WUNRN
http://www.contributoria.com/issue/2015-03/54a94a1d91e4fdad460002b2/
Arranged Marriages
By
March 2015 – India - Two years ago, when
my friend Gauri, a ship engineer, felt ready to settle down and have a family
of her own, she turned to my mother to talk about it. Gauri, 27 and a modern
Indian, is well placed in her job. She has gained a solid goodwill in her niche
industry and is very good at what she does. She is independent, has experienced
her share of adventure in life, or so she thinks, speaks her mind and doesn’t
give a fig what others say or think about her. She is a doting daughter and
takes good care of her parents and sister. She donates to causes and campaigns
that touch her heart, parties hard and rocks the disco with her friends, but
only on special occasions.
Now, when she felt a nudge within to
find a partner and a kind of vague idea of stability, which is also the effect
of her parents’ constant advising, she couldn’t make up her mind. She called my
mother, who has been her confidante and guide on many occasions in the past,
fixed a time and came over to explore her thoughts and seek direction.
Gauri never imagined she’d have to
resort to marriage professionals to find her a man. She has a strong mind. But
her experience with the men around her had put her off. She told my mum that
her colleagues kept flirting with her, even though most of them are married.
She is looking for a decent man with more self-respect than that. She’s seen
marriages being compromised, neglected, or broken and she’s not willing to risk
her individuality for anything. She has dated a few hunks, but has not yet met
one who could connect with her. Over long chats and several rounds of masala
tea, walnut cakes and ice creams, my mother convinced her to give the popular
Indian matrimonial portals a try. That way, her search would not be public
(Indian neighbours can be nosy) and she would have enough time to make up her
mind. Her only option, she thought.
Was Gauri being too fussy? Was she at
all prepared for marriage? Why is marriage important for Gauri? Like many other
young careerists, she could have chosen a live-in relationship. No big deal. At
any cost, she’s not going to force herself to live with a person she doesn’t
like. No one would like that. “To live together under the same roof, to be able
to share our rooms, beds and finances, both of us must be able to respect, love
and trust each other a lot,” she feels.
That night, Gauri spoke to her parents
and they sat together to create her profile on a top matrimonial portal. They
posted pictures and descriptions of her and officially announced to the virtual
world that she was willing to be swept off her feet.
Within the next four hours, as soon as
her profile was activated and validated, interested candidates, or their
parents, siblings and friends started mailing her with requests and invitations
to consider their profiles. She had enough prompts and requests to consider
daily. It was more than she expected. She put aside 30 minutes before bedtime
to explore the database of suitable candidates as per her choice and review the
invitations she received. She shortlisted several profiles and showed them to
her parents and sister, who were just happy that Gauri is contemplating
marriage, after years of pleading. They reviewed the profiles and her parents
spoke to the parents of a few selected candidates.
Gauri herself wrote to several of the
shortlisted people, chatting with some of them in real time. She rejected many.
She met three at various coffee shops around the city, but finally rejected
those too. One had hidden his height on his profile and turned to be a tad
shorter than her. One spoke badly with the waiter and the third, in a
roundabout way, suggested that Gauri should focus more on taking care of her
in-laws and children than her job, post-marriage.
Gauri spent some time considering the
first person; he seemed nice, but finally she decided to drop him. Lying has
never been a virtue. She took no time to reject the other two. A couple of the
shortlisted candidates became good friends with her, but were not who Gauri was
looking for. After two months, she was almost ready to give up on her search
but continued spending some time on the portal as it had become her routine by
now. Her parents were exploring their networks and had informed helpful
relatives that they were looking for a suitable groom.
On one unexciting visit to the portal,
just as Gauri was about to log out, a chat window popped up. A sibling of a
potential groom wanted to speak to her. She informed Gauri that she and her
family had seen her profile and were interested to take it forward; if she
would allow, she could speak to Neelabh, the candidate, the next day.
The following evening, Neelabh, an
engineer himself, greeted her and wanted to speak for five minutes. They hit a
note and five became 50. It seemed they had a lot to talk about, but they
retired with a promise to catch up again next day. Then another day, and the
next. Finally, they realised a week had passed and they had been having longer
conversations, often averaging for two hours.
Gauri looked forward to these
conversations. Her sister had started teasing her about her late-night virtual
voyages. She and Neelabh planned to meet; the following weekend, he flew from
Ahmedabad to meet Gauri in Kolkata. A month later, Neelabh ’s parents and
sister met Gauri and her family at their ancestral home. The families liked
each other; my mother was invited over as a special guest and everyone was
happy.
