by Sudhir Kakar
Although the cruel mother-in-law and the suffering daughter-in-law (including the eventual triumph of the younger woman over her older antagonist) is the staple of many women’s songs, folk tales and of widely watched TV soaps, it is rarely recognized that the reviled mother-in-law is but an agent of the Indian family. Given the organizing principle of the traditional Indian family, in which the parent–son and filial bonds are more central than the husband–wife tie (that is considered the fulcrum of the modern Western family), the new bride constitutes a very real threat to the unity of the larger family. Abundantly aware of the power of sex to overthrow religiously sanctioned family values and long established social norms, the family is concerned that the young wife may cause her husband to neglect his duties as a son, as a brother, a nephew, an uncle; that he will transfer his loyalty and affection to her rather than remaining truly a son of the house.
These are not either/or choices; however, custom, tradition and the interests of the family demand that in the realignment of roles and relationships initiated by the son’s marriage, the couple not take centre stage, at least not in the early years of marriage. Signs of developing attachment and tenderness between husband and wife are carefully monitored and their development discouraged. Oblique hints about ‘youthful infatuation’, or outright shaming virtually guarantee that the young husband and wife do not publicly express affection for each other; and they are effectively alone together only for very brief periods during the night. The much-maligned mother-in-law, besides (or even because of) being animated by her own possessiveness in relation to her son, is no more than the family’s designated agent preventing the build-up of a ‘foreign’ cell in the family body.
One would expect the transition of marriage to be easier for women in South India with its tradition of cross-cousin and uncle-niece marriages which ensure that women are not married to complete strangers and do not have to settle down far from their parental homes. Marriages should be even easier for women in places like Kerala with its history of matrilineal families in sections of its population. The ‘higher’ status of women, however, does not seem to relieve the stresses and strains of marriage for the young girl to any appreciable degree: Kerala, for instance, reports high levels of dowry-related deaths among women, while Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum), the state’s capital, ranks among the highest in the prevalence of domestic violence in Indian cities.17 High levels of literacy and participation in employed work, greater freedom and decision-making authority, as in the case of women in Tamil Nadu, are not enough to overthrow the weight of cultural norms governing the role and behaviour expected of a newly married woman.18
We have said that the commonly shared, pan-Indian notion of marriage is not of a relationship between two individuals but an alliance between two families or, more, between two clans. The choice of the partner, then, is not individual but arranged by the family. Although, as we’ve seen, in more modern families young people have the right of veto on their parents’ choice of the partner, even here there is a subtle gender discrimination; the consultations with the daughter are often more perfunctory than those with the son.
Arranged marriages are not only a pan-Indian norm, cutting across the divides of education, social class, religion and region, they are also rarely seen as an imposition by the young people concerned, who overwhelmingly prefer them to the kind of love marriages typical of contemporary Western societies. The preference is partly based on the young person’s acceptance of the cultural definition of marriage as a family rather than an individual affair, where harmony and shared values that come from a common background are more important than individual fascination.
Love marriages also have a bad press in India in the sense that they are reputed to turn out to be generally unhappy. This reputation is more than just rumour or prejudice, not because of the love between the young people that initiated the marriage but because of the social attitudes that put the marriage under enormous pressure. Thus, for instance, a study of men and women of different castes from fifteen villages in Tamil Nadu reveals that only five out of the seventy women had made marriages that were not arranged. None of the five had parental support for the wedding; they had to elope and get married in a temple. The author writes, ‘All but one of the five women now regret their decision. The opposition from the husbands’ parents has made their lives miserable. Their husbands have not been able to break away from their parents because of financial constraints, and the woman having come “empty-handed” [with no gold or cash as is usual in a traditional wedding], and not having any support from her natal family, has only exacerbated matters.’19
Perhaps the greatest attraction of an arranged marriage is the fact that it takes away the young person’s anxiety around finding a mate. Whether you are plain or good-looking, fat or thin, you can be sure that a suitable mate will be found for you. Although physical beauty is important for the Indian girl, it does not command the same premium in the selection of a partner as it does in Western societies. In India, the beauty industry can certainly dip into the woman’s latent desire to be beautiful, a desire which may have been pent up in traditional India for a long time and has now begun to find a voice. It cannot, however, as it does in the West, mobilize the woman’s fear of never finding a mate merely because she has not done enough to enhance her looks.
The consensus in favour of arranged marriage through the centuries is truly astonishing; in fact, the only ancient Hindu text that considers the love marriage as the highest form of marriage is the revolutionary Kamasutra. What, then, of Bollywood movies where love marriage reigns and is depicted as the only road to happiness?20
Now love and the lyrical impulse of its narration are indeed universal, one of the few constants left in a world that makes a fetish of cultural relativism. Erotic passion, with love’s tender discoveries, sudden torments and consuming desires, is one of the last bastions of our common humanity. Indians, too, are enamoured of the love story, of (Bollywood) tales about young lovers who are believed to express the purest of romantic sentiments. In India, as in most other cultures through history, the love story has never been a reflection but a subverter of the accepted mores prescribing the relations between the sexes.21 The pleasure we take in this subversion is one of the many enduring fascinations of the love story which is a vehicle for the vicarious satisfaction of our hidden desires and obscure longings.
