الإصدار 6 - العدد 18 (2026-09-20)

Caste, Class, and Conjugal Change: Evidence Based Insights into Marriage, Divorce, Singlehood, Interfaith Unions, and Marital Fragility in India with an Aligarh District Case Study

Dr: Salahuddin

Department of Mathematics - College of Science - Jazan University - Jazan-45142- P.O. Box 114- Saudi Arabia

Leveraging unit‑level data from NFHS‑5 (2019–21) and the 2011 Census, this study explores how caste, education, and household wealth jointly shape marriage timing, dissolution, singlehood, non‑marital unions, and interfaith relationships in India. Nationally, divorce/separation is rare (1.2%) but deeply stratified: Scheduled Caste women report 2.4% separation versus 0.7% among upper‑caste Hindus. Among the urban graduate population, never‑married proportions at ages 30–39 have climbed to 12.3%, pushed by hypergamy deficits and female economic autonomy. Muslim women with a bachelor’s degree face a distinct predicament: 18.4% are married to men who did not complete secondary schooling—almost twice the Hindu figure—due to a narrow pool of qualified grooms, patriarchal mobility constraints, and dowry‑based bargaining. In Aligarh district, educational hypogamy reaches 23.1% for Muslim graduates and coexists with robust community opposition to interfaith couples, evidenced by 47 police complaints of “love jihad” (2019–2022). Logistic regressions confirm that both women’s hyper‑education and economic distress raise dissolution odds, with the greatest risk observed among high‑education dual‑earner couples where the wife out‑earns the husband. The paper also traces the conversion of premarital romances into marriage, the interference of parents and communities across caste‑religious lines, and the role of status and financial anxieties in parental opposition to both self‑chosen and arranged matches. The overarching argument is that India’s marriage system is being restructured by gendered educational expansion, persistent caste endogamy, and a conservative counter‑mobilization against women’s autonomy.

 JEL Classification 2020: J12, J13, J16, D10, D13, I31, K36, Z13.