Marital Ideoscapes in 21st-Century India: Creative Combinations of

Although arranged marriage has survived in India, the custom is increasingly challenged by the current influx of new commodities, media, and ideas. Interviews with 15 male and 15 female unmarried professionals, age 22 to 29, in Vadodara, Gujarat, showed that educated youth have moved beyond the conventional love-versus-arranged marriage dichotomy. They instead focus on achieving specific goals: intimacy, equality, and personal choice, along with supernatural support, growing into love, and brides joining husbands ’ families. To achieve these aims, they use both systems: separately, simultaneously, and in creative combinations. The theories of Arjun Appadurai explain that as the Western-inspired ideoscape of romantic love encounters Indian family values, Indian upper-middle-class youth respond by generating hybrid goals and systems of mate selection. They have linked imagination to hope and are using voice within their families to win the recognition, and often the partners, they seek