nach oben

Studies in Comparative International Development

Erschienen in:

08.05.2015

Crossing Caste Boundaries in the Modern Indian Marriage Market

verfasst von: Amit Ahuja, Susan L. Ostermann

Erschienen in: Studies in Comparative International Development | Ausgabe 3/2016

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

Though caste remains a major social cleavage and a source of social exclusion in India, three factors now rise against it: a diversifying middle class, urbanization, and a demographic youth bulge. While conventional wisdom suggests that Indians marry within their own caste, we find that in the urban, middle-class marriage market, which increasingly includes members of lower castes, openness to intercaste marriage is substantial and varies within and across groups. Why are some more open to intercaste marriage? Drawing on a semi-experimental study of 1070 marriage market participants belonging to both Scheduled and upper castes, we argue that interest in intercaste marriage is rooted in a desire for upward mobility and governed by the principle of exchange. Those who can benefit from an exchange and who have high class or caste status to offer are more likely to express an interest in intermarriage. Among Scheduled Caste individuals, interest in intermarriage increases with income, while among upper caste individuals the opposite is true. We also find that the Scheduled Caste groups in our study are more interested in intermarriage than the upper caste ones. Increasing openness to intermarriage – particularly when upper castes are willing to marry lower (backward and Scheduled) castes – is a sign of social inclusion in urban India.

Vorheriger Artikel The Right to Health: Institutional Effects of Constitutional Provisions on Health Outcomes

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Nur mit Berechtigung zugänglich

This data was provided by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, India.

This data was collected by one of the authors, Susan L. Ostermann, and her colleague Nafisa Akbar; we refer to it as the Akbar-Ostermann Dataset.

Matchmaking patterns have shifted in urban, middle-class India. For centuries, people in South Asia have relied mostly on marriage brokers and kinship networks to find marriage partners. Today, urban middle-class Indians cast a much wider net; they also turn to newspaper ads and matrimonial websites to find marriage partners.

As we elucidate further in the paper, we chose to focus on women because women, unlike men, take on their husbands’ castes when they marry.

The term “Scheduled Castes” is a proper noun and takes its name from a list or schedule of untouchable castes once included in the British colonial census. This group of people is also variably named as Dalits, Adi-Shudras, untouchables, or outcastes. The term “upper castes” is not a proper noun but rather an informal grouping across caste categories and is thus not routinely capitalized in the same fashion as Scheduled Castes.

For the purpose of this study, varna refers to “a broad caste category” and jati refers to “a subcaste.” The Hindu social order is comprised of five caste categories ranked on a declining scale of ritual purity. The upper castes, the top-ranked categories, consist of the Brahmins (priests), the Kshatriyas (warriors), and the Vaishas (traders). Shudras (peasants) and Adi-Shudras (untouchables) are commonly grouped as lower castes, with the former frequently referred to as backward castes and the later as Scheduled Castes. Scheduled Caste individuals were classified as untouchable based on their hereditary occupations that included ritually polluting tasks like leather processing, barbering, sweeping, and some funerary functions. Untouchability was outlawed in the Indian Constitution adopted in 1950. Many individuals do not perform their hereditary caste occupations.

Our semi-experimental design allows us to confirm a link between interest in intermarriage and an individual's group rank and class endowments. The aim of the design was not to establish the actual magnitude of this interest.

We call both of these “status endowments” because they matter a great deal for one’s prospects in the world, how people judge one’s position in society, and because one is typically born with them. In India, caste is one form of status endowment, while socioeconomic status or class is another form of status endowment. Though there was traditionally and is still quite a bit of overlap between these two status endowments, they are currently not perfectly correlated; there are numerous people who are upper caste, but from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds and vice versa.

We view caste as ethnicity following Chandra and Wilkinson (2008).

See Mendelsohn and Vicziany 1998; Weiner 2001; Viswanathan 2005; Deshpande 2011.

According to Barth (1969), it is “the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses." The cultural practices and behavior of a group are often a function of ecological conditions and have little to do with group identity. See Chandra (2006).

See Pai 2002; Jaffrelot 2003, 2013; Chandra 2004.

See Frøystad 2005.

See the second round of the India Human Development Survey for 2011-2012.

