Lucknow, 03 July (HS): “The question is all over these days.

It surfaces in television studios, in newspaper columns, in family WhatsApp groups,

usually after the latest disturbing headline. A young man in Pune is allegedly

pushed off a fort by the woman he was weeks from marrying. A bride from Indore

is accused of conspiring in her husband’s murder on their Meghalaya honeymoon.

A graduate in Bhopal dies at her in-laws’ home amid allegations of harassment.

A software engineer in Bengaluru leaves behind a long video about the legal

battle and the emotional strain he could no longer bear. The details differ;

the shock is identical. And the question follows almost on its own: is the

institution of marriage itself coming apart?” quips Prof. Arvinder A Ansari,

Dept of Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia, Secretary, Indian Sociological Society

(ISS).

“It is an understandable question, and a misleading one.

Spousal homicide remains among the rarest of crimes, and a handful of

sensational cases cannot diagnose the health of an institution. To treat them

that way is to mistake the headline for the history. But the unease they

produce is not foolish. It points, however imperfectly, to something real and

far more common than murder: the growing strain inside intimate relationships,

including among the people we assume are insulated by education, city life and

modern values. The danger is not in announcing that marriage is finished. It is

in refusing to see what is changing inside it. The sacred language of marriage

still survives, in rituals, in family honour, in the expense of weddings and

the moral weight of being married. But that language now sits uneasily beside

what actually happens in many homes: private resentment, coercion, emotional

immaturity, the slow grind of legal conflict, and the difficulty of leaving a

marriage with dignity. The result is not collapse. It is a new fragility,” she

opined.

Andrew Cherlin’s idea of the “deinstitutionalisation” of

marriage helps name that fragility. Modern marriage, he argued, has drifted

away from the fixed social rules that once told husbands and wives how to

behave. It began as an institution organised around duty, property, and family alliances.

Over time, it became a bond built on companionship. More recently, it has

turned inward and individual, expected to deliver personal happiness and

emotional growth. India fits the pattern with a twist. Even as marriage loses

its practical necessity for some, its symbolic value stays extraordinarily

high. The wedding grows grander precisely as the marriage grows less certain.

Émile Durkheim saw the underlying danger a century earlier,

in his idea of anomie: the condition in which social norms weaken, and human

desire loses its regulation. Institutions like marriage, for Durkheim, gave

life structure and held impulse in check. Loosen that structure and people gain

freedom, but they can also be left restless and unanchored. Later thinkers said

much the same in their own vocabularies. Anthony Giddens described the modern

ideal as the “pure relationship,” one that lasts only as long as both partners

feel fulfilled. Zygmunt Bauman called it “liquid love,” a bond entered into

with the quiet awareness that it can just as easily be dissolved.

India is revealing precisely because it sits between these

worlds. Marriage here has seldom been only a union of two people. It has been

an alliance between families, a transaction in honour, lineage and caste. That

is why the self-chosen love marriage has so often been read not as a private

decision but as a threat to a larger order. The old scaffolding of marriage,

the kin networks and religious sanction and economic dependence and the stigma

of separation, held unions together even when the couple inside was miserable,

and sometimes even when one partner was suffering.

That scaffolding is weakening now, though it has not fallen.

The young increasingly speak of compatibility and selfhood; their families

still speak of duty and adjustment. Divorce is legally available and socially

punishing. Love is more visible and not yet fully accepted. Choice has widened,

but the price of choosing wrongly, or of choosing again, stays high. This is

the volatile middle that Indian marriage now occupies: sacred in public,

negotiated in private.

That friction explains why these recent cases have struck

such a nerve. A society that had fully individualised marriage might have shrugged

them off as isolated crimes. A society that had kept marriage wholly

institutional might have found them unthinkable. India is caught in between,

still treating marriage as destiny while quietly handing individuals the power

to choose, to refuse, and to undo. When a bride is accused of killing a groom,

or a young woman dies amid dowry allegations, part of the horror is the horror

of recognition. The bond we were taught to think of as unbreakable turns out,

like any modern relationship, to be breakable.

None of this means marriage in India is dying.

Deinstitutionalisation is not extinction. People still marry, still pour

fortunes into weddings, and still treat marriage as the natural destination of

an adult life. What is changing is where the bond gets its strength. It is

shifting from the outside in: from community pressure to the couple’s own

commitment, from obligation to affection. A structure that once held regardless

of happiness now holds only while both people keep choosing it. That makes

marriage more honest and more equal than it was. It also makes it lighter, more

breakable, and more anxious.

We will keep reaching for sensational explanations, because

a structural one is harder to see than a headline. But the deaths in Pune,

Bhopal, Meghalaya and Bengaluru are not evidence that love has turned lethal or

that marriage has failed. They are evidence that the old scaffolding is coming

down, and that we have not yet built an ethical language to put in its place. That

language cannot be nostalgia for unquestioned duty. Nor can it be a careless

celebration of individual desire. Modern marriage asks for something harder

than either: honest communication, real consent, emotional accountability, and

the recognition that separation, however painful, is not a disgrace. The crisis

is not that Indians have stopped believing in marriage. It is that we still

consecrate it as sacred without preparing anyone for the emotional and ethical

work that intimacy now demands.

Hindusthan Samachar / Abhishek Awasthi