Doing it our way: Love and marriage in Kolkata middle-class families

With the exception of a few anthropologists working on gender much of the recent literature on emerging intimate modernities in South Asia seems to support a view of social relationships evolving in a kind of linear development towards free choice, individualism and sexual identities. In this article I argue that apart from the ostensibly overwhelming transformations that individualism, discourses on coupledom and the public display of affection among the young may suggest, the new ways of being intimate, of choosing a spouse and of conducting conjugal relations among middle-class urbanites have to be interpreted in relation to less conspicuous discourses, which are equally powerful and significant, in particular the resilient ideology and practical implications of the joint family. Based on fieldwork with Bengali-speaking middle-class families in Kolkata spanning two decades, the article charts continuities and supple shifts in the way love and marriage are conceived in this setting.