Posted by: Aadisht on: September 13, 2007
Marwaris become wholesale traders. Of steel. Or generic pharmaceuticals or cement or pretty much any commodity. Send their kids to a local Maadoo school and then a local Maadoo B. Com. college. The sons join the family business. The daughters are married off. The family’s black money goes as dowry and becomes an unsecured loan to the [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: May 5, 2007
Time to wrap up the hugely procrastinated dowry series. I’ve defended dowry as a good and useful financial tool. The main argument against this (pointed out by Ritwik) is that dowry is still indefensible- especially because in UP and Bihar dowry will not be used by entrepreneurial sons-in-law as capital and it will drive girls’ [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: April 1, 2007
I started the dowry series with two personal anecdotes. now here’s another one. Years before Gurubhai was marrying for money, my grandfather’s sister-in-law was mortgaging her jewllery to finance his apprenticeship in a shop. Without the apprenticeship, my grandfather would have been a tailor. With it, he eventually got his own shop, became an Exide [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: March 15, 2007
Over at this post by Skimpy, there’s a discussion in the comment threads going on about where dowry comes from. In the post itself, Skimpy makes this point: then a friend told me that in Gultland dowry is mostly in kind (land, gold, etc) and they’re all in the bride’s name. so if her husband [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: February 21, 2007
(No dowry posts or any posts for that matter last week. Apologies if you were keeping a watch out- I flatter myself. I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and an overload at work- which persists this week also. So this post shall be rushed and incoherent and pompous and Aym Gramd. Sorry. Things may improve next [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: February 12, 2007
After all the comments and responses to the first three posts, this is a good time to touch upon the mistakes I’ve made while writing about dowry. The first, most blatant mistake was to entangle dowry and arranged marriages. Paying dowry and forcing your daughter into an arranged marriage both arise out of the desire [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: February 7, 2007
The last post on dowry throws up three corollaries which run contrary to received wisdom. Here they are: Women from communities which don’t have a tradition of dowry are worse off in the long run. In castes and subcastes with a dowry tradition, the girl and her parents have a financial incentive to delay marriage, [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: February 6, 2007
Back to dowry. As I mentioned in this post, fifteen megarupees is now considered too low a price for the privilege of getting your daughter married to someone she’s never met. However, there’s evidently no shortage of people willing to cough up the market clearing price. If you parked twenty megarupees in a fixed deposit, [...]
Posted by: Aadisht on: February 5, 2007
There’s this rumour making the rounds of the IIMB gossip circuit that one of the IIMB guy’s mother was approached by an IIMA girl’s mother; who offered the girl’s hand in marriage along with ten megarupees of dowry. The guy’s mother refused, on the grounds that the girls’ family were Punjabi baniyas, while they were [...]