Early marriage and reproductive health in India: Building sociological feminist perspectives and regional and transnational conversations

Globally, early marriage is considered harmful for young women’s health as it pushes them into early childbearing and results in poor reproductive health outcomes. My doctorate looked at the Indian state of Bihar where, according to government data, 40% of all women are married before 18, and the maternal mortality ratio is 118 deaths per 100,000 live births, the highest in India. Against this background, I examined the marital household as a site where women’s access to healthcare is shaped and contested. Among the 38 women I interviewed, all of whom had married in adolescence, 19 had a ‘love marriage’, the prevalence and implications of which have not been adequately studied. My postdoctoral project, therefore, accounts for the role of love, care, neglect and abuse in young women’s marital relationships, foregrounding how women navigate a multitude of emotions and dynamics to claim care. Through the fellowship, I aim to disseminate the findings from my doctoral research and develop future research. I aim to publish three journal articles. In the first two, I will break down two predominant ideas: that age is the most significant determinant of married adolescent women’s poor reproductive health, and that early marriage is inevitably violative and a barrier to women’s care. The first paper will challenge the policy preoccupation with the adolescent body becoming a reproductive body upon marriage, by tracing the impacts of sexual activity itself (repeated, unsafe, unwanted), the burden of unrelenting household labour in marriage, and the physical and mental depletion they cause together. The paper, therefore, will show the implications of the nature of such marriage and not only the age at which it occurs. The second paper will prompt an imagination of young women’s marriage as relationships where husbands exercise authority in both benevolent and abusive ways, determining the terms of women’s access to care. Here, I highlight how women navigate such authority, evoking it, accepting it or resisting it to maximise their care and also to feel cared for by their husbands. In the third paper, I will document my design of a research project inspired by the Feminist Participatory Action Research framework, and discuss how participation and action emerged outside of the activities curated within this framework, even posing challenges to it. I will supplement the publications with two roundtables on early marriage, involving a range of stakeholders: researchers, feminist activists, policy-analysts, medical practitioners, and crucially, adolescent girls and women navigating the realities and registers of early marriage: love, autonomy, honour, force. The first of these roundtables will be hosted in Bihar in India with Project Potential, a regional NGO, with the aim to enable grassroot conversations, and the second in the UK, to examine the transnational regulation of age at marriage and its disciplinary underpinnings in development and human rights discourses. The final component of the fellowship is a research proposal for a new project on women’s health in India. The project will examine how women’s experience of fertility—forged and challenged in the household—translates to feminist advocacy around fertility, which is usually positioned in relation to the sites of state, biomedicine and international development. I will use qualitative methods, ethnographically studying sites of fertility negotiation and control, along with advocacy spaces. The fellowship, therefore, will set me up for a career in critical feminist health research.