Arranged marriages and dowries are giving way to modern shaadi websites and online dating. A look inside remarriage in South Asia.

A two-time bachelor, 35-year-old Indebir Singh is somewhat of a maverick in India, a deeply conservative Hindu nation. He married his girlfriend after they’d dated for 3 years, uncommon for a country where most marriages are arranged by parents.

“It was a love marriage, but we decided to end it after 5 years,” says Singh, an executive for a software training company in New Delhi. “It’s been more than a year since my divorce. I want to get married again, but it’s hard trying to find like-minded people,” he sighs. So he opts for staying in shape, with badminton and daily visits to the gym.

Tying the knot for a second (or third) time is not yet a natural sequence when you look at the bulk of South Asia, where marriage is widely perceived as a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Even in the fast-modernizing India, parents still negotiate the vast majority of marriages. Their oft-repeated inducement to the befuddled fiancé is, “Marriage first, love comes after.” Divorce, as far as parents are concerned, is not an option.

In this modernizing country, as in most of South Asia, wedding ceremonies are extravagant and costly. In India’s more prosperous cities, grooms often walk away with huge dowries of around $100,000 (even though, officially, dowries are prohibited by a rarely enforced 1961 law). Some dowries reach as high as $500,000 in cash, gold, diamonds, and real estate.

As India’s economy soars, so do the price tags of weddings, often seen as a chance for India’s rich and rising middle class to flaunt their new wealth. Weddings in India are a $10 billion industry, leading many Indians to often joke about the country’s “marriage-industrial complex.” Fathers often take out bank loans to help pay for a daughter’s lavish wedding, which can last for several days and include up to a thousand friends, relatives, community officials, and colleagues.

Although India’s increasing exposure to the West is gradually changing social norms, divorce is still rare enough that the word is often whispered. Second marriages? More whispering. Among India’s higher castes, even young widows are forbidden to remarry. It wasn’t long ago that women in India were expected to throw themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre. (The custom didn’t apply to men whose wives had died.)

In much of India, a widow who remarries loses her claim to her deceased husband’s property. Today, remarriage is largely a phenomenon of India’s urban middle class, usually young twenty- and thirty-somethings stepping out of their arranged marriages.

And so the tide is changing.

In the past decade, enough ads for second marriages started cropping up in matrimonial sections of newspapers that many of India’s major dailies created special categories for them. Internet websites for people who are divorced or widowed and seeking to marry again have mushroomed here.

Businessman Vivek Pahwa saw an opportunity. Not long after the success of his marriage website, Shaadi.com, the Internet entrepreneur started another one for people whose first shaadi did not work out as planned. (Shaadi is the Hindi word for marriage.) That website is aptly named SecondShaadi.com.

No one was prepared for the popularity of India’s first matrimonial website, with its continuing Hindu, mother-father-arranged-marriage traditions. It was a sign that India’s centuries-old wedding traditions were changing, especially in the larger, more metropolitan cities like Mumbai and New Delhi, India’s capital.

“More and more people are beginning to open up to the idea of a second marriage, especially as people get divorced at a young age,” says Pahwa. “Society is moving forward. There is some hesitation, though, since society doesn’t encourage divorce. But in the big cities, divorce rates are rising and the remarriage taboo is decreasing.”

Most of the site’s 35,000 members are divorced. Only about one-fifth of them are widowers. Women have a serious advantage when it comes to choosing potential mates through the website: Men make up more than two-thirds of the membership, which is roughly consistent with the ratio of male-female Internet users in India.

To the extent that first weddings are lavish, second weddings are low-key.

“I’ve photographed many weddings, says Sandeep Sitara, a professional photographer in the southwestern Indian state of Goa, “and I’ve noticed there’s not as much fanfare with second marriages. That’s probably because it’s still looked down on.”

Indian women face many hazards in their search for a second marriage in the country’s male-dominated ethos. They are constantly wary of “serial grooms,” married men on the prowl for wives-or, more to the point, their lucrative dowries. Serial grooms are a growing problem in India, where rising prosperity and soaring dowries have created an incentive for fraud. As many as 30,000 Indian women-the true number is likely much higher-are duped into fraudulent marriages mainly to husbands living abroad.

“I had no idea that my husband was already married. Within weeks of my marriage, I found out that he’d been married at least a dozen times,” confesses Sneha Singh, 35, who started the Ark Foundation, a nonprofit agency in New Delhi that helps women who have been defrauded or abused by their nonresident Indian husbands.

Singh separated from her husband after 3 weeks, but not before he walked away with at least $2,000 in wedding gifts. Surprisingly, her parents are pressuring her to stay in the marriage, to “work it out.”

“For women especially, marriage is a gamble,” Singh says. “But many parents are willing to play this gamble with their daughters.”

Divorce and remarriage are also rare in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as in India. Centuries-old Hindu and Buddhist traditions there reinforce the idea that marriage is more than two people tying the knot. It’s a union of families, which takes on special meaning in a region of the world where families often consist of three generations living under the same roof. Split-ups and subsequent remarriages are more common in Pakistan, where Islamic custom makes it easy for a man to divorce his wife.

But in nearby Bhutan, a tiny and deeply Buddhist Himalayan nation perched between India and China, divorce is almost unheard of, mainly because marriage protocols are so flexible. Bhutan is one of the few places in the world where women can have more than one husband. (This gives a whole new slant to the term “remarriage.”)

“It doesn’t happen very often these days,” explains Nim Dorji, a Bhutanese tour guide. “But there are some women in the eastern part of the country who marry more than one husband, usually brothers. It makes sense, because most people in the east of the country are yak herders. They must travel for weeks, even months, for fresh grazing fields, leaving their wives alone for long stretches. With several husbands, the wife doesn’t have to be alone as much.”

Of course, husbands can also marry more than one wife. But it’s an option few men in Bhutan are able to afford. In the Bhutanese version of the HBO TV drama Big Love, the wives often live in separate houses or, at the very least, in separate wings of a sprawling compound, where they raise their respective families. That can get expensive.

Some social analysts say it will take at least another decade before the taboos surrounding divorce and remarriage start to fade. But, according to Pahwa, it’s inevitable with the rapid modernization of India and the region as a whole.

“The first marriage is usually fixed by the parents. The second marriage is usually a chance to take control of one’s own choices,” Pahwa says. “There is probably some hesitation about going through the whole process again, as well as owning up to family and friends about your divorce and your decision to marry again.”

But, he adds, with hope in his eyes, “most people I talk to are optimistic.”

Freelance writer Raymond Thibodeaux, formerly an Africa correspondent for the Boston Globe and Voice of America radio, lives in New Delhi, India, and covers the South Asia region for several publications worldwide. His wife, Emily, is the South Asia bureau chief for the Washington Post.