by Ira Trivedi
A lanky boy, dressed in a shiny black suit, claiming to be Shilpy’s brother, whispers in my ear, asking me if I want to ‘take something’. I know from his tone that this ‘taking’ pertains to alcohol. I do not want to have a drink, but I am curious to see what the offerings are. I follow him into a small bedroom with peeling walls and a single wooden bed. A bar has been set up on a small wooden dressing table where a bottle of Old Monk rum, another of Smirnoff vodka, and a few dusty bottles of Kingfisher beer are on display.
Shilpy has changed from her wedding sari into a bright sequinned salwaar-kameez. She wears red and white plastic bangles that extend up to her elbows—the sign of a newly married bride. I ask her about her future plans, perhaps a honeymoon? She tells me excitedly that they will be going to Lonavala, a hill station outside Mumbai. I ask her if she enjoyed her mass marriage experience. She says that she is sad that Shahrukh didn’t show up, but she didn’t mind having Vivek Oberoi as a stand-in. She tells me dreamily that she will be able to tell her children and her grandchildren that a film star attended her wedding.
I am surprised to hear that even though Shilpy’s is a love match, a dowry is expected from her family, especially since they did not host the wedding. Shilpy will take with her gold jewellery, a dining room set, a bed, a sofa, and an air-cooler when she moves to the house that she will live in with her husband and in-laws, where she will continue her life as a teacher.
At around 11 p.m., I leave Shilpy’s house, though there is no sign of the celebrations winding up. Bollywood music is blaring, and everyone is playing Antakshari. Many of the boys seem drunk to me, ‘taking drinks’ on the sly. I take an auto back to my hotel, a small derelict building that was advertised as a five-star hotel on the internet but, which I discover, is all of half a star.
I think back to the celebrations of the day. Marriage is an equalizer if there ever was one. In a country as diverse as India, the obsession with marriage is common to all—one of the few things crossing the lines of caste, wealth and social status. It is heartening to see so many people of different religions, castes, income levels, and from a range of professions including farmers, shopkeepers and school teachers, come together to celebrate what they believe is the biggest event of their lives. Nothing, not a medical camp nor an education programme, could have garnered Ravi Rana the goodwill that this event did.
As I navigate the alleys of a sleeping Amravati (except for, hopefully, 3,270 couples) I recall one particular incident from my eventful day. At the wedding kund where a painfully young boy was getting married to an equally juvenile girl, I had asked the boy why he was getting married. He had looked quizzically at his wife-to-be before turning to me with a wide-toothed grin and replying, ‘Because Papa say so.’ I then went and asked his Papa why marriage was so important. He gave me a questioning look. ‘Because it is.’ I persisted, trying to get a more convincing answer, but Papa wasn’t especially forthcoming. Finally, fed up, he weightily said: ‘Just because. This is the way that it was, this is the way it needs to be and this is the way it always will be.’
BREAK-UP
‘The Ideal Brahmin Marriage’ reads a large, garishly framed photograph of my elder sister’s wedding that takes up prime wall space in my grandfather’s living room in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh. My grandfather has served a hat-trick term as the president of the All-World Brahmin Samaja whose primary focus is to set up marriages. Dadaji is known in many circles as a matchmaker par excellence and, for as long as I can remember, I have found endless streams of eager parents accompanied by their single sons and nubile daughters in his living room. Today, the scene in my octogenarian grandfather’s living room is quite different. Dadaji, a lawyer by profession, is handling divorce with the same fervour and gusto as he once did marriage, and he is known in the same circles that lauded his matchmaking skills as a leading divorce counsellor.
On a recent visit, I found in my dadaji’s living room none other than my cousin Chintoo. Growing up, we all thought that Chintoo had some form of disability because he never participated in our games, he just sat in a corner and stared at us. He would never speak to us, only make strange sounds from time to time and occasionally hit us for no reason. When Chintoo went to college, got a job and married a girl of his parents’ choice, we were pleasantly surprised. Chintoo was normal after all. We were all shocked when, just a year after his marriage, Chintoo filed for divorce. It turned out that even after his nuptials, Chintoo had continued a romantic relationship with a long-time paramour whom his parents had not approved for marriage since she was not of the same caste. Following a digital trail, his new wife had caught Chintoo red-handed. To save face, Chintoo’s parents told the family that the girl had the affair, not Chintoo, but the truth was eventually revealed to us by my grandfather who was Chintoo’s chief counsel.
