May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (6 page)

Arranged marriage is not unique to India and has in fact existed in some form in most societies throughout the world. In the West, only in the last three hundred years has love come to be seen as a part of marriage at all—a development that academics theorize evolved from the concept of courtly love in the Middle Ages and also from the impact of Christianity, which is thought to have deepened the bond between husband and wife by likening it to the relationship between man and God. Much later came industrialization, which increased
social mobility and broke down the extended family, a change that is just beginning in India.

Arranged marriage survives among the Indian middle class partly because a new kind of system has emerged. (The term
middle class
, as it is used in India, refers not to those in the middle economic group but to the people in the top 10 percent, who can afford to buy consumer products and live what the West would consider a semblance of a middle-class life.) A generation ago, a bride and groom rarely spoke to each other before the wedding. In many cases they had never even laid eyes on each other. They had no veto power over their parents’ choice, and if the marriage was miserable, so be it. Even now, for the majority of Indians, marriage still works this way.

But these days middle-class couples are allowed to meet several times before making a decision, and a few can go out once or twice alone. Although most marriages are still arranged among members of the same caste, engagements may last six months and more, and women may reject the choice of their parents. This is considered a substantial breakthrough, and some families insist the result is not an arranged marriage at all. Leila Seth, a socially progressive mother who is one of only ten women among the four hundred High Court judges in India, told me, “Frankly, I don’t think it’s such a bad system.” The prevailing opinion among the middle class is that not only do these marriages work, but they are more successful than those in the West.

In the summer of 1985 I set out to write a story on arranged marriages in the middle class. There had been a number of articles on the subject by Western correspondents, but most had focused on the entertaining pages of matrimonial ads in the Sunday newspapers. They do make for good reading. From
The Hindustan Times:
“Alliance solicited from industrialist/businessman of Delhi for graduate, 21, slim, fair, beautiful daughter of Delhi-based Brahmin industrialists. Write Post Box No. 5729.” From
The Times of India:
“Intelligent, well-read, beautiful, home-loving, English-speaking girl preferably from liberal-minded Christian family for extremely well-placed senior government executive, good-looking, late forties, must be willing to settle in North America, religion and caste no bar.” But I was more interested in discovering if there was something in arranged marriage that really did “work.” These were my early days in India, when I was filled with a newcomer’s enthusiasm and a determination to break away from my Western judgments. In retrospect, I realize there was something else going on. My own parents had been divorced, as had some of my
friends. I think I was searching for some kind of a “secret” to marriage that the Indians had and Americans did not.

Arun and Manju Bharat Ram were recommended to me as the ideal couple, an example, their friends said, of how arranged marriage functions at its best. It turned out they were neither typical nor middle-class: Arun Bharat Ram, a prep-school classmate of Rajiv Gandhi, was heir to one of the largest industrial fortunes in India. Indira Gandhi and fifteen hundred others had come to his wedding. Maybe the “secret” to the success of the marriage was simply money and connections. On the other hand, their families were prime examples of the highly Westernized industrial society in which parents still see marriage, at least for some of their children, as a business alliance. There were also love marriages in Arun’s family, and he himself had dated American women while studying in the United States. In the end, I found no one who better illustrated how Indians could turn what I thought was the relationship between marriage and love upside down.

The Bharat Ram house was an expanse of marble, with modern Indian art and security guards, set behind gates in one of Delhi’s leafier neighborhoods. It was August and insufferably hot, but in the Bharat Ram’s VCR-dominated study, I sank into the leather sofa and froze happily in the blasts of the best air conditioner I ever encountered in India. I sat there once to talk to Manju, then returned, feeling perversely like a marriage counselor, to put the same questions to Arun. He was forty-five, slight, and had a handsome, delicate face; dressed in a sport shirt and slacks, he looked as if he had just spent a pleasant morning on the golf course. He had the social ease and upper-class distance that marked a lot of Rajiv Gandhi’s school chums. Manju was traditional and more accessible. She had a pretty, warm face and wore an expensive silk sari. Her hair was in a long braid down her back.

