Even in 2011, the rate of inter caste marriages in India was as low as 5.82%

WHOSE EDUCATION MATTERS?
AN ANALYSIS OF INTER CASTE MARRIAGES IN INDIA

Abstract

Endogamy or intra-caste marriage is one of the most resilient of all the caste based practices in India. Even in 2011, the rate of inter caste marriages in India was as low as 5.82%. In this paper we explore whether education has any relationship with this age-old practice of marrying within one’s own caste. Using a nationally representative data set, the Indian Human Development Survey, we find that, in sharp contrast with the findings in the existing literature on out-marriages in the Western countries, education levels of the spouses themselves do not have any association with the likelihood of their own marriage being an inter caste one.

However, couples with a more educated mother of the husband have a significantly higher probability of being in an inter caste marriage. Increase in years of education of the husband’s mother by 10 years would lead to an increase in the probability of inter caste marriage by 1.86 percentage points which is equivalent to approximately 36 percent of the sample mean. Our analysis highlights the importance of recognizing the institution of arranged marriages in any analysis of Indian marriage markets.


Conclusion

We look at the relationship between education and the practice of caste endogamy, which is the defining and one of the most resilient features of the caste system in India.
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An overwhelming 73% of marriages are arranged by parents, and spouses have very little contact with each other before marriage. Interestingly, this pattern holds true for inter caste marriages as well.

Our regression analysis brings out two important results. First, contrary to the findings of the existing literature on Western countries, the education level of an individual does not predict the likelihood of his/her marriage being an inter caste one. Our results are reinforced when we find the same to hold true even if we decompose the effects of education into its constituent channels – the ‘cultural adaptability effect’ and the ‘assortative matching effect’ – as identified in the literature (Furtado 2012). Second, complementing the observations from our descriptive analysis, we find that it is the education of the husband’s mother that has a positive and statistically significant association with the likelihood of an inter caste marriage. Our results are robust to the inclusion of a host of control variables, a wide range of variations in the sample, and a varied set of fixed effects, which includes district fixed effects, year of marriage fixed effects as well as district and year of marriage interaction fixed effects. We posit that education works through giving more voice to the mother in the household to implement the best outcome for her child, if the stigma or cost of an inter caste marriage is not too large. Given that the bride’s family disproportionately bears the stigma of an inter caste marriage, education of only the groom’s mother has a positive association.

 Thus our analysis highlights the importance of recognizing the institution of arranged marriage in any analysis of Indian marriage markets. Taken together, the two aspects of our result indicate that once the arranged marriage set up is recognized, one can easily understand the result that education has no effect on the decision of one’s own marriage, but only on the decision of the marriage of one’s offspring.