Subject: Re: Exploiting an Unjust Advantage: Arranged Marriages & Educated Indians

From: [email-masked]
Date: 15 Aug 90 12:46:41 GMT

[email-masked] (Veena A. Gondhalekar) writes:

>for my conclusions though.  Female relatives and friends of mine who got 
>"married through arrangement"  got a definite say in the choice of their 
>husbands even though some of them belong to extremely MC households and 
>are not, IMO, liberated enough.  Here I'm talking of women born during 
>or after mid/late 50's.

I tend to agree.

>	Of all the arranged marriages,  those between US residents of 
>Indian origin (GC holders or equivalents) and Indian women in India seem 
>the most deplorable considering the manner in which one goes about them
>in most cases (I haven't yet heard of a female Indian GC holder 
>going to India for a couple of weeks and returning with a hubby). These 

Ok, here is one. An Indian girl I know grew up in Kenya, and came to US for
graduate and post-graduate studies. She wanted to get married to any
Indian, but nothing worked out (most attempts were for "arranged"
marriages where the "guy" and "gal" could "interview" each other also.).
Finally, she was told about a doctor in India (my wife's aunt's cousin ..)
who wanted to come to US. After some correspondence and photo exchange
etc., the marriage was okayed by both concerned !! The girl involved didn't
even have a Green card yet. (She is on an H-1). In fact, I believe
that the decision was taken by the bride and the groom and NOT by their
parents. 

>guys have nothing to their merit (except a GC) that local guys 
>don't/couldn't have.

Conversely, these GC guys don't lack anything that the local guys have.

>>    When we endorse  a  social  practice   that requires  a man  to  spend
>>    significantly   less  time in  getting  married  than    in  buying an
>>    automobile; a practise, which in its most popular form, thrives on the
>>    marginalization  of an entire  gender,  it is  over-sanguine to expect
>>    that the deep-rooted inequalities between the sexes  will disappear as
>    
>Couldn't have made a more astute observation.

An automobile is much easier to judge than a prospective spouse. It usually
has a track record. There are millions of (nearly) identical copies produced
earlier. If the "test drive" feels good, perhaps the car IS good.

As far choosing an "arranged" spouse, no matter how much you want to, it
is not easy to judge a person's character, temperament, etc in a few
meetings. Can you really figure out if your to-be-wife is going to
tolerate a slob-of-a-husband [that you are :-)] or if your to-be-husband
is going to be pleased with a lazy-no-household-work-of-a-wife [that
you are :-)]? I know a girl whose husband is too lazy to drive anywhere
for sightseeing. etc. etc. How do you figure these traits out over
a chinese dinner or in a brief movie-date? Apart from asking, can you
really figure out if your spouse really shares your interest in your
type of music, etc?

>	The question is what choice do Indian males have here if they 
>do not wish to get married to a non-Indian woman.  Considering the 
>extreme imbalance between the male and female population of Indians 
>here,  this question does not obviously have an easy answer. But a
>3-way ticket marriage is definitely NOT IT.

We all agree that we would like to know our to-be-spouse
well before marriage, but apart from going steady in college for a few
years (at least months), I can't think of a way. Beating up on a 3-way
ticket marriage is not going to help. A 10-way ticket marriage is probably
going to be as much of a gamble.

Sumitro Samaddar

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From: [email-masked] (Sitaram Raju)
Date: 15 Aug 90 17:17:55 GMT

>[email-masked] (Veena A. Gondhalekar) writes:
.....
.....
.....
>>>    automobile; a practise, which in its most popular form, thrives on the

As opposed to a social practice that is endorsed here, namely spending
less time in a married state/cohabiting than in automobile ownership.
It is quite common to come across statements like 'My ex-SO and I had
a meaningful and satisfying relationship for two years'. People
typically own automobiles for about half a dozen years before
trading/selling it. Let's not quibble about the difference between
cohabitation and marriage (in this country).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sitaram Raju
Dept of Comp Sc and Engg,
Univ of Washington, Seattle

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From: [email-masked] (Subbarao Kambhampati)
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 90 22:27:15 GMT

[Responses to Mr. [email-masked] and others who expressed
 support for prevalent practises based on their evaluation of "Indian"
 and "western"  marital norms]

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Sitaram Raju) writes:
>>[email-masked] (Veena A. Gondhalekar) writes (quoting rao@sunrise):
>>
>
>.....

What are you trying to say here?  That relationships here don't last
as long as they do in India, and so the prevalent practise in India is
just as good?

