In June, a couple in their 20s walked into the office of senior lawyer Mrunalini Deshmukh in Bandra, Mumbai. Deshmukh asked them if they needed a divorce. “No,” they said. Did they need counselling? “No”. They were not even engaged, let alone married. Deshmukh explained she was a family lawyer. The couple smiled. “We came to a lawyer because who would know better what goes wrong in a marriage and what leads to a divorce,” they said. For the next hour, the couple asked Deshmukh about in-laws, money, children, finances, assets, and drew up a road map for a path they were not even clear they wanted to go down. “They were looking at what are the issues that are likely to come up. They asked for dos and don’ts. It was an eye-opener for me,” Deshmukh says.

As the institution of marriage evolves socially and legally, it is clear that Indian society has always had a more practical approach to it than the Western world.

In Ahmedabad, the non-governmental organization (NGO) Vinamulya Amulya Sewa is a marriage service for senior citizens set up by 62-year-old Nathubhai Patel in 2001. Patel has just received an application from his oldest member yet: 1919-born R.T. Tiwari in Bhopal. In Coimbatore, as in San Francisco, US, couples working in the IT sector routinely choose “weekend marriages”, living apart in perfect harmony for their jobs. Newly-wed Rekha Sinha (name changed on request), a 35-year-old Mumbai corporate executive, whose husband has a special child from a previous marriage, says: “I am clear that should anything happen to my husband, the financial responsibility of that child is as much mine as it would have been his.” These are the new spaces being negotiated.

The legal system, Deshmukh says, is beginning to take note of what the courts are calling “the changing fabric of society”. Take, for instance, a marriage in the public eye like that of director-actor duo Kiran Rao and Aamir Khan. It would have to deal with children from a previous marriage, exes, former and current in-laws and a child born through IVF-surrogacy—not the easiest of mixes. With it come issues of inheritance, property, legal rights, medical decisions and more. The courts are trying to keep pace with this kind of elasticity.

Even as the break-up of the joint family and changing definitions of what constitutes a “family” put a strain on marriages, the pace of social change is still glacial. Sociologists say 80% of Indian marriages still follow the “arranged” or “semi-arranged” (love with parents’ approval) format. Yet, our laws barely span India’s complex marital systems where, in Shavian terms, a puritan morality remains a luxury of the upper classes.

Sociologist Patricia Uberoi, honorary director of the Institute of Chinese Studies, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and author of Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India, points out that paradoxically, India’s new laws constrain traditional freedoms. “That elderly women are able to find companionship is a change over the past. Marriage between cousins is no longer legal, yet it continues by partial recognition of customary law.”

In the politicisation of Muslim polygamy, it is forgotten that till colonisation, it was Hindu practice too to take multiple wives. Without a uniform code, India’s marriages have been directed more by the flow of custom at any given point.

“The first social reform was the Hindu Widows Remarriage Act of 1856, which has rarely been implemented by the upper classes, while it was common practice in lower classes even before reform,” Uberoi says. India has always been governed by codes based on community law. “Marriages, remarriages, love marriages, homosexuality, wife swapping, etc., always existed in India. If a man wanted to marry a widow, or elope, he paid compensation to the husband’s kin. A lot of the breast-beating is by upper classes who looked to align social reform with a Western world view of what is ‘modern’.”

As Asiya Alam, a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, researching changing marital practices during the colonial period, puts it, “Regardless of community, there is an increasing focus to legislate marriage on common grounds with emphasis on the financial security of the wife. The regional and religious diversity in India prevents simple generalizations about family dynamics.”

The one constant in this diversity of India’s marriages has been love. Goa-based psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar points out that the Dharmashastras list eight types of marriage, but it is only in the Kama Sutra that “love marriage” tops that list. This is not to say that love has historically been of no consequence. On the contrary, love is the intrinsic constant; just not the staple Bollywood, violins-in-the-air kind. Indian society has always had space for, like its multiplicity of gods, its multiplicities of love.

