Divorce in India
November 3, 2013
JANE S. writes:
Tanishq, a leading jewelry brand in India, has produced a TV commercial that is stirring up controversy.
It shows a beautiful bride preparing for her marriage ceremony. In Hindu society, jewelry plays a massively important role in weddings, engagements, and every other celebratory event in a woman’s life.
Then an adorable little girl appears on the scene and it becomes apparent that she is the daughter of the bride. This is a second marriage for the woman.
This is controversial because, in traditional Hindu society, remarriage for a woman was not possible. A man could repudiate his wife. He might do this if she produced a daughter when she was expected to produce a son. A man could have as many wives as he could afford. Starting over with a new husband was not an option for a woman.
Widows were not allowed to remarry. A while back, there was a discussion on TTH about the ancient custom of sati, where a widow was burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. An Indian reader insisted that sati was completely voluntary and every woman who chose sati did it of her own free will.
Thanks to the intervention of British imperialists, sati was outlawed, after which, Indian women quit voluntarily choosing sati. But widows continued to have extremely low social status in traditional Hindu society.
I am so glad things are changing. There are a lot of Hindu women I care about. I am glad they have choices their mothers and grandmothers didn’t have. Thank heavens, the horrific spectacle of women being burned alive is in the past.
At the same time, I can see the disease of progressivism spreading over the land, destroying their culture the same way it is destroying ours. I have tried discussing this with young Hindu women in their 20s, but with no success.
The Tanishq advert doesn’t bother me. I would rather see a woman have a second chance at a happy marriage. I would rather see children get to grow up with a dad. It’s a great improvement over a woman being treated as a pariah because her husband dumped her, or because she was unlucky enough to outlive him.
Laura writes:
While divorce is still rare in rural India, it has become common in big cities.
The ad obviously presents a romantic view. Most children are not happy to see their fathers tossed aside or their parents remarry. Repudiation of wives is highly unjust, but then so is divorce. The institution of divorce is no less of an injustice than the barbaric practice of repudiating wives and generally works out much better for the rich than the poor.
But I would imagine divorce is good for the jewelry business.
— Comments —
A reader writes:
This is an Indian women’s magazine that has been published since the 1950s. I am sending you this link to show how Indian society is Westernizing among the middle class and the strong undercurrent of feminism that goes with it.
Karl D. writes:
You said: “Most children are not happy to see their fathers tossed aside or their parents remarry.”
I wholly concur. My father left when I was ten years old and my parents ensuing divorce was one of the most traumatic events of my life. Something which shapes me to this very day. Two years later my father remarried and I was trotted out and made to attend the wedding and pretend (as best I could) that I was thrilled about it to all concerned. I was even made to sing a song at the reception! They have been married now close to 35 years and have two daughters, yet I still feel very much like an outsider. My mother never remarried.
Jane S. writes:
The article you referenced says: “What makes it worse is that Indians are loath to seek out shrinks or counsellors to save sinking marriages.”
Indians are loath to discuss problems, period.
Several years ago, they started a support group for women from South Asia in my city, one of the first of its kind. Many South Asian brides come to the U.S. via arranged marriages. They find themselves thousands of miles from home, separated from their families, and sometimes the circumstances are much different than they were led to expect. Like maybe the guy claimed he has a good-paying job or a nice house, but he doesn’t.
They established this organization to help these women get settled in a strange new land. They tried starting a support group, but it didn’t work because they found, the women didn’t want to talk about their problems.
That was in the beginning. Within a short time, young female college students from radical programs like women’s studies, peace studies, got on board as volunteers. Before long, they were running the organization, as they graduated and entered the work force.
Their agenda was to break up families whenever they could. If a married woman called the hotline and said, “he hit me,” they were like, “That’s it, you have to leave him. Have to.” Even though the woman had nowhere else to go and her family in India did not want her back.
Whenever this organization put on a fundraiser, they would bang the drum about the horrendous domestic violence against women in India, and that would get people digging into their pockets.
I knew some good women who volunteered for this organization in the beginning. They became disgusted with the radical agenda and quit.
Terry Morris writes:
Given the difficult choice between injustices (too often this is the choice we’re left with), I admit that my inclination is toward repudiation of wives, and away from divorce. We have seen in Western society the devastation the latter has left in its wake. Why would we want the same for other cultures, just for the sake of giving women a “second chance at a happy marriage?” Speaking of which, why stop there; why not a third, a fourth, even a fifth? Where does it stop? Where can it stop when the goal is a chance at a happy marriage, when divorce and remarriage is a clean, easy means to that end? Divorce will destroy Indian culture, as it has our own.
