Demonstrating Marriage
The personal is political, we hear from Feminist movements around the world. Until I got married, I never quite realized the truth of this statement. Until I got married, I was just a “person”. Sure, being a woman affected me in some specific gendered ways. Being a woman means that one has to hesitate to walk out alone on the street after 9 o’clock. Being a woman means that using public transport doesn’t just involve questions of time or cost. All of this is indeed personal. But, but, but. I still never realized fully to what extent very personal decisions would be affected, until I got married.
One of the things which really struck me after getting married, was being expected to wear a ‘thali’ or ‘mangalsutra’. Why wear a thick, heavy chain that irritates my neck and serves no obvious function? The explanations are many. It ensures the long life of the husband. It is ‘our custom’ and therefore should be followed. Society expects you to wear it. It ‘demonstrates’ that you are married.
Let’s take these one by one. It ensures the long life of the husband. To any sane, rational mind, of course, this will come across as pure rubbish. Does the husband’s life literally hang on a thread? What about cultures that don’t have a thali concept? Do their men all die untimely deaths? When we pose such questions, elders become defensive and start saying that “it’s all a question of belief!” Well, I certainly don’t believe. More importantly, what about the wife’s long life? Who is praying for that? To me, the Mangalsutra represents the highly unequal power play of traditional marriages, where it was really the husband’s life which mattered and the wife was seen as an adjunct.Â
Next, it is ‘our custom’ and therefore should be followed. What is a custom? What infact is Culture? I don’t see culture as something that is inherently valuable, for its own sake. Any culture is something that is formed over a long period of time, influenced by the needs of the people at the time. Once upon a time, our ancestors live in caves. Surely they had their own needs, their own lifestyle, perhaps even their own music, dance, rituals. If Culture is unchangeable, then we should all still be dressed in bark and skin. The logical answer to this would be that cultures change since human beings themselves are dynamic and never content with any one state for long. Why then should we retain practices that have no meaning, simply because they claim to represent some ideal, ancient custom? The strangest thing is that the Arya Samaj priests claim that Vedic weddings had no such ritual of tying the mangalsutra!
Quite often, it seems as though the burden of transmitting culture is to be borne purely by women. Many conservative colleges, for e.g. will not allow female students to wear western clothes, on the grounds that they wish to preserve ‘Indian culture’ and ‘decency’. It never occurs to them, that male students, and men in general, wear shirts and trousers, Western articles of clothing, as a default. Somehow, men’s clothing is seen as neutral, it is only women’s clothing that becomes a battleground. Is this because women are somehow seen as ‘belonging’ to society whereas men are free agents, representative only of themselves? Women must therefore conform to some standard, set by the ideal ‘Bharatiya Nari’, while men only need to think of their own convenience. (Note, I am not advocating wearing Indian or Western style clothes, just that it is ridiculous to imbue them with so much meaning)
Let’s get back to the last two reasons for wearing the thali. Society expects you to wear it and it ‘demonstrates’ that you are married. These are what really, really get my goat. The first of these is more easily dismissed - sure, society expects a lot of stuff, but an individual can choose to ignore them in many cases. The second one, in my opinion, really gets to the heart of the matter. Demonstrating that one is married. Why? So that other predatory males don’t pounce on you ? So that you have a badge identifying yourself as the property of your husband? This whole notion of demonstration makes me very uncomfortable. A woman is so much more than a wife. Even as she gets married, she continues to play many other roles. She continues to work, in many cases. She continues to pursue her interests. She continues to be a daughter, a sister, someone’s favourite aunt. None of those roles ask for badges. Even if we agree that this new bond with a life partner is ‘more’ special, it doesn’t make sense that it needs an announcement to the world at large. Your family and friends know that you’re married, right? As for safety, men who indulge in sexual harassment are not going to be deterred by a woman’s marital status. Nor should we need to crave protection on the grounds of being married. And if you think about it a little deeply, why is it really important to tag oneself as being attached? Don’t ‘you’ the individual deserve respect, irrespective of your marital status?
In the past, there was a notion that a man took charge of his wife. Women did not have an income of their own nor did they own property, for the most part. Economically, it made sense to pray for the long life of the husband, out of sheer selfishness, if not out of love! Today, (educated women atleast) we don’t ‘need’ our husbands to stay alive - we want them to stay alive because we love them, just as much as they want us to have a long and fulfilling life. Isn’t it then time to drop a highly one-sided affair, a relic of the past where women desperately ‘needed’ their men?
When I got married, I wasn’t bold enough to dispense with the ritual altogether. I could not bring myself to say, I am not a cow that you need to rope me in! I wish I had the courage to do that. Unfortunately, such a sacred aura is built up around the mangalsutra that it is difficult to stand up to the elders in the family and proclaim that it is rubbish. But yes, I believe its time we came up with a new marriage format that is Indian, yet more egalitarian.
Some of you may perhaps think, what is the harm in it? Even if it doesn’t confer any benefits, surely it doesn’t do any harm either? I actually believe that it does. To me, the mangalsutra symbolizes all that is wrong with the way we view marriage in a woman’s life. Finding the right person and building a life together, are no doubt, wonderful things. But Marriage is not the ultimate aim of a woman’s life. It should not be accorded the importance it currently does. The Mangalsutra is the ultimate symbol of this supposedly ultimate goal of a woman’s life. This is why widows are denied the right to wear it. Just as it is a symbol of achievement as viewed for a woman traditionally, it is also a symbol of deprivation, in its absence. Marriage is not about demonstarting that you’ve joined a particular select club. A woman should not have to demonstrate how she has ‘changed’ after marriage. She continues to be the person she always was, and its educated, urban women like us who will need to bring about this change. Some people say, “it’s my choice”. Sure, but we need to think about the context in which our choices are made. I have only one rebuttal to the choice argument. Did your husband feel the need to “choose” a culturally relevant, symbol of marriage for himself? In all likelihood, no. (No, wedding rings mostly don’t apply in the Indian context). Like men’s clothing and so many other things, marriage is in a sense neutral for men - they continue to play the roles they did without any fanfare to introduce this additional role.
As for me, I ditched my mangalsutra shortly after getting married. For a long time though, whenever I visited my parents, I would put it on, to avoid ruffling any feathers. My parents have never insisted on ‘traditional girl’ roles for me or my sisters. We were free to study what we wanted, choose our own careers, focus on work, manage money. When it came to marriage, however, I realized that some things don’t change so easily. Even liberal parents find it difficult to let go of certain customs. Recently, I stopped hiding and told my parents upfront that I don’t wear it. I still put it on, when I visit my grandparents - it is such a sensitive issue, that it seems as though they would be seriously hurt if I didn’t. My decision to stop wearing a ’symbol’ of marriage was for me a necessary part of living out my feminist beliefs. It has made me realize that sometimes, the political is to be found in highly personal issues, but the personal can be used to take a political stand.
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