Aligarh/Varanasi: Ladling spoonfuls of ghee onto the steaming plates of dal and rice, Shazi would appear to paint the conventional picture of domestic life, as both she and her partner help themselves to lunch. Living in a residential colony near Varanasi’s Nadesar region, the 29-year-old woman, who also goes by Shahzadi, and her partner Manish, 46, could easily pass off as any of the other families and married couples in their area.
But for one small catch: they aren’t actually married, and their struggle to establish the status of their relationship has just begun. They are a Hindu-Muslim live-in couple in Varanasi – the odds couldn’t be higher in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh. Both atheists, she comes from a Muslim family, while his is an upper-caste Hindu one. Even as their landlord now knows of their religious differences, he remains unaware of their marital status. “We have always told everyone that we are married. Our first challenge was to get people to accept the differences in religious backgrounds, we are still trying to overcome that. Talking about a live-in, especially here, is a different ball-game altogether,” Manish sighed.
There’s a paradox at play in today’s India. On one hand, the Supreme Court has been expanding the rights of couples to include unmarried ones, and children borne out of such relationships. And women’s participation in higher education and the workforce has been growing. Dating apps are witnessing a proliferation in small-town India and pre-marital romance, and relationships outside the norms of Indian morality and social acceptability are on the rise. On the other, is the backlash to all this, especially for interfaith couples — be it Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code or UP’s anti-conversion law, the space for live-in is shrinking. And when a case like Shraddha Walker-Aftab Poonawalla comes in public, self-appointed guardians of culture spread an intolerant narrative that vitiates the atmosphere.
It’s in this backdrop that lovers and couples find themselves navigate society — pesky neighbours, hostile landlords and vindictive parents. Especially in small towns, strategy is key. Many present themselves as siblings, some wear mangal-sutras and sindoor, and yet others find themselves thank the subtle patriarchy that makes landlords only enquire about the man’s documents, allowing them to pass off as husband-wife without scrutiny.
Pesky neighbours kept asking me why I haven’t put sindoor or observing
karwa chauth. We had to always keep to ourselves to avoid interference from
the others in the colony
— Shazi who is lives in Varanasi with her partner
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No country for live-ins
Shazi and Manish met over five years ago, when Shazi started volunteering with communist party members after having completed her graduate studies. Soon after, she started preparing for the UP Provincial Civil Services or PCS exams. “It was while studying for the entrance exams that I realised I should know the practical side of what I’m studying. So I volunteered with activists and local communist party members for campaigns and awareness programmes”.
It was there that she met Manish, then associated with Varanasi’s CPIML [Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation], who has since become an independent activist now. “All this while I thought I’m preparing for PCS to make a change in society, but here was a man who had actually given everything up to make a difference in society, to work for the poor and the oppressed,” Shazi said, as she recounted how they started falling for each other through the course of conversations around society, politics and life.
Both Manish and Shazi’s families have yet to come to terms with their relationship, even as Shazi now talks to her parents occasionally, mustering up the courage to maintain ties as her own family lives less than two kilometres away from their rented flat.
Life and love in a smaller town and city particularly, is never easy. The couple negotiated the early days of their courtship by meeting in-between her exam coaching classes. “While the classes got over by 3-4pm, I’d tell my parents it only gets done by 7pm. So I could get some time to meet him,” the spritely young woman said.
But things took a dramatic turn amid the onset of the pandemic in 2020. It was then in April that Shazi started volunteering with local activists’ relief efforts at giving out rations and food, when she happened to come home late in the evening amid the lockdown. “One day, I came back home late and one of our neighbours asked my elder brother that your sister keeps going out until late night amid a lockdown, what is she up to? My mother slapped me that day. My brothers also said “Isko hum log bahut bana diye, padha diye, baal jo katwa kar badi Priyanka Gandhi bani ho na. Yeh humaari naak katva degi.” (We’ve raised her to grow up like this, letting her study. Now she’s trying to become some Priyanka Gandhi, with her short haircut. She will sully our family.) My mother also concurred saying “izzat se zyada bada kuch bhi nahi hai”.
