DOWRY DEATHS IN INDIA: The plight of India's brides.
Mandelbaum, Paul
DOWRY DEATHS IN INDIA 'Let only your corpse come out of that house' Paul Mandelbaum O n the outskirts of Delhi, in the shadow of the famed Qutab Minar tower, lies the village of Saidulajab....
...Several months after the wedding, he says, Manju's in-laws demanded a washing machine, a refrigerator, and 50,000 rupees...
...Turning to the June 27,1993, classified section, he found one looking for a "beautiful educated match" for a "Kanpur-based handsome boy 29/173/5000 employed leading industrial house only son of senior business executive with own residence...
...One day, roughly five months after her wedding, she and her father met for lunch...
...Problems, however, began at the wedding itself, when, alleges Agarwal, the groom's family demanded a car...
...The prospective groom's father, visiting from New York, objected strenuously to the offer of three lakhs, or roughly $8,500, on the following grounds: "What do you think of me...
...They're taking too much of a chance with somebody's life," charges Himendra Thakur, who heads the International Society against Dowry and Bride-Burning in India, an organization he runs from his home in Salem, Massachusetts...
...Enacting an elaborate pantomime, Manju's neighbor indicates, by pointing to the browned leaves of a backyard plant, the spot where he found her and from which he took her, in the back of his bicycle rickshaw, to a local clinic...
...Grooms working for the elite Indian Administrative Service can sometimes command dowries equivalent to $100,000 or more...
...There is something that has become pathological in India," she asserts...
...dowry death," and placed the burden of proof on the accused in any situation where a bride dies unnaturally during the first seven years of marriage, if a history of dowry harassment can be shown...
...Often a bride's death is staged to look like an accident—hence the popularity of burning...
...Sadly, this reluctance has hardened in recent years, according to Delhi University sociology professor Veena Das...
...The Commonweal 1 8 October 8,1999 first, kanyadan, called for enhancing the virgin bride with an array of jewels...
...As indicated by the traditional Hindu parting to a newly wed daughter ("We are sending your bridal palanquin today...
...Her father, Nawab Singh, has a thirty-one-item list of the bounty he gave, including 70,000 rupees (close to one year's salary), a scooter, a color TV, 224 grams of gold jewelry, 2 kilograms of silver, bedroom furnishings, and thirty-five suits of clothes for the groom's side...
...Meanwhile, the day-to-day struggles fall to a hand-ful of privately run women's shelters...
...These two concepts merged and have mutated into a type of groom-price, now practiced not only by Hindus but also by some of their Muslim neighbors...
...He adds that the ensuing pressure became a nightmare for Sangeeta...
...They think they're saving a home," says Thakur, who maintains that at the first sign of dowry harassment, "the marriage should be dissolved...
...Agarwal if his daughter's engagement was decided hastily, he assures me it was quite typical...
...At the same time, some brides' families have been doing quite well, so well that they might wish to hide surpluses of hard currency from the tax authorities...
...The new laws acknowledged a quasi-manslaughter crime called Paul Mandelbaum's journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere...
...In the small southern town of Bangarapet, a village elder recalls for me the dowry negotiation he mediated on behalf of a local family...
...Increasingly, today's marriage alliances are made blindly through brokers, classified ads, and Internet services...
...A bride's parents may be especially reluctant to allow her back if there are still maiden sisters whose chances of marrying might be hurt by the reputation of coming from a "difficult" family...
...The courts have yet to settle the case...
...So many things," the school teacher recalls for me harriedly over his lunch break...
...Responding to a grounds-well of pressure from women's groups and the media, in the mid-1980s India's Parliament passed sweeping amendments to the largely moribund Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, as well as the Indian Evidence Act and the penal code...
...then Manju's husband struck the match that would eventually kill her...
...When it was time to marry off his twenty-nine-year-old daughter Sangeeta, who had completed her Ph.D...
...This strikes me as an absurd question: How could divorce conceivably approach the tragedy of dowry death...
...She was burned by them purposely for dowry," says Nawab Singh...
...Two days later, Sangeeta was found dead from "asphyxiation as a result of hanging," according to a postmortem report...
...Sometimes, dowry conflicts may mask other underlying problems—infidelity, sexual incompatibility, for example—that are unthinkably intimate for many families to acknowledge and discuss...
...This urgency fueled a climate of extortion...
...When I get around to asking Mr...
...Oldenburg has traced some of the roots of India's dowry problems to the British Raj and the economic pressures imposed by its agricultural tax system, which in turn pitted Indian farmers against one another...
...Manju Singh's parents felt obliged to present a significant endowment, even though she held a bachelor's degree from Delhi University while her fiance was a village shopkeeper...
...One of the best known, Shakti Shalini, was formed thirteen years ago by mothers who were grieving for their lost daughters and who wanted to offer a haven to endangered brides...
...Hindu parents have long stressed that a married daughter should refrain from returning home...
...For one, availability of a host of household appliances, as well as their increasing promotion on television have created a hunger among the lower-middle class and others who lack the purchasing power to afford what they are being encouraged to desire...
...Fire can obscure a variety of incriminating details, and the cheap kerosene stoves to which many Indian wives are virtually chained often do explode, providing offenders with a plausible scenario...
...It is there that he heard her cries of agony on July 10,1996...
...I know the president of India...
...She was weeping," he recalls...
...They feel very good when they send somebody back...
...In many cases, dowry is seen by both parties as an acknowledgment of the groom's desirability...
...He maintains that Sangeeta committed suicide not because of any dowry demands but possibly because she had no desire to marry him in the first place...
...Shakti Shalini also gives counseling sessions designed to restore such troubled marriages, a service not appreciated by everyone...
