Marriage, intimacy, and the messy politics of COVID-19 in India

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak has radically altered interpersonal relations and intimacies. This briefing highlights the specific ways in which intimacies have been impacted, transformed and given new meanings during the COVID-19 pandemic by bringing to the fore case studies of engaged and newly wedded heterosexual couples in India. It challenges the public-private dichotomy by highlighting how interpersonal intimacies become embedded in complex structures like the State, labour, gender, law, and international relations. Through the various interviews cited here, I examine the hardships and challenges that the coronavirus pandemic in India had introduced into people’s daily lives and conjugal relations. Additionally, I show how the governmental policies of a nationwide lockdown, self-isolation, work from home, and social distancing had adversely impacted the mental health, emotional wellbeing and socio-economic conditions of several individuals. In light of my findings, I attempt to reconceptualise ‘intimacy’ in pandemic times as a multilayered and ever-evolving concept that skips fixed definitions, and which can be deployed as a useful analytical tool to study the messy entanglements between the ‘quotidian’ and the ‘political’.