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Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Nandini Krishnan

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105 pages

English

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If you're an Indian woman and old enough to legally bear children, chances are that an overweight relative has asked you, while fondly stroking their pot belly, 'When am I going to eat at your wedding?'The modern Indian woman's attitude to marriageand especially to arranged marriageis a confused one. As traditional matchmaking methods and internet chat rooms come together to build matrimonial websites, our parameters have changed, but the time-honoured practice of arranged marriage sticks. Hitched explores in depth the considerations matrimony should involve, and the issues that can crop up at different stages of an arranged marriage. A cross-section of womenthose who married young, married late, married the first man their parents parked before them, or married out of caste in an arranged setupopen up about experiences ranging from the frightening to the hilarious and the awww-inspiring.

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India

Cultural studies

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Sociologie, société et politique

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	22 août 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184004724
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0480€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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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 was at my aunt s place one day ; Our parents are family friends, and we used to play together as kids, apparently, but I don t remember ; Both of us were pissed with our parents, and came in with the intention of rejecting each other, and then we realized we d gone to the same school and had crushes on each other ; and so on.
In writing the stories of the women I spoke to, I grew progressively excited about the book, and it began to evolve beyond its original structure. At times, I would feel I was writing a motivational book, at times a dystopian novel, at times a Barbara Cartlandesque romance. Sometimes, it would appear that arranged marriages, for all the thought that goes into them, are simply wrought by destiny. Just when I was beginning to think there wasn t much difference between a love marriage and an arranged one, one of my interviewees would speak about expectations her in-laws had of her that had taken her aback. Someone else would tell me how, unlike boyfriends, husbands often didn t want to know about their partners pasts.
However, everyone appeared to feel that there are several levels at which one has to cope in an arranged marriage. There is a lot of pressure on the man too, especially when it comes to mediating conflicts between his wife and his family. Everything in an arranged marriage is a shade different from a love marriage. A bride is seen as conniving, for having got her husband besotted with her. When a couple lives in another town, or abroad, the wife is expected to stay with her in-laws rather than her parents when they visit. Protocol is important. All the women I have spoken to have had challenges to mount, and many had to figure it out for themselves, chiefly because they didn t know people who had shared the experience. Their parents and in-laws, too, have had to deal with certain things. As the mother of a friend told me, Everyone wants sons-in-law like their sons, and daughters-in-law like their daughters. That won t happen. You have to lower your expectations, or at least step back, and let your children take the call.
This book isn t intended as a guide for women looking to have arranged marriages alone. The women-and men-who have shared their stories and advice are at various stages of that journey. Some are searching for spouses, some have married recently, some have studied after marriage and babies, some have gone to work for the first time after their children began to go to full-day school, some have stuck it out in unhappy marriages and some have walked out of wedlock. Though each story is specific, and though I could glean certain overarching topics and slot them into separate sections, this should perhaps be read as a story of stories-because there was something in each I could relate to, and I hope the reader will feel the same way.
April 2013,
Chennai
Uttara Singh Chauhan tells us how to romanticize a fianc and domesticate a husband.
U ttara Singh always knew exactly what she wanted-a television-news anchor, she would work in five channels, for two years each, from ages 20 to 30. She would be married before she turned 25, and spend some quality alone time with her husband. Then, she would have her first child before she turned 30, go on maternity leave, come