India in Love

by Ira Trivedi

  Gopalji uses a few important points to guide the matchmaking process. He explains his method to me. The most important criteria for eligibility on both the boy’s side and the girl’s side is wealth. Caste is no longer the be all and end all of arranged marriages, explains Gopalji. It is perhaps not even a starting point. Wealth defines caste, and people want to marry into a family of equal prosperity. People prefer to stay within their communities, although communities have become fairly inclusive. So Aggarwals are happy to marry Gujaratis, Marathas, Jains, or Marwaris. Punjabis will marry Sindhis because they have a similar mentality.

  I ask Gopalji what the average age of marriage at A to Z is. Gopalji says that over the past decade, the age is increasing for girls and boys. ‘Today, the average age for marriage of girls is twenty-six, for boys, it is twenty-eight. Five years ago, the average age for girls was twenty-three, and for boys, it was twenty-six.’ Gopalji says the timeline for marriage is completely random. ‘Sometimes it happens instantaneously, the decision is taken at the first meeting, sometimes it takes a few years to get a girl married. That is why I ask families to start looking for their children, especially for their daughters, once they turn twenty-two. Girls begin to lose their innocent looks after twenty-five, and then it is very difficult for me to find anyone for them.’

  Gopalji often mentions ‘innocent looks’. If a girl is especially pretty, he won’t say that she has a nice face, or even nice skin if she is fair. He will just say in admiration, ‘What an innocent face’. I ask him what he means, and he isn’t able to put it in words. ‘Innocent just means innocent, like a small baby.’ I wonder if this is part of the Indian obsession with virginity and purity.

  According to Gopalji, for the girl’s side, the second most important thing is the boy’s career. Gopalji divides his clients into two broad categories—professionals and businessman. He usually matches people within these categories, because they possess the same ‘family culture’. If the father owns a business the children either work in the family business, or set up their own. If the father is a professional, then the kids are usually professionals too. It is rare for these two categories to join in matrimonial alliance. It isn’t that one is preferable over the other, but rather that everyone seems to want to marry their own kind—doctors want doctors, engineers want engineers, and businessmen want businessmen.

  From the boy’s perspective, the third criteria is looks. The girl should be good looking, especially if the boy is wealthy. Usually, girls are more willing to compromise on the looks of the boy. Family matters to the girl. It is important to see the mentality of the family. How is the mother-in-law? Will she let you go out of the house? If the girl likes to wear jeans and short skirts, will she be allowed to do that after marriage? If she is an independent-minded, working girl, will she be able to cope with a restrictive mother-in-law?

  Gopalji’s clients primarily consists of upper-middle class Punjabi and Marwari families. Different religious groups like Parsis, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians have their own marriage brokers. Gopalji’s most coveted clients are boys between the ages of twenty-four to twenty-eight—in the prime of their marital youth, because these are the most in demand. His least favourite clients are girls (though they are hardly girls anymore) above thirty-three—because he has the most trouble marrying them off. He has recently started charging a premium for registering female clients northwards of thirty.

  When I ask Gopalji if he arranges matches between north and south Indians, he looks at me incredulously: north and south Indians never consider each other in an arranged setup. Though they may come from the same caste, their cultures and customs are too disparate. South Indians have their own marriage brokers. He has had over 20,000 clients in a decade as a marriage broker, but never has a south Indian person registered with him.

  After Gopalji shortlists potential matches, he hands the baton over to the parents. ‘Parents are very smart. They shortlist three or four boys. They don’t pressurize the girl for one boy. They do the initial filtration, and the girl or the boy makes the final choice. This is good because parents observe many things, whereas the children are only interested in ego satisfaction. The family see the big picture, not the small things like the girls and boys do. Girls will say, ‘Oh, his hair is less; we don’t want to marry him.’ Or the boy will say, ‘Her skin is dark; I won’t marry her.’ The parents know their children best, and they can make better decisions for them.’

  Gopalji’s formula has been carefully developed and is time-tested. It is based on a few solid principles. The first is that the two families must meet before the girl and the boy do. For a first meeting it is standard for two entire families including grandparents, siblings and even close relatives to meet. ‘If I ever have the kids meet first, I have gotten totally failed. It has been a total flop show. The parents have to meet first because they consider everything: money, education, values, and they can motivate the kids accordingly. Let me tell you an example. There were two families, Marwaris and Sindhis, and they like each other’s biodatas. But I knew that this would never work because all Marwaris think Sindhis are snakes. I insisted that the families meet first so that they could see if they gelled. The parents met three times, and then the children. The kids had twenty-six meetings for twenty-six days, not skipping even a day. They observed each other carefully. They went to a bar; how much does the other person drink? What is the temperament after they drink? What kind of behaviour does he display when he is sad? How does she behave during her monthlies? Finally, they got married, and today they are happily married.’

