Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

Even in 2021, a well-designed Pew survey on social attitudes found that more than sixty per cent of all Indians wanted to ensure women did not marry outside their respective caste groups. Using such data, activists argue that caste and patriarchy are married. They highlight how families desire control over women’s bodies and mobility to maintain the purity of their caste networks. Such control is a key reason why women’s employment opportunities are minimized; the ultimate goal is to reduce any chance of boyfriends or workplace romances from taboo communities. In fact, a key theory explaining the decline in female employment in India centres on how economic growth has made it possible for millions of families to practise conservative values by withdrawing women from paid jobs. Sociologists call this the ‘Sanskritization’ effect. Higher incomes allow family members to perform puritanical upper-caste social rituals where women’s bodily honour is guarded strictly within the home. As incomes increase, families no longer need more members to work in order to stay afloat and women are discouraged from working outside. This phenomenon has contributed to India being the only middle-income country where a phase of rapid economic growth and poverty reduction has not resulted in more women working outside the home.