I was going to write a Poe about the Aryan Nations and Chik-fil-A today, but I found this post A hideaway for India's rebel couples on the BBC, and felt I had to share this. As many Purgatorians know, I've been writing about faith-based insanity on the subcontinent for a while, in part because Hinduism gets a free pass in the West, and in part because many Hindus love to overreact against any perceived slights to their multi-god absurdist religion.
Now, let's get on with the article.
The pale 19-year-old girl, Krishna, is sitting in a small room at a police barracks in northern Haryana state.Buying a gun, it turns out, is not a hard thing to do in that part of India.
...When asked whether her family could really kill her husband, because she married outside her caste without permission, she hides her head in the folds of her long diaphanous scarf and nods.
"Yes, yes, they can."
Her family had refused to accept her relationship with Sonu, a 22-year-old barber from a lower caste, and had arranged her marriage with her another man, whom she had never met.Caste in India is based on the pernicious idea of karma. Those born of a low caste can spiritually contaminate (pollute) those of a higher caste and deleteriously affect the higher caste's karma. That means marrying a lower caste individual will cause the higher caste person to be reborn as a lower form in the next life.
I hate the idea of karma, so very much.
Her family had refused to accept her relationship with Sonu, a 22-year-old barber from a lower caste, and had arranged her marriage with her another man, whom she had never met.
Earlier this month, Krishna, daughter of an out-of-work father and a homemaker mother, slipped out of her Saharanpur home on a sultry June night, and took a bus to her boyfriend's house in neighbouring Haryana.
The next morning, they got married at a local temple in Kurukshetra, went to the court and sought police protection.
Seeking police protection against your own family is not uncommon in India. In response to the need, the government has set up safe houses.
The court ordered the police to give the couple shelter at one of the many homes to protect runaway couples that dot Haryana. Last year more than 200 couples were given shelter in such homes. And they keep pouring in.Faith, patriarchy, and misogyny mix together into an all to familiar recipe of suppression.
A female is "always under guardianship", says social scientist Prem Chowdhury. As a girl, under her parents, and as a woman, under her husband. "Any breach of this ideology of guardianship, control, and dependence, however small, is considered to be very threatening."
Relationships in the same village, outside the caste and faith, and within the same gotra (clan on father's side), are forbidden by families and hardline village councils. Kangaroo courts set up the councils often sanction killings of such "erring" couples to redeem honour.The old ways in India are being actively challenged not so much from religious leaders (of course) but from mobile technology. Just as smart phones helped create the Arab Spring, mobile technology is shattering age-old barbaric ideas in India.
Young men and women across the divides are braving centuries of social resistance and - helped by the mobile phone and social networking sites like Facebook - are falling in love in the villages and small towns of India in greater numbers than ever before.
Shallu was studying for a degree in computer applications, and Subhas trying to pick up a diploma in marketing when Cupid struck.
Two years ago, says Shallu, she sent a friend request to Subhas on Facebook from her cheap Nokia phone. They had a common friend, but Subhas's Facebook page did not have his picture - "He had a picture of a baby on his profile, he was so shy," she giggles.The two eventually had a secret wedding and had to go into hiding at one of the safe houses.
Religions keep their power by coercion. In America the coercion is often in the form of the faith-based terror of Hell. On the subcontinent, however, faith is far more aggressive.
...The couple say members of Shallu's family went to Subhas's house and asked them to "return" their girl.
"If she doesn't return home, things can happen," a relative told Subhas's family.I wish the couple, and others like them, well.
I won't be praying for them.
Faith is the problem.
This is Purgatory.