1. A search of the Times of India archives reveals the debates that were raging in the English language press through the 1930s over the place of love in the nuptial bond. Related to these were discussions of elopement and the “restoration” of women to their natal families. Popular culture reflected these concerns—the dynamics of romance, courtship, and conjugality shifting over the decades. Scholars who have examined filmic repertoires of love suggest that in the immediate post-Independence period, romance appeared as a way of mapping social tensions. As a narrative device, romance as transgression was gradually replaced through the 1990s by romance as a way of restoring the joint family. The conversations around choice and social norms have surfaced with greater virulence in present day India. The means of resolving this tension have been varied—from the violent, sometimes homicidal imposition of family and community authority to the elision of its transgressive potential through the design of the “love-cum-arranged” marriage. The heightened social paranoia that has accompanied Hindu nationalist mobilization is often articulation over the question of conjugal choice—seen in the violent campaigns against “love jihad.” The preservation of caste boundaries through violence on those who breach them has been similarly well documented. For more, please see The Times of India, May 5, 1932; May 9, 1932; December 20, 1934; January 3, 1935; July 17, 1955. For shifts in the representations of romantic love in popular cinema, please see, among others, Dwyer, Rachel, All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sex and Romance in Modern India (London, 2000)Google Scholar.; “Yeh Shaadi Nahi Ho Sakti! (“This Wedding Cannot Happen!”): Romance and Marriage in Contemporary Hindi Cinema,” in (Un)Tying the Knot: Ideal and Reality in Asian Marriage, ed. Jones, GW and Ramdas, K. (Singapore, 2004)Google Scholar; Virdi, Jyotika, The Cinematic Imagination [Sic]: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003)Google Scholar; Uberoi, Patricia, “The Diaspora Comes Home: Disciplining Desire in Ddlj,” Contributions to Indian sociology 32, 2 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A very small selection of work focusing on the violence surrounding inter-community relationships include: Charu Gupta, “Hindu Women, Muslim Men: Love Jihad and Conversions,” Economic and Political Weekly (2009); Mody, Perveez, “Love and the Law: Love-Marriage in Delhi,” Modern Asian Studies 36, 01 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chowdhry, Prem, Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste, and Patriarchy in Northern India (New Delhi, 2007)Google Scholar.

2. See, for instance, Mody, Perveez, The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi (London, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donner, Henrike, “One's Own Marriage': Love Marriages in a Calcutta Neighbourhood,” South Asia Research 22, no. 1 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brosius, Christiane, India's Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity (London, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Orsini, Francesca, Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, vol. 62 (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar.

3. Some (and certainly not exhaustive) exceptions to the trend include, Parry, Jonathan P., “Ankalu's Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh,” Modern Asian Studies 35, 4 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jonathan Parry, “The Marital History of ‘a Thumb-Impression Man’,” Telling lives in India: Biography, autobiography, and life history (2004); Grover, Shalini, Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India (New York, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Samita Sen and Nilanjana Sengupta, “Marriage, Work and Education among Domestic Workers in Kolkata,” Economic and Political Weekly (2012).

4. I have conducted detailed interviews with the women of three families, along with more informal conversations with other women in Wazirpur. My conversations with men have been rather cursory; mediated in many cases, through the women that I have interviewed systematically. Partly, this was to do with my own gender position, the ease with which I got access to women's spaces, and the slight awkwardness that invariably accompanied my entry into exclusively male spaces.

5. Narayan details a similar tendency in her research. Narayan, Kirin, “Honor is honor, after all: silence and speech in the life stories of women in Kangra, North-West India” in Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History, ed. Arnold, David and Blackburn, Stuart (Bloomington, IN, 2004)Google Scholar.

6. For an exploration of these dimensions of life stories, see also Arnold, David and Blackburn, Stuart, Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (Bloomington, IN, 2004)Google Scholar.

7. Portelli, Alessandro, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History workshop journal 12, 1 (1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Damodaran, Sumangala, “The Shape/Ing of Industrial Landscapes: Life, Work and Occupations in and around Industrial Areas in Delhi,” in Space, Planning and Everyday Contestations in Delhi (Springer, 2016)Google Scholar.

9. Khanna Knitting and Hosiery Works vs. Delhi Development Authority, November 4, 2004.

10. “Custodial Death and Police Firing-a Tale of Two Cities,” Economic and Political Weekly 30, 16 (1995)Google Scholar.

