Exploring Singledom in India

Globally, rising numbers of people are choosing to stay single. So much so, that Bella DePaulo, currently an academic affiliate with U.C., Santa Barbara, advocates for a “single studies discipline.” At a time when many long-held human beliefs are being rightfully questioned, marriage has remained in thrall to ancient norms. The commonly held notion that marrieds are happier than singles might break down when the tenor of real marriages is put to the scanner.

But the opposite conviction, that all singles are happier (or happy), when examined with a researcher’s ardor, throws up nuanced shades of maybes and maybe-nots. Sarah Lamb, currently a Professor of Anthropology and Humanistic Social Sciences at Brandeis University, turns her academic sights on single women in India. In Being Single in India, she depicts how singledom plays out in a society where marriage is strongly positioned as an aspirational end-goal, especially for women.

Careful not to confine herself to metro elites, like the women who feature in Kalpana Sharma’s anthology, Single by Choice: Happily Unmarried Women (2019), Lamb gathers stories from across strata. Kicked off in 2014, her study, spanning seven years, involved eight short trips to Kolkata and its proximal towns and villages.

Stitched from open-ended interviews and participant observations, which in lay terms translates to “hanging out” with women in diverse settings, the work draws from the experiences of “fifty-four core interlocutors:” who range in age from 35 years to 92, who straddle classes from educated urbans to rural day-laborers

Medha Manna: A Singular Journey

For instance, Medha Manna, who became, over the course of the study, a close associate of Lamb, grew up in a poor village home. As the thirteenth child of a household where only three survived, she was the daughter of “small farmers,” her mother being wholly illiterate.

Medha took to learning with a hunger that would be inconceivable to many: she borrowed old newspapers from a neighboring village to lap up the news, read grocery bags (glued together from old newspapers), and walked four or five kilometers to access a library. “I also listened to the radio whenever I could,” she told Lamb. At one point, when Medha’s family asked her to stop studying, she stopped eating for three days.

Later on, after she did her PhD and became a professor of Bengali, her brother and his wife were reluctant to get her married. After all, they would no longer receive a slice of her income. Because of her earnings, her nephews are well-educated, and her family members stay in a well-accoutered house.

Currently, in her 50s, she experiences both the joys and travails of singledom. There are times when she feels beaten: “I have to fight with hostility in every step of my life due to my not being an ordinary person.”

Yet, by the end of the book, Lamb observes how some single women, who’ve had richer professional trajectories than their married counterparts, might, at the end of their lives, feel differently fulfilled. Often more so than those who had been unhappily married or widowed or abandoned, without compensating careers or pastimes.

Staying Unwed by Choice

Reflecting a growing trend among urban elites, India Today’s 2019 cover featured the “Brave New Woman”, who as the article put it, was “single by choice.”

But despite a morphing landscape of human relationships, the collective consciousness remains fixated on marriage. Ads glorify jewellery-donning brides, while “Indian Matchmaking” attracts countless Netflix viewers. As Rutu, a blogger who pens her thoughts on the platform “beyourself,” puts it, “I acknowledge the inescapable trifecta that defines a true Indian: Bollywood, cricket, and matrimonial unions.”

Maria Qamar’s satirical comic strip, titled “Trust No Aunty,” depicts how well-meaning but irksome Aunties relentlessly target unmarried women with their ubiquitous refrain, “Why aren’t you married yet?!!”

For women, Lamb observes, remaining single in India comes with heightened societal and economic repercussions. While the obstacles are apparent – housing woes, complexities with parenting, and the dearth of socially sanctioned partnerships – many newfound opportunities have emerged.

In terms of financial autonomy, many individuals find themselves self-sufficient or even better off without a partner. Housing options have expanded, offering a plethora of non-traditional living arrangements. Novel forms of romantic and sexual relationships are gaining acceptance. The ascendance of feminist and LGBTQ+ rights have facilitated a broader embrace of singlehood.

Even among low-income women, a grassroots movement called “Ekal Nari Shakti Sangatham” (EKSS) has galvanized women in Northwestern India, facilitating access to property rights and legal support.

Singledom Across Classes

In Lamb’s study, 70% did not see themselves as having “chosen” singledom. Besides, in middle and lower-income groups, autonomy and freedom are not prized as they might be in more Westernized or cosmopolitan settings.

Many single women spoke of not having friends. Some would say things like, “I did have friends in school, but they are all married now.” Single women find it difficult to break into “marriage-centered circles” – which might consist of mothers or wives, rather than just women friends.

Single women must also contend with whispers and talk about their “sexuality”.  Unmarried men are not interrogated in the same way. Even married women roam about with more freedom.

70% of the respondents hadn’t been married because their families had failed to arrange a suitable groom; reasons for this ‘failure’ included poverty, selfishness, incompetence, alcoholism (usually of the father), the death of both parents, etc. Or from patriarchal norms that require the bride’s family to give a dowry and bear all the expenses. For women who wish to continue supporting their natal families, marriage can be an obstacle.

Education’s Paradox

India passed the Right to Education Act in 2009. Despite more girls getting educated, and being allowed to study for longer than earlier, there is a higher dropout rate from the workforce. As Lamb puts it, “recent studies report India with one of the lowest women’s workforce participation rates in the world.”

