Speaker: Rama Devi
We speak of love as unconditional: boundless, transcendent, beyond category. And yet, in practice, who we love and who we marry is rarely a private matter. Caste, gender, family, and social expectation quietly shape the choices we believe are entirely our own.
Can we really love and marry freely when the weight of social norms like caste rules, notions of honour and shame, questions of purity, follows us into our most intimate decisions? And what does society’s resistance to inter-caste relationships reveal about the limits of change in an institution as durable as marriage?
This talk traces the evolving institution of marriage in contemporary India, examining how romantic choice is shadowed, defined, and sometimes transformed by the identities we carry.