For those of us who are so wishing that the public’s fascination with arranged marriages was over, well … it’s not. Back in 2005, there was a lot of buzz [including here] around financial writer Anita Jain’s New York magazine article “Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?” So much so that she got a book deal out of it.
Next month, her memoir Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India will be published in the UK, US, and India by Bloomsbury. 
The book is being pitched as a “witty, confessional memoir” that simultaneously records Jain’s romantic quest and the story of “a country modernizing at breakneck speed.” The big question it asks: Is the new urban Indian culture in which she’s searching for a husband really all that different from America? Has globalization changed the face of arranged marriage
I want to groan, but I’m trying to be openminded and wait till I’ve actually read the book. I can’t help it though. The red flags go up in my mind when I hear about another arranged marriage book. And, now, this one combines that with another buzz word “globalization.” Is this the chick lit version of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat”?
[Below the fold, glimpses of an excerpt which appeared at the Guardian last weekend.] At the Guardian is “The Marrying Kind,” an excerpt from the book. In the following section, Anita decides to move to India to find a husband.
In my three years in New York, I didn’t come close to even one romantic relationship. Dating felt like an absurd cat-and-mouse game, where people were more concerned about what they could get away with than with settling down. Despairing of another summer of Sunday brunches with the stodgy and unresponsive company of the New York Times, I knew I had to leave New York, but where could I go?
That was when I began to think of going to India. There are more men in India than women, around 930 women to every 1,000 men, according to recent census data, the discrepancy a disturbing result of infanticide and sex-segregated abortion. So I figured my options were simply more plentiful in India. In cities such as Delhi and Mumbai, the vast majority of marriages were still arranged, but I’d also heard that a culture of dating and sleeping around was gaining ground. Nonetheless, in India, a desire to be married wasn’t at loggerheads with the advances for which feminists had struggled.
People commonly go to India to find themselves or find God, but I went to find a husband. I would give myself a year, which I figured was ample time in such a marriage-oriented society. I wondered if I’d be able to find someone modern enough in his thinking to be comfortable with a wife making decisions for the household and having a full life outside the marriage – one that included going out with friends, drinking and smoking. A woman who has had sex in the past – and not just with long-term boyfriends.
So, how, the Guardian editors ask in the story’s head, “Would Delhi men cope with a Harvard-educated working woman? And what happened when her father placed an advert seeking a ‘broad-minded groom’?”
Anita’s dad, we discover, apparently has too-high expectations of sealing the deal during his six-week trip to India. His optimistism yields to a trickle of responses which are followed by disappointing in-person meetings. At an encounter with a corporate lawyer, the following ensues:
My father wants to see if there is more to the fellow. He believes only one question is required to take the measure of a man. Leaning in, he carefully chooses his words in Hindi: “If my daughter Anita is sick and cannot cook, who would cook dinner?”
Waving his hand as if shooing away a fly, Vinod answers, “I have a maid.”
Knowing how decisive the question is, Papa gives him another chance. “The maid is sick. Who cooks?”
“I have two maids,” he says, notching up his attitude of arrogant dismissiveness.
“Your other maid is sick, too. Who cooks?” my father says, relentlessly.
“I’d hire a third,” Vinod says, unblinkingly.
Neither is backing down. It is a face-off. “Forget the bloody maids! What do you do?” Papa bellows.
Gulp, at the end of all these examples, wouldn’t the average reader be left with the feeling that there are no broadminded men in India? Or is this just the excerpt that was chosen because it was deemed “juicy” enough to boost sales? (I know many progressive and broadminded desi men, my husband included, so am really hoping that this book is more than your stereotypical arranged marriage kahani. My copy of the book is on the way so stay tuned.)
For those in the NY area, the author will be reading with Sandeep Jauhar at the Asian American Writers Workshop on August 7. Details here.
i guess trying some other American city was completely out of the question that she hopped straight over to India? wow……way to inspire hope for the rest of us single girls.
I’m really eager to read this… with the knowledge that it’s only one individuals’ experiences.
I have to say that I’m a little surprised that she went from looking for love in NYC to looking for it in India. What about Non-Indians? It took me a while but I see now that as an American born Indian who grew up in Kentucky, I have much more in common with my white brothers than most from India.
To be fair, I’ve not seen a whole lot of Indian husbands cooking, back in the deshi. In fact, very few, actually only 2!
But I have something to add regarding dating in India.
I spent almost 4 years there working and longed to have a serious relationship leading to marriage and could only get a few month’s short term relationship from each guy I met at best.
Even the 2 who expressed interest in marrying me backed down under family pressure.
It’s tough for a girl who does not fit into caste, class, cultural and ethnic expectations.
Heartbreaking really.
