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December 1, 2002
Not an offering
Women in South Asian societies have had to suffer all kinds of indignities on account of the retrograde custom of giving them dowry at the time of their marriage. Subhadra Butalia speaks out against
As a custom, dowry is said to have been prevalent among the rich and propertied classes. Apparently, it was believed that women were not competent to handle property and so at the time of marriage, when the daughter was virtually leaving home for good, she was given dowry to compensate for what she would lose out in terms of the family fortune. Apart from this logic, the rich also used the giving and taking of dowry to cement ties with other rich families and also managed to keep the son-in-law at a distance from their family property for no one wanted him to be given the chance to touch this wealth.
Among the not so rich, the custom of bride price — almost the opposite of dowry — prevailed. Here, the prospective groom had to pay a price to take away the bride. It is believed that as poorer sections of society began to aspire to move up in the social scale, they emulated the practice of dowry which came to be seen as markers of status. In addition, political uncertainties meant that parents were increasingly unsure about the welfare of their daughters and began to woo prospective grooms with offers of dowry. Once rising unemployment and rampant consumerism were added to this, the resulting mixture was a potent one, with people beginning to see dowry as a quick path to satisfying their greed for goods and money.....
How can we get rid of this blatant insult and exploitation of women, especially when most people are totally convinced that dowry is their right? I remember that one of the many times that I was fired with enthusiasm to do something about dowry, I drafted a letter to the government asking for a thorough change in the law relating to dowry. I shared this with my colleagues in the college where I taught and asked if they would be willing to sign it. One of them got into quite a debate with me.
“Why should I not take dowry?’ he asked. ‘I will have to provide for the woman for the rest of my life. She’ll eat in my home, at my expense. The least her parents can do is provide for her food.” I was really taken aback. I had never been faced with such commercialization of marriage. And this from a teacher! What must he be teaching to his students? As we were arguing, another colleague walked in and asked what was going on and he was told, “This madam here is asking me to sign a letter protesting against dowry. How can I do that? Dowry is part of our rich heritage and it is a custom that has been followed for so long. Mercifully we have not yet given up our culture even though we have imbibed so much foreign culture.”
Such opinions are common, and my colleagues were not alone in their beliefs. My own sister had refused to get her son married if his in laws did not provide a motorcycle in their daughter’s dowry.
As I write these words I am only a few days away from my eightieth birthday. For more than a quarter century I have been involved in the anti-dowry agitation. Even though I had never been a supporter of dowry, I can’t say that I opposed it in any active way until the death of Hardeep Kaur, a tragic circumstance which catapulted me into the thick of agitation. The vision of that young woman, wrapped in a white sheet so that her burns would not be visible, is still fresh in my mind and often haunts me.
What must she have felt as she watched her husband and mother-in-law set fire to her? I continue to be troubled by this. What have we done, I often ask myself, to ensure that the world is a better place for young women to grow up and live in?
In the course of my work on dowry I have come across every sort of corruption: the courts, the law, the systems of justice, police investigations, political interference, not to mention the corruption of custom and tradition. The people who seem to matter least in this are women. There have been times when I have felt enormously tired, when I have despaired because nothing ever seems to change, yet every time I have been accosted by such a feeling something has happened — a small victory, a woman who has resisted — to make me feel better....
But now that I look back on my years of work and my development as a human being, I realize that there were many lessons that I picked up along the way. A small incident from my school years sticks in my mind. As a child I wanted to attend parties all the time and once I wanted to wear lipstick to a friend’s birthday. My mother did not allow me to do so, saying, “Not here. When you go to your own home you can do anything.” I was stunned — I looked at my mother in disbelief. I was close to tears and my mother must have seen this for she put her arms around me and tried to explain. But I refused to listen. I thought, I was born here, I have grown up here, how can she disown me like this? If I don’t belong here, then where do I belong?
My mother sang a lot and one of her favourite songs, a Punjabi marriage song, which imparts a piece of advice from a mother to her daughter, often comes back to me. The mother says, “Dear child, your days of joy are now over and you are leaving the warmth of your parents’ home. You are going to a strange place where no one will care for you, no one will listen to you. Tread carefully, my child, be respectful and create a place for yourself through humility and respect.”
The pathos of that song often comes back to me when I look beyond my own life into the lives of those innumerable women who are tortured for dowry, who are at the mercy of callous relatives and have nowhere to go. Their only relief is death.
Nowhere in marriage is the woman considered to be a human being with feelings, needs and desires. I remember once being shocked because the young son of a neighbour of ours said he was getting married because his mother was very ill and they needed someone in the house to do the housework. I wondered then if this was all the young woman meant to him, a home help. I asked the young man sarcastically why his mother had not married rather than him. Predictably, he wasn’t amused.
As I walked home from his wedding ceremony, I remembered another incident that had made me really angry. I was waiting at a bus stop when I heard some women talking about a young man who was looking for a bride. “Three girls have been offered to my son. I am tempted to accept the one from Mussoorie.”
“Yes, yes, auntie,” replied the other women, “let’s take the one from Mussoorie, at least we’ll have some place to go to in the summer.”
At the time I was not involved in the anti-dowry agitation, yet the word ‘offer’ had irritated me. I remember thinking, she’s talking as if someone is offering her fried fish on a plate. Little did I know then how true this was, for that, sadly, is the attitude: here’s a piece of fish or whatever; if you don’t like it, throw it away, you can always get a replacement.
In recent years, the anti-dowry agitation seems to have gone into a sort of decline. Yet, the number of cases of dowry-related violence and dowry deaths continues to rise. Earlier, we had believed — and perhaps we were wrong in doing so — that dowry was largely a middleclass problem and it related only to Hindu families, mostly from North India.
Today, we have been disabused of this notion as dowry continues to spread its tentacles far and wide and we hear stories of Muslim, Christian and Sikh women who are suffering because of dowry. Meanwhile, the courts continue to be prejudiced and unfair, and convictions are so rare as to be almost negligible. And within the women’s movement too, there are now differences of opinion, with prominent women claiming that dowry is something that is actually pro-women, rather than against them.
When I listen to such statements I don’t know whether to be resigned that we have, once again, come full circle, or despair that we have made such little progress, or hopeful that these differences are at least beginning to lead to a debate, which hopefully will make us wiser and more capable of addressing such issues. I leave you with this question.
Excerpted with permission from
The gift of a daughter: encounters with victims of dowry
By Subhadra Butalia
Penguin India. For more information log on to www.penguinbooksindia.com
ISBN 0-14-302871-5
170pp. Indian Rs200
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