English Biodata Format for Marriage

What an English marriage biodata contains

An English marriage biodata is the format used when the two families do not share a regional language, when the profile will be posted on a matrimonial site, or when one side lives abroad. It leads with the practical facts: full name, date of birth, age, height, and current city or country. Education and profession carry more weight here than on a regional-language biodata — degree, institution, job title, employer and work location are usually spelled out rather than summarised.

The family section is shorter than its Tamil or Hindi equivalent. Parents' names and occupations, siblings and their status, and the family's home city are generally enough. Caste, sub-caste and community are included or left out depending on the family, and English is the format where they are most often left out.

Horoscope details are optional

Unlike the Tamil and Hindi formats, an English biodata often has no horoscope section at all. Families who match horoscopes tend to exchange them as a separate document once a profile has been shortlisted, which keeps the biodata itself readable for recipients who do not read charts.

When horoscope details are included, they are usually written as plain rows — birth star, sign, birth time and birth place — rather than drawn as a chart. Some of the English templates on this page carry horoscope fields, and some of those print Rasi and Navamsam charts. Those are worth choosing only if you know the receiving family reads them: a chart nobody at the other end can interpret takes up a third of the page and answers nothing. Families from Tamil Nadu who need a jathagam biodata in English can use the simple and premium astrology templates, which print the same Rasi and Navamsam charts with English labels.

Formatting and photo tips

Keep it to one page, and keep the label order identical throughout so a reader comparing several profiles finds the same field in the same place each time. Write dates unambiguously — 14 March 1996 rather than 14/03/96, which is read as a different date in some countries. Use an email address that is your name rather than a nickname, and name the PDF after yourself so it stays identifiable once it has been forwarded a few times.

A plain head-and-shoulders or half-length photograph in good light is enough. Recent matters more than flattering: a photograph more than a year or two old tends to prompt a request for another one.

Common mistakes

The most common is length — a two or three page biodata reads like a CV and gets skimmed rather than read. After that: writing the paragraph about yourself in the first person while the rest of the page is in the third; giving a job title so vague that nobody can tell what you actually do; quoting a salary band instead of a figure, or dropping the field without saying so; and leaving off a phone number, which is still how most first contacts are made.