11. The Hindu, January 3, 2015.

12. In November 2016, the Prime Minister of India declared the Rs.500 and Rs.1000 note to be invalid, overnight. In areas such as Wazirpur, where much of the financial transactions are carried out in cash, production was badly hit. The production orders had dwindled, many workshops in the area shut down, and several workers went back to their villages.

13. Damodaran observes a similar composition of the population in Wazirpur. Damodaran, Sumangala, “The Shape/Ing of Industrial Landscapes: Life, Work and Occupations in and around Industrial Areas in Delhi” in Space, Planning and Everyday Contestations in Delhi (India, 2016)Google Scholar.

14. All names have been changed.

15. Zulekha, Sunita interviews. Thorner in an older piece and Joshi, more recently attest to similar patterns of marriage and migration. Alice Thorner and Jyoti Ranadive, “Household as a First Stage in a Study of Urban Working-Class Women,” Economic and Political Weekly (1985); Joshi, Seema, “Marriage, Migration and Labour Market-a Case Study of a Slum Area in Delhi,” Indian Journal of Regional Science 37, 1 (2005)Google Scholar.

16. A neighboring locality

17. Though exact statistics are difficult to arrive at, studies suggest that women's share in formal employment is at roughly 5 percent while in informal employment, women make up around 25 percent of the labor force. Samita Sen and Nilanjana Sengupta, “Marriage, Work and Education among Domestic Workers in Kolkata,” ibid. (2012). For a discussion of gendered dimensions of informal labour, see for instance, Jeemol Unni, “Gender and Informality in Labour Market in South Asia,” Economic and Political Weekly (2001).

18. “Marriage, Work and Education among Domestic Workers in Kolkata.”

19. As other work on Delhi has shown, there are, of course, a wide variety of migration patterns in Delhi. For instance, Mukherjee discusses the solo migration of Bengali women to work as paid domestic labor in Delhi. Neela Mukherjee, “Migrant Women from West Bengal: Ill-Being and Well-Being,” Economic and Political weekly (2001).

20. The village as a site for acceptable marital negotiations is revealed not only in oral narratives but also in legal matters. Of special significance are the multiple court cases that have been filed in Wazirpur over charges of kidnapping and abduction, which sharply bring out the social tensions over self-chosen marriages.

21. See, for instance, Vatuk, Sylvia, Kinship and Urbanization: White Collar Migrants in North India (Berkeley, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grover, Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India.

22. Osella, Caroline, “Desires under Reform: Contemporary Reconfigurations of Family, Marriage, Love and Gendering in a Transnational South Indian Matrilineal Muslim Community,” Culture and Religion 13, 2 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. That said, there is a gradual shift as an increasing number of families are beginning to buy “plots” of land in the outlying areas of Delhi.

24. Grover, Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India, 103. Most young women in Wazirpur are self-confessed “Delhi girls,” an identity that they seem to carry with comfort and pride.

25. In a piece on domestic workers in Calcutta, Sen and Sengupta have argued that the gender dynamics that privilege early marriage for women also enables an easy entry into paid domestic work. This relationship between work and marriage among urban poor women, they point out, could be destabilized by education. In the case of Feriha and her sisters, we can observe a not entirely unusual phenomena, where young women work as part time paid domestic labor while continuing with their education. Interestingly, they worked in the homes of their teachers—a deeper exploration of such labor practices would lead us to other forms of exploitation, where the domain of formal education intersects with informal labor regimes. Sen and Sengupta, “Marriage, Work and Education among Domestic Workers in Kolkata.”

26. Paying guest accommodation, a common form of residential arrangement across India.

27. With regard to articulations of love in Hindi cinema, Rachel Dwyer argues that the use of English in declaring love is linked to the emergence of English as the “global language of the youth.” In Wazirpur, such cinematic repertoires of love continue to frame the expressions of romance and courtship. See, Dwyer, Rachel, “Kiss or Tell? Declaring Love in Hindi Films,” in Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, ed. Orsini, Francesca (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar.

28. In particular, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (released 1995). Feriha's retelling of their first meeting explicitly references Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, where in one of the film's most iconic scenes, the male protagonist silently pleads with his love interest to turn back to look at him. For a deeper discussion on DDLJ and its narrative of romance, family, and kinship, please see, Uberoi, “The Diaspora Comes Home: Disciplining Desire in Ddlj.”

29. Grover, Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India; Mody, The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi. ²⁹Ibid.

