The death of a single unknown individual doesn’t always register as news in a country where ethnic violence, religious upheaval and natural disasters have claimed tens of thousands of lives this year alone.
But when the September 3 Bombay editions of The Times of India published an article entitled “Housewife murdered for bringing insufficient dowry,” it hit a certain chord among the paper’s readers. Beneath the horrific headline ran the story of a young village woman murdered by her in-laws simply because eight years after she married, her father still had not fully paid for her Rs 5,000 (USS159) dowry. The weapon of choice: electric shock in her in-laws’ house.
The case, while extreme, has helped shed light on an increasing trend in the world’s second most populous nation violence against women. While tragic events like the young woman’s murder occasionally make it into the newsroom, lesser variants of punishment for the same “crime” often go unreported.
A government data sheet on violence against women notes the increasing incidence of such atrocities, especially in certain parts of the country. Five states = Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan and one northern union territory, Delhi, together accounted for 68.3% of such crimes in 1991.
While Indian laws provide daughters and sons with an equal share in their parent’s estate, most parents and for that matter most daughters tend to treat the dowry as ‘full and final payment” of the daughter’s claim. Now, science has been pressed into service for an easier alternative: preventing the birth of a baby girl.
The state governments are not the only legislatures to tackle the question of dowry. As early as 1961, the federal government passed the Dowry Prohibition Act, which punishes anyone who offers or accepts a dowry. But few people have invoked the measure, fearing that if they do they will find it hard to find a husband.
Until roughly the tum of the century (and in some regions, even until about the 1920s or 1930s), dowry was unknown among the Hindu peasant classes. Not very long ago certain classes of Brahmins in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and other states even paid a bride price. But not any longer. Now even Muslims and Christians have fallen for the seduction of the dowry system, albeit in a limited way. But it is the upper caste Hindus, the kulins as they are called, who began tall. Claiming the scriptures were on their side, they referred to old percepts saying that in an ideal marriage the bride should be heavily bejeweled and come with lots of presents.
In the beginning, dowry was used as a means of promoting social mobility, when a lowly family wanted to advance itself in society’s pecking order, one of the things it could do was marry off a daughter to a family of a higher social standing by offering a fat dowry.
But many cultural traditions have caused the practice to degenerate. What began as an option has become mandatory. Grace and civility have given way to crude bar gaining. There are instances of girls failing to marry because those guardians could not arrange the dowry. Even with “love,” as opposed to “arranged” marriages, dowries are now demanded through one pretext or another.
Article extracted from this publication >> November 12, 1993
