The Institution of Marriage

Across societies and through history, marriage has taken an extraordinary range of forms and served differing functions -- there is no single, universal template. This variety, and the values attached to who may marry whom and how many times, has real consequences for people's lives.

Consider widowhood. For much of India's modern history, remarriage was denied to upper-caste Hindu widows, and the campaign to permit widow remarriage became one of the major causes of the nineteenth-century social reform movements. That history has not simply been left behind: even today, close to ten per cent of all women in India, and around fifty-five per cent of women over the age of fifty, are widows -- a reminder of how significant this life-stage remains for a large section of Indian women, and how much marriage norms shape what options are available to them afterwards.

Marriage's numerical form also varies. Polygamy refers to marriage to more than one spouse at the same time, and takes two distinct forms: polygyny, where one husband is married to two or more wives, and polyandry, where one wife is married to two or more husbands. Polyandry tends to appear, sociologists have noted, in societies facing harsh economic conditions -- where a single man's earnings or labour cannot adequately support a wife and children on their own, sharing a wife among brothers can pool resources more effectively. Extreme poverty also creates pressure to limit population growth, which such arrangements can indirectly serve by restricting the number of women who bear children within a kin group. …