Lower Class Girls in India - Difficult to afford a Dowry and impossible to get a Divorce!

In the past days I have been writing about the various problems of arranged marriages. While reading my entries again, I thought one might get the impression that I am writing only about one certain class of society. Many people in the west to whom the concept of arranged marriages is something new, may think that only people of a certain class would remain in their marriage even though there are problems. They don’t know that the problems related to those marriages are common to all different levels of society and that all of them tend to accept their ill fate rather than break up and divorce. It doesn’t matter whether you ask a couple of the lower class, the middle class or the high class, arranged marriage is not successful but they nevertheless remain married. It is only logical if you look at the structure of society – let me explain you why.

We start by looking at those people whom you would call ‘lower class’ according to their financial situation. They don’t have much money and surely not enough to save for an Indian wedding, which usually means a whole lot of expenses. They work every day to get enough money to eat in the evening, buy some clothes and raise their children. They rely on other people for bigger events. When their daughters get married, they ask for support wherever they believe they can get help. Individuals give some money and charity organizations pay, too, so that they have a dowry to hand over to the groom as well as the money to organize the wedding party and ceremony. They make every effort to get enough money but if it doesn’t suffice, they take a loan from a relative, a friend or someone whose business it is to lend them money and earn interest when they pay it back.

The high financial effort that the parents thus have to do is one of the reasons why many people wish for a boy – if they have several girls, they have to pay for all of their weddings and the dowry on top!

Once they have the money together and have found a groom of the right price class, the girl gets married. That can also happen quite early, especially in poor families. Girls get married at the age or thirteen or fourteen already, even though it is by law illegal to marry below the age of 18. In villages however, there are every year lots of child marriages. These girls are not mature enough to do anything else than what their parents want them to do. Her whole life she has done what they told her, so even if she gets married and doesn’t like the husband to whom she was married, she will go and tell her parents. They will reply that she should accept him, adjust herself and make it work somehow.

Imagine the daughter’s situation! She has not learned any profession and would be depending on begging or hard labour to make her living on her own. Her parents will hardly be able to take her back either! Maybe they would do so out of love but imagine her guilty feelings if she really did come back and make their financial situation problematic again! If she has children already, it is even more difficult.

For the boy, the new groom, the situation is also not easier. If he realizes that his wife cannot deal with his family and maybe searches for fights with him, too, what is he supposed to do? If they did get divorced, he would be laughed about for not being able to keep a wife with him! And wouldn’t he feel some responsibility for her, too?

So they stay together, no matter what is wrong in between them. They suffer and fight, often clearly visible to the people around them as they live close-by others. Nevertheless they don’t change anything.