INTO A CRAMPED, stuffy room on the outskirts of Delhi shuffles a middle-aged woman in a yellow sari. Giving her name as Nirmala, she launches into an account of a marriage gone horribly wrong. Her husband has become a drunkard, she says. He often comes in late and is sick on the floor. When drunk, he can be violent: recently he tried to strangle Nirmala, injuring her neck. Nirmala’s father- and mother-in-law, with whom she and her husband share a home, are bullies who accuse her of lying in bed all day. So she has moved out to live with her parents.

Nirmala’s husband, Chiranjit, has also turned up at the hearing, which is a mahila panchayat—a sort of informal marriage court run by women. He disputes little of what his wife has said. He points out, however, that he has defended Nirmala against his brother, who has tried to beat her. He also says that she has attacked him on occasion.

The marriage would appear to be over. But that is not the conclusion drawn by Nirmala or Chiranjit, both of whom say they wish to be reconciled. The two dozen local women who have gathered to hear their case agree. Chiranjit should stop abusing his wife, defend her against his parents and clean up after himself when he is sick, they declare. For her part, Nirmala should reduce the sum she is demanding from her husband to get her injured neck treated. Fine, says Nirmala. She will return home, though if things do not improve, she will file for divorce.

Marriage in India is much more about binding families, and much less about personal choice and fulfilment

India remains a highly traditional society. Marriage is much more about binding families, and much less about personal choice and fulfilment, than in most other parts of the world. Arranged marriages are so much the norm that people who find their own partners sometimes seek to disguise the fact. Among Hindus, caste barriers appear insurmountable.

But change is afoot, especially in the crowded, sprawling cities where a growing proportion of Indians live. Astonishingly quickly, India’s most important social institution is being reshaped. Traditionalists loathe these changes; Westernised elites celebrate them. But even they underestimate the transformation.

Many young Indians now have mobile phones, which make secret courting easier. The growth of marriage websites and, more recently, dating websites has given them more control over the search for a partner. And India is becoming wealthier, more urban and more educated. A quarter of young Indians now go to university, and half of all students are women. Because marriage is usually delayed until people have finished studying and found a job, brides and grooms are growing older. As recently as 2005-06, 47% of Indian women in their early 20s were married before their 18th birthday. By 2015-16 the share had fallen to 27%—and just 18% in the cities.

Pandit Rajesh Sharma, a Hindu priest with a sideline as a marriage broker, says that power has shifted over the past 15 years or so. Although parents might seek marriage partners for their children, the final decision now rests with the young, especially among the urban middle classes. One large survey shows that the more educated the woman, the more likely she is to have met or communicated with her husband before the wedding day (see chart).

The perfectly chaste bride is going out of fashion, too, says Ajit Singh, a private investigator in Delhi. Mr Singh has a theatrical detective’s hat and dark glasses, but spends much of his time on the unglamorous task of checking out prospective marriage partners on behalf of parents. Women’s families usually want to know whether a man is as affluent as he says he is, and whether his mother is a bully. Men’s parents, for their part, want to know about a prospective bride’s romantic entanglements. To them, Mr Singh delivers a warning. It is a good idea to find out whether a girl currently has a serious boyfriend and whether she has been engaged before, he says. But prying any further will only lead to disappointment. “Everybody has a past,” he explains.

Caste is weakening more than appearances suggest. Amit Ahuja, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-author Susan Ostermann have tested it by signing up eligible grooms to three of India’s largest marriage websites. The men, who were very similar in every respect other than their caste, contacted women and measured how they responded. Many of these men seemed to be snubbed just because of their background. For example, only 33% of affluent upper-caste women responded to advances from successful lower-caste men. Intriguingly, though, 60% of less affluent upper-caste women expressed an interest in such men. That suggests Hindus now see caste not as an impenetrable barrier but as a bonus in the marriage market, like a university education or fair skin.

Sometimes urban anonymity and technology enable young people to challenge more fundamental social rules. In Shashi Garden, a slum near the centre of Delhi, live two newlyweds, Shazia and Subobh. They are an Indian rarity: a mixed Hindu-Muslim couple. They met when Subobh rented an annexe of Shazia’s parents’ house, from which he ran a mobile-phone business. The courting couple talked long into the night on their mobile phones. When the two sets of parents eventually learned about the romance, they were deeply shocked. But they accepted it, and the marriage went ahead.

These changes seem disconcertingly quick. The West took centuries to articulate an ideal of companionate marriage, and decades after that to elaborate social codes around dating and premarital sex, points out Ira Trivedi, a novelist who has written a book about marriage in India. In her country everything is happening at once. Until recently, she points out, many Indian men were unaccustomed to the sight of a woman’s exposed upper arms. Suddenly they can download Tinder, a dating app created in Silicon Valley.

Conservatives consider the changes outrageous. Informal male-dominated courts known as khap panchayats strive to prevent inter-caste marriages (and, it is whispered, wink at honour killings). Hindu nationalists fume about “love jihad”—marriages between Hindus and Muslims in which the Hindu partner converts to Islam. India’s Supreme Court is currently hearing a case brought by a middle-aged Hindu man whose daughter had married a Muslim whom she had met at medical college. A lower court had annulled the marriage, declaring that the new bride was “weak and vulnerable” and ought to have consulted her parents before the wedding.

For Madhu Purnima Kishwar, a culturally conservative feminist, nothing less than the future of Indian society is at stake. Love marriages—the Indian term for unions conducted in defiance of parents’ wishes—do not last, she says. And when marriage ceases to be a family concern and becomes a purely private matter, family obligations of all kinds are forgotten. If Indian parents relinquish their control over their children’s marriages, the country will be on a slippery slope to Western-style teenage pregnancies and old people left to moulder in retirement homes.

This is a caricature of the West—where, in fact, teenage pregnancies are rarer than they are in India. But conservatives are right to fear changes to marriage. There is indeed a link between arranged marriage and wider family obligations. Formally, at least, much of India is patrilocal: married couples are expected to live with the husband’s parents. If a man’s parents help him pick a bride, it is because they are also picking a live-in companion and, eventually, a nurse for their dotage.

Cracks in the system

Once this web of obligations begins to fail, it can collapse quickly. What should worry conservative Indians is not so much that their country will go the way of America but that it will follow Japan. Arranged marriage was the norm in Japan before the second world war, and many retired Japanese lived with their children. Today arranged marriage is almost unknown in Japan, and children feel little obligation to take in their aged parents.

In India, meanwhile, marriage is also quietly eroding from below. Nirmala’s threat notwithstanding, slum-dwellers whose marriages collapse seldom bother with divorce. Instead they separate from their spouses and take up with new partners. Sometimes they announce that they are now married to their new loves. Technically this is illegal, but nobody seems minded to interfere. “In all these years I have hardly ever seen a prosecution for bigamy,” says Gouri Choudhury of Action India, a charity, who has been working with poor city women since the 1970s.

Nervously and unsteadily, India is letting go of old ways and groping towards something that resembles Western marriage. At the same time the West is in one sense turning more Indian. The idea that the best marriage partner is someone with the same family background and belonging to precisely the same social group seems to be rooted in the subcontinent. But something that looks remarkably like caste marriage is becoming increasingly common in rich countries.