In this paper, we present the insights gained from a detailed study of coupling a highly modular English-Hindi RBMT system with a standard phrase-based SMT system. Coupling the RBMT and SMT systems at various stages in the RBMT pipeline, we observe the effects of the source transformations at each stage on the performance of the coupled MT system. We propose an architecture that systematically exploits the structural transfer and robust generation capabilities of the RBMT system. Working with the English-Hindi language pair, we show that the coupling configurations explored in our experiments help address different aspects of the typological divergence between these languages. In spite of working with very small datasets, we report significant improvements both in terms of BLEU (7.14 and 0.87 over the RBMT and the SMT baselines respectively) and subjective evaluation (relative decrease of 17% in SSER).