South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal
Book Reviews
Reena Kukreja. Why Would I Be Married Here?
Marriage Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal
India
Paro Mishra
Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/8908
ISSN: 1960-6060
Publisher
Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)
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Reena Kukreja. Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossess...
Reena Kukreja. Why Would I Be
Married Here? Marriage Migration and
Dispossession in Neoliberal India
Paro Mishra
REFERENCES
Reena Kukreja. 2022. Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossession in
Neoliberal India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 284 pages.
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal , Book Reviews
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Reena Kukreja. Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossess...
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Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage,
Migration and Dispossession in Neoliberal
India is a welcome addition to the small
but steadily growing literature on crossregion marriage migration in India, also
referred to as long-distance marriage
migration. The book examines the
growing migration of rural women from
eastern, southern, and northeastern parts
of India to northern and northwestern
states for the purpose of marriage.
Anyone familiar with post marriage
movement and migration in India would
know that this is quite an unusual pattern
for
arranged
marriages.
Indeed,
“marriage distance”—between a bride’s
natal and marital home—has remained
predominantly small all over India, often
extending to close villages or neighboring
states but only exceptionally to diasporic
Indian communities. In what follows I
offer a chapter wise summary of the book and my evaluation of this text.
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In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the book is organized into six chapters.
Chapter 1 is a summary of economic, political, and social transformations that fuel
these new marriage-scapes. It discusses India’s ongoing rural economic transformation
through agrarian reforms since the liberalization era and how it fueled both agrarian
distress and gender inequalities. The author argues that along with the imposition of
neo-liberal reforms, there were parallel developments, like the spread of Hindu
fundamentalist ideology and dominant castes’ violent assertion against Muslims and
Dalits that exacerbated their economic and social precariousness through systematic
discrimination and violence. The Dalit and Muslim women bore the biggest brunt of
structural violence as their experience of oppression at the hands of the dominant
groups was shaped by the intersection of caste, class, religion, and gender, eventually
resulting in their lack of access to education, productive assets, and social services. The
intensified levels of poverty and deprivation combined with commercialization of
dowry in neoliberal cultures contributed towards gendered dispossessions of Dalit and
Muslim women “including the foreclosing of matrimonial choices in their home
communities and regions” (p. 56) and pushing their families to seek marriages alliances
without expectations of dowry elsewhere.
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Chapter 2 elaborates on how male marriage squeeze or bride shortage was not
universally experienced by all men in regions with imbalanced sex ratios, a point also
made by other scholars working on cross-region marriages in India (Chaudhury 2018;
Mishra 2018). Men who were either landless, unemployed or “social rejects” (p. 71)—
due to old age, widower status, physical deformity or undesirable traits like alcoholism
or substance abuse—turned to cross-region marriages after being “rejected” in the
local marriage market. This, Kukreja argues, further strengthens her argument about
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal , Book Reviews
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Reena Kukreja. Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossess...
neoliberalism rendering social relations monetized and “determined by market forces”
(p. 67).
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Chapter 3 shifts the focus to bride-sending regions and makes two major arguments.
First, that the “coercive accumulation” (p. 93) of resources by the state and private
players resulted in rural impoverishment. Second, that capitalist accumulation
combined with patriarchal ideology reinforced the gendered violence and commodity
fetishism of local grooms who now demanded higher dowries as “capital accumulating
and, by extension, poverty alleviating strategy” (p. 100) These trends, the author
argues, ultimately dispossess poor women of their matrimonial choices and incite them
to opt for cross-region marriages instead.
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Chapter 4 criticizes the dominant perception of cross-region marriages as cases of
bride-trafficking. Instead, it reveals the multiple channels of marriage mediation and
the enactment of agency and verification checks by prospective brides’ parents to
control deception by groom’s families and the matchmakers. The next two chapters
focus on the lived experience of cross-region brides. Deploying the framework of Dalit
feminism, chapter 5 discusses in detail how migrant brides are marked by the “stain of
the internal other” and suffer discrimination and exclusion within destination regions
owing to their caste, cultural, religious, regional identities, and skin tone. The final
ethnographic chapter shows how unlike local brides who come with dowries and have
natal kin support readily available, cross-region brides’ complete dependency on affinal
kin allows for a “more efficient extraction of their labor” (p. 195), both productive and
reproductive, by their marital families. Thus, migrant brides, barring a few cases of
resistance, transform into docile bodies fulfilling labor expectations and constantly
negotiating strenuous intra-household and community dynamics.
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This book is praiseworthy on several counts. First, it documents cross-region marriage
migration into hitherto undocumented host regions—such as Rewari and Nuh in
Haryana and Jhunjhunu and Alwar in Rajasthan. It thus deepens our understanding of
cross-region marriages in relation to factors like the level of regional development and
population composition (as in the case of Muslim dominated and relatively underdeveloped Nuh). Second, it provides a much-needed analysis of bride-sending regions
—Balasore in Odisha and Cooch Behar in West Bengal—and the factors that shape crossregion marriage-scapes not covered by earlier studies. Finally, the book draws its
findings from a large sample size of 246 villages and 1546 cross-region brides, which
helps in giving a macro picture.
