In February this year, Harman, a 19-year-old woman from Dhogri village in Punjab’s Jalandhar district, was busy with her wedding preparations. Still fresh out of school, she had not intended to marry so soon, but life had other plans for her. “The boy’s family was willing to cover my expenses, including tickets, and send me to Canada to study, so why not get married now?” she said.
A few months before, Harman had successfully passed the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), a widely recognised proficiency examination that scores non-native English language speakers on writing, reading, and listening skills. For Harman, the IELTS is more than just a language proficiency certificate; it is a gateway to opportunities abroad. A gateway that has since opened. She said: “Almost everyone in my class was taking it too. I scored an impressive 7.5 in the opening bands.”
The moment Harman’s score became known, her family was inundated with marriage proposals. Sitting beside Harman, her mother said: “We even got proposals from Sharmas and Jats [who are placed higher in the caste hierarchy]. People asked if Harman would be willing to marry right away.”
According to Harman’s mother, families closely follow all women students who are studying to crack the IELTS. “They come to us and say, oh, your daughter is doing IELTS, when will the score come? When they learn she has a good score, they say, let’s talk to the family.”
This has become a common scenario in Punjab. An IELTS score has now become significant social “capital” in marriage proposals, more so than other achievements. The reason is simple and rooted in the overarching aspiration of Punjab’s youth to go abroad. It has spawned a unique arrangement based on a simple premise. If a young Punjabi man cannot migrate on his own, he can capitalise on a woman’s IELTS score or other qualifications by marrying her. The groom and his family then undertake to sponsor the young woman’s education abroad. Once the girl goes abroad, they wait until she secures a spouse visa, post which their son can join her there permanently. Marriage to an IELTS top-scorer has become the latest alternative emigration tool, meant to circumvent the legal emigration system.
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Manvinder Kaur, professor at the Department cum Centre for Women’s Studies & Development at Panjab University, said that these contractual marriages acknowledge the reality of women’s lives. She said: “In situations where women lack basic freedom in their hometowns, pursuing such marriages might be viewed as a pragmatic means to seek freedom and escape from subordination.”
Pointing to the growing trend of young people aspiring to live abroad, Kaur said: “Earlier, it was primarily boys from the Majha and Doab regions of Punjab, but now even the Malwa region is seeing this trend. Entire villages are marked by vacant houses.”
Varinderjit Singh, 33, runs an IELTS institute near Harman’s village. A management diploma holder who taught himself English during his years in New York, Varinderjit returned to Punjab some 12 years ago to begin his career as an IELTS coach in Jalandhar district’s Adampur. Noting the high demand for English-language training, he eventually opened his own institute in Kathar village in 2016. His clientele grew steadily, with candidates coming in from the many surrounding villages. Reflecting on the motivations of his students, Varinderjit remarked: “The rush to join an IELTS course should not be confused with the rush to learn English. IELTS is secondary, Canada is primary. People are clear about this goal.” His institute thrives on the increasing allure of Canada, rather than on the genuine desire to master the English language.
In Jalandhar, commercial premises with numerous coaching centres for IELTS and similar qualifying exams are a common sight. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Varinderjit highlights the gender dynamics in exam performance. “Most of our top performers are girls. Look at the leader board,” he said, pointing to the wall behind him. “It’s predominantly women. On the other hand, many men struggle for two to three years to pass, and sometimes they still fail.” Varinderjit acknowledges the institute’s unintended reputation as a quasi-marriage bureau in Punjab. “Almost every second day, a man or a family comes in, asking if there is an eligible girl excelling in classes or if someone has successfully cleared the IELTS.”
Shivani (name changed), a 25-year-old from Kathar village, returned to India from Canada in 2022. She had entered Canada through a contractual marriage four years earlier. Reflecting on her experience, she said: “I married and after six months I went to Canada. From the moment I entered Canada, there was constant pressure to get my partner over as soon as possible.” The trip to Canada was Shivani’s first-ever venture outside her village, and she found herself at sea, grappling with many new challenges. Apart from navigating documentation and finances, she had to contend with persistent demands to expedite her husband’s emigration papers. Over time, however, the hardships in the foreign country became so overwhelming that she decided Canada was not the place she wanted to live in. She returned and ultimately filed for divorce.
Shivani graduated from an English-medium school. She estimates that 90 per cent of her classmates planned to prepare for the IELTS instead of enrolling in a college in India. Nearly six lakh students in Punjab take the English proficiency test each year. Shivani said: “Everyone said they wanted to go abroad, so I thought, ‘I want to go abroad too.’ At that time, I did not know how challenging life there would be.”
