Write short note on the following with a sociological perspective : Challenges to institution of marriage. (2012)
The functionalist account — George Peter Murdock (Social Structure, 1949), Talcott Parsons (1955) — treats marriage as universal and functionally necessary. Challenges to it are of two kinds: internal, where marriage fails at what it claims, and external, where other arrangements do its work without its form. India shows both, without collapse.
The challenges
- Declining universality and delayed entry. Never-married persons aged 15–29 rose from 17.2 per cent (2011) to 23 per cent (2019); NFHS-6 (2023-24) records 20.1 per cent of women aged 20–24 married before 18, against about 47 per cent in 2005–06.
- Violence inside the institution. Divorce remains near one per cent of the ever-married, yet NFHS-5 records 29.3 per cent of ever-married women reporting spousal violence, and cruelty by husband or relatives was 31.4 per cent of crimes against women in NCRB 2022. Exception 2 to Section 63, Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 carries the marital rape exemption forward for a wife not under 18. Marriage still licenses what it elsewhere criminalises.
- Cohabitation recognised. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 protects a “relationship in the nature of marriage”; the tests came in D. Velusamy (2010) and Indra Sarma (2013). Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code (January 2025) requires live-in registration.
- Reproduction detached from marriage. With TFR at 2.0, below replacement, marriage no longer implies a large family; deliberate childlessness has appeared among urban dual-earner couples.
- Partnership outside the heterosexual frame. Navtej Singh Johar (2018) decriminalised homosexual conduct; Supriyo (2023) refused same-sex marriage recognition while conceding that queer couples cohabit as families.
- Individualisation. Education and earnings improve what Amartya Sen (cooperative conflicts, 1990) called the breakdown position: the terms on which a woman can refuse.
Reading the evidence
Anthony Giddens (The Transformation of Intimacy, 1992) argues that plastic sexuality severs sex from reproduction and yields the pure relationship, sustained only while it satisfies both partners. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (The Normal Chaos of Love, 1990) add that love becomes the creed of individualised biographies, so expectations rise until they snap. Against this, Indian marriage stays near-universal, endogamous — inter-caste unions near 5 per cent — and arranged for the great majority. K. M. Kapadia (Marriage and Family in India, 1955) made the distinction that holds: sacramental content erodes while the institution persists on an ethical, companionate footing.
Conclusion
Marriage in India is being reconstituted, not dissolved. Under challenge are its indissolubility, its monopoly over sexuality and reproduction, and its immunity from scrutiny — not the institution itself. An institution that survives by changing its terms concedes that the old terms were never neutral.