Politics of the Intimate Pt. 2: The Brahmin Arranged Marriage
There is a black and white photo taken very early in the days after my parents got married, with them sitting on two chairs outside their house. I once put it up in a Facebook album, as part of a vintage album with a caption going something like “The typical arranged marriage photo.” My mother called me up, very upset, and demanded I take it down. I was nonplussed but her agitation got through and I complied. Everyone knew they had an arranged marriage, I thought, and my parents have themselves chuckled numerous times over their meeting through the classic family-sponsored The Hindu matrimonial classifieds in the 80s.
Nowadays, I wonder a lot about that photo and her response. The plain unsmiling gazes of my parents, their stiff body language, the clear lack of intimacy, a lot of which had just struck me as “typical” of arranged marriage carried a lot of emotional weight for the people involved, something I had easily set aside with the amount of time having passed… but for my mother, those reminders were still raw. She didn’t want to be reminded. And she didn’t want others to see it.
***
At the heart of Brahminism’s regime of power is marriage and sexuality. The arranged marriage of Brahmin man to Brahmin woman is the core means through which the caste system sustains its power. Primarily, it ensures the continuity of “pure” Brahmin bloodlines, but from the materialist point of view, it also ensures that ancestral private property, and all their social and cultural capital in the forms of “respectability,” intellectual authority, and social status are retained within Brahmin communities. And all of it emerges through mandating how, where and when sex and reproduction can be allowed to happen.
The Brahmin arranged marriage is undergoing transformative shifts in the modern age, because it has to reproduce the Brahmin’s supremacist, exclusionary position in the caste hierarchy without the segregatory advantages of village life. However, it is impossible to situate the “modernity” of marriage in Brahminism, without understanding the orthodoxy of marriage in Hindu society, particularly through the creation of gendered codes of behavior in caste society. From Vedic eras, where women’s fertility played a key role in the “high” status that women occupied, to the Classical period, where the Manusmriti was formulated, putting stringent restrictions on the value and mobility of women, to the successive revolution of Buddhism and the counter-revolution of Brahmins through the Bhagavad Gīta, women in Hindu society have as a totality been essentialized, socialized, and reduced only to their value for sexual reproduction. The Manusmriti in fact equated women to “Shudras” or the lowest of the fourfold caste varnas, considering both groups to be polluting and reserved the harshest of punishments for their transgression of social boundaries.
Even more significantly, marriage in the Brahmin setup has to be understood in the context of the dogmatic Brahminical varnashrama dharma, where marriage enables the transformation of the male from a brahmacharya (bachelor/student stage) to the grihastha (married/householder stage). The brahmacharya stage is in fact, supremely important to Brahminism, and this stage has to be adapted to fit into contemporary “modernity.” In orthodox Brahmin communities, the brahmacharya phase is when the young Brahmin male comes of age, specifically through separation from maternal and female domestic influence, and then put through a rigorous Brahminical education with male gurus, initiated into priestly rituals, and socialized into his role of belonging to a priestly class and an upholder of dharmic education. The brahmacharya stage is initiated with the upanayanam or thread-ceremony, signifying the “twice-born” status of savarna men in general, and Brahmin men in particular. Brahmin women, it must be noted, cannot access Brahminical education or twice-born status like the Brahmin man can.
These constructs of gendered Brahminism also signify something significant that Osella & Osella (2006, p. 36) point out:
These uncertainties and ambiguities highlight an important aspect of Brahminhood itself: that it claims to be synonymous with maleness. From a male point of view, femaleness can be sloughed off in initiation by removing birth pollution and replacing the biological mother by a ritual father, making the child ritually born of two males. Yet females can not be so easily written out of the social picture. Women are necessary for the community’s continuance, while a wife is an indispensable ritual partner (Fuller 1980; Fuller 1991). From a female point of view, a woman is certainly of lower status than her husband, the initiated ritual specialist who has been reborn as a Brahmin; yet as a Brahmin she considers herself different in another way — superior, less polluted — than other womenfolk. While respondents would agree that ‘technically’ she is a Sudra, a once-born who has not undergone the initiatory second birth, in practice, a Brahmin woman is treated as a Brahmin. This severely undermines the ritual’s claim to be the only way of effecting and conferring Brahminhood, suggesting the acknowledgement of essentialized and inborn qualities. If Brahminhood is not made by the rite but is natural, an essentialized caste status akin to ‘race’, perhaps so too then is masculinity, making the rite’s claims to purge the male body of residual female pollution redundant.
