Wokay!

(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 week.)

Okay. The prevailing wisdom is that dowry is a bad thing. But why?

Two reasons that I can think of.

The first is that huge dowry demands strain the finances of the brides’ parents, and could clobber their standard of living. (Ravikiran earlier pointed out over email that the bride herself benefits from the dowry being transferred to her new household.) We dislike the idea of one family transferring all its wealth to another family and getting nothing in the bargain.

The other reason is that the thought of brides and grooms as commodities to be bought and sold appalls our conscience. We are liberal enough to be repulsed at the thought of trading people.

Which is where the problem lies. Liberality goes only so deep and so broad in the Indian context. The vast majority of people are not liberal. The ones who are are not liberal enough to reject years of tradition.

Dowry is being kept alive by a lack of liberal values. Once those values spread dowry will go away. The problem is that values take bloody long to spread. Until that happens, the next best thing is the economic incentives I described here.

Next in the series: the origins of dowry.

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 for cultural acceptance, but they’re still two separate things. So when I said that women from communities without a dowry tradition are worse off in the long run, I did it with the assumption that social acceptance would come only from arranged marriages, and rightfully got thulped by Nilu for it. There are lots of other ways to gain social acceptance- education, religiosity, and being cultured to name a few.

(Also, just as Nilu knows no Mylapore maamis who got married early, my data points were Delhi Mallus/ Iyengars/ Sardarnis who all had arranged marriages when they were 18-23. Serves me right for theorising based on anecdotal data.)

As for the deeper question of whether I’ve got my cause and effect mixed up, my position is that dowry is a consequence of inadequate financial systems and bad inheritance laws. Now, even though the financial system and inheritance laws have improved to the point that there’s no economic motivation for dowry, dowry persists as a custom because of cultural inertia. So the value of a marriage doesn’t really have a bearing on dowry any more.

Mistake number two was to loosely throw around the word elope as a catch-all. What I should have said was ‘the parents have an incentive to allow the girl to find someone for herself who won’t demand dowry’. Eloping is an extreme manifestation of that.

Mistake three was pointed out in Rashmi’s comment. It’s mostly a rant about market mechanisms, and Rashmi has either not read the post through or not understood it- but she does point out that I totally forgot that rising dowry demands also incentivise female foeticide and cutting down on education for women.

Fair enough. I was thinking about the incentives facing a family which hadn’t killed off their daughter, but then if I wanted to make a pretense of having a comprehensive series on dowry I should have mentioned that too. Mea culpa.

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 UP baniyas. Or the other way around. Who gives a damn about the finer distinction between baniyas anyway?¹

When I first heard about this story, I got enthu and started thinking about how one could use rejected dowry offers to estimate the monetary value of a religious/ regional/ caste/ subcaste barrier. My initial enthusiasm evaporated later on. It’s actually a very silly idea, because different people will have wildly differing valuations of a community barrier². My parents, for example, are getting so disturbingly desperate for grandchildren that they would have a zero valuation. Other people might have an infinite valuation.

More importantly, the offer might not even have been rejected because of the subcaste difference. It’s possible that the guy simply thought the girl was irritating and couldn’t stand the thought of being married to her. Citing subcaste differences might have been a politer, more face-saving way of saying no than saying ‘I’m sorry, but she’s an irritating cow, and being married to her would drive me up the wall.’³

The second rumour is about this guy who joined my employer in the same batch of campus recruitment as me. The story goes that somebody with all the right caste and astrological details and what not offered their daughter and fifteen megarupees of dowry. The guy’s parents practically laughed in their faces at this low offer.

This is astounding. If we take only the guy’s pre-tax annual salary, fifteen megarupees is a valuation at a P/E ratio of approximately 19. And this was rejected. It looks like the market for grooms is as stretched as the market for securities these days.

So what’s a girl- and her parents- to do in these days of overheated valuations? That, dear reader, will be the subject of several upcoming posts. These two rumours have gotten me thinking about dowry as a concept, and there will be lots of blogging on it this week. Until then, do read these somewhat related links: For Love or Money I and For Love or Money II.

¹: As is evident from the mother’s reactions, baniyas themselves do. I was asking a rhetorical question.
²: As any MBA will tell you, any valuation I would have calculated would have been wrong anyway.
³:Which is what I would have said. But then I don’t see the point of saving other peoples’ faces.