India’s Divorce Diaries: More Women Want Out

Divorce trends reveal a lot about us, and bust some common myths about the reasons behind splits.

Informal data suggests that more women are filing for divorce (Photo: Rahul Gupta/The Quint)

In matters of getting hitched or deciding to split, some things have changed since the 1950s and some haven’t. Divorce rates are rising steadily, but not at the alarming rate that those worried about the collapse of Indian family values might suggest. Informal data reveals that increasingly, women themselves are choosing to file for divorce, and divorces are higher in those states where women have more agency in their relationships.

A study of the Indian Census of 2011 by Suraj Jacob and Sreeparna Chattopadhyay says that the different rates of divorce between urban India and rural India are just ‘wafer thin’, which puts to rest those theories about divorces being the result of “modern lifestyles’’.

On the flip side, no amount of modern living can address regressive thinking where despite laws trying to even the playing field, an Indian woman typically gets not more than 10 percent of her ex-husband’s income after a divorce.

And here’s another peculiar reality – there are more divorced women than divorced men.

What? Huh? How? Really?

Yup. Thanks to neighbourhood-variety patriarchy, it is more difficult for a divorced woman to find a willing partner than it is for a divorced man.