According to a widespread tradition, women are vested with honor by their families and communities; a woman’s sexual behavior then has broad ramifications. By marrying into a lower caste, a woman can be said to bring dishonor to her family and/or community, a shame that can only be remedied through her death.

In over 80 percent of these cases, the woman’s family was implicated in the crime.

See Pande 2003; Prakash 2009; Hnatkovska et al. 2013.

See Galanter 1984.

See Jaffrelot and Kumar 2009.

See Hnatkovska and Lahiri 2012; Hnatkovska et al. 2013. Research based on the Indian National Election Studies data finds that members of the lower castes have experienced some upward mobility over time, however, the Scheduled Castes have lagged behind significantly as compared to upper castes (Kumar et al. 2002a, b; McMillan 2005; Vaid and Heath Anthony 2010; Vaid 2012).

According to the National Council for Applied Economic Research's (NCAER) Centre for Macro Consumer Research report, by 2015-16, India will be a country of 53.3 million middle-class households, translating into 267 million people falling in the category. As per the study, which uses 'household income' as the criterion, a family with an annual income between INR 3.4 lakh to INR 17 lakh (USD 6,000 to 28,000), at 2009-10 price levels, falls in the middle-class category (Kaur and Palriwala 2014). Our study participants, for the most part, hold a college degree, reside in urban areas, have access to the Internet, and report an annual family income of at least INR 200,000 or USD 4,000. Below this annual income level, an individual was exempt from paying income tax in India in 2011-12. For a wide-ranging discussion on the modern Indian middle class, see Baviskar and Ray (2011).

Matrimonial advertisements in newspapers and membership on matrimonial websites are expensive and are typically beyond the reach of low-income Indian families.

Together the lower castes (backward castes and Scheduled Castes) make up approximately 60 percent of the Indian population.

See Sankhe et al. (2010).

Srinivas called this process of mimicking the upper castes’ practices by upwardly mobile lower castes as “Sanskritization.”

See Newport (2013).

Membership on such websites costs up to hundred dollars for a six-month package and compares favorably with newspaper ads, many of which cost as much as USD 75 for three weekend appearances.

See the essays by Sharangpani (2010); Titzmann (2011); Poonam (2012); Titzmann (2013); Choudhary et al. (2013); Kaur and Palriwala (2014) on the growing role of matrimonial websites. According to Trivedi (2014) there are more than 20 million users of more than 150 matrimonial websites in India.

We chose to conduct this study on online platforms instead of responding to newspaper ads because the latter medium did not provide us with standardized information on respondents and their families. Online platforms require members to provide more complete information on themselves and their backgrounds.

These three states are among India’s largest and boast distinct cultural and linguistic identities. Historically, both Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra have been home to strong anti-caste social movements. In Uttar Pradesh a serious challenge to the caste system appeared later in the form of lower-caste political parties.

This range was even smaller with a set of groom profiles for a particular state. For example, for all three profiles in the Northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the men were 27 years old, had an annual income between 9.5 and 9.75 lakhs, were 5.9 inches tall, and belonged to a family of a senior civil servant. However, while these grooms are above average on most attributes, they are by no means among the best grooms present in the market. For example, on groom’s income, a highly valued attribute, incomes in the same age-bracket went as high as 3.5 million rupees per year.

Instead of using false résumés, a common practice in labor market studies, the study generated data by working with actual prospective brides and grooms. Overall, nine potential grooms were identified, three in each of the three states. No pictures of the grooms were made available to the participants when contacting them with an expression of interest. This allowed us to make sure that nine profiles used in the study were almost identical across all the parameters revealed in their profiles. Introduction of a picture would contaminate the study and takeaway an important control related to beauty. Moreover, the absence of pictures is not at all unusual since in many matrimonial searches, pictures are only exchanged once initial mutual interest has been established.

Our women respondents were contacted by our grooms through a message of interest—one that most women would consider to indicate a willingness to further explore a possible relationship. This message was standardized and, among other attributes, prominently displayed the caste of the individual expressing interest.

Typically, each individual who registers with a matrimonial website receives many expressions of interest. As a result, our profiles were just three of many other expressions of interest. In order to avoid any bias arising out of the order in which ads were received, we randomized different components of the process of expressing interest. Sometimes our Scheduled Caste groom was the first to express interest, while other times, it was an upper caste groom who first initiated contact. Our grooms also sent their expressions of interest at different times in the week and different times of the day. Finally, no individual received expressions of interest from all three of our grooms at the same time.