One reason is that in-laws and husbands often prevent women from working. As Rebecca Traister suggests in All the Single Ladies, this can in the long term, lead to a decline in marriage rates, as “more women will abstain from marrying.”

Mamta Banerjee even introduced a scheme called “Kanyashree Prakalpa” to keep girls in school for longer. Posters across West Bengal advertise the girls studying with slogans like “I am a Kanyashree Girl. I am Progress.” About 7 Mn female students were eligible for the payouts in 2021. In 2017, the government even won a UN award for instituting the scheme.

Lamb heard that as a result, some women are choosing not to marry, while others are saying they will be more picky about whom they marry.

Neither Here Nor There

As women get educated and start earning more, they rise to the upper classes. But grooms from the lower classes are unwilling to marry them. As Medha observes wryly “In Indian society, the groom must be superior to the bride in all ways, in all ways – except for looks.” Such women are not necessarily accepted by elites either. Men find it easier to marry, even as they scale the socioeconomic ladder since women are happy to marry “up”.

Pierre Bourdieu spoke of “habitus” – deeply ingrained habits that get encoded into physical bodies, that distinguish people of different social classes. People who fall into a limbo – of belonging neither to this class nor that, struggle to find a partner.

An interlocutor, in Lamb’s book, who falls into such a limbo, is Nayani, who works as a maid at an upper-class household, and is treated like a ‘daughter.’ But, of course, she is not a real daughter, and hence cannot claim the privileges of the family she works for.

“We see how aspirations to learn and work can both expand and contract women’s life-course possibilities in complicated and intertwined ways.”

Exploitation by Natal Kin

Whether women can send money back to natal families depends on the in-laws. But often, after parents die, single women have tenuous ties to brothers’ families or other natal kin. This theme is depicted in Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960 film), which dwells on its protagonist Nita’s struggle with being the family’s sole breadwinner.

Lamb met Sukhi whose story was similar to Nita’s, who thwarted her suitor because she could not desert her family. Some older widowed women also told Lamb that daughters loved their parents more than sons: “We are sad when they are born, but we realize that daughters love their parents more.”

But the daughter has a precarious existence in her natal home. The song in Meghe Dhaka Tara emphasizes this: “Let me bid you farewell, my daughter. You leave my home desolate…How can I endure your departure?” Since married daughters often visit during Durga Puja, their departure is connected to the departure of the Goddess Uma or Durga from their homes. As Lamb observes, women are displaced either way: whether married or not.

Single women strive to maintain kinship ties with their natal family, because “[k]inship is vital to most Bengalis’ senses of self, well-being, and life.” Yet, despite single women often contributing extensively to the well-being of natal families, the relationship is often not reciprocal. They do not receive care in return.

Aging and Singledom

They also contend with the question, as they age, of “who will care for me?” But in Single by Choice: Happily Unmarried Women!, Kalpana Sharma argues that this question should bother all equally – whether single or unwed, whether you have children or not. After all, not all progeny can be in the same city as a parent, when needed. Sharma argues that single people prepare better for such situations than others who might assume help.

Sanjaya, a polio survivor who founded a “single women’s support group” observed that aging and singleness are often connected. People fear futures, when there will be no one to shop for them or help with accessing doctors. In Going Solo, Eric Klinenberg points out that there are rising numbers of single persons across many nations, who are also above 65. Hence, “[how] to meet the challenges of later life alone is a key theme in singles studies scholarship.”

While 80% of Indians live in multigenerational households, many old age homes or swanky senior living communities are emerging, with various options based on one’s socioeconomic group. While many of these are for the well-heeled, hopefully, solutions might be forged for others too.

Having Fun: Alone and Together

In many ways, single women may be relishing better, more fun-filled lives than their married counterparts. They have careers, they are free to travel and explore the world, they can live life on their own terms without being restrained or confined by families. In the U.S., Natalia Sarkisian and Naomi Gerstel found that “being single increases the social connections of both women and men.” (2016)

In India, this is still difficult for non-elite women, who are socially prohibited from enjoying themselves in this manner. Often, as Lamb notes, single women do not feel as comfortable inhabiting public spaces alone, in cities like Kolkata. Like even talking at cafes, going to movies or shows; Lamb herself found that many wished to linger with her, as it gave them an opportunity to dwell in those spaces with company, rather than alone.

As Deepa Narayan puts it in Chup, women have always been taught to please others: “Pleasing as a moral life principle simply means do not exist for the self but exist only for others.” (2018) When Medha bought a car, her brothers, nephews and others kept asking to borrow it, so she eventually sold it. When single women treated themselves to special foods, they preferred to think of offering it to “Gopal” – a statue of baby Krishna – and then eating it as prasad; but not as something that they cooked deliberately for themselves.

In “Defending Frivolous Fun: Feminist Acts of Claiming Public Spaces in South Asia,” Shilpa Phadke analyzes how women’s behavior in public shatters norms of what is acceptable and what isn’t. Phadke wrote the book, Why Loiter? to reclaim such spaces for women.

Many of the women, like Medha, seemed to have been transformed just by participating in this research. Towards the end, Medha was more consciously involved in self-improvement, pursuing yoga, meditation, making friends with other single women, traveling, and so on. She also stopped expecting reciprocal affection from her kin. “From all this self-care, I’m no longer angry with anyone like I used to be.”

References

Sarah Lamb, Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility, University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2022