Indian weddings are usually gorgeous affairs, replete with colour and ceremony, fun traditions and solemn rites. The ceremonies leading up to the big day are also occasions for celebration and merrymaking.
One such pre-wedding ceremony is the Roka, predominantly practised by Punjabis, wherein the families of the bride and the groom meet and exchange gifts. It is a proto-betrothal — the first, formal agreement on the match. And it is literally a roka, which means that the boy and the girl have been stopped from looking elsewhere for a mate.
At first glance this seems like a harmless custom. However, the Delhi High Court recently took a dim view of it, calling it a “social evil”. The court was ruling in a case where a woman had appealed against the grant of divorce to her husband. Both husband and wife had alleged that the other’s family had been displeased with the gifts they received at the time of Roka.
‘Roka’ a Social Evil?
The Delhi High Court Bench of Justices Pradeep Nandrajog and Pratibha Rani remarked that Roka’s “significance is that on the account of money given by the family of the female to the male, it is conveyed to the society that neither would henceforth scout for a life partner – the search for a life partner is stopped: Roka. It is a social evil which needs to be condemned. It entails useless expenditure and in many cases, becomes the source of future bickering.”
The judges were spot on.
Marital Transaction Under the Garb of Roka
The practice of Roka is a throwback to the time when parents decided a match for their young children, in effect, booking the prospective bride and the groom for each other. It was a social contract sealed much before the actual contract of marriage. It yoked the boy and the girl to each other without their having any say in the matter.
Today, the pre-engagement ceremony of Roka translates into society’s stamp of approval on a boy and a girl seeing each other. So they are hitched well before they actually tie the knot. In that sense, it precludes the possibility of their looking for a better partner for themselves.
However, the more disturbing aspect of Roka today is that it has become one more occasion for the groom’s family to expect lavish gifts from that of the bride’s. What was once a simple get-together in the bride’s house, where the two families would exchange sweets and dry fruits to formalise the alliance, is now yet another piece in the transactional, commodified jigsaw that is the Indian wedding.
Keeping Up With Expectations
Of course, the wealthy are able to splash their cash and hold the ceremony in plush hotel banquet halls. They shower the groom-to-be with money and extravagant gifts. The girl, swanning around in diamonds and designer wear, gets some goodies too.
For the rest, Roka piles up the pressure. Roka, Sagan, Sangeet, Mehndi, Shaadi — as far as the bride’s side is concerned, every joyous ceremony underlies the intense pressure to keep up, to match expectations of generosity and ostentation. You come up short, and your daughter will hear of it in her sasuraal.
Age-Old Practices
India outlawed dowry way back in 1961. But how do you outlaw the overweening social pressure to give “gifts” to the groom and his family? For dowry, call it by any name, and give it at once or piecemeal — at Roka, at Sagaai or surreptitiously, behind closed doors — springs from the deep-seated belief that a man is so precious, so god-like, that he needs to be duly pleased before he will agree to marry your girl.
Indian wedding ceremonies are awash with practices that testify to this belief. In South Indian weddings, for example, the bride’s father is required to wash the feet of the groom. In another custom called “Kashiyatra”, the groom pretends to be uninterested in marriage and wants to go off to Kashi. That’s cue for the bride’s father to entreat
him with folded hands — and who knows what other blandishments — to marry his daughter.
The judges were right in calling Roka something that “entails useless expenditure and in many cases, becomes the source of future bickering”. However, the same could be said for the entire apparatus of glittering Indian weddings. The good thing is that more and more Indian women are sufficiently empowered now not to remain trapped in a
marriage that is exploitative from the word go.
For them Roka is but a pause — not a final stop.
(The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi. She can be reached @ShumaRaha. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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