30. See, for instance, Das, Veena, “Masks and Faces: An Essay on Punjabi Kinship,” Contributions to Indian sociology 10, 1 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Patricia Uberoi, “When Is a Marriage Not a Marriage? Sex, Sacrament and Contract in Hindu Marriage,” ibid. 29, 1–2 (1995).

31. Veena Das, “Masks and Faces: An Essay on Punjabi Kinship,” ibid.10, 1 (1976).

32. Singh, Amita Tyagi and Uberoi, Patricia, “Learning To'adjust': Conjugal Relations in Indian Popular Fiction,” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 1, 1 (1994)Google Scholar; Patricia Uberoi, “A Suitable Romance? Trajectories of Courtship in Indian Popular Fiction,” Images of the modern woman in Asia: Global media, local meanings (2001).

33. Grover demonstrates that the post-marital support extended to women is often linked to the kind of marriage she has contracted. For Feriha, too, the anxieties of forging a marital union against the wishes of her family are partly tied to the dreaded possibility of familial ostracization.

34. Mody, The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi, 114.

35. Apart from relying on support from her brother, she has also begun applying for government jobs; the financial independence and the social privileges/security that would come with government employment would allow her to negotiate the tricky terrain of inappropriate love.

36. The main difference between an abduction and a kidnapping centers around age of majority. One court judgement reads section 376 IPC as, “if the girl was eighteen or over, she could only be abducted but not kidnapped, but if she was under eighteen, she could be kidnapped as well as abducted if the taking was by force or enticement through deceitful means.” See, Manju and the State vs. Govind and Others, 30 July, 2010, 11. For an ethnography of love marriage and its contested social and legal representations, see also Mody, Perveez, “Kidnapping, Elopement and Abduction: An Ethnography of Love-Marriage in Delhi,” in Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, ed. Orsini, Francesca (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar.

37. Ibid.

38. Tarlo, Emma, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley, 2003)Google Scholar.

39. Sen and Sengupta report similar findings among domestic workers in Kolkata, where there is little awareness or interest in legally registering marriages. Sen and Sengupta, “Marriage, Work and Education among Domestic Workers in Kolkata.”

40. Sister's husband.

41. A symbolic ritual wherein they would exchange garlands in a temple.

42. Since I have not yet been able to interview the couples in question, both these incidents of elopement have been sketched out from Roopa's and Feriha's recollections, respectively.

43. In a horrific incident in June 2010, Monica and her husband, Kuldeep, and Monica's cousin, Shobha, were killed by their male relatives near Wazirpur. The three victims and the three perpetrators grew up Wazirpur village, adjacent to the Wazirpur industrial area. The caste composition and social texture of the two areas are quite distinct and I have not examined the dynamics of romantic love in the urban village of Wazirpur; a comparison of these two adjacent spaces might offer fruitful lines of future inquiry. See The Indian Express, June 26, 2010; The Hindu, June 25, 2010; The Guardian, June 25, 2010.

44. In the case of middle class families in Kolkata, Donner highlights the stigma of premarital sexual intimacy and addresses the investments made by parents in monitoring their daughters. Parental involvement in forming the marital bond, she suggests, is deeply tied to Bengali middle class identity. Parry has identified coeval shifts in the form of and the value placed on the conjugal bond with the changes in employment regimes. He contends that greater salience and emphasis is accorded to the couple and the indissolubility of the nuptial bond in the milieu of formal sector, permanent workers, while marital ties were far more fluid among informal, contract workers. In Wazirpur, one can find a variety of conjugal configurations; yet, it is also pertinent to recognize the strategies and attention devoted to maintaining social honor and reputations among primarily informal sector workers. This stress placed on reputation accompanies, as other scholars have shown, normative gendering and an adherence to notions of patriarchal honor. Donner, Henrike, “Doing It Our Way: Love and Marriage in Kolkata Middle-Class Families,” Modern Asian Studies 50, 4 (2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jonathan P Parry, “Ankalu's Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh,” ibid. 35 (2001);Grover, Marriage, Love, Caste and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India.

45. Interviews, Rekha, Puja, Priyanka, and Neha.

46. Dhawan, Nandita Banerjee, “The Married ‘New Indian Woman’: Hegemonic Aspirations in New Middle-Class Politics?,” South African Review of Sociology 41, 3 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. A middle caste/backward caste (traditionally potters).

48. While her understanding of the law and the legal apparatus is relatively hazy, this points to the awareness she exhibits towards the possibilities afforded by the law.

