DISTANCED by thousands of miles, years apart in age and duration their marital lives, a housewife and an engineer make a state ment: the turn of the century won't have the broken Indian marriage shying away from divorce anymore. The time for legal termination of conjugal relationships that are dead in the mind and the bedroom has perhaps arrived in the country.
Even as upwards of 20 divorce petitions are filed by incompatible couples in the courts of the capital every day, the principal counsellor at the Bombay Family Court, Pratibha Gheewalla, vouches that the past two years have seen each of her counsellors being burdened with about 300 new divorce cases annually. Bangalore too has registered a similar escalation. "The numbers, judging by the cases I have been dealing with, have doubled in the last three years," asserts Hemalatha Mahishi, a senior family court lawyer in Bangalore. A situation better, perhaps, than in Kerala where the last recorded police statistic of the causes for suicide has an ominous 460 listed against "quarrels with spouse"—up from 209 just four years ago.
"Why kill yourself or even suffer stifling existence in a dead marriage? Things have changed and divorce has become a real middle-class alternative," asserts Calcutta-based Uttama Guha Thakurta. "It's no longer a weird thing which makes sense only to promiscuous moviestars." The 39-year-old music teacher claims it took her two years to make her husband agree to a divorce by mutual consent. "He didn't quite understand why I wanted to end the marriage. Not that he was beating me nor were either of us having an affair, but our marriage had been rotting for over seven years. We had become indifferent to each other. Just flat-mates. It was best that we declared the marriage dead legally as well," Uttama recalls.
A step Bombayite Meeta Khanna decided to take after three years of a 'wrong' marriage. "We were both on different wavelengths. He lived for appearances and expected me to change—right down to insisting I wear contact lenses instead of glasses," a hurt Meeta says. Having filed for divorce recently, the 28-year-old insists that 90 per cent of marriages break down because of the man. "A woman thinks of divorce because her husband pushes her into it," she claims.
Contrarily, Salim Sura, 48, attributes the rising divorce rate to the new Indian woman who has "given up the quality of womanhood in exchange for self-sufficiency and thinks and walks several steps ahead of the times". The Bombay-based businessman's 10-year-old marriage came apart when he stumbled upon proof of his wife's 'infidelity'. Now remarried to a college teacher, Sura observes: "The present structure of marriage has got to change. Otherwise, marriages will eventually be redundant since divorce is no longer a stigma." In metropolitan India at least, the structure of marriage itself seems to have changed. There are few predetermined marital roles for men and women today, no stereotypes to follow. Women not only seek autonomy through employment, but in most families this is also an economic imperative. Matrimonial advertisements stand testimony to the increasing preference for working brides, and yet, after marriage, men miss their non-working mothers' single-minded dedication to the family. The contradiction afflicts women too: much as they desire economic independence, they long for the security their mothers enjoyed within the confines of the home. Dealing with the car mechanic, the electrician, the phone bill were never on mama's agenda. "Who is the man of the house today? Who wears the pants? There are no norms, no rules. There is confusion and, therefore, conflict," contends Indrani Guha, a practicising psychotherapist in Delhi. Recalling her counselling experience, she says that in most unhappy marriages men miss their mothers and women the protection and loving care their fathers bestowed on their mothers. "Add to this the new, assertive woman who is much less hesitant to walk out of a marriage if she feels stifled or humiliated," Guha points out.
In agreement, Kusum Kumar, family law researcher at the Indian Institute of Law and author of the monograph Harassed Husbands, says: "Some of the new breed of women who come in for divorce today offer reasons such as 'I feel lifeless with him' or 'he doesn't fulfill my physical needs'. Our mothers would never have dreamt of saying such things to walk out of a marriage."
Not that these reasons are peculiar to women. For years men have complained about their wives not being presentable in public and incompatible with their social requirements or sexual appetites. But no longer are these demands expressed only through taunts. New divorce laws have made it possible for men to seek dissolution of marriage even for apparently frivolous reasons such as a wife's refusal to prepare tea for his friends.
S.N. Srivastava sued wife Kalpana for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty, citing this very reason. The court granted this to him, observing: "Where a wife refuses to prepare tea for the friends of her husband, she not only hurts his ego but causes him humiliation before them." This may be an extreme example, but barring some exceptions, courts have tried to keep pace with changing social attitudes.
As Anusuya Dutt, a family law expert in Bombay, points out, "in the last two or three decades, people have become less rigid and the attitudes of the courts are in keeping with these changes. But legal reforms have preceded social reforms."
In vigorous agreement, 36-year-old architect Srikant Vyas complains that he lost many of his friends when he opted for a divorce this year. "These same people would be witness to nasty fights between my wife and me every other day. But it was okay to be my friend then. Whereas most people will mouth progressive sentiments encouraging the freedom of spirit and all that, they are still suspicious of divorced guys. And it's much worse for women," he says.
Hardly surprising, then, that 32-year-old art director Mitali Roy, who came to Delhi after filing for divorce in the Calcutta courts recently, was advised against disclosing her marital status to potential landlords by her friends. "Nobody, my friends said, would be willing to rent out a house to a cantankerous divorcee," says Mitali.