If the Brahmin male is the ideal form of humanity, then all women are fundamentally an “impurity” within Brahmin epistemologies of sex and sexuality. Their presence, their “nature,” their dharmic roles are all understood as bad influences on the Brahmin male. However, the Brahmin woman in her particularity, is biologically necessary for matrimony, for status, domestic management, and most importantly, sexual reproduction that leads to the furthering of the Brahmin male line of inheritance. The Brahmin woman’s chastity or sexual purity then becomes a critical issue to manage, and an epistemology of sexual relations has to be constructed around Brahmin manhood and womanhood that reserves each for the other, and for no others. This epistemology is encoded within the Dharmśāstras such as the Manusmriti, and other Sanskrit texts such as the Kama Sutra.
What is evident in these texts is that an entire system of control and management have to be devised to ensure that the Brahmin woman’s virginity becomes social property, that her family becomes primarily accountable for. Every Brahmin woman’s virginity is of importance to the whole community, for the failure of one woman’s family to protect her virginity presents a threat to all Brahmin women’s chastities. It signifies a loss of control over sexual purity that could prove to be the end of the Brahmin community — already the smallest caste-varna percentage-wise (estimates suggest 3–5% of the population, thanks to unreleased census figures). Hence, the unmarried Brahmin woman who is known to have lost her virginity signifies a loss of honour for her and her family, which can often translate into loss of material, social, and cultural capital through social boycotts and punishments.
This is where the advent of “modernity” — capitalist, scientific, political, and social — has pushed Brahminism into a new stage. Traditional caste societies, with the four varnas and fifth outcaste category of Dalits, have been thrust into turmoil with industrialization. The emergence of cities in India, where the bulk of industry accumulated wealth, also became sites where the Bahujan masses congregated to seek upward mobility, better resources like education and healthcare, in the hope that democracy and the urban environment would make caste oppression melt away. Brahminism had to ruthlessly recalculate its methods, its alliances, and its affordances, to accommodate changing spatial and material boundaries.
Gender in particular, had to be reformulated — the idea that women could be confined to domestic spaces to protect their chastity and to constrain their education could no longer be justified within the parameters of a new, “modern” India. In making claims to being democratic and progressive, Brahmin-savarna nationalist leaders presented the advancement of women — mainly their own savarna class of women — as a sign that they were shedding off old orthodoxies. Brahmin women in early modernity could now occupy public spaces, become educated in the English language, gain public prominence, and in some rare cases, even take up professions.
This façade of modernity that is often paraded by Brahmin families is something that needs meticulous decoding. And I cannot find a better set of codes than cinema, which most effectively uses visual codes to embed Brahminical ideology, so I turn to a recent Tamil film that provides an excellent understanding of the anxieties of modernity in the Brahmin arranged marriage. The 2013 film Kalyana Samayal Saadham (KSS) begins with the narrator, Meera (played by Lekha Washington), a software engineer, providing a short, entertaining awareness of how gender from the time of a female’s birth decides the entire series of experiences a woman has in her lifetime, leading to the premise of her arranged marriage with another IT engineer, Raghu (played by Prasanna). This film was remade into Hindi as Shubh Mangal Saavdhaan with Brahmin protagonists in Gurgaon/Gurugram, which I haven’t seen, but I think the Tamil Brahmin milieu of KSS is perfect to unravel the sexual mysteries in Brahmin marriages.
What goes unmentioned is that Meera’s and Raghu’s is a Tamil Brahmin arranged marriage, and that the gendered expectations that are problematized throughout the film are entirely Brahminical. The film’s entire narrative is set in the time period between engagement and wedding, and the key conflict in this setup is Raghu’s erectile dysfunction, his inability to “get it up.” The film has been praised tremendously for its handling of such a “sensitive” topic — because of course, “impotence” (as the issue is termed throughout the film), is such an issue of Brahmin male embarrassment (and god forbid, Brahmin men should ever be embarrassed about anything). The second half of the film thus involves a series of interventions by Raghu’s various male friends, all trying to solve his “problem” of erectile dysfunction through babas, gurus, and the like. More on this later.
One of the foremost interesting things the film does is provide a portrait of Meera and her family. We are told the focus of a girl’s life is always marriage, and in the montage that follows, everything that Meera does growing up is fast-forwarded through the lens of her future marriage. When the 5-year old Meera finds someone’s wedding invitation pretty, her mother predicts she will want a grand wedding herself. When a 10-year old Meera is fighting with her brother, her grandmother tells him that everything will be his after she gets married, so he should let her be. When her mother goes jewellery shopping it is with an eye towards her future marriage. Meera says at one point that the two most important “qualifications” for a girl in the marriage market are dancing bharatanatyam and learning Carnatic music. Later, her ritushuddhi ceremony, the puberty-celebrating ritual that signifies a girl’s entry into “womanhood” through the arrival of her menstruation, is shown with fond nostalgia.