For the past one year, Shivani has been working at a visa agency in Jalandhar and credits her IELTS score and subsequent time abroad as the reasons she got the job. She said that the visa agency too is a matrimonial bureau of sorts. Every now and then boys struggling with low IELTS scores approach the agency to ask about girls with high scores.
Bending patriarchy
These young women appear to be quite comfortable being wooed for their examination scores. Shivani explained: “If a woman from a middle-class background wants to study, her parents are usually unwilling or lack the means to invest in her education. Just imagine someone approaching such young women and saying, ‘You can study and do whatever you want, just pass the IELTS exam with good scores and marry our boy.’ I believe women who have never imagined stepping out beyond their own city or village will find it hard to say no.”
The reluctance of parents to invest in sending their daughters to study abroad, considering it secondary to their sons’ education, is not new. As Harman said when her mother briefly left the room: “We come from a middle-class family. We have only one acre of land, which my parents would happily sell to send my brother to Canada. Why would they spend that money on a girl? A woman is going to end up in someone else’s house, right?”
The quest of families to find a woman who can successfully pave the way for their sons to go abroad extends far beyond the confines of IELTS institutes and visa centres. It stretches into neighbourhoods, matrimonial sites (with requirements such as “Brides with IELTS needed”), and even spills over into public spaces.
Sukhjit Kaur, 22, an IELTS aspirant from Sham chaurasi village in Hoshiarpur district, recalls waiting at the bus stop on her way to Jalandhar for coaching classes. Random men would approach her to inquire about her progress with IELTS. “It used to creep me out,” she said.
As Punjab’s youth ardently pursue opportunities abroad, patriarchal systems have devised new ways to use women to further these ambitions. Yet, such marriage contracts are not always successful.
Sunita Sharma, 46, an experienced matchmaker, has run a successful marriage bureau from her home in Jalandhar city for 12 years, matching clients both in the district and abroad. She told Frontline that many times the young women who are contracted to go abroad simply refuse to call in their husbands once they are overseas. “Sometimes the girl finds someone else there or simply wants to go abroad independently, using the man as a tool. The women leverage the man’s family to facilitate their own journey abroad.” According to the NRI Wing of the Punjab Police, 186 complaints related to contractual marriages have been filed in the State since 2019. Each complaint alleges that the woman “deceived” the man after going abroad.
Highlights
- An IELTS score has become significant social “capital” in marriage proposals in Punjab. The reason is simple: if a Punjabi man cannot migrate alone, he marries a woman who has successfully cleared the IELTS.
- The groom and his family then sponsor the young woman’s education abroad. Once the girl goes abroad, they wait until she secures a spouse visa, after which their son can join her there permanently.
- This has upped the woman’s value in marital partnerships and even led to a few inter-caste marriages. Still, the larger issue here involves the desperation of young people to go abroad since job opportunities in India are few and far between.
Potential for transformation
The deeply entrenched patriarchy that willingly uses women as stepping stones gets a shock when women strategically navigate the systems created to exploit them and figure out how to thrive within those very systems. Balvir Singh, a Provincial/State Police Service officer in Patiala district, manages the NRI Wing. He emphasised that such betrayals not only affect the young men but also their families. “The entire family bears the burden of debt,” he said. The cases fall under Section 420 of the former Indian Penal Code, involving cheating.
Sandeep Singh, also a member of the Provincial/State Police Service and part of the NRI Wing in Amritsar, said: “While numerous cases are brought to our attention, complaints are officially registered only where clear evidence exists, backed by documented proof and a proper sequence of events. The surge in such incidents is directly linked to the heightened desire to live abroad.” But, Sandeep Singh added: “Authorities cannot dictate the ways in which people choose to enter into marriage. It is a matter of personal choice.”
Another interesting fallout is how, given that the institution of marriage often perpetuates the caste system, Harman’s success in the IELTS exam became a transformative moment. It not only opened doors for her to explore opportunities abroad, with prospective grooms eager to invest in her for a spouse visa, it also blurred the boundaries of caste that had long defined her identity.
When this writer was still in Harman’s village, her marriage to Sahil, the groom Harman’s mother had referred to as “Sharma da munda” (the Sharma boy) from the same village, was finalised. Sahil and his family were beaming with excitement and happiness. Sahil’s father said with reference to Harman: “Oh, she is very good! Most importantly, she has excelled in English in our village. She is our English-speaking daughter-in-law.”
English as a tool of empowerment
Does this mean that the currency of language, specifically English, blurs the lines of caste? The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu considered language to be not only a tool of communication but also a reflection of power relations and positions among its users. Scholars like Kancha Ilaiah have argued that English-language proficiency can empower marginalised groups by granting them access to knowledge, opportunities, and a broader platform for expression and representation. In her poem “Mother English”, the revered 19th century educationist Savitri Phule passionately exclaimed: “In such a dismal time of ours / Come Mother English, this is your hour. / Throw off the yoke of redundant belief / Break open the door, walk out in relief.”
