THE EYESORE...BUT WHY??

 At the very beginning, I want to state that this piece is not directed to any particular community or group, nor it is meant to offend anyone. It is just an amalgamation of different experiences and observations that I had made over the years.

The legal age of marriage in India was 18 years, which has been recently raised to 21 years. But in India, we had a heinous practice of “Child Marriage” in the past – something which is still practiced in many remote areas of the country. If we ask our grandmothers to recount their tales of marriage, a lot of them would say that they had got married at the age of 6 or 7 years – even before attaining puberty! And after that, they had raised 8-10 children while living in giant families. But has it ever crossed our minds why were girls married so early to men thrice their age? The answer is simple – girls are always considered a “burden” or if put in hindi, they are considered “bhojh”. It is not the concept of raising girls which was difficult but rather the thought of getting the girl married that bothered a household because of the prevalence of ‘dowry’. However, with the changing times, technological advancement, government initiatives and numerous efforts, the dowry system has been abolished to a large extent, if not completely. There are still communities where huge amount of money, in cash and kind, is given by a girl’s family for marriage if she has some form of physical anomaly.

But is it only ‘dowry’ that bothers a girl’s family when she reaches a marriageable age? Why is it that even parents of girls in urban India, where dowry is nearly negligible, remain worried for their daughters? This again goes to the concept of considering girls as “parayadhan.” No matter how good-looking, well-educated, self-sustaining a girl or a woman is, she isn’t considered a “well-settled” human being in life if she is unmarried or has no children. Even our ace tennis star, Sania Mirza after few years of marriage with Shoaib Malik, was asked when was she planning to “settle in life” as she didn’t have children then. This kind of mentality actually revolves around the age-old realms of patriarchy that is very deeply ingrained in the Indian society. There is a belief that a girl is always the responsibility of first her father, then brother, and finally her husband. Irrespective of the fact that we have examples of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Indra Nooyi, Manju Sharma and others in our society, irrespective of the fact that a girl has the prefix of “Dr./Prof.” despite being a “Ms.”, she isn’t a perfect girl if she isn’t a “Mrs.” Maa-baap ke baad aakhir bechari ladki ko dekhega kaun? Khud kamati hai to kya..! An independent, well-to-do, unmarried girl is always a societal eyesore; parents also tend to freak out on the ever-lasting Indian question of “Log kya kahenge?” Even after marriage, a girl cannot be the bread-earner of an Indian family nor can a boy be “stay-at-home-dad” – a concept which isn’t very alien in the western culture and which was very beautifully portrayed in Anne Hathway’s “The Intern.”

My article isn’t “Anti-marriage” or “Anti-Parenting” for girls. It simply wants to highlight the fact that our society needs to be a little more progressive when it comes to women and marriage. It isn’t very easy to change this deep-rooted mindset of people with just an article or talk but at least we can try to make a head-start in that direction.