“That was the final straw. I realised that agar maarna hi hai (if they have to hit me), then there is no use preparing for civil services to be independent. I chose my freedom immediately after that moment itself: by leaving their home and deciding to live with a partner of my choice,” Shazi said.
Since May 2020, the couple first sought refuge in the home of an old former engineer and activist friend, where they lived for several months without paying rent. This was followed by their attempt at finding their own place in 2021, where the couple admits that they lied to everyone that they were married
After Shazi’s decision to leave her natal home, she phoned Manish and told him that she had made a choice. “I said to him ki dekho aisa hai (this is how it is). And then said that I’ve made a choice for myself, so if he wants to, he can take this leap of faith with me,” she added. Both agreed to live together.
Since May 2020, the couple first sought refuge in the home of an old former engineer and activist friend, where they lived for several months without paying rent. This was followed by their attempt at finding their own place in 2021, where the couple admits that they lied to everyone that they were married, and hoped only Manish’s identification documents would be checked.
“But even when we found a flat, it was like the society in Taarak Mehta ka Oolta Chasma, and pesky neighbours kept asking me why I haven’t put sindoor or observing karwa chauth. We had to always keep to ourselves to avoid interference from the others in the colony,” Shazi said, rolling her eyes.
They managed to stay there for three months, before their landlord discovered their marital status, and gave them a month’s notice to leave.
Shazi pointed out that he would have thrown them out within a day itself, and only served a notice “because he knew we were socially and politically active, and can cause a scene”. After this, the couple went back to their engineer-activist friend’s home until they finally found another place in November 2022, which is where they’ve since managed to stay. While Manish’s family lives over 150 km away in another town, Shazi’s parents live barely a mile away from this new flat.
“My parents know where I live now, but they’ve reconciled with the fact that they can’t do much about it this time,” she said.
The couple’s present set-up is in a society consisting mostly of married and conventional families, with theirs being a squalid set of rooms in the corner flat adjacent to the marshy Varuna river-bank.
Yet, their story of hardships is far from unique. That’s also where they find solace, in knowing they are not alone.
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Live-ins on the rise
In February 2024, the Uttarakhand government made headlines for its first-of-its-kind Uniform Civil Code or UCC.
Most controversial of the UCC’s provisions is the section now enforcing mandatory registration of live-ins in the state, both at the start and end of a relationship. This includes stipulations requiring officials to conduct a summary inquiry into the relationship, and a couple’s failure to provide information could result in jail time.
While the Supreme Court has widened the ambit of rights for such couples, pushback has come from high courts, statutory bodies and politicians have made observations stigmatising the phenomenon. In 2017, Rajasthan’s Human Rights Commission chairperson Prakash Tatia dubbed live-ins as a form of “social terrorism” that were increasingly infecting society. Meanwhile, the Madhya Pradesh high court in 2022 said that live-in relationships were “giving rise to sexual offences” and promoted promiscuity. Time and again, several benches of the Allahabad high court have observed that such relationships are “time-pass”, “immoral” and “illegal”, particularly in cases of interfaith and intercaste couples approaching the court to seek police protection. As recently as March 2024, the Madhya Pradesh High Court observed that ‘constitutional rights need not always be enforced’, while hearing the case of a live-in couple seeking protection. At the same time, another court in the state has decreed that wearing sindoor is the ‘duty’ of a married Hindu woman.
Recently, Haryana BJP MP Dharambir Singh described them as a “dangerous disease”, demanding the creation of a law against such relationships.
Relentless sensationalism and stigmatisation in the courts and media has also played upon conservatism in families and residents welfare associations (RWAs). Last year, the RWA of a swanky high-rise apartment complex in Noida issued a diktat against renting out to unmarried persons or ‘bachelor tenants.’
Yet, despite a slew of curbs and state authorities backing such taboos, young Indians continue to navigate these alternatives to conventional married partnerdom.
And it’s not just in big metropolises like Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru.
Across India’s smaller cities and towns – from Varanasi to Vadodara, Aligarh to Alwar and beyond – live-in relationships are on the rise, and so are all the accompanying social pressures. As more and more couples seek to explore alternatives beyond marriage, society and pop-culture are catching up, devising new stratagems to fight families, landlords, and social prejudice aplenty.
