I Will Speak Out: Narratives of Resistance in Contemporary Indian Women’s Discourses in Hindu Arranged Marriages

Much has been written about the importance of recognizing and understanding resistance as it is experienced by members of Other and/or marginalized worlds. In this essay, I discuss resistance as enacted by middle-class women of a Punjabi community in contemporary Hindu arranged marriages who live in South Delhi, India. Accessing life-history narratives of women currently involved in these marriages, I argue that the structure of the Hindu marriage creates a constraining framework of power within which women are placed in disadvantaged positions. It is within and from these positions that women resist filial relationships in structural, relational, and interactional ways. I explore two emergent forms of resistance -- Marital Self-definitions and Addressing the Mother-in-law. I explore these forms as truncated resistances because my participants resisted ‘what they could’ within the constraints of a filial reality. Finally, I conclude by merging my voice with contemporary transnational conversations about the problematics of interpretation and naming resistance.