A growing number of Indians are hiring private detectives to check up on a prospective bride or groom's character, sexual history and finances before marriage.
Agencies say they've seen a huge rise in pre-matrimonial investigations to check a suitor's background, because more people are meeting online and families are less involved.
"It's not spying, we just wanted to know about my sister's boyfriend before she married him," says Anita (not her real name). She hired a private investigator to verify her now brother-in-law's background. Her sister met and fell in love with him at work, but Anita and her parents wanted to "authenticate" his family's status and finances before the wedding went ahead.
She enlisted the services of one of India's many pre-matrimonial detective agencies, which spent a month drawing up a report into his earnings, family history and past relationships, among other things.
"He told us he was from a good family, but we needed to ensure he was telling the truth.
"Earlier in India with arranged marriages which were set up by the family, relatives would know about a partner, but now you don't know if he's married or has children or whatever, so we needed to hire someone to check all this," says Anita, adding her still-happily-married sister never knew about the detectives.
Anita turned to the services of Veteran Investigations, a Mumbai-based agency which has been carrying out "pre-matrimonial" checks for more than 40 years.
The vast majority of enquiries come from parents who want to assess the "character" of their future son-in-law, says Rahul Rai, who runs the agency.
"When we talk about character it could be some personal habits they have, it could be their lifestyle - maybe he's involved with someone, maybe he's into prostitution, maybe he's a drug addict.
"Some have very specific requests like checking the sexual preference of someone, if they have doubts."
No comments:
Post a Comment