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Much of the contemporary academic and popular discourse on love focusses on what may be called individual sex love or romantic love between sexually desiring partners. When it comes to South Asia, exegeses on sacred love – between sacred beings or between devotee and sacred being – are also elaborated, along with the denials of individual sexual love. Unfortunately, in the attempts to unearth the marginalised history and sociology of the last and to give it a new valency, mundane, earthly love (or its absence) in which sexual desire is normatively absent seems to slip away. Yet, such love not only permeates the language, texture and practice of personal relations and everyday life, it shapes feelings, hopes, denials and the embracing of romantic and sexual love. Focussing on familial and social relations/life/practices suggest that we may re-read the transgressions of romantic love as conflicts between the demands of the varied loves and relationships that the subject is made through. These conflicts also have much to do with the separation or interweaving of love and duty and love and power/hierarchy.

Contacts : Marie Fourcade , Tiziana Leucci