marriage. 65
bride has reached puberty or is fifteen or sixteen. City brides are usually older than
seventeen, and college girls typically marry after graduation. In general, the age of
marriage is rising throughout India.
Munni, like most Indian girls, considered marriage to be something that would
happen to her without her having to do anything to make it happen. She never for
a moment worried about the possibility of becoming an old maid—even the ugli-
est and most deformed girls were always married, if not to the most desirable hus-
bands. One old woman in Nimkhera, Langribai, had been stricken with a crippling
paralysis when she was about nine. Though she could only creep about in a crouch-
ing position, she was wed to an older man blind in one eye. Now widowed, she is
the mother of four grown children and still runs her own household. Only once did
Munni hear of an unmarried girl past fifteen—an idiot girl in a distant village.
Somehow, every girl’s parents found her a husband.
Munni would have been startled to learn that in cities not too far from her village
there are scores of spinsters. Among educated urban classes, there are nurses, teach-
ers, social workers, and other women who for a variety of reasons have never wed.
These women must walk a difficult path, for unmarried women attract attention
even in cities. Forbidden by ultra-Victorian mores still in vogue in urban Indian to
date men or to receive gentlemen callers who are not close relatives, the career
woman must constantly guard her reputation and check her desires for pleasure.
The network of communication in India is so efficient that a minor transgression
would bring immediate disgrace to a woman and her family. In some coed colleges,
teachers are quick to note a budding romance and report it to the girl’s parents.
In rural India, too, chastity for the single girl and fidelity for the wife are consid-
ered ideal, but quietly committed sins are far from uncommon. In fact, old Mo-
grawali sometimes whispered to Rambai’s mother-in-law that they were about the
only women in the village who were unsullied. This was an exaggeration, but it was
true that barely a dozen of Nimkhera’s 160 postpubescent females had never been
the subject of innuendo or gossip. In fact, any grown girl or woman seen alone with
an unrelated male is likely to be quietly criticized, but a public scandal rarely results
unless a woman is extremely promiscuous or an illicit pregnancy occurs. In some
areas, a woman is likened to an earthen pot that, once polluted, can never be
cleansed, and a man is compared to a metal pot that is easily purified with water.
Thus a promiscuous girl may find her reputation irreparably damaged, while an er-
rant boy is forgiven. In North India, if a girl who goes to her husband pregnant is
rejected by his family, she may even be killed by her own shamed father. High-
ranking Muslims insist that a bride be a virgin, and the marital bedsheet may be in-