Abstract
Parul Bhandari (Ed.), Dissent with Love: Ambiguity, Affect and Transformation in South Asia, 2024, 190 pp., ₹1,165, Routledge. ISBN: 978-1-032-44437-6 (Hardbound).
Edited by sociologist Parul Bhandari, Dissent with Love, is a pioneering anthology that interrogates the entanglement of love and dissent within contemporary South Asian societies. Through its innovative ethnographic lens, the book dissects love as not only an emotion or affect but as a socio-political act that operates in ambiguous and transformative ways. Grounded in intersectional feminist and queer frameworks, the collection offers critical insights into how familial, gendered, sexual, legal, and spatial norms are simultaneously challenged and reinforced in everyday articulations of love. Accordingly, the volume makes a substantial contribution to gender studies by theorising love as a terrain of negotiation for gendered agency, identity formation, and socio-political transformation.
The book is structured into four parts—‘Familial Transgressions’, ‘Cultures of Love and Consumption’, ‘Normative Love?’, and ‘Structures of Love’—each thematically clustered to foreground different dimensions of affective dissent. The introduction by Bhandari sets the conceptual tone, proposing that love in South Asia is inherently embedded in dissent—not always radical or revolutionary, but frequently negotiated through micro-resistances, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Her introduction maps four broad themes—romantic love and marriage, gender and sexuality, state and law, and cinematic representations—while, at the same time, critiquing homogenised, neoliberal notions of intimacy. Bhandari’s invocation of ‘theatrics of modern love’ as a performance tethered to consumerism and global identity is an especially incisive contribution to gender and media studies. She also cautions against interpreting all forms of romantic transgression as emancipatory, emphasising the emotional and structural complexity of dissenting love.
In Chapter 2, ‘“The Transit Generation:” Love, Obligation, and Partnership among Himalayan New Yorkers’, Sienna R. Craig and Nawang Tsering Gurung provide a nuanced portrait of diasporic Nepali youth navigating familial obligations and romantic aspirations. The chapter deftly captures how gendered expectations and generational negotiations structure partner choices in the diaspora. Particularly illuminating is how women’s choices are constrained by notions of cultural continuity, highlighting the affective burdens of being transnational daughters. Mihirini Sirisena’s ‘Disagree, Not Disrupt: Navigating Differences with Parents for Love’ (Chapter 3) turns to urban Sri Lanka to document how romantic love is asserted through strategies of negotiation rather than rebellion. Sirisena’s analysis contributes significantly to understanding South Asian feminist ethics of care and relationality by offering an important corrective to the binary of obedience versus resistance. It explores how women negotiate agency within relational frameworks, often aspiring for both parental approval and romantic autonomy.
In Chapter 4, ‘Happily Single in Delhi: “Late” Marriage, Self-love, and Leisure Practices’, Parul Bhandari explores the affective economies of self-love among unmarried middle-class urban professionals. While remaining single appears transgressive, Bhandari argues that it is less a rejection of marriage and more a tactical deferral in search of compatibility, autonomy, and space. Her ethnography underscores how neoliberal cultures of therapy, wellness, and leisure intersect with feminist self-making, thus enriching discourses on postfeminism and the ‘new’ Indian woman. Focusing on the same geographic area, in Chapter 5, ‘Modern Men That Love and Hurt’, Shannon Philip critiques the emergence of commodified masculinities in Delhi and Gurugram. Drawing on interviews with men who see themselves as ‘modern’ and progressive, Philip reveals how their performances of gender equality often obscure latent patriarchal desires. This chapter is a critical intervention in gender studies as it demonstrates how neoliberal masculinities co-opt the language of feminism while reifying male entitlement. The ‘new man’ may endorse love marriages or respect autonomy, but remain emotionally violent or controlling, revealing affective asymmetries in intimate relationships.
Anuja Agrawal’s ‘Between Desire and Domesticity: Live-in Relationships in India’ (Chapter 6) investigates the legal, moral, and affective negotiations of couples in non-marital cohabitation. Contrary to assumptions of live-in relationships as emancipatory, Agrawal’s analysis shows how many such couples aspire to eventual marriage, indicating the enduring cultural pull of normative domesticity. The chapter significantly contributes to feminist legal studies by analysing how the law’s recognition of cohabitation paradoxically reinscribes heterosexual, conjugal norms.
Chapter 7, ‘Exiled and Separated: Aspects of Migration for Same-sex Couples’ by Ruth Vanita, is among the most powerful and politically urgent contributions in the volume. It examines how same-sex couples navigate the lack of legal recognition in India by migrating, often forcibly, to countries with more inclusive rights. This chapter foregrounds how queer desire is shaped and thwarted by both affective ties and legal exclusions, marking a seminal intervention in queer studies. The chapter is in keeping with Vanita’s scholarship that has long emphasised queer South Asian histories, and here she extends it to the contemporary politics of exile, legality, and belonging.
In Chapter 8, ‘Hami Ayaunik: Asexuality on Instagram in Nepal’, Dikshya Karki focuses on the digital narratives of asexual individuals in Nepal. By analysing how asexual youth curate Instagram content to articulate and normalise their identities, Karki contributes to the growing discourse on non-normative sexualities in South Asia. Her ethnographic approach foregrounds the role of digital media in creating counter-publics and affective solidarities, while also noting the pressures to perform visibility. This chapter is especially valuable for expanding the terrain of gender studies beyond the hetero/homo binary to include ace subjectivities. Sneha Krishnan’s analysis (Chapter 9, ‘Gated: Non-criminal Incarceration, Caste, and Elopement in Urban India’) of women’s hostels that function as sites of surveillance and containment, particularly in caste-crossing romantic cases, is chilling and revealing. She discusses the case of a young woman ‘locked up’ by her hostel for attempting an inter-caste marriage. The chapter theorises gendered spatiality and carceral domesticities, offering a feminist geographic critique of how institutions regulate female mobility and desire. It underscores the ways caste and gender operate in tandem to control women’s affective futures.
The final chapter, ‘For the Love of the Taj Mahal’ by Sarthak Malhotra, interrogates the monument not only as a symbol of eternal love but also as a contested, everyday space shaped by death, tourism, and labour. By juxtaposing the spectacular romantic mythology of the Taj Mahal with the mundane realities of those who live and work around it, Malhotra destabilises romanticised imaginaries of love. His ethnography opens up critical questions about heritage, class, and gendered labour, thereby connecting the affective realm of love to broader political economies.
These and more make Dissent with Love a landmark contribution to gender studies, anthropology, and South Asian cultural studies. It refuses simplistic binaries between tradition and modernity, rebellion and conformity, or love and duty. Instead, it foregrounds the fluid, ambiguous, and often ambivalent practices through which South Asians re-negotiate love in the face of patriarchy, caste, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism. Its methodological richness lies in the ethnographic depth of its contributions, and its conceptual brilliance emerges in framing dissent not as a linear trajectory toward liberation, but as an affective and relational practice full of contradictions. It importantly expands the purview of gender studies to include asexualities, masculinities, same-sex migration, and the mundane geographies of love.
This volume will resonate with students and scholars of sociology, feminist theory, queer studies, anthropology, and South Asian studies, but its reach extends beyond the academy. It speaks to anyone invested in understanding how love—as a social force—is constantly being reshaped in the crucible of culture, politics, and emotion. By theorising dissent with love, and love with dissent, then, Bhandari and her contributors have made a profoundly original intervention—one that will inspire future inquiries into the affective politics of gender, intimacy, and resistance.