Dhiren Borissa, a Dalit queer activist, poet, and urban sexual geographer, said: “English gives you a sense of upward mobility. And if it allows you upward mobility, it helps you to be in the realm of desire because English is one of the attributes through which desire is transacted.”
The larger issue involves the reasons why young people in Punjab are using desperate means to go abroad. In this image, a large poster of an immigration consulting agency lures hopefuls in Rajpura town in Punjab, in 2022. | Photo Credit: Krishna N. Das/ REUTERS
Borissa added: “Having proficiency in English can give you an advantage, perhaps because it enables you to negotiate class barriers more effectively. This carries the potential of a love relationship transcending caste lines, even if it is fleeting or temporary. When it comes to marriage, one can’t confidently say the same.”
Considering how English has been instrumental in the upward mobility of marginalised castes, one wonders if the benefits of English proficiency are now manifesting themselves in the form of contractual intercaste marriages. According to an experimental study conducted by the International Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, proficiency in English significantly impacts the marriage market in Delhi.
The study revealed that including English language skills in a marriage profile led to a 38 per cent increase in the number of interested individuals. Moreover, mentioning English proficiency in the profile of a marginalised-caste woman resulted in a significant 57.7 percentage point increase in the probability of her matching with a privileged-caste man (and by extension, marrying up in the caste hierarchy).
Such findings are pointers that English language proficiency can indeed widen one’s range of potential marriage partners and contribute to breaking down caste barriers in the marriage market. In India, only 5 per cent of marriages are intercaste, and the majority still opts for arranged unions. The term “arranged marriage” is not seen as one implying a lack of respect for the couple’s desires or the absence of romantic feelings. Rather, it is seen to signify unions where emotional affection is not a prerequisite and where the stability derived from established social and kinship networks is prioritised.
Vidyasagar Sharma, a scholar in the faculty of sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany echoed this, emphasising that marriage in Indian society is deeply intertwined with social norms like the belief in caste. Sharma said: “In a sequence where a girl’s proficiency in English leads to her qualifying for the IELTS, which in turn enables a spouse visa, what is the underlying currency of transaction? Language.”
Canny calculations
However, it might be far-fetched to directly correlate English-language proficiency to a breaking down of caste barriers through marriage. The handful of intercaste marriages that happen as a result of the desire to go abroad are often cases of class replacing caste as a marriage requisite: when a person from a privileged caste chooses to marry someone from a marginalised caste who has better educational qualifications, he effectively exchanges his caste status for the educational advantage of his partner; the marginalised-caste spouse might not be considered an equal partner in the marriage.
As the journalist Aravind pointed out in his 2021 essay, “Re-Reading Ambedkar’s Insistence on Inter-Caste Marriages”: “The tiny percentage of inter-caste marriages that take place in India is hardly a result of Hindu society acknowledging the worth of ideas like liberty, equality, and fraternity, rather they are ‘class-supplanting-caste marriages’.” In any case, the effectiveness of intercaste marriage as a means of transcending caste divides is doubtful too. In The Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar himself amended his initial statement in favour of intercaste marriages by saying: “The real remedy is to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the Shastras.”
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Police officer Sandeep Singh pointed to the canny calculations that lie behind most of the IELTS marriages in Punjab. “Individuals enter the union solely as a means to migrate abroad. Many times, the marriage becomes devoid of any significance once both parties set foot in a foreign land,” he said, which negates the possibilities of social change coming through these unions.
Amit Ahuja, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, echoed Sandeep Singh: “In these IELTS marriages, the benefits do not extend beyond economic considerations. I see these as strictly transactional, with economic motivations taking centre stage.” However, he said, “Since the man contributes financial resources and the woman contributes education, these marriages appear to promise greater equality in terms of both caste and gender as both parties have significant leverage in the arrangement.” While it would be an exaggeration to attribute societal transformation to contractual marriages, “they do signify a shift in societal dynamics in how individuals interact, particularly as women from lower castes wield increased influence”, Ahuja said.
The larger question around IELTS marriages involves the nature of the society that encourages such unions. Professor Kaur said: “It is a question of the overall development in Punjab. Why are young people using such desperate means to go abroad? The issue needs to be framed as a broader social and development question.” The State government has only recently initiated coaching programmes for admissions to polytechnic schools and Industrial Training Institutes. It is the lack of opportunities at home that seems to be fuelling the desperation to migrate overseas.
Anuj Behal is an independent journalist and urban researcher primarily focussing on issues of housing rights, urban justice, gender, and sexuality.
