Arranged marriage

In a new series, I will combine photos and short sound clips. In this first contribution a fragment of a women’s song, recorded in Varanasi (India). Local women sing about a young bride who doesn’t want to leave for her husband’s parents’ house (in the song ‘sasural‘) for she fears many problems  …

Aarti's marriage | Varanasi, India

[mp3player width=150 height=20 config=fmp_jw_widget_config.xml file=http://www.mirjamletsch.com/women-song.mp3] © recorded by Mirjam Letsch

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When Aarti, daughter of the local midwife, was married off, there were mainly tears. Never had she seen her husband and she was afraid of that first night, about which the women of the neighborhood had warned her so often. I photographed her marriage and the birth of her first child, one year later.

This entry was posted on vrijdag, januari 14th, 2011 at 15:34. It is filed under Blog Home, Image & Sound and tagged with arranged marriage, Benares, India, marriage, song, traditional, Uttar Pradesh, Varanasi, women's songs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.