From The Margins of Hindu Marriage (Essays on Gender, Religion and Culture)

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Providing new perspectives on Hindu marriage in South Asian culture, the essays in this collections explore points at which the conceptual boundaries of marriage are crossed or transgressed. Rather than focus on ideal or normative expectations about marriage, the authors choose to examine those more revealing times at which such norms are tested or rejected. Drawing on folkstories, songs, and first-hand narrations of life stories that illuminate the marginal experience, these essays shed new light on Hindu widowhood, adultery, levirate, divorce, and sad, as well as on the subversion of marriage by devotion to dieties and by alternative constructions of conjugal duty and marital experience.

Combining insights from anthropology, Indology, folklore, and the history of religions, this collection is an important contribution to the cross-cultural study of marriage and gender issues, and to our understanding of these facets of South Asian society and culture.

Lindsey Harlan is Associate Professor of Religion at Connecticut College and the author of Religion and Rajput Women: The Ethic of Protection in Contempo-any Narratives (1992), and is working on a study of hero-veneration in India. Paul B. Courtright is Professor of Religion at Emory University and the author of Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (1985), and is working on a study of sati.

**Contents and Sample Pages**