“A lot of norms of virginity, monogamy, all that are being challenged. Perhaps, they were always being challenged but it was clandestine earlier. Now, thanks to education and the mobility, particularly of girls, things have changed,” said Kavita Srivastava, women’s rights activist and president of the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties or PUCL. Srivastava’s Jaipur-based PUCL office also doubles up as a ‘safe home’ for young couples and women who’ve escaped from their family homes. Nestled in one part of a bungalow complex in Jaipur’s Van Vihar, the four-roomed office and personal residence of Srivastava forms a crisis center for human rights work, with the space frequently being used to host those facing troubles finding a safe place to stay. “Sometimes when couples on-the-run come, especially intercaste or interfaith ones, we ask the boy to stay here with us and the girl goes to the short-stay home run by the Rajasthan University Women’s Association,” said Srivastava. She added that the women were encouraged to give their statements to the police in this time.
Meanwhile, a 2018 study of 1.4 lakh people online in the 18-35 age group revealed that nearly 80 per cent of these millennials supported live-ins as a way of a life, with 26 per cent of those polled saying that they would even prefer this over marriages.
Bollywood too has been no stranger to this phenomenon. More than a decade ago in 2013, the Yash Raj banner’s Shuddh Desi Romance was a sleeper-hit, reopening conversation on live-ins outside the big cities of Tier-1 India. Set in Jaipur, the Sushant Singh Rajput and Parineeti Chopra starrer highlighted the struggles of a young couple living together in a smaller city, presenting an alternative storyline not fixated on marriage as the happy ending. Well before all of this though, two decades ago, Salaam Namaste mainstreamed the idea of live-ins in 2005. The Kartik Aryan and Kriti Sanon starrer Luka Chhupi again brought the focus to live-ins in small town India, with its lead couple’s story in the backdrop of Mathura and Gwalior. On Netflix, the Mithila Palkar-starrer Little Things features a couple navigating the ups and downs of their live-in, albeit in the cosmopolitan Mumbai.
Across India’s smaller cities and towns – from Varanasi to Vadodara, Aligarh to Alwar and beyond – live-in relationships are on the rise, and so are all the accompanying social pressures.
It’s no wonder then, that couples like Neha and Diya, Manish and Shazi, Saddam and Maniben, and countless others, are fighting their battles in the more difficult terrain: small town India.
While live-ins have been subject to stigma and hardships in big cities too, such metropolises also offer more anonymity and wider options. It’s difficult to keep things secret in a smaller town, particularly given how those in smaller communities are more likely to know each other, and the limited socio-economic opportunities in smaller towns that allows limited independence.
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Small-town, narrow minds
For 25 year olds Neha and Diya, being a queer couple in Varanasi has meant struggling to not just convince their families, but even a much-later realisation of what they find as “heightened patriarchy”. The couple, who have been seeing each other for the past four years, first knew each other as classmates and friends in school nearly eleven years ago. Born and brought up in Varanasi, the two admit they want to live and work there itself, despite the lack of what they dub as a more “open” and “visible” queer community in bigger cities.
The discovery of their mutual liking for each other, and things getting serious took its own course in just months, but the struggle for acceptance from both family and society has indeed been an uphill battle. “My family has come around to accepting our relationship, they know that I am serious about it. But Neha has only their father, so convincing him has been hard,” said Diya who goes by she/her pronouns.
While Diya’s family was initially reluctant to come to terms with their daughter’s sexuality, things slowly started to change by 2022, when her partner Neha started visiting their family home. “My brothers and parents interacted with Neha, they saw he was serious about me. They started realising it’s not just a phase for me, that I’m not going to be married off to some man. I think by 2023 they came to terms with my affections and how serious I am,” Diya said with a small smile. The face-to-face interactions and years of conversations culminated with Diya’s spontaneous decision to cut-off contact from her family and run to Allahabad for a few days. By then, her family and Neha called her back home.
