Rethinam, a 45-year-old woman from rural Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state in India, hates looking at her wedding pictures from two decades ago. “I look sad in every photo,” she said.
A first-generation Christian from a Hindu background, Rethinam, who goes by one name, was the only member of her family to become a Christian after she was miraculously healed from a persistent illness. She then met her future husband, Augustine Arumugam, through India Campus Crusade for Christ as he evangelized at her college. Also a former Hindu from Tamil Nadu, Arumugam had always wanted to marry another Christian from a similar background.
Yet when he sent a formal proposal to her family expressing his desire to marry her, they were furious. Accusing her of being in love with a man outside their religion and caste, they immediately fixed a marriage for her with her sister-in-law’s brother to stop her from marrying Arumugam.
Facing persecution from her family, which included physical abuse and emotional blackmail, Rethinam ended up running with Arumugam to a town two hours away to get married quickly by a pastor without their family or friends present. Their marriage led to years of estrangement from her family.
Today, Hindus who convert to Christianity still face immense struggles to marry in the faith. Their numbers are few, with only 0.4 percent of adults being Hindu converts to Christianity, according to a 2021 Pew survey. Meanwhile, 12 Indian states have anticonversion laws in place, leading to fines or arrests for those accused of forcibly converting people. Family and community pressures are also still strong, although Rethinam noted that increasing education levels and exposure to media have caused most people to become more open to marriages for love.
For Rethinam and the two other Hindu converts CT spoke with, the importance of marrying fellow Christian outweighs the suffering they face. They sought to be equally yoked with their spouses (2 Cor. 6:14) and feared that by marrying non-Christians, they could be swayed back to the Hindu faith. In many cases, the church became a surrogate family as their own families rejected them.
“I had to go through a lot of physical and emotional torture,” Rethinam said of the period before her marriage. “There was no church, no fellowship, and no Christians around me to help. But there was an unusual conviction that this was God’s plan and that he would bring [it] to pass.”
Before Rethinam met Arumugam, her parents didn’t stop her from pursuing her new faith, as they assumed she would come back to Hinduism once she was married. But when she told her family her decision to marry Arumugam, everything changed.
They dragged her to several Hindu temples and took her to an exorcist to “cleanse” her from her beliefs. The exorcist charged them 50,000 Indian rupees ($585 USD) and rebuked Rethinam for dishonoring her family. She performed rituals that included smearing camphor on Rethinam’s forehead and chanting mantras, leaving Rethinam terrified and embarrassed.
When the exorcist failed to see a change in Rethinam’s conviction, she instructed the family to take away her Bible, seize her diplomas, and forbid her from praying. For the next few months, Rethinam said her family beat and slapped her daily. They promised to give her property and gold if she agreed to give up marrying Arumugam. They threatened to kill themselves if she went through with the marriage. With no access to the Bible and no ability to pray openly, Rethinam’s strength came from remembering Exodus 14:14, which says, “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”
At the time, Arumugam, who was in Chennai working for Campus Crusade, had no idea of the persecution Rethinam was going through.
Unable to bear the abuse any longer, Rethinam packed her things and got on a bus to a town two hours away. Through a mutual friend, she contacted Arumugam and told him everything that had happened. Arumugam took the next train to meet Rethinam.
Assessing the seriousness of the situation and considering the honor killings prevalent at the time, his friend advised them to get married before her parents found her.
“That entire night, we visited every church in the vicinity in search of a registered pastor who could marry us,” Arumugam said. “We were told at 4:30 a.m. that we’d be married at 5.30 a.m. In the presence of a few people, a pastor got us married in a small house church. Instead of rings, we exchanged [a Bible].”
In the meantime, Rethinam’s family was furiously hunting her down. When they discovered her whereabouts, Arumugam’s friend was able to pacify and convince them to meet with Arumugam’s family, who were accepting of their marriage. But the next day, her family arrived with big knives, determined to take Rethinam home. A pastor, a few members from the local church, and members of the Communist Party office—which supports interfaith and intercaste marriages in India—facilitated a meeting between the families at a local church.
Outraged, Rethinam’s family refused to accept the marriage and cursed her for betraying them. Three months later, Arumugam’s family held a formal reception for the couple, which Rethinam’s family did not attend.
