NEW DELHI, INDIA -- The motorized rickshaws of this city have the engines of lawn mowers but are driven like rocket ships. It is a rainy day in March, and as buses, fuel trucks, grandmothers on motorcycles, and vintage cars swerve within inches of us, all producing their mad cacophony of honking horns, my face goes whiter and whiter.

Beside me a young woman laughs.

Her name is Priyanka and she is a 22-year-old university student. She has volunteered to help me find sources for a story I’m working on.

But on this Wednesday afternoon, as we careen around the curves and charge across the flyovers, I do nothing but pray for survival and listen to Priyanka’s melodic voice.

“Let me tell you something about this Jennifer Lopez,” she says. “Americans think she is fallen from the sky. I don’t understand. She is not so beautiful.”

“Can you tell him to drive slower? I think I’m going to—”

“And Leonardo DiCaprio? Let me tell you. I was happy when that boat sank.”

The rickshaw stops. A woman holding an infant runs through traffic to tug my arm. We pull away as Priyanka hands her a tiny silver coin.

“How old are you?” Priyanka asks. I’ve told her my job in New York is to write about love and dating. Perhaps that’s where this question is leading.

“I’m 33.”

“You’re so old!” She laughs. “In India if you are not married by 30 you are finished. For girls it is 27.”

This seems a little harsh.

“I will finish university when I am 25,” she continues. “Then I will be married at 27.”

To a New Yorker who writes about dating and nightlife, who has interviewed so many women who have abandoned even the idea of finding a spouse, it sounds like someone saying she will find a six-bedroom apartment on Central Park West. On a Friday. In September. When it happens to be windy. Sure, it’s possible, but life isn’t ever that simple, is it?

A Different Way

But perhaps the point is that for many Indians, it is that simple. Forget the reports that appear in magazines like Newsweek, each featuring the obligatory photos of scantily clad 20-somethings in the nightclubs of Mumbai. This country, when it comes to marriage, is still founded more on the customs and principals of Hinduism and the extended family than those of “Sex and the City” and the free market.

Spouses meet through parents. Overwhelmingly. Recommendations begin in the late teen years and serious introductions start not long thereafter. The entire family—parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles—constitutes the search committee. I’ve begun to wonder whether the word “arranging” even comes close to how marriages begin here. “Networking” better captures it.

The sexual mores of secular American youth—premarital sex beginning at 17, for example—that are purportedly on the rise here, are still largely blocked by two obstacles: religious tradition and to a lesser extent, logistics.

Families live together, often in the same room. Even in Mumbai, where there is money and anonymity, desire is held in check by the extant elements of the Rent Act. Think of New York City’s rent control laws re-written by Lenin and you have a sense of this legislation. Many tenants pay what they were charged in the 1950s. Developers don’t build apartment buildings—what would be the point when you can’t raise rents or evict anyone? The housing shortage is just staggering. There may be 18 million people in that city, but not many of them are young and single and have their own apartments.

But even those who are young, dress in Western clothes, speak English, go to nightclubs, and who are ambivalent about arranged marriage, will scoff at this typical American arrangement: two people living together for years, unmarried, childless, unsure if the other person is “the one.” Isn’t the whole point to be loved, to carry on your traditions, and to start your own family?

In America

12,000 miles away, on an April afternoon in Flushing, Queens, Jagdish Sabbir is praying. He is a 19-year-old undergraduate at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York. Today he is inside the Ganesha Temple, 45-57 Bowne Street, circling the navagraha, a shrine to the nine planets. He is dressed in designer jeans and a sweatshirt, he lives in one of the world’s most secular cities, but he comes here everyday.

“A devout young man,” says, Ganapathy Pamanabhan, the temple’s public relations officer who is affectionately known as “GP.”

It is a Saturday and the temple is crowded. Most of the women wear traditional Indian dress; most of the men do not. Sabbir is one of the few people who appears to be by himself. I can’t help asking him a few questions about marriage. Is he open to his parents finding him a spouse?

“I would like to meet her on my own but that really isn’t the most important thing. So long as she respects my mother and we can carry on the traditions, you know, how we meet isn’t what matters.”

The answer is a key to understanding not simply Indian cultural values, but Hinduism itself.

It is a religion with neither a centralized bureaucracy nor a uniform dogma. Beyond the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, there may be millions of other gods. Ceremonies vary widely from region to region, family to family.
And yet it connects the majority of Indians in a way Judaism may be said to connect Jewish Israelis: it is a religion, yes, but one that is synonymous with national origin, ethnicity, and a way of life. And a key to that way of life is marriage.

I ask Sabbir if he has a time table.

“My mom wants me to graduate first, get a degree, get a job, and then think about marriage. She doesn’t want me to think about it all right now.”

When does he expect a wedding to take place?

“Late 20s. Early 30s. At the latest.”

Changes

The debate over arranged marriage, at least as it is posed in the West, has been framed not unlike the debate between socialism and capitalism. Should one submit to planning from above, and the limitations of freedom that might entail, or is one better off when individuals are left to compete for resources – in this case a spouse – in the marketplace? We see it, in other words, in the secular terms of contemporary politics: freedom versus subjugation.

Most Indians don’t see it that way. For them, there is nothing oppressive in meeting a potential spouse through family recommendations. Some might say involving the extended family and paying attention to matters of social standing and character actually have many more centuries of success behind them than modern American love marriages.

Perhaps the real question for Indians is whether the values and practices of Hinduism—with its emphasis on the family, and view of marriage as being not just between two people, but between two families—can thrive despite changing economies and immigration to the West.

And when asked about the continuation of their religion and their traditions with respect to marriage, around the world, from the streets of New Delhi to a temple in Queens, the answer still appears to be a very firm “yes.”