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The Economies of Love: Love marriage, kin support, and aspiration in a South Indian garment city*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2016

GEERT DE NEVE
GEERT DE NEVE*
Affiliation:
University of Sussex, United Kingdom Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The article 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 article explores what love marriages mean to those involved, how they are experienced and talked about, and how they shape postmarital lives. Case studies reveal that a discourse of loss of postmarital 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 jeopardize the much-needed kin support youngsters require to fulfil aspirations of mobility, entrepreneurship, and success in a post-liberalization 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.

Type
Negotiations
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 4: Love, Marriage, and Intimate Citizenship in Contemporary China and India , July 2016 , pp. 1220 - 1249
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

The research upon which this article is based was supported by an ESRC-DfID research grant (RES-167-25-0296). I am grateful to Priya, Arul, and Muthu for research assistance in the field. The article was presented at the European Conference for South Asian Studies in Lisbon, 2012, and benefited from comments by the participants. Thanks also to Grace Carswell, Henrike Donner, Chris Fuller, Filippo Osella, Jonathan Parry, and Gonçalo Santos for detailed feedback. All shortcomings remain my own.

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