The subject of marriage has long held the interest of specialists and laypersons. A recent crop of studies on Indian marriage have livened up the discussion on Indian marriage and brought up new and important issues. The shifts in focus are partly reflective of the changing reality and partly of new theoretical concerns. Today's world is much more self-reflexive with people no longer wishing to lead 'unexamined' or unfulfilled lives - their intimate and marital lives consequently are coming under their own lens and that of the scholar.

In Love Will Follow, Shaifali Sandhya makes the point that almost all Indians continue to get married in the hope that love and happiness will follow. She examines the cultural expectations around marriage by talking to 400 couples from the Indian middle class, many of them NRIs. The subtitle of the book implies that she believes that "the Indian marriage is burning". If it is in dire straits, why so? Or is it that the author's sample is skewed towards conflictual or unhappy marriages - certainly these make for more interesting reading than soppy tales of happy marriages.

An interesting finding of the study, however, is that most Indians rarely wish to face the reality of the poor quality of their conjugal relationship. Most, and especially males, wish to pretend that all is well while women hang on to the hope that all will become well sometime. Women interviewed are much more self-reflective about their marriages and on the whole appear to suffer from a much greater sense of dissatisfaction than men - possibly a consequence of the fact that family and home issues tend to occupy much more of women's time and space. There is also a structural reason for this. Adjustments demanded of a woman in marriage are far greater as she generally moves to the husband's home after marriage.

Even if one ignores the inbuilt inequalities of Indian marriage, many 'modern, educated' husbands are simply happy to let wives do the adjusting . Women who challenge the inequality of the adjustment burden end up in what psychologists identify as 'dysfunctional' marriages; in Western countries, such marriages end in divorce, in India they often go on forever without the couple ever resolving issues. But some such marriages are today ending up in divorce.

Sandhya emphasises that the Indian marriage lacks intimacy which leads to great dissatisfaction and poor marital health of couples. The latter may lead to poor psychological and physical health, especially for women. This is a valid concern. Sandhya's concern is that marital unhappiness should not eat away at our being and both men and women need to be conscious of what makes for a 'working' marriage in which couples remain in a marriage only if the relationship affords them self growth.

Although Sandhya's marital stories may be limited by her sample, they point out that conjugal happiness in India remains a function of the larger social structure and that couples may be beginning to push at the edges to demand greater personal satisfaction. This is true not only of the middle class couples she interviews but even of working class couples. While Sandhya's book makes a contribution at the popular level, we need more diversified and rigorous studies to complete the picture on Indian marriage.

The writer is professor of sociology at IIT, Delhi