Hi PS, hope you’re doing well. I have kind of a stupid question but I always love receiving your input. You mentioned once how for Kushi, Arnav’s “I love you dammit” was all she needed in order to fully be sure about their marriage. But legally they’re married right? Because she can sign things in his name and Arnav keeps saying “my legally wedded wife”. If their marriage is legally registered, why did Dadi make it sound like it was illegitimate in society? Thank you in advance :)
Hello!
The canon can be ambiguous at times on this point. I believe they are legally married because -- as you said -- Arnav runs around yelling “legally wedded wife”. That doesn’t seem like something he’d say unless she really was.
(I don’t think she can legally sign things in his name. That scene with the fake lawyer was just that -- fake. It was a ploy and I doubt that dude was a real lawyer.)
However, in their marriage was illegitimate in the eyes of Society™️. There are two things happening here: their marriage wasn’t religiously valid and they eloped.
Their marriage isn’t religiously valid
They went to a temple, he put sindoor and a mangalsutra on her. But that’s not a marriage. One still needs the vows, in the form of the saptapadi and phere. The mangal mantra needs to be said. And they need to be declared man and wife by the priest. Khushi had the marks of a married Hindu woman but she wasn’t married.
It’s the difference between exchanging rings on a playground, or saying vows, exchanging rings that have been blessed by a priest, and being pronounced man and wife in the eyes of a Church. The marks of marriage are the rings but they do not, in themselves, constitute a religiously valid marriage. In the same way, sindoor and a mangalsutra are the marks of a marriage but they do not, all by themselves, mean a couple has a religiously valid marriage.
And to a religious families, such as the Raizadas and Guptas, the legal papers mean very little, it’s the religious validation that matters.
They eloped
The two issues are related and often conflated, but the other problem is that no one was there to see them get married. Their families assumed that while they ran away to get married, it was done with the proper rituals and customs. They assumed it was religiously valid.
The revelation that it wasn’t threw up another issue -- culturally, marriages sort of need a stamp of approval from Society™️. During Khushi and Payal’s Muhn Dekhayi, the rude Society woman (Sumitra bhabhi) asked point blank whether Arnav and Khushi had gotten married so quickly, and in secret, because they had to (that is, she was pregnant).
And that’s what some people assume if you don’t have a three month long lead up with all the customary events and rituals and don’t invite everyone you’ve ever met and all their relatives.
They had a live-in relationship
While their marriage might have been legally sound, it wasn’t sanctioned by religion or Society™️. This means they basically had a live-in relationship according to what the Raizada and Gupta families believed.
When Dadi said “What you’re calling a marriage is called by some other names by our society” she meant that Arnav was living with his lover.
There’s a certain poetry to the way Khushi’s horror at living together without marriage (largely driven by what Society™️ taught her to think) came back in the form of her living with the man she loves for six months in a marriage that Society didn’t think was complete.











