In recent years, anthropologists, gerontologists and sociologists highlighted multi-faceted ways through which aging and old age can be constructed. But, today, social changes like migration of adult children, lowering fertility, voluntary infertility and nuclear family units, are giving rise to the complex constructions of aging where loosening of emotional sensibilities and loneliness sparks debate; specifically, with the dwindling quality of relations between children and their elderly parents. Metropolitan cities like Kolkata, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, unfurls this socio-material reality of aging where marriages transgressing normative and hegemonic idiosyncrasies of procreative companionship, youthfulness and sexuality, i.e., marriages at old-age or elderly marriages, takes place. This blurs the entangled cultural ethos of forming kinship legacies, social honor and family. While such marriage practices follow heteronormative prescriptions, it fosters the social (re)production of affective consciousness, spatialities, intimacies and shared emotionality as the primary manifestations of cohabitation.
Elderly marriages disburse marital unions as therapeutic role-relationships that reconstitute social, personal and domestic identities. So, rather than legitimizing the social construction of ‘families of procreation’, we might also divert our attention to ‘families of emotions’. This can be articulated as families formed by legal wedlock, friendliness and emotional adaptations but with no social and physical expectations of producing generations and heirs. Foregrounding this, the paper utilizes a qualitative research design with an ethnographic approach to critically explore aging and emotional performativity of marriages as a social process, functional in the reconstitution of ruptured familial milieus in Kolkata. It also focuses on multiple narratives and the mundane experiences of elderly men and women in contesting conventions of ‘young adult’ marriages, asceticism in aging and sexual stereotypes. Besides, it forges elderly marriages as a mediator in the mobilization of care, elderly agency, companionship and social integration, in the context of community life.
