India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  The economic boom in India has resulted in the rise of national and multi-national companies, banks and other impersonal institutions that do not hire based on sex, caste, religion or marital status, making it easier than ever before to lead anonymous lives free from the pressures of family and society. Anonymity also increases with the help of technology. Gone are the days of trunk calls and surreptitious love letters. Cell phones have greatly increased the ability of the individual to control his/her fate and be freed from societal restraints.

  3) The combination of women’s economic dependence on men and men’s domestic dependence on women.

  The dreams of the Indian woman are piercing through the walls of the kitchen and the living room, leaving behind rubble, glass and other debris. More women are working than ever before and becoming financially independent. The prevalence of women in the workplace is 30 per cent in metropolitan areas—with a 10 per cent increase in just the past year. According to a recent survey by the Centre for Work-Life Policy, more than 80 per cent of the women surveyed said they wanted top jobs and were prepared to work hard for them.

  Women’s income has also risen contributing to the ‘girl power’ economy. According to a recent survey by the Indian Market Research Bureau (IMRB) the average monthly income of women living and working in urban areas in India increased from 4,492 in 2001 to 9,457 in 2010. There has been a huge growth in savings accounts owned by women in the last few years—14 million in 2007 to 29 million in 2011, and also a 78 per cent growth in women credit card owners in the last four years.150

  The effect of consumerism too has been a game-changer for women. The marketplace is flooded with gadgets like microwaves, washing machines, ovens, etc. that have decreased the time and labour spent on household chores. Most middle-class households have a fridge and, increasingly, washing machines. Day-care centres and pre-schools have increased options for child-care; this is particularly important for women in urban nuclear families. The freedom of Indian women to make their own decisions has also increased, shaping marketing and branding trends. It is estimated that ‘the percentage of women who made decisions about buying household durables like washing machines, refrigerators, cars, etc. has gone up from 15 per cent to 20 per cent in the last few years.’151

  Men too benefit from the easy availability of sophisticated white goods and are becoming less dependent on women. Bachelorhood has become easier than ever before, and even married men are beginning to take on more household responsibilities. A popular Indian chef, Sanjeev Kapoor, in an interview in The Guardian newspaper said, ‘Twenty years ago if you said you cooked, people would ask what was wrong with you. Now it is the opposite.’ Close to 49 per cent of the visitors to his website are male—a 20 per cent increase from just two years ago.152

  I observe too that many of the young working men that I come across prefer to eat a lunch of fast food—pizzas, burgers and sandwiches—rather than a meal cooked by mothers or wives.

  Couples marry (and stay married) when the gains of marriage exceed the gains of being single. In the past, these economic gains would allow advantages to both partners and traditionally centred around women having an economic advantage at home doing household work, and men generating income by going to work (or working in the field). Today, this has changed, and much of what was once produced at home by women can be purchased or produced by men. Women, like men, can do income-generating work. This decreases the gains from marriage. At the same time, increasing leisure time and disposable income, along with the changing landscape of sexual relationships potentially raises the opportunity cost of being single. All in all, marriage is not as economically viable as it once used to be. Changes in tastes, technology, and institutional and legal environments have decreased gains from marriage.153

  4) Unreliable birth control and fear of pregnancy.

  Various studies show that once the fear of pregnancy disappears, women’s sexual conduct becomes unconstrained and sex, particularly premarital sex, becomes freer. In India, abortion is legal and there are no social sanctions against the practice. Birth control is based on efforts largely sponsored by the Indian government as a measure for population control and contraceptive devices have been freely and openly available in India. Contraceptive usage has more than tripled—from being used by 13 per cent of married women in 1970 to 48 per cent in 2009.154 Over-the-counter birth control pills are cheaply and widely available.

  Nandan Nilekani, in his book Imagining India, delves into the history of birth control in India. He writes, ‘As the global panic around population growth surged, the Indian and Chinese governments began executing white-knuckle measures of family planning in the 1960s’.155 This reached its zenith in the mid-1970s with the announcement of the Emergency. Sanjay Gandhi made male sterilization his baby and the programmes he threw his weight behind were responsible for nearly eight million sterilizations, millions of them forced. A New York Times article from 1982 speaks about India’s national birth control programmes launched by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi:

  Prime Minister Indira Gandhi proclaimed February as ‘family welfare month.’ Billboards equating the ‘small family, happy family,’ were put up in every state, and radio programs advocated family planning.

  The major reason for the campaign is that India’s census last year counted 684 million people, 12 million more than demographers had predicted. Subsidized birth control pills and condoms are being distributed, but most of the emphasis has been on sterilizations.

  Most of those turning up at the medical camps are women who receive $22 for submitting to a quick surgical closing of their Fallopian tubes. Men who get vasectomies are given $15. The difference in payments reflects the new emphasis on women as the key to family planning.156

  In India, there is a fifth factor that has aided the love revolution: Bollywood. Bollywood has been a major influence and in certain sections of society, the Indian family has become far more tolerant to the idea of love marriages with the dramatic rise in movies that show inter-communal or inter-class love stories. This has also become a frequent theme on sitcoms and reality shows on cable television. Cable television, with a penetration of 200 million, has also had a significant impact. From two channels in 1991, Indian viewers were exposed to more than fifty channels in 1996 because of new economic policies. Foreign channels imported foreign cultures and norms, and Western concepts of dating and love were unleashed on Indian minds. The simplicity and prudishness of the national channel Doordarshan was replaced by Star TV, MTV and a host of others, and American culture was served on the go to an entire generation.

