ShareThisNEW DELHI, India - Tarun Pall is the model of an eligible bachelor in India. He embodies the qualities desired for an arranged marriage: tall, handsome, foreign-educated, employed as a management consultant by a major company. Like many 30-year-olds in his social group, he has some experience with women. But, crucially for any prospective match, he has never lived with any girlfriend.
"That would be a strike against me," he says.
Despite its headlong rush into modernity, India still wrestles with the question of whether men and women should live together before marriage. This week the Supreme Court issued a clear opinion on the subject: Shacking up is OK. The court pronouncement came at the end of four years of legal proceedings against a Bollywood actress charged with inciting immorality after she endorsed premarital sex in an interview.
Even Hindu gods made their homes together as unmarried lovers, the court noted.
"How does it concern you? We are not bothered," the judges said in a sharply worded rebuke to the conservative party that raised the complaint. "When two adult people want to live together, what is the offense? Does it amount to an offense? Living together is not an offense."
The opinion does not end the legal problems faced by Kushboo Sundar, the Tamil actress whose comments to Marie Claire magazine drew the wrath of rural politicians in 2006. The court has reserved judgment on the 22 criminal charges against her, including obscenity, defamation and causing a public nuisance by encouraging immoral activity.
Her lawyer, Pinky Anand, said the outcome of Sundar's case will depend on the court's views on freedom of expression, although the judges' views on the legality of cohabitation appear to favor the actress.
"Sex is not synonymous with obscenity; that's what I've been arguing," the lawyer said.
No matter what the outcome of the case, India's courts appear to be setting a progressive new tone on social issues, said Shiv Visvanathan, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. Combined with last summer's ruling by a Delhi city court that declared homosexuality legal, this week's statement sends a message that the judiciary is ready to recognize social practices that are widespread, if rarely acknowledged.
No official statistics exist on unmarried couples living together in India, but one recent study found that 17 percent of young men in rural areas, and 10 percent in urban areas, admitted having had premarital sex.
As an anthropologist, Visvanathan said it's easy to see that the surveys grossly underestimate the recent shift in the country's sexual habits. Young people in India are sometimes reluctant to admit having premarital sex, he said, much less engaging in a live-in relationship, because they don't want to spoil their reputation and hurt their marriage prospects.
"That's the tragedy of the 'new Indian,' " he said. "We need to break the institutionalized hypocrisy. ... The Supreme Court is setting out a new social contract."
Not everyone agrees that's the right direction for India. After telling a magazine that no educated man should expect his bride to be a virgin, Sundar was pelted with sandals, eggs and tomatoes -- and even burned in effigy -- in the conservative state of Tamil Nadu.
The political party that hired lawyers to pursue a complaint against the actress, the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), has continued to agitate for stronger regulation of public morality.
Reached at his office in Tamil Nadu, one of the PMK's members in the local legislative assembly said he believes ordinary people will reject the top court's opinion.
"If anyone can have a relationship of this kind, there will be more perversions, crimes and offenses," said Thiru Velmurugan in a written response to questions.
The country may be changing more rapidly than politicians like Velmurugan realize, however. Media commentary generally praised the court's statement; an editorial in the Indian Express hailed the "life-affirming declaration."
The changes are also visible to Pall, for whom an arranged marriage means something very different that it did for the previous generation. His mother gave up a career as a dancer to marry a banker she had never seen, except in a photograph. Now that it's his turn, he is allowed to meet a potential bride a few times before deciding whether she's the one.
"It's like a date from the 1950s," he said. "You meet for coffee at a five-star hotel, and you're expected to stand, pull her chair, open the door. It's very formal."
While the dating rituals have changed, he says, one thing remains the same: the social expectation that young people will eventually marry.
"The concept of not marrying almost doesn't exist here," he said.
"You're either gay or you marry."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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