Dowry and culture?

Dowry Murder:The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime, by Veena Talwar Oldenburg

I stumbled on this book while browsing through the new books section of my library, and ended up reading not once but several times. One more shocking new revelation that challenges the belief that I know anything about India at all. The book's claim is that the somewhat harmless practice of dowry-giving began its long evolution towards its modern pernicious form due to the colonial government's "good-intentioned" attempt to end the practice of female infanticide in Punjab. Her central point of attack is that treating practices like female infanticide and dowry-murder as a "cultural practice" that is peculiar to a particular community is a flawed construct, where "culture" is treated as some unchanging property of a community that is uneffected by other socio-economic and political factors.

In this regard she points out how the colonial govts stringent policies to stop female infanticide treating as a "cultural problem" had little effect as the government failed to recognize that the high rate of female infanticide in the Punjab area was closely correlated with the progressive masculinization of the economy under the British.

Interestingly, she makes a parallel to the dowry issue in the modern day. There are stringent laws against dowry thanks to active lobbying by women's groups but this had little effect on the spiralling rates of dowry-deaths. She questions whether the Indian govt is being blind to the broader problem of marital violence against women by treating every incident of marital violence as a dowry death.

• An interview with the author, and below is a summary that I found.
  
• Kerosene, Weapon of Choice for Attacks on Wives in India, By Celia W. Dugger - "...Others, like Geetha, 20, offered harrowing testimonies, supported by a growing body of new research, that place them right in the international mainstream of brutishly mistreated wives. The use of fire as a weapon, which seems so exotic, is simply expedient: kerosene, a ubiquitous cooking fuel here, is a cheap, handy weapon, much like a gun or a baseball bat in an American home..."
  

Another summary floating around on the web:

The recognition of gender-based violence in a domestic setting as an important issue and the search for solutions to address it at different levels has been widely recognized as a critical priority. That said, the point that I wish to make is not a novel one but reiterating the need to recognize the relation of this priority to gender-related developments on other fronts. Situating the issue of gender violence in this broader context suggests an added urgency towards addressing this issue.

The reasoning for this is drawn from Veena Talwar Oldenburg's study of the evolution of the practice of dowry-giving in India under colonial socio-economic policies. This evolution is from dowry being implicitly provided as an economic safety net for the newly-wed bride; to its particularly heinous modern form as an explicit currency of status demanded by the groom's family. In this modern form, it has become a motive for inflicting violence on newly-wed women when the dowry demands are not satisfactorily met. Apart from significant harassment often driving women to commit suicide, this act of violence at its worst takes the, now much sensationalized, form of the husband, aided by his parents and relatives, dousing his hapless wife with kerosene and setting her on fire.

Using the historical perspective provided by her study Oldenburg observes that, despite the prevalence of this dowry-motivated burning, this form of violence cannot entirely be ascribed to the practice of dowry alone. Often wife burning in an Indian home is a particular method of inflicting violence comparable to guns and baseball clubs in an American settings. The use of kerosene is as much due to the "advantage" that it leaves little forensic evidence of an attempt at murder and reduces suspicion of a crime having been committed as the widely used kerosene-stoves are known to be dangerous devices in themselves. In this sense, the burning of women by their husbands (and relatives) is to be seen as a part of the general problem of domestic violence arising in marital settings, rather than singularly through the narrow lens of it being a unique product of a cultural practice or even as a culturally mandated form of violence, as often mistakenly believed.

From this perspective, the increasing number of such burning incidents in the last two decades in India presents an explanatory problem, as the legislated penalties in dowry-related crimes, both in principle and implementation, are notably stringent. Here, the important point Oldenburg raises is that the increased incidence of this form of domestic violence may have as much to do with the correlated increase in Indian women asserting their independence as a consequence of other gender-related socio-economic developments. So, increased domestic violence may be an indicator of changing gender relations, with the increased violence being a response of the entrenched patriarchy to challenges to the power structure.

This is an observation that is of much importance. Increased efforts at reducing discrimination against women in obtaining economic opportunities and legal remedies, increased educational levels of women, and the overall increase in age at which women get married are well known positive changes occuring in the Indian public sphere, even if slowly and unevenly. That these positive developments would be accompanied with changes in the behavior and attitudes of women in the domestic sphere is a critical consideration. And as Oldenburg argues, in a strongly patriarchal setting that the consequences may well take the form of increased violence as more women "speak up", and resist being "moulded" to the wishes of their husbands and in-laws.

The point then is that such correlations between changes in the public sphere to the domestic sphere suggests that domestic violence has a dynamic character to it. This emphatically brings an added urgency to recognize and address this issue. Furthermore, it suggests that treating gender-related domestic violence as a problem that is born at the first act of violence within marriage may be overly narrow, even though this forms the basis for measurement and (as Oldenburg points out) even though women start their narratives about violence starting from within marriage. Maybe agentive strategies to "end" domestic violence could be aided by an inclusion of the conditions prior to and leading up to marriage as well.