The Origin of dowry systems

The modern definition of the Dowry System in India is as follows.

 Dowry is a payment of cash or valuable gifts from the bride’s family to the bridegroom upon marriage.

This menace of Dowry has become a social menace in modern India leading to the oppression on women, physical violence on the bride, causing a financial and emotional stress on the parents of the bride, marital conflict and so on. This menace exists even today in the society even though it is a criminal offence to take Dowry during marriage.

The Status of Women in Ancient Indian Society

But what is the real history of this menace. Did it always exist in the Indian society? Was Indian society always oppressive of its women? On the one hand we have the ancient scriptures which talk about women with such high respect. The most powerful God in Hinduism is the female Goddess. Saraswati is the Goddess of Knowledge, not Brahma. Lakshmi is the Goddess of Wealth, not Vishnu. Parvathi is the Goddess of Power and Energy, not Shiva.

We only hear about Swayamvar in the ancient Hindu marriage traditions where it was the bride who decided whom to marry. There was no Swayamvadhu, the groom could not hold beauty contests to decide which bride to marry. Instead it was the girl who in a Swayamvar, would put all the competing potential bridegrooms to different contests and then select the bridegroom whom she liked. In the Swayamvar of Sita in Ramayana, Rama had to lift the Shiva’s bow to prove that he was eligible to marry Sita. In the Swayamvar in Mahabharatha, Arjuna had to hit the eye of the fish rotating above by only looking at the fish’s reflection in a pool of oil below.

So if this was the importance given to women in our tradition, then when and where did this contradiction of the menace of dowry enter our society? We don’t find any instances of dowry related violence in the literature of ancient times. Not even in the literature belonging to the pre-colonial era of India. So when did the Indian society adopt the evil version of dowry which has created numerous social problems in the Indian society ranging from female foeticide, violence on married women, financial stress on parents of girl child, imbalance in male-female ratio, broken marriages, mistrust between families, etc.

Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime, a well researched book by Veena Talwar Oldenburg tries to answer this question. In this book, the author follows the paper trail left by British bureaucrats during the British Colonial rule of India. And then there are personal accounts from women in India including author’s own personal account on the system of Dowry. And what gets revealed after all this path breaking research and analysis, gives a huge blow to the very theory of Dowry being directly responsible for the status of women in the Indian society and goes on to prove how a system meant to actually benefit the married woman got converted during the British Rule into a system which ended up harming the very woman who was supposed to benefit from it.

The Original Institution of Dowry in Pre-Colonial India

Yes, the system of Dowry existed in India even before the British Rule, but not in the format that is prevalent in the society today. In the pre-colonial period, dowry was an institution managed by women, for women, to enable them to establish their status and have recourse in an emergency. In this ancient system of dowry, the parents of the bride, even her kith and kin, all gave wealth to her in the form of valuable gifts etc. It was just like how parents used to give a part of wealth to their sons, so did they give it to their daughters too during the daughter’s marriage. What is very important to be noted here is that, the valuables or the wealth was given to the bride, and NOT to the groom or his family. In other words, the dowry wealth continued to be owned by the wife and not by the husband or his family. This gave the required financial independence to women who would even manage the income from their agricultural land , etc.

So in the original system of dowry prevalent in India, women were gifted wealth from their parents during marriage and this served as a tool of financial independence for the bride even after marriage.

Even during the initial days of the British rule, contemporary European writers Orme, the French Catholic missionary Jean-Antoine Dubois who came to India in 1792, Malcom etc have praised the status of Hindu women in India. Malcom says that the Hindu women “have a say in the affairs of the state, have a distinct provision and estate of their own, enjoy as much as liberty they desire”. Malcom also praises women rulers like Ahalya Bai of being great administrators.

So when did the wrong turn take place?

The Permanent Settlement of Bengal – The British Land Reforms of India

It all started with the Permanent Settlement of Bengal in 1793 by the British under Lord Cornwallis. This enabled private ownership of land which was unknown in India till then. Private ownership of land was never practiced in India in the past. The land always belonged to the government and people only settled in the government’s land. If there was a flood in one place, people used to move on to another place in the kingdom. By introducing the permanent settlement, the British enabled the private ownership of land in India. All modern day real estate related violence in the country could hence be traced back to this act by the British. People there after started fighting over land.

