Caught Between Cultures

CERRITOS, Calif. - Perhaps it wasn’t fireworks, but there was definitely a spark. As soon as she set eyes on him, Rebecca Chokshi knew that Vrajesh was the man she would marry.

Sneaking a peek through the window of her parents’ home in Baroda India, she watched as he, his parents and his brother arrived for the first of three arranged meetings.

“The first time I saw him, I got connected,” Chokshi, 49, remembers. “By then I had seen dozens of guys and I never felt that they could be my husband.  But seeing Raj, I thought that he is a good person, a kind person.  At that time I could not spell it out but, looking back, I would say it was love at first sight.”

Over the next 15 days, the couple met two more times under the watchful eyes of their parents. By the third meeting, they had agreed to marry.  The engagement was set and ten months later the couple was wed in front of 500 friends and family members.

Both time and tradition have changed since Chokshi married in 1982.  While once considered the norm in India and many Asian and Middle Eastern countries, arranged marriage is not the rigidly-constructed institution it once was, but rather a hybrid that melds eastern traditions of security and stability with western ideals of love and mutual respect.

Growing up in the 1970’s in the western Indian state of Gujarat, Chokshi always accepted that, in the tradition of her parents and her grandparents, her marriage would be arranged by her family.  There was never any question, and to do otherwise – to have what was termed a “love marriage” – would have brought shame to her parents.

In those days, and to some extent today, families took enormous pride in finding a husband who could provide security and stability for their daughter and the children she would ultimately bear. Families performed extensive background checks on the boys and consulted astrological charts to make sure the couple was a match.

In Chokshi’s case, she and Vrajesh were allowed to have a say in the choice of their partner and to date after they were engaged.  But that was not the case for her parents, who were forbidden to meet each other before the wedding and did not have the option to refuse the marriage.

“Pictures, yes.  They would see pictures but they could not see each other until the wedding date,” Chokshi says. “Their parents would decide that my daughter and your son can get married.  Because the parents would know better than anybody else who would be a good husband for my daughter.”

While arranged marriage is still commonplace in India - especially in the rural villages – higher education, technology and western influence have left their mark on a tradition and way of life that hadn’t budged for centuries.

“I think it has become very informal now, especially in the cities in India,” Sulabha Abhyankar, a Laguna Woods, Calif. licensed clinical social worker says.

“In fact now, because of everybody being educated and having jobs, they meet people on their own.”

Nowadays, she says, the call centers have transformed the Indian economy. The girls are earning their own money and traveling themselves, so they are not that enthusiastic about coming [to the U.S.] like they were 30 or 40 years ago.

But in 1967, when Sunila Kulkarni’s family was looking for a husband for her, non-resident Indians (NRIs) were in demand, and it was common for men to come to India on a two week vacation and return to the U.S. with a bride.

Sunila, now 64, was visiting her sister in Bombay when a friend suggested she meet Arvind, a cousin who was coming from the U.S. Upon his arrival, an appointment was set for the two to meet at his family’s place.  They liked each other immediately and, after seeing a few more girls, Arvind told his parents he wanted to meet with Sunila alone.

“His parents said, ‘no, we don’t do it that way.  We have to inform her family that you like her and you want to meet her.’”

Against their wishes, Arvind contacted Sunila through his brother and they arranged to meet privately.

“The main thing was that he wanted to see that nobody was pressuring me to marry him,” Sunila says. “And he wanted to tell me that his parents are dependent on him, so he has to take care of them financially.

“And then, of course, my parents were really rich and his family, they were middle class.  So he said ‘will that bother you?’ and I said ‘no, I don’t think it will.’  And within two weeks we got engaged.  We were married within a short time and came to the United States.”

While once seen as a ticket to a better life in the U.S., non-resident Indian grooms have lost their allure in recent years, according to Gourav Rakshit, business head of Shaadi.com, an Indian internet matrimonial service.

“With promising careers, independence and the need to spend more time with one’s family, some of the eligible Indian women are not looking to move abroad after marriage,” he says via e-mail.  “Also, despite the economic slowdown, jobs in India are still secure, which is one of the reasons why Indian grooms are in higher demand than NRI grooms.”

Rakshit said they have seen a drop of more than 25 percent in the demand for US-based members and a 23 percent drop in the demand for UK-based members in a year’s span.

They have also noticed that the search for professional working women has risen 15 percent in the past few months, showing that “financially, people are doing their bit to ensure better stability during this period,” he says.

Shaadi.com, which bills itself as “The world’s largest matrimonial service” was launched in 1997.  Since then, the company has helped arrange over 800,000 matches, Rakshit says.

How does he explain the popularity of Indian matrimonial websites over traditional word-of-mouth matchmaking?

Rakshit says one factor is the changing social fabric among Indians and South Asians in general.

“In the absence of a strong social network to fall back on, people are moving to other forms of connecting and communication. The internet takes away the geographical and spatial boundaries and limitations that traditional matchmaking suffers from. One can meet one’s prospective life partner based in Mumbai, while he or she could be sitting in Seattle.”

Of the total member base of 14 million members, 11 percent reside in the U.S. And while some parents are using Shaadi.com to find matches for their children, 70 percent of the profiles are posted by members themselves, he says.

Sandeep Gupta, 31, and Shefali Patel, 27, met on Shaadi.com in May of 2007.  Gupta posted his profile because of family pressure to get married.

“It wasn’t direct pressure,” Gupta recalls, “but sort of like how everybody else was married and starting to have kids.”

His parents had introduced him to a few girls, he says, but they didn’t work out.  Gupta, a director of analytics and operations for an online retailer, contacted Patel on Shaadi.com after filtering for women who speak Portuguese.  (He had lived in Brazil in 2003 and Patel had lived there as a child.) Patel’s name was the only one that popped up.

