الإصدار 7 - العدد 19 (2026-10-20)

Reconfiguring Marriage in India: Caste, Educational Mobility, Economic Precarity, Dowry, and Marital Instability

Dr: Salahuddin

Department of Mathematics - College of Science - Jazan University- Jazan-45142 Saudi Arabia

Using unit-level data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21), the Census of India 2011, and the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2022, this article dissects the intersecting influences of caste, education, family wealth, dowry, and widowhood on marriage formation, dissolution, singlehood, non-normative partnerships (live-in and extramarital relationships), marital violence, and the contested phenomenon of interfaith unions popularly labelled “love jihad”. Nationwide, divorce/separation rates remain low (1.2%) but are sharply stratified by caste: Scheduled Caste (SC) women show 2.4% separation versus 0.7% among upper-caste Hindus. Never-married rates among the 30–39 age cohort have risen to 12.3% for urban graduate women, driven by hypergamy deficits and economic independence. Among Muslims, 18.4% of graduate women are married to men with less than secondary education—nearly double the Hindu rate—owing to a truncated pool of educated grooms, patriarchal controls on female mobility, and dowry-linked exchange. The Delhi case study reveals an educational hypogamy rate of 21.7% among Muslim graduate women and a co-existing pattern of aggressive community and legal opposition to interfaith unions, with 63 formal police complaints and court petitions relating to interfaith couples registered between 2019 and 2022. We further document the persistent and lethal reach of dowry: 6516 dowry deaths and 144593 cases of cruelty by husband or relatives were recorded in 2022, with a conviction rate of only 11–17 per cent in dowry death trials. Marital rape remains legally unrecognized, yet NFHS-5 data indicate that 6% of married women have experienced spousal sexual violence. The article also examines the 43 million widows of India, for whom remarriage remains socially prohibited among the upper castes, economically precarious across all communities, and ritually stigmatized in ways that produce a form of “social death”. Multivariate logistic regressions confirm that both hyper-education of women and acute economic precarity destabilize marriages, with the highest dissolution risk found among dual-earner, high-education couples where the wife’s income exceeds the husband’s. The article argues that India’s marriage market is undergoing a fundamental realignment driven by gendered educational expansion, persistent caste endogamy, the extractive logic of dowry, the prohibition of widow remarriage, and a conservative backlash against female autonomy.