It was this system which also created the system of Zamindars or landlords in India. Very few realize that the Zamindari system of landlords who ill treated peasants was created by the British rule. Till then, the zamindars were not land lords, but only tax collectors, collectors of land revenue who used to collect it from the farmers and hand it over to the local government. The Britishers converted these tax collectors into zamindars giving them the ownership of that land, and using them as a means to loot the farmers in the name of more tax. The zamindar or the landlord now owned the land, and it was hereditary ie the children of the landlords became the inheritors of the land.

The peasants on the other hand, suffered from this Permanent Settlement. They were left entirely at the mercy of their landlords, who also had share a in the production and which was not fixed! In the Pre-British system, kingdoms collected tax only during the times of surplus or sufficient growth, and the tax was used for the betterment of the society. But in the British rule, tax or Lagaan was collected irrespective of whether there was a famine or a flood, and tax rates were extremely high. It was looting in the daylight. Remember the movie Lagaan?

Prohibition of Property Rights for Women under the British Rule

But the move which affected the status of the women in the Indian society was the rule imposed by the British which prohibited the women from owning any property at all! And this was what created the menace of dowry system in India.

In the existing system, parents used to give wealth and valuable gifts to their daughters during marriage. And the bride continued to own this wealth even after her marriage and it provided the wife financial independence and there was usually no need for a wife to depend on her husband for her financial needs.

In fact, the situation even in 1870s was that,

In 49 separate volumes of customary law covering colonial Punjab, which today comprises Pakistan and Indian Punjab, Haryana, Jammu, Delhi and Himachal Pradesh, dowry has been described in the 1870s as a collection of voluntary gifts comprising clothes, jewellery, household goods and cash bestowed on the bride by family and friends at the time of the girl’s wedding. Nowhere was it described as the prerogative of the groom to make demands on the girl’s family. But the British at that time had not granted their own women property rights, so it was highly unlikely they would do so for Indian women. - Dowry murder as a legacy of British policies

But once the British prohibited women from having any property rights, it meant that all the wealth that a woman got from her parents would be owned by her husband instead. And the moment, this system of husband owning the wealth of his wife was created, the traditional dowry system got converted into a menace creating an institution of greed that oppressed, victimized and suppressed women. The greed that kicked in created a system where husband and his family started looking at the incoming bride as a source of property and wealth, the male dominated society became greedy, husband and in-laws started demanding more dowry from the bride and her parents. The social harmony and the bonding created by the institution of marriage was gone. Marriage became just another business deal, where making wealth was more easy. Male child became an additional source of income, and female child became a financial burden on the family. This led to the creation of the social problems like female foeticide and an imbalance in male-female ratio in the society, which further led to more crimes on women.

After the British prohibited women the right to own or inherit property, until 1956 the women in India did not have the right to inherit property from their parents. It was only in 1956 that the Hindu Personal laws were amended giving the right to women to inherit ancestral property.

But again those rights were not equal to those of men. Sons had an independent share in the ancestral property, while the daughters’ shares were based on the share received by their father. Hence, a father could effectively disinherit a daughter by renouncing his share of the ancestral property, but the son will continue to have a share in his own right. Additionally, married daughters, even those facing marital harassment, had no residential rights in the ancestral home.

IT WAS ONLY as recently as in 2005, when the Hindu laws were amended again, now providing women equal status with men in terms of ancestral property.

Please note that, we are only talking about Hindu women here, because that is how the law system we inherited from the British is. The British based on their divide and rule policy created different laws for different religions. Prior to that the laws in India varied based on geography, and not based on religion or caste of the person.

Successive governments in independent India have retained most of the laws we inherited from the British without much amendments. Hence today unfortunately, personal laws are different in India depending on which religion the person belongs to. For Muslim women and Christian women, the rights are even less. In fact, the Rajiv Gandhi government while in power in 1986 passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act just to nullify the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Shah Bano Case which had ordered the husband to provide maintenance money to his divorced wife, Shah Bano.

The marriage of Christians in India is still regulated by the Indian Christian Marriage Act of 1872 and and the Indian Divorce Act 1869. These acts were considered unfair to women, and the Christian Marriage and Matrimonial Causes Bill 1990 was proposed as a replacement, but no progress has been achieved into converting this bill into a law.

Strange that while we call ourselves a civilized society, we are fine with the personal laws being different for men and women depending on which religion one belongs to. And even strange is the fact that the calls for a Uniform Civil Code in the country which seeks uniform laws to all citizens irrespective of their religion is being frowned upon as being communal! How logical is it to say that the law of land applicable to a person depends on which religion he belongs to? Vote bank politics in the name of caste and religion continue endlessly in our society in the disguise of secularism and upliftment of the downtrodden. Even after 60 years of independence, we are still unable to uplift the marginalized sections of the society, they are being merely used as vote banks for the political class, and all that gets heard is the mere rhetoric every time an election approaches.

