Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka

By Asha L. Abeyasekera

Making the Right Choice unravels the entangled relationship between marriage, morality, and the desire for modernity as it plays out in the context of middle-class status concerns and aspirations for upward social mobility within the Sinhala-Buddhist community in urban Sri Lanka. By focusing on individual life-histories spanning three generations, the book illuminates how narratives about a gendered self and narratives about modernity are mutually constituted and intrinsically tied to notions of agency. The book uncovers how "becoming modern" in urban Sri Lanka, rather than causing inter-generational conflict, is a collective aspiration realized through the efforts of bringing up educated and independent women capable of making "right" choices. The consequence of this collective investment is a feminist conundrum: agency does not denote the right to choose, but the duty to make the "right" choice; hence agency is experienced not as a sense of "freedom," but rather as a burden of responsibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978810327

Book preview

Making the Right Choice

The Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts

Series Editor: Péter Berta

The Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Context series from Rutgers University Press fills a gap in research by examining the politics of marriage and related practices, ideologies, and interpretations, and addresses the key question of how the politics of marriage has affected social, cultural, and political processes, relations, and boundaries. The series looks at the complex relationships between the politics of marriage and gender, ethnic, national, religious, racial, and class identities, and analyzes how these relationships contribute to the development and management of social and political differences, inequalities, and conflicts.

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Sara Smith, Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold

Rebecca Joubin, Mediating the Uprising: Narratives of Gender and Marriage in Syrian Television Drama

Raksha Pande, Learning to Love: Arranged Marriages and the British Indian Diaspora

Asha L. Abeyasekera, Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka

Making the Right Choice

Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka

ASHA L. ABEYASEKERA

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Abeyasekera, Asha, author.

Title: Making the right choice : narratives of marriage in Sri Lanka / Asha L. Abeyasekera.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Series: Politics of marriage and gender: global issues in local contexts | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020025416 | ISBN 9781978810303 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978810310 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978810327 (epub) | ISBN 9781978810334 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978810341 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Arranged marriage—Sri Lanka. | Marriage—Sri Lanka. | Social change—Sri Lanka.

Classification: LCC HQ666.8.S72 A32 2021 | DDC 306.81095493—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025416

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Asha L. Abeyasekera

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Avinash and Githaali

CONTENTS

Series Foreword by Péter Berta

Introduction

1 Sinhala Marriage: Then and Now

2 Making the Right Choice

3 Structuring the Right Choice

4 The Virtuous Self: Failed Marriages

5 The Valued Self: Singleness

6 The Vindicated Self: Divorce

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

SERIES FOREWORD

The politics of marriage (and divorce) is an often-used strategic tool in various social, cultural, economic, and political identity projects as well as in symbolic conflicts between ethnic, national, or religious communities. Despite having multiple strategic applicabilities, pervasiveness in everyday life, and huge significance in performing and managing identities, the politics of marriage is surprisingly underrepresented both in the international book publishing market and the social sciences.

The Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts is a series from Rutgers University Press examining the politics of marriage as a phenomenon embedded in and intensely interacting with much broader social, cultural, economic, and political processes and practices such as globalization; transnationalization; international migration; human trafficking; vertical social mobility; the creation of symbolic boundaries between ethnic populations, nations, religious denominations, or classes; family formation; or struggles for women’s and children’s rights. The series primarily aims to analyze practices, ideologies, and interpretations related to the politics of marriage, and to outline the dynamics and diversity of relatedness—interplay and interdependence, for instance—between the politics of marriage and the broader processes and practices mentioned above. In other words, most books in the series devote special attention to how the politics of marriage and these processes and practices mutually shape and explain each other.

The series concentrates on, among other things, the complex relationships between the politics of marriage and gender, ethnic, national, religious, racial, and class identities globally, and examines how these relationships contribute to the development and management of social, cultural, and political differences, inequalities, and conflicts.

The series seeks to publish single-authored books and edited volumes that develop a gap-filling and thought-provoking critical perspective, that are well-balanced between a high degree of theoretical sophistication and empirical richness, and that cross or rethink disciplinary, methodological, or theoretical boundaries. The thematic scope of the series is intentionally left broad to encourage creative submissions that fit within the perspectives outlined above.

