- 1 It should be noted that romantic love in South Asia is understood in multiple ways (Marsden 2007) a (...)
1Dissent with Love aims to examine the multiple ever-changing forms of understanding and practicing love in South Asia. In a postcolonial context in which love is shaped by ideas of devotion, sacrifice, and containment that are primarily considered to be achieved through marriage,1 consumerist culture and aspirations to “modernity” redefine what love is—or what it could be. Gender scripts and social expectations structure representations and practices of love. Meanwhile, the idea of romantic love is evolving along with the ways in which love is enabled, experienced, and displayed. The interconnection of social aspects shaping this notion and the manners in which it is achieved and experienced are not exempt from tensions and a call to question their diverse and changing forms of experiencing love. In this respect, the concept of dissent(ing) seems to be effective. Dissent is a combination of “resistance and acquiescence” (p. 12) when it comes to transgression and conformity. This notion makes it possible to look at what is considered normative alongside the ways in which individuals are able to consider norms while working around them, ways that are “not static” and do not lead to a “fixed or uniform result” (p. 14). Looking at dissenting love in different ways—including the “dissent of gendered roles, heteronormative ideas of love, popular notions of romantic love, expectations of family, institution of marriage, and rules of law” (p. 13)—sheds light on some important changes in South Asian societies.
2This edited volume provides an overview of research in different disciplines by academics—ranging from anthropologists to sociologists and geographers, along with experts in literature and in the media—who have adopted different methods of research in a variety of South Asian regions and communities. The notion of dissenting love in a South Asian context is convincingly framed across each of the nine contributions organized in four sections and analyzing love and dissent from different perspectives. It provides a look at the tensions surrounding fidelity to family and the individual aspirations that contradict it (Section 1) in addition to the ways in which global citizen consumers perform “modernity” in love, thus appearing as a commodified experience (Section 2). It also addresses “non-conform[ity]” to sexual identities and living arrangements (Section 3) and geographies of love (Section 4).
- 2 Her contribution is based on ethnography on university students’ relationships, which is further de (...)
3The first section of the volume, “Familial Transgressions,” positions dissent in relation to the family. The two contributions in it, both by anthropologists, show how dissent is about finding spaces where individual aspirations and family expectations can meet, engaging with the family’s gaps for acceptation and negotiating limits. Individuals consider family values and expectations, even in situations in which their individualistic subjectivities diverge from them. Sienna R. Craig and Nawang Tsering Gurung center their chapter on a generation born in the Mustang region of the Himalayas who moved to New York City in their youth, hence transiting between places and times. Through three portraits narrated in the first person and drawn from repeated ethnographic interviews, the authors show the different ways in which this generation accommodates their families’ expectations while simultaneously challenging traditional gender roles and inequalities from their region of origin. In doing so, they pave the way for future generations to change norms and practices while also honoring “a collective sense of familial and cultural responsibility” (p. 30). Mihirini Sirisena’s chapter2 shows that, whereas students at the University of Colombo base their choice of romantic partners on individual aspirations, they do not contest parental approval, but instead negotiate with it. The young woman analyzed as an example in this chapter uses familial alliances (with her sister and later her mother), anticipation of timing (counting on her and her boyfriend’s professional success and the right time to bring her mother in the negotiation process), and her relationship’s limitation when it comes to the boundaries of “respectability” to “guide her parents towards an alternate perspective” (p. 61) and have her chosen partner be viewed as acceptable.
- 3 While the choice to not give up on professional ambitions shows the importance of remaining indepen (...)
- 4 Shannon Philip bases his doctoral work on data collected from 2016 to 2022 from longitudinal ethnog (...)
- 5 This case refers to the 2022 murder of S. Walkar by her live-in partner, A. A. Poonawala, who stran (...)
