by Ira Trivedi
‘The dream of constructing a programmes that’s somehow perfectly “neutral” on such a deeply fraught, inherently values-laden subject seems like a recipe for endless controversy, and little real progress,’ Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ op-ed columnist, wrote on the abstinence debate a couple years ago.135 For India, these ‘values’ are steeped in hypocrisy.
Reproductive and sexual health rights of millions are being denied and millions are misinformed.136 Sexuality education policies and programme should be rooted in human rights and, according to Boonstra, should ‘respond to the interests, needs and experiences of young people themselves.’137
Unfortunately, if the gap is unbridged, the crack left unsealed and the needs of younger generations unaddressed, the dark side will only get darker.
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Over four decades ago India seemed to go through a moment of soul-searching when a young woman called Rameeza Bee was gang-raped by three cops. Activists and NGOs were on the streets, reports of rapes increased, people spoke of fast track courts and the need for a robust justice system.138 A few years before Rameeza Bee’s gang-rape, in 1972, a sixteen-year-old named Mathura139 had been raped in the police station; her case was dismissed by India’s apex court because the evidence—her body—showed no signs of rape. The laws were amended and new clauses on rape while in state custody were added. More recently, in December 2012, India had a passing moment of lucidity when Nirbhaya was gang-raped and murdered. All four of her murderers were sentenced to death in 2013.
In the aftermath of Nirbhaya’s death, India was forced to take action and the Parliament passed a more stringent law by putting in place the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 on 19 March 2013.
Rape was redefined with specific, physical detail. Under the law, death is the maximum penalty for rape if the victim dies or is left invalid. For the first time, stalking and voyeurism were introduced as offences and defined as crimes. Sexual harassment was added as an offence in the Indian Penal Code.
Although many proposals suggested lowering the minimum age for consensual sex to sixteen years, the government retained eighteen years as the minimum age after much opposition from political parties. Critics say the law falls short because it still does not include marital rape. The law states ‘sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape’. (Criminal Law [Amendment] Act, 2013)
There is no doubt that India is going through a sexual revolution. For the first time in centuries people are talking openly about sex. That is why there is more reporting of sexual violence—rape, assault and sexual harassment in the work place.
Though sex is edging out of the dark silence, the harsh truth is that until the majority, and more importantly, those in power, acknowledge and even embrace the sexual revolution, India’s youth will be ignorant and mired in doubt, grappling to understand their bodies.
The potential of India’s hundreds of millions of youth is immense—they are ambitious and aspirational, yet they face the threat of being left behind their global peers. For all the advances in education and technology which have manifested in economic growth, there are now hugely important cultural and social shifts that must be addressed to drive the next chapter in India’s story, and properly managing the country’s sexual revolution is one of these.
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*This chapter was contributed by Anjani Trivedi.
II
LOVE & MARRIAGE
LOVE REVOLUTION
My dadaji was a great one for aphorisms. I will never forget one he told me on my twenty-first birthday. He said I should get married quickly because ‘women are like balls of dough. If they sit around for too long they harden and make deformed chapattis’. My grandfather believed that a good marriage was like a perfectly round chapatti and to achieve this perfection, the dough had to be supple, fresh and young. It has been nearly seven years since then, and now at twenty-eight, I am unequivocally, by Dadaji’s standards, a hardened, deformed, inedible roti.
My marriage has been talked about since the day I turned eighteen. My first solo trip with my grandfather was to the Vishwanath (an avatar of Shiva) temple in Varanasi where I was made to perform a puja to acquire a good husband, with Dadaji supervising the proceedings. Of all the gods in the Hindu pantheon, Lord Shiva is the easiest to please as he is known to fulfil a supplicant’s desires sooner than the rest of the gods. To appease my mother and to absolve myself of the consequences of any negative action in my past lives that could delay my marriage, I performed fasts for sixteen consecutive Mondays—the holy day of Lord Shiva.
Unfortunately the fasts did not work as my family had wished, and I remained unmarried. Ten years ago, I would have been considered way beyond my sell-by date, but today it is no longer unthinkable for an Indian woman to be single at twenty-eight.
I am stuck in the liminal space between the old and the new, the past and the present, the East and the West. I am a product of the hubris of this new India. When I was younger, ever since I could understand the concept of marriage, I was told that I must get married to a suitable boy: a Hindu, belonging to my Brahmin caste, preferably within the Kanyakubj sub-caste. Love, attraction, or even liking was not a priority. The first time that my grandfather saw my grandmother was on the day of their wedding. They were married for sixty-five years till my dadiji passed away two years ago. My parents saw each other in black-and-white photographs, and then met twice with their entire families present before they got married. As a kid, I listened confused and dumbfounded as I was bombarded with tales of the genetic superiority and mental purity of Brahmins. My uncle’s inter-caste love marriage in the 1970s to my Punjabi aunt was narrated as a dark tale disguised as warning. All this was forgotten the day I left my parents’ home to go to college in the US where I quickly, almost desperately, started dating all the wrong sorts of boys. Once that happened, it seemed weird to enter into an arranged marriage. Just like with my boyfriends, it seemed natural to want to get to know my husband-to-be intimately, to understand his mental make-up, his notions of love and hardship, his life before we met, what he liked to eat, what his preferred sleeping position was, and only then arrive at a decision for the commitment of a lifetime.
