Love Actually: Youth Mediators and Advisors in North India

This article uses ethnographic research conducted in Bemni, a village in Uttarakhand, north India, to make a distinctive contribution to geographies of love. Building on fieldwork with young people between sixteen and thirty years old who work as “mediators” or “advisors” in Bemni in relation to premarital or extramarital affairs, I argue that practices and narratives of romantic love are strongly implicated in processes of social change. In the rural Uttarakhandi context, young people often use the idea of being specialists in “love” to bolster their own position and resolve conflict. I also provide a counterpoint to geographical youth research stressing the reactionary politics of marginalized young people. I show instead that in a region relatively unaffected by strong religious- or caste-based conflict, youth are able to ameliorate rather than exacerbate violent action, even while they reproduce aspects of caste, class, and gender inequality.