of caste endogamy, inter-caste couples appear to face little difficulty living in a very small town in which one-third of the households are of recent village origin. The data suggest that such inter-caste marriages are tolerated because they are not inconsistent with the system of social ranking operating in both the town and the surrounding rural microregion. This system is class-like and an individual's social status in the social hierarchy is based on the evaluation of multiple ranking-gradients, of which caste is one.