With the country’s changing outlook on relationships, even my traditional family has begun to rethink their views on marriage. Just ten years ago, my elder sister, Ishani, was married at the age of twenty-one. A marriage broker would probably call her wedding an ‘arranged-cum-love’ or ‘introduction marriage’, a quaint hybrid of the traditional arranged marriage and a love match. In Ishani’s case, my parents identified an appropriate boy—a well-educated, tall, fair boy of the same caste who was a doctor in the US. He was a perfect match for their twenty-one-year-old engineer daughter. Ishani had little option but to marry that suitable Brahmin boy; it would have been unacceptable for her to marry out of caste. They remain happily married. A decade after Ishani’s arranged marriage, my younger sister had a love marriage to Rahul, whom she met at work. My parents were thrilled that she had found a partner of her choice. Unlike in Ishani’s case, Rahul’s caste was a bonus, not the major criterion. Rahul is fortunately a Brahmin (though his family is from Kashmir, and speak a different language from ours, eat meat and have their own customs). My parents have changed with time as they see the children of their friends and family members marry out of caste, and even people of other nationalities; they have accepted that times are different, and caste no longer holds the supreme importance that it once did. Even people as traditional as my grandfather, the longest serving president of the Brahmin Samaja, known the world over for his prowess in getting young people married, is coming to terms with love and inter-caste marriage. On a recent visit to his native village, Etawah, he was overheard telling an old classmate from his college days how convenient it was that these days children found their own partners and parents/relatives no longer had to run door to door with their daughters’ birth cha
rts.
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For centuries, marriage has been the mainstay of Indian culture. In the institution of arranged marriage is embedded the idea of a lifetime of commitment—to each other and to family. Today, this is fast changing, and it is estimated that over 30 per cent of urban India chooses to marry for love.140 Yet arranged marriage continues to be the preferred option in the country.
Let’s look at why arranged marriage has remained so important.
A historical overview of arranged marriage suggests that it serves primarily as a means of solidifying alliances between families. Although this is a common feature of marriages across cultures, it takes specific valences in the socio-historical context of India. India’s unique joint family social structure, in which men live with their parents, brothers, and wives, can be traced to the Vedas.141 Although urbanization and migration (both domestic and international) are changing Indian families, most families have adapted the joint family structure (for example, with one brother and his wife living with the parents, with children sharing finances with their families beyond marriage) rather than adopting nuclear family structures that characterize Euro-American unions.142 Elderly parents continue to rely on sons for support, which also reinforces marriage as the concern of the extended family; only 1 per cent of the elderly population lives in old-age homes.143 In this context, arranged marriages are particularly important because they ensure the well-being of the entire family rather than just of the individual, and elaborate wedding ceremonies again reflect this heightened significance. For example, in Mughal times, marriages fulfilled political alliances between different ruling lineages, including between Hindu rajas and Mughal rulers.144
Sources on Mughal marriages suggest that royal marriages were particularly important to the continuation of both family and political rule (which were united due to hereditary rule) and that rulers were most concerned with marriages in times of political instability.
The caste system too heightened the importance of arranged marriage. The Hindu caste system was traditionally based on employment categories and that demanded marrying within one’s caste.145 Throughout history marriage has been used to bolster caste and intra-caste cohesion. For example, the Hindu revival movement in the mid-twentieth century included caste conferences that called for endogamy in order to strengthen the caste system.146
British colonial rule saw the new rulers interfering with and moulding laws governing marriage as part of their drive to codify and regularize the ‘personal laws’ of the various religious and caste groups in the country. Some of this impulse sprang from a genuinely fair-minded desire to organize the plethora of confusing strictures that governed marriage and society in the country, and some of it was rooted in an attempt to perpetuate the divide and rule philosophy that the British followed. The British also codified Hindu marriage laws according to Brahminic customs, including dowry.147 This resulted in the stringent adherence to endogamy within castes and religions, strengthening the system of the arranged marriage at the national level.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF BOLLYWOOD
Though arranged marriage may seem to be a totally retrograde concept to many in the West, the reality is that up until the late eighteenth century, most societies around the world had arranged marriages where love developed after getting married to a suitable life partner, not before. Marriage was considered to be an economic and political institution, much too important to be left to the whims and passions of two young and inexperienced individuals. It was only in the late eighteenth century that the idea of marrying for love, based on the free will of two people began gaining strength. Today, the idea of marrying for love is so deep-set in most of the West, and even a large part of the East, that we tend to forget that it has only been about 200 years since men and women began to wrest control of their marriage from their families and the church.
