India is regarded to have reached the peak of Asian modernity since economic liberalisation in the 1990s. This shift has normalised seeking romantic and sexual relationships outside the customary kinship arranged marriage framework in India's middle and upper-middle classes. In India, live-in relationships and the rejection of the institution of marriage are becoming more common. These intimate relationship arrangements, however, are not identical to their Western equivalents. These agreements are a result of the couple's independent societal rationale(s), goal(s), and thus their futures.
As a result, this research effort has two objectives. Firstly, this project tries to comprehend the nature, intent, and fundamental understandings of long-distance love relationships in the Indian context. Secondly, the project considers how these understandings and ideals interact with the materiality of smartphones and other ICTs for the daily maintenance of the connection and the imagination required for its future.
Recent anthropological research on transnational care interactions has focused on familial ties with ageing parents (Ahlin, 2020), married partners (Acedera et al., 2019), and global care chains (Madianou and Miller, 2012). Understanding that care is not an expression limited to familial bonds and, in post-liberal times, to an economic transaction, this research is interested in bringing in perspectives from the social lives of Indian youth outside of family under the anthropological lens.
Moreover, this project shall touch upon how relationships outside of the normative kinship structure are affected, curated, and intensified through tech capitalism via applications and technologies developed specifically for couples in long-distance relationships.
Finally, given the mediation-heavy nature of the field site and the context of the project, I believe that this project expands the possibility of employing what Walton (2016) refers to as 'Imaginative participation' in addition to multi-sited offline fieldwork.