Ultimately, what two INDEPENDENT, CONSENTING ADULTS do about their
PERSONAL-LIVES is completely their business. If they want to do the
whole schmeal in 2.5 minutes, so be it, if they want to take divorces
for what might appear to you as frivolous reasons, so be it, if they
want to have an open, closed, half-open, 3/4ths-closed or air-tight
closed relationship so be it. None of us have the locus-standi to tell
others about their personal tastes.  However, we do have the grounds
(and a social obligation) to cry foul, when those tastes thrive on
exploiting the prevalent unjust system.

The point of my original article was not to make a blanket judgement
on the merits of Indian vs.  Western notions of marriage (as if the
space of possibilities is really binary!), or to say that the concept
of "arranged marriages" can never be as good as other marriage systems
in an objective sense.  [read Vikram Duvvoori's excellent comments on
that in a separate article titled "love in arranged marriages"]. The
point instead is about THE EXPLOITATION INVOLVED IN THE CURRENT
WIDESPREAD PRACTISE OF ARRANGED MARRIAGE. The point is that the
seemingly personal choices about whether or not you want to go for a
3-way ticket marriage, have a significant amount of extra-personal
ramifications in terms of endorsement to the prevalent exploitation.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario: if a friend of mine puts
a notice in front of the Paloalto bar tomorrow for a ready-made
spouse, (and by fortuitous coincidence) finds an appropriate person
and gets married in 20 hours, I will not get as agitated as I am with
the three-way ticketers.  

Why? Becasue while there is large empirical evidence to believe that
while most people who may respond (at all) to my friend's ad in palo
alto would have done so on their own accord, most people who respond
to a 3-way ticketers overtures in India would be doing so as a result
of coercion and conditioning and as "non-independent" persons. In
fact, an overwhelming reason why such a practise gets so much of
response in the Indian context is PRECISELY THAT IT FULLY EXPLOITS THE
PREVALENT UNJUST BIASES OF THE SOCIETY!  There is a lot of pressure on
women to say yes irrespective of whether or not they really wanted to
take part in such marriages.  Despite all the white-washing, the
women's opinions are DISTINCTLY secondary (how many 3-way ticket
marriages have you seen in which any major decision such as whether or
not the woman wants to come to USA like a piece of luggage is given
significant weight?). Going through arranged marriage system, knowing
all this, in my opinion is wrong in that it perpetuates the secondary
status of the opinions of the women by giving your indirect
endorsement to the existing biased system.  You see, being a thinking
person involves not just being "legal", but a conscious introspection
of the implicit ramifications of ones actions.

That is why, in my posting I carefully skirted around the issue of
"traditional" vs.  "modern" and concentrated on the question of the
practises one endorses. I have no doubt in my mind that the current
system is rabidly sexist (successful marriages notwithstanding and
please don't furnish single point statistics about how your friend had
an ideal arranged marriage--if they did, congrats to them--but that
still doesn't change the overall picture!). I WILL HOWEVER NOT SAY
THAT ENLIGHTENED "NON-BARTERING" VERSIONS OF ARRANGED MARRIAGES ARE
NOT POSSIBLE.

What I am objecting is not so much the "arrangedness" of the marriage
but the "exploitativeness" of the marriage.  I would have to admit
that my reservations won't hold in special cases where both parties
concerned actually made an honest effort to prove to themselves beyond
reasonable doubt that there is no exploitation involved.  (Ofcourse,
this option might very well mean that the grooms cant get back in 3
weeks time, and that is usually considered a NO-NO in terms of the
their career objectives, apparently..)

-Rao
[Aug 15, 1990]
---------------------------

   "THE  ISSUE FACING US  IS NOT ABOUT  HOW TO CHOOSE  BETWEEN TWO SHARPLY
   DIVIDED SYSTEMS  OF MARRIAGE, BUT  ABOUT  THE  NEED  FOR  A CONSCIOUS,
   RATHER   THAN  TRADITION-BOUND,   CHOICE     AMONG A    CONTINUUM   OF
   POSSIBILITIES."

                   -rao quoting rao ;-)

    "[Shopping for spouses] is inherently wrong  so long as one half
    (approx.) of the human population constitutes the shoppers and the
    the other half the objects on sale, this can never be an acceptable
    system."

                   -Veena Gondhalekar

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From: [email-masked] (Subbarao Kambhampati)
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 90 22:27:15 GMT

-Rao
[Aug 15, 1990]

                   -rao quoting rao ;-)

                   -Veena Gondhalekar