Arranged! board game, boxed, designed by Nashra Balagamwala, New York

Deep red box featuring South Asian mother caricature with young South Asian couples in traditional dress. Box contains board, playing pieces, and cards.

Nashra Balagamwala's game highlights the pressures faced by girls and women being pressured to enter an arranged marriage

LONDON, July 2020, (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When Nashra Balagamwala's Pakistani family started pressuring her into an arranged marriage, she decided to get creative to avoid the myriad of suitors being foisted upon her.

Like many young women in South Asia, she was targeted by older women, nicknamed Rishta aunties, who wanted to pair her up with eligible men.

"It truly started when I was 18, right as my sister got married ... literally, the day of wedding, all the aunties started coming up to me and saying, 'You're next, you're next'," said Balagamwala, now aged 27 and living in New York.

"I'd wear the fake engagement rings, or whenever an auntie was looking I'd pour an extra helping of food on my plate," she said, as the matchmakers considered women who didn't watch their figure to be less desirable brides.

Those real-life strategies inspired her to create the board game "Arranged!" where players take the role of teenage girls trying to escape an 'auntie', which features in "Gamemaster", a documentary about aspiring game designers released this month.

Arranged marriages - where a couple are matched by family members - are common in South Asia. Whilst it is different from forced marriage, many young people face intense pressure to wed and start a family shortly after reaching adulthood.

Wanting a different life, Balagamwala convinced her family to allow her to wait until she was 21 - and as she reached the deadline as a student at Rhode Island School of Design in the United States, she came up with the idea for the game.

"When I was going back for the winter break, my parents had a boy lined up for me to meet," she said.

"So to de-stress from that I started creating this list of all the crazy things I used to do, or that my cousins used to do, to try to discourage the Rishta aunties."

Sonia Elks, (see references).

Game designer Nashra Balagamwala created Arranged! to highlight the challenges of an arranged marriage and to spark conversations about this and other experiences familiar to South Asian women, such as skin whitening, secret boyfriends, and dowries. The game is based on Nashra's personal experience of the pressure placed on her by her Pakistani family to enter an arranged marriage. Satirical scenarios provide the entertainment in this strategy game following three young Pakistani women as they try to avoid a matchmaker.

B.90-2022