I ask grandfather if he finds divorce, especially in the case of someone like Chintoo, shocking since Dadaji himself is such a strong advocate of marriage.
‘No,’ is Dadaji’s tempered response. ‘It is part of Kalyug (the dark age predicted by the Hindu shastras). It is bound to happen, and it is my duty to deal with it,’ he says steadfastly. So many things have changed in his lifetime and Dadaji applies the same tactic to face divorce as he does to the rest of his life. He deals with all things in life unemotionally, with the head and not the heart, with the precision and temperament of a surgeon—whether he understands them or not.
Perhaps the only thing that remains unchanged in that living room, preserved with the sanctity of a shrine, is that picture of my sister Ishani and her husband posing with my grandfather, whose beaming smile is as bright as the klieg lights under which they stand.
♦
Growing up, I hardly knew any Indian kids whose parents were divorced. Divorce was seen as a big misfortune which happened in the rarest of cases. I had the chance to see divorce close up when my masi (my mother’s younger sister) got divorced after three years of marriage. Chhoti Masi had an arranged marriage to a man who lived in the US. Prima facie, he seemed well-to-do: he was an engineer at a large US corporate. However, when Chhoti Masi landed in the States after she was married, she was sent off to work loading trucks in a grocery store, to help with finances. When she quit her job, her in-laws and husband, who lived together in a one-bedroom flat, cruelly insulted her. Chhoti Masi gave the marriage everything she had, but eventually she returned to her parents’ home in India. After her divorce she felt like a social pariah, so she sequestered herself away from family and friends and turned to spirituality to assuage her woes.
As a kid, my parents spoke about Chhoti Masi in hushed tones, lest her fate influence us girls. When I hit marriageable age, my parents often warned me, ‘If you don’t get married, you’ll end up all alone like Babli.’ When I got really annoyed, I would tell them: ‘Well, if I get married to the wrong guy under pressure from you, then I may get divorced like Chhoti Masi too!’ This statement always led to a quick termination of the marriage discussion.
Today, things have changed substantially, and thousands of Indian women like Chhoti Masi are making matrimonial choices that their mothers and grandmothers could hardly have dreamt of. This is a drastic change in attitude when, just a generation ago, divorce was considered a family shame. Today, divorce is no longer the anathema that it once was. The increase in divorce rates and the accompanying loss of taboo is apparent in newspaper matrimonials where divorce columns are getting longer by the day, and with the mushrooming of matrimonial sites like Secondshaadi.com. Divorce has even become a staple feature of the hugely popular family dramas that play on television and have millions glued to their screens. In the popular soap Balika Vadhu (Child Bride), the main character Anandi’s divorce had viewers in tears, and her re-marriage to a handsome, suave government official had viewers celebrating and bursting firecrackers on the street.
For much of Indian history, divorce did not occur. Traditionally, Hindu weddings were not looked upon as merely a ceremony, but as a sacrosanc
t, religious act where multiple Hindu gods, the cosmos, the sun, the moon and the stars were all involved. Marriage is described in the shastras as a tradition where the body of the virgin bride merges into her husband’s permanently and eternally and they become a single entity. It a holy sacrament and the gift of a girl to a suitable person is a sacred duty of the father for which the father gets great spiritual benefit. As recently as 1970, the Allahabad High Court declared the institution of matrimony under the Hindu law as a sacrament, not just a legal contract.
There were so few instances of divorce in Hindu marriage, that there is no word for it in the Hindi language. When divorce did happen in the Hindu tradition, it occurred in extraordinary circumstances—when a spouse was discovered to be insane or impotent, or if he/she had decided to renounce the world. Ancient texts like the Naradasmriti allow women to remarry in certain situations: if the man is impotent or decides to become an ascetic. In Muslim marriages, an option for divorce or talaaq did exist, but the Prophet cautioned that it was what Allah hated the most, and that it should happen only in the rarest of circumstances.
