Cross-Region Marriages in Rural Haryana: Summary of the Existing Literature on Women and their Children

Abstract

Haryana in north India has had a history of continued low sex ratio and gender regressive society over the years. Men started finding it difficult to urge married locally and hence brought wives from poor and faraway places. Cross-region marriages are those marriages that traverse the normal boundaries of village exogamy (marriage outside one’s own village), caste endogamy (marriage within the caste), language, class, and culture, and often entail a long distance within India. These are arranged marriages and do not occur through the agency of people brought together by the wedding, i.e., these are not love marriages. They take a girl completely aloof from her maternal family home, region, language, and cultural contexts. The burden of adjustment in such marriages lies solely on the ladies and society seems to not ‘accept’ them as their own. Children too do not have it easy as there’s ambiguity about their ‘acceptance’ in Haryana society. There is a big lack of literature on the children that makes it difficult to predict their future. And as these marriages increase in number, it becomes necessary to create new scientific research evidence on matters of those children specifically using new and untested research methods, concepts, and geographies.