Mixed marriages in Indonesia: Some comments on the law and the literature

Abstract

pletely fulfil the requirements of true tragedy as marriages obstructed by religious belief. As much as love is to the lovers, religious marriage stipulations are evidently of the highest order to believers. Conflicts between love and belief hence raise the spectre of inescapable unhappi ness. So the unexpected and sudden death of the Muslim girl Farida after her marriage to the Catholic Sumarto in the novel Keluarga Per mana (Ramadhan 1978), for instance, appears to be her just fate: these stories never have happy endings. The novel Keluarga Permana deals with a world with which the In donesian reader can identify. Cases of the kind treated there are no fiction, they are fact. So-called 'mixed marriages'2 are a real problem in Indonesia.