I started the dowry series with two personal anecdotes. now here’s another one.<\/p>\n
Years before Gurubhai<\/a> 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 sitributor, and broke into the middle class- which allowed him and his family to escape from Partition alive. If it hadn’t been for my great-aunt’s dowry, I probably wouldn’t be writing this today.<\/p>\n This is the good side of dowry: it transfers wealth from people who have it to people who don’t. This wealth is especially useful to people who need to break from lower class to middle class and won’t get any help from banks to do so. It also gives parents an option to give their daughters an inheritance without having to use a will- which is of no small importance in a country where legal documents can be disputed to such brutal effect.<\/p>\n So here’s a reality check. Dowry has negative connotations. It is associated with forced marriage and a lack of modernity. It has been attacked by everyone from Munshi Premchand to 1980s Doordarshan propaganda filmmakers. It still<\/em> serves a useful purpose.<\/p>\n But what about the bad stuff I’ve already talked about? The dowry deaths? The unreasonable demands to in-laws? A dowry death is a murder, and needs to be treated as one. The crime is murder, not taking dowry. Similarly, if you have a problem with in-laws being harassed for bigger dowries, treat it as criminal extortion and don’t criminalise dowry. Dowry is value-neutral. As Skimpy points out here<\/a>, it’s no business of the state – or anybody else- what two families do by way of voluntary wealth transfers. It become’s the state’s business only when physical coercion or intimidation are involved.<\/p>\n Another point. Even assuming dowry bans are successfully enforced, it could end up being a net loss. It would end the high profile, heartstring-tugging, heart-bleeding stories\u00a0 of dowry deaths and destitute girls’ parents, but it would also end up preventing parents from giving their daughters an inheritance without having to die first, and from entrepreneurial sons-in-law getting cheap venture capital. Compare Bastiat’s essay on the Seen and the Unseen<\/a>.<\/p>\n Dowry isn’t perfect, but it isn’t evil either, any more than high school exams are evil because they lead some students to commit suicide. It could work better, sure, and I’ll discuss how in the next (and final) post of this series. But it’s still a useful tool, and needs to be appreciated as that- a tool, nothing more and nothing less.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/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-290","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\/p7AOU2-4G","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","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=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}