Among the many things that need to be revamped in the mainstream Pakistani society dowry would probably be one of the major ones. Sure no harm in giving the bride gifts on her wedding for her home and personal use but with the growing number of girls start staying unmarried simply because the parents don’t have the money to meet the ‘demands’ of the groom’s family, then it is a quandary that needs to be looked into. The most irksome angle of the dowry situation is that the tradition for an increasingly elaborate dowry is set by the people who don’t even need dowry’s from the girls in order to ‘run their homes’ or ‘support’ the grooms in any way. When the more educated and bourgeoisie class stoops to an all time low, the uneducated ones can only be expected to follow.
Dowry is a massive social ill on both sides of the Pakistan-India border and who hasn’t heard of the infamous bride burning where the girl who brings insufficient dowry is burnt ‘accidentally’ by her in laws so that a new ‘prey’ may be caught who can bring in a better dowry.
Since there is no practice of conducting studies on this issue in Pakistan, the actual dowry related accidents have for the most part gone unrecorded. Shahnaz Bukhari is the founder of the Islamabad-based Progressive Women’s Association and has handled 17,000 cases of women who have been subjected to dowry related violence such as rapes, murders and stove burnings.
It wouldn’t be altogether fair to state that the government has remained oblivious to the disaster this dowry-demanding has caused in the society. Back in the 1970s in an attempt to curb the escalating violence over dowry, Pakistan attempted to make dowry giving or taking entirely illegal. A new law in 1976 set a certain amount of dowry to be permissible where the bridal gifts and marriage expenditure could not exceed 50,000 rupees (about $900). But as was seen in this case, the lack of social responsibility and firmly rooted trends rendered this law practically void.
We don’t need facts and figures to tell us about the havoc dowry is causing for the middle class and lower middle class families. All of us have undoubtedly witnessed distressing cases within our families and the families of our friends, neighbors, cleaning women etc. etc where the good looking and educated girls are unable to get married because they don’t have the dowry to fulfill the demands of the greedy, near-carnivorous grooms. We can write and preach all we want but the practice can never really go away unless we show by action that the educated class not only abhors the tradition but has decided to do away with it for good.
Not only should there be no dowry but it should be announced to everyone present at the wedding by the groom’s family that they are taking the girl home in one suitcase of clothes. If she wishes to bring along her personal stuff such as books and memorabilia, that would not constitute dowry that is currently running into lacs of rupees, with furniture for nearly the entire house, fridges, TV, DVD players, microwaves, cars, motorbikes, linen enough to cover every bed for the next generation, crockery, cutlery and what not. Not to mention the 100 dresses that is the standard now with a ton of gold. And I forgot to mention the gifts that need to be given to the groom’s parents, sisters and brothers. Dowry needs to go and it needs to go from the educated and well off families who are not giving dowries but actually competing in society to make sure no one gives better dowry than them. It has become a status symbol but their little game is ruining the lives of the poorer girls. In the process they are setting a craze that is stirring up hell for the middle class and poorer families who are unable to give so much to their daughters. They are relegated to the fate of watching their daughters get old because they don’t have the money for the dowry to satiate the needs of the grooms who get greedier and greedier by watching this ostentatious display of dowry trends set by the better off in society.
Ironically dowry seems to be a highly stable sociological trend in a country where only 56 percent of the people have access to safe drinking water and only 24 percent has satisfactory sanitation. 91 out of 1000 babies die before their first birthday and doctors and health services are available for only 53 percent of the population. So one might think that the citizenry would have other things on its mind rather than dowry? Hardly so. The leader of the CDHP, Community Health and Development program remarked, ‘We would be lecturing them about the use of oral rehyderation solution for infant diarrhea, when they were worried to death about a husband who was becoming addicted to drugs or how to raise dowries for their daughters’. So what is the solution? Though at this point where the menace has permeated into the very fabric of society it could be anyone’s guess but still the first steps need to come from the upper classes that have been at the forefront setting new and mightier traditions in giving and taking dowries.
