Shaadi or Barbadi? Your Pick
By Javeria Khan
It’s that time of your life when you have just hit twenties and everyone around you, including your beloved parents, have started hinting on your nuptials.
All of that but the kicker is that none of this uncalled-for teasing is meant for you to get a ‘laal ten’ and go about in search of your perfect not-temporary but permanent partner, but just that, simply teasing.
The debate around arrange marriage or love marriage in South Asia’s demographic is a practical one rather than an academic one like in the west.
Marriages here are mostly arranged by parents or the elders in a family where two strangers get hardly enough time to get acquainted and bam! They are happily married. Or so we are constantly led to believe.
Love marriages here however is a big issue. So much so that I am sure we all must have read at least one story in the daily newspapers of a couple who had eloped a long time ago to have been found and then killed by their families for having committed this blasphemous act.
My problem with this debate is simple. Even if its arranged, why not allow complete freedom of choice? Instead, the idea of exploring compatibility via dating or simply through some chit chats is still frowned upon by the majority.
Why do people take it wrong?
Sure, the tribal mindsets of Arabs and the colonial ‘sharma sharmi’ or propriety standards the British brought with them can be held accounted for. But I think the main issue currently lies in ‘log kya kahenge?’ ideology.
If a girl expresses her interest in her choice of partner she is rendered shameless and if a boy manages to do that here, and strangely I have seen its getting more difficult for them to do it, they are easily shut down. If by some miracle a boy manages to marry his said choice of partner, the poor girl receives no acceptance from the in-laws.
Our society has yet to evolve and accept that marriage, a social contract, is primarily between the two consenting individuals. Sure, the families are also unionized, both socially and genetically, but that is all secondary.
I am sure my parents and the majority of the generations before them were content with the idea of just being told who to marry and romanticize it for a time being or their whole lifetimes. But we are completely past that stage now.
I am sure I speak not just for myself but for most from my generation that we are not against arrange marriages completely. But the idea of not wielding a choice and the chance to find whether there is any compatibility with the prospective spouse is a thought that gives us the creeps now.
