Love in liminality: the modes and spaces of intimacy in middle-class Pakistan

ABSTRACT

In recent years, a burgeoning literature has attended to transformations in notions of intimacy, romantic love and conjugality in South Asia, and challenged the depiction of these processes as unilineal shifts from collective (‘traditional’) obligations to individual desire (a symbol of ‘modernity’). Picking up on these themes, this article considers the coexistence of different modes of intimacy in middle-class urban Pakistan. Through a focus on emotive practices of young upwardly mobile women in Lahore and Karachi, it draws out how different ideals of intimacy coexist, the ways in which they are entangled in everyday practices, and the sites, situations and spaces in which they separate. Living largely in joint-family arrangements, young women continuously negotiate between, on the one hand, private desires for nuclear family life and associated forms of consumption and, on the other hand, the economic pressures and emotional obligations that necessitate collective living. A continuous presence of liminality allows for a way in which these conflicting desires are experienced and managed. Liminality, here, allows for experimentation and potentiality, a zone in which new desires and practices are experienced. Yet, simultaneously, it encompasses ‘emotion work’ that bends and brings these new emotional trajectories in line with dominant moral codes. Ultimately it is not the processual transformation from collective to individualized ties, nor a disruption of pre-existing ethical codes but the management of differing demands and desires that is constitutive of ‘feeling’ middle-class.

KEYWORDS:

• Romantic love
• joint family
• intimacy
• liminality
• consumption
• morality

Acknowledgments

Fieldwork was supported by an ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship for the project ‘To Pakistan with love: Islam, intimacy and transnational marriages’ (ES/L0097757/). All names have been changed to protect identities. Many of the ideas discussed here were sharpened and nuanced during a visiting fellowship in 2017 at the History of Emotions Centre at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. I would like to thank Margrit Pernau and Deepra Dandekar for their generous input to these arguments. Any shortcomings, however, remain my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Abeyasekera, “Narratives of Choice”; Mody, The Intimate State; Uberoi, Family, Kinship, and Marriage in India, Freedom and Destiny; Grover, “Lived Experiences”; Ahearn, Invitations to Love; Srivastava, Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes; Osella “Desires Under Reform”; Donner & Santos, “Love and Intimate Citizenship”; Ganguly Scrase & Scrase, Globalisation and the Middle Classes; Mazarella, “Citizens have Sex”; Hoek, Cut Pieces; and Dwyer, All you Want is Money.

2. See, for instance, Osella’s critique of Parry’s use of Antony Giddens to refer to shifts from arranged to pure relationships in India, Osella, “Desires Under Reform,” 244. See also Donner & Santos, “Love and Intimate Citizenship.”

3. Dwyer, All you Need is Money, “Kiss or Tell.” For a larger discussion on conversations on love as a way of talking of a break from the past, see Marsden, “Love and Elopement,” 97; Cole & Thomas, “Thinking Through Love,” 15; Collier, From Duty to Desire; and Menin, “The Impasse of Modernity,” 898–899.

4. Mody, The Intimate State; Abeyasekera, “Narratives of Choice”; and de Neve, “Economies of Love.”

5. Orsini, Love in South Asia; Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity; and Sreevinas, Wives Widows and Concubines.

6. McKinnon, “Vital Relations”; and Davidoff & Hall, Family Fortunes.

7. Turner, “Frame, Flow and Reflection,” 465.

8. Armbrust, Martyrs and Tricksters; Griffith et al, “Migration, Time and Temporality”; Elliot et al, Methodologies of Mobility; Ali, “Go West Young Man”; and Osella and Osella, “Marriage, Money and Masculinity.”

9. Appadurai, Modernity at Large.

10. Bhabha, Location of Culture.

11. Maunaguru, Marrying for a Future, 17.

12. Pernau, “Feeling Communities.”

13. Brosius, “Love in the Age,” 32–33.

14. Illouz, Consuming Romantic Utopia.

15. I utilize the concept of ‘emotion work’ as theorized by Christiane Brosius, who draws upon Arlie Hothschild’s concept of emotion work as the effort involved in creating feelings ‘suitable’ to a particular situation or generating an emotion that was previously absent (2007, 30).

