Around the time I got married, I found myself drawn to books about Indian women. As we traveled through India, meeting my family and showing Clinton and his parents the city and monuments, I spent a decent amount of time in the backseat of a car. After weeks of busi-ness, I was grateful for the downtime and happy to immerse myself in tales of women of my culture. As I had just had my wedding, Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds gave me company.
The Newlyweds
By Mansi Choksi | Goodreads
Read: September 27-30
A literary investigation into India as a society in transition through the lens of forbidden love, as three young couples reject arranged marriages and risk everything for true love in the midst of social and political upheaval.
In India, two out of every three people are under the age of thirty-five. These are men and women who grew up with the internet and the advent of smartphones and social media. But when it comes to love and marriage, they’re expected to adhere to thousands of years of tradition. It’s that conflict between obeying tradition and embracing modernity that drives journalist Mansi Choksi’s The Newlyweds.
Through vivid, lyrical prose, Choksi shines a light on three young couples who buck against arranged marriages in the pursuit of true love, illustrating the challenges, shame, anger, triumph, and loss their actions and choices set in play.
Against the backdrop of India’s beautiful villages and cities, Choksi introduces our newlyweds. First, there’s the lesbian couple forced to flee for a chance at a life together. Then there’s the Hindu woman and Muslim man who escaped their families under the cover of night after being harassed by a violent militia group. Finally, there’s the inter-caste couple who are doing everything to avoid the same fate as a similar couple who were burned alive.
Engaging and moving, The Newlyweds raises universal questions, such as: What are we really willing to risk for love? If we’re lucky enough to find it, does it change us? If so, for the better? Or for the worse?
A review from the eyes of a newlywed
The Newlyweds may follow three couples of diverse backgrounds, but through these stories, it represents thousands of couples in India. Their stories may be different in many ways from my upbringing and yet, as it happens when you grow up somewhere, you know certain things to be true. You know the expectations, assumptions and judgements that exist in society. One day you might even have had your poor teenage mind rattled by realizing that caste did matter to people you adored.
I did not grow up with a fear of inter-caste or inter-religion marriage because my parents came from two different states of India and convinced their families to have a love marriage in the late 1980s. Same sex marriage was not something we ever talked about in my house. The reality is I didn’t know much about LGBTQ+ community until I came to Canada. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in India. The lesbian couple in The Newlyweds was to me the most thought-provoking of all the stories. I felt for those two girls and how they handled society’s rejection of their relationship.
Leaving home for someone who the family will not approve of is a huge step. My imagination would never be able to do it justice. Through the stories of couples in The Newlyweds, I could follow them on their journey and see what that looked like.
This book has a big cast of characters. Rather than being three separate stories, I liked that the book is organized in three parts where we meet the couples at different times in their relationships. It makes it easier to contrast the role that their families and society at large played in the situations. This is a well researched book with a brutally honest look at hope and despair. Two people fall in love and dream about forever being together. Some people pretend to sell these dreams. Sometimes, the couples realize that the very family they thought they had to leave is the one that will support them and take on all the hate of the community for them. Sometimes, they learn that their parents just secretly want them to go back to ‘normal’. There is so much pain and suffering but there is also love, new life and getting to know oneself.
Mansi beautifully depicts many heart wrenching moments of the drama of life including running away in the dead of night, being provided a shelter, finding a one room apartment to live in for the time being, somehow making ends meet and finding solace in prayer and love. There is violence in these pages, family members hurt instead of the one who made the ‘mistake’, businesses destroyed, community bonds broken. I am not kidding. The Newlyweds is an eye-opening book. These are real people who Mansi met and followed for years.
I have lived in Canada for almost a decade now. I had the opportunity to leave India, to educate myself to my heart’s desire, to marry someone from out of my country and culture, to be supported by my parents and family through all of it. Seeing Indian men, women and children just captivated by my husband, wanting to take photographs with him as well as this book, The Newlyweds, was a bitter sweet experience. I am grateful for the life I have been able to create. I am privileged to have hopped on a plane and moved to another continent while for some people, seeing a caucasian man in their own city is the closest they will get to going abroad. I am also empathetic for the struggles that so many people still have in the 21st century in being with the love they have found.
This is what stories do – they bring us close to emotions and situations we have not experienced. They make the world bigger. As I was driven around Delhi, I observed the common man and thought of the people I was reading about. It was mind blowing to me that a society, culture and way of thinking as a community, can cause such a conflict between what a person can have and is.
The stories of the three couples in this book represent the issues that continue in India till today. Time is changing us but slowly and in the meantime, people are living lives that are rooted in beliefs that have not evolved. The Newlyweds is centred around Hinduism and our mythology has many examples of homosexuality and the concept of the genderless soul. Marriage is the sacred union of two souls. People still live in fear because of the love they feel. There are many books about this and after the thoughts that The Newlyweds provoked in me, I want to read more about love and struggle and how people now stand up for those they love. Thrity Umrigar’s Honor makes that list. Books help us talk about these things that generally stay inside the periphery of the taboo topics, the dark realities of the world that we live in.
If this sounds like a book you would be interested in, give it a try or add it to your Goodreads shelf. Pop by tomorrow to read my interview with author Mansi Choksi! 🙂
There are little things about the culture, language, and way of communicating that make the depiction of a place authentic. It makes me happy to see the everyday life and language I remember depicted correctly. Every place has its own preferred units of measurements, and sometimes I feel that in order to help the western reader relate to the concepts, western vernacular like ‘millions’ and ‘miles’ is used over the regional ‘crores’ and ‘kilometers’. I hope that as we get access to more stories from around the world, we try to stay true to the experience of the place and accurately represent these diverse ways in which we talk.
Since this was a book about marriages and weddings, here is a photo from the one I celebrated. It was a multicultural affair. In our ceremony, we recited a curated version of the seven vows from Hinduism, me and the bridesmaids dressed in traditional Indian clothes, got henna done, and we had a blast Canadian style with lots of Indian energy dancing by yours truly.
Reading a book about India while travelling in India is one of my favorite things. I loved experiencing it and I am excited to see which books I pick next time I go.
Many thanks to the publisher for providing me a review copy of this book for an honest review.
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