Gauri has now placed an order for a
sequinned peach and silver benarasi silk saree to wear at her wedding. She and
Neelabh, in a silver and white churidaar kameez, will have tied the knot in
front of about 250 guests, by the time this story has been published.
Gauri has resorted to a modern Indian
version of arranged marriage. And she is not alone.
Sudeep, a non-resident Indian working in
the banking sector in Kuala Lumpur, asked his parents to find a suitable bride
for him. His parents immediately alerted their indigenous network and created a
profile on two matrimonial portals. They searched for three to four months,
then a friend of theirs put them in touch with another compatible family.
Sudeep’s parents visited Neena’s family and immediately liked them. Neena is
completing her course in medicine and wishes to specialise in paediatrics.
Meanwhile, Sudeep’s parents had shortlisted and spoken to several other
families and possible would-bes for Sudeep. They drew up a list of some 18
candidates. Sudeep came over during his Christmas holidays, met a few of the
girls, was taking time to make up his mind, then he met Neena and was
completely bowled over by her sophisticated manners and elegance. He
immediately cancelled meeting the others. He has now applied for three weeks’
leave from work in April, when he will marry Neena and the duo will head to Langkawi
for their honeymoon.
Then there is Prachi, a high school
chemistry teacher, whose grandparents met an old acquaintance whose son, a
government officer, seemed a suitable match for her. They invited the whole
family to Prachi’s home and the potential bride and groom met first among the
relatives and later, by themselves, at various coffee shops, shopping malls and
decent places in the city. They were married with full family party after eight
months of courtship.
Gauri, Sudeep, and Prachi are
independent young adults, upwardly mobile and well-placed in urban India. They
are just a few of the large number of young marriageable Indians who have
struck lucky in their arranged marriages and almost sketched a life of “living
happily ever after”. They are lucky because although they needed support in
finding their life-partners, they had not been forced into marriage like many
others.
Theirs is a new genre of Indian youth
who chose to have their spouses selected by their family but did not hand over
the reins to them. They were involved in the complete process of searching for
the right partner, shortlisting the candidates, meeting them, judging them,
rejecting or accepting them. In modern India, the process of arranging
marriages has evolved to include long periods of dating and courtship, sometime
ranging over a year. As for Gauri, who had almost lost faith in men thanks to
the examples around her, she went into an arranged alliance and she’s happy she
did so. How would Sudeep from Kuala Lumpur have struck up with Neena, if it
hadn’t been for the chain of friends and friends of friends who arranged to
connect them?
Padmanabhan Iyer, a marriage consultant
tending to the cream of Brahmin society in Chennai, says: “It’s all about
bringing the right groom for the right bride, or the other way round. People
these days do not sit at home. Even the girls are independent and working,
often times in another part of the world. When parents want to find a suitable
boy for their young achiever daughter, I am called up. I can find a boy for
that girl within the same culture, caste and probably work location. Similarly,
I can help parents find a nice girl for their NRI son who can manage the home
along with her own career, in perfect Indian style.”
“I guess arranged marriages in India are
mostly about retaining purity of blood lineage and, of course, wealth. Since
this system [of culture, rituals, bloodline, etc] is so rooted in us, those who
marry outside the system seem to have a tough time, usually. Additionally, the
choice of the spouse is taken sincerely by others with no materialistic
concepts in mind. But arranged marriages are an excellent solution for the
person who wants to get married but is too shy to go ahead and find a mate,”
says Suneetha Balakrishnan, journalist, editor, blogger and author of a novel
based on the Indian matrimonial system.
Dr Vijay Nagaswami, an eminent
psychiatrist with more than 25 years’ experience working with couples and
relationship issues and the author of three well-read self-help books on managing
marriage and relationships, agrees with Suneetha. “It’s just a pattern of mate
choice. Often it may be seen as a cop-out, where a young person may fall back
on it after unsuccessful attempts at finding a partner, or after a series of
heartbreaks. However, the system is without doubt one that ensures that even
one who is least likely to find a date may find a spouse with far less
trouble.” This is a prerogative in the Indian context.
What
is the system?
Arranged marriages are where family,
friends and relatives of the potential bride and groom, with or without the
help of third-party, professional matchmakers, select their partners in
marriage. The New World Encyclopedia says: “In an arranged marriage, the
marital partners are chosen by parents, community elders, matchmakers or
religious leaders in an effort to guide young people through the process of
finding the right person to marry.”
Arranged marriages are not just an
Indian phenomenon. Wikipedia says: “It was common worldwide until the 18th
century. In more recent times, arranged marriages are common in South Asia,
Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, south-east Asia and parts of East Asia;
elsewhere in developed countries, arranged marriages have continued in some
royal families, parts of Japan, among immigrant and minority ethnic groups.
