Progress with a Heaping Dose of Hypocrisy

Western criticism or at least skepticism of Indian marriages is certainly not a foreign concept. Most of it tends to focus on the arranged aspect. “Do you really marry someone you don’t know?” “Is it true that your parents just pick someone for you and you have to marry them?” Not one of us Indian-American kids has escaped those questions and the looks of judgment and shock from our friends when we reveal that our parents did actually have an arranged marriage and that they only knew each other for seven days before the wedding. We all get asked if we will do the same from people who look horrified that we might answer in the affirmative.

I think that often times we Indian-American kids get on the defensive with questions like those. We quickly say that we don’t want the same and that our parents won’t force us to have an arranged marriage, and whether it is true or not, we push the fact that things are changing. That even in India people don’t hold the same traditional views anymore. That people do have arranged marriages, but they have free will and are making choices for themselves. That girls and guys in India even date nowadays. That India is progressing socially as well as economically.

My issues with Indian marriages are not with the arranged aspect. Frankly, it seems refreshingly simple and effective in contrast to all the struggles we all go through with dating to have someone else do all the work. The issue for me is really that despite the fact that there is so much talk these days of the progress, both social and economic that is taking place in India, you still see such hypocritical and old-fashioned ideas when it comes to marriages apart from the arranging. At the risk of sounding like a critical Westerner, I have to say that I find these attitudes and actions so shocking. Even more so because this is Bangalore, a city that is supposedly so modern, cosmopolitan, progressive and open-minded.

This week I found out about a coworker at Ujjivan who has just announced that she is getting married and that she is quitting her job effective immediately to move to Mangalore, a liberal coastal beach town about 600km west of Bangalore where her fiancé and her family live, to plan and prepare for her wedding which will take place in October. This girl is one of our strongest employees and just received a promotion to Branch Manager two months ago. She is also a Silver Medalist in bodybuilding at the Asian Games, and a graduate of one of the top South Indian universities with a degree in social welfare. I would not say that she is your typical or traditional South Indian girl, which is why it shocked me to hear that she would drop everything and completely change her life just because she is getting married.

I pulled her aside upon hearing all of this to ask her what was going on. She said that she is getting married and that she is going to move back to Mangalore and has no plans of working after marriage. She said that if she does work, it will be with her husband’s textile business, but that she would not continue with social work or microfinance, a field that she is so good at and obviously enjoys. Her facial expressions revealed that she was upset about all of this and frustrated at the situation, but she pretty much accepted all of it.

Now I understand that the decision to quit her job and not work after marriage was not hers alone and I don’t blame her entirely. I know that she like most girls out here have significant pressure from their parents, their community and their in-laws and/or fiancé to make certain choices and behave in a certain way. But that is actually what bothers me most about the situation. This is a girl that invested so much in her education, traveled around Asia for her bodybuilding competitions, moved to Bangalore on her own to pursue this career, all with her parents’ support. Yet now according to her it’s those same parents who are telling her to quit everything. As if that life and her personal and career goals were only OK until she got married, but that she should just forget about all of that afterwards and be prepared to give it all up in an instant. I’ll admit that I don’t know all the details and dynamics of this particular situation and there could be many variables which I don’t know about, but mine is a larger comment on the society within which these choices (which you hear about all the time) are made.

Broadly speaking, why in this day and age in a supposedly progressing India should a girl who is so independent and successful before marriage have to accept such a radically different life after marriage? Why have social norms changed to allow a certain type of “more progressive” behavior for unmarried girls, but retained the same, old, traditional beliefs for married women? Why is that considered acceptable? That isn’t real progress; it’s hypocrisy doused with double standards, gender inequality, and underlying deep-rooted “traditional” beliefs.

To be fair, this is obviously not the case of everyone. Even at Ujjivan, we have many single girls who have gotten married while at Ujjivan and have still continued to work after marriage. And an even stronger confirmation that women work and thrive professionally after marriage lays with our loan customers. They are all working women who are married usually with children, and are often the main breadwinners in their family and manage all of the responsibilities of their home along with their job duties. An interesting point here is that it seems that despite what you might think, in my experience the poor seem to exhibit more gender equality than the middle class. I think that this stems more from necessity than choice, but it’s still interesting to go the slums and see so many industrious working women literally running the whole community from shops to restaurants to vegetable and fruit vendors juxtaposed against middle class Indians where the idea is still that women should not work and certainly not after marriage. There is always this idea that education and financial security brings opportunity and progress, and while I don’t negate that in the broad sense, you have to stop and wonder when you see such opposing attitudes between the classes.

I was talking about all of this to my mom this past weekend and she brought up yet another example of upper class hypocrisy and old-fashioned attitudes when it comes to Indian marriages: the upcoming highly publicized wedding of Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan. Supposedly the Bachchans have required Aish to marry not one but three plants before she can marry their son. Before you think that you read that wrong, the idea of marrying plants harkens back to centuries-old superstitious beliefs that if a girl is “cursed” (apparently Aish is according to the Bachchan’s pundit), that her first husband will die if they get married. To prevent this, she is required to marry a plant, so that in theory that plant becomes her first husband. It is then killed and she is allowed to marry a person “safely”.

Now, why the Bachchans are requiring her to marry three plants, I don’t know. But the bigger issue is that if Amitabh Bachchan, practically a god in this country, has allowed such old-fashioned and sexist practices to take place in his family, what kind of message does that send to everyone else? If even the Big B can do it, then why isn’t it OK to insult women with these “traditions”? It’s ridiculous, infuriating, and beyond hypocritical that this kind of thing is taking place at such a highly publicized level.

A.B.

Reading: My Housing Loan Manual(!)
Listening to: Salaam-E-Ishq