Becoming Haryanvi
Out-of-state brides face journeys through linguistic, cultural and community barriers to build families and futures in Haryana.
By Maya Phillips
Thirteen years ago, 33-year-old Bahadur finished his night shift as a security guard at Swami Vivekanand College near Haryana’s capital city of Chandigarh. His phone rang, and Bahadur answered the call from his father back in his home village of Titram. His father had news: You’re getting married.
At the same time, a three-day train ride away in West Bengal, 20-year-old Geeta considered her options after rejecting the marriage proposal of a man from Calcutta. She described him as rich but ugly — she couldn’t imagine herself with him. Besides, she had no interest in Calcutta.
“I was ready to get married,” she said. “And I wanted to see Delhi.”
Geeta says her mother had been mentally ill for most of Geeta’s life, with mood swings and an easily distracted mind. Her father had denied her an education when she was a girl, bringing her home from school halfway through the only day she ever attended because, he reasoned, there was no point in educating a girl who would only grow up to be a housewife. After her father died when she was 10, her oldest brother Gautam took on the role of a parent at age 14. Geeta and her other brother Nitayi worked in their home rolling bidis, a small, cheap cigarette made from unprocessed tobacco.
The day after his father called, Bahadur and seven relatives left Haryana for West Bengal. Bahadur and Geeta met the day of their wedding, a small and inexpensive Bengali-style ceremony. Two days later, they headed home to Haryana, each unfamiliar with the other’s language and culture.
Geeta left her home as the wife of a man she had known for less than a week. She wanted a husband who could take her to Delhi, because that would prove his ability to provide her and her future family with a comfortable life.
Bahadur had already paid a mediator — Geeta’s cousin Chanchal Das — 45,000 rupees (about $544), and also paid for himself and his relatives to travel to West Bengal. After their wedding, he brought Geeta to Delhi for a week. Despite Gautam’s disapproval of the match because he didn’t want his sister to move so far away, Geeta was satisfied.
Her family respected her choice, and though he provided no dowry, Gautam gifted Geeta gold jewelry. She returned home five months after her wedding to reassure him that she was living the life she wanted, and he felt better about the match.
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Bahadur thought he was getting married once before, years earlier. But when his prospective wife and her family met him and his family, she decided to marry his younger brother instead. From that moment, he says rumors began to spread through Titram about Bahadur and he became an undesirable match, so he left the village and resigned himself to being a bachelor.
Geeta and Bahadur wed in West Bengal 13 years ago. The couple did not speak a shared language and knew each other for less than a week when they married. “She changed my life,” Bahadur said of his wife. | Photo by Maya Phillips
In Bahadur’s home state of Haryana, the 2023 gender ratio at birth was 916 girls to every 1000 boys, one of the lowest rates of female births in India but still a much improved rate compared to when Bahadur was born. With such an imbalanced sex ratio, Haryanvi men who make up the excess part of the male population face two options: bachelorhood or using a mediator to find a bride from out-of-state, as Bahadur’s father arranged for him.
The demand for out-of-state brides has changed Haryana at political, communal and familial levels. Politicians seek to gain the support of young male voters by running on platforms promising brides, mediators make money by striking marriage deals between families, human trafficking has arisen with underage brides and villages across Haryana are now home to women from Assam, West Bengal, Bihar and other states. In their attempt to build better futures than they could have in their home states, these women navigate cultural differences, language barriers and, often, discrimination from their community and husband’s family.
Geeta had a plan, but life in Haryana came with more barriers than she expected.
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Geeta and Bahadur shared a home with both of Bahadur’s younger brothers, their families and his father. Geeta spent the first two years of her marriage copying her sisters-in-law to learn their language and behaviors, but she says they often left her out of social gatherings, even such simple activities as fetching water from a well. They were embarrassed by her difficulties communicating in Haryanvi.
Geeta says she worked hard for her new family, but when her work ended and she was alone, she cried and thought about her home. She prayed for help.
“I can’t break off the marriage,” Geeta said. “I can’t go back home like that.”
Leaving her husband would reflect poorly on Geeta as a wife, and she would have to return to Gautam’s house with a slim chance of ever leaving to start her own family one day.
“If I leave him here, he will also be humiliated. We have to think about both of us.”
She began to turn to her husband, and as they shared their troubles with each other, Bahadur spoke slowly in Hindi rather than his usual Haryanvi dialect to help Geeta, who spoke Bengali and a bit of Hindi, understand.
“If I leave him here, he will also be humiliated,” she said. “We have to think about both of us.”
The two of them settled into their lives, Bahadur working in a shop and Geeta tending to the house and, after a few years, to their two sons, Manish and Mayank. With her children around, Geeta no longer felt lonely.
But Bahadur says his brothers looked down on his marriage, telling Bahadur and Geeta that their sons were lesser grandchildren than their own because of their Bengali heritage. They claimed that the family house, land and other possessions did not belong to Bahadur’s family.
Despite Bahadur’s insistence that he wants Geeta to be comfortable, Geeta has always chosen to wear Haryanvi clothes instead of the sarees traditionally worn by married Bengali women, explaining that sarees attract more attention to her body than she likes. She has worn a veil and covered her face in public to fit into Haryana’s more strict culture, even though it sometimes gets in her way and makes her run into things. Her sons have grown up with knowledge of just a few words of Bengali, and when she brings her family to Bengal for two or three weeks every summer, she acts as their translator.
Geeta does laundry in the courtyard of her house while Bahadur and sons stand above her on the stairs. Geeta hopes Manish and Mayank will grow up to lead good lives as Haryanvi men, and she tries to provide them with opportunities she didn’t have. “Now everything is different,” she said, remembering the problems her family faced when she was young. “We had to cook food in anger.” | Photo by Anna Pearson
“You have to adjust,” Geeta said.