Other groups that practise this custom include the Unification Church.”
Researchers claim: “Arranged marriages
were common as far back as Biblical times and beyond. The traditional purposes
of these types of unions were political, military, and social. They were
commonplace among the royalty and nobility around the world. In ancient Egypt,
for example, one of the chief goals of arranged marriage was to keep royal
bloodlines pure.”
According to our Indian Vedic stories
and mythology, women used to be scholarly, strong willed, powerful and
sensitive. They could decide whom they wanted to marry or whether they wanted
to marry at all, or bear children, without any help from others. Numerous
anecdotes of sage women and mythological goddesses support this tenet. However,
marriages were set up between royal families to seal a deal or to protect a
state, for completely diplomatic reasons, with or without the consent of the
two concerned people. Probably because of the existence of this factor of
coercion, diplomacy and sacrilege, marriages that are arranged by people other
than those getting married have acquired a negative hue.
In India, arranged marriages were very
different earlier from what they are today. Over continents, like societies,
the institution of marriage has undergone mammoth change. A hundred years ago,
Indian society was rife with child marriages, unequal marriages and forced
ones. In an appropriate marriage, the parents would search for the potential bride
or groom, find out about their family background, temperament and disposition,
and astrological and social compatibility before finalising the alliance. The
differences in age or educational qualifications were not bothered with. Only
in the rarest of rare cases was the opinion of the groom (or the bride) paid
any heed. Further, the voice of the potential bride or groom would only gain
any serious attention and empathy if a sibling or a relative within the same
age group were present. Usually the bride and groom would not have met before
the wedding. Any question of them giving their consent or opinion was a far-off
dream. But again, that was probably a generation or two back.
Today, however, all
stakeholders understand that a marriage is supposed to bind two different
people together, supposedly for life. Hence, they all look for compatibility.
Parents allow their children to meet their potential partners, spend time to
get to know each other better and proceed to the mandap (marriage venue) only after both candidates
agree to take the relationship ahead. Most often, a blood test for the Rh
factor is done and in some cases, relationship counselling is obtained.
Nihar Pradhan, cofounder and partner of
a digital learning organisation and author, says: “Marriage is a beautiful
choice between two individuals who ultimately have to decide to live together.
There can’t be a better proposition where the two individuals have the freedom
and the maturity to take a call on their own. Since it is a very important and
one-off lifelong decision, it needs to be taken rationally with a good amount
of deep thought and a great degree of emotion. The impact of a wrong decision
is very high and affects not only the individuals but, in the Indian context,
both the extended families and the children. Everybody may not have the freedom
and the maturity to take the right decision; hence families get involved to
facilitate selection and decision-making.”
An
evolving system
Nihar’s opinion may seem intrusive to
some, but one has to understand the weave of Indian society before making a
judgement. In India, marriages happen between two families, and not just
between two human beings. The couple, as an entity, has a role to play in
society and in every sphere of life.
Look at our Bollywood movies. Every time
the protagonists fall in love, either they strive to convince their parents to
agree and permit them to marry, which makes up the entire three-hour stretch of
the movie, or they give up their lives for true and genuine love when the warring
parents do not agree. Setting aside the dramatic extremisms, a part of the
story remains true. A happy family picture essentially has a young couple
dipped and absorbed in mutual love (who cares whether it was arranged or not)
and a smiling troop of parents, siblings, friends and relatives blessing them
with flowers and all things sweet. So, in essence, be happy, keep your families
happy, diplomatically or otherwise.
Dr Vijay Nagaswami points out: “The
arranged marriage process has changed over the last decade or so and there are
three distinctly recognisable categories. First, you have the classical
arranged marriage, which is usually done through networking, horoscope matching
and the works. The second is what is coming to be known as the love-cum-arranged
marriage (LCAM), which basically means that two people fall in love and their
families are cool with the idea of their getting married. And the third is the
arranged-cum-love marriage (ACLM) where the bride and groom are strangers until
their first meeting, at the end of which they fall wildly in love with each
other. But whatever the type of arranged marriage, with the advent of marriage
portals, there is much greater ownership of the marriage by the couple since
they actively engage in the mate-seeking process from scanning to shortlisting
and they do have a substantial say in the final decision.”
Are
arranged marriages forced marriages, or not?
