Hitched : the modern woman and arranged marriage

208 Pages·2013·1.29 MB·English

by  Krishnan

Published by Random House India in 2013
Copyright © Nandini Krishnan 2013
Random House Publishers India Private Limited
Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B
A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, UP
Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
United Kingdom The names of some of the interviewees have been changed to protect their privacy.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed
or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed
under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright
law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and
publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
EPUB ISBN 9788184004724
To Maruthi, Babu Mama and Ma
Introduction
‘You need to train your man like a dog with potential’
Uttara Singh Chauhan
Star-crossed partners
Vijaya Raghuraman
The army wife
Shreya Gopal
A suitable Muslim
Zainab Haider
In a new country
Meera Anthony
From the artiste’s eye: staying in tandem
Akhila Ravi
From the artiste’s eye: scripting a successful marriage
Ruhani Kapoor
Peeling off the gloss
Sara Jacob
‘The foundation of my marriage was tissue paper’
Ruchika Solanki
You can’t hide and seek
Smriti Rao
Dealing with changing priorities
Madhumitha Prasad
Is marrying young a mistake?
Vaidehi Raman
Mark your territory
Shwetha Srinivasan
Riding the air waves
Aarthi Varanasi
When it all crumbles
Preethi Madhavan
‘The arranged marriage set-up is like speed-dating’
Devyani Khanna
The wedding hungama
What do couples fight about in the first year?
Past imperfect
The things our parents don’t tell us
‘How do I jump into bed with someone I don’t know?’
The many guises of dowry
You marry the man, not the family
Rejection: inflicting it, handling it
Your space, my space
Living with in-laws: does it make sense?
The clock is ticking
The question of children
What’s in a name?
Minding your language
The horror stories
The other side: what men want
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
T
he idea for this book first took root over a phone call. Meru Gokhale, to whom
I had once spoken of how I want to write a satire on Indian marriages, asked
me if I wanted to write a serious book on arranged marriage. She refused to believe
both that she hadn’t woken me up, and that I wasn’t qualified to write it. She asked
me to think about it for a day or two, and get back in touch. I was in a dilemma. I’d
known I wanted to work with Meru since I had first met her, not only because of the
wonderfully fun conversations we’ve had, but because I’ve simply loved every book
she has edited. I knew she is that rare breed of editor who can tap the right buttons
in a writer’s head without the latter even realizing it. But I didn’t see how I could
write a non-fiction work on arranged marriage.
As I thought about the book, I thought mostly of my own brushes with arranged
marriage. My mother would rather regularly, in my early twenties, tell me hesitantly
that there was ‘an offer’. I would usually roll my eyes and say, ‘What’s the bid?’
Profiles would be emailed to me, and grammatically incorrect emails from
prospective grooms’ parents forwarded. Most of these contained details of the ‘boy’s’
exam results from high school to college, his salary, his designation and his
personality—‘outgoing’, ‘friendly’, ‘cheerful’, ‘vivacious’, and in one case,
inexplicably, ‘rambunctious’. It was hard enough to find a ‘prospect’ whose hairline
could be spotted, whose neck wasn’t caked with powder and who didn’t sport a
Chulbul Pandey moustache. It was harder to find someone who didn’t think Orhan
Pamuk was the name of a book.
Most of my friends and I had spent our twenties whining either about our
boyfriends, or about the sort of men we were being put in touch with. A lot of those
accounts could go into a work of fiction. But how would I find people who had had
arranged marriages, and who were willing to talk about them? And then, I realized
that many of my friends—intelligent, smart, funny women—had eventually taken
the ‘arranged’ route, and several of them were so happy that I’d even forgotten they
found their husbands through a maze of matrimonial ads, horoscopes and awkward
conversations.
There are, of course, those who are firmly opposed to the idea of arranged
marriage. One of my friends calls it ‘mercenary’, and says she knows people who
marry based solely on the career progress and bank balance of their prospective
spouses. There are those who are so resentful of the process, and the demand for
‘tall, slim, fair, beautiful, intelligent working’ women who must also cook well, that
they respond with physical specifications of their own. There are those who are
disillusioned and frustrated by the process. There are those whose marriages were
technically arranged, but read like love stories.
I began to put down a structure for the book, and realized it wasn’t going to be
either didactic or dry. Marriage is one of the most crucial aspects of a woman’s life—
whether she chooses to have an arranged marriage, wait for ‘Mr Right’ to bump into
her by accident, or do without marriage—and a good part of our twenties and
thirties are spent thinking about it. Will we meet the right person? Can’t the right
person be found outside an arranged set-up? Are we settling? How do we know
someone is right for us? When do we have children? What do we tell our relatives
when they ask about ‘good news’? What if we can’t have children? Will we regret
marrying the people we did? Can we study after marriage? What compromises will
that involve? How about working after marriage? Is it possible to leave an unhappy
marriage? Is having an arranged marriage an admission of defeat, a confession that
we simply couldn’t find love? Once we’re married, does it really make a difference
whether it was love or arranged, or do we deal with the same problems and enjoy
the same harmony either way?
Each of these questions yielded varied answers, ranging from facetious to
poignant. To my surprise, I found that people actually wanted to discuss their
marriages, explore their own reasons for getting married, and speak about the little
pretences we all hide behind. A friend and I bonded over how, even if we were to
have arranged marriages, we wouldn’t want people to know it, and would have to
think of romantic back-stories—‘He saw me at a wedding, and asked his mother’s
friend to set me up with him’; ‘My cousin and she went to the same school, and she