In India, where living together without a nuptial knot is otherwise called as live-in-sin., the apex court came out with a legal support for co-habitation, two days back. Rajshri Iyer talks about the cultural shock that created a stale mate in the country following the verdict.

Soon after the thunder blast of Women’s Bill in the Parliament, came the Supreme Court verdict justifying the co-habitation, which appeared to be a cultural shock to the nation’s centuries-old-beliefs. Hot discussions are spreading over the culture-rich Indian terrains having the dedicated boarder service of the moral police, leaving sounds and fury as usual signifying nothing.

Khushoo when opened up

It was in 2005, that Khushboo, the noted actor of South India kick started with much aplomb, the agitations inside the Indian mindset by positively talking about co-habitation. This made the Tamil people outraged at her and along with some religious hard liners, filed not less than 20 criminal cases against her.

During an interview with a magazine she opened up herself saying nothing wrong if a matured couple decided to live together without the institutional support of marriage. Khushboo also asserted that no educated boy would expect his bride to be a virgin.

Khushboo, the lovely actress belonged to Tamil Nadu has essayed various memorable characters in all the South Indian languages which made her a darling to all the South Indians. Some besotted Tamil rasigar even came forward to dedicate a temple to the actor as Sree Khushambika Kovil!!!! That was her vibrant impact over the South Indian mindset. Such an adored one when came to the limelight to a kind of ‘verbal expose’ in a sudden morning, the people belong to the land of Kannaki, the epitome of vestal wife-hood, could not digest it. Hence were the riots, hence were the excommunications.

Brushed aside as Bohemian the agitations debased her glamorous charisma in her professional life, but she has shown a clean pair of heels by getting into the familial haven where enjoyed much of a usual Indian family bond. Meanwhile, she went on with her legal battles but her pleas were dismissed by the Madras Court. But Khusboo has proved that those sentences she uttered were not banal lip exercises but facts and truths which made her ‘bold and beautiful’ throughout her celeb-life. She took daring steps to move to the Supreme Court which after the usual drags and lags at last came forward with the scandalous verdict.

An Institution called marriage

When Khusboo came out with her shocking statements, the offenders  were outraged and moved towards legal action claiming that she had lead the youngsters astray and caused general chaos by destroying the hallowed institution of marriage.

Indian culture inculcates high esteem on the establishment called marriage. More than becoming the harmony of minds, these customized celebrations mirror a lot of other social expressions. Many people marry for the wrong reasons, such as – to overcome loneliness, to escape an unhappy parental home, or because they think that everyone is expected to marry, because only “losers” who can’t find someone to marry stay single, out of a need to parent, or be parented by another person, sometimes because they got pregnant, or because “we fell in love,” … and on goes the list.

Those are the individualistic aspects. When it comes to the social life of an average Indian, marriage is not something a noun but a verb. Subsequently, this act becomes a platform to showcase the social dignity, financial power, strength of relatives and so on. In turn, the Event Organizers and Jewelers fatten day by day. Local thieves and robbers are busy with novel forms of activities and they are being treated and feasted inside the prison with the tax money paid by the poor Indians.

Traditions and customs besieged by generations become compulsory norms egging the bride’s family to feast the grooms thus make the money lenders throughout the country grown as a hefty mafia. But at the end, Family Court buzzes with the bee-lines of couple-foes and their verbal combats. Simply money or wing-dings can never glue two lives that have to be lived out.

If it is a love marriage, the only difference is while standing in the argie-bargie queues in the Family Court there won’t be anyone to court the couple so that they can sign up in a mutual agreement paper and can came out of the judicial entanglement without wasting much time.  It is nothing but as quoting Frederick Nietzsche, – It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. A nuptial knot is as worthless as a gold plaited pendent if it is devoid of understanding.

What is Traditional?

It is in such an India the apex court came to the lime light with a parboiled verdict. Subsequently, apprehensions and soliloquies usher along the track. The Asian Age, the accepted English newspaper has given a green signal to the verdict by extolling the panel and they described it as a legal mile stone in the judicial history of India. Most of the media inside and outside India either directly or indirectly upheld it in the pretext of the bold headlines of a felicitated stardom.

But the average men were taken aback at this new twist which they fear to help create broken families, venereal diseases, single moms, teenage pregnancies and such fragmented culture and scarred kids like that of the dilapidated Western way of life, right in India. They also apprehend of sending a wrong signal to the youngsters in this world of consumer economy.

The distinction here has a clear cut between that of moral and legal. They flay the panel for offending the age-old traditions of India and narrating that of Krishna-Radha co-habitation story instead. There is no law against Pre-marital sex and Live-in relationships in India. But India’s Fundamental Rights enshrined in the Constitution are having a solid moral boundary and it has chore concern over the social ethics.

By providing a legal recognition, the young generation would go astray, the parents apprehend. But the escalating rates of divorces nudge the need of a deviation in our thinking. Earlier, while India was a coalition of combating provincials under tyrant kings, we had a lot of zenanas where the kings had a number of ‘substitutes’ besides the queen. Like the said Radha-Krishna, there had been a number of extra marital affairs. We can pick a Sree Ram or a Vasista-Arundhati couple or a Satyavan-Savitry cult out of the many polygamy traits of our tradition.

Why should we go beyond ages? Just look around,-  How many of the Indians of the previous generations are having a surname or initials with that of an own father? The matriarchal system pertained in Southern India was ‘rich’ with single moms and the kids had only their maternal uncles as their local guardians!! Still some tribal communities in some villages in Tamil Nadu follow these kinds of live-in relationships unto their death. Sometimes on the 60^th birth day of the ‘groom’ they might undergo such wedding ceremonies carried out by their grand children. Sun TV has aired about those jovial couples in their behind-news program Nijam, one month  back.

Moral Policing

But when morality equated with chastity, through the intrusions of Victorianism in India, some of our own traits became forbidden for us. We ourselves have mutilated or dismantled some of the customs according to personal convenience. When we nurture our children we nurture our whims and wants along with them and that may be ardently differing to their own thoughts. But we won’t agree to let them, in the pretext of following the tradition in which we were forced to stifle in the bygone days.  So we attempt to glue to the scanty moral fiber with which we try to tether them also.

The Supreme Court has thus come out of the colonial hang over and threatening taboos at last, thanks to Mrs.Khusboo. But along with the bursting out of a revolutionary remark the judiciary should step ahead to provide legality to such relationships that exist in India beyond the accounted statistics. By doing so, we can wipe out the ‘moral police service’ and ‘peeping Tom culture’ now rampant in the Indian society parallel to the hike in IT industry and mobile revolution. In a democracy where ‘honour killing’ is equated with divine sacrifice and young blood drenches the religious streets to purify the sins of ‘unrecognized sex’, judiciary can have much more strong pillars to support our social canopy.

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