What are marriage and love in South Asia? What do we understand about South Asian societies by studying about marriage, love, and sexuality? In South Asia, marriage is classically understood as an alliance between families or social groups for economic and political reasons, and as an instrument for maintaining a particular normative social order and perpetuating certain hierarchies. Marriage is seen as an institution which legitimizes sex and engineers social/biological reproduction. It is also placed within the private domain of society. However, recent studies on marriage show how, in this era of globalization, mobility, the notions of love, marriage and sexuality intersect with larger political, social, legal and global structures, on the one hand, and notions of gender, class, caste, morality, and modernity on the other. In these ever-changing global South Asian societies, ‘alternative’ and ‘non-normative’ conjugal relationships, love, and sexuality have been seen as part of the globalization and modernizing process. Through this course, we will critically analyse such claims and examine how love, marriage sexuality and kinships are constructed, shaped, governed and constituted politically, culturally, legally, and ideologically. How do the larger structures such as state, legal institutions, colonialism and globalisation, migration processes, class and caste configurations, gender formations, and new communication/visual technologies shape the everyday life of people by entering their private domains through the notions of love, and marriage? Moreover, by studying marriage, kinship and love in South Asia, we critically examine and unpack the dualistic ideas of private vs public, individual vs community, global vs local, modern vs traditional, change vs stagnation, and ‘normative’ vs ‘non-normative’ in South Asian societies.