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July 06, 2005

Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: Matrimonial

Matrimonial. /MAT·ruh·MON·eeyuhl/. An advertisement announcing the availability of a person for marriage. Provides some details about the person's looks and employment and lists their preferences in a potential mate. The simple act of advertising for a girlfriend landed a man some coverage by BBC. However, in India, eligible single people have been advertising their availability for marriage for several years now. When someone replies to a matrimonial ad, more complete summaries of the two peoples' lives are exchanged with the hope of finding a match.

If you have read my earlier ruminations about The Aunties' Network of arranged marriages, a matrimonial can be thought of as similar to a query posted to the network. Matrimonials differ from aunties' network messages in just two ways. First, because matrimonials appear in print or online publications, they have a much wider reach than the network of aunties accessibly from any aunty peer. As a result, they result in matches trickling in from outside one fully connected section of The Aunties' Network. Second, because they have a wider reach and are more impersonal, matrimonials contain fewer details than a query on The Aunties' Network. Queries on The Aunties' Network include significant amounts of verifiable information and sometimes include natal charts as well; details in matrimonial ads are mere teasers in comparison.

Matrimonials have led to an interesting subvocabulary of Indian English that deserves a multitude of 'Vishy's Indian English Dictionary' entries. Here's a page of sample matrimonials. Here are some explanations for words that appear in this page and in other matrimonials:

alliance

A match and the resulting coming together not just of two people but of their families as well.

bar

Constraint/consideration. Phrases like 'caste no bar' mean that the caste of a responder will not be a consideration.

wheatish

An adjective for complexion. The color of wheat -- not quite fair but not dark either, assuming a baseline Indian complexion. Some publications, adhering to the noble principle of being color blind, refuse to accept matrimonials with certain keywords in them, such as 'fair'. Clever matrimonial advertisers circumvent this restriction by substituting 'fair' with 'gori', the Hindi word for fair. White people advertising in a matrimonial shouldn't use 'fair' to describe their complexion. However, 'riceish' may work.

habits

Unhealthy habits, socially unacceptable to varying degrees, such as smoking, drinking and narcotic drugs.

domesticated

Not used in the 'When were dogs domesticated?' sense, domesticated is a term applied in particular to prospective brides that indicates a good sense for maintaining a home and cooking good food for her prospective husband.

Posted by Vishy at July 6, 2005 02:30 PM

Comments

Posted by: a at July 7, 2005 12:25 PM