Lack of tradition of divorce in Hinduism is mainly responsible for Indian mindset totally opposed to the concept of divorce. Biologically speaking, divorce is desirable because strained marriage is no good for anybody in the family. But sociologically, a divorce prone society is less likely to produce better citizens considering its adverse effects on the kids.
Biplab
From: bubun paul <bubun111@yahoo.
To: fosaactv@yahoogroup
Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2008 11:35:07 PM
Subject: [fosaactv] Divorce is acceptable to Indian parents now..!!
MUMBAI: The Great Indian Wedding is succumbing to the Great Indian Divorce.
Few societies on earth take marriage more seriously than this one.
Marriage comes early, sometimes even in youth, and is cemented by
illegal dowries. Opulent weddings swallow life savings. So venerated is
marriage that when bruised, beaten wives flee to their parents' homes
for sanctuary, they are often turned back, implored to make it work.
But now, in courtroom battles across the subcontinent, in cases
brought by slum dwellers and outsourcing workers and millionaires
alike, Indians are fighting in growing numbers to divorce. And as words
like "alimony," "stepchild" and "pre-nup" start to roll off Indian
tongues, many observers bemoan a profound metamorphosis of values in a
nation trotting toward new affluence.
"The great Indian family is definitely under threat," said Shobhaa
Dé, the author of "Spouse: The Truth about Marriage" and one of India's
most widely read social chroniclers. Dé, herself divorced and remarried
years ago, described the new ethos as "unthinkable to an earlier
generation."
Consider the microcosm of Mumbai. Since 1990, around the time that
India opened its gates to the world, the annual number of divorce
petitions filed in Mumbai has more than doubled to reach 4,138 in 2007,
far outpacing population growth, according to data culled for this
article from musty, hand-kept records at the city's family court.
Multimedia
Photographs
The great Indian divorce
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Or, to put it more vividly, Mumbai made divorcés of 30,000 more
people in those 17 years than it would have had the annual rate of
breakups held at the 1990 level.
Such detailed data are not compiled at the national level. But,
according to a study of 2001 census data by two Indian demographers,
Ajay Kumar Singh and R.K. Sinha, Mumbai's divorce rate - with about 7
percent of marriages failing - is roughly on a par with that of other
metropolises and not much higher than the national level, offering a
reliable gauge of the national trend.
When SecondShaadi. com, an online matchmaking service for Indian
divorcés, debuted last year, its executives assumed that most clients
would come from big, cosmopolitan cities. Instead, in a reflection of
how widespread divorce now is, 60 percent of its more than 25,000
customers came from outside India's five largest cities and 36 percent
from outside the 20 largest cities, according to data provided by the
company's founder, Vivek Pahwa.
The divorce boom partly reflects changes that have made it easier to
leave marriages everywhere: taboos waning, laws loosening and women
gaining financial independence. But there is perhaps another, more
amorphous factor behind the change. Conversations with marriage
counselors, divorce lawyers, social scientists and couples themselves
suggest that, if divorce is rising, it is because of an underlying
transformation of love.
Traditional Indian marriages had little to do with romance. Often
but not always arranged, they were mergers between families of similar
backgrounds and beliefs, and their principal purpose was baby-spawning.
Love was strong but subliminal, expressed not in hand-holding and
utterances of "I love you," but in a sense of mutual sacrifice and
tolerance.
But in an India drenched in foreign influences - Hollywood in the
theaters, teenagers named Sunita who call themselves "Sarah" and answer
calls for Citibank's American customers - an imported idea of love is
spreading.
Ever more couples marry each other for each other, out of personal
enthrallment rather than a sense of family duty, and even arranged
marriages come with new expectations of emotional fulfillment. And it
is this new notion of love, with the couple at the core, that makes
marriage both more riveting and more precarious than ever before, many
Indians believe.
"In the older situations, where it was the families coming together,
maybe the couple tried harder to adjust, because they could not even
think about getting out of the marriage," said Freny Italia, a social
worker in Mumbai who counsels divorcing couples. "It was for the sake
of the family. It was for the sake of the children. There was a lot of
giving and sacrifice. But now they say, 'I'm an individual. I have my
needs.' "
This is acutely true of a new generation of women unwilling to do
what preceding generations of women have been raised to do: adjust, to
any length necessary, to save a marriage.
"Once a daughter is given in marriage, she is supposed to turn into an ameba," Dé, the author, once wrote.
But growing numbers of educated, working women, confident and
financially secure, refuse to do so - and, increasingly, their parents
back them up.
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