The love story, whether in movies or fiction, is the dream of capturing love’s freshness and spontaneity free of all social restrictions and internal inhibitions and of becoming one with the beloved while overwhelming the forces that would dampen desire and the urge to merge. In a society that is deeply hierarchical, with caste and class barriers which are not easy to cross even by the god of love Kama, the dream is of love unimpeded by the shackles of family obligations and duties toward the old and all the other keepers of society’s traditions. Bollywood movies are thus not a guide to Indian marriage but a doorway into the universal dream of love; what they offer are not role models for the young but romantic nostalgia for the freshness of love’s vision to men and women of all ages.
What happens to love in an arranged marriage? Is it fated to remain a dream, an unslaked thirst? Must it be completely submerged in the arranged marriage’s ideal of safety? An arranged marriage does not quite obliterate the allure of the dream of love, although it must be admitted that it mutes the dream’s vivid colours. Studies show that in the case of poor women in traditional India, the expectations from a potential husband are pretty basic: ‘He should not drink or beat me, and support me and the family’.22 Women belonging to higher strata may have additional expectations, namely that the husband be educated, have a salaried employment and be ‘modern’ in the sense of not unduly restricting the freedom of his wife. In the upper classes, where the expectations are even greater, young women still do not enter marriage with as high hopes as in the West. The woman does not expect, as is often the case in Western societies, that the partner w
ill satisfy all her emotional needs and longings, that her husband will not only be an adult sexual man but also a father, mother, a little baby boy and a twin brother (and vice versa in the case of a man). Her demands on the husband, mostly unconscious, to fulfil these multiple roles—rather than their being spread over the larger family as in India—can certainly be a source of disquiet in Western marriages.
Yet even in India, in-depth interviews with women from the poorest slums reveal that their dream of love, of integrating tenderness with eroticism, mutual respect with caring, has not disappeared.23 Its location, though, is not the same as in the West. Love is not looked for before marriage but ideally arises in the jodi (couple) that comes into existence after marriage.
The squalor of slum life does nothing to dim the luminosity of the women’s romantic longing to experience the husband’s love. On the contrary, the abysmal material conditions and the struggle against poverty arouses their ‘sense of life according to love’—to quote the poet Philip Larkin—to its fullest wakefulness. The dream of the transforming power of love, of what the woman might have been if she were well and truly loved, is tenaciously clung to amidst (and perhaps because of) all the suffering and pathos of her existence.
The central image of this dream is the couple or jodi. The couple, of course, exerts a universally powerful pull on the human imagination, given our deeply buried wish to be seen by the spouse as god might have done—that is, with absolute love and total understanding. It is telling that in spite of the social consensus in favour of the joint family and widespread praise of its virtues, the couple continues to remain a lodestar in the cultural imagination of Indian women. Iconically represented as the mithuna (sexual intercourse) couple in medieval temple sculptures, its highest manifestation is ardhanarishwara—the Lord who is half woman, a visualization of the jodi as a single two-person entity. This is the cultural ideal which makes a Hindu invoke a deity not on its own but as a couple: Sitarama and not Sita and Rama, Radhakrishna and not Radha and Krishna.
The persistence and importance of the jodi for the woman’s sense of identity helps us comprehend better why many women, in spite of their economic independence, choose to suffer humiliation rather than leave an oppressive husband; why some women, in times of extreme marital stress and burning rage towards the spouse, exercise the option of suicide rather than separation. It is the persistence of this ideal which explains why a woman, from any class, is apt to deny the presence of marital problems, such as a husband’s alcohol abuse and violence, in order to hold aloft the portrait of a happy couple. To confess to an unhappy marriage is not only to reconcile one’s self to the loss of a cherished personal goal but also betray a powerful cultural ideal.
The profound yearning of a wife, as a woman, for intimacy with the husband—as a man—is an overwhelming issue in fiction and in the lives of middle-class patients seen in psychotherapy. Connecting the various stages of a woman’s adulthood, from an expectant bride to a more sober grandmother, the intense wish to create a two-person universe with the husband where each finally ‘recognizes’ the other, is never far from her consciousness. It is a beacon of hope amidst the toil, drudgery, fights, disappointments and occasional joys of her stormy existence within the extended family. The dream of finding love in marriage is tenaciously clung to through the suffering and pathos of her existence as a young bride. This love is a quieter affair, without the delicious delirium that can mark the periods of courtship and the beginning of a marriage in the West; its feeling-tone is of contented togetherness rather than ecstasy. In other words, the dream of love remains necessary for marriage. The difference is that in Indian marriages this love has a different quality; it is less romantically or erotically imperious and does not have to prefigure marriage but can waft in gently afterwards, sometimes years later, when the couple is well into adulthood.
