Across Kashmir’s villages and cities, broken marriages are leaving behind fractured lives, struggling children, and a community quietly reckoning with the rising tide of divorce, reports Babra Wani
The Bhat household in a remote village of South Kashmir had waited years for this moment. In 2016, the family’s only son was finally to be married, and the celebrations reflected the depth of their relief and joy. The entire clan was invited, the whole village came, and Arif, the groom, was, by his own account, the happiest he had ever been. His lifelong dream was coming true.
It lasted less than a week.
Within days of the wedding, his new bride had begun to withdraw, barely speaking, maintaining a cold distance that Arif could not fathom. When she left for her maternal home after the first week, she did not return. Within a month, she had asked for a khulla, a divorce initiated by the wife. Arif was left reeling.
“She gave the reason for my disability,” he recalled, “but she had known about it even before the marriage. It was not something that my family or I had hidden from her. Everything was in front of her.”
Arif is physically disabled, and while this had been no secret during the arrangement of the match, it became the stated justification for ending it. Later, however, a different truth surfaced: the bride had been pressured into the marriage by her own family, and had been in love with someone else. The moment Arif learnt this, he stopped fighting. “I no longer had any reason to,” he said quietly.
Now forty years old, Arif has resolved never to marry again. “I don’t want such an ugly experience in my life ever again,” he said.
His story, devastating as it is, is far from exceptional.
A Society in Transition
For generations, marriage in Kashmir, as across much of South Asia, was an institution governed by family, community, and an unspoken compact of compromise. Matches were arranged by parents, and couples were expected to bend, endure, and persist. Divorce was rare, spoken of in hushed tones, and carried an almost irreversible social stigma.
That compact is straining under the pressures of a changing world. Education, economic independence, shifting gender expectations, and the growing refusal, particularly among women, to silently absorb mistreatment have all contributed to a gradual but visible rise in marital breakdowns across Kashmir. Divorce is no longer the rare aberration it once was. It is becoming, quietly and painfully, a part of the landscape.
The blessings offered at Kashmiri weddings, Khoda deenov taar (May God help you sail through), Khoda waatnaeinow andas (May God help you together), Deak ke poorinow, speak to a community’s deepest hopes for its newlyweds. Those hopes do not always survive contact with reality.
Abandonment
Fatima was twenty-three years old and had been married for six months when she finally accepted that she could no longer remain in her marriage. Her husband, a man in his thirties, selected by her parents, had, from the beginning, treated her with a startling indifference.
“There were times when I was sick and needed to see a doctor,” she recalled, dressed in an off-white kameez salwar, her voice measured and calm. “He never took me. When any of his male friends came to the house, he would lock me in the room, forbidding me from coming out.”
His insecurity, she said, expressed itself through control and neglect simultaneously, a contradiction that eroded whatever trust she had placed in him.
The breaking point arrived the day she fell seriously ill. Her husband promised to take her to a doctor. She waited. He left early that morning and did not return until late at night. As her condition worsened through the long hours, so too did her faith in the marriage.
The following morning, Fatima left.
She returned to her father’s home and told him everything. Her husband never once reached out to ask after her. After more than a year of living apart, she formally sought a divorce. When her father informed the husband and his family, they agreed without protest.
“It was as if I had never mattered,” Fatima said.
Her experience mirrors that of Showkat, whose situation unfolded in reverse; it was his wife, he said, who was indifferent to him, to his needs, and to the relationship itself.
“She only focused on herself. Never thought seriously about anything,” he said. “Marriage is like a two-way traffic. Even if you compromise, there comes a breaking point, no matter what.”
The Weight of Greed
In Kashmir, as elsewhere in South Asia, dowry remains one of the more insidious forces fracturing marriages. Recent years have seen an increase in dowry-related deaths across the region, a grim indicator of how deeply this practice continues to corrode marital life. For some women, however, there comes a point at which survival demands leaving.
Saima, thirty years old, was married in 2023 in what her family considered an excellent match. Her husband held a prestigious post. The wedding ceremony itself was extravagant. Within weeks, the reality behind the façade became apparent.
“I tried to negotiate and compromise,” she said, “but the torture kept increasing with each passing day. I was isolated, rebuked, and called names.” The pressure for money and valuables from both her husband and her in-laws was relentless and escalating. “Soon I realised that things were not going to change.”
She told her family. They acted swiftly. Within two months of the wedding, the marriage was over.
The aftermath, however, has been anything but swift. Saima’s mother suffered a heart attack in the wake of the ordeal. Ten months on, the family is still, in her words, “trying to heal.”
“I was left devastated,” Saima said simply. There was nothing more to add.
When Love Turns Elsewhere
Of all the reasons that marriages collapse, an extramarital affair or a redirected romantic attachment may be the most quietly devastating, not merely because of what it ends, but because of what it reveals about what came before.
Tasleema’s case is particularly painful in this regard. She and her husband had a love marriage, not an arranged one. They chose each other. They were together for over ten years. And then, in his forties, her husband became involved with another woman. He pushed Tasleema out of the home and divorced her. Within a short time, he had married the other woman.