Among the potential topics closely connected with the problem sensitivity of the series are honor-based violence; arranged (forced, child, etc.) marriage; transnational marriage markets, migration, and brokerage; intersections of marriage and religion/class/race; the politics of agency and power within marriage; reconfiguration of family: same-sex marriage/union; the politics of love, intimacy, and desire; marriage and multicultural families; the (religious, legal, etc.) politics of divorce; the causes, forms, and consequences of polygamy in contemporary societies; sport marriage; refusing marriage; and so forth.

Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka shows in a fascinating way why the desire to be modern has emerged and become a key identity-forming ideology in the urban middle class in Sri Lanka and how this process has been shaping marriage patterns and practices from the early years of the twentieth century. Based on fifteen months of field research among Sinhala Buddhist families in Colombo, Abeyasekera convincingly demonstrates the complex sociocultural dynamics of the shift from arranged marriage to love marriage—emphasizing that this transformation took place much earlier in Sri Lanka than in other South Asian societies.

Abeyasekera’s book offers a brilliant picture of why choice rather than love is defined as the central factor of modern partner selection and convincingly highlights how the key narrative of choice—and its central element, a choosing person—has been created jointly by various generations. Making the Right Choice not only explains how the narrative of choice is closely connected to ideologies of gendered self, modernity and progress of the family, women’s education and employment, and caste and class identities but also provides a thought-provoking analysis of how women’s marital agency works in the urban middle class in Sri Lanka and why the moral and emotional effects of that agency are manifold and often ambivalent.

PÉTER BERTA

University College London

School of Slavonic and East European Studies

Making the Right Choice

Introduction

The questions I raise in this book first began to take shape during a moment of quiet introspection when I found myself, having unconsciously escaped the present, contemplating the meaning of things. The year was 2007, and I had been invited to a family wedding. Even before the event I had been rather taken aback by the venue—a five-star hotel in Sri Lanka’s capital city of Colombo. On the day, the self my twenty-three-year-old niece presented—stunning as a magazine-cover bride in a shimmering low-cut sari blouse, laughing as she sipped champagne following the toast, taking the floor with ease for the first dance—took me by complete surprise. The wedding captured my imagination by raising questions regarding marriage, intimate relations, personhood, and the nature of social change in Sri Lanka. In the months to come I often found myself reflecting on the meaning of the event.

I was ten when her mother, my cousin, got married in 1984—more than two decades before—at the age of twenty-eight. The wedding ceremony was held in their modest home in my father’s village in Kandy, located in the central highlands. The pōruva (wedding dais) was erected in the main hall, and the good chairs, some their own and some borrowed from our grandparents’ house, had been carefully arranged for the important guests, namely the immediate family members of the bride and groom.¹ The others sat on rented plastic chairs in a temporary shed erected in the garden, while the children played on the path across the paddy fields that led to the house. Alcohol was discreetly served from a bedroom that was partially hidden from the hall. Many of the younger men, too embarrassed to drink in the presence of elders, gulped down their shots inside before hurrying out to rejoin the crowd. The women sipped cool drinks and caught up on the family news. My aunt and uncle seemed to be everywhere at once, welcoming guests and making sure the day’s events ran smoothly. My cousin, clad in the same wedding sari her sister had worn three years before, sat on a couch in the main hall with the groom, intermittently licking her lips because she was self-conscious about the lipstick she was forced to wear for the occasion. The marriage had been arranged through a mutual relative, and the relationship was too distant for my cousin to have met the groom more than a few times. To ease the sense of awkwardness she must have been feeling, my cousin frequently grabbed hold of any one of her younger relatives who happened to pass by, making us sit by her as she introduced us to the groom—explaining whose child we were and listing our achievements in school and also our quirks. The groom responded by squeezing our cheeks and teasing us. I remember my cousin not budging from that couch until it was time for her to leave home. The homecoming ceremony was held at the groom’s home the next day.² After that, the newlywed couple spent their honeymoon in what was then my family’s home—a colonial bungalow on a tea plantation my father managed in the hill country.³ To spare the groom of any awkwardness he would have felt in finding himself alone with his new wife’s relatives, he was accompanied by his cousin and a kinsman known to both sides of the family who had been instrumental in introducing the couple. My parents still have the photographs from that time. My cousin—looking a little shy—is holding my hand; her husband—looking somewhat sheepish—stands beside her, his cousin’s arm around his shoulders; and the rest of the group—my parents, my younger brothers, and the mutual relative—stand on either side of the couple.

