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Written by Pooja Pillai September 2, 2022 4:45:49 pm
What is irksome is the reference to the "consumer culture of use and throw" and the needless lecturing over live-in relationships which are projected as being mere convenience for those who wish to walk in and out of relationships. (File Photo)In her book, Seeing Like A Feminist, academic Nivedita Menon recounts a story that she heard from her mother: “Her brother, my maternal uncle, at the age of eight, in the early 1940s, sat studying his English primer, rocking back and forth, muttering loudly, ‘Family means wife and children, family means wife and children. Their grandmother, hearing him, was appalled. She raged up and down the house: ‘Is this the kind of Western nonsense they’re teaching children in school now? But family means sisters and their children…no wonder tharavadus are collapsing one by one…’” For Menon’s great-grandmother, the “tharavadu was the natural institution; it was the patriarchal nuclear family that was the bizarre Western practice”.
So what exactly is the Kerala High Court talking about when, in its recent order, delivered in a matrimonial appeal by a man seeking a divorce, it places marriage at the heart of the family and describes this as having been the case since “time immemorial”? As Menon’s story illustrates, it wasn’t too long ago that even in some communities in Kerala, the man-woman-children family was considered an aberration.
The merits of the case and the ruling itself are not a concern here. The real problem is the heavy moralising by the higher judiciary about non-marital relationships, which only ends up obscuring an important observation that the division bench of Justices A Muhammed Mustaque and Sophy Thomas makes about the nature of marriage: “Mere quarrels, ordinary wear and tear of matrimonial relationships or casual outburst of some emotional feelings cannot be treated as cruelties warranting a divorce.” Like everything that exists on this earth, marriage too is subject to erosion. Even the happiest of marriages is not the steady state of bliss and companionship that popular culture sells it as and can frequently become the state that Anton Chekhov probably had in mind when he wrote, “If you fear loneliness, don’t get married.” A marriage changes as the people involved change, subject to both internal and external factors. To stay together till death do them part requires a lot of emotional labour which the individuals may or may not feel up to as time goes on. So far, understandable.
What is irksome, though, is the reference to the “consumer culture of use and throw” and the needless lecturing over live-in relationships which are projected as being mere convenience for those who wish to walk in and out of relationships.
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As mores change, society evolves. Marriage, perhaps, still serves a purpose for many, but for a growing number of people – especially women — it is an obsolete institution that ties them down to gendered/sexual roles that they reject. Certainly, there are many marriages now where this is not the case, but they’re exceptions to the very troubling norm. In such a scenario, it is only natural for the idea of family to expand to include live-in relationships and other kinds of arrangements, including non-romantic ones, that work better for the individuals concerned. This is the reality that the Supreme Court, in an order delivered last month in a case related to maternity leave, has already accepted — and is, indeed, pushing for its wider acceptance. It is time the rest of the judiciary caught up and avoided indulging in a moral panic about the state of marriage.
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
First published on: 02-09-2022 at 04:45:49 pm