TO MARRY, OR NOT TO MARRY?

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 - Anusha Batra


Credits: Netflix


The conversation surrounding marriage in urban, middle-class India comes in many shades. We grow up hearing that marriages are between families, not individuals. We also grow up with our home-grown terms such as arranged marriages and love marriages. A random search of the web offers us many videos[i] and posts[ii] titled arranged vs love marriage. The two quite clearly are seen as opposites. Arranged marriages purportedly emphasise the family as primary decision-makers of an 'individual's marriage. Love marriage accords the individual concerned the choice to marry. The two are, however, not always mutually exclusive.

There was a time when Indian matrimonial adverts would be seen as antithetical to ideas of romantic love. What mattered was caste, class, ethnicity, religion, language, family background. Today, individuals are increasingly relying upon dating/ matrimonial apps, even roping in services of matchmakers to find similar social background (caste, class, ethnicity, religion) and thus, 'compatible' partners, not just for themselves, but also their families.

However, marriage means very different things to different sections of Indian society which is both diverse and unequal. There has been a spike in child marriages with COVID-19. Schools, and mid-day meals, are shut, and families facing economic distress are keen to offload what they consider their 'burden'.[iii]


Credits: Netflix

The challenges for an upper-middle-class young woman from a cosmopolitan city like Delhi is very different. The constraints and compulsions on the girl child from a poor and marginalised rural community are both overt and violent. The question I ask, however, is whether a privileged upper-middle-class woman like me is free to choose whom she wishes to marry, and more importantly, not marry if she wishes not to? Does she have a say when it comes to her marriage? Does she have a choice? Though it is unlikely that the recent Netflix series 'Indian Matchmaking' wanted to problematise marriage as a social institution, its relevant for us here. The people who want to get married (men and women) in the series are almost all independent, confident, either Americans of Indian origin or upper-middle-class men and women in India.

'Indian 'Matchmaking' drew a lot of attention to this matter of arranged marriage. Sima Taparia, from Mumbai, is the matchmaker. She travels to where the clients live and often meets with the parents and the person looking for a match. This episode shows some of the requirements the clients are looking for and the variety of backgrounds that Sima deals with. If one glimpses through the titles of the episodes, they read: 'trim, slim and ' educated'. 'I'm trying my best'; 'It's high time'.[iv]

Sima takes her job seriously, (roping in services of astrologers and face-readers to double-check if the 'stars are aligned' or not). She weighs the pros and cons. She is clear that a 'little adjustment' is necessary. For instance, she tells a client, Rupam, that being a divorcee and single mother, her 'options' are extremely limited, or another one, Aparna, whom she berates her for not being 'flexible enough'. Sima describes her as 'negative' and 'stubborn'.

The question I wish to bring to the foreground is whether "it is essential- to marry? Do women have a 'choice' not to get married? Is our society ready to let unmarried women be?" The pressures to marry are many: subtle, emotional, or even the oft-repeated phrase "everyone gets married, what's there to think about it?" Another argument in favour of marriage is, "but who will look after you when you grow old", or "you're thinking only short-term, life gets extremely lonely after a point of time, especially, when all your friends have their own family to look after to."

The fact that parents and elders in the family are concerned stems from dominant societal norms which are not easy to violate. They are external, coercive, general and if one 'deviates' there are sanctions. This is good, old Durkheimian sociology at work. Notwithstanding the grounds for their worry, there appear some contradictions in the reasoning "who will look after you?

If the modern, urban middle-class woman is 'expected' to take care of an entire family and run a household, along with her job, indeed, she can look after herself. For someone who is expected to shoulder the many responsibilities of taking 'care' of a household, looking after just oneself is a piece of cake.   Indeed, it works otherwise. A lot of women (like Sima's client, and Akshay's mother Preeti) want a daughter-in-law so that her son can be taken care of. There are people who married, just for the happiness of their parents. Or because of the biological clock.

I would like to return to that matter about remaining unmarried. The explanation that one is single because one has not found the 'right' person is not taken seriously. Many Simas of the world would offer their help matchmaking.  There is a stigma attached to single women in urban middle-class India. Yet, people contend, "of course a woman has that choice. After all, if she can convince her parents, why bother with what the society thinks". But that's not how society works. The happy story, however, is that society does not remain unchanged. There are many more single women today. "It is a demographic that is quietly asserting its right to be taken seriously, creating its own sub-culture, with books, movies, web series, even organisations dedicated to it". The National Forum for Single Women's Rights is a national platform for single women leaders, while the Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, formed in 2000, is an alternative family for single women.[v]

This matter of 'choice' needs to be problematised. The individual is not a self-propelled entity. Society often defines our choices. In a market-driven society like ours, choice is the buzzword. It's like the 'choice' offered by the Television industry.  There is a myriad of channels but what is played out essentially remains the same. We may have control over the remote in our hands, but the content between which we choose is set by someone else. Put plainly it's like the long list of paneer dishes on the menu card. We are going to get another orange-gravy dish, be it Shahi Paneer, Paneer Makhni, Paneer Lababdar, Paneer Do Pyaza.

To marry or not to marry, therefore, is just a personal question. It is a social issue that is embedded in our economics and culture. This is not unique to India or to our times. Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice offers the most tough-minded and unsentimental analysis, counselling that Jane Bennet should secure her rich husband first and think about love only after they are married. 'Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance'. [vi]

 

References:

Bhatt, J. (2020). We Need To Talk About Indian Matchmaking's Mommy Issues, accessed at https://thehauterfly.com/culture-2/culture-we-need-to-talk-about-indian-matchmakings-mommy-issues-akshays-mom-preeti-was-a-classic-example-of-toxic-femininity/ on 19th October 2020.

Kaur, N. (2020). Rupam Kaur in Indian Matchmaking, accessed at https://medium.com/@KaurRepublic/rupam-kaur-in-indian-matchmaking-e08ad09b46e2 on 19th October 2020.

Kumar, P. (2020). Comments about Aparna shows our own biases: Indian Matchmaking creator Smriti Mundhra, accessed at https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/movies/comments-about-aparna-shows-our-own-biases-indian-matchmaking-creator-smriti-mundhra/article32393199.ece on 19th October 2020.

Ramadurai, C. (2020). Indian Matchmaking: The Reality Show that's Divided Viewers, accessed at https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200806-indian-matchmaking-the-reality-show-that-s-divided-viewers on 19th October 2020.


[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6b75GyJnz0, accessed on 19th October 2020.

[iv] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12580168/, accessed on 19th October 2020.

[v] A new book Single By Choice: Happily Unmarried Women! edited by Kalpana Sharma, has a series of such single women chronicling their experiences. https://theprint.in/opinion/no-three-tiered-wedding-cake-no-mangalsutra-single-women-a-growing-tribe-in-india/262608/, accessed on 19th October 2020.

[vi] https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/courtship-love-and-marriage-in-jane-austens-novels, accessed on 19th October 2020.

 

(A different version of this article appears on Anusha's blog and can be accessed at - https://anushabatra4.wordpress.com/2020/09/02/to-marry-or-not/.)

 

Anusha Batra is a freelance writer based in Gurgaon. An alumna of Lady Shri Ram College for Women (LSR) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), she seldom shies away from sharing her unfiltered social views on her blog Musings- https://anushabatra4.wordpress.com/



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