Today, the scene has changed considerably. In the 1970s and 1980s, the divorce rate in India was insignificant, ranging from 0.2 per cent to 0.14 per cent and barely touching 1 per cent of the total population.226 An official national statistic on divorce is unavailable because divorce proceedings in India are dealt with at the state level, but the 2001 census (the last time a national divorce figure was available) estimated the national divorce rate to be as high as 7 per cent.227 Though this number may pale in comparison to the 50 per cent divorce rates of the US, what is significant is the steep increase.
Examining divorce rates in Indian cities will give us a better idea of the enormous increase. In Delhi, touted to be the divorce capital of India, an estimated 9,000 divorce cases are filed every year.228 This number is almost double of what was seen four years ago. In 2004, there were only two or three family courts; today there are seventeen. In Mumbai, the financial capital of the country, over the past decade, the number of divorces has increased by 86 per cent.229 Since 1990, the annual number of divorce petitions filed in Mumbai has more than doubled, outpacing population growth.230 In Bangalore, the IT capital of India, numbers indicate an increase of over 60 per cent.231 A majority of those filing for divorce are young, in their twenties and thirties, and work in the city’s corporate sector. In 2007, the Bangalore Mediation Centre was set up in the hope of disposing of the number of divorce cases; more than 1,783 cases were referred here in 2010-2011.232
States with high divorce rates include Kerala, India’s most literate state, where the number of divorce cases has increased by 350 per cent in the past 10 years;233 in Kolkata, 200 per cent in the past decade; 234 surprisingly, divorce has also gone up in Punjab and Haryana—both traditional agricultural states—by 150 per cent. 235
In most marriages around the globe, the initial years are typically considered ‘honeymoon’ years, but for Indians they’re usually the worst. Most divorces occur in the twenty-five to thirty-nine age group, and usually during the first five years of marriage.236 Unlike in the West, where a common reason for divorce is the mid-life crisis, it is rare to see couples in their forties and fifties getting divorced. According to Dr Vijay Nagaswami, relationship counsellor and author of the New Indian Marriage Series, mid-life crises amongst Indians rarely end in divorce, but often in infidelity. Older couples in dysfunctional marriages remain together because of the taboo around divorce which they’ve grown up with, but younger couples have no such qualms and are quick to divorce.
The most apparent reason for the higher divorce rate is the financial independence of Indian women, which allows them to step out of unhappy marriages. Today, almost a third of India’s 480 million jobs are held by women, and over the past decade, women’s incomes have doubled in the cities. About 60 per cent of women in urban areas say they are responsible for everything that happens in their lives.237 A higher focus on careers than on personal lives amongst women is a prominent game changer. In a study that surveyed over 1,000 women in the age groups of twenty to thirty in cities across the country, 93 per cent wanted to continue studying or working after marriage.238
Earlier when two families came together, the couple tried harder to adjust, because divorce was simply not a choice. But today because of their financial independence, and the consequent rise in confidence, the traditional view that women will accept and adjust to their husbands and their families no longer holds. Women are no longer ready to sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of the family. Individual happiness trumps all. Changes in the law too have helped divorce. Over the past decade, divorce laws have seen a lot of change, making it easier and faster to get a divorce.
According to Aarti Mundkur, a lawyer at the Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, ‘Women are able to split due to minor shifts in the law. Now, it’s just a bit easier to live alone, rent a house, work in new sectors. If these (legal) conditions had existed earlier, we’d have seen the same divorce rates.’239
Before 1955, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs had no option of divorce. Section 13 of the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 legally introduced divorce in Hindu marriages if the divorce fell under the ambit of adultery, cruelty, renunciation of the world (a strange one), change of religion, or missing partner. These laws allowed divorce only if there was sufficient evidence of ‘faults’ even amongst couples who mutually wanted a divorce. These couples negotiated amongst themselves to determine uncontested claims of faults, and presented them to the courts. This fault-based system allowed for mutual consent divorce, but not unilateral divorce. In 1976, an amendment added mutual consent without a need to present ‘faults’. In 2010, the Indian government responded to the vertiginous rise in marital breakups and the surging backlog in court cases by proposing an amendment that would make it easier and faster to get divorced. The new amendment proposes that couples show irretrievable breakdown of marriage or incompatibility and the six-month mandatory separation period be waived.
