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4/30/2005 » Musings, Religion | 
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Marrying age
I cringe at many a desi village custom. It’s thoroughly depressing that some Indian girls are still being married off by age 12:
When the teacher read out the Hindi-language alphabet in the modest two-room village school, Munni, 9, held her textbook in one hand and rocked her wailing 3-year-old brother with the other... even with the free meals, girls often drop out of school. They "have to help the family during the harvest season or look after the younger siblings," Ahmad said. "Girls also get married quite early. It is very difficult to retain them because education is not a priority." Munni's mother acknowledged as much. "She is our firstborn and we will marry her in about three years," she said. "She can study until then."
[A]s Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen 'like a ray of sunshine through a window--leaving it unbroken.'
(The Immaculate Conception is a heck of a convenient explanation. ‘We’ve got to get Mary to be saintly. Hmm, how do we rescue her from the messiness of actual sex and original sin...’ There are lots of these little elisions in all religions. Krishna stole the gopis’ clothes, but their relationship was purely chaste, wink wink.)
But we’re not alone. The nice thing about Jehovah’s Witnesses was reading the Bible and thinking, holy shit, their stories are just as surreal as ours. The advantage of moving to New York is governors named Cuomo and Pataki and apartments whose prices go up the closer they are to ethnic neighborhoods with good food. The wonderful thing about travel is figuring out the ethnic origins of white-bread American words. Johnson is analogous to Johannsdottir, Smith came from Schmidt, pariahs and polo chukkers are straight-up deshi. Ethnic is the new white, from public school taunting to downright posh.
Today the NYT reminds us Neanderthal marriage customs are not a uniquely desi shame, they’re tribal:
More than half of Kyrgyzstan's married women were snatched from the street by their husbands in a custom known as "ala kachuu," which translates roughly as "grab and run." ... at least a third of Kyrgyzstan's brides are now taken against their will. Kyrgyz men say they snatch women because it is easier than courtship and cheaper than paying the standard "bride price," which can be as much as $800 plus a cow.
This in particular is reminiscent of desi village culture:
Once a girl has been kept in the home overnight, her fate is all but sealed: with her virginity suspect and her name disgraced, she will find it difficult to attract any other husband... "Every good marriage begins in tears," a Kyrgyz saying goes.
It’s always bothered me the way the doli / vidai in a Hindu wedding ends in tears. Here you are on the eve of marrying someone you love and are starting a family with — it’s a muharrat, not a funeral. Some of the tears are genuine, but I suspect many more are of the crocodile variety, the spigot turned for sake of tradition. I have no use for these tears, just as I have no use for the Kabuki show that is hired wailers at wakes.
At its heart it’s a submission ritual: the baraatis have stormed the gates, the bride has been caught, the doli is her broken surrender, carried off in a palanquin to the conqueror’s harem. ‘Dilwale dulhaniya le jayenge’: it’s Alexander entering Babylon, Hulagu entering Baghdad.
Actually surrendering to your significant other is deeply intimate. It’s neither the beseeching supplicant on bended knee nor the teleprompter bride.
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