...Agarwal telephoned the father of this twenty-nine-year-old businessman earning 5,000 rupees per month, and over the next four days the families met several times to negotiate marriage expenditures...
...As late as 1987, high concentrations of dowry-death cases were mostly confined to the corridor connecting Punjab, traditionally a very patriarchal and violent part of northwest India, to Delhi and, further east, Uttar Pradesh...
...Speaking before a Kanpur civic organization in order to pitch his dream of building a series of "residential training centers" for abused brides, Thakur is confronted by an elderly man in the front row, who stands up and demands, "What about divorce...
...Antidowry activists claim the actual death toll is much higher, and the British journal Orbit recently put the annual figure at fifteen thousand...
...What do you know about my status...
...They have seen dowry as a means to invest that money under the table and to secure their daughters a place in higher-status families...
...in solid-state physics, Bimal Agarwal of Kanpur started replying to ads in the Sunday Times of India...
...This "marriage settlement" is often calculated in direct relationship to a groom's prospects...
...Even some tribal groups who until recently preferred the inverse custom of bride-price have switched...
...As her father and I converse on his apartment balcony, I am distracted by the anachronism of a laser eye-surgery center located across a narrow dirt street crowded with sleeping pigs...
...On July 1, Sangeeta was engaged...
...The parents of sons, according to Oldenburg, capitalized on the urgency felt by the parents of daughters to arrange a marriage by an acceptably early age...
...In general, Hindus face a spiritual imperative to marry and remain married, with nothing less than the salvation of their forebears at stake...
...In any case, modern-day dowry came to corrupt two ancient Hindu customs associated with arranged marriage...
...E ven if the last quarter of the twentieth century did not create dowry death, several intersecting social and economic trends seem to have esca lated the problem...
...I tried to give as much as I could...
...Her husband, Sanjay Goel, points out for me the ceiling fan in his family's middle-class living room...
...Manju's case is one of an alleged six thousand "dowry deaths" a year in India...
...In the days before kerosene stoves, writes historian Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Indian brides fell down wells with suspicious regularity...
...The term typically refers to a newly-wed bride who, upon moving into her husband's family home, is harassed over the goods and cash she brought to the marriage, leading to her murder or suicide...
...Ultimately, these two forms of dowry inflation have increased the likelihood that more and more brides' families will have a harder time fulfilling the terms of the marriage Commonweal 1 9 October 8,1999 settlements they feel obliged to enter into, setting the stage for dire consequences...
...While most Indian marriages are still made by parents as a way of ensuring a suitable match within an appropriate range of subcastes, as more Indians move from the countryside to teeming cities or abroad in pursuit of opportunity, chances have grown that a bride would marry into a family geographically removed from and previously unknown to her own parents...
...The transience of the modern world has also put other pressures on arranged marriage...
...As she tried to escape—so alleges the police report—her husband and brother-in-law caught hold of her while her mother-in-law doused her with kerosene...
...Sangeeta's father, however, alleges that not only did dowry play a role in her death, but that she was murdered...
...A passing woman carries atop her head the dried cow chips commonly used for cooking fires...
...Nonetheless, he alleges, Manju's in-laws began to harass and beat her in a spiral of domestic violence leading to her death...
...Other cultural observers speculate that such a climate may have arrived earlier, when Hindu parents felt anxiety about protecting their daughters' honor from Muslim invaders...
...But in the mind of this gentleman and many others in India, divorce is viewed with an alarm difficult to appreciate in the United States...
...Indian grooms living in the United States seek compensation not only for their own self-perceived worth but for providing access to the American dream...
...Twenty years ago, India's feminist leadership began sounding the alarm...
...Whatever the outcome, it seems fair to say that Sangeeta Goel, like many Indian women today, was burdened with the worst of two worlds: the marriage mandate of tradition combined with the compassion-less anonymity of modern-day life...
...Typically in the case of dowry death, one thing is very shocking: "The girl has gone to her parents repeatedly and says she wants to come back, but the parents refuse to take responsibility for her...
...He is currently completing a novel about marriage set partly in India, for which he has received a 1999 James Michener¦/Copernicus Society of America fellowship...
...What will be the state of my prestige if I collect three lakhs from you...
...Such traditions serve to keep many Indian wives married, even when their safety is in danger...
...I know the president of America...
...She said, 'Father, go and talk to those people.'" But he had recently tried that, he says, and was reluctant to intervene again so soon...
...Today, Indian brides and their families feel compelled to buy their way into a marriage alliance with "gifts" of cash, jewels, and consumer goods for the in-laws' pleasure...
...The next day, lying in South Delhi's Safdarjung Hospital with burns covering nearly her entire body, the twenty-seven-year-old regained consciousness long enough to tell a local police officer that her husband and in-laws had threatened to beat her the previous afternoon, haranguing her yet again over the inadequacy of her dowry...
...But by the mid-1990s, significant per-capita concentrations of dowry death had infested half of India's thirty-two states and union territories...
...Commonweal 2 0 October 8,1999...
...Through its narrow rutted dirt al leyways, a local resident takes me to the home of his onetime neighbor, Manju Singh...
...But this stance has met great resistance in India...
...The second, stridhan, provided the bride with a premortem inheritance from her parents...
...In most cases of dowry death, the physical evidence is murky...
...Furthermore, the ancient Laws of Manu enjoin a wife to suffer her husband's trespasses (thus, most marital breakdowns are viewed as the wife's fault...
...In the ensuing years, the violence seems only to have escalated...
...The families of grooms have seized an opportunity, through negotiation of the customary premarital settlements, to acquire some of these items through dowry, leaving it to the bride's family to worry about the bills...
...Often the conflicts are not so much about material goods per se as about the family status such items represent...
Vol. 126 • October 1999 • No. 17
