Looking for the right man in a foreign land

Anita Jain is the kind of woman who can keep you up all night chatting about everything from sex and family to culture and literature, with insight and wit. (I know; it was 3 a.m. my time when we finished our interview, which turned out to be the most convenient way to bridge her time zone in New Delhi with mine in California.) But is she the kind of woman you’d want to marry?  Or, more to the point, can she find the man she’s looking to marry?  That’s the question at the heart of Jain’s memoir, Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India (Bloomsbury, 2008), in which she decides, after years of dismal dating experiences in the West, to move to her parents’ homeland of India to see if she can find The One. 

Jain grew up in northern California, went to Harvard, and worked as an international journalist before moving back to New York, where she had dalliances with too many men who didn’t want “anything serious.” A child of Indian immigrants, Jain had always been less than receptive to her parents attempts at finding a mate for her.  Eager to settle down without just settling, Jain decided to move New Delhi, where she guessed that the combination of urban lifestyles and traditional values might lead her to her perfect match.

Through a combination of drunken adventures, marriage-oriented online dating, semi-arranged marriage matches, and even a real date or two, she carefully navigates the minefield of being single, thirty-something, and a perennial outsider in a country that is rapidly changing its ideas and practices around dating, youthful independence, and marriage itself. 

Minal Hajratwala: So far you haven’t found The One in India, but you’re staying there for now – what have you found there that’s making you stay?

Anita Jain: I'm hoping to move into film, either writing or production, and I think it's a great place to be for that. Plus the U.S. economy is in the toilet!

MH: It sure is. And I could definitely see your book becoming the Bollywood version of “Sex and the City”...

AJ: I'm not so into the SATC comparisons. I really think my book is a serious exploration of the New India as I see it. That part is very important to me. My own search is a tool I use to tell the story of the New India.  So it does raise my hackles a bit when the book only gets noticed for the racier elements. The way it's written is I think very serious, almost grave at points.

MH: Agreed. Sometimes we think of the New India or the New China or whatever as just catching up to or mimicking the West. Aside from sexual liberalization, what are some of the distinct elements of the New India as you see it?

AJ: The fact that it never really is a New India. It's always brushing up against the old, almost in every second, and I try to describe that as well.  Here you have a [rock] band, but one of the guys has taken a very serious traditional oath [to never smoke, drink, eat meat, or engage in physical relations with women before marriage].  Or here I am living it up in Delhi, but thirty minutes away I have family that hasn't changed a bit from the previous generation. It's all so terribly interesting to me.

MH: Do you think there is a growing gap, maybe a generation gap or rural/urban gap? Or do you think the more traditional-minded elders, say, are learning to change along with the younger generation and becoming more “broad-minded”? Or it's just all side-by-side and in tension...?

AJ: Tradition-minded elders in the city are changing, many of them, if they have children that are adopting certain lifestyle choices, i.e. to be gay or to live with someone before marriage or to have relationships before marriage. But I think certain parts of India will take a long while to change.  Like the character Nandini: She lives with her boyfriend, for the last two years, but her parents still expect her to marry a Rajput.

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