If you바카라re a data journalist trying to understand and explain India through numbers, you get used to using proxies to make up for all of the information that you wish you had but doesn바카라t exist. ConsumpÂtion expenditure becomes a proxy for income (which India doesn바카라t collect), your ability to accurately report your age to a census surveyor becomes a proxy for numeracy (which is hard to measure). And marriage becomes a proxy for love. While this might outrage some readers who feel that this ignÂores the single experience, from a broad-brush perspective of Indian data it makes sense. Marriage in India is near universal. By the time they are aged 45-49, only one per cent of women and two per cent of men have never been married.
Love marriages are still rare. As of January 2018, at least 93 per cent of married Indians said that theirs was an arranged marriage. Just three per cent had a 바카라love marriage바카라 and another two per cent described theirs as a 바카라love-cum-arranged marriage바카라, which usually indicates that the relationship was set up by the families, and then the couple fell in love and agreed to get married. There has been only very slight change over time바카라94 per cent of octogenarians had an arranged marriage, and the figure remains over 90 per cent for young couples in their twenties.
What this also means is that most Indians바카라 first experience of sex is after they are married, and relatively late. Just three per cent of unmÂarried women and 11 per cent of unmarried men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four told surveyors that they had had sex. Since marriage is very closely associated with the first experience of sexual intercourse, as people get married later, the age at which Indians first have sex has been rising rather than falling. Of the seventy-two countries for which there is comparable data, Indian men have their first expÂerience of sexual intercourse the latest, at age 24.3.
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While advertisements for matchmaking websites would like to make it appear that arranged marriages are no longer as rigidly orchestrated as they once were, the data does not bear this out. Forty-one per cent of women had no say in their marriage and just 18 per cent knew their husbands before marriage.
Physical characteristics still play an important role in the marriage market: one analysis of matrimonial advertisements in a newspaper in West Bengal found that height was mentioned in the ad by 96 per cent of the women and 90 per cent of the men. A prospective bride바카라s skin tone and beauty were mentioned by groom-wanted ads in 75 and 70 per cent of the cases, respectively. Â
Above all other attributes, however, is caste. The matrimonial advÂertisement study found a high preference for caste relative to other attributes; a man from the same caste as a prospective bride but with no education was as likely to be contacted by the hopeful bride as a man from a different caste with a master바카라s degree. Men were willing to sacrifice three shades of skin tone to marry someone within their caste.
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More than data on whom Indians love, we have a lot of data on whom Indians think it바카라s not ok to love. Three-quarters of urban respondents in a major national survey said that they would not accept an inter-caste marriage for any of their children. Education and incÂome groups made next to no difference to attitudes to inter-caste marriage. Fewer than 10 per cent of urban Indians said in a 2014 survey that anyone in their family had married outside their caste and not many more outside their sub-caste (jati). Another survey, in 2011-12, found that just 5 per cent of urban respondents had had an inter-caste marriage, and that the number had changed little since the previous round seven years prior to it.
For richer urban Indians, these numbers may seem unlikely, given that younger people often profess their willingness to marry outside their caste. But there is likely a large gap between stated and revealed preferences. In 2015, resÂearchers contacted 1,000 prospective brides through matrimonial websites and found that the SC man was least likely to be contacted, despite all other variables바카라educational qualifications, salary and even skin colour바카라being nearly the same.
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Younger people do not have much more progressive beliefs; a 2017 survey on the attitudes of young people found that one-third of young people opposed intÂer-caste marriage. While this was a smaller share than in a similar survey in 2007 (55 per cent of young resÂpondents opposed inter-caste marriage), this does not mean that young people are walking the talk; the share of married young respondents in the 2017 survey who said their spouse was not from their caste was just four per cent.
Inter-religious marriage was even rarer; just five per cent of urban resÂpondents in the 2014 survey said that anyone in their family had married someone outside their religion. In a large national survey, 85 per cent of people said that marriage between two people of different religions was not acceptable. Young people in their late teens and early twenties were even more likely than older people to say that intÂer-religious marriage was unacceptable, and neither income nor education made people more likely to accept inter-religious marriage.
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Families do not take transgressions lying down. In 2014, I examined every judgment passed in a case involving rape (IPC section 376) in Delhi바카라s seven district courts in 2013바카라nearly 600 in all. Of the 460 cases that were fully argued before the courts, the largest category (189 cases) dealt with cases involving or allegedly involving consenting couples. The majority of these바카라174 of these 189 cases바카라involved couples who seemed to have eloped, after which parents, usually of the woman, filed complaints of abduction and rape with the police. Many of them involved intÂer-caste or inter-religious relationships.
This situation is about to get much worse. Over the last decade, Hindu nationalist groups in India have floated a theory they call 바카라love jihad바카라, the belief that Muslim men lure Hindu women into sexual relationships and marriage as a way of spreading their faith. Once laughed at by the Indian mainstream as the talking point of an extremist fringe, the idea has now taken firm hold among India바카라s rightwing. In 2020, three states with BJP governments brought in stricter sentences for men found to be 바카라coercing바카라 women into religious conversion for the purpose of marriage, and also added resÂtrictions on consenting inter-religious couples. Whether these cases stand in court or not appÂears to be irrelevant; in the first few months since the new law was passed in India바카라s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, where one-fifth of the population is Muslim, dozens of young Muslim men were arrested for 바카라offences바카라 that included meeting a Hindu girl for a pizza date.
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But does that mean that falling in love, including with someone of anoÂther caste or religion is rare? In truth, we don바카라t know. While resÂearching my book, I talked to Nitin Kamble, a young man from Maharashtra바카라s Satara district, who worked in a motorcycle repÂair shop in Mumbai, and within minutes our conversation turned to the young woman he was in love with, who was from another caste, and who he was worried would never be allowed to marry him, a Dalit. I told him weeks later on the phone about what the data on inter-caste marriage showed and asked him if this made him feel like an exception. He told me I was wrong, but not because he didn바카라t believe the data or because he thought it was fake. 바카라That바카라s data about marriage, madam,바카라 he said,바카라not about love. 바카라I think if your data asked people if they have ever fallen in love with someone from another caste or religion, many will say yes. I see that all around me among my friends. But when it comes to getting married, most of us are not yet ready to leave our families. That바카라s why your data looks like that,바카라 he said. Â
(This appeared in the print edition as "It바카라s Just Numbers, Love")
(This piece draws on the writer바카라s new book, Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India)
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Rukmini S. is a Chennai-based data journalist