The two have been trying to find a place for themselves, or convince Neha’s father and live-in together in Neha’s home, for the past three years. “Of course, it is difficult for people like us everywhere, because even in a city like Mumbai, LGBT identifying people face discrimination and many of us have to rent a place by saying we are friends, or siblings. Ironically, in some ways, by lying about this we have it easier than heterosexual couples since landlords will view a male and female renting together with more suspicion. But we can’t live our lives in a lie, na?” pointed out a bespectacled Neha, who goes by he/they pronouns.
An aspiring events-manager, he has been trying to find a stable income and build this enterprise along with his partner Diya, to become financially independent. Stressing upon how “people are more likely to know each other, and your families” in a smaller city or town, Neha noted how this made things more difficult for them in Varanasi.
“Our families keep saying that even if we do what we want, others should not come to know. We keep getting told, ‘logon ko nahi pata chalna chahiye’ (people should not come to know), he added.
There’s also the fact that in the absence of financial independence, women in particular, face the brunt of marital pressure. “In Delhi, you can use the word ‘gay’ very normally, here it’s not normal and the word used is a Hindi gaali for a man and man couple. And for a woman, it’s just taken for-granted ki chalo kuch time baad iski toh hum shaadi hi kara denge. The belief that a woman can be dealt with by marrying her off is more pervasive here,” Diya added.
We’re currently seeing at least 3 or 4 such cases where couples have been advised to tell every landlord that they’re already married. For example, I know of another couple who had no choice but to get married, because the woman’s family had accused the man of kidnapping and filed a police complaint against him
— Neeti, coordinator at the NGO Asian Bridge International
An unmarried man and woman trying to find a room is hard to digest even in bigger metro cities, concedes Neeti, a coordinator at the NGO Asian Bridge International and a local queer and gender rights activist.
“We’re currently seeing at least 3 or 4 such cases where couples have been advised to tell every landlord that they’re already married. For example, I know of another couple who had no choice but to get married, because the woman’s family had accused the man of kidnapping and filed a police complaint against him.”
The woman in question was a girl on the cusp of turning 18, who met the man who was 24 years old. Three months into their live-in, both the local court and family pressured them into marriage and they felt they had no choice but to do so.
“They didn’t give her time or space to just live with him, now she is regretting the marriage,” Neeti, who goes by they/them pronouns, added.
Usually, those in Varanasi’s working-class and socio-economically poorer localities face fewer questions, making it relatively easier to find a place. “But even here, if the word goes out, then you can get into trouble. If the landlord also finds that a police case can be registered or that the families can register a case, then the landlord is even more unwilling to rent to them,” they pointed out.
Neha and Diya concur. Their own experience at finding a flat has been stalled precisely because of the fear of backlash, or even a police case, from Neha’s father who has yet to be convinced. The two admit that lying about being “just friends” is easier for a queer couple like them, but the risk of a family member seeking them out or having landlords turn hostile and side with parents makes it virtually impossible for couples to rent.
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Maitri-karars, hunt for legal shields
It’s easy to imagine that the lure of market forces and money would hold sway over social mores, but the reality couldn’t be more different.
Landlords in Varanasi and Allahabad conceded that the pressure to not rent to unmarried couples, especially “alag caste se (from different castes)” (including religion), outweighed the lure of money.
A Varanasi-based landlord with high-rated Google reviews remarked that the ease of finding a place would be better if the couple was either engaged or planning to get married in the next few months. He added that being unmarried would then “lead to big difficulties with police verification.”
Yet, lawyer Ramesh Kumar practising in the Allahabad High Court refuted this, pointing out that there was no legal hurdle when two consenting adults wish to live together, as much as social stigmas and police acting as moral or familial custodians.
Meanwhile, Ranju Singh, a house-owner and social sector professional living near the kachehri (court complex) area of Varanasi, pointed out how in her experience living and working in the town, as well as in Azamgarh and Lucknow, it was almost impossible to find people in “middle-class to upper-class localities” who’d rent to a live-in couple. These couples find themselves join a long list of Muslims, Dalits, ‘meat-eaters’ and single women subjected to housing discrimination and residential segregation across India’s cities. Singh concedes that for those in smaller towns, it is easier to drop even pretence, with many asking for surnames or caste backgrounds outright.
