Old ways, new world: for Afghan and Indian immigrants in the U.S., dating and marriage present special challenges.

• Author: Berger, Joseph
• Position: National

Ashrat Khwajazadah and Naheed Mawjzada are in many ways modern American women, spurning the headscarves and modest outfits customarily worn by Afghan women.

Both in their early 20s, they have taken a route still controversial for Afghan women living in America: going to college to pursue professions. And both defy the ideal of submissive Afghan womanhood. Mawjzada speaks up forcefully when men talk politics at the dinner table.

But at the same time, neither woman has ever dated. Like most women in the Afghan community in New York, they are waiting for their parents to pick their spouses.

Elsewhere in New York, Bodh Das, a physician from India, wanted his daughters to marry within his Hindu caste. His eldest daughter, Abha, returned to India in 1975 to wed a man she had never met from her father's Kayashta caste. Das's second daughter, Bibha, also married a Kayashta.

But Rekha, who is the most Americanized of Das's three daughters, married a man outside her father's caste whom she met in school. It was what Indians call "a love marriage": that is, a marriage that is not arranged by the parents.

Indians and Afghans living in America, particularly women, must often strike a delicate balance as they grow up in a relatively freewheeling society, but with immigrant parents who are holding on to the customs of their homeland. The tension between immigrant parents and children today is no different from that experienced by the Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrant groups of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those newcomers also looked on with anger or resignation as their children gradually adopted the prevailing culture.

Among Afghans, no tradition is more ironclad than parents arranging their children's marriages. It is generally felt that if a daughter chooses her own husband, it damages her father's stature in the community.

"The girl is a trophy piece," says Mawjzada. "If the girl has a good reputation, the family has a good reputation."

Marriage customs for men are more lenient. Bashir Rahim, 29, says that if he meets a girl who interests him at a family gathering he will find out her address, then send his parents to her home to start a conversation about marriage.

AN ANCIENT HIERARCHY

India's caste system goes back thousands of years to the origins of Hinduism. At the top were the Brahmin scholars and priests; at the bottom were the Dalit, or "untouchables." After India gained its independence from Britain in 1947, the legal forms of the...