They first met in 1967, the year Arun had come home to New Delhi after graduate school at the University of Michigan. He was twenty-six and about to start work in the family’s textile business—high time, his mother said, that he found himself a wife. Seeing no movement on the part of her son, she took matters into her own hands and began an all-points search. But Ann Arbor had changed Arun. Although he still felt “truly very Indian,” he also felt “a contradiction, coming back from the West, that I shouldn’t be getting into an arranged marriage.” Finally, he agreed to see a prospective bride, “with no strings attached,” just so his mother would stop pestering him.

That was Manju, a twenty-two-year-old graduate of a home economics college and the product of a conservative middle-class business family that never dreamed their daughter might marry a Bharat Ram—even though traditionally the bride’s family marries above itself on the economic scale. (Sociologists say that marriage with a bride of lower status assures the groom’s family that their new daughter-in-law will be sufficiently dependent on them.) Both Manju and Arun belonged to the prosperous Bania subcaste, which falls within the larger Vaisya, or merchant, caste. In India, arranged marriages both reflect and reinforce the caste system, which remains especially rigid among the rural poor. But unions like that of Arun and Manju prove that caste is still important among at least some sections of the upper class.

A marriage broker hired by Manju’s parents had introduced the two families, but Manju was no less reluctant than Arun was to take the next step. Even though she had always known that her marriage would be arranged, she shuddered when she remembered how a relative had been made to parade before her future in-laws and then quote from Shakespeare. “They discussed her coloring as if she weren’t there,” Manju remembered. “It really was like a girl being sold.”

Arun and Manju’s first meeting was over tea with their parents at a luxury hotel. Manju was so scared that she dropped her cup, but everyone quickly assured her this was a sign of good luck. Arun, meanwhile, still had stiff legs from sitting cross-legged during his sitar lesson that day, but all Manju knew about his limp was that she was about to be married off to a man who might not be “normal.” The only impression she made on Arun was that she was “a pretty girl” and “very quiet.” After the meeting, Arun told his mother, “I’ve done you your favor; now leave me alone.” But his mother persisted, and Arun agreed to see Manju again.

This time they went to dinner together and left the parents behind. “That was when I talked to her for the first time,” Arun remembered, “and I felt she was quite interesting.” Manju decided the same thing. “We had a lot of things in common,” she said. “He was always soft-spoken. He never tried to show off his family and his background. He always made me feel like an individual.”

They saw each other two more times, but with chaperones. At this point, the courtship had gone on long enough and a decision had to be made. Manju had already told her parents she would marry Arun if that was what his family wished—she had no major objections, she
liked him, and that was enough. A few days later, Arun’s mother came to the house. “We want her,” she said. Immediately the massive wedding preparations got under way.

“Obviously, I wasn’t in love with her,” Arun told me matter-of-factly about the days after the engagement was announced. “But whenever we met, we were comfortable. According to our tradition, that would lead to love. I was willing to accept that.” Manju felt the same. “At the time, I didn’t love him,” she said, “but it was very exciting for me. Suddenly, I was very important. All of my parents’ friends were a little envious about the family I was marrying into.” The wedding took place six months later, followed by a honeymoon in southern India, where the two spent their first extended time alone. “We had always had people around us,” Manju said. “This was awkward and difficult. One didn’t know how much to give.” She missed her parents and called them every day.

Afterward, she began a slow adjustment to life within a family that was much more sophisticated than her own. “These people were more aware of things happening around the world,” she said. “At times, I felt as if I were stupid. But I learned how to cope with it. My husband helped.” When they moved to their own house five years later, there was another adjustment. “It was a frightening experience, living by ourselves,” Manju remembered. “There were times when we didn’t know what to do with each other.” She kept reminding herself that her mother always said a woman has to compromise a lot. “She also used to say, ‘If you’re unhappy, unless it’s really bad, don’t tell me.’ ”

By the time I met them, nearly two decades and three children later, the Bharat Rams had long since adjusted to married life. It is always impossible to know what is really going on in someone else’s marriage, of course, but the Bharat Rams said they were happy, and I believed them. “I’ve never thought of another man since I met him,” Manju told me. “And I also know I would not be able to live without him. I don’t think I’ve regretted my marriage, ever.” Arun echoed his wife. “It wasn’t something that happened overnight,” he said. “It grew and became a tremendous bond. It’s amazing, but in arranged marriages, people actually make the effort to fall in love with each other.”

