Arranged Marriage – Love Marriage

What do you think about when you hear about arranged marriage? – a poor 16 year old girl who is being married against her will to a 25 year old man… or possibly something similar, right? At least when I arrived in India, I had quite some prejudices against arranged marriage, I didn’t really know how it works and gave it a negative connotation only. This entry is dedicated to this topic nobody in the Western world really understands if you haven’t directly been exposed to it. I want to show you how I have gotten to experience this concept, what made me get rid of my western view and why arranged marriage actually fits Indian society quite well.

North Indian wedding ceremony

I recently read a book of a successful contemporary Indian author called Chetan Bhagat. His books usually talk about the story of individuals in India which face some problem with an aspect of Indian society: education system, arranged marriage, etc. In the book “2 States” a couple from different origin and cast are in love and want to get married which is very difficult in India. The synopsis of the book says the following “Love marriages around the world are simple: Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. 
They get married. In India, there are a few more steps: Boy loves Girl. Girl loves Boy. Girl's family has to love boy. Boy's family has to love girl. Girl's Family has to love Boy's Family. Boy's family has to love girl's family.
Girl and Boy still love each other. They get married.”

Indian Bride: rich make up, beautiful dress and a lot of jewelry

Let me give you a little background to regular marriages in India. First of all it is important to know that Indians usually stay with their parents until marriage if they live in the same city as their family. So except if you study or work in another city you would not live alone or with friends and surely not with your partner. Consequently, before a couple gets married, they don’t live together, they supposedly don’t have sex and they don’t hang out the way we do (staying out late at night etc.). This is the way it happens mostly. However, in big metropolitan cities this is slowly changing, living relationships are coming up etc. But seen overall, these cases are still a very small minority. So what happens when a couple gets married is that the girl moves to the house of the family of the guy. She will live there with his family either until the parents die or stay to live with another son. Living there she’ll be included into the family as a full member and learning the way of doing things according to the boys family. There, another crucial factor comes into the play: the cast/community. Basically the society is split into 4 main groups, the Varnas: 1. Brahmins : clergy and teachers wielding religious authority. 2. Kshatriyas : warriors, nobility, and administrators, wielding political power. 3. Vaishyas : merchants and farmers or cattle-herders with economic prosperity and 4. Shudras: servants or unfree peasants. Within every varna there are hundreds of casts. The cast system is not only applicable to the Hindu religion only but is also lived by Christian and Muslim Indians. India is a very much value driven society and according to its nature, every cast has very different values which are lived and preserved with rigour.

South indian wedding ceremony

So, in order to get back to our primary topic, the marriage, let me ask a simple question: Who would you trust most to keep up your family’s tradition? Who would you want to include into the everyday life of your family? Who would you want your daughter to spend her life with? Of course, someone who has similar thinking and values than you have. Someone from the same background. Someone from the same origin. In a nutshell, someone from the same cast. Consequently, arranged marriages don’t have to have anything to do with “family politics” as we might be tempted to believe according to western thinking. I don’t say that one should exclude this reason, which is of course valid for many cases mostly in rural areas. But I want to underline that for the parents it is also strongly linked with the assurance to find someone for your child who shares the same values and who can care for your child the way you would do.

So how do you find someone from the same cast? I can’t generalise on this but what I have seen it is mostly one primary reason: Internet Matching Sites. Yes, of course there are also family friendships, etc, but what I have most commonly observed was that the family looks for a suitable partner on a marriage website. It’s he same principle like our dating sites, just that it is particularly for wedding and the profile includes things like cast, origin, complexion (fair or tanned skin), profession of parents and siblings. Check it out yourself on www.matrimonialsindia.com, for example. It’s quite entertaining. J So the whole family looks for a future partner, not only the individual him/herself. The opinion of the parents is very important, as they “know” how to select the best matching partner.

Foto shooting at the wedding reception

In case someone wants to get married to someone he/she fell in love with and who is not from the same cast, often a drama begins. First because the authority of the parents is put into question, second because they’ll have to live with a girl with different traditions or give their daughter away to a family with different traditions and thirdly because the community will point at the family for not having gone the good way. There must be even more reasons to this, but it seems like not getting into arranged marriage is somehow like getting off the track of being a good son/daughter.

The dowry which the girl's family gifts the groom's family. Often displayed at the reception function.

In a case of love marriage of course the scenarios differ a lot, as some families are more liberal than others. But on the bottom line it is still surprising for most of the people when they hear that a couple of very different background manages to get married. Sometimes you also hear of the term “Arranged cum Love” which is basically a love marriage but which has the buy-in of the families so that it seems as if it was almost arranged.

There is another aspect of this whole arranged married thing. In India you should be married at a certain age. The older you get, the less chances you have to find a good partner. There “must be something wrong with you” if you are over age. Even though maybe you just continued with your education or were in a challenging job or whatever. The first impression says that there’s something fishy about you. So girls should be married at the age of about 27 latest and guys maybe at 29. Unimaginable in Europe, you get married when you found the right partner. But what if the right partner will be taken already or doesn’t want you just because you’re a bit older? Arranged marriage is a social structure to avoid this scenario, it ensures you to find a suitable person in time because the whole family will be concerned about your good future and will help you. And since values and origin are predominant in Indian households, the’ll be able to help you to find that person because they share the same. I don’t say that love is excluded from this… there has to be some spark between the individuals even in arranged marriage, but there is no time to test it the way we do it in Europe.

Wedding couple

This is how it works: family decides its time, they look for a partner, find one which seems to fit, get in contact with the family (or possibly the person directly), they check if things fit, show interest, stay in contact for some time and arrange a get together of the two… during 15-30 minutes the interest has to be confirmed or you decide that it wasn’t the one (which is ,as I understand, rather rare since you have checked the family and its values through), so you confirm the interest, the parents fix a date for engagement together with some astrologer (around 1-3 months later) and a date for wedding is set (maybe 4-6months later), they get married, the girl moves to the groom’s family the day after the wedding… and that’s it. It’s a very quick thing. After 4 months your life took a turn of 180°. One important fact to be considered in order not to create any misconceptions: The individual is involved in most of the steps, depending if he/she already wants to get married or not. But in any case the final decision of saying yes is taken by the couple. Indirectly the parents of course have a large influence, because their opinion is highly valued but the one saying yes to the choice of the family at the meeting is the individual him/herself.

Dressing up for an engagement