In 2005
Anita Jain, a second generation Indian in America, published an article in the
New Yorker magazine, in which she described her attempts at striking a balance
between the New York dating scene and the arranged-marriage set-up that is
prevalent amongst the Indian Diaspora spread across the globe. Jain, a graduate
from Harvard, wrote:
‘It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that shaadi, the word for marriage in many Indian languages, is the first
word a child understands after mummy and papa. To an Indian, marriage is a matter of karmic destiny. There
are many happy unions in the pantheon of Hindu gods—Shiva and Parvati, Krishna
and Radha.’
Following the publication of the
article, Jain was approached to write a book. Jain proposed doing a book that
would take her to India, the country of her ancestors. The result is a rollicking,
no-holds-barred, memoir, Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in New
India.
Jain’s father, a graduate with a
degree in engineering from one of the prestigious universities in India, left
the country of his forefathers in search of a better life-style. He immigrated
to America, where, after years of hard toil and several dead-end jobs and
failed money-making schemes, he gained entry into the social class Karl Marx
described as petit bourgeois. But, as
they say, you can take a man out of India, but you can’t take India out of a
man. Having escaped the bucolic town of Meerut (from which he hailed) and
several dozen relatives stuck at the lower rungs of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy
of needs, Jain’s father saw little reason to visit India in the decades after
he moved to America. He also held the country of his birth, based on his experiences
in the hinterland of Uttar Pradesh
(Northern Province), the most populous state in the Indian Federation, in
withering contempt (‘India will never change,’ is his verdict when he visits
his daughter in India). However, in his thinking he would appear to be very
much an Indian of his generation in at least one aspect: very keen for his
daughter to be married to a ‘nice Indian boy’, preferably vegetarian, although—Jain
wryly observes—he was prepared to slack the rules if the boy earned more than
200,000 dollars a year. Throughout Jain’s twenties, her father put
advertisement in immigrant American newspapers such as India Abroad which went like: ‘Match for Jain girl,
Harvard-educated journalist, 25, fair, slim.’ ‘Jain’ is the author’s surname as
well as the name of the relatively less known Indian religion to which she
belongs. Jain—that is the author— informs us that her religion began its life
as an offshoot of Hinduism, but has been absorbed over the millennia by the all-encompassing
Hinduism. Although accorded the status of a religion, it is treated, by most
Indians, including, perhaps, its followers, as very close to Hinduism. (In
literature, ‘Jainism’ gets a mention in American Pastoral, my least
favourite Philip Roth novel, where the daughter of the novel’s narrator
converts to Jainism and becomes a vegetarian, news the narrator receives as if
she has contracted a deadly communicable disease. ‘Jainism’ is a militantly
vegetarian religion and its strict followers, Jain informs us, do not eat root
vegetables such as carrots.) If he was in a magnanimous mood, Jain’s father
would add the line, ‘Caste no bar’. Jain’s brother who, incredibly for someone
who grew up in America, never had a girl-friend before he married a girl his
parents chose for him, was, happily married with a kid; but his precocious
sister was altogether different cup of chai.
She refused to settle down into matrimony. Equipped with her Harvard degree,
Jain, throughout her twenties, worked in different continents: South America
(Mexico City), South East Asia (Singapore), and Europe (England and Spain), and
returned to New York just when she turned thirty; single and in search of Mr
Right. The problem for Jain was she was leading a life out of the Sex
and the City, but harbored notions of love and romance that wouldn’t have
been out of place in a Bollywood potboiler. She had had enough of
commitment-phobic Americans (and Europeans and South Americans). She did not
want to wake up alone in the morning (or in the bed of a man she had no
recollection getting in bed with). She was no longer in the first flush of
youth and felt that time was running out for her. She wanted a husband, pronto.
In a journey that was the reverse of that which her father undertook when he
was roughly of the same age as she, more than three decades before,
Jain decided to emigrate to India. Her father left his homeland in search of a
better job; Jain decided to return to her ancestral homeland in search of a
better husband; or a husband.
What follows is a highly
entertaining and readable account that is part travelogue and part memoir.
Jain is in a unique position to
offer insights into what she described in an interview as the sexual revolution
sweeping through the young people in the big Indian cities, very similar to the
one the US experienced in the sixties (amongst other things). She is both an
insider and outsider: an Indian born and raised in the USA, who has not severed
the links to the country and culture of her parents. What she also has, as
becomes increasingly apparent as the memoir progresses, is a refreshingly open
mind shorn of preconceived stereotypes about India. In the year (that is
described in the memoir) Jain goes out on dates with many men. Her tastes, when
it comes to men, are Catholic. Ethnicity is no bar (although she meets more
Indians than Westerners), caste is no bar, language is no bar (some of the men
she agrees to go out with are referred to by the hip, English-speaking crowd as
‘vernac’—short-hand for ‘vernacular’, as they can’t speak English), background
is no bar (some of her dates have escaped grinding poverty in India’s
hinterland to come to the metropolis), religion is no bar (Hindus, Sikhs,
Muslims, Christians—all are welcome), earning capacity is no bar (she ends up
paying for some of her dates after realizing that the evening’s bill is
probably equal to their monthly salaries), and, finally, dietary habits are no bar (flesh-eaters have
as much a chance as grass-eaters of getting to know Jain). It would be fair to
say the girl is not picky. The young in Delhi, Jain discovers, are not all that
different from their counterparts in New York. They wear designer clothes,
smoke hash, drink alcohol (Old Monk
seems to be the favourite in the circles Jain moves in), think nothing of
pre-marital sex, and—this would surely shock Jain’s father—are prepared to end
marriages and relationships on grounds such as they have fallen out of love.
