Marriages of inconvenience: the remote Indian village cut off from love

For the bachelors of Jondalgatti, love is not lost – it’s simply out of reach

In the heart of southern India, where dense forests eclipse the sun, the villagers of Jondalgatti have not celebrated a wedding in more than a decade.

The culprit, villagers say, is not tradition or fate, but the simple absence of a road.

Home to around 200 people, the tiny village in Karnataka state is now a place where eligible bachelors linger in limbo. Twenty young men, all of marrying age, have spent years searching for partners willing to brave the village’s isolation.

“Some youths have managed to have love marriages with women from other castes as they failed to secure suitable alliances from their caste, even after years of waiting,” said village resident Parashu Patil, as quoted by the Times of India. “Women and their parents directly avoid youths attached to Jondalgatti.”

In some cases, men have married widows – an option chosen out of necessity rather than choice.

For others, even hope is a luxury. One young man, who has searched for a bride for four years, described the heartbreak of repeated rejection: “All the other parameters matched, but the brides-to-be and their parents eventually backed off after considering the situation in our village.”

The village’s remoteness is its greatest impediment. Reaching the nearest main road requires a hazardous 7km (4.4-mile) trek through thick forests, avoiding the threat of wild animal attacks. Only in March did Jondalgatti see its first bus service, though this operates strictly at dawn and dusk.

The challenges do not end there. With no access to healthcare and little to no network coverage – in a nation where nearly 80 per cent of the population owns a mobile phone, according to market research company Counterpoint Research – even the simplest comforts of modern life are out of reach.

Some parents, resigned to the reality of isolation, have watched their sons leave “bachelor village”, as it’s been nicknamed, in pursuit of a future elsewhere. “The bride made it a condition that she would not live in our village after the wedding. We had no other choice but to agree to it,” one mother told the Tamil-language magazine Kumudam.

Mallappa Jondalagatti, another villager, described the “extreme difficulty” she faced finding wives for her two sons. In the end, she accepted the women’s demand that the grooms live outside Jondalgatti. “For 10 years, my sons and their families have rarely visited us. Even our relatives avoid visiting us,” she told the Times of India.

The exodus has left the village’s school eerily quiet. With no new families settling, even the youngest generation is vanishing.

“We have not had any new enrolments for the next academic year,” lamented its headmaster, Ashok Arkasali. “There are no children in this village.”