{"id":1338,"date":"2014-11-14T09:29:57","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T03:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marryadevotee.com\/?p=1338"},"modified":"2014-12-21T10:29:40","modified_gmt":"2014-12-21T04:59:40","slug":"arranged-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marryadevotee.com\/vaishnavism\/arranged-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"Arranged Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"
His Grace Madhavananda Prabhu is a leading disciple of Srila Gour Govinda Swami and is looking after Gopal Jiu Publications in India. Out of his kindness and concern for the devotees he sent this wonderful article for us to read.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
It emphasises the importance of arranged marriages and horoscope matching over the modern concept of love marriages.<\/div>\n
\n

His letter and the article he sent is available below.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Hare Krishna<\/p>\n

My pranams. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!<\/p>\n

I recently came across an article written by a journalist with the LA Times\u00a0on the topic of arranged marriages. I thought you might find it interesting\u00a0and\/or useful for preaching.<\/p>\n

The author is 2nd generation Indian (born in the USA). As a young lady born\u00a0and raised in America, she naturally has some preconceptions and strong bias\u00a0against arranged marriages. In this article she describes attending a\u00a0traditional arranged Hindu wedding in India for one of her cousins. In the\u00a0course of the wedding she gradually becomes intrigued by the family and\u00a0marital values she sees therein. Too her own surprise she begins to shed\u00a0some of her bias and in the end wishes that she herself could have such a
\nwedding.<\/p>\n

As it is coming from a secular source, it seems to me to be a nice article\u00a0for persons to read who are either ignorant of the value of arranged\u00a0marriages or who have some bias against it.<\/p>\n

I hope that it is useful for you and that all is well for your bhajan.<\/p>\n

Vaishnava kripa prarthi,
\nMadhavananda Das
\n=============================<\/p>\n

“Do you take this stranger?”<\/p>\n

By Swati Pandey, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer<\/p>\n

June 26, 2008
\nGORAKHPUR, INDIA — It was near midnight at the Railway Club, a posh spot at\u00a0the train station in Gorakhpur, close to the Nepal border. Hundreds of\u00a0guests had gathered four hours earlier to eat made-to-order dosas and\u00a0Indian-Chinese fusion finger-foods, to watch green, red and gold fireworks\u00a0explode over palm trees and to dance to bass-heavy Bollywood tracks.<\/p>\n

My cousin’s wedding would soon begin.<\/p>\n

A family astrologer had recommended the date and advised that the wedding\u00a0start after 10 p.m. and conclude before 4 a.m. Those last hours would end\u00a0six days of ceremonies, the first reunion of my maternal family in two\u00a0decades and my first full Hindu wedding. They would also end my uncle’s\u00a0efforts to arrange a marriage, and a future, for my cousin.<\/p>\n

All of it — the years spent selecting a suitor, the final minutes of
\nanticipation, the newness of the couple, a man and woman not shaped by\u00a0former loves and heartbreaks — was romantic in a way I hadn’t expected.
\nGrowing up in America for all my 25 years, I’d long ago given up on the\u00a0tradition, but by midnight, I had started to wonder.<\/p>\n

What I never realized, as a googly-eyed adolescent who had imagined eloping\u00a0with a George Clooney type, was that “love marriage,” as many Indians call\u00a0it, is the aberration.<\/p>\n

Arranged marriages are common in countries and cultures that came belatedly\u00a0to Romanticism and rock ‘n’ roll and whatever else gave rise to what we call\u00a0youth. It’s difficult to quantify them because the term is such a broad one\u00a0— encompassing a childhood betrothal and a parent’s mere suggestion of a\u00a0vetted match.<\/p>\n

My cousin’s arrangement was closer to the latter. Her father found Vishal\u00a0through one of my paternal cousins. Shockingly for this conservative swath\u00a0of north India, sometimes called the “cow belt,” he set a date for them to\u00a0meet without a chaperon.<\/p>\n

