Whose shaadi is it anyway?

by Maanvi

Usually, I don’t begin newsletters with a disclaimer. But seeing that any discussion on arranged marriages quickly devolves into a chaotic debate no one asked for, let me start this newsletter with one anyway - this is not an essay on arranged marriage vs love marriage. One of the reasons being, because I am not qualified to talk about either. But mostly because this debate is, quite frankly, boring. Some arranged marriages are great. Some love marriages are also great. You will be a fierce advocate of either depending on how you choose to get married. If you don’t want to get married, you will sit on the sidelines — maybe with a tub of popcorn. Congratulations to all involved, thank you and good night.

(Okay not good night, dear reader, I hope you are still reading.)

So to conclude, no this newsletter is not adding to that noise. What I am interested in — thanks to the return of Sima Auntie to our Netflix (and our hearts?) — is looking at how arranged marriage works, and what it says about how Indian women are supposed to be. Think of this as a detective picking apart the concept of arranged marriages. More Miss Marple than Hercule Poirot though.

1. The Biodata
As Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking and Sima Auntie informs us, this is the first step in the arranged marriage process. All of you - your personality, your education, your bad jokes, your achievements - condensed on a few pages. Of course, a bio data is different from a dating app bio. So what takes precedence are markers of your existence that you have no control over. Like, your caste, your religion, your community, and your date of birth. If arranged marriages were a tall tower of cake - indulge my baking metaphor here, please - then these are the spongy cake base upon which the whole thing stands.

While some people choose to go the arranged marriage route by discarding these filters and others choose to modernise the whole thing (hi, iitiimshaadi.com!), it’s hard to really let go of these traditional filters. So, if you don’t believe in caste or religion, where do you go from here? 

2. The Criteria
Here’s a fun fact about myself: I don’t fully know how tall I am. I know I am somewhere between 5’3 and 5’4, but if you hold me to a gunpoint and ask my height, I will…probably lie my way out. Which is why the usual criteria for finding a suitable girl or a suitable boy baffle me. Strict specifications on height and weight for a potential partner almost feels like we are commodifying human beings. Add on to a dash of “fair-skinned” criteria, and we really are looking at goods in a market, aren’t we?

Thanks to a bit of my unofficial research on arranged marriage Reddit subs, another criteria which is of vital importance is salary. Numbers are traded, calculations made, percentages calculated… tell me again how this is not a commodification?

3. The Choice: At the heart of arranged marriages is the question of choice. Who is making the choice on who you get married to? Arranged marriages say that the choice firmly lies with your parents, or your family. So marrying then, becomes not a personal choice that you make, but a social one. From the point of view of society, and especially when it comes to young women, the biggest threat to arranged marriages is not “love,” but freedom. If more and more young women exercise their freedom to marry who they want - which might be a choice not affected by caste, religion, or community - then it’s a strike out for her agency. What can she do next? Decide to live life on her own terms? The way she wants to?

4. The Verdict: Arranged marriage is a market. And like all markets, to enter it, you have to play by the rules. Which for young women means to conform to an ideal that can be restrictive - rules for height, weight, income and of course, the desirable adjectives. (Does “homely” mean someone who prefers to stay at home rather than party it up on Saturday, you think?)

So, arranged marriage, thumbs up or down? I will rely on the disclaimer to get out of giving a decisive verdict. But from where I am standing - with my single woman Miss Marple glasses - I can’t help but ask: why do we even need arranged marriages?

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