1) relationships are hard. arranged, non-arranged, in between, cross-cultural, same family (i.e., cousins), etc.
2) their hardness is different in quality (different races, class, religion, nationality, age, all are different).
3) with the banalities out of the way, I know many progressive and broadminded desi men. what does “broadminded” mean? i think to a large extent what we’re addressing here are differences of values between those who were raised in the united states and those who were raised in india. for example, i can totally empathize with indian americans who go to work in bangalore and are shocked and annoyed by the fact that people throw trash out the window. years of indoctrination and expectation re: recycling and littering are hard to break.
4) our ancestors were generally peasants, but they had no problem finding mates within the village. what went down? well, let’s not always just look to supply. there are some issues on the demand side….
In my personal experience the major cities in India are not that different than any big cities in the US in terms of dating. There is plenty of good people with the not so good and I find it hard to generalize, I will be hard pressed to find anyone of the people I know in India who has had an arranged marriage in the past ten years. The problem is to assume that arranged marriages are static, the present day arranged marriages are nowhere near the arranged marriages of our parents’ generation, most of them these days have some level of flexibility.
In terms of conditioning, one thing that always fails me is the chaos at Indian grocery stores (specifically Patel bros at Newark Avenue in Jersey City). All the conduct that may be followed in American grocery stores is out of the window in the Indian grocery stores I speak of. Has anyone else has had similar experience in their local Indian stores?
I think that statement must necessarily be a qualified one these days, as e.g. a lot of (mainly urban) desi men and women think very similarly about the dynamics of the male-female relationship as their US counterparts. They prob. would use broadminded in the same manner, such that there’s not always that much of a difference, given certain circles, when used in either country.
My cousin married a man who grew up in Delhi. She never learned to cook and so didn’t he. They cook dinners together from recipes they find on the internet.
You really can’t generalize about DBD guys.
Its not uncommon for ABD guys to mantain the village mentality of their parents, while DBDs (especially from Delhi and Mumbai) to have more modern views on gender roles.
I think I beat Rahul in “spot the PG contest” today.
book stores, grocery stores, hardware stores, Indian stores… ?
🙂 go for an indian muchly, eh?
The Wall Street Journal speaks about this very topic:
On a tour of one of his supermarkets, Kishore Biyani notes that shopping carts are getting stuck in the narrow aisles, wheat and lentils have spilled onto the floor, black spots cover the onions and it’s difficult to hear above the constant in-store announcements. He grins and congratulates the store manager.
Mr. Biyani, 45 years old, has built a large business and a family fortune on the simple premise that, in India, chaos sells.
Kishore Biyani’s businesses have built their success by mimicking the chaos and grime of traditional Indian markets.
Americans and Europeans might like to shop in pristine and quiet stores where products are carefully arranged. But when Mr. Biyani tried that in Western-style supermarkets he opened in India six years ago, too many customers walked down the wide aisles, past neatly stocked shelves and out the door without buying.
Mr. Biyani says he soon figured out what he was doing wrong. Shopping in such a sterile environment didn’t appeal to the lower middle-class shoppers he was targeting. They were more comfortable in the tiny, cramped stores — often filled with haggling customers — that typify Indian shopping. Most Indians buy their fresh produce from vendors who keep vegetables under burlap sacks.
So Mr. Biyani redesigned his stores to make them messier, noisier and more cramped. “The shouting, the untidiness, the chaos is part of the design,†he says, as he surveys his Mumbai store where he just spent around $50,000 to replace long, wide aisles with narrow, crooked ones: “Making it chaotic is not easy.â€
Even the dirty, black-spotted onions serve a function. For the average Indian, dusty and dirty produce means fresh from the farm, he says. Indian shoppers also love to bargain. Mr. Biyani doesn’t allow haggling, but having damaged as well as good quality produce in the same box gives customers a chance to choose and think they are getting a better deal. “They should get a sense of victory,†he says.
The approach has made Mr. Biyani rich. His company, Pantaloon Retail (India) Ltd., is now India’s largest retailer; it expects to report sales of more than $875 million for the fiscal year ended in June. He and his family own a 42% stake in Pantaloon, valued at about $630 million.
Mr. Biyani is proving that modern retailing, with a bit of spice, can work in a country where traditional markets dominate. On the back of his success — and rushing to close his head start — are some of the world’s largest retailers. While few may subscribe to Mr. Biyani’s chaos theory of retail, all will be struggling to find ways to attract the millions of Indian consumers who are shopping at branded chain stores for the first time.â€
what guys REALLY want – a sohnee jananee who makes rajmah and butter chicken.
as #11,
Thank you for the article, I am actually talking about Indian grocery stores in America, although the need for chaos may explain some of what I have seen as well 🙂
preach brother…PREACH…although I would revise the word “jananee”
Not just that…i assume you have on the PATH train to NYC and seen the chaos there. Us desis jus lose all sense of direction when we are in a jhund. I went to India after 9 yrs in May and right at the airport I was made aware of where I am headed. Airline seating is called by rows, from back to front. Yet we forget all that, ignore simple instructions and group around the door as if it is leading straight to swarg. We fail to understand that its not first come first serve.
