Love and Marriage in Modern India

India is home to one of the world’s oldest societies, with thousands of years of religious and cultural traditions.

Journalist Anita Jain, born in India but raised in northern California, felt drawn back to her homeland to find a husband the old-fashioned way — by an arranged marriage.

At thirty-three, she was feeling pressure from her Indian family to marry. Her father placed ads in Indian papers and brokered online dates. Her mother cried. Fed up with the New York dating scene, Anita moved her search for a husband to Delhi.

What she found was not the India of her parents, or not exactly. Instead, she found a thriving Generation Y, partying in tight jeans and tank tops to Bhangra club beats, harvesting the fruits of the high-tech boom. A hybrid of old and new, where clubgoers encounter cows in the street.

This hour, On Point: Looking for love, marriage, and tradition, in modern India.

What do you know of that gear-grinding between generations? How do you reconcile the clash of the traditional and the new? Tell us your story. You can join the conversation right here on this page.

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Guests:

Joining us from New York is Anita Jain. She’s a journalist born in New Delhi and raised in northern California. Her new book, out yesterday, is “Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India.” You can read an excerpt from the book.

And from Cambridge, England, we're joined by Perveez Mody. She’s a lecturer in social anthropology at Cambridge University and author of “The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi.”