‘Purani aur nai shaadi:’Separation, Divorce, and Remarriage in the Lives of the Urban Poor in New Delhi

Abstract

Low-caste women and men in New Delhi frequently remarry in their lifetimes. While one of the major stories about social change in modern India is that divorce is growing by leaps and bounds, for the urban poor in large cities remarriage remains foremost a practical necessity. For the lowest castes in India, the virtual absence of high-caste chastity norms pertaining to their conjugal lives has hitherto been a putative route for explaining why certain social groups are in a position to form liaisons and remarry so easily. This article seeks to foreground gender, structural constraints, and everyday deprivation as factors in understanding why remarriage is a widespread practice amongst the low-caste poor in a metropolitan setting. The ethnographic focus is on poor women's marital trajectories and on how they robustly negotiate divorce and remarriage with male partners, counsellors, the state, and NGOs in their quotidian lives.

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