Historian Stephanie Coontz in her excellent book, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, studies the marital patterns in North America and Europe. She concludes that marriage has changed more in the Western world in the previous thirty years than it has in the past three thousand. The ‘love revolution’ began in the US in the eighteenth century when the development of a market-driven economy led to the erosion of traditional social systems. Young people began accepting the radical idea that love should be the primary reason for marriage, and that they should be free to choose their own partners. Yet marriage continued to be of paramount importance as men and women were seen as fundamentally different beings, sexually and otherwise—the man was the provider while the woman was the nurturer. By the 1970s, the love revolution culminated with marriage losing its centrality in society and people stopped believing that marriage was a necessary step to lead fulfilling lives. After extensive research, Coontz specified four criteria that led to the breakdown of traditional marriage.
These four criteria are:
1. The belief that men and women are different in terms of sensibility, lifestyle and sexuality.
2. The ability of society to regulate an individual’s personal behaviour and punish them for nonconformity.
3. The combination of women’s economic dependence on men and men’s domestic dependence on women.
4. Unreliable birth control and fear of pregnancy.148
While Coontz’s theory applies to the Indian scenario as much as it does to the US, the way it plays out is quite different. Though marriage in India continues to play an important role in people’s lives, it is seeing a lot of change. The tradition of arranged marriage is breaking down as people choose to marry for love rather than for religious, caste, family or economic reasons. For the first time in thousands of years, India is going through a unique love revolution in which young people are taking the marriage decision into their own hands and choosing to marry for love. According to a study by the International Institute for Population Sciences and Population Council that conducted interviews with 51,000 married and unmarried young men and women from six states—Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu—77 per cent of unmarried women think they should be able to take their own decisions about marriage.149
Let’s look at India’s love revolution more closely by applying each of Coontz’s points to the Indian scenario.
1) The belief that men and women are different in terms of sensibility, lifestyle and sexuality.
The Victorian stipulations of the Raj-era that men and women are inherently different and should move in separate spheres are under attack. Till just a decade ago, single-sex Catholic convent schools were regarded as the height of educational excellence attended by the children of the elite. Today, many of the premier schools and colleges in India’s urban centres are co-educational. Likewise, as Gita Aravamudan points out in her book, Unbound: Indian Women at Work, ever since Indian women began entering the workplace in significant numbers in the 1950s and 1960s, social attitudes towards them began changing in a number of ways. Men began wanting wives who were educated. After independence, new work opportunities came around which required men to move away from their hometowns and joint families. Without the support of a joint family, women were forced to leave their homes and undertake chores that their office-going husbands had no time for. As women left the confines of their homes, they discovered an attractive world and the advantages of economic freedom. A silent, almost unnoticed ‘revolution’ was occurring in the middle class and, suddenly, educated women were seen as financial assets by men. Women began entering the market force in large numbers as nurses, teachers, stenographers and bank clerks. These working women, exposed to industry, had higher aspirations for their daughters who grew up and took the work force by storm. By the 1970s women were working alongside their male counterparts in the corporate and public sectors.
With the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s, new avenues of employment presented themselves to women. These new opportunities were not segregated by sex and included positions in call centres, software comp
anies, biotechnology and the new media. The autonomy of middle-class women transformed the traditional Indian family as girls were encouraged to get an education and a job. The Indian IT-BPO industry pioneered employment for women and, more than any other industry in the country, promoted the interests of women in the workplace. Today, the IT industry has a larger proportion of women employees as compared to other sectors. The coming together of men and women in the workplace, and their changing roles in society generally, has severely dented any existing notions that they are vastly different from each other.
2) The ability of society to regulate an individual’s personal behaviour and punish them for nonconformity.
The ability of family, relatives, government and neighbours to regulate personal behaviour is eroding quickly in India. There is an increasing pattern of migration where young people are moving away from families to study and work, choosing to live alone in urban areas, free from family regulations and pressure. A 2010 McKinsey Global Institute study on ‘India’s Urban Awakening’ predicts that 590 million people, about 40 per cent of the country’s population will live in cities by 2030, and 70 per cent of net new employment will occur in cities; up from 340 million in 2008 (30 per cent of the population).
The pattern of urbanization and migration has allowed for far more anonymity in personal life, and less penalization for personal choices, as young people live and operate far from the watchful eyes of their families, relatives or communities. Age-old institutions such as the village councils or khap panchayats that regulate individual and societal behaviour are slowly losing favour, particularly amongst the youth, who would rather move away from small towns and villages than suffer these stifling regulations.
