Day 70: No easy answers

On love and romance in rural India

In rural Bihar, where we work, any romantic relationship outside the realm of marriage is punishable by complete social isolation. And if that relationship happens amongst people from different castes, or “worse” yet, different religions, then perhaps even by violence.

Working with teenagers and young adults, it’s a major question mark that hangs over the work we do. We seek to be an open space, where youth can discover themselves in holistically, in their complex entirety. And yet, the mere emergence of such a relationship, if word were to get out to the local community, could threaten our entire existence.

What to do?

Can you really fully develop if you are constantly having to hide or suppress the feelings you have? And yet, nothing will kill the platform and space we’ve created to share such feelings quicker than people sharing these very same feelings.

Perhaps the youth can figure it out for themselves — when they start to feel something for someone else, then they can start to think about the relative risks and rewards of acting upon these feelings, and then make a decision accordingly? Except — how would you even know if it’s worth pursuing until you…pursue it?

And secondly, love and romance are not a rational phenomena that can be understood via cost-benefit analyses. I mean, for a second — imagine that you were one of those youth; how would you feel if you liked someone, and had the weight of not just the love itself, but also of an entire community and all the youth who will be learning with us in the future. Terrible.

How do you intervene as a facilitator?

Imagine you start to see sparks and you try to nip them in the bud before they grow into a fire; you try to separate them in group activities so that, maybe, the feelings can be rooted out preemptively.

Yet, seeking to socially engineer our community is fundamentally out of line with our philosophy. Additionally, one of our most important underlying values is self-organization, which means allowing people to come together, socialize, and learn as they see fit. So, again, in seeking to directly stop such relationships, we’d also be violating our Swayam Seekhis’ right to self-organize.

And secondly, the Swayam Seekhis are smart enough to recognize when people are trying to manipulate such situations — which breaks the trust and prevents them from opening up in the future, further harming our ability to create the kind of community we want to create.

What about bringing it out in the open? Addressing it head on? This is the best option, in theory, but it’s not as good of an option in practice. The youth in our community lack a language and context to discuss romance beyond over-blown Bollywood love stories and arranged marriage.

And secondly, what could even emerge from such a discussion? One possibility would be that the organization supports any and all people who want to seek pursue romantic relationships, but this could lead to very dire consequences for the organization as a whole. The second could be to directly stop such activities by explaining the context we’re in and what the impact could be — but then we also become a source of oppression, no better than “samaj,” or society.

The third would be to simply ignore it and allow whatever needs to happen to happen. But, again, this is problematic in that it could lead to serious issues for both the youth and the organization in the future.

The fourth, which one of our teammates often recommends, is to help couples get married whose parents would allow them to get married — i.e., same religion and caste. In my mind, this “solution” is highly problematic, as it’s another form of social engineering, and it also reaffirms the existing system of marriage, which is based on caste, class, and religion.

I’ve heard some people in the organization say things like, “if they start liking each other, then they’ll stop focusing on learning.” But that’s a very limited view of learning — in fact, they’ll probably learn more from such situations than they will going to some training or workshop. And such distinctions of real life from learning is a betrayal of our commitment to viewing life holistically — as one big classroom, where we can continually experience, reflect, learn, and grow.

But then again, if the local community or their parents find out, then our entire community may be in jeopardy. This fact can’t be ignored.

What to do? I don’t have an answer.

We are all embedded in multiple networks and communities simultaneously; we seek to create an open community, tolerant of diversity, and yet, we continue to be constrained by intolerance. Its a reminder that injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.