You really can’t generalize about DBD guys.
Its not uncommon for ABD guys to mantain the village mentality of their parents, while DBDs (especially from Delhi and Mumbai) to have more modern views on gender roles.
that’s not true, you obviously can generalize. you just did!
.
I wouldn’t. That’s EXACTLY what (desi) guys want!
jeet,
You are absolutely right, this was the other thing I had in mind, it is comic to see the crowd around the gates for flights to India and also everyone standing up as soon as the flight lands. BTW “Jhund” is my word of the day 🙂
what is this whole nonsense about 1 maid, 2 maids, 3 maids….?
You get amazing takeout in cities all over the world — don’t you?
Well I just read the 2005 article and it wasn’t cringe-inducing as I expected it to be. I guess my expectations are low after that horrible Marie-Claire article. She makes some interesting points and you can’t disclaim the experiences/interactions shes had with the men.
I can’t say that I haven’t thought about the whole arranged marriage route, since I am over 30(GULP!) with no prospects in site. But then the thought of meeting someone only a few times and then getting engaged and eventually married to them totally freaks me out. I mean you truly don’t know someone until you live with them…
I am definitely interested in reading her book to see what her experience was like.
I mean you truly don’t know someone until you live with them…
IMPURRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But then the thought of meeting someone only a few times and then getting engaged and eventually married to them totally freaks me out. I mean you truly don’t know someone until you live with them…
It sucks and even worse for my wife since she stuck with me.
16 · razib said
Razib,
I said its not uncommon. I believe my statement implied that there are a lot of variations among ABDs and DBDs.
I hope she got married. There just happens to be a lot of unmarried desi girls in early to mid 30s. I am not kidding, a lot.
I believe my statement implied that there are a lot of variations among ABDs and DBDs.
right, but that is a generalization 🙂 i guess that’s a jackass move semantically, but substantively i think it’s kind of correct insofar as rejecting a strong generalization with an assertion of a uniformish distribution is a positive claim and not one of agnosticism.
Dear lord, this shit again? I thought we’d seen the last of this tired, rehashed nonsense after her and Sarita James’ half-dozen articles on the matter, but now it’s in the long form. Is this all these woe-is-me, ‘Harvard-educated’ women know how to write about? One is tempted to believe they purposely remain unmarried to be able to continue writing about a seemingly perpetual state of Sex-and-the-City-dom. Is it all possible for the arranged vs. love marriage topic to be unaggrandised?
It sounds like you are wise in being wary.
Since this cliched topic of arranged marriage raises it head again, let me trying to rehash a concept from a recent Obama related article : Nudge against Fudge – This so called modern, progressive desi arranged marriage has become a “libertarian paternalistic” decision making process. As stated in the article libertarian policy is that people should be generally free to do what they please. Paternalistic policy tries to influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.
My suspicion is that most of the desi chick lit authors are forced by the whim of publishers to deal with Indian topics, most probably don’t interact with Indians socially
I like the groom’s spirit. He knows the answer uncleji is looking for, he just won’t give it to him. And why does a Harvardi feminista need daddyji as go-between?
i just read her article and found it absolutely nauseating. what sort of woman allows her dad to put her profile all over the web? and then she complains when she has to meet boring duds?! and i find it so silly that you reject all the men in one country and decide that the solution lies in another one. hon, here’s where i’d recommend a little bit of introspection. perhaps the problems lies with you and your approach to men, relationships or life?
i’ve actually found this to be a huge issue with a lot of my desi friends (men & women). they tend to be totally obsessed with marriage, shallow, and want far too much compared to what they have to offer. and they LOVE to fall for people who’re completely wrong for them or out of their league. (disclaimer: this is completely anecdotal, obviously, which is why i am generalizing and does not apply to ALL desis).
i really wish they’d stop churning out these endless books about people going to india to find love, a groom, a bride, god or themselves. i want to smack people who buy this bs over the head because the answers aren’t ever that simple and they certainly don’t lie a convenient flight away!
Seriously I have never seen an Indian man in India cook, I remember the look on my uncles face when my father went to the kitchen to get my mother a cup of coffee. Every time I ask for a recepie of something I ate, it’s met with giggles. Forget men, there are very few broadminded people at all in India, espcially among women. We are from an urban upper middle class family in Kolkata.
