KANCHANPUR, NEPAL – Even before Phoolmati Chaudhary, whose name has been changed to avoid family conflict, was born, her parents had already arranged her marriage to a friend’s son.
Arranged marriage is a custom of Nepal’s Tharu ethnic group, which Phoolmati’s family belongs to.
Now, 15 years later, the teenager from Nepal’s Far-Western district of Kanchanpur says she became depressed when she found out about her engaged status as she now has a boyfriend whom she dreams of marrying.
“When I confronted my parents [and told them] that I didn’t want a marriage that was fixed before my birth, they didn’t listen,” she says as she draws circles on the barren earth with her bare toes. “They continued to pressure me [into the marriage].”
The teenager says that the boy her parents arranged her marriage to began to follow her around and pressure her to marry him.
“[I have found out that] he has some bad habits,” she says of his drinking and gambling tendencies. “I don’t want to spend my life with someone like that. But my parents seemed to be worried about their promise to their friends and the society rather than my wishes.”
Phoolmati says that her family also doesn’t know she has a boyfriend whom she loves and wants to marry.
“Should they come to know about it, I’ll be in trouble,” she says, her tone filled with dread and discomfort.
Faced with continued pressure from her parents, Phoolmati says she eventually threatened to commit suicide if her parents forced her to marry the boy. She says that her parents relented and brought her to Kathmandu, the capital, to let her stay with relatives.
Her relatives are now trying to get Phoolmati, who lacks basic literacy skills, into school. Her parents have also promised that they’ll now let their daughter make her own decisions about marriage and family.
Nepalis say the arranged marriage tradition – known as “mangni” – developed from parents’ desires to protect their children from unsuitable marriages and to strengthen relationships with friends. But the tradition is on its way out as many young people from the Tharu community have rejected the marriages their parents arranged for them when they were infants or even in the womb. Although the custom is still prevalent in some areas, opponents say it’s fading as one government committee works to stamp it out.
The custom of parents arranging the engagement of unborn or young children with the children of their friends is known as mangni. Rajendra Prasad Chaudhary, regional member of the Tharu Welfare Assembly, an NGO that addresses social issues in the Tharu community, says that the mangni trend gained momentum around 1943, especially in the Terai and inner-Madesh districts in Nepal, and later developed into a tradition. But he says it has now largely diminished among the country’s 3.3 million Tharus because of increased objection from the younger, more educated generation.
Chaudhary, who lives in Dang, a district in Nepal’s Mid-Western region with a large Tharu population, says that a Tharu custom dictates that if a person’s son elopes with someone else’s daughter, the parent has to give one of his or her daughters in marriage, irrespective of how young she is, in exchange to the family who “lost” their daughter in the elopement. He says that this may have led to a surge in the mangni tradition so parents could protect their daughters from being taken from them.
Phool Man Chaudhary, a senior member of the Tharu community in Dang, says that this exchange of daughters for daughter-in laws might have arisen from the scarcity of women in Tharu communities in the past. Community members say there isn’t a confirmed or specific reason for the scarcity.
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