Hindu brides and grooms wait to garland each other during a mass wedding ceremony in the northern Indian city of Mathura, Jan. 31, 2009. The ceremony was organised by an organisation for 26 financially poor Hindu couples on the occasion of the festival of "Basant Panchami." (K.K. Arora/Reuters)
In India, love hurts
With an increased emphasis on romantic love, and greater opportunities for women, more Indian marriages are breaking down.
NEW DELHI — In India, love is in the air. Unfortunately, so is the raucous noise of lover's quarrels and the soporific drone of the court judge.
The flawed, but familiar, bonds of tradition are fading away. And there's nothing to replace them except for what Danny DeVito identified in "The War of the Roses" as the “two dilemmas that rattle the human skull: How do you hang on to someone who won't stay? And how do you get rid of someone who won't go?”
For thousands of years, Hindu society had the first problem licked. Marriages were contracts of servitude that sent a daughter off to her husband's family home with a hefty dowry and the injunction not to complain, because it was a one-way trip. Now, though, India is working on DeVito's second dilemma.
Women are gaining independence through education and a more important role in the workforce. Divorce laws have been made more liberal, and progressive legislation has been adopted to curb “bride burning” to extort dowries. Women no longer have to suffer psychological or physical abuse. More couples live in nuclear families instead of with the husband's mother and father, which ought to make things easier but has instead resulted in a relaxing of the unofficial ban on a wife's family butting into the couple's business.
And, perhaps most significantly, a new cultural obsession with romance and personal fulfillment has raised the bar for a happy marriage.
“If people have to be romantic and romance has to endure through thick and thin, the idea can be that if romance withers, the marriage is ended,” says Patricia Uberoi, a New Delhi-based sociologist.
India does not track a national divorce rate, but some analyses of the number of divorce petitions filed in municipal courts indicate that divorce has doubled since 1990 in trend-setting Mumbai and Delhi.
“Statistically the number of cases on the docket has exploded,” says Prosenjit Banerjee, a Delhi divorce lawyer. That means that even though the number of courts devoted to divorce proceedings has grown to around a dozen over the past 10 years, up from just four or five, there are still more than 30 cases listed before each court every day.
The phenomenon has already spread beyond the cosmopolitan centers.
Though the broadest available figures, from the National Family Health Survey, still place the figure much lower, some estimates now peg the (once negligible) national divorce rate at close to 6 percent. The statistical discrepancy that can probably be attributed to the glacial pace of the Indian courts, since the NFHS counted the number of divorced people and other estimates focus on the number of divorce cases.
Very interesting tie-in with The War of the Roses.
-Warren Adler
(Author of War of the Roses)
Jason: I started reading this with great interest but stumbled on this paragraph right at the beginning:
For thousands of years, Hindu society had the first problem licked. Marriages were contracts of servitude that sent a daughter off to her husband's family home with a hefty dowry and the injunction not to complain, because it was a one-way trip.
"Thousands of years"? and "contracts of servitude"?
I feel this is exaggeration in the extreme...I will come back and write a more detailed comment but would just like to mention a few quick points for now:
1] India had a long, historical tradition of a woman choosing her own husband (called "Swayamvar").
2] Marriage was and remains a sacred ritual, sanctified by tradition...To call it "contract of servitude" is gross distortion of facts and history.
3] Indian society has indeed faced the problem of diminishing status of women and the problem of "dowry" - However it is niether thousands of years old - nor present in every part/region of India...
4] Please do have a look at these links and let me have your thoughts
I look forward to your response - either here or on my blog.
http://satyameva-jayate.org/2009/04/10/women-in-hinduism-part-2/
http://satyameva-jayate.org/2009/02/25/abul-kasem-rebuttal-maliger/
http://satyameva-jayate.org/2007/03/16/the-last-word-on-water/
Forget blogs and links. Get into the real world and see that there are STILL cases of dowry in India and maybe I'm not a historian nor I may not know history of India that well, but India still has a "problem" of dowry in most parts of the country. This is something that is going to stay unless we change our mindset and educate our children on this. Most of the kids today stay with their grandparents who STILL has the mentality of accepting/offering dowry and believe it or not, our kids grow up seeing and hearing that.
Speaking of swayamvar, it was always practiced in the castles and palaces of rich kings who could "afford" to ask their daughters to choose their husbands. But what about the general public? Child marriage, sati, a little girl married to an old man - all these did exist a few hundreds of years ago and believe it or not, it still does - ok, maybe not sati! And the worst part is the local government (panchayats) are sucking it up and living with it.
I found the author of this post thoroughly confused (correct me if I am wrong). Does he want to say that the divorce rate in India/Hindus(?) is increasing because:
- Women are getting educated and hence have become less tolerant
- Women and their families are abusing the anti-dowry laws to get out of an incompatible marriage
- People have become more romantic and don’t want to stay with the partners their parents found for them.
- Wife’s mother is the major reason for breaking of Indian marriages!!!
Or does he want to say that there is something fundamentally wrong in our traditional marriages which doesn’t work in the “modern” context?
