![]() In the same way, choice of marriage is also much influenced by caste and religious norms and values. It is largely regulated by the norms and values of the groups and society. Marriage as a social institution establishes a social relation with the members of two families. The effect of the education of mothers and mothers-in-law on love marriage also stresses the importance of the gender dimension in marriage studies in India.Įach social group in the Indian context, whether it may be a caste or religion or tribe, has its own rules and regulations that define the practices of social relations within the group and outside the group. This finding may show that although love marriage is an individual process, in contrast to jointly arranged and totally arranged marriage, the family still has an influence. The effect of mother-in-law's education on love marriage appears to be particularly strong. Moreover, the education of mothers and mothers-in-law is positively associated with love marriage. Although still marginal, we find that the practice of love marriage is increasing and is strongly entrenched in the cultural system based on caste, religion and region. Moreover, while previous studies on the topic have mostly been descriptive, we adopt a multivariate, multilevel approach at the regional level and focus on the emancipatory role of education with respect to traditional marriage. Using data from the second round of the Indian Household and Development Survey (IHDS) in 2011-12, this study contributes to enriching the still limited literature on marriage in India. In this study, we examine love marriage in India, its trends, the diversity of practices across cultural groups and regions and the relation of love marriage with the educational level of parents and parents-in-law. ‘Some-choice' marriages empower husbands and not the parents-in-law while ‘no-choice’ marriages typically benefit the parents-in-law and not the husbands or the wives. But a complex pattern of power relationships emerges among wives, husbands, and in-laws. Women who started married life in self-choice marriages later end up with the most decision-making power. Our analysis using panel data of 20,927 mothers from IHDS indicate three marriage types- self-choice marriages (5 per cent), parent-arranged with no choice on the part of young women (39 per cent) and parent-arranged - with some choice (56 per cent). Drawing on the life course theoretical framework, we argue that household authority follows a trajectory, which begins at least with her transition to marriage. However, little is known about the bearing events transpiring at the beginning of a woman's marriage have on the path of her decision-making power in the household over her life course. Marriages in India are near universal and age at marriage is low implying that nearly all women spend a large part of their lives in a marriage. The dimension we focus on in this paper relates to women's transition into marriage. Women's limited intra-household decision-making power has several dimensions: geographic, cultural, economic, and demographic. Education is associated with greater autonomy in partner choice decision but it most strongly associated with parent arranged marriages with consent. Results from multinomial regression analysis confirm that the trend towards parent arranged marriages with the daughter’s consent has been persistent over time. Contrary to our hypothesis, the largest difference between educated and their less educated counterparts is not with respect to parent-arranged and self-arranged marriages rather it is between parent arranged marriages with no participation (22 percentage points) and parent arranged marriages with consent (36 percentage points). Share of jointly arranged and self-arranged marriages have remained somewhat similar across birth cohorts. There has been an almost equal 5 percentage point increase in parent-arranged marriages in which daughters have participated. Descriptive statistics indicate that parent-arranged marriages in which the daughter has no participation have declined 5 percentage points from the oldest to the youngest cohort. We distinguish between four marriage types- parent arranged marriage with no participation, parent arranged marriage with participation, jointly arranged marriage and self- arranged marriage. In particular, we examine (1) if women of recent cohorts (born around 1980) are less likely to report arranged marriages than women of older cohorts (born around 1956) and (2) if educated women are less likely to report arranged marriages than their less educated counterparts. Using a very unique data set (India Human Development Survey, 2005), this paper examines if self-arranged marriages (or love marriages) have replaced parent-arranged marriages as the dominant form of marriage in India.
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