Alex writes:
That commercial advertises not jewelry but divorce. It tells the viewer that she can divorce her husband, remarry and have a glamorous, romantic wedding where she will be the star and the center of everything and people will give her new jewelry. And if she has children, her new husband will love them as his own.
You can only sell so much product by advertising the product. Realizing this, the company is advertising a way to get jewelry (as part of the package of a new, happy life) for married women – divorce and remarriage. The company is trying to create a new market segment by destroying families. (I write this just for the sake of the remote chance my lying eyes are really seeing what they tell me they are seeing, because I know that everything a business can possibly do in pursuit of profit for itself ultimately works for the common benefit of society.)
M. Jose writes:
Do we know that the woman is divorced and not widowed?
Ingrid writes:
When I watched the Indian jewelry commercial, my first impression was that the woman was supposed to be a widow, marrying for the second time. This may be because I saw a Bollywood film a few years ago in which a woman loses her husband in an accident and eventually remarries with the support of her family, and the family of her late husband. I don’t follow Indian society closely, but there seems to be some effort in some parts of society to improve the treatment of widows and to improve their prospects, so I think that some portrayals of widows “moving on” are starting to appear in the media. The bride seemed to be almost reluctant at certain points, the way that I can imagine a widow (or widower, for that matter) feeling and acting while going ahead with a second marriage. Perhaps I missed something, but I didn’t think that the woman in the commercial was necessarily supposed to be divorced. I think that in western countries, where divorce is so common, we tend to assume that a woman re-marrying is divorced rather than widowed. However, maybe in India they would assume that a woman is a widow, since divorce is still fairly uncommon?
Regarding Karl D.’s comment on his father’s remarriage, I was shocked at the level of selfishness, self-absorbtion and cruelty showed by his father and step-mother. His father not only abandoned his family, but then expected his 12 year-old son to sing a song at the reception of his wedding to a new wife…I really don’t have any words. My parents are divorced (although I was an adult when they split up), and I have many friends and relatives that lived though their parents’ divorces while they were children and teenagers, but I’ve never heard of anything this heartless. I’m not surprised that Karl D. feels like an outsider with his father and his second family.
Laura writes:
I have known other cases similar to Karl’s in which young children were expected to celebrate a parent’s remarriage.
As far as whether the woman in the commercial is a widow or not, it would have been easy for the producers to clarify this issue by, say, having her look at a photo of her dead husband with sadness. At the very least, it is left intentionally ambiguous. Given the woman’s age and the context of rising divorce in India, it is reasonable to assume she is not a widow.
Jane writes:
My sense is also that backstory is intentionally left ambiguous. Second marriage is such a big deal for a woman in India, the circumstances behind it are really not important. Widowhood, divorce, broken engagement, they’re all the same.
The World of Apu is a classic Bengali film about a young man who travels to a country estate to attend the wedding of a friend’s cousin. Marriage preparations are underway, but when the bridegroom arrives, he is in the throes of a seizure or some kind of incapacitating fit that clearly renders him incapable of getting married. That is bad news for the bride—it means she will be ineligible to get married ever again. Never mind that it wasn’t her fault. Lucky for her, the out-of-town visitor is a compassionate and honorable man and, at the last minute and with some persuasion, he steps into the role of bridegroom.
It may be unlikely that she’s a widow, but not impossible. Hindu families like for their daughters to marry older men. I knew a Hindu woman who decided to marry a boy she knew from school. Her parents didn’t approve of the match—not because there was anything wrong with the guy, but because the couple were the same age. It’s a big deal.
If the woman in the TV advert is divorced, then the likelihood is that she was the one who was dumped. Maybe because she had a daughter instead of a son. She is portrayed as the mother of a little girl on purpose.
Rita Jane writes:
In Jewish law, children are actually forbidden from attending the wedding of a parent. Jewish law permits divorce, and the idea of this rule is to spare the child from the pain of watching their parent remarry. I know people who have gotten dispensations (say, to attend the remarriage of their widowed mother), but the purpose of the rule is to acknowledge the feelings of the children who might be pushed aside.