We checked for bias in the response rate and we did not find a statistically significant difference in the rates at which upper caste and Scheduled Caste individuals responded, or failed to respond, to our expressions of interest.

An inclusive list of all subcastes or jatis in our sample is as follows. Upper castes: Brahmin, Agarwal, Kshatriya, Kayastha, Rajput, Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu, and Pillai; Scheduled Castes: Mahar, Chambar, Matang, Chamar, Jullaha, Nai, Khatik, Kori, Balmiki, Nishad, Dhobi, Ravidass, Devendra Kula Vellalar, Arunthathiyar, and Adi-Dravida.

We also collected data on the profession of the women, but decided not to code and analyze this data. We did so in part because our qualitative research indicated that education and socioeconomic status—but not profession—were important parameters by which grooms consider prospective brides; unsurprisingly, these were the same bases upon which brides try to impress prospective grooms. We also reasoned that profession is, in many ways, redundant to educational background and socioeconomic status.

These interviews were conducted by the authors themselves and this sample was not drawn from participants in the semi-experimental portion of this study.

These interviews were conducted in Delhi, Lucknow, Chennai, Nagpur, and Mumbai. None of the participants were a part of our semi-experimental study. We interviewed 8 men and 33 women. Among our subjects, 18 were upper caste and 23 were Scheduled Caste.

Such deception would have also undermined the credibility of a major matrimonial agency of the type with which we worked.

Based on our own experience of how sensitive the topic of intercaste marriage was with interview subjects, we think that the instances of intermarriage are underreported to surveyors in rural and urban India. Respondents are likely to be wary of revealing a potentially controversial detail such as this to a stranger visiting their homes.

It is difficult to rank the backward caste jatis since the state does not collect caste-wise data on income or welfare indicators. The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are the only exceptions to this practice.

While this type of behavior does not indicate that an individual will go on to marry someone of a different caste and we collected no data on this outcome, in India, where caste boundaries have been reported to be strong, willingness to entertain marriage prospects from individuals in different castes represents a significant and consequential outcome.

We coded education in this way under the basic and warranted assumption that in the Indian marriage market education is typically valued in this basic rank ordering.

The lower-middle income category was defined as an annual family income of less than 2 lakhs, the middle-income category ranged 2-5 lakhs, and the upper-middle-income category was defined as above 5 lakhs. Each of these coding brackets was self-reported by participants and then verified using participants’ reported income/assets. Participants have strong incentives to report their socioeconomic status honestly to potential grooms, as misreporting is likely to be discovered eventually and punished harshly. As a result, we only recoded approximately 10 percent of participants’ self-reported socioeconomic statuses. In almost all of these recoding cases, participants had underreported their income/assets.

For a table of other descriptive statistics, see Table 3 in the Appendix.

For more information on our sample, please see Table 3 in the Appendix.

Kaur & Dhanda (2014) report that men far outnumber women on matrimonial websites, so it is unlikely that our Scheduled Caste women participants face a shortage of Scheduled Caste grooms.

These are the largest and most socioeconomically well off Scheduled Castes in their respective states of Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu.

All three jatis were over 50 percent of their respective state sample.

Krishna (2006)—through research conducted in two Indian states, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan—discovers a new generation of local Schedule Caste leaders. These local political entrepreneurs, who Krishna calls “Naya Netas” (new leaders) have developed a following not only among members of their own community, but, importantly, also among members of communities ranked higher than the Scheduled Castes. Along similar lines, in a study conducted in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Kapur et al. (2010) find that with a rise in rural Scheduled Castes’ standard of living, members of this caste category are reporting better treatment at the hands of groups that have traditionally dominated them.

Jim Yong Kim, the President of the World Bank addressing the Vibrant Gujarat Summit at Gandhi Nagar on January 11, 2015.

See Ambedkar, B.R. Annihilation of Caste Vol. 1, P. 67.

Among others, see Mendelsohn and Vicziany (1998); Weiner (2001); Viswanathan (2005); Deshpande (2011).

Banerjee A, Duflo E, Ghatak M, Lafortune J. Marry for what? Caste and mate selection in modern India. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics. 2013;5(2):33–72.

