The Unwelcome Wedding Guest

_"Dowry Deaths in India" by Paul Mandelbaum, in Commonweal (Oct. 8, 1999), 475 Riverside Dr., Rm. 405, New York, N.Y. 10115._

Every year in India, some 6,000 newly wed brides—and perhaps as many as 15,000—are murdered or driven to suicide in disputes over their dowries, reports Mandelbaum, a journalist and novelist. Modernization, far from reducing the toll of "dowry deaths," seems to be pushing it higher.

As in the past, most Indian marriages today are arranged by parents seeking "a suitable match within an appropriate range of subcastes," Mandelbaum reports. But with more Indians migrating to the cities or abroad in search of opportunity, the families involved in a match are less likely to have known each other previously. Increasingly, the marital arrangements are made blindly, through brokers, classified ads, and Internet services. And, in a corruption of ancient Hindu customs, Mandelbaum says, the brides and their families now "feel compelled to buy their way into a marriage alliance with ‘gifts’ of cash, jewels, and consumer goods" for the inlaws, with the amount often rising with the groom’s apparent prospects. A groom who works for the privileged government bureaucracy, for instance, may be able to command a dowry worth $100,000 or more.

In a typical dowry death, Mandelbaum says, a new bride is harassed by her husband and in-laws, who insist that the goods promised or delivered are insufficient. Often, it is the status they confer rather than the goods themselves that the husband and his family crave; sometimes, the conflicts are really not about the dowry at all but about underlying problems in the marriage too intimate for open discussion. Eventually, the harassment leads to the young woman’s death, often disguised as an accident.

In the mid-1980s, in response to pressure from feminist groups and the news media, Parliament altered the criminal code, Mandelbaum writes, "plac[ing] 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."

Yet dowry deaths have spread. Once "mostly confined to the corridor connecting Punjab, traditionally a very patriarchal and violent part of northwest India, to Delhi and, further east, Uttar Pradesh," areas with a high incidence of such murders are now found in half the country, Mandelbaum notes.

Many Indians view divorce with alarm, and Hindu parents tell their married daughters not to return home. In a typical case of dowry death, Veena Das, a sociologist at Delhi University, told Mandelbaum, "The girl has gone to her parents repeatedly and says she wants to come back, but the parents refuse to take responsibility for her."