My niece had met her husband at a mutual friend’s party. I was told he was from a respectable family and that they were a good match. My cousin proudly announced to me that the young couple was flying to Singapore after the homecoming ceremony. The young man had recently started working there, and the bride, after setting up home in their newly rented apartment, would also look for suitable employment. I observed with fascination the equal measures of confidence and decorum with which my niece, accompanied by her new husband, weaved through the hall, stopping at every table, as is the custom, to thank each guest for his or her presence. She made polite conversation with some, laughed with others, and treated her elders with the deference they expected. Although both sets of parents were close at hand to introduce those guests the young people did not know, it was clear that the couple was the focal point. After dinner, the young couple danced with their friends and younger members of the family until it was time for the going away ritual. The mood at this juncture became somber as the young bride and groom worshipped their parents and elders by kneeling by their feet, folding their palms together, and touching their foreheads to the ground. The gesture symbolized respect and deep gratitude to the elders for nurturing them in childhood and now for enabling their transition to adulthood. A thank-you card was distributed at the same time—a glossy photograph of the couple alone in a lush garden, holding hands and gazing fondly at each other as the sun set in the background.

Within the space of twenty years, marriage practices, lifestyle choices, and ways of being seemed to have dramatically changed for this particular branch of my father’s family, who had, until the present generation, lived in villages and townships away from urban centers. I wondered: How did a traditional Sinhala-speaking middle-class family produce a fashionable English-speaking daughter like my niece? How did a family earning a modest income and living outside of Colombo come to host such a lavish wedding in the city? How had my niece managed to find the right husband on her own? How did she, with seeming ease, negotiate between the traditional background she came from and the outgoing, forward young woman—words used by her family to describe her personality—she had become? And, why did she seem to be more in control of her life than the women in the previous generations?

Marriage, Morality, and Modernity

The questions I found myself asking after the wedding are similar to those animating the discussion in this book: How do we make sense of the entangled relationship between marriage, morality, and the desire for modernity within the specific context of middle-class aspirations for social recognition and upward social mobility? How do these tangled longings shape a gendered self? The book is especially concerned with how a gendered self is produced, experienced, and presented through personal narratives about marriage. I focus on narratives of personal experience as a critical forum for reflecting on what it means to be modern and moral.

The relationship between gender, modernity, and morality is an enduring topic of popular and feminist scholarly debate in Sri Lanka, not least because of the backdrop of Buddhist egalitarianism that supports greater gender equality in Sri Lanka as compared to her neighbors in the Indian subcontinent.⁴ Yet very little is known about how ideas about gender, modernity, and morality are constructed within marriage, and the ways in which these ideas circulate and influence intimate lives and intimate relations in Sri Lanka. Not since the classic village-based ethnographies of the 1950s and 1960s has there been a focus on marriage, kinship, and caste and class relations in Sri Lanka, specifically about the Sinhala community.⁵ While marriage rituals and practices feature prominently in the older ethnographic accounts, gender relations are discussed mainly from the theoretical perspectives of structuralism and functionalism, and women’s lives are decidedly absent from these accounts.⁶ Social science research in Sri Lanka has since the late 1970s been overdetermined by the ethnic conflict. This is true for feminist scholarship as well. While a few important studies on women’s histories and women’s representation in historical accounts exist, gendered identities and gender relations have been mainly studied through the lens of nationalism and postcolonial identity politics.⁷ At the same time, the discourse on women, gender, and development, which emerged in the mid-1970s and coincided with liberalization of Sri Lanka’s economy in 1977, provided the impetus to study gender relations through the lens of women in the globalized labor force, namely the plantation and apparel industries, and Middle East migration for domestic work.⁸

This book thus fills a gap in the anthropological and sociological scholarship on Sri Lanka. It explores how the desire to be modern has been reconfiguring marriage norms and practices among the urban middle class in Sri Lanka from the early years of the twentieth century. Using narratives of mothers and daughters that span three generations, the book establishes that, unlike in the rest of South Asia, the shift from arranged to love marriages took place much earlier in Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history, and theorizes why being modern has always been central to urban middle-class identities.

