Bengalis Are Falling in Love — Just Not With Each Other
For a culture so obsessed with its own superiority, why do so many marry outside the community?
When Aritrika Roy, a master’s student at Purdue, was growing up in Jharkhand, she didn’t really know many Bengalis beyond a tight-knit circle of family friends — and wasn’t interested in dating them. “I [looked] at them like ...brother[s]” Roy told The Juggernaut. She also found some of their traits, including the arrogance, kind of annoying. “They really liked to portray that they knew a great deal.” Roy would also watch astonished as the Bengali boys waited for their moms to pick them up from college, while the girls walked home on their own.
From Piku (2015) to Vicky Donor (2012) and Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023), Hindi cinema has famously depicted this contradiction: Bengalis seem obsessed with their own culture, yet tend to marry outside of it. And off-screen, there are the real-life romances of Sharmila Tagore and Tiger Pataudi, Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri, Mindy Kaling’s mother and father, Jhumpa Lahiri and her husband. Bengali-Bengali marriages seem to be becoming less common — even as data shows that over half of India marries within its own community. Why?