16. Beatty, “Anthropology and Emotion,” “Current Emotion Research in Anthropology.”

17. The research was funded by ESRC Future Research Leaders Fellowship, 2014–2017.

18. Osella & Osella, Social Mobility in Kerala; Donner, “One’s Own Marriage”; Fuller & Narasimhan, “Companionate Marriage in India”; and Osella, “Desires Under Reform.”

19. Donner, “One’s Own Marriage”; and Fuller & Narasimhan, “Companionate Marriage in India.”

20. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India, 68

21. Chakravarti, Rewriting History, 212

22. Orsini, Love in South Asia, 30–31.

23. Ibid., 31.

24. Mody, The Intimate State; and Abeyasekera, “Narratives of Choice.”

25. de Neve, “Economies of Love.”

26. Majumdar, Marriage Modernity, 57

27. Maqsood, The New Pakistani Middle Class.

28. For examples from other postcolonial contexts, see e.g. Armbrust, Mass Culture.

29. I do not mean to suggest that it is only new middle-class groups that live in joint family arrangements or are concerned about upholding family values. Rather, it is to highlight how these collective concerns play into individual intimate relations, emotions and their articulations. The projection of established groups here is a rhetorical strategy, indicative more of class contestations and forms of social distinction than anything else. The family arrangements of old middle-class groups is neither a concern of this article, nor a focus of my fieldwork. However anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is becoming more common amongst more affluent groups as well, not so much to achieve middle-class status as with newer groups, but to enjoy a more comfortable lifestyle. With the sharp increase in urban property prices, rent and inflations, the younger generation of established families can only afford to reside in affluent neighbourhoods, such as Cantonment, Gulberg and DHA in Lahore or DHA and Clifton in Karachi, through either inheriting property or living with parents. Like with newer groups, the encounter with the neoliberal economy has made established groups rely more, rather than less, on family support.

30. Maqsood, “Buying Modern,” The New Pakistani Middle Class.

31. For comparative experiences on the failed promise of education in South Asia, see Jeffrey, Timepass; Jeffrey et all, “When Schooling Fails”; and Brown, “From Guru Gama to Punchi Italia.”

32. Osella & Osella, Social Mobility in Kerala.

33. c.f. Marsden & Ibanez-Tirado, “Repertoires of Family Life.”

34. de Neve, “Economies of Love”; and McKinnon, Vital Relations.

35. Uberoi & Tyagi, “Learning to Adjust.”

36. Mody, The Intimate State.

37. Pernau, “Love and Compassion,” 23.

38. Ahmed, “Collective Feelings.”

39. Violence against women, under the trope of ‘honour’, has been on the rise in both rural and urban Pakistan. Love marriages, without the approval of families, often incite such violence – in 2014, a woman was stoned to death by a crowd outside the Lahore High court and in 2017, a woman was shot dead by her brother outside the court. Aurat Foundation, a local NGO, estimated that, in 2014, at least a thousand women were killed in the name of ‘honour’ (https://www.dawn.com/news/1108900).

40. Das 1995.

41. Still, “Spoiled Brides.”

42. Brosius, “Love in the Age,” 32.

43. Ibid., 27.

44. Orsini, Love in South Asia, 239, 235, 241.

45. Ibid., 234.

46. Ibid., 235.

47. Author. (full reference to be included after review to ensure anonymity)

48. For similar experiences elsewhere, see Elliot, ‘’The Makeup of Destiny.”

49. Carey, “The “Rules” in Morocco.”

50. Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, 17; and The Long Revolution, chapter 2

51. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory.”

52. See note 35 above.

53. Dwyer, All you Need is Money, “Kiss or Tell.”

54. Osella, “Desires Under Reform.”

55. Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia, 10.

56. Alavi, “Social Forces”; Metcalf, Islamic Revival; Naim, “Prize Winning”; and Daechsel Politics of Self Expression.

57. Pernau, “Feeling Communities.”