The book focuses on the enduring debate about gender, morality, and modernity and how it unfolds in the particular context of Sinhala-Buddhist middle-class families living in urban Sri Lanka. It specifically examines the ways in which marriage norms and practices evince ideas about gender differences, standards of virtuous behavior, and modern lifestyles and identities. Marriage was central to the early work of feminist anthropologists concerned with understanding the social reproduction of gender and gendered norms.⁹ These scholars illuminated how gendered subjectivities, modesty, and sexual propriety are embedded in, and the outcome of, everyday practices and relations within the institutions of kinship, marriage, and family.¹⁰ This book builds on the legacy of feminist anthropology to illustrate the enduring influence marriage exerts in shaping notions of gender, morality, and modernity, especially within the middle class.

My argument is preoccupied with understanding how women from different generations narrate agency and manage the presentation of the self as they talk about marriage. By paying close attention to the narratives of not only married women but women who described their marriages as failures, single women, and women in divorce courts, the book sheds new light on how gendered subjectivities are fluid, unpredictable, contingent, and context driven. The feminist scholarship on the anthropology of marriage and personhood in South Asia has tended to focus on the married woman or women who will eventually marry. Scholarship that explores and theorizes the extent to which it is possible to live out the category woman in nonhegemonic ways and the possibilities of desiring, investing in, and inhabiting alternative subjectivities that are not necessarily subordinate and embedded in marriage is rare.¹¹ It is this gap that this book hopes to fill by extending the analysis to women who are single, divorced, and unhappy in marriage. By attending to the multivocality of narratives—assertions, disavowals, and equivocations—this book also disrupts liberal assumptions about individualized agency and what it means to be modern in South Asia.

The Setting

This book is by no means a definitive account of middle-class life in urban Sri Lanka. Its focus is the Sinhala-Buddhist communities living in the capital city of Colombo. By taking a particular community as my point of departure—a key feature of the anthropology of marriage on South Asia—I do not wish to imply that attention to a specific ethno-religious group necessarily limits the study of marriage within the boundaries of intracommunity relations and processes. In fact, my focus on the Sinhala-Buddhist middle-class is intended to illuminate boundary making in urban Sri Lanka. By this I mean paying attention to how the politics of marriage has affected social, cultural, and political processes and relations in Sri Lanka, and is deeply implicated in defining and reproducing social difference. As I illustrate, deciding who one should marry is also about whom one should not; deciding on sameness and differences is a way of delineating identities and forming and maintaining group boundaries.¹²

Colombo, where my fieldwork was based, is Sri Lanka’s commercial and cultural capital, comprising approximately 800,000 residents.¹³ Colombo was chosen as the administrative hub of the British colonial regime in the early nineteenth century and has, since then, attracted migrants from all ethno-religious and socioeconomic groups seeking employment and trade opportunities, and also access to prestigious schools.¹⁴ While the Sinhala-Buddhist majority dominates the sociocultural and political landscape of southern Sri Lanka, Colombo is home to almost all ethnic minorities—Sri Lankan Tamils, Indian or Malaiyaha Tamils, Sri Lankan Moors, Burghers and Eurasians, Malays, Sri Lankan Chetty, Bharatha, Borahs, and Sindhis—whose primary religious orientations are Hinduism, Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Christianity.¹⁵ When I began my fieldwork in July 2009, the three-decade long war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had been formally declared over in May of the same year.¹⁶ When I started visiting my respondents’ homes, the euphoria in the streets that marked the end of the war—people lighting firecrackers and distributing milk-rice to neighbors and passers-by—had subsided, and life had gone back to its daily rhythms, albeit with a heightened sense of expectation about life without the threat of everyday violence. Colombo had been a recurring site of anti-Tamil riots and a prime target of LTTE attacks. For thirty long years the war had devastated the socioeconomic landscape of Tamils, and also Muslims, in the North and East, as well as disrupted the lives of all ethno-religious communities, including the Sinhalese, living in the South and elsewhere on the island.

