Saving Face and Saving Money

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, you’d get more than one and a half megarupees a year at current interest rates. But societal taboos and social standing seem to be valued much higher. If you pay some wanker to take your daughter off your hands, you lose money. But if you don’t, you lose face. As a collective society, we seem to put too much of a premium on face.

But I think it’s a waning trend. Here’s why:

  1. Remember the Nisha Sharma case? A few people had made disapproving noises about how she hadn’t walked out because the groom had asked for dowry, but because the groom had asked for too much dowry- ‘unreasonable demands’. They disapproved because they thought that any demand more than zero is unreasonable.
    But I think it’s fantastic. It shows that even if you are indoctrinated to put a value on societal pressures, you don’t put an infinite value on them.1 There is a point at which you’d rather have the money than the respect. And if grooms demand more than that, you’ll tell them to go stick their heads in a pig.
  2. Respect faces competition these days. In the bad old days, when all you could buy with your money was a Premier Padmini and a badly constructed house, the respect of your societal peers is valuable in comparison. Today, though, your money can buy much more. If gaining respect means losing out on a premium flat in Gurgaon, or a foreign education for your other children, or a vacation abroad, you’ll think twice about rushing to buy respect.
  3. The economic rationale is disappearing. If your daughter is supporting you instead of you supporting your daughter, paying somebody else to take her off your hands is a pretty stupid idea.2

So I’m optimistic. Not optimistic enough to think that dowry will vanish in the next twenty years, but enough to say that it’s on a downtrend.

By the way, the series isn’t over yet. Do stick around.

1 I realise that generalising from a sample of one is not sensible. Let’s say that the Nisha Sharma case refutes the assertion that social customs are completely immune to monetary incentives.
2 This point seems to contradict the rest of the post by assuming that marriage and dowry demands are driven by economics rather than cultural inertia. My personal, unverified hypothesis is that dowry had an economic rationale to begin with, acquired the cultural overtones later, and is now driven purely by tradition. However, even if culture forces parents to marry their girl off, economic reality will encourage them to at least push the age of marriage forward.

0 Responses to Saving Face and Saving Money

  1. Baada says:

    Don’t think the entire dowry will be in cash, there is jewellery and land also (land in the girl’s name, some sort of collateral guaranteeing decent caretaking of the girl I suppose).

  2. Vivek Kumar says:

    About the Nisha Sharma case.. there were some reports that presented the boy’s side of the story. He claimed that they broke up the engagement because they found out that she had an affair in college, and this upset the girl’s side. These are only claims, of course.

    Do keep in mind that when Nisha Sharma eventually married someone else, there was a court case filed by her ex-boyfriend saying he was already married to her and claimed that they got married in a secret ceremony somewhere. All these are also just claims. But then, the demand for ‘too much dowry’ was also just a claim.

    In all likelihood, there was more to this than simplistic assertions.

  3. Pravallika says:

    Just wondering if more than “Face and Money”, could there be a possibility that the girl might have thought that the guy isn’t worth to spend her life with?
    a. one who had asked/accepted his parents taking money as an investment in his relationship with the gal?
    b. one who had ill-treated her parents for money?

    Pravallika

  4. […] The last post on dowry throws up three corollaries which run contrary to received wisdom. Here they are: […]

  5. Baada, that’s the last post or so in the series. Will touch on those aspects.

    Vivek, some claims are more likely than other claims, no?

    Pravallika, that is possible. But then did she not think that when the guy was asking for the ‘reasonable’ amount of dowry before the wedding?

  6. Vivek Kumar says:

    Having seen a fair number of seemingly strange claims, which later turned out to be true, I don’t really know if I can say that. Now I think that all claims are just claims.

  7. Vivek Kumar says:

    Sorry for the double comment. I used “just” as adverb, not as adjective 😉

  8. skimpy says:

    agreer about face being much more important than money in the current indian context.

    i think it has to do with some of nehru’s antics – where there was a cap on corporate salaries because of which being rich was not nice. remember the indian movies of 50’s and 60’s – the hero was never rich, it was always the villain that was rich!

    the only way to get rich in those days was by illegal means because of which money lost its jazz. and “respect” has always been high on the indian’s list…

    (and this face vs money thing si what leads to my mom paining me to write the civil service exams.)

  9. […] 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. […]

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