U.S., August 23, 2005: One Saturday in July, a few weeks after he finished his medical residency at Brown University, Ronak Shah married Kunal Patel, another doctor, in a union that embraced every ritual of the Hindu nuptial script. However, the venerable South Asian tradition of arranged marriages has taken on an American reinvention. Dr. Patel’s mother and father had a hand in their daughter’s selection. They were in touch with friends and cousins for suggestions about whom she should marry. But Dr. Patel was free to reject them all. Less than a decade ago, the decision about whom a South Asian woman here might marry was still often left to her parents. But recently, purely arranged marriage has evolved into a new culture of what might be called “assisted” marriage, in which parents are free to arrange all they like–allowing their sons and daughters choice among nominees. Some of the impetus for assisted marriage is coming from young people themselves–men and women who have delayed marriage into their late 20’s and early 30’s, said Ayesha Hakki, the editor of Bibi, a South Asian bridal and fashion magazine. As Madhulika Khandelwal, a historian who has studied Indians here, said, “Young people don’t want to make individual decisions alone.”
In large part, Ms. Khandelwal said, the transition from formally arranged marriage reflects social changes in India itself, where assisted marriage is now common among the educated, urban middle class. That is because, she said, there are fewer extended-family living arrangements and more women pursuing higher education. The purpose of assisted marriage here is not simply to preserve Indian cultural identity, but more pointedly to maintain class, religious and regional identities in a place where they might easily be diffused, those who have studied the Indian diaspora say. Arranged and assisted marriage have left Indians with the lowest rate of intermarriage of any major immigrant group in the United States. Among South Asian men and women here in their 20’s and 30’s, the vast majority of whom are foreign born, fewer than 10 percent marry outside their ethnic group, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau’s 2003 American Community Survey conducted for this article.