And crucially, Meera makes a comment about how when in school, she understood the division of humanity into two classes (“rendu vargam,” as she says it), male and female. Gender is defined in this Brahminical worldview not just as a category dividing humanity, but as the category dividing people. How is it that in India’s deeply divided caste-race-linguistic-class divisions, gender is the only category identified by the Brahmin Meera? This is perhaps one of the singular idiosyncrasies of how Brahmins experience Indian reality — that despite differences there is some national unity or similarities across these other differences, but gender is still fundamentally about difference. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, etc. Meera goes on to make another fantastical leap after this statement — that it was engineering that made her realize that these differences are really just superficial (!!). One can only LOL when she appears in an orange jumpsuit, whips off her safety visor and then proceeds to cut metal with some machine and then stares romantically at it.
Meera then admits that like a good girl she has “outsourced” the task of groom-hunting to her parents, who spend copious amounts of time on bharatmatrimony.com, India’s most well-known and parodied matrimonial website. This is the first stage where we are introduced to the idea that this is a “modern” family. Her parents are net-savvy, they don’t expect the girl to display her “talents,” or the whole community to come and approve the selection of groom. And they allow Meera the freedom to reject the men they select. Meera tellingly says the “smart” thing to do is to select the best option available among the possibilities. Very early on in this film, the Brahmin marriage is shown to be what it really is —not a love story, but a selection among convenient options, a compromise.
Among her best options appears Raghu, an affable “modern” guy who has the gall to ask her parents if he can talk to her one-on-one in a coffee shop, and then goes on to tell her he’s scoped her out on social media and her blog. One can’t decide on the spot whether to spend their lives with this one person, he says. Despite the lack of conversation, almost immediately, Raghu tells her family it’s a “yes” from him and that “the ball is in your court, Meera.” He even adds her on Facebook! But his parents are seen to admonish him in the car on the way home and ask — what about manners, traditions, customs, and what about our “negotiating power”? Raghu chides them asking, “Is this a business deal?” How “modern.”
The question of what arranged marriage is between Brahmins is positioned in this highly romanticized way. Of course, arranged marriage is a caste-based contract; at one point, Meera’s father is shown to be obsessing over how much another Brahmin groom earns. And the question of “suitability” in the arranged marriage is essentially one of weighing “pros” and “cons.” At one point Meera literally makes chits with “yes” and “no” and asks her dog to decide (he picks “no”). And the pragmatism of choosing a mate comes down to questions of good values, good character and good family, all under the umbrella of the same Brahmin community (so of course, she has to say yes to Raghu). Also implicit is class — wealthy Brahmins are unlikely to marry their children into poorer Brahmin families, not unless they possess enough social capital and “status” to compensate for lack of wealth. But all of this is elided in KSS, and “compatibility” becomes a new “modern” factor that Brahmin groom and Brahmin bride are now seeking with one another.
Which is of course how Raghu wins over Meera. Despite agreeing to marry him, Meera does not accept his friend request on Facebook — impressing a girl in an arranged marriage is easy, she says, but becoming her friend is something else altogether. And so a “non-conflict” of the wedding mandap not being available is staged as an elaborate conflict in the story, with Raghu helping his in-laws save face by insisting they have the wedding in a the village temple of their kuladevi. Meera’s father, whose “modernity” refused to stage the wedding at the village temple is now grateful his son-in-law enabled this traditionalism as an escape route. And Meera gratefully says “I love you” and accepts his friend request.
This is where the problem of sex becomes interesting in this film. As Meera and Raghu get engaged, socialize more often, even drink in each others’ company, after months of “arranged dating” they decide to finally have sex… except Raghu does not get aroused. The couple are so “modern” they of course have to Google this, and as Raghu types the term “impotence” on Google, Meera corrects it to “temporary impotence” in the search engine. The assertion that his problem is “temporary” is important to state, for both of them.
What does erectile dysfunction symbolize in this film? The easy explanation the film gives is that it’s a common problem in “this generation,” that our “lifestyle” and “stress” are affecting our sex lives. The film skirts a genuine critique of the bourgeois capitalist workforce by suggesting that stress management is all that is required. The allegorical explanation I want to make is equally straightforward —that there is a crisis of Tamil Brahmin masculinity in the Brahmin arranged marriage with regards to his gender and his “modernity.” We cannot forget that today’s Tamil Brahmins live in the shadow of one of the more successful anti-caste agitations in India by Periyar and the Dravidar Kazhagam. In dislodging Tamil Brahmin men from their entitlements to land and power, the non-Brahmin movement has forced the Brahmin male into reformulating his traditional caste identity, transcending it to pose as “casteless” and thus, “modern.” My consistent use of “modern” in quotes is to imply exactly this — that when this film suggests that its characters are “modern,” what it’s trying to position as modernity is castelessness.
