Browsing for Bridegrooms: Matchmaking and Modernity in Mumbai

This article demonstrates how a traditional cultural practice such as the arranged marriage system is given a modern meaning by young women in urban India. Through young women's narratives on love, marriage and careers, it highlights how neo-liberalisation and its resultant culture of consumerism has offered them a vocabulary through which they articulate and resolve the continuing tension between traditional notions of family-making and modern desires of individual growth. These young women's strategic deployment of arranged marriage practices points to various shifting configurations of power; it allows us to understand women's resistance beyond dichotomies of absolute complicity and complete opposition and provides us with an example of how an alternate modernity might be imagined and lived.