Courtship Ideas of South Asians Get a U.S. Touch

New York Times
August 23, 2005
Courtship Ideas of South Asians Get a U.S. Touch
By GINIA BELLAFANTE

At 10 a.m. one Saturday in July, a few weeks after he
finished his medical residency at Brown University,
Ronak Shah married Kunal Patel, another doctor, in a
union that embraced every ritual of the Hindu nuptial
script.

Dr. Shah arrived at the Hanover Marriott in Whippany,
N.J., by horse and carriage. He wore a traditional
sherwani. And he greeted, before all others, his
bride's mother, in a gesture that signified the
importance of parental engineering in Indian marriage.

But for Dr. Shah and Dr. Patel, both 28, and thousands
of young Indians raised in the United States, that
engineering is undergoing a change. The venerable
South Asian tradition of arranged marriages has taken
on an American reinvention. Dr. Patel's mother and
father had a hand in their daughter's selection. They
were in touch with friends, cousins and cousins of
cousins for suggestions about whom she should marry.
But Dr. Patel was free to reject them all.

Only over dinner with Dr. Shah - her ninth suitor -
did she finally begin a courtship that was fueled as
much by chemical attraction as by familial interest.
Her marriage, as some young Indians refer to it, was
"love-cum-arranged."

Less than a decade ago, the decision about whom a
South Asian woman here might marry was still often
left to her parents, the prospective bride's
individual preference for tall dentists or
contemplative artists notwithstanding. But recently,
purely arranged marriage has evolved into a new
culture of what might be called "assisted" marriage,
in which parents are free to arrange all they like -
allowing their sons and daughters choice among
nominees screened for caste, lineage and geography,
among other measures - and giving the children veto
power.

These young people may have come of age in an America
of "Moonstruck" and "Dawson's Creek," but in many
cases they have not completely accepted the Western
model of romantic attachment. Indeed, some of the
impetus for assisted marriage is coming from young
people themselves - men and women who have delayed
marriage into their late 20's and early 30's, said
Ayesha Hakki, the editor of Bibi, a South Asian bridal
and fashion magazine based in New Jersey.

"That has been the most remarkable trend," Ms. Hakki
said, citing the example of a male acquaintance, who,
after dating on his own, turned to his parents for
guidance.

As Madhulika Khandelwal, a historian who has studied
Indians here, said, "Young people don't want to make
individual decisions alone."

The Patel-Shah union was instigated by the chance
encounter two years ago of Dr. Shah's mother and Dr.
Patel's at Famous Pizza, a restaurant in Queens that
is favored by Indian immigrants. Friends from the town
of Nadiad in India, the two had not seen each other in
30 years. Their conversation moved to the subject of
their still-single children.

In large part, Ms. Khandelwal said, the transition
from formally arranged marriage reflects social
changes in India itself, where assisted marriage is
now common among the educated, urban middle class.
That is because, she said, there are fewer
extended-family living arrangements and more women
pursuing higher education.

The purpose of assisted marriage here is not simply to
preserve Indian cultural identity, but more pointedly
to maintain class, religious and regional identities
in a place where they might easily be diffused, those
who have studied the Indian diaspora say. When Mona
Mahajan, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School
from New Jersey, married an Indian she met on her own,
she was the first in five generations of her family
not to have wed a Punjabi.

Arranged and assisted marriage have left Indians with
the lowest rate of intermarriage of any major
immigrant group in the United States. Among South
Asian men and women here in their 20's and 30's, the
vast majority of whom are foreign born, fewer than 10
percent marry outside their ethnic group, according to
an analysis of the Census Bureau's 2003 American
Community Survey conducted for this article. "In the
beginning I was pretty against all of this," Dr. Patel
said of this newer approach. "Growing up here, you
feel that you're supposed to fall in love, but once
you figure out that everyone goes on blind dates it
doesn't feel quite as strange."

Among Indian parents here who are traditionally
inclined, many begin to seek husbands when their
daughters are 22 or 23, but the search may be
forestalled if the woman is pursuing a graduate
degree, Indian women report. Men begin looking for
wives with their families' help at about age 26;
within more liberal households, children often marry
those they meet on their own.

Preceding any planned meeting is the exchange of the
all important "bio-data" between families, the term
used for a portfolio with the potential bride or
groom's profile.

The embrace of more traditional habits is apparent in
other ways. Weddings are often elaborate and last
three or four days. Families of the betrothed often
still consult a Hindu astrologer who schedules wedding
ceremonies according to the stars. When Anamika
Tavathia, 24, was engaged to a young Indian she met in
college, his family visited hers to propose on his
behalf and the priest determined they should marry on
June 26 of this year between 10:30 and 11 a.m.

This fall is expected to be an unusually busy wedding
season in Indian communities, because many couples
postponed weddings last year when many days were
deemed inauspicious.

Royal Albert Palace, a five-year-old catering facility
in Woodbridge, N.J., with a 21-foot statue of a former
deputy prime minister of India out front, has become
the locus for Indian weddings, and it was there, at a
wedding last month, that two young women discussed
assisted marriage.

"My dad's parents didn't even see each other until the
day they were married," said Kesha Patel, 25, who came
to the United States as a child and is looking for
someone, with her family's help. "So when I think
about that, I'm grateful for the system we have."

Kesha Patel has taken trips to India to meet
prospective partners, and her family has arranged for
her to meet men here, as well.

"Sometimes you'll get the bio-data and it will be
great, and then when you meet the person, you're
disappointed," she said. "My parents won't understand,
they'll say, 'But he's from a good family, he's a
doctor, he's a doctor, he's a doctor.' And I'll say,
'But he's short.' "

Alienating one's parents is anathema to Indian
culture, and most young people wish to avoid doing so
through marriage. Four years ago, Preet Singh, a
28-year-old teacher in Chicago, fell in love with a
woman seven years his senior and not a Sikh. He hoped
to marry her and live with her in his parents' home.

"My mother might have accepted the marriage but she
would not have lived with us," he said. "It was one of
the nastiest breakups of all because that person
helped me mature into a man." Not long ago, Mr.
Singh's sisters posted his profile on an Indian
matrimonial Web site, and he will marry this fall.

Part of his parents' displeasure with the previous
relationship was the fact that he was dating at all.
Though a Bibi magazine survey conducted three years
ago revealed that the majority of married men and
women questioned had had sex before marriage, dating,
as Mr. Singh put it, "does not exist in our culture."
This view leaves parents encouraging children to
resolve the marriage question quickly.

The parents of Leena Singh waited until she was older
than 25 and had earned a master's degree in
mathematics and an M.B.A. to find a husband. Ms.
Singh's father eventually found someone to her liking,
Sanjeev Tavathia, a young man studying engineering in
Iowa. They met in the company of relatives, then went
out alone. Back in San Diego, where she was living
with her parents, she called Mr. Tavathia and told him
she was ready for marriage. He said he was 90 percent
certain. They married several months later.

"From the beginning, I felt there was a physical
chemistry," Ms. Singh said, "but it took years to
develop a mature bond, and I guess you could call that
love."

Despite its groundings in pragmatism, assisted
marriage is spoken about among some young Indians in
highly romanticized terms - implicit in it is the
cinematic idea that immediate attraction should result
in an eternity spent together.

Kesha Petal's sister married a man to whom she was
introduced through her aunts. She decided to marry him
the day after they met. "A lot of my friends," Kesha
Petal said, her eyes gleaming, "tell me you know in an
instant."