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However, certain methodological issues need to be raised. Kukreja explains in the
introductory chapter that her access to the research sites was mediated by 31 locally
situated male and female fieldworkers from seven collaborating Non-government
Organizations (NGOs) and a women’s advocacy group who came on board for the study
in both sending and receiving regions (pp. 28–9). This ignored the possibility of the
political orientation of the NGOs and the activists—who are known for their
“interventionist impulses” (Doezema 2001:1) as they assume the role of “rescuers,”
“helping victimized other.” This is likely to have had an impact on data collection. The
author did not reflect on the biases that may result from this method of data collection
and how to control or scrutinize them. It is not surprising therefore that in this book
cross-region brides, despite “resistance and refusal” (p. 215), remain victims of
commodified social relations living under debilitating conditions, routinely
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Reena Kukreja. Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossess...
discriminated against and denigrated in their marital communities, unlike local brides.
This brings me to my second point.
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This portrayal of cross-region brides as “victims” is critical because Kukreja seems to
suggest that local brides have radically better bargaining capabilities in comparison to
cross-region brides. A comparative study of local and cross-regional brides in Uttar
Pradesh by Chaudhry (2019) has already debunked this myth to show how the brides’
bargaining power—local or cross-regional—in their marital homes is mediated by a
complex set of factors and not just determined by their natal family’s proximity.
Domestic and gender relations in rural north India have not dramatically improved in
favor of women, who continue to be disadvantaged under patriarchal systems. The
absence of voices of local brides in Kukreja’s account is glaring and makes impossible
critical comparisons between the experiences of local and cross-regional brides.
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Finally, the central claim of the book is that cross-region marriages are not simply
spurred by masculine sex ratios but are an outcome of neoliberal reforms and
Hindutva-politics induced gendered dispossessions of women from marginalized
communities. Unfortunately, this claim fails to take into account the long historicity of
cross-region marriages in north India. There is ample evidence of cross-region
marriages in colonial records (Darling 1928) and ethnographic accounts (Jeffery and
Jeffery 1997; Parry 1979). These document how the demand for women’s labor in
agrarian economies was met through unconventional marriage arrangements, often
contracted over large distances. Further, even as the phenomenon has increased over
time, cross-region marriages became fairly popular in the 1980s as growing networks of
cross-region brides propelled more chain migration. Overt emphasis on neoliberalism
as a driver of these matrimonial arrangements masks the possibility of situating crossregion marriages in the backdrop of the hegemonic nature of compulsory heterosexual
marriage in rural India where young, socio-economically marginalized men and women
have very limited say in who to marry, when and where. Moreover, the author’s
characterization also evades the possibility of viewing cross-region marriages as a way
of escaping the social stigma attached with involuntary singlehood for both men and
women.
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Despite these limitations, the intersectional approach of this book—that interrogates
the criss-crossing of patriarchy, caste, class, colorism, and ethnicity in shaping life
outcomes for marriage migrants—offers a compelling account of the lived experiences
of cross-region marriages. The book will be of interest to scholars in the field of
marriage, migration, kinship, and gender studies, and anyone keen on understanding
the changing dynamics of marriage in India.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chaudhry, Shruti. 2019. “For How Long Can Your Pīharwāle Intervene? Accessing Natal Kin
Support in Rural North India.” Modern Asian Studies, 53(5):161345. doi:10.1017/
S0026749X17000853
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal , Book Reviews
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Reena Kukreja. Why Would I Be Married Here? Marriage Migration and Dispossess...
Chaudhry, Shruti. 2018. “Now It is Difficult to Get Married: Contextualising Cross-regional
Marriage and Bachelorhood in Rural North India.” Pp. 85–104 in Scarce Women and ‘Surplus’ Men in
Communities of Asia: Macro Demographics versus Local Dynamics, edited by S. Srinivasan and S. Li.
Canada: Springer.
Darling, Malcolm Lyall. 1928. The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Doezema, Jo. 2001. “Ouch! Western Feminists’ ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World
Prostitute.’” Feminist Review 67:16–38. doi:10.1080/01417780150514484.
Jeffery, Roger, and Patricia Jeffery. 1997. Population, Gender and Politics: Demographic Change in Rural
North India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mishra, Paro. 2018. “Being ‘Bare Branches’: Demographic Imbalance, Marriage Exclusion and
Masculinity in North India.” Pp. 25–46 in Scarce Women and ‘Surplus’ Men in Communities of Asia:
Macro Demographics versus Local Dynamics, edited by S. Srinivasan and S. Li. Canada: Springer.
Parry, Jonathan P. 1979. Caste and Kinship in Kangra. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House.
AUTHORS
PARO MISHRA
Assistant Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Indraprastha Institute of
Information Technology, Delhi (IIITD)
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