Not for arranged marriage

SUNETRA CHOUDHURY
October 6, 2013

I think it was the picture of the young woman and her young man that really firmed up my position on this subject. It sounds really cliched but she looked like the girl next door, she looked like she could have been my friend telling me how her family doesn’t like her boyfriend. The girl with a PLU name, Nidhi Barak, didn’t live next door but she did live right next to Delhi, in Rohtak. As much as we could identify with Nidhi’s life story — girl meets boy, they fall in love, their families disapprove of it — her death took us back to another age, and maybe to some Taliban-dominated country. The fine arts student was lynched and cremated in public by her family and her boyfriend was beheaded. For falling in love.

We blamed the khap panchayat for its constant diktats against same-gotra love, same-village love; we rightly blamed the parents and they were arrested for this never-in-a-million-years-will-we-forget lesson against love; we blamed the politicians who silently encourage these khaps; but I think, that much of the blame lies with us, for still treating love marriage as abnormal and arranged as the norm. And every time one of us, educated, supposedly independent, individuals agrees to marry someone not of our own choosing, someone we don't love, we are silently condoning those who kill to oppose the concept of love marriage.

I know the arguments for an arranged marriage but what surprises me is how common and normal it still is. When a journalist I know recently got married, I asked her where she met her husband. She hesitated and said a little apologetically, “No, it’s an arranged marriage.” She looked a little wary and I remember telling her being married was quite fun; she said, “Is it?” We didn’t talk more and I didn’t want to intrude but I really couldn’t figure out why she would agree if she was so uncertain.

Could it be that our tradition of listening to elders in our family is just getting the better of us? Maybe, we are confusing the need to respect and take care of them with putting our lives in their hands. After all, isn’t the right to choose our partner the most basic right of us as individuals? Isn’t it an exercise of free will that we have a responsibility to fulfil? And when we give it up to make our parents happy, we aren’t just being lazy about asserting our independence, we are trying to be ‘good’, unlike those who bad, wayward people who marry out of choice and for love.
for full text  http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/not-for-arranged-marriage/article5204945.ece