{"id":276,"date":"2007-02-12T15:03:47","date_gmt":"2007-02-12T09:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2007\/02\/12\/where-i-went-wrong\/"},"modified":"2007-02-12T15:03:47","modified_gmt":"2007-02-12T09:33:47","slug":"where-i-went-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2007\/02\/12\/where-i-went-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Where I Went Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. There are lots of other ways to gain social acceptance- education, religiosity, and being cultured to name a few.<\/p>\n

(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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mistake number two was to loosely throw around the word elope as a catch-all<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Mistake three was pointed out in Rashmi’s comment<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[59,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dowry","category-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-4s","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}