On the day Prince Harry announced his engagement to biracial US actor Meghan Markle, one of India’s inter-religious marriages became a spectacle in SC.
The United Kingdom’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle created quite the storm with their engagement announcement Monday. While any marriage in Britain’s royal family makes news (remember, nearly 23 million Americans watched TV coverage of Harry’s older brother William and Kate Middleton’s wedding in 2011?), this one also raised many eyebrows for going against the unwritten code of morality only the British seem to understand.
Why? Because Meghan Markle is biracial, American, half-Jewish, a high-profile actor, and a divorcée; her mother is African American, and her father is white, and Jewish. Scandalous, right?
Yet, the news was largely met with happy, if gossipy chatter. To be sure, Markle has faced her fair share of sexist and racist trolling. In fact, the abuse got so lurid last year that Harry had to come out and publicly condemn the “wave of abuse and harassment” Markle faced. But the news of their engagement had social media congratulating the couple for their fairy tale like love story.
Indians, with all their large-heartedness, too joined the congratulatory party on social media – ironically, on a day when one of India’s own inter-religious marriages became a spectacle in the country’s highest court.
As Hadiya Jahan arrived in New Delhi with hopes that the apex court would reinstate her right to marry exactly who she wants, follow the faith of her choice, study or not study what she desires, most Indians continued to look on at her life choices with suspicion.
Obviously, Islamophobia is at work here, with the collective Hindu anxiety playing out on India’s political and legal landscape. But it’s also about the collective inability of a nation to fathom the choices of an adult woman if they happen to be unaligned with mainstream religious and cultural morals, which compel the best of us to think “well, there must be some element of brainwashing involved”.
Hadiya’s agency has been trampled over from the word go. And after releasing her from her parents’ custody and stating unequivocally that “wife is not chattel”, when the Supreme Court tells Hadiya that she must finish her studies first, her own agency to give priority to her married life over her academic life is still being trampled over. That’s the thing about freedom: it ought to be honoured even when it is exercised in ways unpalatable to the liberal imagination.
The future of inter-faith marriages in the country now depends heavily on what the court adjudicates in Hadiya’s case. If the court were to go ahead and restore Hadiya’s marriage to Shafin Jahan, thereby sending a clear message against those riding the communal bogey of ‘Love Jihad’, we as a country might end up being a little less hypocritical when we celebrate Prince Harry and Markle’s fairy tale wedding.
It will take time, but Britain is making a genuine effort to become a more tolerant, diverse society. This royal wedding will strengthen that trend. As for Ms Hadiya, great pity to observe the ordeal she is going through to live her life on her own terms. An inter faith marriage needs to be carefully thought through, including how the children will be brought up, but when a couple is sure of their abiding love for each other, as Sunil Dutt and Nargis were, everyone else has little role to play, except shower rose petals.