In her extensive study of divorce in India, psychologist Shaifali Sandhya, author of Love Will Follow: Why The Indian Marriage is Burning, found another less apparent but important reason for marriages in India failing. Expectations of love and intimacy were not met for 70 per cent of couples. ‘The biggest conflict is love,’ says Sandhya. ‘Marriage was historically about families, but couples now want to form their own unique territory. Women want love to be more active. That’s a new thing.’240 Sex too has become important to marriage, unlike the olden days where two people had sex only to procreate. According to a survey, 64 per cent of respondents said sex was ‘very’ or ‘extremely important’ to their marriage, and a third reported not being sexually satisfied in their existing marriages.241 Sandhya also says that Indian couples are saddled with new, more ‘Western’ problems of work, sex and money, as well as the older problems of testy in-laws, overbearing relatives and children, creating a ‘double whammy’, and too much pressure to handle.
DOUBLE DIVORCEE
At the Sivananda Ashram in Kerala, Shiny stands out as the most ardent meditator. In the luminescent dawn, as the rest of us fidget in uncomfortable cross-legged positions on the cold, hard stone floors, Shiny’s beatific face is the picture of peace. Strikingly handsome, with a lean, muscular 6’2’’ frame, he had caught my attention and one day over a cup of herbal tea, he and I got talking. I am at the ashram for a two-week yoga retreat, and he claims he is there indefinitely, on the run from his demonic wife of fifteen months in his hometown in Jalandhar, Punjab. He had packed his bags, written a letter to his father and his father-in-law announcing his wish to divorce his wife and boarded a train with no destination in mind. That journey eventually led him to the ashram, where he has now been for over two weeks with no intention of leaving anytime soon.
Over many hours of yoga and endless cups of tea, Shiny and I became fast friends. Little did I know then that this quiet man—with his studied look of calm—and I w
ould become close friends, meeting year after year at the ashram to recharge our batteries and exchange stories. Three years later, as I research divorce, my first point of reference is Shiny. Of all the stories that I have encountered in my research, Shiny’s is the most fascinating. First, because I have been a witness to it and second, because this is not Shiny’s first, but second divorce.
The last time I saw Shiny was at the ashram in Kerala; he was ebullient, glowing with good health. Today, when I visit him and his family in Jalandhar, he looks tired and worn out. I ask him if the divorce has taken a toll on his health. His answer comes to me as somewhat of a shock—he has spent the last fortnight in prison. His bail application was rejected so he had to spend ten days in the lockup. His wife had filed a criminal case against him during the divorce proceedings. Despite his frazzled looks and jail-time, Shiny is in his usual good spirits. He laughs and tells me, ‘It’s like the ashram, really, the same bland food twice a day, the same early morning wake-up call and strict schedule. Everything felt the same to me, except that I was woken up by a bothersome policeman rather than ashram bells.’
As we drive through Jalandhar to reach Shiny’s home, I observe that it looks just like any other Indian town—a once sleepy town now positively fizzing with new growth fuelled by new money, chaotic traffic, dusty parks, the ubiquitous MG Road and randomly placed statues of leaders, the only difference being that these ones wear turbans since we are in Punjab.
Shiny lives in a bustling residential colony on the outskirts of town which started out as a nine-house colony when his family first moved here. He proudly points out a glitzy mall that is being built around the corner that fuses Spanish architecture with Indian. A large signboard on the construction wall reads: ‘The experience of a bazaar. The comfort of a mall’. Shiny’s family has grown with the neighbourhood. They started out as solidly middle class and over the past decade have ridden the Indian growth wave and are now upper-middle class. We drive by Shiny’s factory where he works with his father. It is a small, rustic building with a big painted board that reads ‘Dada Industries’ where they manufacture bathroom fittings.