As Manish and Mayank grew older, they also came into conflict with their cousins.
“Her kids would beat up my kids,” Geeta said, speaking about her sister-in-law. “She would scold and beat my kids and sometimes even throw them out of the house.”
Nine years after arriving in Haryana, when Geeta felt confident enough in her language skills and her sons were old enough to be in school, she found a job outside of her home cleaning a science teacher’s house. For years, money from the family land had gone to Bahadur’s brother Shamsher. Geeta had made her peace with this, but now she wanted to make her own money and get her family out of this house.
If Manish and Mayank bothered their aunts while Geeta was at work, they were locked outside the house until she came home. The sight of them sitting on the street, sometimes crying, only motivated her more, she said.
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Geeta is one of about 130,000 women in Haryana who have faced these circumstances, being in some way “purchased” for marriage by Haryanvi men, as Bahadur paid a mediator to arrange his marriage to Geeta. These women travel to Haryana in the hope of building a better life for themselves and their families but, in most situations, face difficult barriers of language, culture, isolation and degradation.
Tanu, a bride from Himachal Pradesh who also now lives in Peoda, about 10 kilometers from Geeta, rarely leaves her home after three years of marriage because of her difficulties adjusting to Haryanvi dialect.
“They tried to teach us with love,” Tanu said of her in-laws.
But the language, along with differences in custom like wearing a veil in public, are still foreign to Tanu. She feels comfortable in her husband’s family’s house, but the broader community is intimidating. So she cooks and cleans in her home, and in free time watches television or learns to make crafts from YouTube videos, decorating her bedroom with bright paper flowers of pink, red and yellow.
She visits her siblings back in Himachal Pradesh every few months for a week or two, and still feels connected to her home.
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Another bride, also named Geeta, is originally from Assam but has been living in Haryana for 14 years. She doesn’t know her exact age, but believes she was around 20 years old at her wedding.
Like other out-of-state brides, her first challenge was communication.
“It’s been 10 years [and] I still make mistakes,” she said, speaking quickly. “When I came here, I couldn’t understand a word. I learned slowly.”
She remembered being very scared to get married and move so far from home, and that her parents didn’t approve of such distance. Her desire to build a better future carried more weight than concerns of distance.
“I wanted to get married in a wealthy state,” she explained. “This was my standard.”
Her husband had been married before and had a daughter, but after he was widowed he couldn’t find another wife in his community. Geeta spoke to him on the phone and then met him in person two days before their wedding, and she liked him.
Geeta carries her wet laundry up to the roof to hang it out to dry. She pushed for this house to be built exactly the way she wanted it, ignoring her brother-in-law’s opinions and putting her family’s needs first. “I didn’t agree,” she explained. “I made it separately.” | Photo by Anna Pearson
Today, Geeta has four children, ages 8 to 13. Like Geeta from West Bengal, she has not taught them her native language. When she visits Assam for a month every two years, she brings two of her children and acts as their translator. While in Haryana, she doesn’t miss Assam, and while in Assam, she doesn’t think about Haryana, she says.
The loneliness she felt when she first arrived in Haryana disappeared when she had her children, and she has adjusted to Haryana’s more conservative society by veiling her face in public and not wearing jeans. She feels equally like an Assamese and a Haryanvi woman, identifying herself as Indian and encapsulating both cultures. She is glad her children are Haryanvi. Here, they can get a good education and maybe travel even farther than she did.
“If the kids study, they will get a job,” Geeta said.
“They will have their freedom. They will do whatever they want.”
Not all of Haryana’s out-of-state brides eventually settle into their new lives, or even want them.
Though neither local nor federal government statistics exist on India’s out-of-state-brides, the United Nations and other independent organizations have raised concerns over the trafficking of women and girls within India. As of 2021, 23% of marriages in Haryana include an underage bride.
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Eighteen years ago, Snehlata’s son Ajab worked as a truck driver and fell in love with a girl, Anita, from Bihar, a state just north of West Bengal. They married at the respective ages of 17 and 16, making them both underage, and moved into Snehlata’s home.
“She comes from a very poor family,” Snehlata said, explaining that Anita’s parents lived in a mud house and could afford to eat only bananas and rice. “Here she has everything. She likes it here.”
But Anita is not here. She is in Bihar with her family, and Snehlata cannot say when her daughter-in-law will return.
Snehlata emphasized Anita’s respect and dutiful nature, saying that Anita loved her more than her own daughter did.
“Her complexion is a little dark,” Snehlata concluded, “but I like her. She works for me.
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Geeta stands in the doorway of her new house in Titram Jan. 13. Building this house was an expression of freedom for Geeta and her family, and it is still a work in progress. “We will keep investing as much money as we can,” she said. “Whenever more money comes, we do something.” | Photo by Maya Phillips
One year ago, Geeta and Bahadur built their own house in Titram. Bahadur’s brother Shamsher tried to tell Geeta how to build her house, coming by regularly to judge her decisions. She ignored him.
“They get jealous of us,” she said of her husband’s family. “I am putting my own money here, so I will make it as I want.”
She still works for the science teacher’s family, and she is called “sister” by his wife and “auntie” by his children. Her sons attend school and say that they do not feel different from their peers despite their Bengali heritage.
Today, Geeta considers herself a Haryana woman, despite what her husband’s family might say, and raises her sons to be Haryanvi men.
“Now, I don’t have any problems,” she said, 13 years after arriving in Haryana. “Now, I am happy.”