(In a dry tone—that raises its head from time to time throughout the book—Jain
observes, ‘These days it takes a lot less than wife-beating to trigger a
divorce; mere temperamental differences will do.’) They also have a very
relaxed attitude towards issues like religion, ethnicity, and sexuality. Jain gets
to know a vibrant gay community in Delhi. She makes friends amongst gay men
many of whom, Jain would have us believe, are in happy, stable relationships.
India, you get the impression from the memoir, has an ambivalent attitude
towards homosexuality. Hinduism, the main religion of the country—the only
surviving religion of the Antiquity—has no position on homosexuality; indeed,
one of the names of Shiva, one of the Gods of the Hindu trinity, Jain informs
us, is Ardhnarinateshwar— a Sanskrit
word, the meaning of which is ‘half a man and half a woman’. So homosexuality
is not a religious taboo, but it is definitely a cultural taboo and is rarely
discussed openly in households. Indeed Jain meets gay men (she does not meet
lesbians; all of her homosexual friends are men) whose families were prepared
to turn a blind eye to their sexualities so long as they married and procreated.
One of Jain’s acquaintances did not ‘come out’ until he was thirty, and spent
most of his adolescence groping servant boys.
So much for the metropolitan city
with its gaggles of young men and women for whom life is a mélange of parties, discos, and posh restaurants serving haut
cuisine (at prices which would put you in the mind of a second mortgage). What
about the mofussil? Jain discovers that outside of the emancipated (if that is
the word) womenfolk in Delhi, things have not changed a great deal for women,
if the life-stories of two of her cousins are anything to go by. Jain visits
her mother’s hometown of Gaziabaad, a mere forty minutes drive from Delhi and
described once by the Newsweek as one of the ten fastest
growing cities in the world. Jain sees no evidence of that (although admittedly
she does not venture outside of the area where her aunt lives). At her aunt’s
place, she meets her two cousins who married when they were twenty-one—arranged
marriages, of course—and have been living with the joint families of their husbands.
They have to seek permission from their mothers-in-law in everything they do.
They rarely leave homes and, inside of their homes, spend most of their waking hours
in the kitchens. (We also learn that traditional ‘Jain’ households in which Jain’s
cousins live, have interesting rituals around defecation and cleanliness, which
they have to observe.) Their days (and lives) revolve around cooking, cleaning,
and looking after their children and husbands. And both the women, bedecked in
gold and jewelry from head to toe, are very happy with their lives. They are
perplexed, amused even, when Jain tells them about the life she leads in Delhi,
less than an hour’s drive from Gaziabaad—the life of staying out all hours most
nights, drinking and smoking in bars with men—, but are not pitying or envious.
Jain is a sharp and non-judgmental
observer of what goes around her and effortlessly throws into sharp relief some
of the less well-known (or advertised) facets of Indian psych: such as the
Indians’ preoccupation with the fair skin. This frequently manifests as what
Jain describes as inward racism, and the goras
(Indian colloquial—not pejoratives— term to describe the Westerners—literal meaning:
‘white’) get preferential treatment over their own. Jain recounts stories of
two Australian girls who do not strike you as excessively burdened in the
talent department, and who (funnily enough) start off by working in the Indian
call centres (so that, for a change, when your call is answered by a person who
introduces herself as ‘Amy’ is indeed ‘Amy’ and not, say, ‘Amita’), getting
good jobs thanks to their skin colour.
