Desi Weddings, Marriage, And Discovering Mutual Interdependence
Exploring Desi weddings, marriage, and its influence on my political thinking
I am a feminist.
I hated going to weddings in Pakistan. I think it was because they were always very boring. The card says the reception starts at 7. You get ready in your nicest clothes and are ready to leave by 6:30. Your mom and sisters have just started going to the shower. You stuff a family of 8 in a single sedan. Arrive at 8:30 and realise only half the guests have arrived. You wait patiently for 2 hours at your table for dinner as your elders talk among themselves, occasionally noticing your existence. They ask about what grade you are in and remark how tall you’ve gotten from the last time they saw you during the previous years wedding season. The women’s section always seemed much more fun. There’s singing and dancing, and the women and girls are dressed up in much more colour.
The marital union between a man and a woman is probably the single most powerful influence in my life. All my social politics emanates from the intellectual impetus imparted by my experiences around it. I began to notice gender inequality in my adolescence through the prism of marriage. Why is it that Islam allowed men to marry up to four women but women were restricted to one man? A trivially simple question that received, on reflection, some incredibly misogynistic answers: polyandrous women spread STIs and polygamous men do not, men have a harder time controlling their urges so it is necessary, men may want children or specifically male children that their first wife could not provide (step aside Henry VIII). Why does Islam have such stringent punishments for homosexuality? This was a question I never directly asked my elders because it would evoke a visceral disgust towards the mere mention of the existence of homosexuals. Beyond these dilemmas of practice at the fringes, I just never associated marriage with happiness. I had only seen marital strife so it was disorienting to attend so many weddings every year where everyone acted happy. Didn’t these people know what came next?
Weddings were, still are, a performance. I think I always felt excluded from the performance so I felt a bit bored. I also did not like the script. I hated superficial relationships then, just as I hate them now. I did not want to waste my time feigning interest for people I did not have any connection with. That is why every time I see photos from a wedding, specifically a Desi wedding, I feel a mixture of sorrow and nausea.
Paradoxically, I was eager to get married myself. So eager in fact that I fantasised of marrying younger than most of my peers. Instead of early 20s, as was the norm, I wanted to get married as soon as I finished high school around 18. My marriage would be an exception because I was a total romantic. Somehow, I would avoid all the strife, all the rage, the domestic violence, the insults, the public quarrels, the incitements that I had grown up witnessing. Because I would be better at it. I would simply avoid these problems by force of will. The perilous thoughts of a first born child given too much importance throughout his upbringing. Cringe.
Contradictions in thought have the property that once they are identified they seem blindingly obvious. My discomfort at weddings arose from that unacknowledged contradiction. The performance of jubilation at the climactic event posed itself as a contrast to the bitter unhappiness I associated with marital life in practice. The absurd uniformity of celebration so obviously elided a darker reality that it stirred unease in me. Simultaneously, it inspired a curiosity about marriage and love. My original misdiagnosis was that marriage led to unhappiness because they were arranged between relative strangers by parents more concerned with the principles of breeding cattle than any concern for their children’s happiness. It would be better if everyone was allowed to marry for love by their own choice. So that would be my pursuit. Marry for love, ideally before I turn 20. In trying to fulfil this fantasy I attempted to court a cousin of mine at the encouragement of my father, who had long harboured his own fantasy of arranging such a marriage, when I was 18. Thankfully, that was the last time in my life where I made major life decisions to gain parental approval. Cringe.
I read this Agony Aunt column in an English newspaper that was delivered to our house on the weekends. That is where I read of the routine abuses women suffered in the home. I read about love marriages gone awry, sectarian differences plaguing the pursuit of love, but mostly I just read about men beating women and in-laws emotionally torturing them. Similar things, at perhaps a lower intensity, were happening in my home. When I read those letters, the women speaking in them were speaking on behalf of all the women around me, past, present, and future. Those stories stirred me to take women’s rights more seriously around the time I was 16. To be good at love, I had to be good at treating women, at least better than the husbands in those letters. I was so enthusiastic about this new interest, that I vividly remember trying to impress the daughter of my dad’s friend, whom I had a massive crush on, by telling her I was really into women’s rights. A strange thing to segue into small talk. The road to hell is not just paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them. Cringe.
