Caste, the most important factor in marriage for Telugus: Survey

Telugu states are known for their IT industry, large US diaspora and economic growth. Despite these trappings of advancement, Telugu society still leans heavily on caste when it comes to marriage, according to a survey conducted by a Telugu daily across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

The survey turned up several notable findings: inter-caste marriages have become the norm among the rich, the IT industry has given caste-defiance a fillip in both states, and skewed sex ratios are forcing some families to look past caste lines out of necessity.

According to the survey, 83.4 per cent of parents said they would not accept a child's inter-caste marriage. Among younger respondents, the picture softened but didn't flip — 29.3 per cent said they were open to marrying outside their caste, another 10 per cent said they already had, and a clear majority, 60.7 per cent, said they were against it. A further 4.7 per cent of parents said their children had already married inter-caste, and that they had come around to accepting it by default.

One of the more interesting findings was that caste plays a different role depending on class. At the top, wealth is edging out caste altogether; business families, bureaucrats and political households are far more willing to overlook caste if the match makes sense on paper: comparable assets, business synergy and overseas degrees.

At the other end, the calculus is simpler still. Youngsters from weaker sections who have made it on their own and are financially independent and self-sufficient usually get their way, since they give parents little leverage or reason to object. It's the middle class that can't budge, and suffers the most for it, weighed down by a practical fear: that one child's inter-caste marriage could hurt the marriage prospects of the others. That fear is what makes the middle class the strongest holdout against inter-caste marriage.

Kancharla Chandrasekhar Reddy, father-in-law of film star Allu Arjun, said parents should weigh character, financial standing and, above all, family background when finalising a marriage. "Family is very important in my consideration. When the children tell us they were in love, we have to look at how good their family is. Even if they have some problems after marriage, if the family is good, they could support them and bring them out of it," he explained, adding with a smile that these were exactly the factors he weighed when Allu Arjun sought his daughter's hand.

On the middle-class experience, Kadigalla Bhaskar, a trade union leader who married inter-caste, said forward-caste families are reluctant to let their children give up the social status and financial advantage that come with caste. "That's the reason the 'tradition' continues. The weakening of progressive thinking is also bringing caste back as the major consideration for marriage," he said. Silveru Harinath, a researcher with the Centre for Social and Economic Studies in Hyderabad, added that the middle class is truly caught in the middle; not liberated enough to accept their children’s choices.

The survey found that while social media has worn down caste walls to some extent, the barrier resurfaces on matrimony websites. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook, it found, are quietly increasing cross-caste friendships and romances. Matrimony sites tell a different story: more than 90 per cent of matrimonial profiles in the survey prioritised caste or sub-caste, and fewer than 10 per cent of users chose a "caste no bar" option. The infrastructure of arranged marriage, in other words, hasn't caught up with the sentiment of the young people it's meant to serve.

The IT sector, interestingly, has had an outsized impact on the role of caste in marriage. In Telangana, Hyderabad, Ranga Reddy and Medchal, the state's IT clusters, have produced the most anti-caste momentum; in Andhra Pradesh, the same holds for Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Nellore, Guntur and Tirupati. The pattern reverses sharply in Rayalaseema's more remote villages, the tribal belts of north Andhra, and undivided Mahbubnagar and Nalgonda in Telangana, where caste hierarchies remain entrenched, and such marriages stay rare.

One counterintuitive finding: skewed sex ratios may be doing some of the work that changing attitudes haven't. With fewer women available for marriage in some communities, several arranged matches are crossing caste lines out of necessity rather than conviction. This is happening mostly in Andhra Pradesh. Several Reddy families are marrying women from other castes due to the lower availability of women from their caste. Overall, the survey estimates that more than 70 per cent of self-arranged "love marriages" in the two states now cross caste lines, and notes that even some family-arranged marriages turn out inter-caste when circumstances leave elders little choice.

It's worth setting these findings against Telangana's own 2024-25 caste survey, whose analysis was released this April by an expert group led by former Supreme Court judge Justice B. Sudershan Reddy. That survey found that only 5.6 per cent of families had had inter-caste marriages, and that Brahmins had a higher inter-caste marriage ratio than other castes — with about 95 per cent of families still marrying within caste overall. Iyengars and Iyers reported the highest share of inter-caste households, at roughly 12 per cent, followed by the Backwards Classes and Scheduled Caste Christians (9.9 per cent) and Rajus (8.7 per cent); dominant, land-owning groups like Reddys and Velamas showed rates well below the state average despite their economic standing.

For those who do marry across caste, the bigger obstacle often comes through government paperwork. Couples marrying under the Special Marriage Act, 1954, must file a 30-day advance notice, which is posted publicly at the sub-registrar's office and, in some places, sent directly to the couple's family homes. That window gives relatives and caste organisations time to intervene — through intimidation, confinement or worse. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh's high courts reportedly receive hundreds of petitions a year from young couples seeking protection from exactly this kind of harassment, and cases of physical assault, abduction and killing by family members over such marriages continue to surface across various districts.

The provision has drawn legal scrutiny well beyond the Telugu states. Courts have periodically pushed back against it: the Allahabad High Court, in Safiya Sultana v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2021), held that publishing the notice isn't mandatory and that couples can ask the marriage officer to skip it. When the Supreme Court's marriage-equality bench took up the question in 2023, several judges observed that the notice regime produces a "chilling effect" on interfaith couples and sits uneasily with the right to privacy recognised in the Puttaswamy judgment, though the underlying provision remains on the books. The question of striking it down is still working its way through the courts.