Note: Some of the text below is repurposed from the paper.

India has traditionally favoured marriages arranged by family. However, in recent decades, pre-marital romantic relationships or “dating relationships” are growing more common in India. But the socio-cultural context is still discouraging of premarital relationships, especially for women.

In this background, dating violence is quite an under-researched topic in India. This project was part of my MPhil and involved a qualitative study with young adults in Bengaluru, India where I asked them about their experiences of violence in their dating relationships and its implications.

White the paper talks in detail about the various themes found, here, I want to highlight a couple of the more interesting findings:

Some participants I interviewed, both men and women, expressed that feminism and the fight for women’s equality had gone too far. They cited women also using violence against men, engaging in actions such as smoking and the MeToo movement as evidence.
This phenomenon of anti-feminist “backlash” was first identified by Susan Faludi. In simple words, backlash = when increased possibility of women’s equality leads to feelings of threat and resentment for the group declining in power, which leads to actions aimed at undermining the progress made, either through claiming that women have already attained equality or that equality is detrimental to women.
There is some interesting work on backlash in India such as Dehingia et al who analyzed tweets during the COVID-19 pandemic and found that peaks in misogynistic tweets were mostly related to backlash e.g. when an Indian actress spoke about partner violence in a popular TV show. Lodhia (2014) also talks about how men’s rights groups are lobbying for the abolition of crucial legal protection for women in India, perceiving these laws to be biased against men.
At the same time, my study found that young people faced stigma against dating relationships and expressed difficulty in managing anger/jealousy/other common relationship conflicts in a healthy way.
I think the backlash discourse is a detriment to the more important idea that young people need help in expressing, regulating emotions, managing conflicts in healthy ways and getting understanding from people around them about their relationships rather than stigma and shame.

You can read the full paper below if interested.