Speak against dowry deaths

Shreeya Bakshi
Death of young married women with in the family had long have treated as ‘accidental’ and ‘recorded’ as suicides. Same is the case of Neha Naraina who is provoked to end her life by jumping in to river Chenab on April2, 2015 and of Sheetal Sharma of Channi, Jammu. The girls who were well educated and full of life and energy also became the victim of violence (due to dowry) of their in laws.
Apparently, women are now fully emancipated and free to choose their professions and life partners but the fundamentally deep rooted feeling of inequality and discrimination still persists due to domineering attitudes of males and the old age customs and traditions. The normal Indian wife’s thinking is conditioned in such a manner that she cheerfully accepts any amount of domination from the very childhood she is taught that she will have to win over the family in which she is married. Once married a woman’s maternal family shuns her, she must make a place for herself in the new family. Moreover she must serve her husband selflessly, bear everything without complaint and never attempt to return to her maternal family. Women are instructed to remain devoted to their husbands no matters what their husbands do to them. The prestige of both families depends on the women remaining in the marriage.
In our society, family honour resides in the women. The social mores dictates that a woman must never speak out against her husband and a broken marriage is viewed as a disgrace both to woman’s family and to her own honour.
“Jis ghar mai teri doli gyi hai,
Ab wahin se teri arthy uthaegi.”
A very old and common saying of society, consciously or unconsciously affect the minds of the girls. As a consequence, women suffer violence and abuse in silence. When she has nowhere to return, she ends her life by committing suicide.
Emile Durkheim- one of the classical thinkers of sociology considered suicide as ‘social fact’ and not an individual fact. He begins from the premise that one cannot understand individual behavior without understanding the social forces acting upon that individual. He argued that although suicide seems to be an act of individual who ends his/her life but it is always society or social forces who compel a person to end up his/her life. Therefore, not an individual but society must be held responsible for it.
The problem of Dowry is experienced by all sections of Indian society, but it has become a chronic evil by particularly among the educated middle class engaged in salaried jobs and trade. There are no references to dowry in the Sanskritic texts. However, there are references to bride price in the context of the traditional forms of marriage. Dowry is a phenomenon which emerged in the medieval period. The Rajput princes and Jhagirdars gave away gifts to their daughters at the time of marriage with a view exhibit their superior status. And with the passage of time, the practice filtered down to the other twice born castes and to the other sections of the society.
Many social scientists defined dowry as a share of a daughter in paternal property, given to her at the time of her marriage. But even if there is no substantial family property to be shared, there is a tendency among people to borrow money to meet the expenses of marriage and dowry. Now-a-days, dowry has become a matter of prestige for both the dowry givers and the dowry takers. It is considered as a matter of dignity to give more dowry than one’s kinsmen and caste fellows and others. Both givers and takers of dowry talk about these things and value them with a feeling of pride.
It is difficult to suggest a set of factors responsible for the custom of dowry. Traditionally, it may include hypergamy, patriarchy, primogeniture, caste hierarchy, etc. but according to the present state of condition, when the young and educated women are committing suicide in the urban areas due to dowry, reasons seem to be different. It seems as if education and economic independence of women has not empowered her in a true sense. And something more has to be done about it.
Having a glance at a recent dowry murder cases, the need of the hour is to change the discourse of socialization of the girls and the boys too. The Parents of the girl child should always encourage their daughter to speak up and not to feel shy or bad about the ill treatment of her in laws. Society has to come up with open hands to accept those daughters who have come back to their maternal homes due to the torture of in-laws. Parents need to shun away not the daughter but the old traditional proverbs which don’t allow daughters to settle back in their maternal homes.
The boys need to be socialized in a gender sensitive manner and a sense of dignity has to be aroused in them so that they may stand first to say ‘No to Dowry’. Such social evils cannot be eradicated from the society only by legislations, rather the whole society and especially the youth of the nation take a crusade against this deadly evil prevailing in our highly educated- technocrat society. The parents instead of teaching their daughters of traditional traits must equip their daughter with the modern and rational values of education, freedom, equality and so on, so that they may feel competent enough to fight with rotten customs and stinking expectations.
Let’s not be dependent on Law alone, let’s understand our role and analyse our duty, let’s change the equation.
(The author is   Assistant Professor, Ramnagar Campus, University of Jammu, Jammu.)

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