A Practical Solution to end the menace of Dowry

Yes, there is a law in India which makes taking dowry illegal and a criminal offence. And yet we keep coming across so many dowry harassment cases in the country on a daily basis.

I propose a simple solution to practically end the menace of dowry in the modern Indian society. There should be a law which would state that, upon marriage all the property of the husband would be automatically owned by the wife, ie there would be no property rights for married men, at least for a period of 10 or 20 years. This would make dowry meaningless because whatever wealth the bride brings in will still belong to her, and also does the wealth of her husband. So this would discourage all those men who marry merely for the sake of dowry. The pros and cons of this law can be debated upon, but I am pretty sure that this law, if implemented for a limited time period of say 30 or 50 years would be n times more effective in eradicating the menace of dowry from our society. What say? After all for a good husband, why should it matter if he owns the property or if his wife does? Ain’t it?

References:

• Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime by Veena Talwar Oldenburg
• Don’t condemn the institution of dowry
• Land Tenure Reforms under British Rule
• Dowry murder as a legacy of British Policies
• The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act – 2005
• Shah Bano Case

1947 War: Time for Accountability

By suddenly inviting debate on the interlocutors report on Jammu and Kashmir, especially its startling suggestion to restore the State’s pre-1953 status, the Congress Party has virtually disowned the actions of its longest serving Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, thus diminishing the legitimacy and stature of the political dynasty descended from him. Some experts have added fuel to the fire by urging implementation of the report even though Parliament, political parties, and the nation have not yet studied it in depth.

Restoration of the pre-1953 status means a return to the stressful relationship between New Delhi and Srinagar that culminated in the arrest of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah on charges of conspiracy against the Indian State in August 1953. Since the J&K constitution came into effect only on 26 January 1957, pre-’53 status would return the State to a lawless limbo in which its ‘prime minister’ can choose freedom from Article 1 of the Indian Constitution which names the States and territories that shall be part of the First Schedule.

Sheikh Abdullah’s slipperiness in committing to the Indian Union after endorsing the Accession by Maharaja Hari Singh and persistent flirtation with the idea of an independent nation, forced the Centre to replace him with Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad. But Mr. Nehru failed to take the logical step of fully integrating the State with the Indian Union; his many grave blunders remain his lasting national legacy.

Mr. Nehru’s successors and protégés have long scuttled attempts at public scrutiny of these mistakes. But time has eroded their power and many facts are entering the public domain. Dr. S.P. Bakshi, Chief Education Officer of the State armed forces and a member of the Maharaja’s Durbar, published his reminiscences of the 1947-48 war before he passed away some weeks ago, just short of his 99^th birthday.

Though brief, The Inside Story of Jammu & Kashmir State (Knowledge World, Delhi, 2012) is a fascinating narrative of that troubled time. Dr Bakshi for the first time brings on record the fact that a Rasputin-like sadhu known as ‘Mahantji’ played a crucial role in delaying the accession to India by giving the Maharaja delusions of grandeur, telling him of his visions of the State flag flying from Lahore fort and beyond, thus causing immense suffering to the people.

Dr Bakshi’s most sensational disclosure concerns New Delhi’s cavalier disregard of Major Onkar Singh Kalkat’s direct warning about the impending attack, an episode that deserves detailed exposure, with the guilty named. As part of its plans, Pakistan suddenly imposed an economic blockade upon J&K, causing grave hardship to the people. This should have rung alarm bells in Delhi as all supplies of arms and ammunitions to the State were also cut off as all ordnance depots were in Pakistan.

The overall action seems to have been supervised by Gen. Frank Messervy, the British chief of the Pakistan Army, though the main planning was by Maj.-Gen. Akbar Khan who recruited 60,000 soldiers demobilized from Punch area after WWII, ex-INA soldiers, and tribals lured with the promise of loot and plunder. Orders were issued through DO Letters marked Personal/Top Secret and signed by the British C-in-C of the Pakistan Army within days of the creation of Pakistan. In other words, it was a Raj conspiracy!

