Sociology:
Gender; inequality;
family and Marriage
Patriarchy, Patriarchy, entitlements and sexual division of labour
NEWS IN SHORT
A bride in the Auraiya district of Uttar Pradesh called off her wedding after she claimed that the groom failed to read a newspaper without wearing his glasses. According to news agency ANI, the bride said that she and her parents were “uninformed” about the groom’s condition. “When the baraat (groom’s side) came to the house, we got to know that the groom could not walk without wearing his glasses.
SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
- In India where the practice of marriage is determined by diverse factors such as region, religion, ethnicity, caste and socio-economic status, among others.
- For a long time, a majority of marriages were ‘arranged’ in large parts of the country, which meant that parents and other family members played a prominent role in selecting spouses for their children, who were usually neither expected nor encouraged to form a relationship or even an acquaintance with their potential partners before getting married.
- In recent times, however, there has been a move away from marriages in which the prospective couples play no role in spouse selection.
- Such a shift has been fuelled by rising levels of education, growing urbanisation and increasing age at marriage. Print and visual media have also played a role as they popularise the ideal of exercising agency in partner choice
- Although the element of choice is emerging as a distinctive feature of marriages in the country, the percentage of women who have had the opportunity to meet and get acquainted with their husbands at least a month before the wedding is modest.
- Indeed, 65 per cent of the surveyed women reported that they met their husbands for the first time on the day of the wedding itself. Do self-choice marriages offer women greater autonomy than parent-arranged marriages.