prasad1
Active member
I just read an illuminating and frankly frightening piece by Dipti Jain and Tadit Kundu on how Indian women marry – or rather how their decision to do so is made. What was illuminating was that only half of the women who were married as of 2011-12 had any interaction with their future spouse. The term ‘interaction’ is used loosely to include anything from a meeting to a phone call to an email to the girl simply being shown a picture of her betrothed. A dating app allows its users a more rigorous selection process when choosing a one-night stand than most parents in India seem to be bothered with when finding their daughters their one and only.
What was frightening in all of this was that the survey included women in the age group of 15-32. I do not have children but my toes curl at the thought of my 13-year-old niece having just two more years of freedom from household chores and childbirth. The idea that if she were from a family just a little different from mine her mother and i would not be sitting here feeling sick for the many nameless little girls being married off but instead discussing the who, where, when and how to pay for her forthcoming nuptials.
But this is India, a country where teenage pregnancy, something that can be easily and discreetly reversed, can ruin a family’s ‘good name’ but where a teenage marriage is absolutely fine. But let’s come back to the premise of the article – the fact that regardless of age most Indian women know nothing about the person they will marry. And while urban women may have a speck more freedom we still seem to be going about marriage like our rural sisters.
When i got married i didn’t ask any questions. I was so relieved to have finally been asked that i didn’t discuss what marriage would mean for us as a couple. Sure i had seen more than a picture of my future husband, we lived together for three years, but what else did i know? I had never met his family and we never discussed how we would plan our financial future or if kids would enter the picture. Re-reading all of this makes me wonder how different most of us educated folks are from those families that send their teenage girls off into the blue. The answer is not very.
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatime...&utm_campaign=TOInewHP&utm_medium=Widget_Stry
What was frightening in all of this was that the survey included women in the age group of 15-32. I do not have children but my toes curl at the thought of my 13-year-old niece having just two more years of freedom from household chores and childbirth. The idea that if she were from a family just a little different from mine her mother and i would not be sitting here feeling sick for the many nameless little girls being married off but instead discussing the who, where, when and how to pay for her forthcoming nuptials.
But this is India, a country where teenage pregnancy, something that can be easily and discreetly reversed, can ruin a family’s ‘good name’ but where a teenage marriage is absolutely fine. But let’s come back to the premise of the article – the fact that regardless of age most Indian women know nothing about the person they will marry. And while urban women may have a speck more freedom we still seem to be going about marriage like our rural sisters.
When i got married i didn’t ask any questions. I was so relieved to have finally been asked that i didn’t discuss what marriage would mean for us as a couple. Sure i had seen more than a picture of my future husband, we lived together for three years, but what else did i know? I had never met his family and we never discussed how we would plan our financial future or if kids would enter the picture. Re-reading all of this makes me wonder how different most of us educated folks are from those families that send their teenage girls off into the blue. The answer is not very.
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatime...&utm_campaign=TOInewHP&utm_medium=Widget_Stry
