Narratives of Choice: Marriage, Choosing Right and the Responsibility of Agency in Urban Middle-Class Sri Lanka

Abstract

The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on ‘choice’ signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation of the ‘self’. The paper illustrates how young women's narratives about marriage appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which ‘a choosing person’ is consciously created as a mark of the family's modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the ‘choosing person’ is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the ‘right’ choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised ‘choosing person’ reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship.

Comparative Cross-National Analyses of Domestic Violence: Insights from South Asia

“…Sri Lanka is an apparent outlier compared to other former colonies, with less rigid family practices and seemingly lower IPV rates. Sri Lankan women are expected to prioritize the family (Abeyasekera, 2016), and evidence suggests the prominence of cultural norms supporting IPV, particularly when women violate traditional gender expectations (Jayatilleke et al, 2011; Kodikara, 2015). But the country does not have a history of many of the patriarchal practices historically documented in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, or Nepal (Jayawardena, 1998).…”

Embodied shame and gendered demeanours in young women in Sri Lanka

“…Securing good marriage partners for their children is an important kinship obligation that looms large in a family’s mind (Abeyasekera, 2016). A ‘good’ marriage denotes success in a girl’s life; it is also an important status marker and a means of social mobility for the couple and for their families (Abeyasekera, 2016, 2017). In order to secure a good marriage, a girl’s parents must guard her virginity and, equally, her appearance of sexual propriety.…”

Love as understanding

“…These remarks are often ambivalent, signaling both a resignation about decreasing parental authority and, simultaneously, an acknowledgment that modernity has arrived, an ever‐present aspiration in postcolonial contexts. Discussions of love are often a site for maintaining and expressing generational differences (Abeyasekera 2016; Donner 2016; Marsden 2007; Thomas and Cole 2009, 14). Yet young women—including those who had love marriages themselves—were equally dismissive of love marriages, because they questioned the durability of the match.…”

“…With regard to South Asia, recent scholarship has disrupted the common division, in academic and popular discourse, between arranged marriages, as reflecting traditional and collective pressures, and love marriages, as reflecting individualized choice and agency. On the one hand, ethnographies of love marriages have problematized the assumption of agency as individual autonomy (Abeyasekera 2016;De Neve 2016;Mody 2008). On the other hand, ethnographic and historical work has challenged the depiction of arranged alliances as "traditional" (Majumdar 2009) and described the space that the institution gives to personal dispositions and emotions (Shaw and Charsley 2006), as well as to notions of companionship and affection (Donner 2008(Donner , 2016Fuller and Narasimhan 2008;Osella 2012).…”