When Prutha Satpute returned to her family home in the city of Nashik, Maharashtra with Paul Duran-Lemos, a white American filmmaker who grew up in an American Christian household, her parents were taken aback.
Satpute’s parents always knew their daughter would not choose the route of arranged marriage. As a child, she celebrated Hindu festivals and listened with interest as her grandmother told her stories about deities, but her personal faith was weak. She was never as religious as her mother. Moving to the United States for her studies only distanced Satpute further from Hinduism.
When she moved to the U.S. in 2019, Satpute hadn’t expected the COVID-19 pandemic to keep her isolated in her apartment. Her parents used their life savings to pay for her education at the University of Southern California, her dream college. Seeking some excitement in her life, Satpute signed up on dating apps like Bumble and Tinder. After speaking with a man named Paul on Bumble for a month and a half, Satpute decided to go on her first date with him.
“It was almost like we clicked from day one, like the [first] date is still going on,” Satpute said, reminiscing about the beginning of their three-year relationship. “It never finished — we got married on our first date, and we’re living together on our first date. We never had any long-distance things separately, or something like that. It was just love at first sight, I suppose.”
India is home to a diverse group of religions. With growing polarization threatening the country’s commitment to secularism, Indians both living in and outside of India are wary about marrying someone from another religion.
According to a survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 97% of both Hindu and Muslim Indian Americans reported being somewhat or very comfortable with close friends from different religions. But only 52% of Hindus report being very comfortable with a close friend who is Muslim. 46% of Muslims said the same about a Hindu friend.
Respondents felt similarly when asked about their children marrying outside their religion. But the divide between groups is thinning among younger generations of Indians, particularly those who live in the U.S.
As undergraduates at USC, Jay and Ayesha Soni met once in 2002 with little fanfare. But a year and a half later, the two met again and decided to go on a date.
“You know, we’re never gonna get married,” were the first words Ayesha said to Jay during that first outing. Jay Soni was a North Indian Hindu and she was a South Indian Muslim.
Two years later, she had changed her mind.
Soni gave his parents an ultimatum: three months to accept the fact that he was marrying a Muslim woman. They could get on board or not.
“And I was like Dad, come on, this is my choice,” he said. “We’ve actually thought about how this could work and we think it can. And you’re not marrying her, I am.”
Soni, who is now the president of real estate development company Xebec, has three children ranging from ages six to 15. He was never very religious and, despite his parents’ disappointment, he agreed to raise them as Muslims. But the family also celebrates Hindu and Muslim festivals.
While some Indian Americans like Soni are more open to mixed marriages, interfaith couples in India often feel societal pressure and fear physical intimidation from right-wing groups. In 2020, Indian police in the Uttar Pradesh state interrupted a wedding between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman. They arrested the groom under the new anti-conversion law inspired by the threat of “love jihad,” a conspiracy theory that posits Muslim men marry Hindu women to convert them to Islam. The bride’s father filed the complaint against the man.
In a report about religious tolerance and segregation in India, the Pew Research Center found that Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Jains agreed it is important to stop marriages outside of their religious group.
Ishan Singh, a student at USC, comes from the Bhumihar Brahmin caste in Bihar and his family practices Hinduism. Bhumihars are known as the caste group that owns most Indian land.
Singh said, while he has plenty of friends from other religious groups, he wants to follow his family’s desire for him to marry a Hindu girl.
“In India, a house is a house because a woman makes it a house,” Singh said. “Otherwise men are just lazy creatures. So it’s very important for a mother to get a daughter-in-law who keeps the family together, who’s the binding strength, who’s the glue to the family. And she thinks that if she gets someone from her caste, [the daughter-in-law] would at least know better.”
Other Indians living in the U.S. have more lenient attitudes toward interfaith dating and marriage. Dr. Jayesh Shah, the president of the Jain Center of Southern California, came to the U.S. in 1982 and has two children who are both in their thirties. Dr. Shah describes his family as originally being “very orthodox” regarding Jainism, but they did not pressure their children to adhere to strict religious rules. His daughter chose to marry another Jain man, but the son of his wife’s brother dated several Jains and Hindus before finally marrying a Hindu woman.
“We wanted to keep harmony in the family and unity in the family was more important than the one aspect of just the religion,” Dr. Shah said.
Satpute and Duran-Lemos were married in 2022 on Halloween. At the end of this year, they will fly to India and marry in a Hindu ceremony with her parents present.
Since her marriage, Satpute has attempted to reconnect with her Hindu culture. She brought home an idol of Ganesh, a Hindu deity with an elephant’s head and four arms. Her mother has given her advice on how to pray and perform rituals. Last November, Satpute and her roommate invited friends — both Indian and non-Indian — to their apartment for a Diwali celebration.
Now, years after the pandemic and the alienation she felt from her old self and her new identity, Satpute is celebrating Hindu festivals again. This period in her life coincided with the time she met Duran-Lemos — someone she could share her childhood religious experiences with, and all the movies based on mythology that she used to watch as a kid.
“I made him ask for my hand in marriage to my parents in my mother tongue,” Satpute said. “So he had to learn how to say things in my mother tongue. And it went really great, and they were very happy, and my dad was like, ‘how’s he saying all this? Who taught him all that?’ I did. So they are over the moon with having him as their son-in-law.”