No reasonable person is confused here. If marriage is a thing people do, then every citizen should be able to do it.
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Marriage, asserted the Centre in its affidavit opposing same-sex marriage last week, is a socially sanctioned union of two individuals governed either by uncodified personal laws or codified statutory laws. But, but-not just two individuals actually. Only a biological man and a biological woman. Finally, as if exasperated by the jalebi forming in the saat phere of circular logics-judicial interference will cause “complete havoc with the delicate balance of personal laws” (yaniki change is too much trouble for those that benefit from the status quo) because “marriage isn’t just a private decision, but also has a public aspect as several statutory rights and obligations are connected with it”. Yaniki, many laws will need to change to reflect reality (see point on status quo above).
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No reasonable person is confused here. If marriage is a thing people do, then every citizen should be able to do it. If marriage is the only way to ensure inheritance of property (or debts) then everyone deserves it, especially those with property. If marriage is the way to have one’s relationships recognised, and respected, then surely all should be able to marry. If diversity is about being included in the status quo, then everyone should be part of it. Wait, what?
Many questions ripple around the question of marriage as status quo. Where does the definition of same sex marriage, rooted in narrower definitions of cis-genders, leave trans persons? What about the state of heterosexual marriage, beset by marital rape, the sly weight of caste or whether you are photogenic enough for The Big Day? But also, what about all the other types of relationships? Couples who live together, the polyamorous, relationships outside marriage—same sex and across genders—which go on for years but remain in ambiguous, precarious shadows? What of chosen families of today or the moonh bole dilli rishte common in our culture? If the question about marriage repeatedly becomes whom it excludes even as it includes others, maybe it is time to reassess marriage, not only as a happy ending, but the only direction, or relationship status worth ‘legitimising’; and law as the only ratification of intimate life, the organised sector of relationships. As Tulsi Virani sang, rishton ke bhi roop badalte hain, no?
Bob Dylan wrote, “To live outside the law you must be honest”. Debates on gender and sexual life are uncomfortable because they are about these honesties outside the law—but glorious too for all the new liberations of seeing and being they offer us. These debates go quickly to the heart of what it means to be a person, what it takes to treat each other with equal respect, what it means to love and be loved and what we owe each other because of these bonds.
The difficulty and beauty of these questions is that they don’t have single, simple answers. Isn’t that also the commitment of democracy—the poetic fluidity of ideals, the prose of necessity, adjusting with each other? In this marriage of poetry and prose, citizenry and system, personal and public, isn’t the sign of true love (and equality), about asking infinite new questions together, not merely arriving at finite old endings? Yaniki, we have to keep working on our relationship? In the immortal words of the poet Badhshah (kinda), “abhi toh shaadi shuru hui hai”.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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