Inter-caste marriages: Maharashtra's Karanji village shows the way
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Even as khap panchayats (caste councils) demand that the Hindu Marriage Act be amended, seeking a ban on marriages amongst blood relations as well as people within the same village, Karanji, a small village in Maharashtra, opens its doors to inter-caste marriages
Most houses in Karanji, a village 200 km from Nagpur, are painted bright pink. And not without reason. “In our village there are no love stories that end in tragedy,” Sarpanch Prabhatai Khobragade says in an apparent reference to recent cases of victimisation of young people who dare to marry against the wishes of the khap panchayat (caste council) in north India.
The khaps are an informal grouping of elders from the same clan and ‘gotra’, whose rough justice demands obeisance from the villagers they lord over. Their coercive diktats -- most recently on annulling marriages within the same gotra, and imposing exile and social boycotts on those who defy them -- are a direct affront to the state.
While the khaps even pronounce the death sentence on couples that dare to fall in love ignoring age-old caste and gotra considerations, the elders in Karanji have consciously steered away from caste disputes. In fact, the woman sarpanch claims the village has scripted over 38 love stories that have ended in the proverbial ‘and they lived happily ever after’, in the last five years. More importantly, all of these have been inter-caste marriages.
Such stories of happily married couples are rare in a country where even well-placed educated families follow inhuman social practices like caste and dowry, as illustrated in the case of Delhi-based woman journalist Nirupama Pathak who was found dead at her parents’ home in Jharkhand, a few days ago. Senior police officials have taken her parents into custody for interrogation after the media reported a suspected ‘honour killing’ based on the post-mortem report that confirmed Nirupama’s death was due to “asphyxia as a result of smothering”. The police now suspect she was killed by her family because they did not want her to marry a man from another caste.
In Karanji, it’s a different story. In 2005, Ashok Garpalliwar and Meenakshi Deulmalle arrived from a nearby village seeking shelter at a local temple in Karanji. Garpalliwar belonged to the kumbhar community, while Deulmalle was a teli; the families of both were strongly opposed to their marriage. The two had contemplated killing themselves before coming to Karanji.
“We spotted them and called them to the panchayat office. They were genuinely in love and we all felt that their lives shouldn’t end tragically. We called both their parents and convinced them. Though they agreed grudgingly, the initial opposition has melted away, and today the couple is accepted by both families. Their two daughters go to the village school,” Deputy Sarpanch Tukesh Patruji Wanode says.
While this was the first inter-caste marriage that Karanji played host to, the acceptance and understanding on the part of the villagers did not happen overnight. “Till about seven years ago, our village witnessed serious caste disputes. The dalits or scheduled castes (SCs) had their own well and the other backward classes (OBCs) had theirs. While talking to each other and drinking water from each other’s wells was impossible, inter-caste marriages only meant suicides and fights,” says Wanode, who was the first person to challenge the caste system by opening his well to OBC villagers in 2003.
Word about the Garpalliwar-Deulmalle marriage spread and couples started coming to Karanji, not only from nearby villages but from other states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. “We have solved so many cases that it has become an established system. We first talk to the couple. Nothing is done without taking the parents along. We call both parties and counsel them independently. Sometimes they are easily convinced, sometimes we talk to them about laws and gently push them into agreeing,” Khobragade says.
The panchayat samiti then gets the couple married. “We consider every marriage a celebration and every panchayat samiti member contributes some cash, which is used to print three wedding cards -- one for the village, one for the deity, and one for the couple. Sweets are distributed and the village celebrates the wedding,” she says.
And in cases where the parents of the groom don’t accept the match, the couples stay back in Karanji. That’s how Rakesh Khobragade and his wife Laxmi made Karanji their home. Rakesh’s parents opposed the match because he was apparently more educated than Laxmi. “After a two-year courtship, we wanted to marry. But my parents refused to accept us. So we eloped from our village Chandrapur and came to Karanji, where we got married. Today, Karanji is our home and we cannot think of staying anywhere else,” says Rakesh, 37.
Source: The Indian Express, May 2, 2010
The Indian Express, April 15, 2010
Press Trust of India, May 2, 2010