“We were married for more than ten years,” Tasleema said. “It was a love marriage for us.”
She now lives with the double burden of the divorce itself and the social weight it carries.
“I barely go out. I am no longer a confident woman. The taboo, the sympathising eyes of people, those kill me every day.”
In a society where a divorced woman is too often viewed as diminished, incomplete, or suspect, the emotional cost of separation extends far beyond the marriage itself.
Arif’s situation, too, was shaped by his wife’s attachment to another man. The difference in his case is that the other attachment existed before the marriage even began, making the entire union, in retrospect, a performance rather than a commitment.
Beyond Compatibility
Not every divorce has a clear villain. Some marriages simply fail to cohere, two people finding, over time, that they are too different in temperament, values, or vision to sustain a life together.
One man in his mid-forties described a marriage that lasted four years before finally dissolving. His wife was older than him, and from the beginning, there were significant differences of opinion on many matters.
“We both tried to compromise,” he said. “We tried our best to make the marriage work.”
The death of their infant son proved to be the point beyond which their differences could no longer be bridged. Grief, which sometimes binds people together, drew them irrevocably apart.
There are also cases in which the inability to conceive becomes the precipitating factor in a breakdown, often less a failure of the marriage than a failure of patience and compassion within it. Rahila’s marriage ended within its first year when she was unable to fall pregnant due to a medical issue.
It was her mother-in-law, she said, who forced the matter, pressuring her son to divorce his wife without any willingness to wait, consult doctors, or offer the couple time to find a resolution. The son obliged. Rahila’s marriage was over before it had truly begun.
Divorced Before It Began
There are instances even more disorienting than these, cases in which divorce occurs before rukhsati, the ceremony marking the bride’s formal departure to her husband’s home. In such situations, a nikkah has been performed, but the couple has not yet begun their shared life, and yet the marriage is already ending.
“After my nikkah, my in-laws wanted me to be a ghardamaad,” said one man, meaning they wanted him to live in his wife’s family home rather than his own. “It was not something I was comfortable with.” He ended the marriage after two years of this stalemate.
Another woman dissolved her engagement just before her rukhsati after her in-laws showed persistent disrespect towards her family. “They did not respect my family,” she said, and for her, that was sufficient.
In these cases, the formal dissolution of a marriage that barely began can feel simultaneously trivial and profound, a reminder that the commitment entered into at nikkah is real and binding, and that conflicts can make it untenable before domestic life has even commenced.
When Two Attempts Fail
For some individuals, divorce is not a singular trauma but a recurring one. Rizwana married twice, and neither marriage survived.
Her first marriage was arranged by her parents; she accepted it, but her husband had not truly wanted her, and the daily friction of his resentment made the marriage untenable. After the divorce, she resolved to be more deliberate the second time. She met a man herself, assessed the compatibility carefully, and proceeded on her own terms.
“I saw if we were compatible or not,” she said. The second marriage, too, collapsed, for reasons she still struggles to fully understand.
“My two marriages did not work, and I began to think it was my fault only,” she said. “It made me depressed to the next level.”
Ghulam Nabi’s story is similarly difficult to parse. An orphan, he entered his first marriage as an gharjamayi, living in his wife’s home rather than his own, and found that the resulting conflicts, particularly over his desire to build an independent livelihood, were irresolvable. After the divorce, he continued his education and eventually secured government employment. He remarried in his fifties, only to have his second wife cite his age as grounds for the marriage’s failure.
Both individuals carry the particular weight of repeated loss, and the specific cruelty of wondering whether something inherent to oneself makes a lasting partnership impossible.
The Smallest Victims
In all discussions of divorce, it is perhaps too easy to speak in the abstract, to catalogue causes and patterns whilst losing sight of the human cost that accumulates most heavily in the smallest and most defenceless people involved.
Adil was three years old when his parents divorced. He is now twenty-five, a master’s student, and has been raised solely by his mother. His father, he says, has never once contributed to his upbringing, not his school fees, not his daily needs, not a single moment of financial or emotional investment.
“My mother has told me that her in-laws and her husband were very intolerant of her, used to torture her. She did not choose to remain silent; she raised her voice.” That decision, courageous as it was, led to the formal rupture between the two families and ultimately to Adil growing up without a father’s presence.
The consequences, he says, have never entirely left him. “I have been psychologically disturbed. I have felt weaknesses in myself, all because I did not have a father growing up.” The instabilities of his childhood, living in rented accommodation, without paternal support or acknowledgement, have left insecurities that he believes will remain with him.
“The biggest repercussion of a divorce is on me,” he said.
His mother, he is at pains to note, is remarkable, strong-willed, resilient, and careful never to expose her vulnerability to her son. But even her strength could not fully absorb what his father’s absence created.
“To live as a tenant in somebody else’s home for your whole life feels burdensome,” Adil said. It is perhaps the most quietly damning assessment of all, not of any individual failure, but of what a broken marriage, in its aftermath, asks of those least equipped to bear it.
(The names of all individuals in this report have been changed to protect their identities.)
