Married to the mob

What provokes Indians to such breathless group excitement that primeval notions come to the fore, severe loyalty tests are demanded, big money becomes involved, violence and the threat of it loom large, law and order are sought to be manipulated, and individual rights and basic decencies trampled on? Cricket ODIs? General elections? No. Marriage. The institution without which television soaps and most Bollywood scripts would be meaningless has such a ferocious — one might add, creativity-numbing — presence in popular culture because it draws sustenance from India’s reality of marriage as almost a locus of anti-modernity. Tomes can be written to define modernity. But a simple and meaningful definition is that it defines a social scheme of things where individuals and individual choices, as long as they don’t break the law, are automatically and substantively granted primacy, whatever one’s private or collective grievances.

As recent cases in Kolkata and Hyderabad show, as have been demonstrated in countless incidents from many other places, this notion is violently contested when applied to marriage. The idea that two adults cannot simply do what they wish to seems deeply ingrained in this country. Classically, this idea is one of the first rightful casualty of social progress. Of course, things are better now than, say, at the time of Independence. But far too much regressiveness is evident, and it cuts across cultures and class. The last point is especially important.

Wealth-creation, in as much as it expands choices, broadens worldview and threatens certain old arrangements, is supposed to exert a transformative pressure on social/ family suppression of individual decisions. Many old ways of doing things have changed in India’s new and expanding middle and richer classes. But the notion that marriage cannot ‘upset’ some set of social/ family values has not only survived, it seems to be flourishing. Why this is so is a grimly fascinating and hugely important question that every sensible Indian should be asking.