Barth F. Ethnic groups and boundaries. The social organization of culture difference. Boston: Little, Brown; 1969.

Baviskar A, Ray R. Elite and everyman: the cultural politics of the Indian middle classes. New Delhi: Routledge; 2011.

Bertrand M, Mullainathan S. Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labour market discrimination. Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 9873; 2003.CrossRef

Blau PM, Schwartz JE. Crosscutting social circles: testing a macrostructural theory of intergroup relations. New York: Academic Press; 1984.

Bogardus ES. A forty year racial distance study. Los Angeles: U of Southern California; 1967.

Chandra K. Why ethnic parties succeed: patronage and ethnic head counts in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2004.

Chandra K. What is ethnic identity and does it matter? Annu Rev Political Sci. 2006;9:397–424.CrossRef

Chandra K, Wilkinson S. Measuring the effect of ethnicity. Comp Political Studies. 2008;41:515–63.CrossRef

Chhibber P. Democracy without associations: transformation of party systems and social cleavages in India. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; 1999.CrossRef

Chhibber P, Varshney A. Citizens of Tomorrow. Indian Express; 2013.

Choudhary A, Liang L, Kyle G. Online-istan. Himal Southasian; 2013.

Cohen SP. The untouchable soldier: caste, politics and the Indian Army. J Asian Studies. 1969;28(3).

Davis K. Intermarriage in caste societies. Am Anthropol. 1941;43(3):376–95.CrossRef

Deshpande A. The grammar of caste: economic discrimination in contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press; 2011.CrossRef

Dirks N. Castes of mind: colonialism and the making of modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2001.

Dugar S, Haimanti B, David R. Can't buy me love? A field experiment exploring the trade-Off between income and caste-status in an Indian matrimonial market. Econ Inq. 2012;50(2):534–50.

Erskine H. The polls: interracial socializing. Public Opin Q. 1973;37(2):283–94.CrossRef

Frøystad K. Blended boundaries: caste, class, and shifting faces of 'Hinduness' in a north Indian City. New Delhi: Oxford University Press; 2005.

Galanter M. Competing equalities: law and the backward classes in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press; 1984.

Goli S, Singh D, Sekher TV. Exploring the myth of mixed marriages in India: evidence from a nation-wide survey. J Comp Fam Stud. 2013;44(2):193–206.

Hnatkovska V, Lahiri A. The post-reform narrowing of inequality across castes: evidence from the states. In: Bhagwati JN, Panagariya A, editors. Reforms and economic transformation in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2012. p. 229–52.

Hnatkovska V, Lahiri A, Paul S. Breaking the caste barrier: intergenerational mobility in India. J Hum Resour. 2013;48(2):435–73.CrossRef

Ignatiev N. How the Irish became white. New York: Routledge; 1995.

Jaffrelot C. India’s silent revolution: the rise of the lower castes. Columbia: Columbia University Press; 2003.

Jaffrelot C. Caste and political parties in India: do Indians vote their caste—while casting their vote?. In: Atul K, Prerna S, editors. Routledge handbook of Indian politics. New York: Routledge; 2013.

Jaffrelot C, Kumar S. Rise of the plebeians? The changing face of Indian legislative assemblies. New Delhi: Routledge; 2009.

Jayaram N. Caste and Hinduism: changing protean relationship. In: Srinivas MN, editor. Caste: its twentieth century avatar. New Delhi: Viking/Penguin Books India; 1996. p. 69–86.

St. Jean Y. Let people speak for themselves: interracial unions and the general social survey. J Black Studies. 1998;28(3):398–414.

Kapur D, Prasad CB, Pritchett L, Shyam Babu D. Rethinking inequality: dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the market reform Era. Econ Polit Wkly. 2010;45(35):39–49.

Kaur R, Palriwala R. Marrying in South Asia: shifting concepts, changing practices in a globalising world. Telangana: Orient Blackswan; 2014.

Krishna A. Politics in the middle: mediating relationships between the citizens and the state in rural North India. In: Herbert K, Wilkinson SI, editors. Patrons, clients and policies: patterns of democratic accountability and political competition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2006. p. 141–58.

Kumar S, Heath AF, Heath O. Changing patterns of social mobility. Econ Political Weekly. 2002a;37(40):4091–6.