The history of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict can be traced to the colonial era, specifically to the British colonial government’s policy of divide and rule that favored the language, religion, and culture of minorities at the expense of the majority.¹⁷ The bid for independence united elites from all major ethnic groups, but this fraternity was opportunistic and short-lived. From its inception, nationalist politics in Sri Lanka was characterized by narrow communal interests. The main impetus for the nationalist movement in Sri Lanka was the religious revival of the late nineteenth century. For the middle classes participating in the Buddhist revival, religious modernization conjoined with nationalism became the ideological force that merged religious and ethnic identities, creating a Sinhala-Buddhist identity.¹⁸

The simmering ethnic tensions were exacerbated in the post-independence era due to a number of policies introduced by a majority Sinhala parliament that was divided on class lines.¹⁹ The Sinhala-only Language Act of 1956, and later the standardization of university admissions on ethnic representation and the establishment of Buddhism as the official state religion led to several episodes of ethnic riots.²⁰ The anti-Tamil riots of July 1983—a pogrom that started in the city of Colombo and rapidly spread to other townships on the island—is widely regarded by scholars as the pivotal event that thrust the ethnic conflict into the theater of war.²¹ I have provided this overview of ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka to underscore the complex relationship that exists between the politics of marriage and gender and ethno-religious identities and nationalist sentiments, and to specifically flag how the dynamic between the politics of marriage and identity politics shapes marriage strategies and choices.

The rest of this introduction offers an overview of the debates that I engage with in the forthcoming chapters. The first section establishes the centrality of marriage in Sri Lanka and the meaning it holds for the formation of social identities and social relations in the Sinhala-Buddhist community in particular in order to underscore why a feminist inquiry into the anthropology of marriage is still relevant to the discipline of anthropology. The second section provides a sense of the broader context of the ethnography in relation to nationalism and class dynamics and its role in shaping social identities and social relations in urban Sri Lanka. The section also connects the history of colonialism and modernism in South Asia to contemporary forms of distinction and women’s respectability asserted by Sinhala-Buddhist middle-class families living in Colombo. By engaging with the ongoing debates in the anthropology of marriage about gendered agency, personhood, and desire, the third section argues how narratives about choice in marriage complicate individualized subjectivities. The fourth and fifth sections focus on anthropological methods. The fourth briefly discusses the relational dynamics of conducting fieldwork at home and how it shaped the ethnography. The fifth section explains why combining ethnography with family histories and narratives of personal experience are productive for inquiring into the intimate spheres and emotional dimensions of a person’s life, and for exploring how the practice of norms and expression of values respond to contingencies while being shaped by social change. The final section explains how the book is organized and summarizes the purpose of each chapter and its main arguments.

Throughout, my aim has been to write a book that captures the vibrancy, complexity, and intimacy of the personal stories and intergenerational family histories people related to me. Concurrently, I wanted to write a book that would appeal to a wider readership: informed audiences familiar with Sri Lanka; those with a scholarly interest in feminist anthropology, gender and women’s studies, and Sri Lanka as part of South Asia; and others who are concerned with relations between marriage, gendered subjectivities, class relations, and modernity. To this end I have tried to balance the ethnography with an accessible account of the theoretical debates and the sociopolitical context that underpin it.

Meaning of Marriage

During my fieldwork I met Jalani and Les—a married couple in their sixties—who spoke animatedly about their two daughters’ achievements. They had master’s degrees, migrated overseas, and had promising careers in the United States and the United Kingdom. The younger daughter had married a few years ago, and Jalani and Les described the courtship and wedding as if it had happened last week. When I asked about the older daughter, the mood became somber. They were quiet for a while. Les then related to me his incredulity on finding out how successful she was. It is when their daughter had sent her employment documents in order to sponsor her parents’ visit to the United States that they found out how much she earned working for a prestigious consulting firm in New York. They both talked about her generosity—she had no qualms about lending or gifting money to the extended family. When I commented how I admire generous people, Jalani and Les became quiet again. Jalani broke the silence to tell me, with a catch in her voice, that her daughter had turned thirty-five that year. I was completely unprepared for it when Les started crying. I don’t understand why [she] is not married.… What have we done wrong?

