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A FEW months ago, I wrote a column entitled 'Almost-arranged marriage' (Oct 19, 2011).
The basic premise was that growing urbanisation, migration and other pressures have transformed familial structures in Pakistan, including the arranging of marriages.
The consequence of this change, I argued, is a hybrid form of the arranged marriage, which tries to bridge the gap between the individual's desire for compatibility and emotional fulfilment against family pressures.
The crucial assumption I made was that arranged marriage, understood as a marriage in which families instead of individuals control spouse selection, and the joint family, are both 'traditional' forms that stand in opposition to modernity and the nuclear family.
I was wrong.
Like many others before me, I fell prey to the post-colonial 'wishfulness' that casts everything non-western as automatically authentic, pure and originating in a life untouched by the scourges of foreign influence. Many Pakistanis report symptoms of this affliction, groaning under the weight of imperialist overtures all of us are adept at preaching the superiority of bun kebabs over burgers, churidar pyjamas over skinny jeans and chai over coffee.
I owe this newfound clarity regarding the 'invention' of arranged marriage to the work of scholar Rochona Majumdar, whose recent book Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal dissects exactly the assumption that arranged marriage is a form drawn from tradition.
Working with an archive of material on marriage in Bengal over two centuries, Majumdar reveals how the concepts of arranged marriage and the joint family were instead innovations responding to pressure on family structures after colonisation by the British.
Her investigation begins inthe late 1800s when marriages in Bengal were orchestrated through the work of male matchmakers or gharaks who kept detailed records of the genealogies of families, ensuring thus that only families of comparable caste and status were united in matrimony.This was not arranged marriage but what I would term 'familial marriage', purely communal and based almost exclusively on genealogy and other familial attributes. The individual characteristics of the bride or groom, the complexion of one and the job of another, never quite entered the equation.
With the arrival of the British and the development of a national civil service, the pull of urban areas drew breadwinners out of the fold of ancestral villages, initiating the dispersion of families over larger distances and creating the conditions for the reconstitution of the family.
The matchmakers no longer had access to all who were eligible, and questions arose about who exactly from the clan would be included in the redefined family resettled in other places.
It was at this time, under the shadow of British rule, that the arranged marriage and the joint family were born as a response to a changed society seeking to stay true to its communal roots, but also facing the structural demands of new ways of living.
Arranged marriage in Bengal thus arose as an argument against critics who saw the demise of the genealogical matchmaker the emergence of matrimonial advertisements in newspapers, themove away from the vast extended clan to the newly pared-down joint family all as negative developments that threatened the identity of Bengal and Bengalis.
In response to them, the inclusion of parents and unmarried siblings within the family unit that moved to the city afterthe eldestson orsons set up their remote household was a means of insisting that not all that was traditional was being abandoned.
The insecurities of those leaving the fold, placing advertisements that searched for brides based not on their genealogies but on their individual characteristics skin colour, education and, of course, dowrycould thus be packaged as familiar tropes that became 'traditional' to be held up against the far more foreign ways of the British.
Like colonial Bengal, modern-day Pakistan stands at the cusp of change, with the structure of the family finding itself under significant pressure from changing economics and the dispersion of families.
Given the cultural similarities that persist across South Asia, it could be argued that the Pakistani arranged marriage was as much an 'invention' as its Bengali cousin.
Even if the trajectory of transformation was not identical, it could well be that in the yet unborn, British-ruled Pakistan the clan began to morph into the joint family, keeping the parents but abandoning distant aunts and uncles as cities became the new homes of millions.
The discomfort of a contemporary Pakistani generation with existing forms of marriage and family could then be interpreted not as denigration of tradition but simply another reinvention, following the same hybrid process that birthed the joint family and the arranged marriage in the first place.
From this lens, the Pakistani two-income couple of today, living in increasingly small urban spaces and chafingunder the lack of privacy, are onlynew iterations of a long process of redefining marriage.
The argument that the joint family itself was an invention, and arranged marriage a compromise that sought to combine the yearning for a person with specific characteristics over genealogy alone imposes a new lens on the relationship between marriage and culture.
Like Bengalis of the colonial era, who turned up their noses at the emerging 'marriage market' and its crude discussions of dowry or the enumeration of physical attributes, Pakistanis find the push to exclude the family from marriage-making or the nuclear dyad as the new living arrangement quite onerous.
At the same time, unravelling these supposedly 'traditional' forms of loving and living to reveal the inventions they were and are, forces detractor and innovator alike to consider a larger truth: like all things traditional, arranged marriages and joint family systems were believed to be rooted in custom not because they contained some seminal truth untouched by imported ideas, but merely because those who created them needed to believe in their longevity and omniscience.
The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.