4The two sociological contributions in “Cultures of Love and Consumption,” the second section of the book, recall the importance of new ways of living a “good life,” including consumption practices, tastes and looks, and places and activities that form the identity of India’s middle-class. Based on the ethnographies of respondents who self-identify as middle class in Delhi and Gurgaon, they depict dissenting love as displaying a “modern” approach to lifestyle and gender identity. Yet, while the individualization and commodification of love and desire are clearly linked to class identity through practices and discourse, they do not really challenge the patriarchy or the institution of marriage, but instead reproduce it. Parul Bhandari studies “elongated singlehood” in the economic elite working in multinational firms using ethnographic methods and repeated in-depth interviews. Self-care and leisure activities constitute the individualistic lifestyle of cosmopolitan Indians. Consumerist culture and the importance of independence and self-love3 transform the language and performance of love along with validation through the “theatrics of modern love” (Bhandari 2020), displaying their class identity. Bhandari highlights the fact that delaying marriage “has less to do with rejecting the institution of marriage,” but aims to “[attain] a deeply satisfying and fulfilling experience of marriage” (p. 70) in a romantic form in which, outside of duty and familial obligation, self-love and companionship are key. Drawing on his own doctoral research (Philip 2022)4 and the study of the Poonawala murder case,5 Shannon Philip studies masculinities in the age of a “New India,” where “being a man” means thinking of oneself as “modern” and equal to women. Meanwhile, in practice, “modern” men keep their patriarchal privileges and do not address gender inequalities and misrepresentations. Philip shows that the discourse and language of modernity, equality and love positions itself as superior to the “old” (and the lower classes) while invisibilising, depoliticizing, and thus reproducing gender inequalities in an insidious, hidden manner.
- 6 In accordance with the Indian legal term, Agrawal defines live-in relationships as “non-marital sex (...)
- 7 Ruth Vanita’s chapter is largely based on her book Love’s Rite (2005a).
5The next section focuses on sexualities, showing dissenting love as non-conforming to heteronormativity and marital relationships. The first contribution in “Normative Love?” looks at where live-in relationships6 stand in the Indian sociolegal context through the trends observed in legal judgments related to such cases. In it, sociologist Anuja Agrawal shows that those seeking legal intervention as well as the legal and judicial discourse consider live-in relationships as framed by marriage, be it “failed, postponed, or unrealisable” (p. 119). In “Exiled and Separated,” Ruth Vanita uses British and Indian literature and history (including press reports)7 to study the migrations of same-sex couples and what that implies in terms of safety and freedom on the one hand and suffering on the other. The last contribution in this section is drawn from the Instagram posts of a community of people identifying as asexual or aromantic in Nepal. Media anthropologist Dikshya Karki shows how, after the prevalence of sexual health programs in the 1990s, social media now proposes alternative, more fluid identities and relationships. They offer a platform to express oneself and seek answers by relating to others’ experiences while maintaining anonymity. Located in the dynamics and realm of the LGBTQIA+ movement, the growing community of asexuals, or “aces,” foregrounds personal desires and preferences, thus allowing for the questioning and shaping of identities in transition.
- 8 This case refers to a young couple whose love affair was opposed by the woman’s parents and who elo (...)
6Two contributions form the last section of the volume, “Structures of Love”: a chapter by historical and cultural geographer Sneha Krishnan about the “incarceration,” “gating,” or “containing” of women in hostels, ranging from a colonial history to a communal idea of nationhood in India, and another by social anthropologist Sarthak Malhotra, who conducted an ethnography on everyday life in the vicinity of the Taj Mahal. The former uses media analysis—especially the scandal involving Dhamini and Chandru,8 as well as an ethnographic study on women attending college in Chennai (Krishnan 2019)—to unveil the origins, discourses, and project of gating “respectable” women in places such as hostels. The latter focuses on the evolving representations of the Taj Mahal and its status as a symbol of romantic love. Malhotra shows that local people view the site very differently from the single definition imposed on the monument’s identity by state institutions seeking to make it a site of mass tourism. The standardized version of conjugal love that fascinates the world is quite different from the registers of “care, intimacy, hatred, dissent, and belonging” (p. 183) and the “both positive and negative affectation” (p. 184) cultivated by the locals who engage with it.
- 9 “Having first imported homophobic laws and attitudes from Christian Europe and America into India, (...)
7Reading some of these chapters together yields some important findings. First, ideas of love, respectability, and therefore “dissenting sexualities” (i.e., non-heterosexual sexualities) have been greatly shaped by Victorian ideas and projects. As Vanita points out, it is quite ironic to see that formerly colonized territories have become a shelter for the people who used to be persecuted by them, whereas same-sex love was “openly depicted, discussed, and even celebrated” by Indian writers “up to the first half of the nineteen century” (p. 129).9 The British Raj and its philanthropists played an important role in strengthening the notions of caste and ideas of respectability that inform Hindu nationhood (see chapter 9 by Krishnan). In the closing chapter, Malhotra shows how the British contributed to making the Taj Mahal both a site of “romance and tragedy” and a “‘museological artefact’ to be measured and conserved” (p. 174), undermining the local meanings of the monument and the multiple definitions of love it contains.