  To find out more about how India’s love revolution is unique, I speak with author Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.

  ‘For better or for worse, the love match is here to stay,’ declares Coontz. ‘Whatever our own personal opinions are and whatever the strengths of the arranged marriage system may be, arranged marriage is not going to exist indefinitely in today’s globalized world.’

  In the West, the love revolution happened in two distinct steps. First, there was the development of market driven, individualistic, nuclear families because of economic and social processes; as a consequence, the prevailing economic and social systems which were the means to exercise control over young people began to erode. This created an environment ripe for the love revolution to play out in its second stage—with rising female independence, new jobs, access to birth control, etc.

  In India, though, everything is happening at the same time. The change in mindset that the family controls everything, the opening up of opportunities, the relaxation of social barriers, the creation of entertainment options, the easier mingling of sexes, access to birth control—everything is being churned together in one unholy mix.

  The one key difference is that in the West, by the second stage of the revolution, the ability of parents to control their children had been wiped out. That has not yet happened in India. Even though there is a trend
of young people wanting freedom from parents, and wanting Bollywood style romantic liaisons, they are also getting much more pushback than Western young women and men ever got. There are still many hangovers in rural and even urban parts of India of the old system of social production and reproduction, so the tensions that the love revolution creates are going to be much higher in India than they were in the West.

  I wonder how much of a role religion and the caste system have played in the Indian love revolution. Coontz explains, ‘Religion and the caste system are all intertwined. In the West, religion was intertwined with the development of marriage, but the religion there reflected more individualizing tendencies that led to the early development of the market economy. There was less cultural, religious, and socio-economic support for marriage in the West than there ever was in India.’

  Since arranged marriage is rooted in the major religions of the subcontinent such as Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Sikhism and even Indian versions of Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and religion is such an important force in India, how is this going to change? Coontz replies, ‘Throughout history, societies have adapted to social and economic change. Religious structures in a religion like Hinduism reflect a society where control over the young was important to reproduction because of the caste system. But Hinduism has always been evolving, and as the tide gets strong enough to turn it, religion will adapt. It won’t happen exactly like the Western model, but it will adjust to allow freedom in conjunction with its traditions.’

  ♦

  Over the past decade or so, the biggest change to India’s love story has been that romantic love has become a legitimate basis to wed. This has become a common experience amongst the urban, educated middle-class Indian. Essential to this love story is a Western-style consumerism and today in novels, films and television serials alike, young couples fall in love over coffee and movie dates, in malls and in exotic Western locales.

  The Bollywood movie today is the most telling aspect of how modern India sees love. Very often the hero and heroine exchange an English ‘I love you’ even as they fight for their romantic love against the wishes of their families.

  Displays of love too have seen an interesting journey in Bollywood films. Earlier, the kiss was considered to be a Western pollutant, and censor boards, filmmakers and even audiences saw the absence of kissing as upholding Indian culture and tradition. Over the last decade, this prudery is slowly disappearing and the kiss has become a common feature of Bollywood movies. For example, veteran filmmaker Yash Chopra depicts a long kiss in Mohabbatein (2000), when earlier he did not have a kiss even between an adulterous couple depicted naked in a bedroom sequence (Silsila, 1996). Most recently, in late 2012, Shahrukh Khan, India’s leading film star, who never kissed on screen for moral reasons, succumbed to public pressure and shared his first on-screen kiss with his co-star in the blockbuster Jab Tak Hai Jaan.

  India has had a rich, spectacular romantic past, and love, kama, ishq, pyaar, mohabbat, call it what you will, has always been an integral part of our cultural and historical past. Love in India may have taken on different names, forms and meanings, but it is the importance that Indian culture has given to love that has lent it richness. It is ironic then that a country like India that has recorded, celebrated and presented love in such a variety of forms shuns the concept of romantic love in modern times. Although the stigma associated with romance and love is decreasing, in many parts of India, there is still a grave threat to lovers and the love match.

  THE LOVE COMMANDOS

  When fiction bleeds into real life, the results are not as pretty, because as Kothari, Coontz, and numerous others point out, India is still far from ready to whole-heartedly embrace the concept of free love. This is where one of the unique by-products of this revolution has emerged: the Love Commandos.

