The article deals with matrimonial problems’ solution of those Indians, who due to various circumstances were devoid of chances to find a spouse within their own caste. For example, in the 18th century, Lutheran pastor Bartolome Ziegenbalg, whose attestations of the problem are published in the present article, mentions in his letters from India some “wrong marriages” [üble Ehe], officiated by Indians who at the moment were unable to find wives of the suitable caste status. Because of their illegitimacy, such matrimonial practices are hardly mentioned in proper Indian sources and are known only through foreign observers’ attestations. Information from Ziegenbalg’s letters is compared in this research with archival documents from Astrakhan, where for several centuries existed a colony of Indian merchants. Besides archival documents, the article incorporates some notes of travelers who visited Astrakhan at various times, such as Cornelis de Bruijn, Peter Simon Pallas, and Nikolai Ozeretskovsky. The resulting analysis leads us to some quite revealing conclusions about the attitude of Indians to the forced “wrong marriages”, as well as to the children, born in such marital unions. Hindu tradition considers timely marriage and issuing a child each person’s religious duty; a man who failed to marry was scorned and considered unfit for performing religious rites. Accordingly, to avoid such situation Indian merchants, operating far from the Subcontinent, registered temporary marriages with local women (in Astrakhan they were local Tatar women). The author concludes that despite their provisional character, such unions were regarded as proper marriages, and not as simple cohabitations unregulated by social norms. Those acts could be registered only after permission of parents and other caste members had been obtained. Nevertheless, the children from these unions were considered illegitimate, unable to inherit neither their fathers’ caste status nor their professions. In Astrakhan children from mixed marriages were called Agryjanians, they were Muslim like their mothers, called by their Tatar names, and inhabited certain Agryjanian Court, having no access to the Indian Court – as well as their mothers.