‘I was wrong to reject arranged marriage’
Nirpal Dhaliwal on how he now regrets rebelling against the traditions of Indian culture
As the lavish six-part BBC One costume drama A Suitable Boy gets under way tonight – the first ever adaptation of Vikram Seth’s acclaimed novel – it will touch a raw nerve in myself and, I’m sure, many Indians. Set in post-Partition India, it follows the tale of 19-year-old Lata Mehra on her journey to find an acceptable husband; one who meets the criteria of caste, religion, education and upbringing set by her exacting mother, Rupa. Without giving the story away, the novel is both an unsparing examination and a celebration of India’s ancient arranged marriage system.
Having chosen to live differently from most of my Indian peers, pursuing the insecure path of a writer, marrying and then divorcing a much older English woman, I am now aged 46, single, unpropertied and with an easily Googled public past that makes me a very difficult sell on any Indian matrimonial website – all of which makes me, very much, an unsuitable boy.
I was raised in a heavily Indian neighbourhood in west London and, growing up, scoffed at my more traditional friends, whose visits to the temple, social lives, choice of university subject and subsequent careers and marriages es were all informed by their parents’ arents’ wishes.
All I wanted to do o was rave and get high, read and have ave highoctane experiences. I wanted to travel all over the world orld while bed-hopping between en beautiful strangers. To me, Indian dian culture and its emphasis on marriage and family values was the e dreariest ball and chain imaginable. nable.
I went on to do most ost of what I had wanted to. Ironically, nically, for all my rebellion against nst it, India would be the e country that enchanted nted and fascinated me most during my travels, and nd I would eventually spend years there. My disdain, I slowly grew to realise, had not been due to an insatiable lust for living, but a profound and manic restlessness and inability to savour the quieter and more meaningful nuances of life. This was a truth about myself that only dawned on me as I turned 40.
My out-of-hand rejection of even the thought of an arranged marriage had just been part of a disordered and reckless malaise. Refusing to plant my feet into the rich soil of my ancestral culture, I didn’t put down roots, and so have not grown or flourished as I might have. It was easy for me to not follow tradition, given the condition of my parents’ marriage. My father was the very Anglicised black sheep of his family, having left his home in Hanwell, west London, at 16 to join the British Army. He had been engaged to his pregnant CentralAmerican girlfriend in Belize, where he was stationed, when he came home on leave to tell his own father he was getting married.
An iron-fisted Sikh patriarch, my grandfather was adamant he would do no such thing – saying he would be dead to his family if he did – and arm-twisted him into marrying my hastily fetched mother, a recent arrival from India, within weeks.
It was a traumatising, desperately unhappy relationship, and my father, equating arranged marriages only with misery, was actively against any suggestion by my much more traditional mother that I should have one. With my father’s assent, I was free to live my own life – with very little guidance – making innumerable and costly mistakes along the way.
Aged 26, I began dating and soon moved in with a glamorous magazine editor who was 16 years older than me. My parents didn’t express any misgivings, and they and my siblings attended our wedding two years later. After our separation, five years later, they admitted to having had grave doubts from the beginning, but my father had been so committed to his policy of non-interference that he wouldn’t say anything and had forbidden my mother to, denying me their insights when I needed them most. Now, in middle age, I see the stability and affluence of those traditional friends I grew up with; thriving careers and families, nourished by partnerships that were shaped and supported by their parents. I have come to think of arranged marriage as beautiful, and deeply rue my rejection of it.
Despite their enormous exposure to foreign culture, almost 75 per cent of young people in India still prefer having an arranged marriage to a “love marriage”, as independent couplings are known. That preference is as strong among India’s extraordinarily successful and assimilated émigré communities.
I know several Ivy League and Oxbridge-educated professionals, male and female, working in industries ranging from advertising to space technology, who, having had their share of love affairs and globetrotting fun, choose in their early 30s to settle into arrangements guided by their families, with someone of a comparable background. There are no official statistics for arranged marriages among British-Indians, but there’s a very obvious preference for them to date among themselves and find, as my brother and sister did, partners who fit well with their parents’ values and culture.
Westerners often arrogantly dismiss arranged marriages as the backward rites of poor and benighted people, but I feel the exact opposite is true. The more successful and eligible an Indian is, the more likely they are to seek the input of their family in choosing a life partner. A successful arranged marriage is much more like a corporate merger than simply the bonding of two people; rapports between families are as important as the personal chemistry and CVs of the prospective couple. And once the pair have decided on a match, they can count on the absolute support of two large extended families, as well as access to their wider networks, assisting in everything from childcare to business ventures. The delicate politics and emotional complexity of the whole process can be seen in the new Netflix realityshow, Indian Matchmaking,
which has become compulsive viewing across the world.
I see my own experience as a warning to those who, as I did, think that lasting happiness can be found through chasing mere excitement. I am by no means a pariah among Indians, but I do live with the shame of having made dead-end choices, feeling condemned to live what feels to have been, in many ways, an unproductive life. But there is still hope: I can remain childless and also write a bestseller, a combination that would certainly boost my cachet among India’s many professional international matchmakers.
In the meantime, I will watch
A Suitable Boy with interest. Wistfully, I will be thinking of what might have been.
I wanted to travel all over the world while bedhopping between beautiful strangers