India’s Radical Transformation and Persisting Traditions: A Discussion with Miranda Kennedy
By Melody Wilson | June 13, 2011 | India
Miranda Kennedy was an IRP Fellow in 2009.
“I was determined to be more than a casual visitor to India,” Miranda Kennedy writes in her new memoir, Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India.
“I’d been saving everything I earned at my job as a producer at a public radio show so that I could pick up and go overseas to try my hand at becoming a freelance foreign correspondent. The lack of transcendent, transformative experiences in my life so far had disappointed me: My days seemed a blur of headlines and deadlines.”
And so, armed with just her recording equipment and ambition, Kennedy moved to New Delhi. She quickly became a regular freelance correspondent for shows such as NPR and Marketplace, focusing upon India’s changing traditions and culture—particularly marriage.
Miranda recently spoke about the book and her experiences in India at an IRP event.
When she first took off for India, she told the audience, she was not unprepared. She had researched the rapid changes occurring in India, and she thought she had some idea of what to expect.
“I had read that India had changed,” she sad. “There have been very radical economic changes, and I’d assumed that they had translated into the social and cultural realms.”
But, she continued, economic growth does not equal cultural transformation. The changes she had read about—marriage ads in the paper eschewing caste, families of brides choosing not to pay dowry—were happening, but not consistently. “It so depends on the family,” she commented.
The inconsistencies between rapid economic progress and continued adherence to tradition could have a negative impact on the country. “Holding back people based on caste instead of on merit and on gender instead of on merit can really slow down a country’s growth,” Kennedy said.
Continuity and Change in Marriage
Kennedy attempted to make sense of rapid technological and cultural changes by looking at the lives of women, especially in the context of marriage. Marriage is an institution that embodies the most traditional expectations, Kennedy explained, but it has also undergone dramatic changes.
Kennedy read several passages from her book that illustrate the challenges faced by the women she met and befriended. All of them came from different castes, regions, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and all had equally different experiences with marriage.
The Question of Caste
Marriage for Radha, Miranda’s servant, was all about caste. Radha was born a Brahmin, but her family was poor and she illiterate. Without a dowry, Kennedy explained, Radha had to accept “a boy with faults”—in this case, a much older, poor Brahmin who died a few years later, leaving Radha in even deeper poverty.
Yet when Radha began searching for her daughter’s own match, caste mattered to her more than anything—to the extent that she went deeply in debt to provide an acceptable dowry.
Dowry was also crippling for Usha, whose parents had passed away and whose older sisters had already used their savings for their dowries. But instead of focusing on caste, Usha’s brother arranged a marriage with a lower-caste man who was able to provide for Usha and didn't expect a large dowry because of his lower social station.
Arranged Marriages and Modern Expectations
Miranda’s middle-class friend Geeta, on the other hand, didn’t have to worry about dowry; her parents were among the estimated 10 percent of Indians who don’t put stock in this tradition. But Geeta faced other problems: finding a man at the ripe old age of 30, and reconciling her modern desires with her traditional expectations.
Geeta is a relatively modern woman, Kennedy said, but she still wanted an arranged marriage. “She needed that protection to feel confident that she had made the right choice,” Kennedy explained. As Geeta told her: “My parents know me better than anyone else—they probably know me better than I know myself—so they should choose.”
Kennedy touched on what she called “a cultural blockade in the West” against the idea of arranged marriage. “I actually felt that kind of breaking down for me when I was there,” she commented, adding, “There are some good things about arranged marriage.”
Women Who Drink Whisky
But another friend, Parvati, was a “total rebel.” (The Australian edition of the book, Searching for Women Who Drink Whisky, is named after her.) Parvati had no intention of marrying her longtime boyfriend, and she was set in her comparatively wild ways: drinking, driving her own car, living alone.
Kennedy commented: “She had made it clear to her family that she had made these lifestyle choices. But that’s not to say they weren’t hard; you’re always making a sacrifice when you decide to leave your family behind in the choices you make.”
“You Could Never Have Gone Online Before”
It is impossible to discuss culture in India without bringing up the influence of technology, and the relationships between men and women are no different.
“It still remains unacceptable for men and women to date in public,” Kennedy said. But, she continued, you can now have whole relationships—romantic or otherwise—online.
“For many middle-class, educated people—especially in cities—there’s all kind of ways to do an arranged marriage. One of the best ways that people are finding is to go online.”
One of the cultural consequences of this new kind of matchmaker is that marrying across regions, like Geeta ultimately decided to do, is becoming more acceptable. Going online also offers more options to “older girls,” or women over the age of 30 like Geeta.
Bollywood and Family Life
“The influence of Bollywood is huge on the culture,” Kennedy asserted. She noted that many Indians have developed higher expectations of weddings after watching Bollywood’s extravagant scenes.
However, real life also influences the movies. “Bollywood is also changing a lot,” Kennedy said, and many films now feature love matches and well-traveled, independent women.
The industry is rapidly embracing more liberal lifestyles; “Bollywood now addresses homosexuality,” Kennedy reported, a move that was “totally unthinkable” when Kennedy first moved to India in 2004 but has become increasingly accepted.
She describes seeing women driving scooters in Delhi, another shift from tradition to modernity that occurred after she moved back to the US in 2009. “In lots of little ways you can see those shifts happening,” Kennedy explained. “The choices become easier as media influence from the West trickles into the Indian media.”
Why a Memoir?
“I didn’t, like most journalists, want to unveil all my personal gripes and anxieties and messed-up love life stories to the world,” Kennedy admitted. “But I did so because I did think that I was making an important point that I learned as much about myself in those years as my friends did.”
She continued, “The best way to show the women that I met, and the best way to tell the story of the India that I got to know, was to tell it through a personal lens.”
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