Learning to Love: Arranged Marriages and the British Indian Diaspora

By Raksha Pande

Learning to Love moves beyond the media and policy stereotypes that conflate arranged marriages with forced marriages. Using in-depth interviews and participant observations, this book assembles a rich and diverse array of everyday marriage narratives and trajectories and highlights how considerations of romantic love are woven into traditional arranged marriage practices. It shows that far from being a homogeneous tradition, arranged marriages involve a variety of different matchmaking practices where each family tailors its own cut-and-paste version of British-Indian arranged marriages to suit modern identities and ambitions. Pande argues that instead of being wedded to traditions, people in the British-Indian diaspora have skillfully adapted and negotiated arranged marriage cultural norms to carve out an identity narrative that portrays them as "modern and progressive migrants"-ones who are changing with the times and cultivating transnational forms of belonging.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813599644
• ISBN13: 9780813599649
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 154 Pages
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher