Varsha Beldar, from the Pardhi community, was sixteen years old when her family decided she would be married. The engagement had been made three years earlier, in 2022, when she was barely a teenager. Her mother, speaking in a mix of Hindi and her local dialect, described the circumstances of her daughter’s marriage in Rajgarh, a district on the northern edge of the Malwa plateau in Madhya Pradesh. They had no choice; once engaged, “the marriage…
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