Gender, Marriage and the Elites in India

ABSTRACT Scholarship on Indian marriages is vast and interesting, with insights into structural practices and transformations, everyday realities, and maintenance of boundaries and hierarchies of groups. To understand these aspects, studies have focussed on specific caste groups, religious and regional communities, bourgeoning urban areas and emerging class structures. These are rich and compelling studies that shed light on the continued practices and slow transformations of marriage practices and preferences in Indian society. In this article, I provide a brief overview of this scholarship on marriages in India to specifically bring attention to the fact that though rich and nuanced, this field has not adequately studied the category of elites. In line with sociological definitions and contemporary studies of elites, I define elites as the top 1% of the Indian population, who are owners of capital and who by virtue of this, wield political, economic, social, and cultural power. To present these insights, this article is divided into four sections: the first provides a brief overview of the various themes explored and examined by the rich array of studies on marriage, family, and kinship in Indian sociology since postcolonial times. The second section draws attention to those research works that have studied marriage practices (and gender and family dynamics) of privileged classes as upper‐caste groups, upper middle class, and what some might define as professional elites. At the same time, this section explains how these studies are not really about the top 1% or Indian elites. Following this, the next section delves into the study of elites at a global level, briefly discussing the growing literature from the US and UK for example, especially works that have focussed exclusively on elite women, their marriage, intimate and domestic lives. Finally, the article identifies key questions or themes that future studies on elites could explore. As such, this article traces studies on marriages and elites to argue that further research must bring these two themes together as this will enable us to better grasp how elites constitute and reproduce inequalities.