What Goes in a Marriage Biodata (and What Doesn't)

Most biodata are read in fifteen seconds, on a phone, in a WhatsApp thread with six other biodata in it. That is the real design brief. Everything below follows from it.

The six blocks

Almost every biodata that works is built from the same six blocks, in this order. The order matters more than the wording: a reader who cannot find your date of birth in the first four lines assumes you are hiding it.

1. 1.Personal — name, date of birth, age, height, religion and community, mother tongue, current city.
2. 2.Education and career — highest qualification, institution, current role and employer, city of work.
3. 3.Family — parents' names and occupations, siblings and their status, native place, family type.
4. 4.Horoscope details — birth time and place, rashi, nakshatra, gotra. Optional, and only if your family uses them.
5. 5.About me — three or four sentences in your own voice.
6. 6.Contact — one name, one phone number, and who that person is to you.

Some families put About Me first, immediately under the photo. That is a reasonable choice and increasingly common — it leads with a person rather than a specification. What does not work is burying it on a second page.

Field by field

What to leave off

This is the half of the job nobody writes guides about, and it is where most pages go wrong.

• Complexion. "Fair", "wheatish", "very fair" — a description of skin colour tells a reader nothing about whether two people would be happy, and increasingly reads as a red flag rather than a selling point. Leave it out. Your photograph already shows what you look like.
• Salary figures. A number invites negotiation and dates badly. "Senior Engineer at an IT company in Pune" carries the same information with none of the awkwardness.
• Dowry expectations, in any wording. Demanding or offering dowry is a criminal offence in India under the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961. Phrases like "decent gifts expected" are the same thing in a nicer shirt.
• Your full residential address. Your city is useful. Your house number is a safety risk on a document designed to be forwarded to strangers.
• Identity numbers. No Aadhaar, no PAN, no passport number. There is no version of this page that needs them.
• Anything negative about a previous match or marriage. State the fact — "divorced, no children" — and stop there. The explanation belongs in a conversation, not on a forwarded PDF.

A finished page

Here is the whole thing, at the length it should actually be. Note how little of it is prose.

Date of Birth: 14 March 1997 (Age 29)
Height: 5'6" (168 cm)
Religion / Community: Hindu, Iyer
Mother Tongue: Tamil
Current City: Chennai

Education: M.Tech, Computer Science, IIT Madras
Occupation: Senior Engineer, Zoho, Chennai

Father: K. Krishnamurthy, retired bank manager
Mother: Lalitha Krishnamurthy, school teacher
Sibling: One younger brother, final-year medical student
Native Place: Kumbakonam

About Me: I build payment systems, which mostly means I spend my day
arguing politely with edge cases. Weekends are for Carnatic music —
I've been learning veena since I was seven and I am still not good at
it. I'm looking for someone who reads, argues well, and doesn't mind
that I cook exactly four dishes.

Contact: Father — +91 98xxx xxxxx

That is under 150 words and it answers every standard question. If your draft is three pages long, the problem is almost never that you have too much to say — it is that the page is doing a job the conversation should do.

One page, always

The one-page rule is not aesthetic. A biodata gets forwarded, and a forwarded second page gets separated from the first. Everything essential — photo, name, age, contact — belongs on page one, because page one is sometimes the only page that arrives. There is more on this in the formatting guide.