Pg. 99: Raksha Pande's "Learning to Love"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Learning to Love: Arranged Marriages and the British Indian Diaspora by Raksha Pande.

About the book, from the publisher:

Learning to Love moves beyond the media and policy stereotypes that conflate arranged marriages with forced marriages. Using in-depth interviews and participant observations, this book assembles a rich and diverse array of everyday marriage narratives and trajectories and highlights how considerations of romantic love are woven into traditional arranged marriage practices. It shows that far from being a homogeneous tradition, arranged marriages involve a variety of different matchmaking practices where each family tailors its own cut-and-paste version of British-Indian arranged marriages to suit modern identities and ambitions. Pande argues that instead of being wedded to traditions, people in the British-Indian diaspora have skillfully adapted and negotiated arranged marriage cultural norms to carve out an identity narrative that portrays them as "modern and progressive migrants"–ones who are changing with the times and cultivating transnational forms of belonging.

Discover more about Learning to Love at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Learning to Love.

--Marshal Zeringue