49. Mody, “Love and the Law: Love-Marriage in Delhi.”

50. Recent literature on South Asia has engaged with Giddens’ contention that intimacy is linked to the “pure relationship” based on sexual and emotional equality, entered into for its own sake and allowing for the possibility of de-coupling once the relationship is no longer satisfying for both parties. The pure relationship, Giddens suggests, offers a powerful potential for democratizing gender relations. The wider implication of his assertion signals a global trend toward companionate marriage centered around romantic love and individual choice rather than on social and familial demands. Parry's study of conjugal relations in Bhilai marks a crucial intervention, wherein he observes a new emphasis on the couple but contends that this is accompanied not by the possibility of de-coupling but, paradoxically, by an emphasis on the indissolubility of the union. Querying Parry's claim that marriage for the younger (and more upwardly mobile) generation in Bhilai is shifting from being based on pragmatic considerations toward love and intimacy, Osella argues that conjugal relations in South Asia retain continuities with older forms of marriage, even while they are being simultaneously transformed. Other writings on the subject similarly question the transitional model postulated by Giddens. In her study of literacy and social change, Laura Ahearn traces changing ideas of selfhood and agency and draws attention to the processes by which “modernity” is inscribed within the institution of marriage. Donner on Kolkata's middle classes, for instance, points out that “modern” romantic love can also coexist with a resurgence of “traditional values.” In Wazirpur, the two categories of “love” and “arranged” marriage remain powerful at the discursive level; everyday experiences of conjugality, on the other hand, point to a range of intimate configurations. While the circulation of “globalized” ideas of love and romance shape the romantic fantasies, there does not seem to be a unilinear shift towards a companionate ideology. Rather, ideas of love and romance are deeply embedded in and engage with customary social practice. For a more detailed exposition of the various ways in which emergent ideas of love and marriage have been discussed in scholarly literature, please see Jonathan P. Parry, “Ankalu's Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh,” ibid. 35, 4 (2001); Osella, “Desires under Reform: Contemporary Reconfigurations of Family, Marriage, Love and Gendering in a Transnational South Indian Matrilineal Muslim Community”; Ahearn, Laura M., Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donner, “Doing It Our Way: Love and Marriage in Kolkata Middle-Class Families.”; Giddens, Anthony, The Transformations of Intimacy (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar.

51. For other contexts, please see Chakraborty, Kabita, Young Muslim Women in India: Bollywood, Identity and Changing Youth Culture (London, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52. Kakar, Sudhir, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (Chicago, IL, 1990)Google Scholar.

53. Patricia Uberoi has observed the gendered asymmetry of marital “adjustments” in Indian women's popular romantic fiction, where the “adjustment” or the resolution of early marital conflict is primarily to “reconcile a woman to her loss of autonomy, individuality and selfhood in relation to her husband.” Aarti's adjustment appears to be more layered—in which, public adherence to dominant codes of behavior coexists with transgression.

54. Mody observes, for instance, in Delhi, that love marriages are often seen to be based on “lust” and sexual desire, and therefore are antithetical to socially approved unions. For Haryana, Prem Chowdhury argues that a “self arranged marriage is considered no marriage at all.” In Mayadevi's testimony, perhaps, we can see trace a similar assertion; through emphasizing that her marriage was not based on romantic love, she affirms its social validity. See for instance, Mody, “Kidnapping, Elopement and Abduction: An Ethnography of Love-Marriage in Delhi”; Chowdhry, “Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples.”

55. Often, the “bad environment” of Wazirpur is presented as the rationale for the many early marriages in the area.

56. A cheap smartphone in available in India for about Rs. 2000 (roughly, $30).

57. Since their family does not own a fridge, groceries are bought daily.

58. For a deeper reflection on the question of loitering, please see Phadke, Shilpa, Khan, Sameera, and Ranade, Shilpa, Why Loiter?: Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (India, 2011)Google Scholar.

59. Baviskar, Amita, “Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power, and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi,” International Social Science Journal 55, 175 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. She insists that her limited access to a phone has not only hindered this current relationship but also would have changed the course of her marriage. She places the blame for her currently unhappy marriage, partly on her family, partly on her relatives and caste elders, and most explicitly on the lack of access to a cell phone during her marital negotiations. Had she had recourse to a phone, which she could have used without excessive interference, she would have had the possibility of registering her unhappiness to her would-be husband. Her ability to negotiate the terms of conjugality would have, according to her, acquired a different charge.

61. See also Manju and the State vs. Govind and Others, July 30, 2010. Furthermore, Aarti's narrative of courtship reflects a template similar to Feriha's.