Singh said that her own decision to rent a part of her home to a married Christian couple was met with disapproval in their “middle-class colony” in Varanasi.
Even for unmarried couples who do not have to face the prejudices of landlords, other battles persist. Rajkot’s Saddam Garasiya and Maniben Chaudhary would know. The couple’s family backgrounds (his, a Muslim one and hers, a Hindu one), led to difficulties in Maniben’s job posting as a constable in the Gujarat police.
While the two finally got married under the secular Special Marriage Act in November 2023, both knew that threats from family, neighbours, and even colleagues on the job, would pose a risk at the start of their relationship. When the 24-year-old Maniben and 32-year-old Saddam first met in Vadodara’s Dabhoi town over two years ago, they started living together, as Maniben was posted on the job in Vadodara district.
Even though they lived in Saddam’s own home, the couple decided to enter into a ‘maitri karar’, or ‘friendship agreement’ in order to protect themselves from vigilantes and the woman’s family.
A maitri karar is a legal practice specific to Gujarat, which allows for a notarised status to live-in relationships. After polygamy was made illegal under the Hindu Marriage Act in 1956, the custom of maitri karar came about to allow men to give legal support to their mistresses, with the subdivisional magistrate and marriage registrars in the state according such relations with a notarised, legal status in order to secure the rights of women in such affairs, and children borne out of wedlock.
But over time, the practice has also allowed for those on the margins to seek legal refuge and safety for their relationships. In her book Footprints of a queer history: Life stories from Gujarat, scholar and activist Maya Sharma highlights how many same-sex and queer couples registered their relationships under this agreement, in absence of law allowing them to be married.
And it’s not just queer couples. Interfaith couples like Maniben and Saddam too have fallen back on this agreement, in what Saddam said was a “safety precaution, before we could actually get married”. Saddam informed ThePrint how his now-wife, constable Maniben was kidnapped twice in the course of their relationship, by her family members. And getting married under the secular Special Marriage Act (SMA) is no mean-feat.
“We had to wait at least two months after we first went to notify the registrar regarding marriage. And as per the SMA, your address details are put up on the registrar’s notice-board, and both our families were also sent information about the marriage. We knew this would cause trouble for our safety, especially because of her family being very kattar (strict). So we first opted to get a maitri-karar while living together, to be safe until our marriage gets solemnised”.
Elsewhere, live-in couples have to consider producing fake documents. For Fazli (who preferred to go by her nickname), a PhD scholar presently at Aligarh Muslim University, being in several live-in relationships from Gandhinagar, to Goa, to Allahabad, all have “well equipped” her to navigate these hurdles.
Fazli, a 33-year-old who is now in a long-distance relationship with her live-in partner owing to their careers, notes how, on one occasion, she proved that her former live-in partner and she were siblings. “I don’t use the surname that my parents use, but my partner back in Gandhinagar happened to have the same surname as my parents. So we showed the landlord my parents’ documents instead of mine, and got a place to rent by pretending to be siblings!” But Fazli’s ordeal did not end there, with then-landlord’s wife repeatedly showing up, sometimes even staying with the couple, to monitor them.
Years later, when she met her current partner amid Covid in Allahabad, the couple was forced to move homes at least three times in one city, owing to having to navigate hostility from neighbours, not just landlords.
“The first housing society we shifted to in Allahabad kicked us out within 24 hours after people made my partner sit down and questioned him about the exact nature of our relationship.” Fazli and her partner then moved to the working-class Dom Para slum neighbourhood. “People are less judgemental in the slums, but when a locally influential political leader from the slum got wind of our relationship, we had to leave.” By sheer luck, immediately after this they finally found a landlord who did not mind their unmarried status.
While she has since moved to Aligarh to pursue her research, she notes how both of them were “thick-skinned” enough to weather it out. Two of her own friends from Gandhinagar, she points out, had to eventually move to Auroville in order to actualise their live-in relationship. The couple in question had the woman from a Hindu family and man from a Kashmiri Muslim background, facing almost no options in Gujarat, and finally moving to the more idyllic bubble of Auroville.