In my country, once one reaches a
particular age (approximately 24 for women and 27 for men, at very liberal
standards) and attains a certain milestone in life (completed college, got a
job), people start talking of matrimony – that’s the next logical step. Getting
married in India is not a choice but a must! If one is 35 and still a bachelor
or spinster, they receive gallons of sympathy and pity from all around because
they are perceived as a pathetic case, with no one willing to marry them and
their immediate family not having the intention, skill or wealth to marry the
poor thing off.
So when one reaches one of the
milestones that indicates a logical time to get married, concerned neighbors
and relatives start making loud reminders. Parents cringe and fall in line to
start nagging and advising their offspring on the need to get their lives on
track with an appropriate partner so that someone is there to care for them
when they are old. And of course to ensure that you leave a line of sons and
grandchildren before becoming too old.
Coercion! Suneetha comments: “That still
exists for many, especially regarding when and how. A woman is often married
off before a certain age because her grandmother or other senior relative is
ailing and wants to see a grandchild. The son who is seeking to complete a
professional course is forced into a marriage for similar reasons. The maturity
and mental preparation required for marriage seems a non-necessity now. The
worst of all is the blind belief in horoscopes. One’s age for marriage is often
decided by a few planets and their ostensible position as seen by a certain
astrologer.”
Says Dr Nagaswami: “In certain
less-developed parts of the country, coercion continues to exist and the views
of the bride and groom are secondary. Even in urban India, coercion does
happen, maybe more subtly, particularly when the son or daughter in question is
reluctant to get married either because they feel they’re not yet ready for it
and want to focus on their career for a bit before considering matrimony, or
they have fallen in love with someone who’s considered undesirable or
unacceptable by the family. However, when neither of these situations exist,
many young people are happy enough for their parents to arrange a marriage for
them.”
Should we assume that after employing
such meticulous selection processes, arranged marriages are more stable and
sound? There is no reason to believe so. Dr Nagaswami emphatically says not. “I
don’t believe that arranged marriages are more stable. It’s just marriages in
the past were not particularly rocky because of a fatalistic acceptance of
one’s lot in life. And since most of these marriages were arranged, this
fallacious belief has crept in and been parroted by the more vocal protagonists
of this system.”
He adds that couples in love marriages
may face the same set of problems as do those in arranged ones. “As I see it,
how you choose your mate hardly matters. It’s what you put into the marriage
that does. Romantic love dies down anyway within six months to two years. So
the ‘love marriage’ merely has a bit of a head start. And given that even in
arranged marriages young people are taking more ownership of their marriages,
this head start may not really amount to much unless couples understand the mechanism
of converting romantic love to intimate love.”
“Any degree of negative influence and
any degree of coercion is not good for the sustainability of the relationship.
It has to go through both good and bad times. If it is built on a weak
foundation, it is bound to feel the strain. It all depends on the circumstances
whether it can withstand or crumble under sustained pressure,” Nihar says
thoughtfully. “It is a delicate relationship and any scope for fissures has the
potential to dissipate and disrupt smooth sailing when confronted with rough
weather.”
Are
arranged marriages here to stay?
’Contemporary arranged marriages are not
the same any more, because the expectations of both partners in an arranged
marriage are rightly much higher than were those of their parents. I have a
problem when, owing to the ‘Great Indian Marriage Obsession’, parents compel
their children into marriages when they’re not ready, when they’re not
comfortable with the partner chosen for them, or when they have someone else in
mind. The biggest challenge of the arranged marriage today lies in adapting to
these contemporary realities. Will it? Your guess is as good as mine,” says Dr
Nagaswami.
Suneetha chimes in: “I think arranged
marriages are an obsolete concept now, especially in the urban scenario. India
is mostly just villages marching on to be small towns in the mindset, so we
stick to a format we know, which once succeeded in an entirely different set of
needs and wants.”
Nihar, however, begs to differ.
“Arranged marriage is a wonderful process and it plays a sensible and
meaningful engagement in building a successful relationship. It is a reality
that in our society we have enough evidence to look up to the arrange marriage
to make our society a better place to live.” He finds support in celebrity
author and columnist Shobhaa De’ who writes in her book, Spouse: “Arranged has
worked for centuries in India. ‘Love’ is only 50 years old. And both can fail.”
She adds hope to her statement:
“Arranged can progress to love.”
Anytime!
Ritwika Sen, a lecturer in Indian history in a reputed government college in Kolkata, has the last word. “When I get married, I’ll prefer that my parents find a suitable match for me. They know the person that I am, my likes and dislikes, my preferences and ambitions. They are the best people to find someone with a similar bent of mind. Finally, I totally depend on my grandmother who has a sharp eye and reads people well. She is a good judge of character and few people can lie in front of her. I have to be very sure of what I am doing."