After all the comments and responses to the first three posts, this is a good time to touch upon the mistakes I’ve made while writing about dowry.
The first, most blatant mistake was to entangle dowry and arranged marriages. Paying dowry and forcing your daughter into an arranged marriage both arise out of the desire for cultural acceptance, but they’re still two separate things. So when I said that women from communities without a dowry tradition are worse off in the long run, I did it with the assumption that social acceptance would come only from arranged marriages, and rightfully got thulped by Nilu for it. There are lots of other ways to gain social acceptance- education, religiosity, and being cultured to name a few.
(Also, just as Nilu knows no Mylapore maamis who got married early, my data points were Delhi Mallus/ Iyengars/ Sardarnis who all had arranged marriages when they were 18-23. Serves me right for theorising based on anecdotal data.)
As for the deeper question of whether I’ve got my cause and effect mixed up, my position is that dowry is a consequence of inadequate financial systems and bad inheritance laws. Now, even though the financial system and inheritance laws have improved to the point that there’s no economic motivation for dowry, dowry persists as a custom because of cultural inertia. So the value of a marriage doesn’t really have a bearing on dowry any more.
Mistake number two was to loosely throw around the word elope as a catch-all. What I should have said was ‘the parents have an incentive to allow the girl to find someone for herself who won’t demand dowry’. Eloping is an extreme manifestation of that.
Mistake three was pointed out in Rashmi’s comment. It’s mostly a rant about market mechanisms, and Rashmi has either not read the post through or not understood it- but she does point out that I totally forgot that rising dowry demands also incentivise female foeticide and cutting down on education for women.
Fair enough. I was thinking about the incentives facing a family which hadn’t killed off their daughter, but then if I wanted to make a pretense of having a comprehensive series on dowry I should have mentioned that too. Mea culpa.
1. I don’t think mixing up arranged marriages and dowry is that big a mistake in the first place. A true love marriage with exorbitant dowry demands is a very rare phenomenon, and it is not inaccurate to assume marriages with unreasonable, forced dowry as a subset of arranged marriages. An arranged marriage is the predominant consideration for most parents due to a cultural inertia or social acceptance; the giving of dowry however is more of a compulsion. Among the newly-rich in Delhi,etc. a high amount of dowry may perhaps be thought of by some as a twisted and perverse status symbol, however, for the larger middle and lower income populace in UP, Delhi, Bihar most parents would settle for the ‘no dowry’ marriages – it’s just that within the context of endogamous caste arranged marriages, that option is often just not availabale to them.
2. The relation between the existence of the dowry custom and the age of marriage is quite interesting and you may not be very off the mark. Gujarat has by and large no tradition of dowry and is prosperous,and the girls get married at a very early age. Bihar has a very deeply entrenched tradition of dowry, and very often, the girls are married at a later age because the parents require more time to build up the money required for the marriage. Marwaris have a strong tradition of dowry and the girls still get married at an earlier age. Within the communities that follow dowry, things are even more complex. In eastern UP and Bihar, among the poorest regions of India, the process of marriage is a huge hassle for parents due to exorbitant dowry demands even for unemployed (yes unemployed : P/E ratio of infinity, how’s that?!) men, but post-marital dowry related harassment is relatively rare and female infanicide/foeticide cases are minimal. In Haryana, Punjab, western UP and Gujarat(those few Gujarati communities that do have the dowry tradition), i.e more prosperous areas, post-marriage dowry related deaths and harassment cases are higher, as are instances of female foeticide and infanticide. Nilu’s example doesn’t necessarily invalidate your theory, it is even more anecdotal than yours and an economic theory will always be subject to numerous exceptions, but your theory does need to be based on closer examination and anecdotes/knowledge of a wider range of communities and it also needs to be less simplistic in its choice of variables (only age and a binary dowry/no-dowry variable is rather inadequate).
3. Dowry system is not necessarily the result of poor inheritance laws as we had them post-independence. Traditionally, the concept of dowry as a marriage gift to the girl, and in effect, her last right to her father’s property has existed in India as well as the European aristocracy(basically, all feudal societies) long before inheritance laws were formally codified. The inheritance laws that were then formed reflected this widely-accepted social norm, which is to say that this time you do have cause and effect mixed up. Early inheritance laws were the result of certain patriarchal social notions and traditions(dowry being only one of them), not the other way round. A change in inheritance laws to more modern enlightened norms will thus obviously take a long time to change the social norm(cultural inertia, as you put it), and may not even be successful. Education, which may make a society question its existing norms, is thus a far superior way of controlling the phenomenon, as it hits the cause, not the effect.
“Also, just as Nilu knows no Mylapore maamis who got married early, my data points were Delhi Mallus/ Iyengars/ Sardarnis who all had arranged marriages when they were 18-23. Serves me right for theorising based on anecdotal data”
hey i know the dowry matter is very less in iyengars being a iyengar. i have six uncles and my grandfather didn’t ask a single penny. the same applies to my mom and aunt. they both got married.. and as far as i know there is a demand . but it is very less is what i would say.. and also it depends upon the family.. and 18 -23 or rather 25 is teh correct time for marriage.. i don’t where u got thsi statistics from but i feel its wrong. if u got ot Andhra u’ll know how much is the dowry there. but only problem wheich i’ll say is that the expenses which the gals parents has to do.. that’s pretty heavy and inspite of everything now marriages are happeneing
Padma,
Generally I would say that the practice of dowry taking/giving is very less among Non-Trade and Non-Landed Communities. Because, there is no real asset (other than family jewellery) that can be shared-transferred by way of dowry. And if the community happens to be highly educated/urbanised, dowry is almost non-existent .
Ritwik,
We may have good inheritance laws since independence, but problem is that Till 1990s, the Socialist Governments of India have criminalized “Legal possession of Wealth”. There were crazy wealth tax , gift tax and income tax rates, and things like Gold Control act etc, which made the rich hide whatever wealth they earnt or inherited. Net result is that every money transaction regarding wealth was done with principle of disregarding the laws of the land. Dowry was one easy way to transfer assets between individuals without encountering gift taxation. In a way, Governments of past have themselves done their bit to encourage discrediting and debasing of their laws. Hopefully things are looking better after 1991 and now we are seeing more and more awareness and practice of gender neutral inheritance laws.