Working with young women facing pressure to marry

Abstract

Marriage is a tightly controlled aspect of women’s lives in India. It marks a woman as a ‘well- settled’ adult. There are master narratives in India that govern when, whom and how women marry. This paper is a testimony to two young women resisting pressure to marry. It captures practices and ideas that were helpful in shifting our conversations from pathologising women and their families to challenging the larger sociopolitical master narratives that compel women to marry in pursuit of a thinly described ‘good life’. This paper illustrates women’s agency and knowledge about living an independent adult life. It invites ways of coming together with family to unite against pressure to marry.