At that time, Major Onkar Singh Kalkat was serving as Brigade Major at Bannu Frontier Brigade Group under Brig C.P. Murray, who was away at Mural outpost on 20 August 1947. On his behalf, Major Kalkat received and opened an envelope marked Personal/Top Secret and found within a detailed plan of Operation Gulmarg. He hastily called Brig Murray, who told him not to breathe a word to anyone or he (Kalkat) would not be allowed to leave Pakistan alive. Perhaps the Brigadier alerted the Pakistani authorities anyway, for Kalkat was placed under house arrest. He made a daring escape and reached Ambala on 18 October 1947 and took a goods train to Delhi.

The next day, he met senior officers of the Indian Army and told them of the Pakistan plan to launch Operation Gulmarg. But they dismissed his claims, for reasons that deserve to be made public, as also the identities of the officers concerned. It is inconceivable that this news would not have been made known to Governor General Louis Mountbatten, Prime Minister Nehru, and the then Defence and Home Ministers. Nothing is known of their reactions then, or later.

Yet, in this context, we must question the unwarranted delay in sending troops to relieve the besieged Sate once the invasion began, on the pretext of first getting the Instrument of Accession signed by the Maharaja and Governor General. Why did Lord Mountbatten insist on the loss of a valuable day? Why were Jawaharlal Nehru and even Vallabhbhai Patel so much in thrall of Mountbatten that they couldn’t challenge his evil advice that cost the nation so dearly? At least Patel realised that going to the UN Security Council would be ruinous to India.

The UN helped to deprive India of the northern territory of Gilgit, necessary for the British to oversee Russia. Britain had leased Gilgit from the Maharaja and built an all-weather airfield and roads between Gilgit Agency and the North West Frontier Province. Indeed, Gilgit was integrated with NWFP and run from Peshawar. When Gilgit was returned in August 1947, Rao Bahadur Brig. Gansara Singh, General Staff Officer of J&K State Forces, was appointed Governor. On midnight, 31 October 1947, Major Brown of the Gilgit Scouts surrounded the Governor house and arrested Gansara Singh; the Gilgit Government was handed over to Pakistan a few days later.

Dr Bakshi speaks eloquently of the personal valour of Brig. Rajinder Singh, Chief of Staff of the J&K State Forces, who gave up his life to save Srinagar valley by blowing up the vital Uri bridge and delaying the raiders by a crucial 48 hours. His posthumous award of a Mahavir Chakra is still perceived by many as niggardly. Through vivid snapshots, Bakshi unveils the enormous sacrifices made by the officers and men of the J&K State Forces, which made them the only force from a Princely State to be absorbed en bloc into the Indian Army as a separate unit, the Regiment of the Jammu and Kashmir Rifles.

A major triumph of this war was Maj.-Gen. Timmy Thimaya’s audacious feat of scaling the inhospitable Zojila Pass with Stuart tanks, the highest recorded use of tanks in battle anywhere in the world –11000 ft.

10 shades of Indian secularism

Secularism is what we’re taught to be proud of, even at the cost of our traditional Hindu identity. The choice between cultural nationalism and constitutional secularism confuses a many. Let’s drive through the shades of Indian secularism.

1. Not to Ram and Krishna, yes to Mohammad and Jesus : In India, with 80% Hindu population, and the only homeland of Hindus in the world, the birthdays of great sons of the soil, Shri Ram and Shri Krishna, are not compulsory central government holidays, while the birthday of Saudi Arabia born prophet Mohammad and both the birth and crucification day of Bethlehem born Jesus, are compulsory holidays throughout India. This seems in sync with the secular hypothesis that Ram and Krishna are imaginary comic characters while Mohammad and Jesus are actual historical characters. There are only 2 Hindu holidays out of compulsory 14, in contrast with 4 Muslim ones.

2. Right to expropriate Hindu temples’ property : The Constitution of India enables the government to take control of Hindu temples and trusts and appoint its nominees in their controlling body and even control its funds. The government doesn’t have this privilege for the mosques or churches. The government cannot interfere in the functioning of the mosques, madarsas and any minority institutions even if they receive government aid, which is taxpayers’ money. The minority institutions are not bound to comply with the Right to Education act either. This can be seen as a lighter version of Pakistan and Bangladesh’s enemy property laws which enable their governments to confiscate the propeties of Hindus by declaring them enemy properties.

3. Secular India follows Sharia laws: Everyone knows that India doesn’t have uniform civil code. Indian muslim males are legally allowed to have up to 4 wives at a time, and can divorce them by saying ‘Talaaq’ thrice, in compliance with Sharia. Hindus and Christians have to follow proper court procedures to file for divorce. The women right activists who organise ‘slut-walks’ to celebrate their ‘rights’ and advocate girls visiting pubs, do not speak on this matter. Shah Bano case stands as a glaring example of how secularism is a constitutionally prescribed drug meant only for Hindus, not for minorities.