“He looked better in person than in photographs,” Garima Upadhya, 26, said,\u00a0recalling their first meeting. “He was always laughing and joking.”<\/p>\n

They next met at their engagement party in Gonda, Garima’s hometown. Two\u00a0months after that they would be married; the all-nighter wedding would be\u00a0the most time they’d spent together.<\/p>\n

That’s still more time than my mother had with my father before marrying him\u00a0in 1969, in the same house where Garima was raised.<\/p>\n

They met face to face when my father looped a garland around my mother’s\u00a0neck at their wedding. They moved to the U.S. within months.<\/p>\n

My father attended school while my mom improved her spoken English by\u00a0watching daytime television, the teacher to so many immigrant women. Whereas\u00a0Garima called her sister’s cellphone only hours after driving off with her\u00a0husband, my mother had to save up for a short, staticky call home.<\/p>\n

She tried to hold on to her old life and customs, but when she patted the\u00a0part of her hair with sindoor, a red powder many Indian women wear to denote\u00a0their marital status, Americans worried that she was bleeding.<\/p>\n

She wears it only for special occasions now, and so, for Garima’s wedding, \u00a0she applied sindoor and piled on the other many accessories of married\u00a0Indian women: thick gold bangles, anklets, toe rings, a wedding ring and a\u00a0mangal sutra — a gold-and-black beaded necklace.<\/p>\n

Beside her, I felt nakedly unmarried and young.<\/p>\n

For five nights, the guests arrived at dusk at the house in Gonda.<\/p>\n

The first ceremony was the sangeet, a sort of bachelorette party. A crowd of\u00a0200 women drummed tablas,danced and sang funny ad-libbed songs about the\u00a0groom.<\/p>\n

I had seen one sangeet in the U.S., performed on a stage by a handful of\u00a0women. It was more a folk art display than a boisterous, inclusive party.\u00a0Still, it was something.<\/p>\n

The next day brought a ceremony that’s rare in India because it requires a\u00a0body of water within walking distance. A nain — a jack-of-all-female-trades\u00a0hired to preside — began the ceremony by painting in red ink a thick line\u00a0around each woman’s feet, in the manner of Hindu goddesses and old-time\u00a0Bollywood actresses. The ink would last longer than the days of celebration.\u00a0She made sure to break mine at the heel, signifying that I was unmarried.<\/p>\n

Then the nain led us, a line of singing, sari-clad women darting between\u00a0motorcycles and rickshaws, to the nearest pond.<\/p>\n

There, my mother dug a mound of dirt that we would take back to Garima. In\u00a0an earlier time, Garima would have sculpted it into a hearth for her new \u00a0home.<\/p>\n

My grandfather explained the ritual. “The bride is being uprooted from her\u00a0family,” he said in his nimble English. “And so the women uproot the soil.”<\/p>\n

While we sang and prayed, Garima packed and gabbed constantly with her\u00a0future husband on her cellphone.<\/p>\n

Despite her unabashedly joyful voice, I still found myself wondering why she\u00a0decided to have an arranged marriage. All our cousins had had “love\u00a0marriages” and had still won parental approval, however reluctant. My\u00a0parents have never expected me to have an arranged marriage, even if they\u00a0praise the practice and occasionally name-drop eligible bachelors.<\/p>\n

Garima was never the shrinking Indian ideal of a girl. She was brash and\u00a0essentially American like me, and always had been. When I visited India\u00a0every two or three summers, we were inseparable.<\/p>\n

At about age 5, in matching miniature bridal saris, we vied to see who would\u00a0receive more compliments. A few years later, we were disrespectful to our\u00a0elders; we talked back and threw tantrums.<\/p>\n

As teens, we bragged about boys, despite our meager experience with them.\u00a0She was mostly obedient to her father, who forbade her from talking to boys\u00a0out of earshot. I was shy, studious and either was ignored or mocked by\u00a0boys.<\/p>\n

Now, Garima was lecturing me on love.<\/p>\n

“Swati,” she explained to me in her slightly patronizing English, “love
\ngrows with time. You don’t just fall into it.”<\/p>\n