Kakar explains: “In the traditional Indian view, which still exerts a powerful influence on how even the most modern Indians view marriage, the couple is not the primary constituent of the family, as is taken for granted in modern Western societies.... The Bollywood love story, as befitting a dream, is not a reflection, but a subverter of Indian mores prescribing the relations between the sexes.”

While Indian marriages may seem to be the result of loveless social machinations, it is not so. Indian marriage, elastic in its embrace of multiple social circumstances, is big, ancient and strong enough to take on whatever kind of love you have in mind. In this context, we visit the modern Indian marriage in some of its newest forms.

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THE NEWLY-WEDS

Ghanashyamdas Trivedi and Madhuben, Ahmedabad

Ramesh Dave/Mint

Even as the phone line crackles long distance, 65-year-old Ghanashyamdas Trivedi’s pride is unmistakeable. He has told this story before and he will keep telling it to make a point. “Main akela ho gaya tha meri wife ki death ke baad (I had become lonely after my wife’s death),” he says. After his wife died of cancer in 2002, Trivedi, a retired bank employee, lived with his son. Elsewhere, Madhuben, 65, a widow, was being shunted between the homes of her three sons and daughter, all of whom were married and resented her intrusion into their lives. They decided to send her to an old-age home and, unable to resign herself to such a life, she approached the Vinamulya Amulya Sewa trust, an Ahmedabad-based marriage service, says its founder Nathubhai Patel. She hoped a remarriage would change her life, she told them. The trust matched the pair, called their families and arranged for the marriage. Trivedi’s family was game, Madhuben’s children opposed it. But the couple went ahead anyway. “It worked wonderfully for us because my son needed a mother, I needed a companion and my wife needed us too. We all needed each other so it fit,” Trivedi says. It has now been four years since the Trivedis’ new-age family was formed. Madhuben’s children are also beginning to accept her remarriage. The Trivedis are the otherwise traditional Indian couple with a modern twist. Trivedi says: “We have become celebrities in Ahmedabad. I took her around and told people in my housing colony, society and everywhere I went that I am remarried and this is my new wife. People came to visit us and congratulate us. Many people come to interview us. They tell us we are an example for society. We want old people to consider remarriage. Do not live alone and without support, go and do it, we want to say.”

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THE WHY-WEDS

Deepti Chatti and Udit Parekh, Bangalore

Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint

Deepti Chatti, who works in the social development sector, and Udit Parekh, who works with a start-up, are in their mid-20s. The Bangalore-based couple, who returned from the US in 2010, have been in a live-in relationship for five years. To them, their relationship is not a stop-gap until a marriage. It is what the court refers to as “akin to a marriage” legally. Young, giggly and in love, the couple say it struck them early on in their relationship that they would want the other to be able to take medical decisions for them, or stay financially sound, in the other’s absence. They approached lawyers and were in the process of drafting legal documentation to this effect (options for this are available in the US) when they returned to India. They’ve withstood social pressure to tie the knot formally. “Neither of us is religious, so to marry for religious reasons would be hypocritical. We have a strong objection to society’s pressures on young people to get married,” says Parekh. Chatti adds: “We also object strongly to the withholding of the right to marry from people in homosexual relationships. We have no wish to be part of a social institution (marriage as it exists in society today) that is so inequitable and illogical. It’s like being asked to join a club whose political mandate is antithetical to ours—we are politely saying ‘No thank you’.” Chatti believes the justifications for marriage are easily countered: “Your family just wants you to be happy and safe. Once they realize the person you are with ensures that—and this is as much for the guy as for the girl—they see marriage from your point of view; it is a formality,” she says.

The absence of the security net that marriage as an institution becomes for a couple is something you can always find legal alternatives to. For instance, the couple have discussed buying a house together. While unmarried partners can jointly own a home in letter, loans are not available, and complex inheritance laws leave unmarried survivors optionless. Some insurance companies have started “life partner” policies, but can a partner step in to take crucial medical decisions? “We haven’t found lawyers in India yet who can address these issues for us, but we are looking,” says Parekh. Affidavits and memorandums of understanding, though not legally binding, are options. The couple believe love and commitment are not the sole preserve of the narrow institution of marriage, and legal alternatives can handle social security.