But the pressure to maintain a happy facade in marriage costs many people the best years of their lives. Forty-eight-year-old Harminder Kang, in fact, suffered two decades of sheer torture in trying to keep up the pretence. Harassed by the perverted sexual demands of her husband, Harminder had hesitantly approached a lawyer for advice within the first three years of wedlock.
"The lawyer suggested against dragging my bedroom into the court. I would be ridiculed, I was told. Too embarrassed to crosscheck with my family on the matter, I reconciled to coping with his animal demands for a lifetime," sighs Harminder. But the demands worsened over the years.
"The children grew up and could hear me crying in pain in the bedroom. I was scared to leave my daughter alone in the house with my husband. Relatives and family friends got to know. And the well-meaning ones intervened but only resulting in temporary patch-ups." Till Harinder's daughter, who had begun working by then, forced a decision upon her mother.
And last year, a weary but certain Harinder filed a divorce petition in the Delhi court. "If only people were not so keen to see others 'happily married', I might have known a peaceful night's rest earlier in life," she says.
The tendency to force meaningless reconciliation unfortunately finds its way into many a lawyer's chamber and counsellor's clinic. A peek into the Legal Aid Centre at Delhi's Patiala House Courts reveals the fil-ial pressures that are brought upon coun-sellors to effect truce between incompatible couples. Parents from either side screaming at each other, a retinue of relatives as audience and harassed counsellors trying to drill sense into the elders of the families characterise sessions. Pleas such as "leave them alone, they are now the children of the court and we will see that they live together" fall upon deaf years.
But the urge to "rehabilitate and reconcile" dominates most counsellors' mindsets as well. "Marriage is not a game. We keep telling parents to stop pampering daughters. Today's generation needs to increase its tolerance level," says Swarnalata, marriage counsellor at the Legal Aid Centre.
Even qualified and experienced counsel-lors attached to institutions of repute often fail to grapple with the sensitivities. One such counsellor, working for a leading med-ical institute in the capital, blandly told Vyas: "Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Go home, go back to your children and say sorry to your wife. Some woman in your office must be behind all this. Get rid of her." Not surprisingly,counselling generally fails to bring about a reconciliation of minds.
THE experience of many unhappily married couples suggests that both parents and counsellors usually fail torecognise the new factors that adversely affect marital stability today. The tremendous stress caused by the competitive environment, the demanding nature of jobs which entail long hours at office, mountinglem of bringing up children in today's consumerist society readily lead to frayed tempers and the steady erosion of companionship. Says Dr Murli Desai, head of the family studies unit at Tata Institute of Social Studies in Bombay: "The family is getting fragmented because of consumerism. People have become richer and their wants have taken precedence over their relationships. Couples take more time over building a wardrobe than building a relationship."
Academic studies, confirming these trends, reveal how the factors that propel divorce have undergone substantial change over the four decades since the introduction of the Hindu Code Bill in 1956 which legalised divorce for the majority community. Whereas in the past, the absence of, or inability to bear,
children was the primary reason for people seeking to dissolve a marriage (Damle's research of 1956) today, irritability, desertion, cruelty and interference by in-laws, rank above childlessness, impotency and chronic ailment (Choudhary's findings in 1988).
Just as the reasons for seeking divorce have changed, so has the advice given, especially to harried women, become more complex. Bombay's lawyer-activist Flavia Agnes advises clients against readily agreeing to dissolve a marriage: "Divorce only gives a woman the right to remarry. In our couple-centred culture, there are no facilities for a divorcee or a spinster." She feels that even under extreme provocation women should not walk out of their matrimonial home as it can leave them helpless and even destitute.
But Delhi lawyer Indira Jaising contends: "Divorce is a feminist issue. No woman seeks dissolution of marriage for fun. It is only when male chauvinistic attitudes and physical violence cross limits that women want to end a marriage. They are unclear about their economic rights after divorce and our primary task is to educate them about these. Laws should be changed to secure a dignified place for women in their matrimonial home even if a marriage sours."
Similarly, lawyer Rani Jethmalani says it is very important to work out a satisfactory financial agreement before granting divorce. A woman's right to an appropriate share of her husband's property must be ensured, she argues, pointing out that in-laws often try to take advantage of women's ignorance and even her own relatives are not adequately supportive at times.
While lawyers try to grapple with divorce becoming commonplace, social scientists argue that modern legislation has only helped bring into the open a pre-existing reality. Says sociologist Veena Das of Delhi University: "Conjugal separation in India is much higher than legal separation. Many couples turn celibate and women often spend months at their parental home after marital disputes. These things have happened for centuries. But now the law has given unhappy couples the instrument to formally terminate relationships."
Das feels that Indian society is undergoing significant changes with women evolving alternate networks of support and do not have to always shuttle between their parental and matrimonial homes. The sociologist reassures: "There is much more flex-ibility today in terms of such arrangements. So although the current scenario may look rather confusing, actually it is perhaps much more peaceful than before."
But even with such frenetic changes, it will be some time before the Indian marriage stops looking for peace with in.
