[magicalhippo]

I'm Norwegian, living there. A very good friend is Indian, her parents moved here while she was just a few years old. I never heard her talk about her caste, or the system in general really.

That is, until one day, out of the blue, she said she was getting married. Her parents had found a boy who also grew up here in Norway that she was to marry the following year.

After a bit of talking it was clear she was not very fond of the idea of her parents finding her a mate. However from what I gathered she was just about as worried about his caste.

He was of a lower caste than her, and this was not ideal at all from what I understood. However, his family was rather well off, so perhaps it would be acceptable after all...

This came as a complete shock to me, as I had perceived her as rather liberal and as mentioned had never heard her speak of her caste or similar. But there it was, weighing her down.

[dkarl]

For a contrasting anecdote, just to illustrate the range of beliefs, I knew a couple who met in the U.S. and agonized over the impact their marriage would have on their families in India because she was Brahmin and he was Kshatriya. They thought it would be problematic, especially for her parents, if their parents' friends, neighbors, etc. knew they had a daughter married to a Kshatriya. After dreading for months the task of sharing the news with their parents, finally they did it, and... it wasn't a big deal at all. Her parents said, "It would be a big problem for us if you were coming back here to live, but you're not. Everybody knows it doesn't matter in the U.S. Nobody will care." They did not think having a daughter married to a Kshatriya in the U.S. would bring them the same stigma as having a daughter married to a Kshatriya in India would. And not because they were hiding the marriage: they had a big wedding in India with both families and hundreds of guests from each side.

I don't know if their expectation turned out to be true, and obviously there are a lot of people who don't share their thinking, but I found it striking that they would even expect people feel differently based on where their daughter was living. In the U.S. we learn that caste rules are "religious," and our idea of religion is like Christianity, something that is either true everywhere or true nowhere. The idea that your judgmental neighbors would say "oh, it's fine because they're living in a country where nobody believes in that stuff" was a new one for me.

[newen]

Ultra religious Brahmins have a rule where they don’t allow non-Brahmins to enter their house. I think the parent’s problem might be due to having non-Brahmins enter their house often if the couple were living in India. While if the couple were living in the US, that wouldn’t be such an issue for them.

I have a Brahmin friend in her 30s living in Bangalore who married a non-Brahmin and while she and her child were allowed into her parent’s house, her husband wasn’t. Obviously she is not happy about it but she visits her parents every so often and...her parents are what they are I guess. I had a hard time imagining such a situation.

[timwaagh]

Shouldn't it be more shocking that your friend agreed to an arranged marriage? I mean I'm not in Norway (pretty close though) and I don't know to what degree this is acceptable in Norwegian culture. But in mine it very much isn't. We ought to expect more from women these days. Because caste might be a completely foreign problem to us, but arranged marriages used to be the norm here as well. It took the second wave of feminism to eliminate that problem and make parents feel ashamed for even trying. We wouldn't want to have that practice sneaking back in through the back door again.

[magicalhippo]

Both were quite shocking to me.

However the arranged marriage did not come as such a surprise, I guess because there's been a fair bit of talk about it here due to other immigrant cultures also practicing it.

[saagarjha]

Modern arranged marriage is usually "here is someone you may be interested in" rather than "you must marry this person that you have never met".

[shuckles]

If caste only came up in a mutual interest decision like a wedding where there aren't power imbalances, isn't that fine? Who someone chooses to marry seems like an unreasonable place to intervene to resolve disparities.

[jrochkind1]

Who's talking about intervening?

If someone was interested in marrying me until they found out I was Jewish (the closest analogy to my own experience), I would not think that was "fine". Even if I don't know any way to "intervene" in it, certainly not if you mean legally, governments should not be in the business of telling people who to marry.

But if you told me that there aren't power imbalances in marriage decisions so it's "fine" and what am I getting upset about, why is it even worth talking about or commenting upon, I'd think you were an asshole.

[shuckles]

“Caste is a huge problem. To substantiate this, let me tell you about the story of a person who didn’t seem to care about caste at all, but later decided to not marry someone over it.”

That is not a story which substantiates the claim that caste is a huge problem. I agree that someone who made a marriage decision based on caste isn’t someone I’d want to marry in the first place.

My comment about power imbalances can be read in two ways: there are no power imbalances in marriage or conditioned on there not being power imbalances in that particular decision. I meant the latter, but you seem to be attacking the former.

[fhood]

I don't understand how a person could manage to only care about "caste" when getting married and never care about it any other time. Maybe I just don't understand what you were trying to get at with your original comment, because the statement doesn't really make any sense to me either.

[shuckles]

I only want to marry people of a particular gender, but that doesn’t make me problematically sexist. Religion is a similar desiderata. Perhaps you can argue that people can convert, but as a Jew who seriously dated a Catholic for almost two years, I’d argue that boundary isn’t particularly fluid.

As an example, what if they decided against the marriage not because they cared personally but because their family did, and satisfying their family’s preferences was important to them? What’s the harm? Nobody has an obligation to marry you.

[webmobdev]

Not OP - every caste has its own unique cultural aspects. So a person could disregard caste in most avenues of life, but still give it a thought while considering a prospective spouse to find an affinity through shared cultural values. That's one reason that came to mind.

[tehlike]

except, imagine the conscious and unconscious bias it leads to. your socialization circles are all people in similar castes no?

[shuckles]

I agree that caste preference in marriage can have bad effects, similar to many other filter bubble mechanics in society. It’s also probably a symptom of other problematic concepts of value.