Unkept Promises, Unequal Worlds: A Sociological Study of Intimate Abuse in Promise-to-Marry Cases in India

The article presents a sociological study of promise-to-marry 'rape' cases in India to illuminate the inner lives of intimacies. It argues that promise-to-marry cases cannot be understood merely as instances of deceptive sex, wherein the consent of the victim is vitiated by a false promise of marriage as a pretext for sexual intercourse. Rather, through an ethnographic study of promise-to-marry cases in Delhi, it explicates the myriad forms of harms including explicit physical and sexual violence, infringement of reproductive autonomy, economic fraud, emotional manipulation and abandonment experienced by women in intimate and acquaintance contexts. In doing this, it presents a methodological insight in terms of studying intimacy through sites of violence complaints. It also foregrounds victim narratives from the field to highlight how caste-endogamous marriage, intimacy and sexuality remain intertwined in the socio-cultural context of India, even as youth forge romantic ties across kinship and community boundaries, more than before. It is argued that promise-to-marry cases provide an unexplored but useful avenue for understanding women's experiences of romance and coercive control in pre-marital relationships in India. The article thereby contributes to the fields of sociology of law, feminist literature on domestic and intimate partner violence, and sociological studies on intimacy and marriage.