(Reproduced from the website of The Wall Street Journal, http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/08/23/the-modern-woman-and-arranged-marriage/)
When Nandini Krishnan started researching for her book about urban educated women who enter arranged marriages in India, she was surprised by two things: First, how many of these women there were, and second, how well their marriages seemed to be working out.
“Cosmopolitan Indians live under the delusion that arranged marriages are obsolete, but they are not,” Ms. Krishnan told India Real Time ahead of the publication of her book, “Hitched: The Modern Woman and Arranged Marriage.”
The women Ms. Krishnan interviewed for the book describe how arranged marriages have changed dramatically in recent generations. “It’s more like a blind date now, you are set up by your parents and meet before for a coffee and decide whether you like each other,” said Ms. Krishnan, who isn’t married.
However, there is more pressure to make a quick decision about a person than in a dating relationship, Ms. Krishnan says. Questions about whether the other person wants to have children and even where they want to send them to school come up way earlier before an arranged marriage than in a love match, she says.
“I think arranged marriage is here to stay but it will keep evolving, families will withdraw a little bit and it will become more like online dating in the U.S. or U.K.,” the 29-year-old author said.
There are no official statistics on arranged marriages in India, although some estimates suggest up to 90% of matches are made in this way.
Ms. Krishnan says she is troubled by some arranged marriage traditions.
“One thing I really don’t like is horoscope matching because that gets in the way of good matches,” she said. In India, a couple’s star signs are crosschecked to see if they align. “Now that we are more evolved, I think that horoscopes should be ditched. It’s also too rigidly caste-based and religion-based,” she said.
In the book, in which some names have been changed, women discuss the inner workings of arranged marriage and how to make it a success.
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