Bride Burning: An unspeakable evil!

 

A Matter Of 

Extreme Cruelty:

Bride Burning And

Dowry Deaths

In India

by Partha Banerjee

Injustice Studies Vol. 1

November 1997

The root cause of the problem behind dowry deaths is Hindu religious orthodoxy and its degenerate caste system that divides and re divides Hindus into innumerable classes,

groups, subgroups and factions and provides manipulative socioreligious power to the “upper” castes to drive the “lower” castes to subservience, humiliation, poverty, and death. 

Dowry is derived from the ancient Hindu customs of “kanyadan” and “stridhan”.

In “kanyadan”, the father of the bride offers the father of the groom money or property, etc. whereas for “stridhan”,

the bride herself gets jewelry and clothes at the time of her marriage,

usually from her relatives or friends. 

In “varadakshina”, the father of the bride presents the groom cash or kind.

All of these could be done voluntarily and out of affection and love. 

These days, these customs have become coercive and brutally dangerous.

The caste-based Hindu marriage system is sacramental and not contractual or civil (Sarkar Shastri in Dutta, 1984). 

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According to this system, a marriage is forever,

and there is no scope for a separation.

Among the various ceremonies previously practiced,

the ceremony in front of a “godly” fire

(“Yajna” in Sanskrit) has taken over,

a ceremony that has resemblance with the ancient Roman

“confarreatio” marriage (Dutta, 1984). 

An analysis of this marriage would find its root in the antiquated system of “marrying a wife by capture”. 

Examples of these customs proliferate throughout the post-Vedic Hindu history.

This form of marriage began the practice of dowry, where originally, the family of the bride would accept gifts and money from the groom’s (potential conqueror’s) family as an alternative to bloodshed during the capture of the bride (Dutta, 1984). 

This practice still remains among the “lower caste” Hindus and also Muslims of the Indian subcontinent.

A later modification of this system has paved way for the present coercive and exploitative patriarchal dowry system primarily practiced by the “upper caste” Hindus. 

However, dowry is an economic and definitely not a religious matter. 

The degenerate caste system and its sponsor conservative social and political rulers of India have provided a religious twist to it for their own interests. 

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Some ancient Hindu scriptures such as Manu-Samhita and Gautama-Samhita,

where the wife is deemed to be a subordinate “property” of the husband and is barred from all religious and official activities,

have also fueled the oppressive aspects of the practice.

The Brahmanical-order Hindu caste system has degenerated to such an extent that it has brought about extreme misery and distress not only to the “untouchables”,

but also to artificially formed “inferior” groups belonging to the same social stratum or caste. 

In case of an arranged marriage (and barring a few urban areas, most marriages are arranged where the bride is chosen by the family, relatives, and middleman of the groom),

grooms are traditionally from the “superior” and the brides are from the “inferior” factions of the same caste. 

So, the religious twist is this: by coming up with the dowry, the bride’s family is elevating itself to the upper ladder in the caste hierarchy. 

This is but one excuse behind extorting the dowry.

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There are many other reasons, and all are equally vague and deceptive. 

The bottom line is greed and oppression in an increasingly materialist and historically male-chauvinist society.

Most dowry deaths have occurred in the upper strata of Hindu communities, i.e.,

the Brahmans (the caste of priests cum the Kings’ policy-makers),

Kshatriyas (the caste of worriers now-turned politicians),

and Vaishyas (the traders now-transformed sponsors of conservative parties). 

Most killing of women for non-payment of “promised” dowry have so far occurred in the urban affluent upper-caste Hindu communities. 

In spite of its rapid escalation and migration into traditionally incidence-free areas and non-Hindu communities of India as well as Bangladesh and Pakistan 

(in Pakistan, the death of newly married women due to “stove bursting” has often been featured in the news media in recent years), 

the phenomenon of dowry death is by and large concentrated in the communities and areas mentioned above. 

In places where traditionally there is an absence of caste- or dowry-based marriage system (such as the tribal communities of the far-east Indian states or predominantly caste-free Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist majority areas), dowry deaths are still not rampant.

This evidence reasserts that the problems of dowry death, bride burning, and other forms of dowry-related violence on women is a Hindu phenomenon that is now almost out-of-control due to the following reasons: 

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(1) retention of the caste system, 

(2) undermining of the woman by the religious orthodox and social patriarch making herself and her family vulnerable to socioeconomic pressure and extortion, 

(3) ever-increasing greed of the bridegroom and his family, 

(4) an economically strangled hyper populated society non-supportive of unmarried women, and 

(5) a morally depraved political system run by the pro-status quo conservatives.

However, few (including the educated Indian middle-class) talk about stamping out these social evils. 