  I alight from an auto and traverse the narrow alleys of Paharganj, a central Delhi marketplace known for its cheap hotels and backpackers. ‘Follow me’ beckons the Commando who will show me the way to the central office of the Love Commandos. He walks slowly, but in the whirr of sounds, sights and people, I lose him. I struggle to find him in the maze-like ancient alleys of what was, in the eighteenth century, Delhi’s principal grain market. Today, this is an urban marketplace, spilling over with people, automobiles and animals. I absorb the odours and bewildering sights and sounds as I walk past a shanty. I re-establish contact with my guide and follow him through a crowded market, past a shop featuring men’s Lux Cozi underwear and another one where a pair of lime-green draw-string pajamas with an ice-cream-cone-print takes up prime display space. I walk past a stable, which holds twenty albino mares with fast-blinking pink eyes, some of them decked out in colourful wedding paraphernalia. These are wedding horses, traditionally meant to be white and female, on which the groom will ride on his wedding day. I cross a hole-in-the wall police station (so tiny that it has room only for one police officer, one chair, and a beat-up phone) which is in curious contrast to a ‘Men’s western saloon’, a two-chair barber shop next door. The hulking Commando finally takes a left turn into a congested alley where an ancient woman with a shrivelled face is sitting on a cot peeling vegetables; another octogenarian next to her, wearing a pair of magnifying-glass-like spectacles is stringing together raakhis for the upcoming raksha bandhan festival—she gives me a toothless smile.

  The Commando leads me into a decrepit one-room shanty, with uneven bruise-coloured walls, riddled with stains, scars and scribbles. He declares that this is the head office of the Love Commandos. The twenty-square-foot room is unventilated and has an unidentifiable odour. The floor is caked with dust and littered with several shoe-print-stamped loose papers. A stack of dirt-covered books lines the walls and wires sprout from many corners. The main points of interest in the room are a flat-screen monitor, a computer, a smut-covered printer and a blinking internet router. I am a little taken aback. The Love Commandos’ website boasted a lot of media coverage, international and national, including the BBC, The Guardian, the Times, and a host of others. Most recently, they had been featured on the hugely popular television show, Satyamev Jayate, hosted by Bollywood celebrity Aamir Khan. I would have imagined that they would be operating with more resources.

  Taking up most of the office space is a corpulent Harsh Malhotra, who introduces himself as the Chief Coordination Officer. Next to him is a petite Sanjoy Sachdev, the emerald-eyed Chairman of the Commandos. They are dressed for the interview in crisp starched white linen kurta pajamas. A grimy plastic stool is dragged forward for me to sit on. A noisy air-cooler makes it difficult for me to hear what they have to say, but the electricity promptly goes off and that problem is solved. Candles are lit in the dark, windowless room even though it is bright and sunny outside.

  On the night of Valentine’s Day, 14 February 2010, Sanjoy Sachdev and Harsh Malhotra spent the night in jail. They had been arrested for protecting lovers against the wrath of right-wing Hindu groups. That night they decided to dedicate their lives to helping lovers and took the fate of India’s young lovebirds into their own hands. To deal with the inordinate number of honour killings that had been taking place, they started Love Commandos, an organization dedicated to helping lovebirds flee their pursuers. Their ultimate goal was to eliminate honour killings from the Indian landscape. Love Commandos is Chairman Sanjoy’s brainchild, and he speaks passionately and poetically about how love must be unequivocally protected.

  ‘People used to think we were mad. They captured us and threw us in jail. Do you know how many Valentine’s Days I have spent in jail? More than you have seen in your life!’

  ♦

  In a country with deep-seated traditions of patriarchy, casteism and family honour, falling in love across caste and community lines is difficult, and sometimes even life-threatening. Threats to the lives of lovers often come from their own families—families who believe they lose face in society by the romantic actions of their wayward kin and reports of honour killings of young lovers have b
ecome rather common in newspapers. These cases are often cloaked in obfuscation, with few legitimate sources and little evidence. In cases of inter-caste or inter-community romance, the risk of being killed is so great, especially in certain north Indian states, that the government has opened police shelters for runaway couples where they are offered protection against the brutality of their family members. ‘The Punjab and Haryana High Court receives as many as 50 applications per day from couples seeking protection. This is a staggering tenfold rise from about five to six applications a day five years ago’.157

  Despite the menacing odds, love and longing in the small towns of India is increasing like never before. Young men and women are braving centuries of social resistance and daring to fall in love across caste lines. ‘[A]nnually around 984 Dalits marrying non-Dalits get protection orders in runaway marriages’.158 About eight to ten establishments in Chandigarh conduct marriage ceremonies to provide the required certificate of marriage to the couple and a marriage arranger in a temple claimed that a temple in Punjab had solemnized 1,500 marriages over the last five years.159

  The Love Commandos’ main agenda is to rescue endangered couples from the wrath of families and bring them to the safety of their shelter in Delhi where they offer protection. Once the couples arrive at the shelter, Harsh and Sanjoy act as mediators, speaking with their parents, community leaders and politicians, negotiating terms and conditions for the return of the lovebirds to their homes. Sometimes they even perform marriage ceremonies for runaway couples. They tell me about several life-threatening missions that they have embarked on, in most cases to rescue the girl, who is forcefully held by her parents. I ask if I can accompany them on their next mission. They refuse, saying that my life would be under serious threat if I were to go with them. They point to the Commando who has led me here.

  ‘He is our Commando trainer. He is a black belt in martial arts! You have to train with him if you want to come!’ declares Harsh.