A rishta is a marriage proposal and the arranging of one is a formal social process with its own actors and its own rules.
Traditionally a vichola, an intermediary, carried the proposal between families. Village exogamy and got exogamy meant the search had to go outside the village and outside four clans, so intermediaries were necessary and were often the family barber or a relative in another village.
The criteria are stated openly and are not romantic: land, family standing, education, the reputation of the household, and increasingly whether anyone in the family is abroad.
Marriage bureaux, matrimonial columns and now apps have replaced the vichola for a large part of the urban and diaspora market, and the criteria have not changed.
A visa is now among the most valuable assets in the Punjabi marriage market and is explicitly priced, which has produced the category of marriages entered into for immigration and abandoned afterward.
The system is a resource allocation mechanism and everyone involved understands it as one.
The match is arranged through a network of relatives and, increasingly, through agents and websites, and the constraints are got, village, land, education and now visa status.
A person with permanent residence abroad is the most sought after match in rural Punjab, and the marriage market has priced that in explicitly for thirty years.
The abandoned bride is the consequence that reaches the courts. Marriages contracted for a visa and left behind number in the thousands and the state has a cell for the complaints.