In a 2018 survey of more than 160,000 households, 93% of married Indians said that theirs was an arranged marriage. Just 3% had a "love marriage" and another 2% described theirs as a "love-cum-arranged marriage", which usually indicates that the relationship was set up by the families, and then the couple agreed to get married. There has been only very slight change over time - 94% of octogenarians had an arranged marriage, and the figure remains over 90% for young couples in their 20s. Manisha Mondal always thought she would have a love marriage. "I was used to fighting with my parents. I fought to attend a college that was a little far away from home. I thought, okay, love marriage will be the next thing to fight about," Manisha, an office assistant in Bhilai, a small town in eastern India, told me. But in the first few days of college, a few boys approached her to talk - and older female students took her to the bathroom for a talking to. If she spoke to boys, they warned, her reputation would get ruined.
Most Indians see themselves and their country as religiously tolerant but are against interfaith marriage, a survey from Pew Research Center has found. People across different faiths in the country said stopping interfaith marriage was a "high priority" for them. The research comes after laws were introduced in several Indian states criminalising interfaith love. Pew interviewed 30,000 people across India in 17 languages for the study. The interviewees were from 26 states and three federally administered territories. According to the survey, 80% of the Muslims who were interviewed felt it was important to stop people from their community from marrying into another religion. Around 65% of Hindus felt the same. The survey also asked about the relationship between faith and nationality. It found that Hindus "tend to see their religious identity and Indian national identity as closely intertwined". Nearly two-thirds of Hindus (64%) said it was very important to be Hindu in order to be "truly Indian".
This research was conducted among 1,525 Indian married individuals between the age of 25 and 50, across Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Kolkata and Ahmedabad. Gleeden, which arrived in India in April 2017, reported eight lakh subscribers in the country at last count. It hit a boom in membership after the 2018 Supreme Court judgment that decriminalised adultery and said the law was against right to equality and life. The judgment was also seen as a move against patriarchy and gender inequality. That said, the survey reported that divorce rate in India is the lowest in the world at 1%, where only 13 split of every 1,000 couples. 90% of Indian marriages are still fixed by families and only 5% of the couples marry for love.
