Indian Parents, It's Time To Stop Shaming Your Children For Marrying Who They Love

Parents shaming children is, unfortunately, a common reality in India. Every time a person makes a choice on something - from their body to their clothes to their careers - there's a desi parent watching close by. Nothing escapes their hawk-eyed vision, which is forever on the lookout for any behaviour, speech or decision that doesn't conform to society's preset norms. They stop, question and forbid you from proceeding any further with whatever it is you were doing to "bring shame to the family."

This policing is especially tight when it comes to the sensitive matter of love. One would think that the sensitivity would be to do with the emotions and possibility that romantic love brings to people's lives. But no. It relates here to how, in India, love incites offence among parents who kick up a storm upon hearing their children - adult children, that too - are under its spell.

Love is too liberating a concept to be mainstream in our conservative society, and so, still carries a measure of taboo. That, in turn, rides on the back on age-old prejudices and divisions parading as 'tradition.' Which is why, news of love marriage in a desi household (and by extension, the whole neighbourhood), continues to raise eyebrows.

Someone choosing a man of her liking to marry. Someone opting for lifelong singlehood. Or someone going for a live-in with a same-sex partner. Why do these organic alternatives to ">arranged marriage - where the family artificially tailors a match in consideration of caste, kundli, religion - terrify parents?

Should what counts as a traditional value system ever be permitted to override individual agency? Picking partners for everything other than love - the colour of their skin, the size of their paycheck, the skill of making chai - is that the tradition we are proud of? How is it fair that women, to prove they are 'achhe ghar ki ladkiyaan' and avoid the risk of being shamed, have to forgo their preferences and bow down to convention?

Parents Shaming Children For Their Love Choices: Will This Culture Cease?

Is love so radical an idea that parents are willing to go the mile to shame their children for embracing it? That families are ready to draw blood for it? That people are losing their lives only because they made a personal choice in favour of something as empowering as love?

The story of Jas Kaur went viral earlier this year. A Sikh woman, she was disowned by her family for marrying a White man outside her religion and culture. As tragic as her plight is, Kaur is one of the luckier ones. Because she made it out alive. So many women in India haven't been that fortunate. In July, a man in Jharkhand killed his pregnant daughter since she married outside their caste. More recently, an intercaste couple was found dead in Punjab in a suspected case of honour killing.

The frenzy surrounding 'love jihad' is so rabid that interfaith couples are compelled to live in fear of violence. Many feel the concept is only a tool to monitor and control who women love and retain the 'purity' of religion through 'female honour.'

Meanwhile, for the LGBTQIA+ community, the fight to gain legal recognition of same-sex marriages is painfully still on, despite the landmark Section 377 scrapping in 2018. Before the Delhi High Court, the centre is persistently opposing these petitions of hope on the claim that the "sanctity" of marriage in India is something preserved only between a "biological" man and woman.

When laws and legal remedies offer limited solutions to love, can we really expect positive affirmations from Indian parents? 

What scares our society is the social and structural change love is capable of bringing - across the lines of gender discrimination, class privilege, casteism, communal hate. The independence in making your own individual choices is perceived to be a faultline that will disbalance the status quo. And why would the stakeholders of patriarchal systems want that power hierarchy to ever change?

These are everyday ground realities in India. Rosy conversations about the acceptance of love marriages and parents gradually turning soft to their children's choices are only surface-level, ordinary perhaps in elite urban circles and on upper-class Netflix screens. But frequent headlines of crime inflicted on those choosing whom to love, show that India is far from change even today.

Views expressed are the author's own.

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