Auroville offers a commune for persons across nationalities, race, religion, sexuality and caste. For young couples who transgress conventional morality, such townships offer a refuge from segregation. In the absence of these set-ups, those in small towns rely on whisper networks, often through a close-knit circle of local activists and progressives who put in a word.
“Generally, it is through a trusted friend or progressive person’s reference that a couple can find a place in such towns,” pointed out Varanasi-based landlord and social sector worker Ranju Singh.
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Small town women and age-old battles
While unmarried couples skip, hop and jump through hoops of tricky arrangements and lies in order to secure a place to live, the pressures faced by women in these relationships often are magnified. Not only is there the burden of societal stigmas around premarital sex, which is implied in such relationships, there’s also the breaking away from families, fending for financial independence, and the intimate partner and gendered violence common to any domestic relationship.
Kavita Srivastava points out how live-ins mark the assertion of women’s agency, “not just in breaking away from her natal family, but also in terms of economic independence and education.” Several instances have emerged of young women meeting their prospective partners amid going to high-school, college, and coaching centres.
“Recently we had a girl aged 18, who told us that her exams finished soon and all she wanted was for us to help her move out of her home. In another case, a woman was living with another friend and getting into an alternative way of life of community living, of ahimsa. But then the landlord here in Jaipur got together with her family to throw them out,” rued Srivastava.
The latter incident in question involved 24-year-old Anjaly, an independent artist currently based in Jaipur. After a relative sexually assaulted her and her parents stayed silent, Anjaly decided to cut off ties with her parents at age 16. Since completing her MBA, finding a place to stay even in a capital city like Jaipur has been an arduous task.
“I’m not in any relationship but landlords would ask me about my parents and when I’d say that I am not in touch with them, I’d be denied flats, despite presenting my official documents. They can’t see me as an independent adult woman, and my choices are unconventional,” she said in resignation.
In December 2023, Anjaly was staying in her own apartment space when her abuser traced her place and came over, and she tried to register a complaint even as her parents remained unsupportive. “It was at that time the landlord threw us out, he didn’t give me a reason at all. He didn’t even return the security deposit amount,” she said.
Walking out from one’s biological family home is indeed not just about entering into live-in relationships, but often also a woman’s control over her identity and agency. Couples in this framework thus end up challenging social norms even if they never intended to.
Hunched over the phone as she billows puffs of her cigarette, Shazi remarks how her live-in relationship has led to her starting her own cloud kitchen in Varanasi, in order to support both her and her activist partner. And the couple’s changing minds too, even if that was never their intention.
“We recently threw a big party for our comrades, friends and well-wishers. Until then, most of them didn’t know of the religious differences and our relationship, but now they do. There’s a stereotype that Muslims are more religiously kattar (rigid), but ironically, many of our comrades who are from the local weavers (Ansari) community here were the first to embrace us and stand by us,” Manish said.
Today, the couple are still oscillating between opting for the institution of marriage for the sake of social acceptance versus live-ins, owing to their beliefs as well as religious differences. The draconian anti-conversion law in the state of UP has made marriage under any personal law much more difficult. Compounded by Manish’s activist history and being under the police’s radar for protesting the CAA-NRC, the two believe that the Special Marriage Act route would also pose several risks, with Right-wing groups and families being privy to their personal information.
Coincidentally, it’s in this backdrop that Justice Renu Aggarwal of the Allahabad high court has now held that the UP anti-conversion law would apply even in the case of live-in relationships. With nowhere to go, the two atheists attempted to convert to Buddhism in a simple ceremony, in order to obtain some legal certification of marriage to safeguard them. Yet, they have still not been able to procure the document to show marital status.
But there is hope, still. And a determination, cultivated gradually through the sheer happenstance of their relationship’s ups and downs.
“We’ve done it all, really. At this point, the only thing we can do is to try to slowly work in the community here, to change minds. We can’t leave or just get up and move to Delhi or Mumbai. Whatever has to happen, must happen here. Things must change here,” both say resolutely.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)