*Trigger warning: Contains mentions of suicide, domestic abuse, harassment. 

My thesis supervisor is not exactly aware of this, but I enrolled in a PhD program in Australia partly to get myself out of the Indian marriage market. The COVID-19 pandemic had forced me to go back, slowly obliterating my employment options that once facilitated my stay away from home. Home was flavourful familiarity, of course. There were the simple pleasures, of seeing and smelling coconuts everywhere—at the beach, on your plate, in your hair. Banana chips, fried sardines, the tang of tamarind, ripe jackfruit. But in some crude form of a buy-one-get-one-free discount, pressure often accompanied pleasure. That meant wedding brokers, matrimony apps, body appraisals and sometimes, my angry tears. I’d just turned 27. Scheming my escape throughout the lockdown, I finally made my way out of my hometown in Kerala supported by two fool-proof arguments in my arsenal: 

1. I’ve earned a full scholarship (tuition fees and living expenses included), and  

1. Women’s education is important (beti bachao, beti padhao—“save the daughter, educate the daughter.”) 

I had successfully won myself three-and-a-half years of singledom, some financial support and physical distance from my native country in pursuit of a challengingly immersive doctoral education, which required me to move to a different country. As an international student on a temporary migrant visa, I survived on a stipend that was barely above minimum wage in Australia. I was not allowed to take long breaks from study. This was great, because it meant that I’d neither have the time nor the bandwidth to deal with marriage and other arrangements even if my family presented an offer that was impossible to refuse, what they call “The whole package.”  

I write this essay with the firm realisation that this is possible precisely because I speak from a position of relative privilege. I won the Indian middle-class lottery by climbing on the shoulders of my parents who, in the 1980s, migrated to an oil-rich, Gulf nation in search of better salary and opportunities. When riyals got translated into rupees, over the span of 20 years, it compounded. 

But as a young woman growing old in India, I’ve come to learn that caste and religion work in insidious ways to trample on your freedoms, even when you’ve unconsciously received its (unearned) benefits. It arrives in the shape of relatives who bluntly mention that they salivate at the thought of your wedding feast. It assumes the form of parental anxiety: when they do not know when (or if) their daughter’s returning home, it gets increasingly difficult to arrange a man for her, who ticks all their boxes and passes all their filters. That’s the thing about these marriages—they are “arranged,” alongside a strong serving of coercion. Arranged, with a cunning certainty accrued after intense background checks.  

This essay is about arranged marriage and its many excesses in India. The distance between Australia and India has shielded me so far, but the same cannot be said for some unfortunate women back home who married out of love or got married off simply because they were turning old. This should be their story, if only they were all around.  

~ 

This subject is not original. Nor is it new. It is almost always in the news. The institution of (arranged) marriage continued to claim its victims even as recent as July 2, 2025. “Chennai woman dies four days after wedding; dowry harassment by husband, in-laws alleged,” goes this headline. “I cannot bear his torture,” screams a second one in a similar story from June. Then, you read about a 23-year-old who got “honour-killed” for marrying outside her caste. Triggered by extreme abuse and torture from their in-laws as well as their own family, Indian women also die for bearing daughters instead of sons, as these cases from the states of Chattisgarh and Gujarat show.  

Just in case these tragedies weren’t enough, here are some statistics for the sceptics, for those who think the work of attaining gender parity is over. A 2018 study published in The Lancet found that around 37% of the world’s female suicides take place in India, and that Indian women were twice more likely to die by suicide compared to the global average. Married women accounted for the highest proportion of suicide deaths among this, and it was found that early arranged marriage was one of the culprits—alongside young motherhood, domestic violence and low social status—that led to the country’s alarming female suicide rates.  Data from the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), the Indian government agency responsible for collating crime statistics, shows that housewives constituted half of the total number of women who died by suicide in 2022, and that a significant proportion of these deaths occurred due to “marriage-related” issues or “family problems”.  That is an average of 61 suicides per day, with one happening every 25 minutes, as this article notes.  