For the first few years after their marriage, Rethinam received painful letters full of threats and curses from her family before they cut off all contact with her. Rethinam faced heavy emotional turmoil due to their estrangement.
“For the first six months, I would cry every night,” she recalled. “The absence of family pricked me, especially after I gave birth to my first daughter. Whenever I’d see grandmothers play with their grandchildren, I missed [my] mother.”
She also missed important family moments, like her brother’s wedding and her uncle’s funeral.
It took five years and the death of her nephew before Rethinam’s family reconciled with her. Things between her and the family mostly returned to normal. However, in 2014, Rethinam found out that her father’s will stated he had no daughter.
“He didn’t even acknowledge me as his daughter,” she said. “It still hurts when I think about it.”
Today, most marriages in India are still arranged, and views on caste remain deeply embedded in the older generation. Only in 2014 did India start recording honor killings instead of lumping them with murders, kidnappings, or injuries. The number of these cases is on the rise, and there is still no legislation to tackle honor-based crimes.
First-generation Christians continue to fight silent battles to marry in the faith. Suhas Manjunath, a Hindu convert from Bangaluru is the only Christian in his entire village. The 32-year-old knew the reactions to his desire to marry a Christian would test of his faith, and his prayers for his family’s salvation intensified as he started to think of marriage.
He faced verbal attacks from his family when he told them he would only marry a Christian and refused to let them set him up with anyone. He recalls how one Sunday his mother hid his bag and physically stopped him from attending church. This was out of the ordinary since his family had accepted his choice to be a Christian, believing that he would return to Hinduism after marrying a Hindu woman.
“To be able to attend church is a prayer I never thought I’d ever have to pray,” he said.
In a culture where most marriages are arranged by families, Manjunath found his support system within his church. Manjunath found a woman from a Christian family through a fellow church member who shared Manjunath’s profile with friends in his circle.
At first, his family refused to accept his choice, citing social pressures from his relatives and community. They blamed his mother for letting him become a Christian and blamed the church for setting him up with a woman of whom they did not approve. After a year of constant conflict, his family finally relented and attended their son’s wedding.
During that time, the pastor and deacons of his local church played the role of Manjunath’s family, including mediating between the couple’s families and counseling the couple on how to handle conflict in a God-honoring manner.
Single female converts often have a harder time finding a Christian spouse, said Arumugam. “Hindu-convert boys easily find girls from Christian families, but it is very hard for a Hindu-convert girl to find a Christian boy to marry,” he said. He ticked off the reasons: Christian families are afraid of accepting former Hindu women who might not be familiar with Christian traditions, which is part of the wife’s job to pass on to her children. They also worry that if the girl doesn’t have her family’s support, they won’t receive a dowry.
“Christian families are happy to accept committed Christian boys who take a stand for their faith, but the same families don’t want to take the risk of getting their boys married to Hindu-convert girls,” he noted.
Gayathri R, a 26-year-old Tamil Brahmin who became a Christian in college, is waiting for her parents to accept her choice to marry a Christian man she met through her mentor. (In Southern India, it is a common practice to write one’s surname as an initial or abbreviation.) He is also from a Hindu background but from a different caste and state.
This has been the toughest phase of her spiritual life, she said. She is close with her parents, but they have become critical of her faith, accusing Christians—and sometimes her—of converting people.
“For many Hindu families, when their child becomes a Christian, they see it as their child being taken away from them,” Gayathri said, who lives in Chennai. “I want to bear a testimony that Jesus is a loving God and show them that they won’t lose me because of my faith.
But there are costs to pay. Gayathri is prepared to be known as “the girl who ran away” in her family circle. “It doesn’t matter what you do or what you’ve achieved. If you marry against your parents’ choice, it becomes your whole social identity,” Gayathri said. She noted that friends and mentors from her university fellowship have been a huge support in helping her navigate this season of her life.
Gayathri said she is willing to have a Hindu ceremony if her parents ever agree to the marriage. “It is a sacrifice I will have to make to honor my parents,” she said.
It’s been one and a half years since Gayathri started waiting for her parents to accept her decision. She doesn’t know how much longer she will have to wait or even whether her parents would ever agree. “The one thing I’m sure about is that God will give me the courage to do what I need to do,” she said.
