Hello everyone, it is I, your Feisty Indian Aunty who just watched Meenakshi Sundareshwar on Netflix with absolute delight. I came across the movie as it was trending on the Netflix Top 10 here in Malaysia and being a die-hard romantic, I just couldn’t help but click play. Now, this isn’t the kind of story that I usually encounter in my Mills and Boon reading. It is, however, a story that I have come across many time in real life. This isn’t about two people meeting, dating, falling in love, and living in wedded bliss for ever after. This is about an arranged marriage and the blossoming of love.
This story begins with an arranged marriage. It starts at the meeting between two families who do not realize that their wedding agent had made a terrible mistake. The potential groom, Sundareshwar (Abhimanyu Dasani), goes to the wrong house and instead meets Meenakshi (Sanya Malhotra). Both the bride and the groom are very attractive and when they meet, there is a spark, but the both of them soon realize that there’s been a huge error.
Before they can call the whole meeting off, however, the bride’s grandfather intervenes and decides that both But the bride’s grandfather decided that Meenakshi and Sundareshwar are destined to be together. The two of them get married, are forced by circumstance into a long-distance marriage, go through the usual ups and downs, joy and heartbreak, leaving us with a story that truly strikes at the core of what it means to work through an arranged marriage in the 21st century.
The thing that made this movie so special to me was its setting and how it ties into the real story of the Meenakshi Amman temple in Madurai. According to 13th century lore, Kulashekarar Pandyan, a king who ruled over the Pandyan dynasty, performed a yajna (pooja) as he hoped for a son to succeed him on the throne. He was instead granted a daughter, who was born from a pit of fire, and had three breasts. Lord Shiva tells the King that he should bring her up as a boy and that her third breast would disappear the day she met a man worthy of being her husband.
Reaching maturity, she is crowned as successor to her father and decides to go on a conquest of the world. She defeats kings and gods until she finally meets her match in a young hermit who turns out to be (plot twist) Lord Shiva himself. When they meet, Meenakshi suddenly realizes that she is Parvati reborn. Her extra breast disappears. And she takes the hermit-god, now called Sundareshwara, back to Madurai to be her husband and consort.
In today’s world arranged marriages are not favoured and couples prefer to meet and date before getting married -with or without parental approval. In my day, our elders would claim that love marriages can fail because the couple is always on their best behavior when they date. Cohabitation was all but unheard of at the time. Back then, people claimed that arranged marriages work better because the families concerned are vetted with great care, with regard to astrological compatibility, heritage, background, careers, relatives, siblings, wealth, and even the mental health status of the extended family. It was believed that with arranged marriages, an initial attraction was more than enough for a pairing, and that love would eventually find its way into the couple’s hearts.
Marriage of any form is a contract. Arranged or otherwise, it is not an easy thing. Two young people from different backgrounds have a great deal of adjustment to do. You don’t just marry each other, but each other’s families as well, and whether you live alone or with your in-laws there is still a lot of things to be learnt and adjustments to be made.
Your Feisty Indian Aunty had a love marriage and lived with a very large extended family. It was fun but involved a great deal of responsibility. But my mother-in law was a wonderful woman who had some great advice to warring mothers and daughters-in-law. And I quote: “If you love your son, why won’t you love his wife? And if you love your husband, why won’t you love his mother?” They are words that I live by to this day. The secret to a long and lasting marriage is for couples to remind themselves of why they fell in love with each other in the first place. I know it’s harder said than done, but it’s definitely something worth remembering.
Everything in this movie echoes so many of my own experiences and philosophies when dealing with marriage. Yes, there is the added complication of living in a modern world, but the problems we face are perennial and universal. And the solutions, no matter where or when we’re living, also feel the same. Meenakshi Sundareshwar is a good movie. Watch it for the lessons learnt.
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