Mixed doubles - You, I and our Gods

I have finally launched my dream research on love and relationships that go outside the boundaries of religions. It is called "Mixed Doubles - You, I and our Gods".

There are times in life, when you feel that you were born to do a certain thing. Like all your life has been a preparation for doing that thing. This research is something like that for me.

It has been more than ten years since I have been thinking about it. But I was afraid to start it. It will consume all of me, it won't leave me any time or space for doing anything else, I had thought. I was not sure if I was ready for such a thing.

Yet like a broken tooth that you can't ignore, it was always there, at the back of my mind, and every now and then, I found myself thinking about it. During my travels in different countries, many times I came across couples belonging to different religions. Every time, I talked to them, I thought of my research idea.

In a world divided along religious lines, what makes cross-religious couples tick? What challenges do they face? How they cope with those challenges? What is the effect of those challenges on their life as a couple? How do they deal with the expectations of their families? How do their children feel? How have things changed for mix religions couples over the past 4-5 decades? How much do religions matter in ordinary couples' lives today, if they are not very religious? Like that, there were so many questions in mind.

I knew my own experience as a cross-religious couple. I felt that each couple faces this issue differently. How similar are we and how different are we, I wanted to know.

Christian-Jew, Catholic-Protestant, Christian-Buddhist, Hindu-Catholic, Sikh-Buddhist, Hindu-Muslim and Catholic-Muslim. If I think of couples I have known in these years, I can think of all these combinations. There must be many other combinations because often we do not like to talk about religions, especially when religious diversity provokes strong reactions.

"Mixed Doubles - You, I and our Gods" is my attempt to find answers to some of these questions.

I was always interested in religions and religious differences

Growing up in India meant that I was constantly reminded of religious diversity. All the different religious festivities were associated with holidays for everyone, so that as a child I learned about the happy and festive moments of each religion. Often, in my class in the school there were children belonging to at least 2-3 religions. And, where we lived, there were children belonging to other religions as my neighbours and friends.

Thus, like majority of Indian kids, I grew up in an environment where it was normal that people belonged to different religions. It was just one of the factors, among so many others that defined human diversity in India - gender, skin colour, castes, languages, food cultures, dresses, height, body weight, and so on.

On my mother's side, the family had more religious diversity. My mother's paternal grandmother was Sikh. They had land and family relationships in that part of India, which later became Pakistan. Some parts of that family preferred to be Muslim and continued to live there, and we had lost contacts with them. I had heard bits and pieces of these family stories in my childhood, and grew up thinking that mixing of religions was normal and common.

At the same time, there were stories of blood and pain, about partition, about lands that were left behind and about persons who had died. I had felt the bitterness of this loss in my maternal grandmother.

Finally during my years of growing up, among my father's friends, I was used to seeing persons of different religions as our family friends among journalists, writers, artists and persons associated with socialist party.

All these influences meant that I was always interested in understanding about religious differences. For example, I noticed how religions had seemed to make no difference to the way my father's friends interacted, and how it contrasted with the newspaper stories about religious hate, riots and killings.

Love across religions

Bollywood was an important source of the ideas about consequences of love across religions in my growing up years, not just in film-stories but also in the lives of actors like Nargis and Sunil Dutt. Forty years later, today inter-religious love stories are so common in Bollywood that they no longer generate discussions about differences of religions. Like the recent marriage between Riteish Deshmukh and Genelia D'Souza.

My own first memory of an inter-religious love story goes back to late nineteen sixties, when my paternal grandmother's house in Allahabad was given on rent to a Hindu-Christian couple. I remember my mother talking to my father about the difficulties of this couple in finding a house on rent because they were a mixed couple.

Later when I decided to marry a Catholic, I knew that my wife's religion won't be an issue in our family, and it never was. When our son decided to get married to a Sikh, again religion was a non-issue except to plan two different wedding ceremonies so that we could celebrate it two times.

Over last twenty five years, during my travels all over the world, I increasingly see religious differences mixed with differences of languages, cultures and skin colours, to result in fascinating families. Many of them are among my friends.

In Italy, Indo-Italian couples trying to overcome family resistances (the resistance comes only from Indian side), sometimes come to me to ask for advice (that is a perk that comes with having white hair).

Generally speaking, with development of new technologies and globalization, and with decreasing role of religions in our lives, I feel that the number of cross-religious relationships has increased over the past decade.

The idea of this research

Even if religious differences were not an issue in our family, they were or continue to be important issues in other families across different countries of the world.

Over the last few decades, I have encountered couples and families grappling with religious differences in different ways. It can tear apart children from their parents and create years of recriminations and anguish. Alternatively, it can be something that brings additional joy and richness to families, who seem to relish their diversity.

Every time, I wonder what is it that makes families to suffer and divide or to find joy and unite? From those reflections, the seeds of this research were sown in my mind.

Join and Support "Mixed Doubles" Research

If you are or ever were in a relationship with a person of another religion, please join this research. It will require a few email exchanges. Plus, if you are interested, it will give you an opportunity to learn more about what others think of this subject.

I would like persons from all continents and all faiths and religions to be part of this research. I am aiming to have at least one hundred (100) persons to join this research (from now to the end of 2012). Please help me by sharing information about this research on your blog, and through twitter, facebook and G+. Thanks in advance.

For more information and for joining the research, send an email to me at: sunil.deepak(at)gmail.com

You can also find more information at the "Mixed Doubles - You, I and our Gods" page on Kalpana. I have also set up a separate blog for this research, check it - Mixed Doubles Research Blog.

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