-New Podcast: Indian Marriage
To Westerners, the Indian practice of arranged marriage and the restrictive rolls for women in Indian culture can seem quite foreign and at times misogynistic.
In this podcast Sumit Kumar Badola and his wife Navneeta talk about their recent marriage and the changes rolls for both women and men in the worlds largest democracy, India. They also address the issue of women’s rights and where those rights are headed in the future.
December 13th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
I would like to share with you my experience with marriage in India. It is in no way embelllished. It has crushed my idea and love and marraige. It also raises many questions about the idea of marraige in India and the role of women in that society.
I am not Indian, but I visited India 4 years ago and met a man there. He came to live with me and we got married. We have been married now for 3 years and just this past year I lived with him and his family for 2 months. They all accepted me and were encouraging us to have an ‘Indian style” traditional marriage, but my husband did not want to. So I left India, with the understanding that he needed some time alone to further his studies in yoga therapy. 5 days after I left my husband went to meet his guru for the first time, and recieve his blessing. While there he married (indian style) a girl who was a complete stranger, under the influence of his guru. He told this girl that he was already married and loved another women (me), and that he would never love her. But he did agree to give her his name and children. So she agreed to these terms and moved into his house and now lives with him, his parents, his brother and his wife.
My husband (if you can still call him that) called me about 2 weeks after this marriage in India to tell me how much he loves me and doesn’t want to loose me. It was decided with his parents that he would have 2 families, one in India and then one with me.
My husband told me that he did this marriage with the stranger as a comprimise. In Indian culture it is the son’s responsibility to take care of his parents as they get older, and this is done by him getting married. It is actually the wife who then cares for his parents. As she has left her family and now is part of the husbands family totally. So in order for my husband fullfill the responsiblity to his parents he brought a strange women into the house as his “wife” to do this. She was told about me and shown pictures of our wedding and told she would be the 2nd wife. She is there to live in that house only to take care of the parents. As I write this, my husband is trying to create a child with her in order for him to be “free”. He thinks that by giving her a child and his mother a grandchild, he will then be free to leave the house. His mother and this strange women encourage him to come back and live with me.
I tried for many months to accept this situation but it makes me sick to my stomach.
But everyday I question myself, what are my limits? Where does love and understanding end, what sacrifices am I willing to make for love, would other North American women make the sacrifice that I am not willing to make and share their husband? What is marriage? Why do people have kids?
Thanks for letting me share, I wake everyday and think how can this be happening, we were in love and we were happy…is this a sacrifice that i have to make for the man I love because of his culture?
I say no. When the man I am in a commited relationship with goes behind my back and make agreements with a complete stranger, then asks me to accept those terms, I say that is not a husband, that is not a man that is treating me with love and respect.
As for that family now in India, well yes there is now a girl that my husband does not like and feels nothing for who is part of his family. She lives there basically as a maid to cook and clean for his parents. His family doesn’t see him treating her with respect so they don’t either. Now to keep the house in peace, he sleeps with her in the same room just so the other grown, educated, spritually minded men the house treat her with respect. And still he tells me he will get her pregnant and then leave the house.
I have been told that divorce for that family is not a choice, due to the parents social standing and respect in the community and also because that women can not go back to her family, her reputation will be ruined.
I just wanted to present another side of Indian marriages.
Thank You.