  Typically, Gopalji first meets both families individually, usually at their homes, so he can gauge their standard of living. He also likes to meet ‘those in question’ so that he can assess their personality types. If he feels that the two families, and those in question are compatible, then he organizes a joint meeting, always at the boy’s side house. It is important for the girl’s side to see the boy’s home because this is where their daughter will live after marriage. After this initial meeting, the boy and girl are allowed to meet alone without supervision, though Gopalji carefully tracks their meeting and progress. If all goes well and everyone likes each other, then marriage discussions ensue. These negotiations are around how much the girl’s family will spend on the wedding. Dowry, the act of giving or taking money or material assets from the bride during the time of marriage, is legally banned in India, yet it proliferates abundantly, albeit in a new form. Gopalji helps me understand.

  Typically the first question that Gopalji will ask the family of the bride is how much they are willing to spend on the wedding. He then shares this number with other party, who then consider if the proposed wedding budget matches their ‘status’. If not, then Gopalji will try to extract more money from the girl’s side. The higher the ‘wedding budget’ and the more willing the girl’s side is to spend on the wedding, the better the prospective grooms they can bag.

  Money, Gopalji assures me, is hardly ever a problem. The purchasing power of the urban middle and upper-middle classes has increased tremendously (he relates it mostly to escalating land prices). Besides, a big wedding shows that a family has arrived.

  STAR-CROSSED LOVERS

  Gopalji’s two least favourite people in the office are the two ‘astro-boys’, as he calls them, whose main job is to match birth charts with the help of efficient computer software. It isn’t that he particularly dislikes them, it is more that he dislikes astrology in general, and he feels a great deal of pain in paying monthly salaries to his two astro-boys because so many parents insist on matching the birth charts of prospective grooms and brides.

  When it comes to astrology, even the most educated people can be surprisingly superstitious. A friend of mine, a perfectly rational and intelligent student of science who studied at Stanford and then Harvard, refused to even meet a boy if their birth charts did not match. Then she fell in love with a man who was manglik, a man whose unfortunate alignment of stars made him somewhat
of an astrological leper. She finally convinced her parents of the virtues of the man she hoped to be her husband, and they reluctantly blessed the star (un)crossed lovers. Could an alignment of the stars at the time of our birth dictate our future? Human beings have nearly touched the stars, how could we then let the inter-galactic forces dictate our future?

  The day that I turned twenty-five, an astrologer was unleashed on me too. To assuage their anxieties about my delayed marriage, my parents called an astrologer who plugged in my time and place of birth into his computer which threw up a quick astrological chart and told my parents that I would not get married for the next five years. My parents were infuriated by his analysis and they ordered the ‘fraud’ out of the house.

  ‘The truth is that astrology is a long lost science and only 1 per cent of the astrologers know what they are talking about. Today, astrology is mostly used by fakes to make a quick buck and for parents to make excuses when they don’t like a proposal,’ declares Gopalji. It appears that astrology has other purposes too. ‘If parents, especially the girl’s side, really like a match then they will make fake birth charts so that they match.’

  It is clear that astrology plays an inordinately important role in the marriage discussion, often making or breaking alliances. The practice of astrology is deep-set in the Hindu tradition, and it forecasts events in a person’s life based on planetary influences. The underlying philosophy behind astrology is that your past life’s karma dictates your present life. The importance of astrology can be revealed by glancing at newspaper matrimonial ads, many of which boast that the prospective bride/groom is ‘non manglik’ because being manglik or under the effect of the evil planet Mars is an unfortunate circumstance in the matrimonial market.

  To find out more about what all the fuss is about, I speak to K. N. Rao, a well-known astrologer, author and founder member of the world’s largest school of astrology based in New Delhi. I meet Rao in his small apartment in the suburbs of Delhi. In a crowded office, the wizened Rao, with his snow-white beard and eyes clouded over with age, holds court. There are lots of people here; mostly middle-aged couples who have come to pose questions to Rao. I wait my turn while a worried couple inquires about their daughter’s troubled marriage. Next up is an older couple who declare that their family is going through a bad financial period, and wish to know when it will end. All this while there is a cricket match on television, which Rao turns attentively to from time to time. Rao is well known for his accurate predictions of the Indian cricket team’s performance.

  Finally, it’s my turn and we begin talking. When Rao was growing up (he is eighty-six now) kundlis (birth charts) were not matched with the same sort of fervour as they are today. Marriages were conducted within the caste, community, and most commonly between families who lived close by. Birth charts were typically matched only at the time of marriage to find a propitious muhurta or date and time of the marriage ceremony so that it could be performed under the most beneficial planetary energies.

