Changing Marriage Practices

Detailed chapter description

Chapter 133 examines changing marriage practices as a social institution, a household strategy and a legal relationship. Marriage in Mithila, Vajji and Anga is often discussed through ritual continuity, but the contemporary history lies equally in changing ages at marriage, education, migration, partner search, dowry and wedding expenditure, registration, post-marital residence, digital communication and the growing importance of individual consent. None of these changes follows a single line from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’. Arranged marriages can incorporate extensive choice; digital searches can reproduce caste and community filters; later marriage can coexist with expensive dowry; and a legally registered union can remain embedded in dense kin obligations. The chapter therefore treats marriage as a sequence of decisions and institutions rather than as a ceremony alone. The statistical frame requires the same caution used in Chapter 132. Bihar’s most recent marriage indicators now include the NFHS-6 (2023–24) state and district fact sheets released in 2026, while the detailed NFHS-5 state report remains important for distributions and age-at-marriage tables. Nepal’s 2022 Demographic and Health Survey provides recent measures of age at first marriage and registration, and the 2021 census supplies household and marital-status context. Legal thresholds differ across the border: India’s Prohibition of Child Marriage Act treats a female below eighteen and a male below twenty-one as a child for the Act, while Nepal’s current civil-law framework requires both parties to have completed twenty years. These thresholds are legal standards, not descriptions of actual marriage behaviour. Survey measures, civil registration and law-enforcement records answer different questions and must not be merged into a single prevalence figure.