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Dowry Deaths

Chapter · April 2016

DOI: 10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss612

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Dowry Deaths
VINDHYA UNDURTI
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India
The phenomenon of dowry deaths – of vio-
lence against young married women by their
husbands and families related to extortion
for gifts – was vital in activating the women’s
movement in post-independence India in the
1980s. Although the historical and traditional
meaning of dowry has changed over the
centuries, the evolution of the practice from
possibly customary inheritance to extortion
and violence is embedded in an increasingly
consumerist society and capitalist economy.
Highlighted initially by the women’s move-
ment as a symbol of devaluation of women
and leading to major legal reform, analysis
of the criminal justice system’s response to
dowry deaths revealed that they obscured
other causes of gender-based inequalities
and violence against women which are not
peculiar to India alone.
The term “dowry deaths” or “dowry mur-
ders,” as the women’s movement in India
referred to this phenomenon, is used to
indicate deaths of young, married women
due to abuse centered on dowry demands
by their husbands and their families. This
phenomenon first burst onto the center
stage of public consciousness in India in the
early 1980s with media reports of instances of
young brides being burned to death. Captured
by the evocative term “bride burning,” it was
this form of violence against women that was
a key issue to trigger the women’s movement
in post-independence India. While different
forms of violence against women are now
recognized as near universal and a global
phenomenon, the linkage of dowry extortion
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, First Edition. Edited by Nancy A. Naples.
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss612
to marital violence is seen as a “cultural
crime” peculiar to India (Oldenburg 2010).
The custom of dowry – of gifts of property,
cash, and goods – given at the time of mar-
riage by the bride’s parents to the bridegroom
and his family is an old one and was largely
associated with the upper castes in northern
India. It is only in the last four decades or so
that demands for dowry and the continued
pressure on the woman’s natal family for gifts
at the time of marriage and subsequently
became intertwined with extortion. This
signaled a clear message about the worth of
women: the continuing practice of dowry
reflected the woman’s status as a liability in
the sense that the new family must be paid
off for accepting the woman. Further, she
also becomes a hostage to her husband and
in-laws’ desire for a continued flow of gifts.
The practice of dowry has now spread to
almost all regions and across caste groups. In
south India, where the practice of dowry was
virtually non-existent a little more than half
a century ago except in the numerically small
upper caste of Brahmins, the current spread
of the practice and its growing identification
with investible capital is seen as an expression
of upward mobility through marriage in an
increasingly capitalist market economy. The
demand and spread for dowry in this region
are seen as equated with rising aspirations of
modernity wherein the bridegroom’s worth
and accomplishments in terms of educa-
tion and employment are assessed through
the dowry price that he can command. It
is this evolving and dynamic meaning of
dowry across time and across regions – south
and north – in India that accounts for the
persistence of the phenomenon.
Feminist scholars note that the intersec-
tional links of commercialization of marriage
2 D OWRY DEATHS
transactions and dowry violence with the
current socioeconomic context are evi-
dent in increasing consumerism, economic
marginalization, and rising costs of living,
rendering dowry extortion a living symbol of
“private patriarchy” in India today (Kapadia
2002).
Therefore, far from being an obsolete resi-
due of departed times, and despite the diver-
sity of marriage practices between regions
and caste groups in the country, the practice
of dowry and the related coercion culmi-
nating in different forms of violence against
the bride has been grafted onto an increas-
ingly consumerist society. Despite the legal
prohibition of giving and taking of dowry
as declared in the Dowry Prohibition Act in
1961 and its subsequent amendment in 1984,
the practice of dowry in fact continues to
receive implicit social sanction.
Some have argued (e.g., Kishwar 1988)
that the practice of dowry ensures a woman’s
share and inheritance of the family wealth
and provides her with some resource of
her own when she enters the marital home.
However, it is the coercive nature that the
practice has acquired and its relationship to
harassment and abuse of the wife that became
more central to the campaigns of the women’s
movement.
Media reports in cities, in particular, of
young married women being abused for not
fulfilling dowry demands received increas-
ing visibility in the 1980s. Protest cam-
paigns launched by the newly emerging
women’s groups regarded dowry murders as
emblematic of the devaluation of women and
demanded responsiveness of the criminal
justice system to these deaths. Question-
ing the gendered nature and application of
laws, the women’s movement was instru-
mental in interrogating the power relations
within the family structure and in intro-
ducing legal reform to combat the problem
of dowry violence. As a consequence of
these campaigns, amendments to the Indian
Penal Code – Section 498A (“mental and
physical cruelty to wives on account of
dowry demands”) and Section 304B (“dowry
death”) – were made in 1983 and 1986
respectively. These amendments represented
the recognition of marital violence for the first
time in the legal history of women’s rights,
and the campaigns of the women’s movement
resulted in the visibility of such violence as a
political issue. However, what soon became
apparent was that dowry demands obscured
other causes of unnatural deaths of married
women. In what became subsequently evi-
dent as a classic no-win situation, analysis
of the criminal justice system’s handling of
dowry death cases showed that a majority
of them resulted in acquittal of the accused
as on the one hand, dowry payments being
customary were difficult to prove, and on the
other, violence due to any other reason apart
from dowry was normalized within the legal
system (Agnes 1995; Vindhya 2000). It was
only later that the focus of causes of violence
expanded to include other than those related
to dowry extortion. Domestic violence, which
by no means is peculiar to India alone, even-
tually came to be recognized as a separate
crime with the enactment of Protection of
Women from Domestic Violence Act in 2005.
SEE ALSO: Domestic Violence in the United
States; Dowry and Bride-Price; Women’s and
Feminist Activism in Southeast Asia; Women’s
and Feminist Organizations in South Asia
REFERENCES
Agnes, Flavia. 1995. State, Gender, and the Rhetoric
of Law Reform. Bombay: Research Centre for
Women’s Studies, Shreemati Nathibai Damodar
Thackersey Women’s University.
Kapadia, Karin. 2002.“Translocal Modernities and
Transformations of Gender and Caste.” In The
Violence of Development, edited by Karin Kapa-
dia. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Kishwar, Madhu. 1988. “Rethinking Dowry Boy-
cott.” Manushi, 48: 3–7.
 D OWRY DEATHS 3

Oldenburg, Veena. 2010. Dowry Murder: Rein- FURTHER READING

vestigating a Cultural Whodunit. New Delhi:
Penguin.
Vindhya, U. 2000. “‘Dowry Deaths’ in Andhra
Pradesh, India: Response of the Criminal
Justice System.” Violence against Women, 6:
1085–1108.
Agnihotri, Indu. 2003. “The Expanding Dimen-
sions of Dowry.” Indian Journal of Gender Stud-
ies, 10: 307–319.
Gangoli, Geetanjali. 2007. Indian Feminisms: Law,
Patriarchies and Violence in India. Hampshire:
Ashgate.

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