The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [49]
In India, 70 percent of marriages occur within the same caste, and the Indian public disapproves of intercaste marriage. Among middle-class families in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, women will consider a husband with no education from the same caste over one with a master’s degree if he comes from another. A survey of Indian men found that marrying within their caste had twice the value of marrying a “very beautiful” woman over a “decent-looking” one.
But the most notable quality of the matrimonial classifieds was their blunt businesslike tone. Matrimony, the ads made clear, is a family business, negotiated by the parents of the bride and groom, designed to ensure the passage of the bloodline to the next generation and beyond.
Marriage has changed around the world as a growing number of employed and increasingly assertive women have subverted the archetypal mating transaction. But despite the power women have attained in places like Paris, Berlin, or even Mexico City, in others, age-old marital patterns have resisted change. These happen to be the places where women are cheapest.
In India, many matrimonial ads offer boys. But despite appearances, this isn’t about empowering women. India is not the flip side of polygamous societies in which men go shopping for girls. Brides in India are very nearly powerless. Their parents may still usually pay a dowry to the groom, but brides are still the groom’s property.
Dowries are onerous. Research among a subcaste of potters in Karnataka found the average dowry to be equivalent to six years’ worth of the bride’s family income. In Goa, on the west coast, average dowries rose from about 2,000 rupees in 1920 to between 500,000 and 1 million rupees in 1980.
They are rising. One study estimated that dowries across India rose by 15 percent a year between 1921 and 1981. Some suggest it is due to economic development and rising income inequality, which has allowed richer lower-caste women to bid up the prices for higher-caste grooms. Others suggest that fast population growth since the 1920s tilted the male-to-female ratio in favor of men. That’s because women marry at a younger age than men. As the population grew, there were more young brides available for each successive cohort of older grooms. Indeed, among the Karnataka potters, one woman complained that her fifteen-year-old daughter was among thirteen girls competing for six men.
Yet the high prices brides’ families pay to the grooms do not afford women much security in marriage. Even upper-class women are reportedly threatened, beaten, and even killed by husbands and their families demanding higher dowry payments after marriage. India’s National Crime Bureau reports some 6,000 “dowry murders” a year, in which the husband’s family burns the wife alive. Another study put the figure at 25,000 deaths.
The payment of a dowry is relatively rare compared to bride prices, but it is not exclusively an Indian dynamic. In the Chapainawabganj, Chittagong, and Sherpur regions of Bangladesh, researchers in 2001 reported dowries ranging up to 160,000 taka, which is almost four times Bangladesh’s gross domestic product per capita. The researchers also reported extreme violence against women. Lower dowries usually led to higher levels of domestic abuse. Yet women who paid no dowry reported similar low levels of domestic abuse to those who paid the highest dowries of all. Perhaps this is because they had another source of power.
This naturally leads to the question of why would brides pay to be beaten? Why do dowries exist at all? Mostly, it’s not up to the brides. Their parents cut the marriage deal. India is a patrilineal, patrilocal culture. Men carry on the family line, stay in the