Kinship as a 'public fiction'. Substance and emptiness in South Indian inter-caste and inter-religious marriages.

The chapter explores inter-caste/religious (ICR) marriages in Kerala (South India) and focuses on the meanings and experiences of biological kinship when the latter is devoid of its expected emotional and relational substance, to become a 'public fiction'. With this expression, I refer to kinship relations accepted in the public sphere, but which lack foundations in the everyday realm of relatedness. ICR marriages hold an important socio-political role in Kerala as symbols of the State's development, and family ostracism is scrutinised as a form of backward communalism. However, relatives are not always willing to build affective relations. This makes ICR families managing situations where public kinship tolerance co-exists with the negation of its real emotional and intimate possibilities. The article maps how the reality of ICR marriages is turned into a fiction by persisting unspoken norms. It suggests the importance of linked discussions on fiction/ reality in the domestic sphere to the public/political role that kinship and families hold in modern postcolonial societies.