I just never realised the immense class privilege that facilitated this steady intellectual transformation. In Pakistan, to get a regular delivery of newspapers, to be able to read English, to have the luxury of time itself was a marker of upper-middle class rank. The voices of those letters spoke for a similar class segment of society. Its important to acknowledge then, who remained mute in my consciousness. In my mid teens we had a teenage girl, I think her name was Aasia, as our maid. She was about the same age as my oldest sister. I did not like her because she did not obey me. When I told her to do something, she would act stubbornly like my sisters would. On one occasion, I got angry at her, and I took the steel tube of a vacuum cleaner and beat her calf with it multiple times. I do not remember to what ends. I vaguely remember beating her the same way my father beat my mother with the pipe. Memories get enmeshed when recalling this far back. If I beat my sisters to get them to do something, my parents would rain thunder on me. But for beating Aasia, I got off light. A stern telling off and a threat of more severe punishment if I ever did it again. This was perhaps the model example of protecting a lowly maid from the capricious violence of the household princeling. I have seen and heard of much worse abuses. Guilt. Shame. Fear.
On so many occasions, I was saved from myself. The gulf of divergence between the man I was to become and the man I could have become strikes fear in me. I feel that within every man is this gestating demon which, if fed and nurtured, can take possession of his soul and direct him to feed on the misery inflicted on others. But a host of influences intervened to correct my course. Witnessing marriages like those of my grandparents, my parents, and the sensational breakdown of my once-removed cousin’s in particular made me want to be different. I desired harmony and happiness not for myself alone but for two individuals in union. Understanding the problem of mutually interdependent happiness and finding a solution for it became an organising principle intellectually.
Once you latch on to the idea that happiness is only valid if accomplished jointly between two people (more specifically a man and a woman in my case), you can extend this principle to any number of people. Indeed, you can extend this to other species. Mutually interdependent happiness. That is, I think, an intellectual pillar of feminism. To any man skeptical of feminism as an anti-masculine ideology, that would be my first rebuttal. Feminism seeks to reaffirm this principle, rejecting the zero sum game engendered and enshrined by the patriarchy. It is obvious as well that class politics is mutually reinforcing with feminism in this regard; where they differ is in their principal antagonists.
South-Asian weddings are a rich potpourri of class, gender, and religious politics that serve as an excellent teaching ground for the observant. However, I cannot be a formless, silent, “objective” observer. My life has been and to a much more limited extent still is shaped by the significance of this event. My sisters still face pressure from my mother to get married. Another sister, who is divorced, carries with her an invisible scarlet letter within our confected community.
I have never heard of a Desi man speak up against the regressive ideas and glaring inequalities of marriage within his family. The fight is always left to the women, some of whom are so jaded from years of struggle that they compromise and participate in enforcing these norms. Married men go on philandering with the occasional admonishment. Unmarried men can engage in pre-marital relationships for years while similar transgressions from women would have them ostracized completely. Do they ever advocate for women to have the same laxity as they themselves enjoy? Female display of joy, let alone female pursuit of romance, is de facto criminalised.
This may partially explain why the female section of weddings always seemed more boisterous. It was one of those rare occasions, those few spaces, where women could openly enjoy themselves, even if in an observed and curtailed manner. They could sing, they could dance, they could be loud, they could be silly, they could take up literal space and, for a few nights, that would be tolerated and even encouraged. Weddings were where young women could be showcased to a potential groom’s family. So underneath this toleration was a utilitarian intention that furthered patriarchal reproduction. There was also a more insidious opportunity to stalk women from a distance for more lascivious men.
I feel so crushingly alone with these thoughts. This reminder of loneliness is the source of my nausea at witnessing Desi weddings. I am privy to a fair few secrets behind the veil cast over the celebratory atmosphere conveyed through the photographs. The vow of collective silence, source of so much anguish, that every participant takes is maddening. I have witnessed so many otherwise critical minded people succumb to the deadening inertia of custom. It lends an air of performance to the happiness.
People reading this might think I am preternaturally averse to my ancestral culture but it is the converse. I am beginning to appreciate a culture that I had written off as irrevocably regressive for a decade. But I am not merely interested in replicating it, I want to be an active participant within it. I want the jubilation of weddings to be grounded in reality.
That is only possible in a feminist world, where material and social inequalities, not to mention the violence and generalised oppression, imposed on women and sexual minorities is removed and healed. The dances, the maximalist colours, the songs and the poetry, the feast, and the gathering of friends and relatives both near and distant can only be enjoyed in their totality if and when the suffocating weight of oppression is removed. Otherwise, the celebrations will always come at someone else’s expense. Every Desi wedding, but indeed any wedding, then becomes an opportunity to conduct a very different performance for an onlooking public. Either we reinforce patriarchal customs at great expense. Or we commit a transgression against these norms at the risk of offending sensibilities within the audience. Life’s too short to perform a stale script.