New found freedom

I met Pintu Devi last August but the shadows on her young, beautiful face made it hard for me to get her face out of my mind. She was barely 18, dressed in a simple salwar kameez. It looked like the weight of the world was on her shoulders. Her little brother had recently died and they were still in mourning. Her father Sohanlal was with her, and broke down often as she impassively told me her story. This is what she said.

In rural Rajasthan, the practice of mauser is apparently quite commonly followed when an elder dies. Within 13 days of the death, the unmarried members of the family are married in a communal wedding. The auspiciousness of marriage is supposed to offset the ritual pollution that the death has brought. It was in accordance with this arcane custom that a six-year-old Pintu was married off to a 15-year-old bridegroom. “I didn’t even know the boy’s family,” Sohanlal said, adding “I just went along with whatever the elders in the family decreed”. Ten marriages took place that day, of which, four were of children. The youngest participant was barely two. “Even I was so young, I didn’t know what was happening during the ceremony,” she told me.

Life went back to normal after the marriage. Pintu continued to live with her parents till the summer of 2018. She was 18 then, and the boy’s family began demanding that she be sent to her marital home. “By then we had learnt that my father-in-law was a criminal,” she recounted. “I didn’t want to go to their house,” she said. Luckily, her father, who was a tractor operator, didn’t have enough savings to pay for the wedding jewellery and feast. “When he tried to stall, the boy’s family got so aggressive that we decided to annul the marriage,” Pintu said.

Pintu and her family endured threats, aggression and barbs from the boy’s family as well as the larger community after that. Even more traumatic were the many trips she had to take to the family court. She realised that although performing a child marriage is illegal in India, getting it annulled in court is not that easy. “If it hadn’t been for Saarthi Trust, I would never have been able to do it...” she said. Dr Kriti Bharti, founder of the Trust, gave her legal advise as well as psychological counseling to help her tide through this phase.

Finally, in December 2018, over 12 years after she had been so unfairly married off, Pintu won her freedom in court. “I wish I could make sure that no other girl had to go through what I did,” she told me.

But sadly, child marriage continues to enjoy social sanction in Rajasthan. “The authorities publicise the child marriages prevented on akha teej, but conveniently fail to prevent marriages taking place the year round under mauser,” says Bharti. Which is why a nameless chill ran down my spine when I saw a picture of Pintu, smiling victoriously outside court after her marriage had been finally annulled. I couldn’t help wondering if the shadows I’d seen earlier on her face had not disappeared, but simply found another little girl to prey upon.