It was a curious love story. As far as I could tell, they had it all backward. I had been raised on one of the favorite themes of Western literature, that of star-crossed lovers like Romeo and Juliet whose love is a force that exists on its own, a magic that defies the constraints of society. But here the Bharat Rams were telling me that love can be
concocted simply by arranging a marriage between people of common background and interests. In middle-class India, where the family is still more important than any of its individual members, love is believed to flow out of social arrangements and is actually subservient to them. “True love” is possible only after marriage, not before.

Middle-class India defines love as long-term commitment and devotion to family, which can be developed only with much patience and time. In their view, Americans instead define love as passion—which inevitably leads to disappointment in marriage after the glow of those first romantic years wears off. This reasoning always seemed to me a striking example of the Indian belief in their moral superiority over what many of them see as the decadent West, with its dismal record of divorce. Americans just give up, Indians believe, when the marriage hits the rough spots and falls short of an unattainable ideal. Sudhir Kakar, one of India’s foremost psychoanalysts, put it this way: “Americans have too great an investment in marriage. The peculiar part is that you think any human institution should satisfy so many different needs. Americans say there should be romance, a mother for the children, intellectual stimulation also. For two people to be all that to each other is a bit much.”

Many of the young women I met dismissed “falling in love” as something for teenagers and bad Indian films. A few said they had experienced “puppy love” with a boy at school but assured me they were too grown-up for that now. One of these women was Meeta Sawhney, the twenty-year-old Delhi University economics student who had convinced me that women would be my window into the Indian interior world. As she had explained to me: “When my friends who are in love talk to me, I think they sound silly.” She had become engaged that summer to a childhood friend her parents had chosen for her. We had been talking for an hour in her bedroom when I finally asked if she loved him. “That’s a very difficult question,” she said. “I don’t know. This whole concept of love is very alien to us. We’re more practical. I don’t see stars, I don’t hear little bells. But he’s a very nice guy, and I think I’m going to enjoy spending my life with him. Is that love?” She shrugged, indicating no worries about her future. “I know this is going to work. I know everything about him. I know his family. On the other hand, if I were in love with this guy, I would be worried because then I’d be going into it blindly.”

I thought this was madness, or a good job of brainwashing, but later decided Meeta Sawhney was simply rationalizing what she had been
dealt in her life. What choice did she have? Only women from the most Westernized families have the luxury of falling in love before marriage, and even they had best do it only once. In America, a young woman can move on after her first, intense love affair fizzles, but an Indian woman risks gossip that might ruin her chances of a good husband later. One very Westernized couple I knew had dated quietly for a year and a half. At that point, the man’s mother took him aside and told him that since the woman was from a good family, he could no longer risk her reputation by stringing her along. He had one of two choices: either cut off the relationship or make her his wife. He did the honorable thing and married her.

Most teenagers are still not allowed to date, so parents think their children will have no experience on which to make an intelligent decision about a lifelong mate. One of a mother’s biggest fears is that her carefully penned-in daughter will make a getaway one day and fall for the first rogue who comes along. I remember the ruckus in one Indian family I knew when their beautiful niece fell for a handsome Mexican exchange student. I was rooting for her, but alas, one of the interloper’s old girlfriends turned up and whisked him off to south India, breaking the niece’s heart but averting a family crisis. Most girls are more docile and have come to believe what they have been told from childhood: that they will love the husband their parents select. “From the beginning, my mind was set that my parents were going to choose the right person for me,” explained Rama Rajakumar, a thirty-four-year-old Brahmin from the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Brahmins are the highest caste in India. I spoke to her in Delhi, where she was visiting on a break from her job as a supervisor at the World Bank in Washington. She had been living in the United States for sixteen years. One evening in 1971, when she was just starting out in Washington as a World Bank typist, she had gone to a friend’s house and met a man—a Tamil Brahmin, as it turned out—who was studying at the University of Texas. He seemed like “just another guy” to her. She heard nothing from him until two years later, when he sent a letter to the friend saying he wanted to marry Rama. She was not as thunderstruck as might be imagined. It was important to Rama that she marry a man of her own caste, and it was probably no less important to the groom. Tamil Brahmins are hard to come by in the United States, so it was not extraordinary that an eligible one would be interested in Rama. The friend quickly took on the role of marriage broker and wrote to both sets of parents in India.