CHENNAI : Here’s a romantic story for you: in the late 70s, a man in his early thirties went and got himself a passport so that he could travel to Sri Lanka to ask his girlfriend, whom he had met in a medical college in Madras, to marry him. He was the eldest son and stood to inherit a sizeable inheritance, which he walked out on, in order to be with his beloved. They married, and he entered her family and didn’t look back.
That man is my father, and the woman he fell in love with is my mother, and if they were to get married in Tamil Nadu today, nearly 40 years later, they wouldn’t legally be able to register their marriage. That’s because the Tamil Nadu Government has introduced new prerequisites that now make it technically impossible for consenting adults to marry without the presence and approval of all living parents.
Those recently registering marriages in the state have been asked to bring their parents (preferably fathers, for obvious patriarchal reasons) along. This is not entirely new: in November last year, The New Indian Express reported that a registration office asked for a consent letter from a 29-year-old groom’s father. There is now an official circular that clearly details the need for verification of parental addresses, the furnishing of parental death certificates and other paternalistic demands. While not explicitly stated, the technicalities correlate with one thing: parental approval.
It’s a decision so regressive that it’s hard to believe it has come in 2018, but it happens in a very clear context: the Supreme Court’s Hadiya case, involving a young Keralite woman who converted to Islam from Hinduism and married of her own free will, and the violence relating to inter-caste marriages that Tamil Nadu itself continues to see unabatedly. Add to this renewed bigotry towards Periyar, who like Ambedkar advocated for inter-caste marriages as a way to abolish the caste system. In this context, also, are numerous under-reported incidents, such as how — just weeks ago — a panchayat in Punakaiyal village, Thoothukudi district, chased out all women who had married outside their castes in the last 15 years.
We who speak of ‘love marriage’ must necessarily also speak and think of caste and religious exogamy as its natural extension, instead of being content to accept that romance is radical even if it happens only within tightly-knit, and thus closely-guarded, circles. To marry within one’s own demographic background, even with some disapproval (due to economic disparity, prior matrimony, different subcaste, etc) is not radical at all. It changes nothing about society’s greater hegemonic structure, which includes misogyny and various forms of discrimination.
Neither is it helpful to jump ahead to whether or not marriage as an institution is worth preserving without recognising that for many people, it still has meaning both practical and sentimental. To be unable to register a marriage therefore is a terrible blow. Marriage registration eases a number of bureaucratic processes, from obtaining loans and visas to divorce and child custody. It speaks so poorly of current society that I still think of my parents’ marriage as radical, and not just for their time