Swiping Right on Arranged Marriage
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows subverts stereotypes of arranged marriage.
(Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers.)
In today’s dating culture of Tinder hook-ups and sliding into the DMs, arranged marriage elicits a knee-jerk reaction. It is seen as a relic from the past, a modern marker of supposed backward/repressive communities, and akin to a business transaction — the woman as the purchased good — that strips individuals of the basic right to select their own spouse.
Across the South Asian diaspora, youths bear the brunt of the criticism and ridicule about their communities’ continued reliance on a practice that has now bled onto the online domain in the form of matrimonial sites. They are forced to be representatives for cultures that are sometimes distant even to themselves. Worse, they are frequently accosted by acquaintances and strangers alike with the intrusive question, “So, will you have an arranged marriage, too?” In response, they find themselves oscillating between shame and indignation, between denying even the slightest possibility of relying on a “backward” means of finding a partner and lashing out at the often-condescending tone of their unsolicited interrogator.
It is precisely this loaded discourse that Balli Kaur Jaswal’s 2017 novel Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows tackles and breathes fresh air into. By examining the Punjabi community settled in London’s Southall, Jaswal subverts, amongst other things, the Orientalist notion that arranged marriage is part of a backward temporality. Instead, she brings the practice forward from an imagined past into the contemporary and injects much-needed female agency in order to refresh and expand the dated discussion that has long been binaristic and preferential towards “Western” ways of finding a life partner.
The novel opens topically with the question, “Why did Mindi want an arranged marriage?” the italics highlighting contempt from protagonist Nikki, a young British woman of Punjabi descent who is baffled by her older sister Mindi’s active search for an arranged marriage. Not without protest, Nikki is employed to put up her sister’s profile on the marriage board of Southall’s largest gurdwara. There, she stumbles upon a flyer for a job vacancy within the temple to be a writing instructor for a women-only class, which then propels the rest of the narrative.
While the majority of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows follows Nikki as she runs her unorthodox, even transgressive, writing class with older Punjabi widows, during which the women secretly exchange tantalizing erotic tales, the dynamic between the sisters remains integral to the text. They embody opposite sides of the same coin, of what it means to be a South Asian woman in the diaspora. Despite sharing a common upbringing as first-generation British children of migrant Punjabi parents, their experiences are in no way homogeneous and these singularities are carefully laid out in the narrative.
Mindi, as the older daughter, feels immense pressure to take care of the household and their mother after their father’s passing. Extremely “practical”, she is committed to her job as a nurse and seeks a life partner who can understand and share her financial burden. Nikki is the younger daughter, seen as the “proper modern girl” or the “wayward” one by the more conservative in her community, who has secretly given up on law school and switched gears to working at a local pub. To Mindi, Nikki’s approach to life seems flippant and her brand of feminism is misinformed as well as anglocentric for it relegates all that is Punjabi/South Asian under the umbrella of traditional/backward. To Nikki, Mindi’s preoccupation with finding a financially stable partner through an arranged marriage seems materialistic, the act of a “gold digger”, as well as laughable, as seen in a mocking text she sends to her sister while drunk:
“Hey sis! Found the man of your dreams yet? Does he starch his own turban and comb his own moustache or will that be one of your DUTIES?”
In reflecting conflicting mindsets and more importantly, providing adequate narrative space for a character like Mindi to exist free of authorial judgement, Jaswal challenges the problematic assumption that the contemporary South Asian woman is always in opposition to arranged marriage. Moreover, she normalizes the women who do actively subscribe to the practice. The narrative illustrates that arranged marriages cannot be seen as belonging to a fixed singular mode but rather exist along a spectrum, and that while extremely repressive marriages continue to exist—as seen in the haunting sub-plot of an honor killing—the tradition has simultaneously evolved with time to provide women with more opportunities to construct their own parameters.
In one scene, Mindi tells Nikki about a matrimonial website called SikhMate.com that is “more discreet” than expected and that allows for “really specific filters”, a concept not so different from a dating app, aside from its exclusivity to Sikhs and an added option of meeting the women of the families before dating the individuals themselves. Nikki is highly apprehensive of being screened by these “Sikhmate aunties”, calling it a “total nightmare.” Yet, Mindi counters that it would in fact be “less pressure” for her because marriage would mean “spending a lot of time with the women…anyway.” Here, their divergent perceptions of marriage become clear: while Nikki views marriage as a personal relationship between herself and her partner, Mindi views it multi-laterally, beyond just her relationship with her spouse but inclusive of both of their families as well. Contrary to Nikki’s fears, though, Mindi remains empowered throughout her search for a fellow Sikh partner who will suit her and her family and ultimately dates Ranjit, who finds the profile Nikki had put up on the gurdwara’s marriage board.
It is then clear that the supposed chasm between the woman who seeks an arranged marriage and the woman who does not is not modernity at all, since the sisters occupy the same temporality, but rather their priorities as individuals. In giving credence to varying viewpoints, Jaswal invalidates reductive discussions of arranged marriage that are overrun with stereotypes to instead validate the practice, in its evolved sense, as a viable and equal alternative to other normalized forms of seeking a partner. This becomes particularly clear towards the end of the novel when Mindi opens up about her personal views on arranged marriage in conversation with Nikki:
“This whole arranged marriage thing is about choices. I know you see it as the opposite of that but you’re wrong. I am making my own decision but I want to include my family in that decision as well.”
Through Mindi once again, Jaswal also calls out the inherent hypocrisy in contemporary criticisms against arranged marriages:
“Nikki, you go on about how narrow-minded everyone else is yet you think there’s only one way to live and fall in love.”
All in all, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is an ode to women and their entitlement to choose without shame: that the woman who chooses to find love through an arranged marriage is no less valid than the woman who does not; that a woman in her silver years can be as sexual as a woman in her younger years; and that they are all champions of their own feminisms that can be accommodated into one shared temporality.
