Migration and Changing Nature of Conjugality in India

Abstract

This article examines how migration reshapes conjugality in India. It explores how rural-urban and inter-state mobility, spatial separation, and digital communication transform spousal relationships. Migration reconfigures gender roles, emotional labor and family control while creating new possibilities for partner choice in marriages especially in Urban India. However, these choices are shaped by class, caste, gender and kinship norms etc. Migration does not simply weaken the marriage or shifts towards modern conjugal forms, instead it generates new types of intimacy, negotiation, a kind of hybrid transformation coexisting with enduring structures of inequality, control and obligation. This article argues that migratory conjugality in India is best understood as a hybrid formation where intimacy, obligation, autonomy and inequality coexist. This study contributes to sociological debates on changing nature of family, mobility and marriage in rapidly transforming societies in Indian context.