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

on, obstructed marriages have been an often recurring source of inspiration in modern Indonesian literature. None of these sad cases so completely 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 unhappiness. So the unexpected and sudden death of the Muslim girl Farida after her marriage to the Catholic Sumarto in the novel Keluarga Permana (Ramadhan 1978), for instance, appears to be her just fate: these stories never have happy endings.