It didn’t matter that I had been in love before — the kind you fall into,
\nthe kind that does grow with time, but breaks, perhaps because no
\narrangement, no contract, no children held it together. It didn’t count\u00a0because it was unsanctioned by marriage.<\/p>\n

My grandfather made this clear when he sat idly reading my palm one\u00a0afternoon, a small-time hobby for him, an 84-year-old criminal defense\u00a0attorney. He observed the two creases between my pinky and heart line.<\/p>\n

“And you will have one great love,” he said.<\/p>\n

“But there are two lines,” I said.<\/p>\n

He paused, raising my hand to his glassy brown eyes, and stared hard at the\u00a0unmistakable pair of lines.<\/p>\n

“I see only one,” he said. “And it is yet to come.”<\/p>\n

By my family’s standards, my spinsterhood is imminent. An arranged marriage\u00a0had always been an appealing Plan B — if I failed at romance or a career,\u00a0if I got tired of being alone and wanted a family, my parents could simply\u00a0find me a gainfully employed man, as long as I was still fairly young and\u00a0decent-looking and virginal, not too tan or too irreligious, not a smoker or\u00a0a drinker. (I have trouble with some of those; I won’t say which.)<\/p>\n

Garima explained why she opted for an arranged marriage one afternoon, after\u00a0we had spent some time recalling the boys she had crushes on in high school.<\/p>\n

“I know Papa would never choose anyone but the best husband for me,” she\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

I had heard the reasoning before — from my parents, mostly. It assumes that\u00a0one’s parents know one best. That might have been true for Garima, who had\u00a0never lived apart from family, who had never had an actual boyfriend and had\u00a0few secrets to keep.<\/p>\n

But by accident of birth, I had been an American child and dorm-dwelling\u00a0student, a great keeper of hidden diaries, a believer in privacy. Since I\u00a0was 18, I had scrupulously hidden parts of my life from my family,\u00a0collecting and losing loves, as it seems women must to grow up. But why\u00a0should I believe that the secrets I keep are what make me most me? When I’m\u00a0in India, surrounded by the comfort and community of my big family, by\u00a0Garima’s glowing youth and uncanny wisdom, that seems too American a notion.<\/p>\n

For two hours before her wedding, Garima waited for her groom.<\/p>\n

She wore her wedding lehnga, a deep-magenta full skirt and fitted blouse,\u00a0all embroidered with silver and gold thread and blue, pink and silver beads.\u00a0She sat still so as not to upset her veil, or her heavy gold-and-ruby nose\u00a0ring, a hoop the size of a silver dollar connected to matching earrings with\u00a0a chain across her cheek. A necklace dripped from her collarbone to her\u00a0waist, and a dozen bangles were stacked on each arm.<\/p>\n

She was overwhelmingly beautiful, and seeing her made me indulge in a\u00a0girlish daydream of my future wedding, which as a child I envisioned as\u00a0white, but which I had years ago started to see in pink and red and gold.<\/p>\n

Garima, her sister and her female cousins were hiding, waiting for the\u00a0baraat — the groom’s party — to arrive. We peeked through curtained\u00a0windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the men dancing down the red carpet,\u00a0and the groom emerging from his horse-drawn carriage.<\/p>\n

When the baraat finally arrived, as fireworks erupted and spelled, in
\nEnglish, “Garima Weds Vishal,” my family greeted them, offering the groom\u00a0sweets and a quick prayer. We women stayed hidden, holding Garima’s train\u00a0above the dusty floor as she extended a solitary arm out a tinted glass door\u00a0to toss rice toward the groom.<\/p>\n

Finally, when she appeared, she looked dutifully melancholy. As the couple\u00a0stood onstage before the crowd and exchanged flower garlands — like\u00a0exchanging wedding rings — she had only the faintest flicker of a smile.\u00a0Vishal’s grin was broad, but mostly, Garima’s lips were pouted, her head\u00a0bowed.<\/p>\n