Jain does not speak much about
India’s much reviled caste system, but maybe that is because explaining the
complexity of it would have been beyond the scope of the book. (I once heard
British author Louis de Berniers in a literary programme where he said that the
Indian caste system was so complex that even the Indians probably did not
understand it fully; the British class system, he said, was not a patch on
India’s Byzantine caste system). However, here too, you get the impression that
a big gulf exists between the urban areas and the hinterlands. In the
cosmopolitan ambiance of Delhi, caste does not matter: when you are traveling
in the overcrowded metro or gyrating to the latest Bollywood ditties or singing
along to Simon & Garfinkel (It seems the artists who went out of fashion years
ago in the West still captivate Indian youth; they even listen to Judas
priest), you have neither the time nor the inclination to be curious about the
cast of the person next to you. However, in the hinterland where communities
are more closely knit and (for want of better phrase) traditional, these things
matter a lot more. There are interesting titbits of information provided, such
as Jain, although technically belonging to a religion different from Hinduism,
which does not have caste system, also talks about her ‘Bania’ (Merchant)
caste. Jainism, Jain informs us, started its life as an opposition to the
hierarchical nature of Hinduism, but over millennia, has been reabsorbed into
the parent religion. Those who converted to Jainism thousands of years ago
belonged to the ‘Bania’ cast. And the modern day Jains consider themselves
belonging to both their religion (which is anti-hierarchical) and ‘Bania’
caste, apparently without any internal contradiction. You get the impression
that the origin of the caste system was probably socio-economic and dictated by
what people did to earn their living before the system got fossilized.
Jain makes only oblique references
to India’s Achilles’ heel, the festering secessionist movement in Kashmir, and
is careful to be scrupulously neutral in her comments and observations. Muslims
form almost a fifth of India’s population, and the relations between the
Muslims and the majority Hindus periodically reach flash points, resulting in
the kind of carnage that would leave Ashurbanipal speechless. Despite this, the
two communities seem to have learned to live in relative harmony and peace,
side by side (until riots break out). Certainly the attitude of the Hindus
towards the Muslim dress code, to give just one example, seems to be far more
tolerant than that of many in the West.
All this is very well. Does Jain
find true love in India? I will not give away the game by spilling the beans
here. However, you might be excused for wondering, as the book progresses,
whether Jain’s attempts at finding a soul mate aren’t desultory. Jain goes to
India thinking that her options of finding a husband would be more plentiful
there. She could, for example, go in for a strict arranged marriage, or an
‘assisted’ marriage, or she could merely date in a pool far more oriented
towards marriage than the one she was dating in New York. As it happens, Jain,
unsurprisingly, is not too keen on the first option. Indeed, when her
increasingly impatient parents announce their intention to descend upon her in
Delhi and ‘marry her off’ in their six weeks’ stay, she tries her best
(unsuccessfully as it turns out) to dissuade them. However, when he turns up, Jain’s
father is disappointed: firstly, when he is not flooded with offers from
doctors and engineers—the only two ‘real professions’ in his books—wanting to
marry his Harvard-educated daughter after he puts an advertisement in the
matrimonial section of broadsheets; and secondly, by the attitudes of the men
who do turn up. (In her deadpan style, Jain narrates an incident when she meets
an executive, earning astronomical sums, who drives in a Mercedes to meet Jain
and her father in a posh hotel. In the meeting, Jain’s father, an
unsophisticated feminist, asks the man what he would do if Jain was unwell and
could not cook. The man tells him that it wouldn’t be a problem as he has a
maid. Jain’s father asks him what he would do if the maid too was unwell.
Unfazed, the man replies that in fact there were two maids in his house.
Clearly agitated, Jain’s father wants to know what the man would do if the
second maid was unwell too. The man gives him a tolerant smile and says, ‘I
shall order food from restaurants unless you think all the restaurants in Delhi
close down simultaneously.’) Jain spends long hours on shaadi.com and meets a
few men who answer her ads. Her (mostly gay) friends try to set her up with
‘eligible’ men (so it is a bit of a non-starter). Many of these men are simply
not in her league (some of them cannot speak a word of English, and Jain is not
very fluent in Hindi, which, you’d have thought, would be a tad problematic). Indeed
she agrees to go out with some men, you suspect at times, not so much because
she is romantically attracted to them as because she is interested in their
life stories; they are good material for her book (she is in India not just to
find a husband, there is a book to complete). She occasionally meets men whom
she finds interesting to begin with, but these relations invariably follow the
same pattern: either she loses interest in them or they lose interest in her.
Jain, who, we learn, has a degree
in journalism, has a gift for spinning out gorgeous sentences that flow
smoothly. The tone of the narrative is frequently drily acerbic, but never
demeaning or condescending; the writing is witty but not slapstick. There are
several memorable characters in the book, the most memorable of which, surely, is
Jain’s father, the wheeler-dealer from Uttar
Pradesh, who, by hard work, made a success of his life in America. The only
book he has read, Jain tells us, is ‘How to Make Money’. When Jain gives him
Bill Clinton’s autobiography as a present, she is informed by her mother, a few
months later, that he just skimmed through it until he stumbled upon the
salacious bits, which he read in detail. He is ‘money-obsessed’ and is
convinced that doctors and engineers are the only two professions worth taking
a note of. Jain is clearly very fond of him, and treats his attempts to
‘assist’ her in marriage not as irritating interference but as hilarious
capers.
Marrying Anita is not just a riveting story of a
young woman looking for love in a country of her ancestors, it is also a
refreshing and honest look at a country that is waking up from its decades of
socialist slumber and modernizing at a breakneck speed. Recommended.
