WiCDS Wednesday: 'Pragmatic Love: Gender, Caste, and Class in Contemporary India'

Please join us on for a WiCDS Wednesday seminar featuring Ujithra Ponniah discussing ‘pragmatic love’ in India, a concept drawn from her new book.

Pragmatic Love: Gender, Caste, and Class in Contemporary India

Marriages in India, particularly amongst upper-caste groups that I write about in my recently published book Becoming Agarwal: The Manufacture of a Close-Knit Mercantile Caste remain overwhelmingly endogamous. Endogamous marriages are a critical strategy through which a caste group continues to maintain its hegemonic status by locking in resource-rich networks. Drawing on in-depth interviews and long-term ethnographic observations conducted among elite upper-caste women in Delhi, I explore the careful affective manoeuvrings within mother-daughter relationships, especially in the pre-marital stage of life, capturing this dynamic through a framework of ‘pragmatic love’.  I show how pragmatic love is cultivated through morally regulated experimentation, which teaches younger women to coalesce individual and collective desires by mastering the virtues of calculation, ambition, logic, reason, and self-regulation. Arranged endogamous marriages are rarely forced upon elite women merely to reproduce static familial interests and caste status. Instead, by catering to the aspirations of enterprising neoliberal individuals and their families, arranged endogamous marriages are reworked and retain their powerful appeal. Yet, in this reworking, the motivations for inhabiting the caste group among women, undergo an intergenerational shift from those undertaken out of duty and obligation to those where caste identity is experimented with, tested, and inhabited for its entrepreneurial potential. By idealising the institution of endogamous marriage through a tutelage in pragmatic love, other ideals in the form of pursuing higher education, seeking employment, and claiming a share of inheritance are actively discouraged.

Ujithra Ponniah is an academic and artist. She works as a senior researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, She researches economic elites, gender, caste and race in India, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Prior to coming to South Africa, she taught at the School of Gender Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Hyderabad.

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