By Dr. Werner F. Mensk
Dowry must yield to human respect and decency, suggests UK Scholar
Dr. Werner F. Menski, senior lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African studies at the University of London, is one of the world’s leading experts on dowry. The following is excerpted from his paper on the subject.
Back in 1978, Dr. Altekar wrote: “In ordinary families, the amount of dowry was [historically] a nominal one. It was a voluntary gift of pure affection and presented no impediment in the settlement of the daughter’s marriage until the middle of the 19th century. It is only during the last 60 years that the amount of the dowry has assumed scandalous proportions.”
The problem of dowry violence is a modern phenomenon. There is no need to rewrite Hindu scriptures–a ridiculous suggestion anyway, because one cannot undo the past. The Hindu texts, arguing from dharma, do not underwrite cruelty to women for the sake of material possessions. My reading of the scholastic literature suggests that neither legal reform nor social action can achieve improvements unless they take into account individual self-restraint. We need to discuss human psychology and morality rather than law and social policies.
How does one instill self-restraint in greedy or abusive individuals? So far, the arguments we can read all focus on external force: blacken the face of dowry tormentors, boycott dowry weddings, ostracize those who beat women for cash, fridges and scooters, demonstrate against dowry murderers, drag them to court, even hang them in public! None of these deterrent strategies seems to work fully. Thousands of women continue to be killed every year.
The literature confirmed my latent cynicism about the force of self-control, which is also reflected in ancient arguments in Hindu philosophy, to the effect that selfishness and greed are ubiquitous forces in the world and that self-controlled order is not something that can be expected simply to happen by itself. Hindu philosophy and Hindu law show that dharma–doing the right thing at the right time–needs to be promoted by the state, by moral education and by the good example of individuals.
Only some dowry transactions lead to violent deaths. The “dowry problem” is not measurable in financial terms; it can arise among millionaires as well as lower-class families who barely have resources for a decent wedding ceremony.
If dowry-grabbing in-laws have taken not only to expecting but to actually demanding that the bride should arrive in her new home with specified amounts of goods, not only is the bride herself devalued, but the old form of dowry [the free gift] has been intermingled with, and virtually incorporated into, the new dominant form of the demanded assets. Some women, apart from the goods they bring, are seen as property of the family. This is a dangerous constellation and one of the potential scenarios for dowry-related violence, for it is easy to claim that the newly arrived chattels, including the human addition to the family, are not of adequate quality.
In my view, the feminist agenda to revise inheritance or property laws for getting round the dowry problem downplays the fact that dowry violence is not primarily a binary male-female problem, although it seems based on that polarity. The uncomfortable truth is that women themselves are among the worst perpetrators of dowry-related violence. Anyone doubting this should read Verghese’s 1980 account of a dowry suicide.
Married women, over time, gain status and power, to be ultimately themselves found in the dread figure of the mother-in-law. Recently married women are their most vulnerable victims, which can easily deteriorate into bullying.
Ultimately, refraining from dowry violence in its various forms is a matter of individual conscience, for men and women alike. Significantly, the existing literature has not put this in terms of traditional Hindu law, presumably because that would be too “traditional” and therefore politically incorrect. Writing from the distance of London, and willfully disregarding such pressures, I would argue that tradition is a fruitful line of pursuit. At the end of the day, individual men and women have to stand up, in their own home environment and without the involvement of any law or social activist group, against the temptation to use dowry issues as an excuse for mental and physical torture. Dowry violence is not just a “men on women” issue; it goes much beyond the gender division, and our debates must address that fact, however uncomfortable we may be about the implications of it.
Dr. Werner F. Menski: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H0XG.
