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| Big Fat Indian Weddings |
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Throughout the world the wedding day is considered the most important and exciting day in the life of a man and woman. In India, it has become more than that – on the surface there is festivity and rejoicing, scratch a little deeper and the agony is revealed. Beneath all the pomp and the band-baaja are hidden the sores of a huge social issue. How has a day of celebration, a day which the couple has dreamed of for years, become a social problem?
The problem begins with the birth of a girl child. Tragically for most parents the first emotion on the birth of a girl child is not one of happiness but sadness. Already they are looking at her as a tree that will flower and bear fruit in someone else’s garden. Already they are worrying about the money they will have to save to pay for her dowry and wedding expenses, about finding a suitable boy for her when she comes of age. Multiply this worry to the millions of girls that survive in the womb to be born every year and we can see the contours of the social problem called weddings.
What has been the Indian response to this problem? Our response has been to create another social problem, kill the female fetus in the womb. As some sex determination clinics in the nineties shamelessly advertised, “spend five thousand now, save five lakhs later.” Too late many are now realizing that the adverse sex ratio creates another monstrous problem, again at the time of marriage. Many males just do not have females to marry as they have been killed in the womb. Can you imagine the kind of social damage these millions of frustrated unmarried males are creating to the social fabric?
In the meanwhile, the problem of expensive weddings, of exorbitant dowries, is growing every year. Despite girls being educated, despite them working outside the home, despite them becoming professionals, dowry demands are not decreasing but increasing. Communities in India which did not have a tradition of dowry are now taking to this practice. Dowry and marriage expenses are one of the main causes for rural indebtedness and a cycle of debt from which families find no redemption. Farmers have sold land, even their houses to get their daughters married. Many unmarried girls are living a life of misery and humiliation with some even pushed into the sex trade. Many wives are tortured for more dowry even after marriage for now the dowry is not just paid before marriage, it continues to be demanded even after marriage. In 2010, 8391 dowry death cases were reported across India, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. A decade earlier this number was 6995.
One would have expected that this social trauma within the bowels of society would unleash change! This unmitigated sorrow, this social distress would have forced us to tackle this social ill. But alas, in India change rarely comes from below, it is never a response to the seething problem below. Change comes from above. The “above” of Indian society changes, the rest of society imitates. The “above” of Indian society moves from three star weddings to five star weddings, the rest of society aspires for the same. For the “above” of Indian society, weddings is the time to vulgarly display one’s wealth and power, for the rest of society it is a time to buy a little more social status through lavish weddings and higher dowry demands.
Last year India continued to be the largest importer of gold in the world, most of it consumed for weddings. We imported 1000 tonnes of gold. Despite the rise in gold prices our appetite for the yellow metal is insatiable. In value terms, total demand reached Rs. 220,507 crores in 2011, an increase of 22% from Rs. 181,107 crores in 2010, which was in turn an increase of 98% from Rs. 87,430 crores in 2009. To put such astronomical expenditure into perspective, the present health budget of the Union government this year is Rs 26,760 crores. This demand for gold from an economic point of view is dead capital, completely unproductive.
Why do we persist in spending beyond our means? Why this craze for big fat Indian weddings? How come education, even girls’ education, modernization and development, instead of reducing the problem of dowry have in fact exacerbated the problem? How come the problem continues to grow despite a law banning and criminalizing it? What is the secret behind the resilience of dowry? How come dowry as an all pervasive system exists primarily in the Indian sub-continent?
To answer these questions we should first grasp what is unique about Indian marriages, what distinguishes us from the rest of the world. We would point to two features. First of all, nowhere in world are so many millions of marriages arranged. Arranged marriages are the norm, love marriages are an exception. The responsibility of finding a marriage mate rests not with the persons getting married but on the shoulders of their parents. If a girl is unmarried, the persons who stand accused in the dock are the parents. The social status of a family with unmarried daughters is lower than that of a family with married daughters who may even be living with drunk husbands. Like any product there are middle men or middle women whose job it is to make the match. An important job of the match maker is to facilitate the transfer of property and wealth from the girl’s side to the boy’s side. On the results of these negotiations the wedding will fructify or not. For a huge number of weddings, no factor is as important as the economic factor.
The question naturally arises, why does the transfer of property or wealth take place from the girl’s side to the boy’s side and not vice versa? We now come to the second feature of Indian marriages which make us unique in the world. In India marriages are arranged only within a narrow marriage circle, called caste. It is taboo to marry outside caste. Open the advertisement of any major newspaper on a Sunday and you will see how the most educated solicit marriage proposals on caste lines. Even Indians of foreign origin, who have been born and lived abroad, search for mates within their marriage circles.
