‘Brains and beauty plus pedigree’:Conjugality, commodification, and capital accumulation in the colonial Indian marriage market

This article traces how and why the ‘competition’ of marriage culminated in the rise of the matrimonial advertisement across early twentieth-century India. It examines how the matrimonial, as a systematized textual schema, became a constitutive component of a reforming marriage market and integral to how the gendered body was imagined within transforming familial norms. The article draws on the extensive scholarship on labour and marriage in colonial Bengal to argue for the development of an ‘All-India’ middle-class marital marketplace as new forms of networking and work emerged. It does this by undertaking a cross-regional comparative analysis of matrimonials between 1915 and 1950 across urban India—alongside memoirs, colonial ethnographies, and periodicals—to extrapolate strategies of status-making and explore how discourses on conjugality ceded into legislative debates around customary law and property. The article begins by considering the placement and composition of matrimonials before delving into how matches were assessed, arguing that they expressed shifting marital norms, conjugal capital, and caste consolidation which led to the commodification of an expansive marital marketplace. It then examines debates around monetary marriage exchanges (like dowry) as a form of capital accumulation, disentangling how requests were articulated within the matrimonial advertisement through the complex textual grammars of signalling wealth.