The couple, both of whom resided in Orange County at the time, corresponded by e-mail for a few weeks and then met for dinner.  They were engaged after eight months and were married in Boston ten months later in a ceremony that Gupta terms ‘traditional with some twists.’

Patel, who was born in the U.S. and is currently an MBA student at Pepperdine University, says she liked the filters on Shaadi.com.

“They were things you traditionally look at:  religion, color of skin, what they do for a living, body type, height,” she says. “Education was extremely important to me.  I was looking for Hindu but I wasn’t dead set about the language that they spoke.”

She doesn’t consider herself traditional, Patel says, but she still likes the traditional aspects of marriage.

“Choosing your friends is one thing but when you are choosing a life partner you have to take into consideration that you will be raising children and you want your spouse to have the same religious views.  My parents are very non-traditional but we have some traditional aspects.  They gave us a choice, like if we wanted to celebrate certain holidays.”

Although they are from different ethnic communities, she is Gujarati and he is Punjabi, and she kept her last name, Patel says there was no opposition from either of their families to the marriage.

“My parents just wanted to make sure Sandeep made me happy and would fit into our family.  Sandeep’s parents just wanted him to get married as soon as possible.” she says.

Patel says she considers internet matrimonial sites like Shaadi.com a modern form of arranged marriage.

“Anybody can put up a profile for their daughter, their niece, their nephew, to find somebody.  When you meet [the person] you’re kind of already on a fifth date because of the filters,” she says.

She believes the tradition of arranged marriage will continue, despite western influences.

“There are tons of small villages in India that don’t have the western outlook on life.”
Gupta agrees.  “My cousin got married last week in the U.S. and that was a traditional arranged marriage and I know a few other people who have done it, even using Shaadi.com, but they themselves didn’t really have a say.  Their parents were more involved.”

But the old ways have definitely fallen by the wayside, he says.

“Nobody does it the way our grandparents did it.  It’s a different form.”

Perhaps, but many traditional-minded Indians in the U.S. are trying to keep marriage traditions alive through their temples, cultural associations and other parent-supervised youth groups.

They also try to meet among the families, social worker Abhyankar says. “The parents are hoping that if they keep pushing, the kids won’t be tempted to marry outside.”

She has known a few very traditional families where the mother threatened suicide or went on a hunger strike because their child was going to marry someone out of the community.

“I’m sure 20 or 25 years ago it was an issue here – marrying in the same community, the same caste.  But I think the requirements have gone lower and lower,” Abhyankar says.

“Parents still want the traditional girl that will take care of their son, will take care of them and will represent their side of the family and their name, be the ambassadors of the family. But nowadays the girls, having their own point of view, they may not even change their last name.  It’s hard.”

Rebecca Chokshi understands how hard it is to raise traditional kids in a non-traditional world.  She has raised two sons since coming to America - one is 25 and the other, 18 - and she worries about the values they are learning here.

“We have those kind of [Indian] youth groups but I don’t know how much I should trust that youth,” she says. “Because when they are together, they behave like Indians but when they step out they are American, drinking and eating meat.”

She has friends who have tried to arrange marriages for their kids but not in the traditional sense.

“The kids will exchange phone numbers and e-mail addresses,” she says. “They start talking and they meet outside without letting the parents know.  And they start dating and then they would tell the parents.”

Even the parents would like for the kids to get to know each other before they meet them, she says.

Her older son is approaching marriageable age, according to Indian custom. But for Chokshi, caught between two cultures, all she can do is wait and pray.

“If I would have been in India, I would have looked for a wife for my son. I would have some involvement in finding him a girl,” she says. “Over here I have no control.”

Chokshi feels a sense of loss in missing one of the important phases of life, she says.

“For me, it’s one of the things I should be doing in my life – taking him to the girl’s house or making him meet the girl.  It’s one of the things that you don’t want to miss in your life. You want to tell people: look at my son!  I raised my son and I am proud of him!  There are a lot of emotions involved in the wedding process.”

He is currently dating an American girl, though how serious it is, Chokshi isn’t sure. She says if they do marry, she will accept it because that would make her son happy. But given a choice, she would prefer that he marry an Indian.

“I’m not that good in English that I can express myself [and] my feelings,” she says. “If she was Indian we could share more things.

“I want her to learn my traditions.  I want her to learn my ways.  I feel that [if he does marry an American] they would get involved more in American culture.  Though they would accept mine, it would not be the same.”

What is most important to her is that her family’s traditions be carried on to the next generation, she says.

Later, Chokshi retrieves her wedding album from her closet and thumbs through the pages, something she often does when she feels blue. She takes comfort in the pictures and in recalling the happiness that surrounded her wedding day.

As she shuffles through the photos, she lovingly smooths the pages, now creased and faded with the passage of time.  She lingers on some, explaining,

“This was my mehndi party the day before my wedding.”  She points to the intricate henna designs that adorned her feet and hands, remembering the pride she felt as a bride-to-be.

“These are my girlfriends from school. This is the party the morning of our wedding, when our extended families met for the first time. Here I am wearing my two wedding saris – one is white, the other red.”

In her community, she says, the white sari is given to the bride by her parents while the red sari is a gift from the groom’s family.

She pauses over a final picture of she and Vrajesh saying goodbye as they leave for their honeymoon and after that, her new life with her husband’s family.

“That’s my mom, crying,” she says softly, allowing the bittersweet memories to wash over her.  “My dad also cried when I was leaving. I wanted to cry too but I didn’t want Raj’s family to see me sad.”

With a sigh, she flips the album shut, closing the book on a tradition and a way of life forever lost in time.