An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, "ancient" social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an "Indian" tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced "traditions"-the extended family and arranged marriage-entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new "marketplace" for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India.Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.

Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 1Part I. The Emergence of a Marriage Market1. Looking for Brides and Grooms 232. Snehalata's Death: Questions of Dowry 54Part II. Culture and the Marketplace3. Marriage and Distinction: New Critiques of Vulgarity 934. The Not-Quite Bourgeois: The Couple Form and the Joint Family 126Part III. Marriage and the Law5. A Nineteenth-Century Debate: Law versus Ritual 1676. Nationalizing the Joint Family: The Hindu Code Debate, 1955-56 206Conclusion 238Appendices1. Wedding Invitations 2442. Jewelry Catalogues 253Notes 259Glossary 301Bibliography 311Index 337