In the 1960s and 1970s, the life of a District Collector was not always tension-ridden. Amid all the hassle and bustle of work, there were moments of humour, lightheartedness and plain joy. What made those occasions welcome was the fact that they came as a part of the Collector’s duties. These included the most unusual of things, such as performing marriages.
In Madhya Pradesh in those days, District Collectors were designated Marriage Officers under the Special Marriage Act, 1954, and for the Collector of a major district like Indore, occasions to act as chaplain were frequent. The reasons were many: educated young people from different religions and castes, in love with each other, were keen to tie the nuptial knot independently of parental approval; and the west was beckoning, and visa applications required submission of proof of official recognition of marital status. Another reason was the desire of many enlightened parents to keep marriage ceremonies simple.
The depressing atmosphere at the Indore Collectorate, located then in the stable yard of the erstwhile Holkar state, bore festive colours on days on which marriages were set to take place. Officials, litigants, lawyers and busybodies who thronged the Collectorate would cast an amused glance at the self-conscious brides and bridegrooms as they made their way to the Collector’s courtroom. The Collector, though forced to put on a stern look befitting the guardian of the district and the presiding officer of the court, couldn’t feign officious indifference for long and joined in the carnival mood guardedly. He felt a sense of satisfaction in administering the oath to the couples and handing over the marriage certificates to them with his best wishes for a long and happy matrimony. Distribution of sweets within the courtroom was prohibited, but needless to say it went on with tacit official nod.
One feature of the wedding calendar was the number of brides who came from the government-run Home for Destitute Women, nurturing high hopes of a lasting, happy wedlock. There were some public-spirited young men who came ready to take their hand. Experience showed that such alliances turned out to be quite durable, suggesting their social acceptance. More moving were instances of couples, both speech-challenged, expressing through hand signs their consent to marry, with joy writ large on their faces. The accompanying interpretation provided by the Superintendent of the Home for the Deaf and the Dumb was indeed superfluous. The beaming faces said it all. The rest of the weddings were more in the nature of photo shoots since foreign consulates in India, particularly of the United States, demanded a photograph of the bride and the bridegroom with the Collector.
The weddings that provided real interest, however, were those held outside the Collector’s office. The Special Marriage Act permitted the marriage officer to perform weddings at a place of choice of the parties, provided they bore the conveyance charges of the Collector and his court clerk to the venue of the wedding and back. But such occasions were not common as they made substantial demands on the Collector’s time. But every such wedding had an appeal of its own.
One of them turned out to be memorable. The Collector, as was his wont, was reluctant to solemnise the marriage outdoors but gave in to the fervent request of the groom’s father, a retired civil servant. Having agreed, he was least prepared for what was to follow. The wedding site was a park by the side of a lake, and the ceremonies were held in the shade of a cluster of trees with all the guests seated on carpets spread on the ground.
The canopy of flaming gulmohars and golden laburnums interspersed with marigold festoons, the white and pink lilies floating on the waterfront nearby, and the presence of the eager young man and the coy young lady both adorned with garlands, reminded one of a scene in a Kalidasa play. The Collector felt a quiet shame for having been unhelpful in the beginning to attend such a tastefully arranged wedding. His remorse was compounded when he discovered that one of the guests present was the first Central Vigilance Commissioner, Justice Nittoor Srinivasa Rao.
Being a marriage officer had other perquisites too. One became aware of a piece of legislation that actually validated marriages post facto. It appeared that in Bangalore in the 1930s, an evangelist by name Walter James McDonald Redwood solemnised scores of marriages in which both the bride and the bridegroom were residents of the Cantonment area, whereas he was permitted to solemnise only those marriages in which at least one of the two parties was a resident of the City area. Later, when the mistake was discovered and the validity of the former type of marriages fell into jeopardy, the situation was saved with the enactment of the Bangalore Marriages Validating Act, 1936.
Lesson: man cannot undo, wittingly or unwittingly, what the heavens have ordained.
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