Modern Marriages in India: Caste Exogamy and Love Marriage.

Koyel Sarkar , Université Catholique de Louvain
Ester L. Rizzi, Université Catholique de Louvain

Love and inter-caste marriages may not be foreign concept in a fast developing country like India. Grounding on modernization and developmental idealism theories, we aim to study Indian marriages using the second round of IHDS data. We find that while the proportion of inter-caste marriage remains stagnant (5%), love marriage is increasing among new birth cohorts. An important portion of inter-caste marriage is actually love marriage (17%). Interestingly, we find that the caste hierarchy take a J-shape curve on probabilities of modern marriages and development level of the state has little to do with the practice of modern marriages. This change also has a gender dimension. Our preliminary descriptive analysis show that mother and mother-in-law’s education levels act as positive influence on probabilities of modern marriages, while father’s education acts as negative influence. In further analyses, we will apply a multivariate and multilevel analysis to account intra-state and intra-region correlation.

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 Presented in Session 4. Marriage, Family, Households, & Unions