I just have to say that even in the modern context Hindu/Indian marriages work better than marriages in any other society in the world. Exceptions are always there…
For Jason's information, traditional arranged marriages still happen in very large numbers amongst educated, urban, financially well to do Indians. Their success rates are still the highest... In fact, more and more Indians (again very well educated and settled abroad) are prefering to go for traditional arranged marriages for the same simple reason..that they work
Thanks,
Almost seventy percent of marriages in India are arranged, mean to say that parents search for a girl/boy and there is one mediator who plays the role of marriage counselor. Mediator role is to make synchronization between both families according to religion, wealth, society, dowry, both spouses interest and many more. Here in India, almost sixty five percent of marriage relationship is successful, because boy should be working and then he will be married and girl parents will never give his daughter hands to a men who can't survive or don't have good future. So arranged marriage is like a wedding after proper pre-marital counseling, or you can say that arranged marriage is another name of premarriage counseling.
http://www.marriage-counselors.net/
Recent on India :
Goa rape case threatens India-Russian relations
Sonya Fatah - India - February 5, 2010 09:15 ET
A brutal attack on a 9-year-old girl resonates far beyond the beaches of Goa.
Adventure travel: The Great Himalaya Trail?
Jason Overdorf - India - February 4, 2010 07:11 ET
Why walk Everest, K2, and other mountain giants? Because they are there.
Goa's tourism boss links sexual assaults to bikinis
Jason Overdorf - India - February 1, 2010 06:45 ET
A shocking case provokes outrage. The local government blames swimwear.
Ambulance chasing in Mumbai
Hanna Ingber Win - India - January 30, 2010 09:47 ET
Need to get to the hospital fast? Then don't come here.
Special Report
Thomas Mucha - Commerce - January 28, 2010 17:24 ET
20 correspondents, 20 countries and a world of pain. Meet the ground truth of the global economic crisis.
On Location: New Delhi — The gender gap
Jason Overdorf - India - January 23, 2010 10:38 ET
On Location: Delhi — Psychiatry at the street level
Mark Scheffler - India - January 22, 2010 08:38 ET
Facebook, Orkut and the caste system
Hanna Ingber Win - India - January 21, 2010 06:53 ET
Ancient, meet the modern. How are India's complex social interactions playing out across social media?
India's comics boom: The Pao Collective
Jason Overdorf - India - January 20, 2010 17:09 ET
It may not be Savita Bhabhi, but a group of Indian artists is reinventing the medium.
.jpg)
One man's trash
Mridu Khullar - India - January 19, 2010 14:23 ET
About one percent of Delhi residents scrape by as trash pickers. Now, privatization threatens to leave them even worse off.
Bollywood has a new king
Saritha Rai - India - January 17, 2010 09:20 ET
What makes the blockbuster Bollywood film "3 Idiots" and others so smart? Smart marketing, yaar.
Police shut down Mr. Gay China competition in Beijing
Dinah Gardner - China and its neighbors - January 15, 2010 12:59 ET
Restrictions on homosexuality have relaxed in recent years, but state still keeps a watchful eye.
Opinion: What it means to take a holy dip
Raman Nanda - Worldview - January 15, 2010 06:54 ET
The Kumbh festival along the sacred Ganges river means something different to each of the millions of pilgrims who attend.
India autos: Detroit? Frankfurt? Tokyo? Not anymore.
Saritha Rai - Commerce - January 15, 2010 06:41 ET
New Delhi's auto show illustrates how the global automotive industry has shifted. Big time, yaar.
The secret behind "Avatar" and Twilight's "New Moon"
Jason Overdorf - Commerce - January 12, 2010 06:36 ET
Can you hear the Indian accent behind Hollywood's biggest hits?
Opinion: Raped by the law?
Jason Overdorf - Worldview - January 9, 2010 09:55 ET
A controversial case shakes India's faith in the rule of law.
Mumbai Parsis divided on intermarriage
Hanna Ingber Win - India - January 5, 2010 07:02 ET
With numbers dwindling, young Parsis turn to organized social events to meet, and hopefully marry, others of their cultural group.
India education: Engineering going off the rails?
Shailaja Neelakantan - India - December 28, 2009 06:32 ET
India's bid for full Washington Accord membership, an elite honor, has been postponed again.
How an accused secret agent has tied up India-Pakistan-US relations
Sonya Fatah - India - December 23, 2009 06:51 ET
Since David Coleman Headley was taken into custody, suspicion in India about Pakistan and the US has grown.
Watch GlobalPost videos:
Reporter's Notebook
Studies show that healthcare expenses could be responsible for the descent into poverty of as many as half of India's destitute families, reports the...Read more >
I spoke with Arjun S. Ravi, the founder of India's first magazine devoted to indie music, last week. Here's some of what he had to...Read more >
For anybody who's seen a South Indian film, or traveled through Rajasthan, it's no surprise that desis love their mustaches — here known as...Read more >
Featured: Special Projects
Oceans:
Assessing their health
After the Fall:
20 years since the Berlin Wall came down
Life, Death and the Taliban:
Videos and stories
Study Abroad:
Students report from the road
Living in the Shadows:
An intimate look at China's migrant workers
A World of Trouble:
The global economy in 20 hotspots
Comments:
5 Comments.
Login or Register to post comments