[Reader-list] Talk: 09 August 2012: Perveez Mody on Viewing Rights Ethnographically: Love-marriage & Legal entanglements

[Shilpa Phadke]

*City Conversations, Urban Aspirations in Global Cities,
*

**

invite you to a Discussion titled

*Viewing Rights Ethnographically:*

*Love-marriage & Legal entanglements*

by
*Dr. Perveez Mody *
Lecturer and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge


*Date: Thursday, Aug 9, 2012*
*Time:* *4.30 p.m.*
*Location: **Room 601, Guesthouse, Main Campus, TISS, Mumbai*

About the Talk:

In the winter of 1998, a 24-year-old man climbed a microwave tower outside
New Delhi railway station for the second time in three months. His
self-declared goal was to go on an indefinite hunger-strike and he demanded
that the President of India intervene on his behalf and help him recover
his wife from her family. He remained on a narrow ledge two-thirds of the
way up the 210-foot tower and communicated to the press via a mobile phone
and hand-written letters that he threw down or lowered on lengths of
string. He could not have found a more central point in the city—the tower,
located midway between Old and New Delhi, was clearly visible to the naked
eye from most of the city’s major landmarks, including Connaught Place,
Rashtrapathi Bhawan, the Red Fort, and the crowded tenements and bazaars of
Old Delhi. Thousands of people gathered below the tower in the freezing
temperature of Delhi’s coldest winter for the past thirty years; some to
keep vigil, and others to be entertained by the media circus, the police
presence and the filmy ‘love-story’ unfolding before their eyes.

Set against the backdrop of anthropological fieldwork on love-marriage in
Delhi’s largest District court Tis Hazari, this paper seeks to examine the
idea of “rights” invoked by love-marriage couples in Delhi. If we are to
take seriously the academic rhetoric of viewing rights ethnographically,
then the rights of couples (however constituted) are as significant and
meaningful as the rights of families who oppose them as well as the rights
of communities to police their marital boundaries by enforcing cultural
codes. In this paper I want to explore how we might think through these
issues in such a way that allows us to recognise the different ways in
which couples in Delhi conceive of marital rights, whilst at the same time
thinking about how the law facilitates or not these different rights.

About Perveez Mody

Perveez Mody is Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Fellow, King's College,
University of Cambridge.  She did her PhD in Social Anthropology at
Cambridge, but was born, educated and fully baug-ed in a Parsi colony in
Bombay.  She has maintained an abiding interest in inter-marriage, the law
and urban anthropology, and has studied the workings of the marriage room
in Tis Hazari, Asia's largest District court in Delhi.  Her book, *The
Intimate State: Love-Marriage & the Law in Delhi* was published in 2008 by
Routledge.  She is currently conducting research on contemporary debates
surrounding rites and rights under the Special Marriage Act, as well as
writing a book on the practice, law and phenomenon short-handed as "forced
marriage" in the UK.


*"Urban Aspirations in Global Cities*" is an international collaborative
project in which researchers from Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
Mumbai, Max Planck Institute (MPI), Germany and Partners for Urban
Knowledge Action and Research (PUKAR), Mumbai, are working together. The
project aims to compare post-colonial mega-cities in Asia, including
Mumbai, Singapore and Shanghai, and understand how the urban community of
rapidly growing mega-cities impacts the development of urban aspirations.

*City Conversations* is a lecture series that aims at fostering a
continuing dialogue about the urban condition engaging varied cities and
their complexities.