Marriage and Its Many Refusals

Before I even knew what love meant, I knew what marriage was. It was the word whispered over baby cradles, the ritual rehearsed in living rooms, the destiny no one questioned.

Marriage is a word ever present, alive, and kicking from the moment a person is born. This might sound like an exaggeration of the relevance of this institution in a person’s life, but rarely are we blessed to have parents who love each other and choose to have a child without tying themselves to the institution of marriage. I can speak only from what I have seen and known, and for South Asians this rings with truth.

I have read stories and anthropological pieces on how early human societies were based on structures of kinship and non-patriarchal systems where children belonged to the tribe, and every member cared for them. Parentage had little effect on the love and attention one received from the community. While that sounds like a paradise lost, I can only speak for the purgatory I was born into, the patriarchal family structure that necessitates marital bonds for the ultimate aim of procreation and lineage progression.

And of course, there is the sharing and proliferation of capital and resources through the means of merger. Marriage is, ultimately, and I am not a revolutionary to state this, a sharing of resources, culture, status, and respectability aimed at the combined proliferation of familial standing. Do not get me wrong; those who lack this status still marry. Why do they do that, if they have no resources to share and no social capital to proliferate? Maybe they do it for companionship, or maybe they do it for love. But I highly doubt it. If one were to marry for love, it would rarely be as endogamous and as caste- and class-aligned as marriages are in South Asia and even across the world.

Maybe that is why stories of Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Catherine, Shirin and Farhan, and Laila and Majnu stir our imagination. These utopian tales represent what marriage could have been if it were not an institution but a partnership.

As it stands, marriage is and always will be an institution, a great unifier of endogamous power across class and caste alliances. We will forever dream and fetishise the exogamous unions of star-crossed, societally hierarchical, misaligned lovers.

What about those who have the “fortune” to form unions outside these social alignments that define hegemonic marriages? What about those who love across caste, class, religion, and gender lines? Does the very exogamous nature of their union make the institution of marriage salvageable and devoid of its hegemonic image as a patriarchal-capitalist structure?

The author is due to marry in December. She is about to enter what many have called the “Romeo and Juliet” tale of a union across countries and across religious lines, a union of two identities constantly pitted against each other, presented as incongruous, yet celebrated as the “against all odds” story of Indian and British-Pakistani, Dalit- Hindu and Muslim individuals. Does this make the institution of marriage something revolutionary?

The answer would be no. Marriage, as an institution with a specific focus on heteronormative unions, is steeped in a social order devoid of any radical imagination.

In the face of this, any attempt to reimagine the institution of marriage is bound to fail. Such actions rarely receive social approval because the institution is so deeply embedded in the religious lives of people that it has become an expression of one’s religious identity. This leads to the inevitable question that people feel compelled to ask, and your author has been on the receiving end of many such inquiries: “So what is it going to be? A Nikah, a Hindu wedding, or maybe a civil union?”

One must be critical of such questions. Even a so-called radical marriage between “two opposites” remains confined within the religious structures of the two faiths. Of course, one can curate their marriage, picking and choosing which customs to follow and which to avoid. But does that truly answer the question: when does a marriage stop being patriarchal?

What about queer couples who choose to marry? Do they represent a radical iteration of the institution, or is their union simply a romanticised version of the very structure that excluded them for generations?

These are the questions the author carried like stones in her pocket, heavy until she could name what she truly believed. It is her responsibility to present answers that make sense to her.

If marriage as an institution is to be reformed and reimagined, it must be stripped of its patriarchy, class hierarchy, and caste supremacy. These traditions often stem from the religious connotations associated with marriage. For queer couples or any “radical union” to take place within these same frameworks is no more radical than a marriage between similar classes or castes. True radicality comes from shedding the capitalist overtone of the union and moving closer to the community that nurtures it.

Marriage, in this imagination, becomes a partnership between friends who come together not to share status or property, but to share experiences and learning. It is a union where social responsibility, moral values, and ethics align to bring individuals together in commitment to the community rather than to the proliferation of assets.

A wedding envisioned in this way would not be an economically excessive affair. It would not involve multi-day galas lasting three to seven days, nor destination weddings where guests remain inebriated for days and the couple undergoes ten costume changes. It certainly would not feature the couple indulging in celebrations designed to showcase the wealth and status of their families, all under the guise of celebrating “revolutionary love.”

Because if the revolution cannot be televised, it certainly cannot be dressed up, decorated, and coated in the frills and frosting of a gala that uses the language of capitalist consumption to send a message of radical love, one recorded through aesthetic photo-ops and striking images.

Weddings have become carnivals of excess, bloated with borrowed aesthetics and bank loans. Think of a dream sold on conspicuous consumption, shimmering until the lights go out. Behind the scenes: an army of workers, invisible, underpaid, sweating through the spectacle.

