bride burning

bride burning a form of domestic violence against women — usually, newly married women. The specific terminology links it to India and to the custom of dowry. It gets its name from kitchen fires or other kinds of fires that are often staged to make the deaths of these women appear to be suicides or accidents. The perpetrators of this form of violence against recently-married women are usually persons belonging to their husbands' families, and often their husbands as well. Though both are derived from the low social value of women, bride burning needs to be distinguished from sati, or, widow burning — the practice of widows committing ritual suicide on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands.

The root cause of bride burning, as well as other forms of domestic violence against women, lies in their subordination and their frequent powerlessness within their husbands' family following marriage. Thus, cases of bride burning can and do occur without dowry being the causal factor, although dowry is possibly the single largest cause. Dowry commonly refers to the material gifts given to the bride by her family, usually at the time of the wedding. Scholars, such as M. N. Srinivas, make a distinction between the ancient custom of dowry as dakshina or dana (voluntary and often token gifts) and the contemporary practice of dowry. Nowadays dowry refers to material objects demanded (as opposed to voluntarily given) by the bridegroom's family, and often involves significant amounts of cash, property, household objects, and jewellery. In its current form, dowry is regarded, by those who demand it, as a reflection of the social status of the bridegroom's family. Thus, the more eligible the prospective bridegroom (eligibility being perceived as the social standing, the wealth, the educational and career-related achievements, and so forth, of himself and his family) the larger the dowry that his family has the right to demand and receive. M. N. Srinivas, Geraldine Forbes, and other scholars also point out that, in relatively recent times, growing consumerism and the increasing tendency to equate social status with material objects has made it attractive for prospective bridegrooms and their families to use the dowry as a means of enriching themselves at the time of marriage by demanding expensive presents from the parents of the prospective bride. The desire for continuing to benefit materially from the parents of the bride can take the form of pressuring the bride and her family for more dowry even after marriage. The families of prospective brides agree to (or, feel they have no choice but to acquiesce to) the payment of dowry because of the concern that the non-payment of dowry might impair their daughters' chances of marriage. The high social premium still attached to marriage, particularly for women (in the sense that the social status and respectability of women is still largely bound up with their martial status), ensures that families with daughters respond to demands for dowry even when it can ruin them financially. Incidentally, the relatively low social value of girls in Indian society (manifest, for example, in the very recent custom, within some segments of Indian society, of aborting female fetuses) is connected to the financial pressures encountered by their families through the custom of dowry. Dissatisfaction over dowry may find expression through acts of hostility ranging from verbal abuse to actual violence. Bride burning is the most extreme violence against newly married women.

The passage of the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 by the government of India formally banned the practice of dowry. The prevalence of the practice, and its link to the perpetration of violence against women, however, continued, and some observers believe that both practices have escalated. Geraldine Forbes points out that the low valuation of women combined with consumerism to bring about a new way of exploiting womens' dependency. Since the 1970s in particular, women activists have made untiring efforts to expose such social ills and to exert pressure on the law courts and on law enforcement agencies to be much more vigilant about reporting and prosecuting such crimes. Their efforts have met with limited success. In 1986, the government of India passed a bill which increased the punishment for accepting dowry and decreed that in cases where a women died an unnatural death, her property would devolve on her children or be returned to her parents. There have also been criminal prosecutions of those alleged to have been involved in domestic violence against women, including bride burning. Women's organizations, such as Saheli in Delhi (to name one), provide counsel and shelter for endangered women, keep records of women's deaths resulting from suspected domestic violence, and act as a pressure group to demand more thorough investigations by the police. Yet, despite the legislation and the growing efforts of womens' organizations, the problem has not been eradicated. There is, however, greater awareness of the problem, as indicated by its current status as a topic of public discussion in India.

Kumkum Chatterjee

Bibliography

Forbes, G. (1996). Women in modern India. (The new Cambridge history of India IV.2). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Srinivas, M. N. (1984). Some reflections on dowry. Oxford University Press, New Delhi.