4. Celebrating the signs of slavery: Prayagraj, one of the holiest pilgrimages of Hindus, is called Allah-abad. Kashi, Ayodhya and Mathura, each of these 3 holy sites has been desecrated and yet not fully restored. The signboards of Auragzeb road in Delhi stand as the testimony to India’s slavery that Indian secularism celebrates so profusely. In 2007, over 1 lakh Indian muslims paid homage to Aurangzeb’s tomb on his 300th anniversary, that’s when Aurangzeb is known to be the perpetrator of the largest Hindu genocide ever. Aurangzeb had even got Guru Teg Bahadur beheaded in his court for his refusal to convert to Islam.

5. Erase the history, get Macaulaized: An instance of Indian secularism is the 1978 directive to NCERT which instructs it to erase all medieval history which paints a picture of clash between native Hindus and invading muslims in that era. Consequently, we have a chapter each from Akbar to Aurangzeb, but Shivaji and Maharana Pratap are squeezed into a paragraph each in history books. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, discredited Aryan Invasion Theory is still taught in Indian schools. The history books do not cover the Mahabharata despite a plethora of archaeological evidence available to conclusively establish its historicity.

6. Temples - to hell with them: The Archealogical Survey of India in its annual report of 1924-25 published a long list of Hindu temples demolished during Islamic rule. Sita Ram Goel, Arun Shourie and others have published a book after conducting research and they’ve given a 64 page long district-wise list of Islamic monuments which were constructed by demolishing Hindu temples. This list, in the book, “Hindu temples - what happened to them”, includes around 2000+ temples and gives in most cases, the year of construction of those structures also. Even in Kashmir, hundreds of temples, small and large have been desecrated over during the exodus of Hindus in early 90s. The same, however, is a non-issue in larger secular polity. It’s continued unabted in whichever time or space, Hindus have become weak.

7. Violating the sanctity of Ram and Geeta: From Ram Mandir to Ram Setu and to Bhagwad Geeta, all have been dragged into Indian courts. India is the only country in the world where the faith of 100 Crore people is humiliated. It’d be silly to look for parallels where in a Muslim majority country, Quran or the prophet, or in a Christian majority country, Bible or the Christ, could be dragged into a court of law. In India, the central government filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court suggesting that Ram never existed. In the same country, Christian missionaries openly preach about Hindus’ false and ‘characterless’ gods, and so do Islamic missionaries like Zakir Naik, but the tag of ‘hate-monger’ has been attributed to Hindu right wing by secular luminaries in media and otherwise.

8. Not if you’re a Hindu: There are numerous government schemes which are run exclusively for the benefit of minorities at the expense of taxpayer money, despite an apparent prohibition to the same in the constitution. Pashchim Banga government paying monthly stipend to all the Imams of all the mosques in the state is a glaring example of this. The same is not extended to Hindu pujaris. The Haj subsidy, against which the Supreme Court finally ordered, which had been running since Independence even when no other country, not even Pakistan offers it, is another example.

9. The piety of pseudo-secularism: The pious Human Right Activists, known for their love for Jihadi terrorists, those who have been running justiceforafzalguru.org for years now, have not spoken for the inhumane treatment meted out to Sadhvi Pragya, and Swami Aseemanand. Their love for those displaced in Gujarat riots, their sympathy on crores of Bangladeshi infiltrators and their disgusting silence and aversion on lakhs of Kashmiri Hindu refugees and Pakistani Hindu refugees is another jewel of the muddled waters of Indian secularism.

10. The rise of secular fanaticism: The practice of Saraswati Vandana has been discontinued from almost all government events with the rise of secular fanaticism. The TV series Chanakya of 90’s was asked to remove Saffron flags from it, its being indispensable to the picturaization of Chanakya’s Akhand Bharat notwithstanding. Doordarshan’s ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram’ had also been removed before being brought back. Off late, even the practice of lighting a lamp has been criticised as ‘unislamic’. A litigation was filed in Gujarat high court for inaugurating a room by breaking a coconut for its being a Hindu (not Secular). A case was lodged in Chennai High Court to prohibit the employees celebrating festivals in office space. The beast of secular fanaticism has gone wilder over the years, and if not us, posterity will have to bear the brunt of our callous ignorance.