Marriage is a cultural imperative in Sri Lanka, as it is the case in the rest of South Asia. The pressure, however, is not only directed at the individual. The Sinhalese regard marriage as a reciprocal kinship obligation. It is a parent’s duty and responsibility to ensure their children are married. Parents are anxious, even distraught like Jalani and Les, when their daughters remain unmarried past the culturally accepted age—usually around twenty-seven for women and thirty-five for men. Parents regard giving their children in marriage as a primary obligation. Unmarried daughters reflect negatively on parents, as evidenced by Les’s question—What have we done wrong? On the other hand, it is a child’s duty to get married. Younger unmarried women intimated to me their feelings of guilt for hurting their parents’ feelings. For the Sinhalese, marriage is a rite of passage signifying a person’s transition to adulthood. Marriage, however, is not only about achieving individual status; marriage enables kin to move along their life trajectories. In other words, unless children get married and have their own children, parents cannot achieve the status of grandparents, nor can siblings become aunts and uncles. Marriage, and the interrelated social institutions of family and kinship, is fundamental to the formation of a person’s social identity and central to a person’s sense of belonging and security.²² It is within these institutions that a person forms close and interdependent relationships and experiences relatedness—a mutuality of being.²³

Marriage is culturally constructed as the principal source of personal fulfillment, especially for women. It is the only legitimate space in which women can express their sexuality and experience motherhood. Older unmarried women are the subject of speculation and pity. They are often stereotyped as being moody and bad tempered, and the inference is to sexual frustration. A good marriage, characterized by stability, reproduction, and a rich network of affective relationships, denotes success in life for a woman. The Sinhalese are, on the whole, troubled by unmarried women. This is evident in the way marriage is thought of as inevitable. When are you getting married? is the oft-asked question. Single women are asked to explain themselves—Why aren’t you married as yet? To be unmarried is to be outside of normal family life and intimate relations. It signifies a lack, is always problematic, and rarely accepted as a legitimate choice.²⁴ Marriage is, without doubt, fundamental to the construction of well-being and sense of self in Sri Lanka.

Marriage is also the central cultural performance of the urban middle-class in Sri Lanka, as is the case in South Asia. Historically, it was only those families occupying the upper strata of society for whom marriage was a means for asserting and consolidating status.²⁵ Today, weddings are receiving unprecedented public attention. Within a few years into the new millennium, marriage had been taken over by a wedding industry at what can only be described as a dizzying pace. The market offers bridal dressers, storybook albums, wedding loans, and wedding planners. The commercial wedding has become a form of enchantment: dozens of glossy magazines and tabloids feature alluring brides and extravagant five-star wedding receptions; lifestyle programs focusing on the perfect wedding and the modern home monopolize day-time television; and wedding fairs and shows are regular public events. Glamour and romance are the central imagery of these weddings. At a macro level, these changes point to the inexorable impact of the market.²⁶ The glamorous lifestyles of Colombo’s elite have always been highly visible, but mostly inaccessible, to the middle classes in the past.²⁷ The spread of a consumer culture has meant that previously unattainable lifestyles can now be imitated by an expanding middle class.²⁸ The commercial wedding, therefore, has become another means to public declarations of status and distinction. At a micro level, the commercial wedding places a spotlight on how the presentation of the self is being significantly transformed through consumption and display of lifestyle.

The change I had observed from the simple, demure bride of the previous generation to the desirable, self-assured bride of the younger generation in my own family was suggesting something about how the self is structured through the material world it inhabits. It thus poses a question about how socioeconomic processes are implicated in the production of gendered selves. Specifically it points to a dynamic of capitalism that creates subjects primed for intimacy, as well as for consumption and labor in the market.²⁹ Together, these changes reveal several layers of tensions: marriage as social obligation being reconfigured as individual achievement; marriage customs and rituals previously defined and performed within a familial context now being restructured through the market; and marriage as means of consolidating social status was now signaling a globalized modernity.

Class Relations, Nationalism, and Modernity

A central concern of this book is to elucidate the ways in which social mobility, status concerns,