  Rao declares that it was only in post-colonial India that astrology began to play an important role in the matrimonial process. As families moved away from their ancestral villages in search of better prospects, it became harder to make informed matches, and that’s when astrologers began playing an important role. Today, when so many marriages are being arranged through the newspaper and internet, often families know nothing about each other, so they turn to astrology—stoked by the fear of the unknown. Because of this fear, which has only risen with the climb in divorce rates, a whole industry has sprung up to match horoscopes and prescribe expensive pujas to solve future problems.

  Rao strongly believes that most self-proclaimed pandits/astrologers are frauds and they use astrology to promote superstition and make money. For example, if two birth charts do not match, then often the man or woman is married first to a tree or pot, and then to his bride/groom. In recent times, this method made headlines when it was reported that actress Aishwarya Rai was first married to a tree before she married Abhishek Bachchan because of a peculiarity in her birth chart.194 After this celebrity marriage made national headlines, many other young ladies were married to trees before their ‘real’ weddings.

  During the last seventy years of his practice as an astrologer, Rao has come across people with well-matched horoscopes living in unhappy marriages, and ill-matched horoscopes living in peaceful marriages. An ideal match, he says, is based on social, financial and emotional reasons. An astrologer, based on the insights provided by horoscopes, can at best counsel a couple on ways of building a fulfilling marriage, but cannot predict the future, especially in these modern, ‘egotistical’ times. However, as in the olden days, astrology can also be used to calculate the most auspicious wedding time.

  Scholar Rochona Majumdar who studies matrimony in her book, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal, supports Rao’s theory, and wonders whether the growing importance of astrology is because people are getting married with less information than they would have ideally liked about their partner. She writes, ‘It is possible that in the absence of detailed genealogical information, knowledge that at least the stars were favourable to a prospective match comforted anxious parents. The urban astrologer in Calcutta owed his existence, in part at least, to this condition.’195

  TROUBLE IN PARADISE

  One slow, blisteringly hot and hopelessly slow summer day, with no electricity in the office, Gopalji’s distress is palpable. His distress, unlike mine, is not related to the temperature. Gopalji has lost a key client, and he is furious. Facebook has emerged as a major problem in the marriage brokerage business; I have heard this from more than one broker. Matchmaking is all about access, and it is through Gopalji that parents get access to information. Now networks like Facebook give direct access, taking away some of the broker’s advantage.

  Gopalji explains, ‘I introduced two parties. The girl’s side was very wealthy, but the girl wasn’t very good looking. She was dark-skinned and fat, and she was having some trouble finding a match. The boy was very handsome and a professional, but the status of his family was nowhere close to that of the girl’s side. The girl’s side rejected the boy’s side. The girl’s father gave me a cheque and told me to bring him matches and to work very hard on this case. During this time, the boy added the girl on Facebook and started liking her comments. They started doing things behind the scenes while I was hunting for matches for the girl. Then suddenly one day I find out from someone that the fat girl and the handsome boy are getting married. They didn’t tell me, even though I was the one who introduced them. The girl’s father told me that it was a ‘love marriage!’ And now those cheap bastards, the boy’s side, won’t pay me, and even the girl’s side is not giving me the entire payment.’

  When it rains, it pours; as if Gopal’s mood weren’t sour enough, one of his big-ticket clients, a girl’s side party that owns a large chewing-tobacco company has cancelled a meeting, declaring that the girl has ‘female problems’, implying her period. Gopalji is apoplectic, so angry that the crown of his bald head has turned a peony pink. He had been thrilled when the parents of the two parties had agreed to take the matter forward. He had organized a meeting between the girl and the boy at a coffee shop in Delhi, and they were set to meet today—in exactly two hours. The ‘female problem’ excuse seems spurious to me. I wonder what had really happened. Has the young girl got cold feet?

  Gopalji looks crestfallen, all the frustration has worn the poor man thin. Now he just seems afraid of losing business from the boy’s side. He shrugs and looks at me glumly, ‘Probably she got some better proposal. This marriage market is like the stock market, very volatile, you have to close deals quickly or they escape your hands.’

  ♦

  Independent Contact for proposal for moderately fair, good looking, only son 5’11” Lking for smart, homely, height not less than 5’4” not desirous of working, qualified, lively, age between 24-26. Boy Divorcee, but only son of parents.
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  ‘The baraat was big and grand, with horses, elephants, and even camels. We made both the grandmothers sit on top of a rath (carriage) so they would not miss a thing. We didn’t ask the girl’s family for anything, no dowry, no wedding budget. When the girl left, they filled a Toyota Innova with her stuff and left. That is how little the girl brought when she came to us. The girl’s side were from Haryana, so during the marriage we bought a car with Haryana license plates, so it looked like they brought something,’ said Mr Gupta, speaking of his son’s recent wedding and subsequent divorce.

  I am at the home of the Guptas with Gopalji, posing as his associate. The Guptas are in the market for a new bride for their thirty-year-old-son who has separated from his wife and has recently filed for divorce. The divorce papers have not yet been signed, but the frantic search for a bride has already begun.