Marriage of games & chores

Aditya Sinha
First Published : 16 Jan 2010 12:53:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 16 Jan 2010 01:05:04 AM IST

Yesterday, the day after Sankranti/Pongal/Bihu/Lohri, saw not just the solar eclipse but also was my 20th wedding anniversary. In 1990 I, a Bihari raised in the UK and the USA, married an Assamese girl in New Delhi (we now live in Chennai). Ours was a love marriage. As one of my university friends told me: “In America, you fall in love and then you marry; in India, you marry and then you fall!” My mother was possibly interested in arranging my marriage so that she could choose a proper Bihari slave to torment, but I had ideas of my own.

I met my wife at office, at the newspaper where I started my career (and the newspaper that, Voldemort-like, shall not be named). After two years of cavorting we got married (because of a thick fog covering north India from my native Muzaffarpur to the wedding venue in Delhi, I was late to my own wedding); and then the real adventure began. A friend of my wife’s recently read Chetan Bhagat’s 2 States and said throughout the book she not only could not stop laughing but was continually reminded of my wife and I (though I’m sure our life can never be as poorly written as anything Bhagat pens. Even his columns for the newspaper-that-shall-not-be-named are banal). I have not read the book, but the synopsis on the official website says Indian marriages are not as simple as boy-meets-girl, but instead pass through various phases including boy’s-family-falls-in-love-with-girl’s-family. In our case, however, it was more like boy-bullies-both-families-into-acquiescence.

If our marriage has lasted two decades, then I can humbly attribute two reasons for this: one, Assamese people are fairly laid-back; and two, my mother lives on the other side of the planet. Or possibly it is because of the nature of our life together: if a marriage is a mix of games and chores, then a lasting marriage is perhaps a proper mix of the two. Or maybe we work hard at the marriage because I want to prove a point to my mother: she, bitter for a variety of reasons, always blamed her fate on the well-meaning gentleman who proposed the alliance to her father; and she once taunted me by saying, “Who would you blame?” if my marriage went sour since I had chosen my own mate. This has convinced me, so far, of one of the downsides of purely arranged marriages (as opposed to the modern arranged-love marriages): if there’s a third party to blame, then why work hard on your marriage? And the fact is, a marriage takes a lot of hard work. Some couples don’t want to do the hard work, but then those couples ought not to be surprised when they find their children utterly resistant to marriage. (Conversely, I have seen men dying to get married because, as they claimed, their own parents looked so happy).

The other thing that is bothersome about arranged marriages (though I can’t complain if the youngsters prefer it) is the endogamy. It isn’t restricted to India: one of my high school chums was Abe Roth, whose mother was Japanese and father was Jewish of European descent. The parents were both artists, and I always enjoyed visiting them. Abe’s father was one of three brothers, and his father’s parents were not that thrilled when he married a non-Jew. Fortunately for them, the other two sons married Jewish girls. As it turned out, the other brothers were divorced, and Abe’s parents had the only marriage that survived (we all laughed at the irony). Similarly, of my brother, my sister and I, the only one who was forced to marry a Bihari was my sister, and the only one now divorced is my sister. This particularly Indian obsession is a national affliction: a Chennai friend is so worried about getting her mid-20s daughter married that her husband secretly buys a magazine that is apparently a matrimonial for Tamil Brahmins; secretly because if the girl knew, she’d throw a fit. Even with such a niche magazine, finding a match is not easy: apparently a Mylapore TamBram may be too snooty for a TamBram from K K Nagar. In my friends’ defence, they do not insist on their son, in his early 30s and a professional in the US, marry a TamBram (though that’s not to say they haven’t tried desperately); they just insist he get married. The mother says, “Anyone, as long as she’s not Chinese”, which amuses me since I have joked to my in-laws for two decades that they belong to a part of India that was actually stolen from China.

Of course, many argue that endogamy is necessary for those whose economic situation is tenuous; also, that endogamy is vital for cultural protection. Really. Urbanisation is rapidly changing India, from offering middle class youngsters more job options (ask yourself how many whom you know want to sit for civil service exams) to making joint family households a memory for fewer and fewer of us (I lived in a joint family from age seven to ten; it was an exhilarating experience that my children will never know). The idea of cultural vulnerability is also silly: you can learn to enjoy Crème Brulée while still loving your morning Pongal. And though I can claim no scientific evidence, I have come to believe that marriages outside one’s community, ethnicity or even race generally produce good-looking and bright children. India might even make an interracial offspring its prime minister one day.

Though, as with everything else, there are important advantages to cultural similarity. In my own case, it is a sense of humour; ours is a particularly Indian one. We find some Western inter-personal humour crude (for which they call us thin-skinned), whereas they don’t understand the nuances of teasing (which can range from flirtatious to cruel). One could argue against this generality, but there are some cultural chasms that are difficult to bridge, though they aren’t vital to a healthy relationship. And if there is another reason I can give for my marriage having lasted two decades, I can say this: it is because my wife and I share a sense of humour. So on that note, I wish her a very happy anniversary, and I tell her: let’s keep our fingers crossed.

editorchief@expressbuzz.com

About The Author;

Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The New Indian Express’ and is based in Chennai