An elderly couple from Rajasthan got married after 70 years of live-in relationship (Photo: X)
Across India, live-in relationships are often framed as a modern shift in attitudes toward love and marriage. Yet in the tribal heartlands of southern Rajasthan, this arrangement has existed for centuries. Among the Garasia community in districts like Udaipur and Sirohi, couples commonly begin living together long before any formal wedding takes place. Rooted in custom and community approval, this practice reflects an indigenous understanding of partnership shaped more by consent and economic practicality than ritual obligation.
For outsiders the term “live-in relationship” evokes images of urban modernity a lifestyle choice debated in courts, colleges and coffee shops across Indian metros. Yet less than 300 km southwest of Jaipur, this concept is not new. Among the Garasias, cohabitation long predates contemporary discussions on “domestic partnerships” and “rights of partners,” and has done so for hundreds of years possibly a millennium or more. The custom, known locally as dapa, places personal choice and practical economics ahead of ceremonial rites, challenging dominant Indian cultural narratives that tie legitimacy strictly to formal weddings.
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Social structures in Garasia villages reflect a blend of pragmatic realities and cultural autonomy. Historically marginalised economically, reliant on small-scale agriculture, daily labour, and forest products for subsistence, Garasia families have long recognised that organising elaborate weddings with associated feasts, gifts, and extended kinship obligations demands resources often beyond reach. For many households, saving enough to host a traditional ritual can take years. In such circumstances, waiting to formalise companionship makes little sense when young couples want to establish households and raise children together.
Instead, couples form consensual partnerships through social acceptance and customary notification, circumventing shame or ostracisation. Children born in these unions are not marginalised; they are considered fully part of the community. “Marriage is only an option when the couple have enough money,” social observers have noted and since money often accrues gradually, many relationships germinate into decades of companionship before a formal wedding is ever held.
What sets this apart from mere economic necessity is the cultural acceptance and institutionalisation of choice. Teenagers and young adults do not wait in silence for elders to arrange matches. Instead, communities organise courtship gatherings commonly two-day social fairs where young men and women meet, mingle, and form bonds by mutual consent. In several documented cases, couples “elope” and begin living together without immediate ceremonial endorsement, a practice that unlike in the mainstream carries no stigma.
This tradition resonates most strongly in the Abu Road, Kotra and Gogunda areas of Rajasthan, where tribal population density is highest and where Garasia tribal identity endures most visibly. Statewide, Rajasthan’s scheduled tribes make up roughly 13.5 pc of the population, with groups like Garasias, Bhils, Meenas and Sahariyas constituting significant proportions of rural communities though Garasias specifically constitute only a minor share of the tribal total.
What distinguishes Garasia social life from many mainstream Indian contexts is not merely cohabitation before marriage it is the degree of agency afforded to women in choosing and exiting relationships.
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Anthropological reports on Garasia practices describe a system where women have the freedom to accept or reject partners, and even in some circumstances to seek new ones. If a woman elects to leave a live-in relationship and choose another partner, customary protocols require that her new suitor make a higher payment, as a social contractual gesture to her former partner, providing a form of negotiated compensation and social accountability.
It is within this matrix of mutual consent and customary negotiation that gender autonomy carries real weight. Observers have remarked on women’s relatively higher status within these communities: they often play active roles in choosing partners, in household decisions, and in shaping the contours of familial life long before such conversations became commonplace in urban discourses around gender equity.
This dynamic does not suggest a matriarchy, nor an absence of patriarchy, but it does point to interaction patterns and social norms that emphasise personal agency, choice and responsibility features that contrast with rigid caste-based matrimonial norms elsewhere.
For many Garasia couples, marriage is not an immediate endpoint. Rather, it is a symbolic affirmation that follows years sometimes decades of companionship and family life. In documented instances, elders and younger generations alike have formalised weddings only after saving enough to host communal celebrations, support their households financially, or prepare a symbolic stage for future generations.
In June, 2025 a striking case that gained attention in the wider media involved a 70-year-old man and his 60-year-old live-in partner who decided to formalise their union after decades together. On the same day, his three sons also married their respective long-term companions each of whom had lived with their partners for years and raised children within the community. For these families, the wedding ceremony was less a validation of legitimacy than a communal celebration of choices already lived and relationships already sustained.
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In contemporary India, discussions about live-in relationships are often framed through legal debates, media morality, or moral policing. National courts have gradually affirmed the right of couples to cohabit and recognised children born in long-term relationships as legitimate under certain conditions, largely in response to evolving social realities in urban India. Yet social stigma persists in many parts of the country.
By contrast, Garasia practices suggest an indigenous logic of relational legitimacy one rooted in community norms rather than state sanction, in mutual consent rather than public scrutiny, and in lived bonds rather than ceremonial rites.
For social scientists, the Garasia example illustrates the plurality of cultural models that continue to exist beneath the surface of canonical narratives about Indian family life. It showcases that ideas of companionship, parenthood, and partnership do not follow a single historical trajectory; they vary widely across landscapes, histories and ecologies.
In a country where matrimonial rites and legal definitions still command symbolic power, the Garasia practice of dapa reveals something both humbling and provocative: the lived experience of partnership may be older and culturally deeper than the rituals that seek to formalise it.