Sunil Sethi: Marriage - Indian and Italian style

AL FRESCO

An Italian acquaintance of mine, who has been based in India for some time, went on holiday to Spain not long ago. There he met a Russian beauty""long-legged, blonde and blue-eyed""and fell for her like the proverbial ton of bricks. She spoke no Italian and only rudimentary English; he had no Russian but, with great relish informed friends, that communicating through "body language" was a good way to start an affair. Soon she arrived to live with him in Delhi. Some months down the line she discovered that she was pregnant. Marriage was on the cards anyway as the couple was in love but, this, they soon discovered, was just the beginning of their troubles. Who would marry them""and where?

The Italian procedure for marriage is even more complex and cumbersome than the outdated and frequently misused Indian Special Marriage Act of 1954, designed to simplify inter-religious and inter-national marriages. In Italy, a marriage has to be registered in the person's hometown and permissions for the partner must be obtained from his/her hometown""in this case a provincial town in Russia. Marrying a non-Catholic requires a separate set of permissions and, if resident in a third country, as this couple are, presented further hurdles placed by nasty bureaucrats and mountains of paperwork. The Italian embassy in Delhi simply threw up its hand in horror. And when the Russian woman went to her embassy to check out the procedure, the crude and chauvinist official was insulting: "Why do you want to marry an Italian? Can't you find a decent Russian?" She returned home in tears. Eventually, after engaging lawyers, cajoling and bribing notaries and clerks, they were married by a magistrate in south Delhi. "At least," confessed the Italian husband with relief, "India is cheap. It would have cost me several more thousand euros in Italy or Russia".

When last I saw them, the baby had arrived and they were waging a battle in three countries""quoting chapter and verse from bilateral treaties between Italy and Russia""to get the child legitimate passports from each parent's country.

Who says the world is becoming a smaller, easier, more tolerant place to live in? In India, fatwas were recently issued by a Hindu community in Bhopal for a girl who married a Muslim and the city of Surat was shut down because another Hindu girl decided to marry her Muslim boyfriend. The Surat couple was forced to flee to Mumbai""where they were paraded "live" on a news channel. Young Hindus and Muslims are routinely tortured and tormented for trying to legally cement relationships as consenting adults. How often does the Special Marriage Act come to their rescue?

Ah, we say, but these cases are typical of the loony fundamentalist fringe fomenting trouble in small towns. Not true. In recent times, children of friends who have either married foreigners or overseas Indians or Indians from other faiths""or even fellow Indians who simply do not want a religious ceremony""find themselves running in circles around metropolitan courts. Whimsical magistrates and extortionist clerks and notaries can make a simple procedure a long, complicated and expensive one. Demands for affidavits issued by Indian embassies or notaries abroad can pile up until the harassed couple can find an experienced lawyer, grease palms or take the easiest way out""summon a pandit, mullah or priest, convert to the partner's religion, and go for a religious ceremony. The Special Marriage Act was specifically created to avoid such a course and bolster the secular idea.

For a blow-by-blow account of what happens in an Indian marriage court, read the Australian journalist Christopher Kremmer's first-hand account of how he won his Indian bride in his recent book Inhaling the Mahatma. He makes light of his terrible frustrations, which is brave of him, but in fact it is proof of how uncivil the Indian system is about civil marriages.