There are, of course, objective conditions for the likelihood of the couple falling in love after marriage. Arranged marriages work best, and perhaps can only work, if the sexes are kept apart in youth and if marriages are early, before young men and women have had an opportunity to compare a range of potential partners. Except for a minuscule upper class, these conditions hold substantially true for the rest of Indian society. The hormonal pressure created by enforced celibacy during youth and a lack of experience with the opposite sex ensure that the young person is biologically and emotionally primed to fall in love if the marriage partner is even reasonably satisfactory.
THE HOME AND THE WORLD
Urban, upper-caste, educated women began working outside the home in any significant number only after the 1940s. Earlier, it would have been unthinkable for a girl from a respectable family to enter the labour market and look for work. This process of middle-class women working for pay has accelerated since the 1970s, chiefly due to two reasons: One, the change in the traditional view about the education of a daughter which now encourages higher education for girls and thus makes their participation in socially respectable work possible; and two, the growing financial needs of middle-class families, partly due to their higher consumption aspirations.
Most educated middle-class women work in lower- or middle-level white-collar jobs as clerks, secretaries, telephone operators or at better paid jobs in the mushrooming call centres. Those who are professionally qualified are found in the fields of school and college teaching, medicine and research. In the last decade, a small but significant number of middle-class women have branched out from what were long considered suitable occupations for women to enter the fields of advertising, computer software, corporate management, or to set up as small-scale entrepreneurs. Most of these women however show a much greater investment in their career than is usually the case with a majority of middle-class working women.
Women who are working or have worked for remuneration in the past, feel that as compared to their mothers, their higher education and professional qualifications have had a definite influence on increasing their social status and self-esteem. For women who continue to work, their contentment with the freedom of movement and a measure of independence provided by the job is palpable. Even the non-working middle-class woman exudes a greater self-confidence than her mother’s generation. She believes she has a higher degree of control over her own destiny since her education will enable her to enter the labour market should the need ever arise. Having a job is not as important to her self-esteem as the fact that she is qualified to hold one.
As one would expect, the middle-class woman’s interest in wider social, cultural and political concerns—fostered through the watching of TV, reading of magazines and, to a lesser extent, of newspapers—is much more than that of the traditional woman. On the other hand, though, the middle-class woman is lonelier than her traditional counterpart. The latter’s immersion in joint family life and in well-marked sectors of domestic, social and ritual activities carried out in communities of women had absorbed her energy and fulfilled most of her needs for friendship and intimacy. The modern middle-class woman’s bonds with the family—her own and that of her husband’s—are weaker, her friendships intermittent and her social circle narrower. The missing intimacy in her life is increasingly demanded from, and with some luck provided by, her husband.
Tradition continues its hold on the middle-class woman’s mind in that she views domestic and maternal obligations as central to her identity. This is true of the housewife as much as of the high-profile career woman. Traditional norms which demand that a woman’s first commitment be to her children and the second to her husband, do not seem to be influenced by a woman’s educational or occupational status. Working wives who express satisfaction with their career still rank the raising of children as the highest goal of a woman’s life. Here a decided lag between the values of middle-class husbands and wives is apparent. In a fifteen-year-old study carried out in Bangalore, most wives ranked the traditional purposes of marriage—children, love and affection, fulfilment of the husband’s sexual needs (rather tha
n her own)—very high. The husbands, on the other hand, ranked the goals of a supposedly more modern marriage—comfortable life, companionship and fulfilment of individual sexual needs—higher than their wives.24 Perhaps with the exception of upper-middle-class women, our impression is that what Indian women consciously want from marriage—as contrasted to their more subterranean wishes around the jodi—has not changed to any marked degree.
In some ways, the middle-class woman, whether she is working or not, is even more child centered than her traditional counterpart. For instance, she has taken on the primary responsibility for the education of her young children and plays a key role in arranging the children’s recreational activities, areas which used to be earlier in the domain of the husband and elder male members of the joint family. The life of the non-working woman seems to be wholly organized around her children’s needs, the rhythm of her day determined by their various activities. The achievements of the children, especially educational, are her biggest source of satisfaction and validation as a woman. Irrespective of whether she is working or not, the middle-class woman’s maternal role is not an imposition but freely and joyfully chosen; motherhood remains the acme of a fulfilled life.
This, then, is the modern Indian woman: in a white cotton sari at one moment, carrying out an age-old ritual with an attention to detail that both absorbs and animates her, and in a pair of blue jeans at another time, sprawled on a sofa in front of the television watching a soap on family intrigues with an intense interest that lights up her entire face. Hers is the driving force in the changes taking place in the Indian family, an institution that is inherently conservative and changes at a much slower pace than the political, economic and other institutions of society. Slowly but surely the middle-class woman is pushing the family towards a greater acknowledgement, grudging or otherwise, of the importance (if not yet the primacy) of the marital bond. A greater individuation of the child will be an inevitable consequence of this psychological nuclearization within the joint family, as also a boost in the pleasures and sorrows of individuality.