I personally don’t think any amount of programs or education will do any good in putting a quietus to dowry unless each person stats assessing the situation for what it is and starts making attempts at the personal level to uproot the menace. Society is not the responsibility of one or two people, human rights lawyers and educators. It is the responsibility of every person who constitutes the society. Unless everyone starts making an effort to recognize the social ills that are eroding basic human values at the roots, little can be done. The question is, are we strong enough to meet the challenge??
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Ah…! Free woman….
Is there anything like a free woman?? In any society? A good debate there….!
Irum,
you are right, they are two different topics in a way, but in another way they are bound together. Parents will shop for who has the best dowry and so on. When two people know and value one another and marry for love, you are marrying to get the person and not all the property of her parents that you can wring out of them. That’s why I say the dowry curse is tied to the culture of arranged marriages. It’s controversial to say so, I know that.
There’s a difference between show-off marriages–even people in the West do that–and turning marriage into a sterile business contract, the parents shopping around for good family connections, sometimes employment opportunities for their sons, sometimes green cards, and a huge dowry on top of all. How can the young people not suffer under such a system?
It’s also tied to the emancipation of women; arranged marriage in Europe died with the advent of women’s rights as led by the suffragists. Free women, it turns out, want to exercise personal choice in their relationships. Something to think about there, too.
I think the discussion of arranged marriages is a completely different one and has little relevance, in my opinion, on the issues of dowry. Dowry should not be taken or given whether the marriage is arranged or love. For instance, even if the bride and groom are getting married by choice of each other, wouldn’t the parents of the bride still be giving dowry to show off and wouldn’t the parents of the groom still be expecting to recieve it because that it will make their ‘pagri oonchee’ ? So how does an arranged marriage do anything towards helping to uproot the menace from the society so that less off families are not bound by cultural and societal tradition to do the same?
Hi Nimi,
I think you are 100% right and this is something I have observed in my own family, in which sons stay home and the mother-in-law likes her sons’ wives to be a certain way (not very assertive :))
Personally, I think everyone living together can work out. I don’t see anything wrong with joint families. But there has to be a balance and respect for everyone in the household as equals. And how often does that happen?
Here’s another thought that I don’t see people talking about–I think it’s possible that arranged marriages appeared to work out better in the past because the couple married when very young–like in their early teens. They basically grew up together.
Nowadays, parents expect to fix the marriages of of men and women as late as their late twenties or early thirties, after years of college and sometimes several years living abroad. Whether Pakistani parents think so or not, these young people have already experienced relationships and had boyfriends/girlfriends–sometimes they have to break off the illicit relationship for the wedding (making the wedding a joyful moment, yes? Sitting there in love with someone else–lately a popular Bollywood plot). These boys and girls have an idea of what they like in a partner, and are very likely to find the parent-approved spouse lacking in many respects (their parents’ interests are not, after all, their own).
So if parents want to have arranged marriage for their children, I would encourage them to marry their kids before they are fifteen-years old. This is the way it works best. If the parents are sitting there picking out a bride for their twenty-five year old son, they might as well know it–he IS involved with somebody else at that age.
This is something that I think is swept under the carpet when discussing this topic. Parents like to ignore this and marry their children according to their own wishes later and later in life. It makes for a lot of unhappiness.
To Tina,
100% right. There does not seem to be any another way out.
Analysing the root causes, there’s another thing that comes to my mind. I wonder if you agree.
Arranged marriages in Pakistan or in India help another bigger cause i.e. serving one’s parents in their old age. Having no or little pensions and no permanent place to live, often parents consider that if they arrange their son’s marriage in the light of their own old age agenda, only then they shall have a control on their daughter-in-law.
They want that the man to woman relationship passes through them. They are afraid of the fact that a “love marriage” shall make the couple too strong to be subservient to them. Or the guy shall be too obedient to his wife to listen to his parents. Or worse, he would be subservient to girls’ parents, beause his wife shall control him.
Young people must help their parents in their old age but at the same time they must not let them intervene in their relationship. This requires an understanding between the two partners.