Indian scholars are aware of the situation but are reluctant to get involved. The elite and the bourgeois find even more reasons to overlook the mess. 

At the Harvard University-sponsored conferences on bride burning and dowry deaths in India (October, 1995 and November, 1996),

there were talks about the non-violent movement of Gandhi as a remedial measure against the violence and killing of women. 

The present author is not sure about the efficacy of Gandhi’s methods. Gandhi,

the West-painted icon as the “father” of Indian nationhood was a pro-status-quo moderate conservative. 

Gandhi believed married men and women should remain celibate except for procreation purposes (Kapadia, 1995). 

Gandhi preferred girls to remain unmarried all their lives than to be humiliated and dishonored by marrying men who demanded dowry 

(Kishwar in Kapadia, 1995) — however, he never prescribed social changes where the above onus (social and economic) to remain unmarried is not on the women. 

Gandhi acknowledged at a much elderly age, 

“I learned the lesson of non-violence from my wife,

when I tried to bend her to my will. 

Her determined resistance to my will on one hand,

and her quiet submission to the suffering of my stupidity involved on the other,

ultimately made me ashamed of myself and cured me of my stupidity in thinking that I was born to rule her” (Tendulkar, 1952).

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Even though Gandhi talked about the plight of the socially oppressed, including women and untouchables,

his politics did nothing but bring about destruction of the Indian revolutionary forces and transfer of power from the British to the urban Hindu upper caste. 

Gandhi was not a revolutionary and was against any radical changes to the Indian social system. 

Otherwise, with his huge appeal to the Indian and international communities, he could have helped bring down evil and degenerate relics such as the caste barrier. 

Gandhi worshipped Lord Rama, a legendary King from ancient India who often neglected his much-idolized wife Sita and repeatedly humiliated her in public by asking her to prove her chastity. 

Basically, Sita was Rama’s subordinate and an endeared “property”. 

Thus, as the successor who would help keep the British administrative and judiciary system and divisive and exploitative social status quo in post-partition India,

Gandhi was chosen by the post-W.W.II financially and politically bankrupt British colonials who would have soon left India anyway. 

As much as Gandhi was despised by the Hindu fanatics for his appeasement of the Islamic separatists of pre-1947 India 

(and was consequently killed by Nathuram Godse,

a zealot who belonged to radical Hindu groups such as Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha), 

his views on the status and role of Indian women were in fact quite anti-progressive as were his views on many other social, political, and economic issues.

In sharp contrast to Gandhi,

the landmark social movements of

Ram Mohan Ray and Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar

of Bengal in the 1800’s first attempted to

emancipate the oppressed women of India. 

Ram Mohan Ray fought against and brought down the barbaric custom of “sati”.

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Ram Mohan, using his sharp progressive mind, thorough knowledge of the Hindu scriptures,

and social status as a rich landlord with connections with a few compassionate British officers and civilians,

openly challenged and defeated Hindu orthodox pundits in scholarly debates on the issue of “sati”. 

He established Brahmoism, a tenet conceptualized on the Unitarian doctrine of Hinduism and Christianity. 

Brahmoism became the driving force behind the celebrated “Bengal Renaissance” of the nineteenth century Bengal and India. 

At the same time, on the streets of Calcutta, Ram Mohan Ray fought thugs and criminals hired by religious zealots who were hell-bent to break his body and progressive movement. 

‘Sati’ became illegal when in 1830’s, after a grueling social, religious, and political battle, the then governor general of India Lord William Bentinck signed a law in Calcutta banning the practice. 

The conservative Hindu landlords and priests challenged the law and petitioned to the Queen of England. 

To counter this challenge, Ram Mohan left for London. He successfully lobbied with the legislators of the British parliament to make the ban on ‘Sati’ permanent. 

However, Ray could not come back to India — he died suddenly in Bristol.

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A few decades later, a Hindu Brahman scholar Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar spearheaded another movement to legalize remarriage of the widow. 

Ram Mohan Ray and Vidyasagar succeeded largely because of the presence of a supportive group of progressive western scholars and administrators in British India. 

In the early twentieth century, a far more severely brutal and repressive British regime replaced the milder colonial administration. However, that’s yet another story. 

The Dowry Prohibition (Amendment) Act — DPA (1986) introduced as law numbered S.304-B in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) defines dowry death. 

According to this law,’where the death of a woman is caused by burns or bodily injury, 

or occurs otherwise than under normal circumstances within seven years of her marriage and it is shown that soon before her death she was subjected to cruelty or harassment by her husband or any relative of her husband for, 

or in connection with, any demand for dowry, 

such death shall be called “dowry death”.

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