“The Outrage of Marrying Up”: Pratiloma, Endogamy, and Caste Patriarchy in Manoj Mitta’s Caste Pride

Abstract

This article addresses the practice of pratiloma marriage, a union of a woman in a superior position within the caste order with a man of a lower standing, as a crucial site for understanding the tensions between caste endogamy and patriarchal regulation within colonial Indian legal and reformist discourse. Engaging with Manoj Mitta’s Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India, B. R. Ambedkar’s discussion of endogamy, Uma Chakravarti’s conceptualisation of Brahmanical patriarchy, and Nivedita Menon’s account of the legal history of inter-caste marriage, this article argues that pratiloma was not a vestigial category defined by scriptural discourse. In the colonial legal and public sphere that this article seeks to historicise, it was a legal-cultural category through which dominant caste publics, colonial courts, and reformist actors negotiated anxieties about female agency and consent, patrimonial authority, conjugal bonds, property, and caste mobility. Attending to Vithalbhai Patel’s Hindu Marriages (Validity) Bill of 1918, Bai Kashi v. Jamnadas Mansukh Raichand (1912), and the legislative history of the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, this article traces how caste difference could be deployed to deny marriages recognition and materiality. This article does not assume the progressive potential of cross-caste unions. However, it seeks to advance the idea of constrained agency, wherein questions of violence, dependence, familial authority, and caste sanction mediated women’s marital decisions. In its attention to how marriage across caste could serve as a site for intervening in the lives of castes, this article seeks to illuminate the intimate arenas in which caste inequality was negotiated.