That expression held as the bride and groom walked seven times around the\u00a0fire, as the groom’s sister tied a knot with their two scarves, as their\u00a0parents washed the couple’s feet. I was sure it was exhaustion, the\u00a0oppressive weight of her clothes, nerves, an act — as the good, sad\u00a0daughter. It couldn’t be what my mother had felt at her wedding. I wondered\u00a0as a child, seeing my mom’s expression in photographs, if she had been\u00a0forced into marriage, if she loved my dad, if they should divorce.<\/p>\n

But by the time the wedding ended at 4 a.m., it became clear to me how\u00a0sincere Garima’s sadness was. She had one journey to make alone, while her\u00a0husband waited in his car. It was the bidai — the parting.<\/p>\n

The family lined up to say goodbye. Garima’s tears, initially just shining\u00a0around her eyes, began to fall thickly. Her shoulders heaved, and soon she\u00a0was wailing, a long, loud, high wail, bursting forth from a sadness I\u00a0couldn’t understand. It scared the emotion out of me; I felt like an alien\u00a0American, who would never know this strange mix of pain and exhilaration\u00a0that all the women in my family had known.<\/p>\n

Just before Garima reached me, just as I had finished rehearsing what I\u00a0would say to her in the most profound Hindi I could muster, she cried for\u00a0her sister, who rushed to her. She sobbed for her father to take her home,\u00a0but instead, they walked her to the car. Outside, the sun was rising.<\/p>\n

Usually, I am the one embracing a line of tearful relatives to say goodbye.\u00a0This is what I did the day after the wedding, except Garima wasn’t there.\u00a0There was little crying — the wedding had exhausted us.<\/p>\n

I thanked my grandfather for teaching me about some ceremonies. He replied\u00a0in short, sharp English: “Don’t write about it. Do it.”<\/p>\n

It might have been a simple nudge toward marriage, but I couldn’t help but\u00a0hear the same infuriating drop-your-job, find-a-man advice of too many\u00a0bestselling American books.<\/p>\n

My grandfather, with his broad shoulders and bullhorn voice, just needed\u00a0fewer words. And they cut more deeply, because I knew that I couldn’t just\u00a0“do it.” It’s too late for me to have a rite of passage that combines a\u00a0wedding, prom and first date and moving out of your parents’ house and in\u00a0with a man.<\/p>\n

I moved down the rest of the line thinking deeply on the tradition I was\u00a0rejecting by living the way I do. Seeing that tradition as a boisterous,\u00a0living spectacle had made it harder to dismiss, and harder to see my choices\u00a0as inevitable or obvious or easy.<\/p>\n

Garima’s younger sister was last in line. We were now the only unmarried\u00a0ones in the family. Though that status signified so much for me — ambition\u00a0and freedom, failure and loneliness — for her it was an unremarkable fact.\u00a0At 23, she could switch it off like a light by asking her father to find\u00a0someone.<\/p>\n

She gave me a long hug, and I asked jokingly when I should book my next\u00a0ticket, for her wedding. She smiled and uttered the most reassuring words\u00a0I’d heard in a while:<\/p>\n

“Don’t wait for a wedding.”<\/p>\n

Epilogue: After a honeymoon in Goa and a month getting to know the in-laws\u00a0in Gorakhpur, Garima moved to Vishal’s apartment in Gurgaon, a rich,\u00a0sprawling New Delhi suburb. He works as a computer engineer while she gets\u00a0to know her new city and circle of friends. She seems happy.<\/p>\n

For me, returning to the United States always requires forgetting the\u00a0realities of my Gonda days — that pink can be worn with orange; that hot\u00a0showers are a luxury; that marriages can be made by people other than those\u00a0doing the marrying. It took a few weeks to readjust to my life here, but now\u00a0that I have, only with deliberate effort can I recall what appealed to me\u00a0about my cousin’s way of marriage. But then I imagine myself in her place,\u00a0and it is not unappealing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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