Dissent with Love: Ambiguity, Affect and Transformation in South Asia

This book presents a unique rendering of love in South Asia by reading love through the specific lens of dissent. It presents multiple articulations of dissenting love in contemporary South Asia including negotiations with parents to assert choice of partner, migration, elopement, live-in relationships, singlehood, ’new’ ideas of masculinities, and embracing diverse sexual identities. It studies these forms of dissent in the context of changing legal discourses, impact of media in everyday life, and transforming social attitudes.

As such, this book is the first of its kind to analyse the myriad ways in which love and dissent constitute each other shaping the social, political, and cultural mores and movements of South Asia. The contributions are based on ethnographic research cutting across diverse religious, ethnic, and gender and sexual identities of South Asia.

Part of the Social Movements and Transformative Dissent series, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of sociology, anthropology, history, geography, political science, gender studies, and media studies. It will also appeal to academics who study South Asia with a special focus on love, intimacy, sexuality, marriage, migration, history, politics and media.

Parul Bhandari is the Director of Studies (Human, Social and Politial Sciences), Bye-fellow, and Associate Tutor at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. She was an Associate Professor of Sociology at O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), India. A sociologist and social anthropologist, Bhandari’s research interests lie in the study of love, marriage, intimacy, gender, family and class (elites and the middle class) in contemporary South Asia. She is the author of Matchmaking in Middle Class India: Beyond Arranged and Love Marriage (Springer, 2020), and Money, Culture, Class: Elite Women as Modern Subjects, (Routledge, London 2019).