As Fuller & Narasimhan have demonstrated, the Tamil Brahmins have historically expended much energy in transforming their upper-caste identity into a “modern” middle-class one; Kalyana Samayal Saadham now relays that myth into cinematic narrative. Yet for all this “modernity,” Meera and Raghu still have to be scripted as virgins. Virginity is the ultimate ahistoricity, an innocence — just like castelessness. The lack of a sexual past can be equated to the lack of a Brahminical past, and therefore, as casteless virgins, Meera and Raghu’s “sin” of sexual curiosity is rendered innocent through an erasure of the past.
The thing is infuriating in this conundrum of erectile dysfunction however, is the question of Meera’s sexuality and sexual pleasure. So what if Raghu couldn’t get aroused? Was there any understanding of foreplay — oral sex, anybody? Was that not Google-able? Why did Meera and Raghu never attempt having sex beyond the first time? And most of all, why was Meera’s pleasure never a focus in any of the conversations? The answer is fairly straightforward — because female pleasure is secondary in Brahmin marital sex. In fact, when Meera’s father intervenes in Raghu’s “problem” it is to stress that reproduction is essential in a marriage, and that’s why his situation is urgent. Male arousal is required for reproduction after all, and female arousal is not.
It is worth stressing that Meera’s father in earlier scenes is shown as someone who secretly consumes Silk Smitha-type soft porn behind his copies of The Hindu — this is presented as oh-so-cute-but-harmless in all the frames. But this allows him to be the one Brahmin man who completely sympathizes with the other Brahmin man with regards to his covert sexual desire. But as he is also “modern” (ergo, casteless), he is able to transcend the orthodox, superstitious, Hindu mumbo-jumbo that Raghu’s friends subject him to, and provide a “scientific” solution to his problem, i.e. stress balls. It is no coincidence that this stress management solution is ideological to the core with its accommodation of the neoliberal lifestyle; one cannot believe in Brahminism without investing in capitalism and its manifestation in India, well-adapted to forms of caste and gendered labour.
And so, Kalyana Samayal Saadham ends with the kalyanam of Meera and Raghu, barring some more minor hiccoughs that reveal the tenuous nature of “love” in the Brahmin arranged marriage. When Meera is dragged into a late night ceremony to eradicate some dosham (fault in the stars) in Raghu’s horoscope, it becomes a test of her “love” for him — Raghu thinks she shouldn’t make a big deal, she thinks he’s not making enough of a big deal. The fact that Brahminical rituals being enacted in the village setting should be challenged and resisted is not a thought either of them entertains. Instead, in catering to all the family dramas, Meera and Raghu actually decide it might be better to break up, before deciding perhaps not. So much for the new “love-cum-arranged” marriage.
The film echoes much of what I have come to believe the “modern kalyanam” is in a Brahmin marriage — it’s the same “traditional kalyanam” but accommodating some kissing and sex for the sake of casteless “modernity.” But all for the male’s pleasure. None of the other women in KSS barring women evince any sexual desire, and when Meera does so with Raghu, it is promptly laced with her conviction that God will punish them for this, or that his erectile dysfunction is a punishment from God for attempting sex before marriage. These supernatural concerns are then punctuated by her pleas for him to “do something” about it. Solving the problem of his arousal is not her problem, after all. The idea that a loving marriage involves communication, trust, building desire in stages, and not seeing orgasm as the pinnacle of sexual achievement — none of these are ever entertained. In a Brahmin arranged marriage, sex is a gendered chore, you fix your problem, I fix mine.
If we are to imagine what a casteless society truly looks like, the first step would involve doing away with caste-based arranged marriage. But Brahminism is perverse; it will find ways to justify endogamous hegemony. So, in a society where Brahmin power has to be dismantled, the Brahmin arranged marriage that facilitates the marriages of hegemonic power factions needs to be annihilated. What KSS suggests is that the arranged marriage can be recuperated as a site for love — all evidence suggests otherwise. It is why I have to continually reject any possibility of an arranged marriage in my own life. The personal is political, and if we claim to be anti-caste, our personal lives should be the first site where we annihilate caste.
In the next and final part of this series, I will look at another site where the personal becomes the political — the Bahujan maid and how her presence in a Brahmin home becomes the site of disruptions and contradictions.
