Moving for Marriage

Comparative, ethnographic study of women who migrate for marriage in rural north India.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a village in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Moving for Marriage compares the lived experiences of women in “regional” marriages (that conform to caste and community norms within a relatively short distance) with women in “cross-regional” marriages (that traverse caste, linguistic, and state boundaries and entail long-distance migration within India). By demonstrating how geographic distance and regional origins make a difference in these women’s experiences, Shruti Chaudhry challenges stereotypes and moral panics about cross-regional brides who are brought from far away. Indeed, Moving for Marriage highlights the ways in which the post-marital experiences of both categories of wives in this study—their work and social relationships, their sexual lives and childbearing decisions, and their ability to access support in everyday contexts and in the event of marital distress—are shaped by factors such as caste, class/poverty, religion, and stage in the life-course. In focusing on this Global South context, Chaudhry makes novel arguments about the development of intimacy within marriages that are inherently unequal and even violent, thereby offering an alternative to Euro-American understandings of intimacy and women’s agency.

“While this ethnography was conducted in India, Chaudhry’s findings have applicability to our understanding of the more widespread phenomenon of ‘foreign’ brides being brought by better-off men from poorer parts of their own country or from less prosperous countries elsewhere in the world. Though the trend is not new, it has increased significantly with globalization in recent decades and has therefore attracted considerable scholarly interest. Thus, this book contributes not only to the field of South Asian studies but also to the much larger field of the study of gender and marriage migration in the entire modern world.” — Sylvia Vatuk, author of Marriage and Its Discontents: Women, Islam, and the Law in India

Shruti Chaudhry is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.