“Marriages are fixed in heaven” – a Tamil saying says. At first sight, you may think this saying glorifies the marriages as heavenly occasions.  But, if you can read the underlying message of this saying, that is something threatening. It says marriages are so holy and heavenly occasions that they do not happen according to the wish of an ordinary man or woman. That means you can’t have your own choice!

Arranged marriages are the normal custom in Tamil society. They are fixed by the parents, not by the bride and bridegroom – they actually do not have any say in choosing their life-partners. Their only role in their marriage is to give their acceptance to their parent’s choice. Some marriages happen even against the wishes of the marrying couple.

The most important component of these arranged marriages is dowry. Dowry is the monetary aspect that eventually finalizes the marriage. Parents of the bride must give a substantial amount of wealth as dowry to the marrying couple in the form of property and money. Here, dowry is not a willful presentation but a compulsion. That is a precondition for the marriage demanded by the parents of the bridegroom, and without fulfilling that demand the marriage will never occur. This dowry is not a small amount that you can think of. In fact, that would be almost the whole lifetime saving of the parents of the bride. Having worked through out his whole life in earning the dowry for his daughter, the father, sometimes, will have to spend the rest of his life in settling the pending loans. Imagine the fate of a poor father who has many daughters. Sometimes, a brother of a girl has to marry (forgoing his own aspirations) in order to get dowry form his wife’s parents to give dowry for his sister. Thus, the burden is passed to another father of a daughter.

 This custom of dowry corrupts the minds of the people very much. . It prompts a person to acquire wealth through any wrong means in order to pay the dowry for his daughters. This increases the bribery and corruption in Tamil society. It makes the people greedy and cruel to grab somebody’s wealth without conscience. Absence of dowry makes many poor women to live unmarried. Some wives are compelled by the husband’s family to get further wealth from their parents, and that causes many suicides of married women. Dowry is a symbol of male-domination. It implies that the woman is a burden and the dowry is the compensation to the husband for looking after her. It makes the people to think that giving birth to a girl is misfortune.  There is a Tamil saying “Even the king will become a beggar if he gets five daughters.” A practice of killing female infants still prevails in some places of India. Poverty makes this worse.

There will be a lot of questions around this custom. Why can’t the couples live their life without dowry, which is another person’s savings? Why should the dowry be an obligation from the girl’s side only? What privilege do the parents of the bridegroom have to demand dowry from the bride’s parents? How come the right of choosing their life-partners has deprived form the marrying couple and secured in the hands of their parents? What is the stand of the law regarding this custom?

Ignoring all these questions, this society has its own argument that when a society has such a practice for generation, you have to follow it without questioning, and who ever violates it becomes the victim of it. The mechanism of the society is so sophisticated that makes the children believe that their parents are acting in their interest to secure their lives. They do not realize that their right to decide on their marriages is deprived. Loving is contemptuous in the eyes of this society since it defies the hegemony of the parents in deciding their children’s fate. Love affairs bring bad reputation to the children. Fixing marriages for those who had  love affairs earlier  will be very difficult.  Those love affairs can affect the marriages of their brothers and sisters too. In the early days, this society was so powerful with all the authorities to separate and punish the lovers. There were many capital punishments also given to lovers in our “good”-old -days. Nowadays, even though these brutalities are relaxed, the social compulsion still prevails. 

Besides dowry, religion and cast system of this society also play important roles in arranged marriages. People tend to stick to their religion even in marriages. Most of the Tamils are Hindus and inter-religious marriages are usually not acceptable in the society. Likewise, high-cast families do not permit their children to marry low-cast people. Therefore, they always check the family background of their children’s future life-partners thoroughly before fixing the marriages.

Their beliefs in horoscope are also another important filter to be passed through in finalizing a marriage in the Tamil society. If the horoscopes of the bride and the bridegroom do not match, the marriage will not be permitted. They believe, if the horoscopes of those couple do not match, some bad things will happen to the couple or their children or their parents in the future.

In arrange marriages of Tamils, marriages are prohibited between the children of sisters or the children of brothers since they are considered step-sisters and step-brothers. But marriages between the children of a brother and a sister are welcomed since they are cousins.

Now you can see the complexity of arranged marriages, which have so many hurdles in the way of joining two hearts.

Where as the Tamil immigrant community of Canada is concern, of course, the law of the land is not favorable to this custom. Anyone who is a not a minor can marry who ever he or she likes, and the parents cannot prevent him or her forcibly. But still, arranged marriages are the predominant method of marriage in Canadian Tamil community. Dowry, cast, religion and horoscope are still playing their roles in these marriages. But love marriages also happening with or without the concern of the parents. Only leverage that parents have here over their children who marry without their concern is to dissociate them from their family circle. What is happening here is a compromise with reality in order to keep this custom as far as the society can. But it is diminishing slowly here.