Wow! She must have lost quite a bit of weight while writing that article after pulling out so many similar statments out of her ass .
Speaking of arranged marriages, NPR had a story on the same subject this morning.
Its not uncommon for ABD guys to mantain the village mentality of their parents, while DBDs (especially from Delhi and Mumbai) to have more modern views on gender roles.
Yes, but the mentality in villages might still be the same. Out of a billion plus people, how many people belong to the middle/upper middle class living in Delhi and Mumbai?
Sarah sez
As per Tuccilo [writer of SATC, “… just not into you” fame] it’s a generational issue.
On a more positive note… if it works out, the rewards can be quite scrumptious. 🙂
I haven’t finished the book yet, but I’ve got to admit, after the initial opening part, which is basically what was in the New York magazine article, Jain is actually quite open about her own dating history (and, bringing men home for the night) and her experiences in NYC, but shortly after that, quite a bit of humor kicked in, which was a pleasant surprise (I think I had expected a more earnest and less funny book). She does seem to have no problem laughing at herself. Also, her portrayal of her parents’ relationship is quite sweet.
36 · khoofia said
i don’t think the problem is actually us feeling entitled to romantic love, because that’s pretty natural (as is a yearning for more materialistic or supposedly shallow things like fame, fortune or beauty). in my opinion, the problem lies in expecting the love to last forever or to materialize into a walk down the aisle. we’d all be much happier if we conceded that love can be maddening, incredible, euphoric and yes, often, fleeting. it does not always last or translate into marital bliss.
34 · Abhi said
Another similar topic in the Huffington Post titled “Arranged Marriage: What It Can Teach Us”! This sure is getting a lot of press these days! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/23/arranged-marriage-what-it_n_108731.html
“Jain is actually quite open about her own dating history (and, bringing men home for the night)”.
Before being smacked with the ‘double-standard’ label, I wonder how many ABD men (let alone DBD men) are truly comfortable with this for their potential wife. Just curious.
“Jain is actually quite open about her own dating history (and, bringing men home for the night)”.
Before being smacked with the ‘double-standard’ label, I wonder how many ABD men (let alone DBD men) are truly comfortable with this for their potential wife. Just curious.
“i’ve actually found this to be a huge issue with a lot of my desi friends (men & women). they tend to be totally obsessed with marriage, shallow, and want far too much compared to what they have to offer.”
Real talk
This month’s Psychology Today, which I picked up in a doctor’s office waiting room, has an article about an arranged marriage between a white American and an Indian woman: “A Divine Match, Made in Hell,” by Jason Moyer. It’s adapted from his book Two Cups of Chai — and yowza, does the book cover hurt my eyes. Talk about your exotic wife-buying fantasies.
Lizzie,
That cover is something 🙂
You hit the nail.
OMG! That cover is redonkulous!
But the title reminds me of my mama and mami’s breakfast procedure they have developed after over 40 years of marriage. My mami makes 3 cups of chai and when it’s almost ready my mama gets the kakra and places some on a single plate. They both eat the kakra from the same plate and each get 1.5 cups of chai. Cho Chweet!
I think it’s witnessing little things like that in some arranged marriage couples is what makes many of us have a romanticized notion of what it can be like. Even though we know of many people who really aren’t compatible that stay together because of the pressure and got together in first place because of arranged marriage we are like the neighborhood pot-head – we easily forget.
40 · Kev said
It is best to avoid women from new York. One third of the women in New York have herpes.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGH!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Please, allow me.
“Are arranged marriages awesome? Do they suck? Are they normal? They are for these brown people over here! No, they’re not. These people want to escape them! No, the marriages last forever. Actually, they’re exotic and alluring. They’re way better than dating because you commit and learn to love the other person! They’re more horrible than dating because of all the smacking each other around by crazy control freaks. They’re about the same as dating, really–you just meet people and decide if you like them or not. They’re discriminatory. They’re the last resort of the desperate. They’re the first resort of the pragmatic. They’re old and stale. They’re new and hip! They frequently include the use of henna both in the wedding ceremony and on the cover of the resulting books. ABD women have nothing in common with DBD men. DBD men want nothing to do with ABD women. ABD men only want non-DBD women. DBD women only want green cards. ABD men only want sex.”
hurl
Will you people please stop being so lactate intolerant.
Regarding Sanjay (#32)’s comment, I am a DBD Indian male. Growing up, my dad used to cook whenever the need arose, like when my mom was sick or occasionally on Sundays or on festival days when they made some Indian sweets. My mom’s health is pretty frail. So he also used to cook a lunchpack for my nephew in the mornings, before he goes to school, for more than a year. My parents live in India and it’s not unusual in my family or among my relatives to see men cook. And our’s is a reasonably traditional middle class family.