Kumar S, Heath AF, Heath O. Determinants of social mobility in India. Econ Polit Wkly. 2002b;37(29):2983–7.

Laitin D. Identity information: the Russian-speaking populations in the near abroad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 1998.

Lynch OM. The politics of untouchability; social mobility and social change in a City of India. New York: Columbia UP; 1969.

McMillan A. Standing at the margins: representation and electoral reservation in India. New Delhi: Oxford UP; 2005.

Mendelsohn O, Vicziany M. The untouchables: subordination, poverty and the state in modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1998.CrossRef

Merton RK. Intermarriage and the social structure: fact and theory. Psychiatry. 1941;4:361–74.

Munshi K, Rosenzweig MR. Why Is Mobility in India So Low? Social Insurance, Inequality, and Growth. Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research; 2009.

Newport F. “In U.S., 87% Approve of Black-White Marriage, vs. 4% in 1958.” Gallup News Release, July 25 2013.

Pai S. Dalit assertion and the unfinished democratic revolution: the Bahujan samaj party in Uttar Pradesh. New Delhi: Sage Publication; 2002.

Pande R. Can mandated political representation provide disadvantaged minorities policy influence? Theory and evidence from India. Am Econ Rev. 2003;93(4):1132–51.CrossRef

Parrillo VN, Donoghue C. Updating the bogardus social distance studies: a new national survey. Soc Sci J. 2005;42(2):257–71.CrossRef

Poonam S. Casting the Net. Caravan. 2012;4(3):48–59.

Prakash N. The impact of employment quotas on the economic lives of disadvantaged minorities in India. Working papers, Dartmouth College, Department of Economics. 2009.

Sankhe S, Vittal I, Dobbs R, Mohan A, Gulati A, Ablett J, Gupta S, Kim A, Paul S, Sanghvi A, Sethy G. India’s urban awakening: building inclusive cities, sustaining economic growth. McKinsey Global Institute Report, 2010.

Sharangpani M. Browsing for bridegrooms: matchmaking and modernity in Mumbai. Indian J Gender Studies. 2010;17(2):249–76.CrossRef

Srinivas MN. Caste in modern India: and other essays. Bombay: Asia Pub. House; 1962.

Thorat S, Attewell P. The legacy of social exclusion. Econ Polit Wkly. 2007;42(41):4141–5.

Titzmann F-M. Medialisation and social change – the Indian online matrimonial market as a new field of research. In: Nadja-Christina S, Bettina G, editors. In social dynamics 2.0: researching change in times of media convergence: case studies from the Middle East and Asia. Berlin: Frank & Timme; 2011. p. 49–66.

Titzmann F-M. Changing patterns of matchmaking: the Indian online matrimonial market. Asian J Women's Studies. 2013;19(4):64–94.CrossRef

Vaid D. The caste-class association in India: an empirical analysis. Asian Survey. 2012;52(2):395–422.CrossRef

Vaid D, Heath Anthony F. Unequal opportunities: class, caste and social mobility. In: Heath AF, Jeffery R, editors. In diversity and change in modern India: economic, social and political approaches. Oxford: Oxford UP; 2010. p. 129–64.CrossRef

Viswanathan S. Dalits in Dravidian land: frontline reports on anti-dalit violence in Tamil Nadu (1995-2004). Chennai: Navayana Publishing; 2005.

Weaver, C. N. Social distance as a measure of prejudice among ethnic groups in the United States. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 2008;38:779–795.

Weiner M. The struggle for equality: caste in Indian politics. In: Atul K, editor. The success of India’s democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2001.

Titel: Crossing Caste Boundaries in the Modern Indian Marriage Market
verfasst von: Amit Ahuja
Susan L. Ostermann
Publikationsdatum: 08.05.2015
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Studies in Comparative International Development / Ausgabe 3/2016
Print ISSN: 0039-3606
Elektronische ISSN: 1936-6167
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-015-9178-2

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 3/2016

Co-optation & Clientelism: Nested Distributive Politics in China’s Single-Party Dictatorship

Social Movements and Social Policy: the Bolivian Renta Dignidad

The Right to Health: Institutional Effects of Constitutional Provisions on Health Outcomes

The Politics of Urban Bias: Rural Threats and the Dual Dilemma of Political Survival

Lustration Matters: a Radical Approach to the Problem of Corruption