Imported flowers wilt under stage lights, ACs hum through the night, and the climate pays the price for a party. What should be a moment of love becomes a theatre of status, a performance choreographed by capitalism, where intimacy is drowned out by drone shots and designer lehengas.

A queer couple or an interfaith heterosexual marriage ceases to be subversive the moment it chooses to align itself with the same patriarchal traditions that have, for centuries, denied these unions legitimacy.Therefore, an image of a queer couple embracing in front of a Hindu priest, by submitting to these forces and embodying their language of celebration, loses the radical force it once inhabited.

While the author has no qualms about stating that marriages have been and continue to be institutions steeped in uniting similar class and caste backgrounds, and that the institution as it exists needs to be dismantled, the language of celebration also needs to be checked. The celebration of so-called “radical unions” must be questioned to ask the inevitable: how does one inhabit an institution built on caste, class, and capital, without replicating its hierarchies?

The answer lies in refusal.

The answer lies in a ceremony that speaks softly, not loudly. It does not seek to dazzle but to hold space. A gathering of those who have walked alongside, who have witnessed the becoming, who arrive not to observe but to participate. There are no rituals of surrender, no symbols of transaction, just two people, standing side by side, speaking in words they understand, in a language that belongs to them, not borrowed from scriptures that once denied their union.

There is no stage, no drone camera, no choreographed entry. The setting is modest, maybe a community hall, a backyard, a borrowed room. The clothes are chosen for comfort, not spectacle. There is joy, but it is not curated; it is felt. The ceremony is not a performance of love, but a practice of it. It is not a merger of assets but a commitment to mutual and communal care, to shared politics, to building a life that resists the very systems that tried to keep them apart.

This is not a wedding that seeks to be remembered for its grandeur. It seeks to be remembered for its refusal, its refusal to comply, to conform, to consume. It is a celebration not of two families merging, but of two people choosing each other and choosing the world they want to build together.

I am no revolutionary to claim these ideas as mine. I must admit they are not even mine to begin with. I cannot take full credit for the answers to the riddle I posed at the beginning. They came to me slowly, in fragments, during my pirate-hearted, defiant attempt to imagine a ceremony that could help me make sense of this heavy institution; one I never allowed myself to picture being part of. These answers arrived as suffocating images, as thoughts, every time I attended a wedding and my relatives reminded me that I was to meet a similar fate. The revelation, however, came during a moment I did not expect. I was in Nagpur, travelling for my cousin’s wedding, when I picked up a copy of Sarvajanik Satya Dharma Pustak. I tried to read it, and somewhere between its lines, something quietly began to shift.

...

Savitri Bai walked the streets of Nagpur with a bag of spare clothes and a few books, carrying with her the learning that had first set her free. She went to teach other girls whose parents, reluctant most of the time and wholehearted only sometimes, allowed her to guide their daughters. She did it because she knew that the maze patriarchal society had spun for these girls reveals its exits only to those who learn to solve its riddles. She was on her way to teach them exactly that, to help them buy their freedom. And yet, with animal excrement thrown at her on every journey she made, what did she feel? Who comforted her? How does one continue walking a road that turns at every corner only to wound its traveller?

One does this by not walking alone. By taking the journey with someone, if destiny allows you one. Jotirao was that fellow traveller for her. Together they walked the hostile road, and together they solved every riddle it placed before them. Satya Dharma Pustak, the parchment that held the distilled answers to the riddles they had spent their lives confronting, told them what they had long suspected: marriage needs no middleman. It does not need priests, monks, chants, or even elaborate outfits. It needs only two people choosing to be fellow travellers on a difficult road.

But the final awakening was still due, and as most things go, one must face the abyss to know when, and how, to turn away from it.

…

It became painfully clear during the ceremony, when the priest recited the seven vows. One of them, addressed to the bride, went something like, “I promise to choose you and support you in the face of any odds, and will never question your judgment.”

He paused, then, half-jokingly but half-seriously, said, “Pay attention, bride. If you agree to this vow, you must not run to your mother and complain the first time your husband does something you don’t like. If he slaps you by mistake, don’t complain. Trust his judgment. From today, you and he are a unit, and in a unit, you don’t complain.”

In that moment, the author realised that even a so-called radical union could be stripped of its meaning in a single breath.

What struck her most was that this was supposed to be a “radical union,” an inter-caste marriage between a Brahmin groom and a Dhangar bride. And yet, with that one sentence, the priest strangled the revolutionary essence of their union. With a single comment, he undid years of struggle, years of dreaming, years of resistance.

She sat there, stunned, and she knew that if she were ever to love and marry, her union would not be sacrificed at the altar.

Love, if it must exist, must refuse.