Does Marriage Still Define the Life of Indian Women?

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

“What does young India want? At the launch of his sixth book, on just this subject, the popular author Chetan Bhagat offered an inadvertently revealing comment: ‘Naukri aur chokri' - jobs and girls,” Nilanjana S. Roy wrote in The International Herald Tribune.

“In a country where more than 65 percent of the population is under the age of 35, most girls and women are still defined by one major life event - marriage,” Ms. Roy wrote.

Popular television soaps in India “demonstrate this to the point of exhaustion,” she wrote. “Pavitra Rishta” (A Sacred Relationship) on Zee, one of the biggest TV networks, “is about a mother's search for the perfect husband for her daughter,” she wrote. While “Balika Vadhu” (Child Bride) on Colors TV, a popular entertainment channel, follows the life of a young girl, married at the age of 8, trying to find an identity for herself as an adult.

Ira Trivedi, a best-selling author who both holds an M.B.A. and was a contestant in the Miss India beauty pageant, has some perspective to offer. “Marriage still remains of prime importance, family is still the central unit,” she said of her generation of young urban women. “Bollywood and TV - mass media in general - really shape their mores, especially when it comes to marriage and relationships.”

There is, Ms. Trivedi said, a lack of role models for young Indian women, especially those in their 20s. “They can't look to their mothers, who had arranged marriages instead of the love marriages they want,” she said. “And they don't have too many role models beyond Bollywood, or a few media figures, perhaps successful professionals like Chanda Kocchar,” the chief executive of ICICI Bank, the largest private bank in India.

Some statistics reinforce Ms. Trivedi's point. The starkest figure comes from the Indian government's National Family Health Survey, the largest survey of its kind. In 2009, it found that 47 percent of Indian women were married by the age of 18. Many of these women have entered the paid work force, especially in urban India, but tend to look for jobs that will not interfere with family life.

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