It is not difficult to comprehend the implication of this. While demographically at any given time, there are millions of Indians of marriageable age, who by law can get married to each other, yet in practice the marriage market for a partner is not these millions, but is restricted to a few hundred who belong to your marriage-caste circle.
There is a further restriction. The girl’s side is on the lookout for a boy whose economic and social status is higher or equal but not lower than their own. And for this, they have to pay through their nose. Since the boy’s side knows that parents of daughters will not agree to a match where their daughter goes to a family poorer than their own, they extract a price. The higher the price they can extract from the girl’s side, the higher their social standing. The family of a boy who commands a high dowry is truly neighbour’s envy!
Thus, marriage negotiations do not take place between equals but between unequals. The girl’s side is the weaker and the vulnerable side while the boy’s side is the stronger and powerful side. Many a time the girl’s side is in such a hurry after finding a suitable boy, that the marriage is fixed in a rush, whereby the girl and boy have not even had the chance to meet each other, leave alone know each other.
Any outsider to an Indian wedding can tell from the body language of the respective families, which is the boy’s side and which the girl’s. The boy’s side is more arrogant, more strident, more expansive, while the girl’s side is more subdued, more cowed down, more ‘at your service’. Mind you, the boy’s side making exorbitant dowry demands does not suffer from even a twinge of conscience or defensiveness. The boy’s side is completely comfortable with this unequal power equation. Since the girl’s parents themselves look upon their daughter as a burden, dowry is mere compensation to the boy’s side for taking on this burden! This “burden” may be earning a six figure salary, maybe an engineer, a doctor or an MBA, it does not make any difference. It is a scathing comment on our problem-solving abilities when we see many families using the money they extract in dowry during their son’s marriage to pay for their own daughter’s marriage!
It is important to point out that this vulgar and oppressive form of marriage is not part of our tradition. In traditional India, among the upper and landed castes, the caste community regulated the marriage arrangement. The girl’s parents gave their daughter what was called streedhan, which consisted of gold and other household gifts. This was voluntary, the gold and the gifts belonged to the bride and not the in-laws. Most important, it was never demanded, it was voluntary. Among poorer and backward castes the opposite custom prevailed. Since most of these girls did manual work from an early age, the boy had to pay bride-price to the girl’s parents as he had to compensate them for the economic asset he was taking over.
With the coming of the British there was a fundamental change in our political economy. Land became private property to be passed on to the sons, where a daughter had no rights whatsoever even in her parent’s home after marriage. An organized sector was opened up including administrative jobs, where boys cornering these jobs were highly sought in the marriage market. With capitalism, the laws of supply and demand came into play. There was a continuous supply of girls wanting to marry above their economic status, while the supply of boys having such a status was restricted. The boy’s side began demanding dowries while the girl’s side facing competition from other families acquiesced.
Despite modernization, mates were still sought within the caste for that is the only place parents can find them, but community pressure had became weak with migration and economic prosperity. There was no community pressure to restrict dowry which soon became pure extortion.
Thus dowry is not part of our tradition, it the marriage system of caste-based society in the period of growing capitalism. And this is where the contradiction lies. Capitalism on the one hand, removes women from the narrow confines of the home and educates them. The same women play an important role in the economy, competing with men in every sector, even doing better. This economic independence empowers them but the social relation of marriage disempowers them. On the one hand, capitalism intoxicates them with ideas of individualism and free choice. On the other hand, marriage tends to crush their individualism and self worth and negates free choice. Capitalism seduces the youth with notions of romantic love, but the choice of choosing one’s life partner is not based on love but crass commercial considerations within narrow caste walls. The mass media bombards us with images of lavish and glamorous weddings, fairy like receptions, honeymoons in exotic locations. The reality is that of indebtedness for the girl’s parents, the humiliation of the bride for the ‘little’ her parents have given her, the continuous torture of women for dowry even after marriage.
The question which especially the youth should ask themselves is, can a wedding based on extortion and venal commercial considerations, based on inequality between the two sides, lead to a happy married life? We put all our energies on that one big day, our wedding day, where we will be the cynosure of all eyes, but forget that this day is just the beginning of a life- long relationship for which we have not planned whatsoever. At the heart of it, for boys it is what kind of brides they want? Do they want a wife who will be an equal, a life partner, sharing both one’s joys and sorrows, or do they want a servile bride, whose father is an ATM machine. For girls, it is what kind of wife they want to be -- an equal worthy of respect or a servile doormat. If they want equality as every woman wants, they have to say no to any dowry demands, even if society threatens them with a life without marriage.
Saying no to dowry is swimming against the tide. It is deciding to become the exception. It is refusing to make one’s future be subjected to the laws of demand and supply of the marriage market. It is to stand up for what is right despite the social pressures. This is what Satyamev Jayate is all about!
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