Rochona Majumdar. Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. xii + 343 pp. $84.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4462-9; $23.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-4478-0.

Reviewed by Judith Walsh
Published on H-Asia (July, 2010)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha

Family and Marriage in Colonial Bengal

Rochona Majumdar’s Marriage and Modernity is a fascinating discussion of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal and India that challenges our most basic assumptions about the “traditionalism” of arranged marriage/joint families and demonstrates the fundamental and continuing “modernity” of both. This book makes accessible in English a wide range of new and important Bengali-language materials: primary sources--both textual and visual--from print publications and private family collections; and secondary scholarship on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Majumdar’s historicization of Bengali/Indian marriage practices over the past two centuries is also theoretically sophisticated. Since this is, to a large extent, a pioneering effort on the topic of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengali or Indian Hindu marriage practices, there is no extant body of research for Majumdar to consult. But she is aware of and uses the best and most current English-language writings on colonial modernity, women, and family relationships in this period. South Asianists who believe that Bengal has been “over-studied” and can contribute little new to the study of Indian or South Asian history will have to rethink their positions on reading this book. Majumdar’s study demonstrates the wealth of materials available in the rich visual and print archives of Bengal and in the Bengali language and shows the interesting and original insights these materials can produce when used by a scholar fully able to access them.

The goal of Majumdar’s book is to historicize Bengali Hindu arranged marriage practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (approximately 1870 to 1956) and to demonstrate in the process their dynamic, evolving, and essentially “modern” nature. The modernization of families, Majumdar points out at the start of her book, is generally assumed to involve the transformation of family structures “from extended kinship to nuclear” and the alteration of marriage arrangements from those negotiated by families to “marriage contracts between individuals” (p. 1). Marriage and Modernity contests both assumptions. For Majumdar, arranged marriages--that is, marriages negotiated by families with or without the consent of the individuals getting married--are essentially modern constructs, reconstituted in Bengal as Hindu elites and/or caste communities responded to the (modern) economic structures of British colonial rule and postcolonial society. Whatever forms and practices Hindu arranged marriages may have included in the centuries before colonization, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these forms and practices were reshaped by colonial (and postcolonial) modernity: by the use of modern institutions and ideas, such as urban life, Western education, the print media (the publishing of matrimonial advertisements seeking brides and grooms), monetization of relationships (the escalation in the practice of dowry), cultivation of distinction and cultural capital (debates about what constitutes a tasteful wedding), and law (certain legal reforms to do with property and ideas of rights and personhood).

By the early twentieth century, a print-based, predominantly urban “marriage market” had come into existence in Bengal, a marriage market associated with increasing (and escalating) dowry demands. The marriage market transformed education and employment into their monetized dowry equivalents. “The older generation,” one 1879 writer commented, “prized social prestige. Nowadays, men prize money a lot more.... What earlier [polygamous aristocratic lineages known as] kulins expected out of several marriages, these nouveau kulins [that is, university graduates] extract from one” (p. 65).

Between 1870 and the mid-twentieth century, Bengali elites debated both the marriage market and the newly conceived and reconceived rituals, ceremonies, social practices, and conjugal and family relationships associated with marriage itself. In the years immediately after Indian independence (1947-56), Hindu marriage rituals and practices became “nationalized” as a new central government attempted to legislate marriage and inheritance laws and as customs and practices associated with Hindu marriage became increasingly defined and standardized across the Indian nation.

For Majumdar, the rituals, practices, and customs associated with nineteenth- to twentieth-century Bengali Hindu marriages demonstrate the dynamic nature of both arranged marriage and the joint family as institutions. Neither are timeless, unchanging, or “traditional” as we see them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather they are institutions and practices that undergo constant change and dynamic adaptation. The reconception of marriage rituals, customs, and practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal embodied efforts to reconcile romantic love and a new focus on “the couple” (companionate marriage) within the new reconstituted relationships of the Bengali extended/joint family. The arranged marriages and reconstituted joint families that emerged from this process “present a hybrid picture, a product of Indian society’s encounter with colonial rule as well as struggles internal to that society” (p. 11).

Marriage and Modernity demonstrates the “modernity” of Hindu arranged marriage by focusing on three interrelated ideas: “the idea of a marriage market, how market-related developments gave rise to debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and legal regulation of family property and marriages” (p. 2). These ideas are explored through six (roughly chronological) chapters. Chapter 1, “Looking for Brides and Grooms,” describes the late nineteenth-century decline in the use of male matchmakers and genealogists (ghataks) by Bengali Hindu families seeking to arrange their children’s marriages and the subsequent rise of both matrimonial newspaper ads and marriage bureaus in early twentieth-century Bengal as what contemporaries called “the modern marriage market” began to emerge. Chapter 2, “Snehalata’s Death,” focuses on early twentieth-century Bengali debates about escalating dowry demands in the marriage market, particularly in the aftermath of the famous 1914 dowry-related suicide of a young girl. Chapter 3, “Marriage and Distinction,” seeks to relate debates about the aesthetics of wedding celebrations, customs, and rituals to the monetized marriage market of the twentieth century through a review of Bengali critiques of excessive expenditures on weddings and the lack of spirituality and meaning in marriage rituals and behaviors. Chapter 4, “The Not-Quite Bourgeois: The Couple Form and the Joint Family,” illustrates the emergence of “the couple” as seen in late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century wedding photographs, wedding invitations, and wedding poems, and discusses the “new patriarchy” through which this new dyadic husband-wife relationship became situated within a reconstituted joint family system. Chapters 5 and 6 consider efforts to define what makes a “marriage” legal in colonial and postcolonial Indian law, first in the context of a controversial Hindu Brahmo wedding in 1878--chapter 5, “A Nineteenth Century Debate: Law versus Rituals”--and then in the national all-Indian context of debates on marriage and inheritance law in the postindependence period--chapter 6, “Nationalizing the Joint Family: The Hindu Code Debates, 1955-1956.”

One should not underestimate--I do not--how difficult a project Majumdar undertook with this book. This is an abstract, unwieldy topic--made even more difficult by the almost complete lack of previous scholarship on the subject. A search of Columbia University’s library collection for works on “Hindu marriage” produces only Majumdar’s book and one or two twenty-first-century “how-to” manuals on Hindu and Sikh weddings. When Majumdar describes her efforts to create her own personal archive for Bengali marriages--her collection of “wedding trivia” (invitations, poems, jewelry catalogues, menus)--she is describing an effort not ancillary to but essential for her project (p. 17). In organizing her book, the author has picked six aspects of Bengali marriage (and modernity) within the years from 1870 to 1956 and focused on these. Her topics are good ones and overall they work well together. But on occasion both the topics and the connections between them can seem somewhat arbitrary or even unclear.

Overall, however, the book--in its main thesis and supporting discussions--is completely convincing. One interesting (if, perhaps, unintended) consequence of this study is the degree to which it makes clear how much we do not know about what constituted the “traditional” (by which I mean merely precolonial) practices of marriage in Bengal and India. Much, perhaps even most, of what we once thought we knew about arranged marriages must now be placed on the “modern” side of the ledger: escalating dowry demands can be seen as the by-product of the new marriage market; and the use of female matchmakers can be understood as a nineteenth-century replacement for earlier male ghataks. Even the red color of the wedding sari, Majumdar suggests, was a nineteenth-century innovation of the Tagore family that subsequently “came to be regarded as the ‘traditional’ bridal color” (p. 141). If all these practices and forms are “modern,” what forms and practices preceded them?

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Judith Walsh. Review of Majumdar, Rochona, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. July, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25828

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