- 10 Karki’s work on asexuality on Instagram in Nepal also shows the shift toward more individualized ch (...)
8The book also shows how the idea of marriage (and family) is central to the definition of love relationships (and domesticity), framing the legal definition of domesticity and constituting the main motive for live-in couples going to court (see Agrawal’s contribution on live-in relationships). Vanita draws on earlier work (2005b) to show that homosexual couples are severely lacking protection from the law and recognition of their love since they cannot legally marry, but also lack family support. She points out that “what these couples want is to be accepted into their families” (p. 124). Despite some changes propelled by the idea of “modernity,” marriage remains essential. The cosmopolitan middle-class, whose relationship ideal is reshaped by more individualism and self-care,10 dissent from the “right” time to marry but do not reconsider marriage as the ultimate objective (see Bhandari’s contribution). Marriage is also important for the diaspora, who want to maintain a bond with their culture and family of origin (see Craig and Gurung’s contribution), and remains the ultimate goal for students who aspire to choose their own partner without betraying their family (see Sirisena’s contribution).
9The notion of respectability, which is closely linked to caste patriarchy, is also key in making relationships acceptable—or preventing them. In chapter 9, Krishnan shows how incarcerating women in hostels started with in the colonial era, these places being “a key site of convergence for philanthropic and modernizing projects of the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries” (p. 159). This colonial project was reused in the Hindu nationalist project of nationhood, in which social reproduction and the Hindu Indian nation-state seeks to control women’s bodies and prevent them from intercommunal and intercaste alliances, opposing the figure of the non-elite woman (from lower-caste, Dalit, and Adivasi communities). Here, dissent allows women to refuse the caste and patriarchal respectability that draws on the boundaries of national and religious communities. Sirisena’s contribution on Singhalese students shows how respectability can be used as a tool for making relationships acceptable, and how the limits of what’s “appropriate” (a romantic relationship contained in the realm of limited sexual acts, “acceptable” places, the times of encounters, and loyalty to family) are linked to class and caste identity and identity claims.
10Finally, as Bhandari points out in the introduction, analyzing dissent in love can highlight the changing, multiple ways in which individuals perceive and perform love relationships (see Bhandari’s and Craig and Gurung’s contributions), allowing for the expression of other identities (see Bhandari’s and Philip’s contributions on the effects of leisure and dating on (upper) social identity, as well as Karki’s chapter on the assertion of asexual identity through social media). Overall, most chapters contribute to revealing how love is multidimensional, “highlighting themes of patience, endurance, differences with family, and ways of overcoming them, the importance of time, and compatibility that constitute contemporary understandings and practices of love” (p. 15).
- 11 See, for instance: Donner 2016; Gilbertson 2014.
- 12 See, for instance: Abeyasekera 2016; Fuller and Narasimhan 2008; and Maqsood 2021.
11While it covers a wide range of topics and perspectives, “the contributions of this book are in no way an exhaustive range of understanding experiences, articulations, and practices of dissenting love” (p. 17). In fact, some parts of South Asia are not included (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Bhutan), and some aspects (such as the social history and production of love, its caste and religious boundaries or the violence originating from their violation) are not covered. Nevertheless, it is a good start for mapping out some of the academic research that has been conducted on the ways in which love and romance are experienced and reinterpreted outside of focusing on marriage. Indeed, while this volume contributes to showing how marriage remains the prevailing factor for defining love as well as shaping dissenting scenarios, the contributions are not initially centered on marriage. Unsurprisingly, research has concentrated to a large extent on marriage as a primary—and legitimate—site for understanding both (heterosexual) love and the recent changes love has undergone,11 showing that the binaries of arranged marriage versus love marriages are—or have become—irrelevant.12 Although other works exist on topics related to love outside of marriage and its corollaries, they are scarce and scattered. To my knowledge, no other edited volume has gathered together contributions on “dissent,” successfully paving the way for further research.