Curiously, the institution of marriage is almost never placed under the radar for its deadly spillovers in India. Quite the contrary. Weddings are a multi-billion-dollar industry in the country, and matrimonial websites and apps continue to profitably thrive, happily eating away at the family’s worries and their bank accounts. It has acquired further validation in popular culture with reality shows such as Indian Matchmaking, where matchmaker “Sima Aunty,” repeatedly urges women to “adjust and compromise” as she curates matches for them—often positioning this tailored, dating process as a modern take on marital partnerships (when it’s just marriage arranged in a shiny, new, Netflix bottle). The “alignment of stars,” “destiny” and “fate” are invoked to divinely justify these human calculations crudely made using caste, class and religion metrics. As a result, arranged marriage is camouflaged as custom or the innate culture of the region, where the value of women is tied to their marital status. Establishing it as a key tenet of south Asian “culture” dignifies and shelters its modes of coercion and violence from the critical eye.  

Arranged marriage, if addressed at all, is often handled like an immutable, inevitable chronic condition, managed with palliative fixes rather than confronted at its roots. The symptoms that it continues to spawn hoard most of the attention, taking on unique features that grow onto become full-fledged diseases in their own right. However, it is rarely perceived as a villain, because at least one party involved in the system savours its economic, social and cultural benefits. In the case of the dowry system—where the bride is expected to pay the groom in cash and/or kind—the economic gains an arranged marriage brings to the groom’s family are too huge to be ignored. Britannica defines dowry as a “conditional gift” designed to protect the wife in case things go wrong with her in-laws. But for a significant share of women, it’s often a gift that not only stops giving, but comes back to kill you.  

From a legal standpoint, the Indian Penal Code has multiple provisions to safeguard girls and women from forced marriages, child marriages and domestic violence, but oftentimes, it’s almost too late by the time these come to their rescue. More importantly, arranged marriage implies some form of relative consent, which distinguishes it from forced marriage (which is criminalised). However, these distinctions are not always clear. Exactly how much force in an arranged marriage would make it “forced”? Inevitably, the cultures of manipulation, compulsion and control that underlie these practices manage to evade punishment.  But even if one gathers some steely resolve to pursue the penalisation route, she will likely end up taking their whole family to court. A proposition that reeks of biting the hand that fed you.   

~ 

There are too many moving pieces here. One day, triggered by a relative who demanded to know if I planned to “settle down” (a euphemism for getting married and bearing kids), I sat down to draw a clumsy map of possible problems I’d bump into if I had to get married via arrangement. The map metamorphosed into a tree, whose branches I cut down and then, somehow, the map turned into an octopus. The eight feet connect to the head, and it moves. When I push this thought further, arranged marriage disguises itself almost like a mimic octopus, assimilating the outward features of pre-existent social predators, becoming one and the same. The pressure to conform to caste and religious endogamy forms one of its most dominant and far-reaching tentacles. Endogamy—the practice of marrying only within one’s caste, community or religion—hinges on notions of purity and pollution (key features of India’s caste system), intending to keep a community’s bloodline “unadulterated.” Transgress this rule, and one would run the risk of ruining the family’s honour: a potentially deadly risk. Less than 6% of Indian marriages are inter-caste.   

I mentioned dowry earlier, but there’s another vicious tentacle: mandatory reproduction. If you thought it all ended with the wedding, you’re highly mistaken. You have to have children. Sons are preferable; daughters can plausibly be fatal. Another one: domestic labour, where your culinary skills must shine in the Great Indian Kitchen. And another: care work. Daughters are expected to stay at home and care for their aging (or sick) parents-in-law. Sexual servitude is also a part of the octopus, because marital rape is still not illegal in India. The pressure is always on the women to keep the structure of the family intact, so divorce is stigmatised and not a great option. And finally, the big baggage of expectations that tag along with the Indian wife: to be a submissive dispenser of all feminine duties, to be displaced from your own home, to be respectable. The expectations are endless. It is crushing how Sisyphean this feels. But if you’re on the other side in this scenario, as feminist writer Judy Brady puts it: “My god, who wouldn’t want a wife?”   

~ 

I’ve been told that octopuses are mostly harmless creatures. It is true, for the most part.  When you’ve grown up swimming in the same ocean, with the same octopus, it could almost feel like a pretty aquarium. But therein lies its inky mystification, where you delude yourself into thinking you are safe swimming beside it. Until it isn’t. As you turn old, the stings get more ruthless and you must decide whether to swim further away or to turn into a shark that eats cephalopods for supper.  

