Earlier this month, I stayed for a week with a German friend in her home in Frankfurt. Towards the end of my stay, her husband — a Senegalese Muslim — arrived and we spent many hours talking. Inevitably, the conversation turned to mixed marriages. My friend and he had met, fallen in love, talked about their differences, wondered if they would manage to make a go of things, and then decided to try.

It wasn’t easy — there were many adjustments to be made. But it wasn’t difficult either. Perhaps the one thing that worked against ‘normalising’ things for them was that there were not many such marriages around them — so theirs stood out a bit.

The conversation made me think: despite the amazing diversity of our world, marriage in many ways still remains an institution where like seems to join with like. Look around you: how many mixed marriages are there? Take the so-called ‘developed’ countries — the numbers of inter-racial or inter-class marriages are small in comparison with same-race and same-class ones. Take Indians who live abroad — it’s rare to find them marrying outside the ‘community’. Clearly there’s an internal policing system in place.

This is nowhere more clearly evident than in the marriage advertisements that daily fill our newspapers. Indeed, in India, we take this likeness to every possible and impossible extreme: you cannot marry outside your clan, or outside your religion, or outside your caste, or outside your class and so on. Families and communities create these boundaries, selectively using religion and often spurious tradition to solidify them, State institutions sometimes help to legitimise them — and now, more recently, men on motorbikes with saffron flags have added their coercive tactics to police them — and to punish those who dare to assert choice.

I am reminded of the history of Partition. It’s well known by now that during the violence, arson, loot and displacement of that time, thousands of women were abducted and raped. Even though today our saffron warriors are claiming that there was no abduction or rape by Hindu men, we know the truth to be otherwise. There’s plenty of evidence of this in the stories of women themselves, in the police records, in the Constituent Assembly records.

It’s also known that abducted women often married their abductors — sometimes by choice but mostly due to the lack of it. Or, out of pragmatism, many women claiming that marriage was like an abduction so why should this be any different? These cross-religious marriages were frowned upon by the State and for years after Partition, attempts were made to ‘recover’ women in such marriages or liaisons and ‘restore’ them to their religious groups — another sort of policing.

What’s common between that moment and today is that in both instances it was men — self-appointed or otherwise — who felt they had the right to decide for the women. Women, clearly, were — and are — not seen as having either the intelligence, or the capability, or indeed the desire, to make their own decisions. Naïve and innocent, they can do little but lay themselves open to misuse.

The motorcycle gangs are also selective in their opposition. They are only against non-Hindu (read Muslim) men marrying Hindu women. Clearly, this means, in their book that it is all right for Hindu men to marry Muslim women: presumably because Hindu men are too good to use the women’s wombs to create terrorists or pollute religious purity — similar arguments were made during Partition.

While we may find this somewhat amusing, and indeed dangerous, what is more disturbing is the silence on these extra-legal, anti-Constitutional coercive tactics that are being deployed to prohibit choice, which should be every citizen’s right. But there’s also an irony to this that seems to have escaped the motorcycle gangs: if like should indeed marry only like, they should be firmly on the side of same sex marriages!

( Urvashi Butaliais an editor, publisher and director of Zubaan ).

>blink@thehindu.co.in

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