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THE WANT-TO-BE-WEDS

Jerry Johnson and Deepak Kashyap, Mumbai

Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint

“Straight people take marriage for granted because you have systems that have been put in place. We crave the safety of it,” says Jerry Johnson, 30, a marketing executive. Johnson lives with his partner Deepak Kashyap, 25, a counsellor, in Mumbai’s Santacruz suburb. The couple got engaged over the New Year and are working out how best to get married. As Kashyap meets Johnson at his workplace for lunch, they embrace and kiss. They hold hands through lunch and are visibly comfortable with their relationship. In a society where most gay couples prefer to be quiet about their sexuality, Johnson and Kashyap are brave. “It’s about wanting to go to work and sharing your lunch and saying ‘yes, my boyfriend made that for me’ with as much pride as straight couples do. It’s about saying in a conversation, ‘yes, my boyfriend and I went for that movie last night’,” they explain. Many don’t know how to react to them. Kashyap says he’s ready for confrontation: “If you are visible, you are vocal; if you are vocal, society confronts you; if they confront you, interaction begins. Eventually, acceptance will come.” Their confidence is disarming. It’s not all easy though.

As the straight world eschews the traditional safety of marriage, gay couples yearn for it. Their biggest fear is that a disapproving family can today disallow a gay partner to make health or financial decisions in a partnership, leaving them with no legal recourse. Only marriage or civil union, anything sanctioned by law, will help. Kashyap says: “Straight couples don’t question being allowed to own assets, adoption, health decisions and visitation rights during illness. It’s just about acquiring a sense of family and society.” While the law in letter allows two unrelated men to own property jointly, in reality many gay couples form fake or real joint partnership companies to buy a flat, or buy neighbouring flats, to skirt issues of loans, society approvals, registrar red tape and inheritance. Johnson says that sanction goes beyond mere legalities: “When a straight man reaches an age eligible for marriage, there is a social structure that encourages him to look for a partner. This allows him to make a relationship decision that is secure and responsible. A lot of young gay men get into multiple or destructive relationships because they don’t have anyone telling them they are getting into these things too young. Access to a conventional marriage will set up a social structure for the gay community.”

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THE TOGETHER-EVEN-APART-WEDS

Srisaranya Mohan and Premkumar Devraj, Pollachi, Tamil Nadu

SriSaranya Mohan and Premkumar Devraj, both 30 and IT professionals, are newly weds. They are a couple who’ve opted for a “weekend marriage”. It is a feature increasingly common to couples who work in the IT sector. Often, jobs are location-driven and couples live apart to reunite over weekends, or once every month, or even once every six months, depending on the distance. Mohan was a blogger and Devraj a frequent commenter who fell in love with her words over a two-year period when she was working in the US. When she came to India, he courted her for a year and they got married in June. “We pooled our money and started our own manufacturing business here in Pollachi (in Coimbatore). My husband handles the business, but I was looking for work and found a suitable job only in Bangalore,” she says. Devraj left the decision to her, so Mohan began to commute. “We discussed it before marriage and decided that our permanent home would remain Pollachi, and I would commute to Bangalore for work. I didn’t want to be lonely so I chose not to rent my own place, but stayed in a paying guest arrangement and returned for weekends,” she says. It helped that the families extended support. The couple also had a tough time at their wedding, convincing a flabbergasted traditional society that this could work. Mohan says it was not an easy decision to arrive at. “Apart from the physical strain, we had to work out so many other arrangements to make sure we did not ignore each other or decrease the commitment to our relationship,” she says. The first year of marriage, she insists, has been made sweeter by the separation, and both learnt to treasure each other more in the limited time they had together each weekend. “It is a pain every time I board the bus to Bangalore. He has to return to a lonely home and I have to look forward to a lonely week ahead. There have been many times when we both wanted to throw away financial stability and just stay together. But frequent vacations, work-from-home options and flexible timings provided by my IT employer were all a great support.”

To Mohan, her husband’s support has just made her value him all the more. “We do think society needs to open up to couples who are trying to find their own balance. Women should be encouraged to work, and supported in their choices,” she says.

Also Read: Mrunalini Deshmukh’s interview