66. the life cycle
spected by the husband ’s female kin. Birjis Jahan, a Pathan Muslim, told me that a
sullied bride would be returned to her family in disgrace, but she had never heard
of such an incident. Hindus need pass no such test, and a village bride suspected of
being nonvirgin is almost always accepted by her husband.
An unarranged “love marriage” is considered by most Indians to be a daring and
perhaps ill-fated alternative to an ordinary arranged marriage. Many urban youths
who have studied and dated abroad return home to wed mates selected for them by
their parents. Even a tribal girl who has lovers before marriage usually expects to
marry a boy chosen by her parents. Intercaste marriages (seldom arranged) occur
now with increasing frequency, particularly in cities, but they are still disapproved
by the vast majority of Indians. Only in the most Westernized circles, among less
than 1 percent of the population, do young couples date and freely choose their own
mates. (See figure D at the Web site http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/vasu/loh.))
In Nimkhera, one Pathan Muslim couple told me proudly of their arranged “love
marriage.” Muslims are often encouraged to marry cousins (although North and
Central Indian Hindus forbid it), and young cousins who are potential mates nor-
mally know each other well. Seventeen-year-old Latif Khan and his sixteen-year-
old cousin Birjis Jahan had a crush on each other and were secretly heartbroken
when Birjis Jahan’s parents engaged her to an older man. “Birjis Jahan’s mother of-
fered me some of the sweets Birjis’s fiance had sent to her,” Latif Khan remembered,
“but I couldn’t take any. I said I was sick and left quickly. I felt terrible.” Each hes-
itantly confessed their true feelings to a relative, and their parents had a conference.
Soon Latif and Birjis Jahan were happily wed, and even now, as the parents of
twelve children, they say their love for each other is the most important thing in their
lives.
By contrast, virtually all village Hindus are married to someone they have never
met before or have perhaps only glimpsed. Although a Hindu girl should marry
within her own caste, her groom cannot be someone to whom she is known to be re-
lated by blood. Most Hindus belong to a named patrilineal clan (gotra); normally a
girl cannot be matched with a youth of her own or her mother’s clan. In some areas,
members of other clans are also ineligible, as are members of lineages from which
men of her own kin group have taken brides. From Rajasthan to Bihar, over much
of northern India, a girl should not marry a boy of her own village. In the Delhi
area, a boy of a neighboring village or even one in which the girl’s own clan or an-
other clan of her village is well represented must be avoided.^2 In Central India, al-
though village exogamy is preferred, some marriages unite unrelated village “broth-
ers” and “sisters.”