Vision of Vivaaha - the Hindu Marriage system

     Marriages are considered to be one of the core traditions of Hindu culture. 
 According to Vedas, marriage is one of the Ashrams in human life, referred as Grihastha Ashram. 

There are four Ashrams in total. Ashram is a stage of duties to be completed for the targeted growth guided by Vedas. They are Brahmacharya, Grihastha, Vanaprastha & Sanyasa Ashram, each lasting for the span of twenty one years generally. 

At the end of the Brahmacharya Ashram, a person is expected to get married. 

If he doesn’t want that, he may skip this Ashram and directly get in to the Sanyasa Ashram. 

However his relatives and parents have every right to convince him for the marriage.

Now let’s get in to the falsified notions that people have about our traditions when it comes to marriage.

The first argument that people use is that – arrange marriages are the traditional way of choosing your life partner and therefore the right one. Love marriages on the other hand are considered wrong and a harmful effect on our society from the western culture. 

Those who use this argument do not understand the concept of Vedic marriage. There are six kinds of marriages that have been mentioned in Rig-Veda. 

One of those six forms is Brahma Vivah. Brahma Vivah – is a marriage blessed by God, in which a young man and woman fall in love with each other and decide to get married.

 According to Rig Veda, parents should encourage such a marriage. This is essentially a form of love marriage and therefore a part of tradition, and not a western effect.

Another myth is about the ceremonies that are to be conducted during the marriages. As per Vedas, all the mantras have to be chanted by the bride and groom, and the family members. However what we see in today’s marriages – only the Prohit is chanting all the mantras. There is hardly anything that bride and groom do in their marriage ceremonies, except listening to those chants. 

There is no mention of exchanging gifts during the marriage. 

One serious issue that comes again and again is that of inter-caste marriages. And people oppose them again by using cast-lifestyle as an argument. 

And if we talk about Varnas , they are super-sets of castes, the Vedas are not very strict whether one should marry a girl from same Varna or not. 

Instead more focus has been given on the Vedic-education and performance of connected duties for them who are willing to get married. 

Also, the Varnas were counted in three manners. first one is by the tradition of family one selects to take birth, second one is by karma one selects for survival, and third one is the attitude one selects to lead the life. 

Marriage remains an institution even today as it was in the ancient era. The idea of marriage in our tradition is a beautiful one but unfortunately, we hardly follow that idea. 

We are more concerned about the rituals , they actually play the roll of cover to take the content to. 

If we follow Vedic understanding, marriage is one of the sixteen Samskaras that one needs to do in their lives in order to move towards intelligent manifestation. 

The idea really will be far more graceful if we practice it in its original form.