Ankalu's Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh

Extract

The Man with the Brief-case

I once met a man with a brief case on a train . . . I forget between where and where. If you have travelled by train in India you may have met him too. He is conscious of cultural difference and wishes you to understand that Indians have family values - on account of which they don't go in for divorce or extra-marital sex. It was possibly he who first told me (though I have read it somewhere since) that actuarial calculations reveal that one in three marriages in Britain, and one in two in the United States, is destined to end in divorce. I find his contrast confirmed in a scholarly study of the subject. By comparison with its ‘alarming rate’ in the West, ‘divorce was unknown to the Hindu institution of marriage. Husband and wife were bound to each other not only in this life, but even in the lives to follow’ (Pothen 1986: ix).