Review: The Gift of a Daughter. Encounters with Victims of Dowry by Subahadra Butalia

170 pgs ISBN: 0143028715. (Penguin Books India, 2002)

Subhadra Butalia's father was determined to marry her to a husband who would not expect or demand a dowry. When she married soon after the independence of India in 1947, a bride might be nagged or grumbled at for little or no dowry, but there were no threats of violence. By 1961, dowry in Hindu, Sikh, and Christian families was prohibited by law. But by the seventies, the benign wedding gift had become a husband's entitlement, and Subhadra Butalia found herself in a crowd that watched in horror as the bride next door, Hardeep Kaur, became a human torch and was taken to hospital on a stretcher. With 70 percent burns, Hardeep Kaur became one more "bride-burning" statistic, murdered by her in-laws for not bringing enough in cash and kind. Hardeep had been sent back to her parents with a list of her husband's dowry demands, but her parents decided she should "be returned" to her husband and in-laws. The blackmail continued till the parents could pay no more, and then Hardeep was murdered. Why did Hardeep's parents send her back, Butalia wondered? And she wondered why there the newspapers carried not a single report about Hardeep's murder. And of all the neighbors who had stood before the spectacle of a burning woman, only Subhadra Butalia agreed to testify. Thus began her thirty-five year struggle to help victims of dowry-related violence.

Eighty one years old now, Subhadra Butalia has written a slim volume she describes as "neither a memoir, nor a book about dowry." Yet it has elements of both. Using names and stories of victims of dowry death and disagreement, the author explores the deeply embedded tradition and shows us the problems of social organizations and workers dealing with domestic violence in the extended family.

The memory of a childhood friend, Madhu, prompted me to read Subhadra Butalia's book. Madhu, a lovely young Punjabi woman came from a wealthy professional class family. She was head girl of my school, studied French and Sociology at college and dreamed of travelling the world. She married for love in the early 80s, and was shunned for it by her family. By 1983, she was gone. Poisoned, it was rumored, by her in-laws. And the reaction from people in Delhi: "What did she expect, marrying against her parents wishes? Her in-laws should have known there would be no dowry given to her, no matter what their demands. This is what happens to a disobedient girl." My grief for Madhu and my outrage have lasted to this day.

Madhu was not unique. A 1997 estimate by UNICEF placed the annual number of reported dowry deaths in India at 5377, a 12% increase over the previous year. It is now practiced by Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians alike. Dowry demands have made their way overseas so that Wedding Season for brides of Indian origin in the North American diaspora of Indians is

also dowry season. For all its sensational appeal when mentioned in the Western press, bride-burning and the dowry system are Indian expressions of "domestic violence" in materially-developed countries, crossing classes and education levels. While men living in North America who believe woman are non-persons might verbally abuse, beat or eventually shoot them with no separate statistics as to whether economic demands were made to relatives, men and mothers-in-law without access to handguns might, in India, douse a woman in kerosene and light a match.

Subhadra Butalia and the organizations she has founded, Stree Sangarsh and Karmika, have intervened hundreds of times in India to prevent a dowry killing, or seek that murderers be brought to justice. She describes how elusive is justice and explains in a tone of sadness. Yet there must have been enough outrage to carry her through many rescue missions over the years, and to prompt her to write.

The perennial question arises: how can any parent value respectability over the life of his or her own daughter? As in Hardeep Kaur's case, an Indian daughter facing dowry demands is highly likely to be sent back to her in-laws to "adjust", sent to face abuse, violence, even death. Butalia offers two explanations, the first mythological an unwed Hindu woman becomes a ghost the second economic. Economic reasons outweigh any myths in the stories she presents, for the list of explanations begins with the underground cash economy and the ostentatious display by the nouveau riches. And it has as ever-present backdrop, the large-scale dependence of Indian women on husbands, and atavistic ideas of women as property.

Having introduced the problem of dowry by showing the faces and names of its victims over her years of activism, Butalia leaves us with many open questions for further research, such as: why do women sisters and mother-in-laws participate in dowry demands? How can we penetrate the wilful denial of the parents of married daughters that dowry demands are illegal and dangerous to their daughters' physical safety? How different is the practice of dowry (called mehar) in the Indian Muslim community? How does the implementation of Hindu inheritance law underpin dowry demands experienced by women subject to Hindu Personal Law?

By the end of this little gem of a book, you feel the author's ruminating voice fill with wonder and delight in the stories of young women who, in the past few years have thrown feminine respectability to the winds, and called off or walked out of weddings when a dowry demand was made. Subhadra Butalia's father would have been proud of his courageous daughter's many arduous years of helping victims, and of agitating for changes in the law and its enforcement. Though too late for many like Hardeep and my friend Madhu, social workers like her have raised our consciousness, and made it conceivable for young women to question and protest this pernicious institution.

Shauna Singh Baldwin