Countless feminist scholars have been suspicious about the institution of marriage (like  Shulamith Firestone and Carole Pateman, for example), and with good reason. This suspicion extends across Indian feminist literature as well (see Uma Chakravarti, Sunaina Arya and Aakash Rathore among others), but rarely does this suspicion grow legs and stand against the arranged marriage-industrial complex in our contemporary context. Actually, if you empathise with the feminist project, my culture has invented a slur for that too—feminichi—a special label for women who question gender oppression. This is not to suggest that its antonym—free-choice marriage or “love marriage,” as they say in India—is the final answer. But it certainly does seem like an improvement, if only it weren’t so lethal. But, when marriage holds immense social and cultural value for women, when it is part and parcel of your everyday socialisation, when its decisions are often made by a familial collective, when you’re consistently floating in an environment of culturally coercive conditioning, to swim against the current feels near impossible. You could watch your friends slowly wither away, and stand watching as the family takes over the centre stage of your life.  

~ 

A recent WhatsApp voice note from my father went like this: “You should be mentally prepared, dear. Don’t delay this anymore. Getting ready for marriage after you finish your higher education is not practical, considering your age…Don’t delay your plans for vacation, don’t postpone anything. Just come home. If there are any boys ready around the time, let’s try to get you engaged.” I was 28 then, and like some slimy fish, I kept slipping through the tentacles, getting stung but managing to escape each time. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep swimming.  

It seems counter-intuitive, but arranged marriage is never a single event. With a little nibble here and a casual burn there, most women are socially and culturally primed to be perfect marriage-material on a regular basis. Coercion feels as omnipresent as air. I remember making bad tea and getting reprimanded not because it was bad, but because I was told I’d get kicked out of my in-laws’ place if I served that to them. Your natal home awaits your impending farewell because you’re not meant to live there forever—you’re meant to be sent off to another man’s house eventually. Many of my freedoms—hanging out with friends, travelling alone, going to college, wearing what I like—hold an expiry date because “just wait until you get married.” My biological clock is ticking, and parents are owed a promotion to the next level. If you end up attending a wedding (god forbid), relatives will hum in your ear that “you are next”. The list goes on.  

If there is one thing I’ve learnt in all my years of swimming, it is that these bite-sized wounds matter (the octopus carves into them, slowly but steadily. But you do not need to wait for that imminent stinger). That if you feel like bait, you probably are. That “managing your preferences” on the matrimony algorithm is caste in action. That it is tempting to be dazzled by the Bollywood romance-esque song and dance, but beyond all that jazz, lies an institution that is not necessarily sensitive to women’s needs and wants. A thousand empty wombs running astray, untethered to men, is its worst nightmare. As feminist scholar bell hooks said in her book All About Love: “All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget,” when “the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.” Keeping the octopus at bay, even temporarily, can be a good thing. And getting a doctorate while you’re at it—that could be the cherry on top of the cake.  

As I write this essay, my photos continue to float around matrimony apps (shared without my consent, of course). But I will keep swimming away. And I hope that will be enough for now.  

References 

Arya, S., & Rathore, A. S. (Eds.). (2020). Dalit feminist theory: A reader. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429298110  

Brady, J. (1972). I want a wife. Ms. Magazine. https://msanaknudsen.weebly.com/uploads/9/3/6/8/9368722/i_want_a_wife.pdf  

Chakravarti, U. (2018). Gendering caste: Through a feminist lens. Sage. 

Firestone, S. (1979). The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. The Women’s Press. https://teoriaevolutiva.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/firestone-shulamith-dialectic-sex-case-feminist-revolution.pdf  

Gill, A. K., & Anitha, S. (Eds.). (2011). Forced marriage: Introducing a social justice and human rights perspective. Zed Books. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350220201  

Pande, R. (2015). Becoming modern: British-Indian discourses of arranged marriages. Social & Cultural Geography, 17(3), 380–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2015.1075581  

Pateman, C. (1988). The Sexual Contract. Polity Press. 

Phadke, S. (2024). “You are Next”: Unmarried Urban Women in India and the “Marriage Talk”. In C. Brosius, J. de Kloet, L. Abu-Er-Rub, & M. Butcher (Eds.), Being Single in the City: Cultural Geographies of Gendered Urban Space in Asia (pp. 115-147). Heidelberg University Publishing. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1425.c20537 

Thapan, M. (1995). Gender, body and everyday life. Social Scientist, 23(7), 32–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3517859.pdf