other stratagems are adopted. For example, Muslim societies follow the principle of parallel-cousin marriage to keep
family property within the patrilineal group because Muslim
law allows women the right to inherit family assets including land. South Asia is an exception in this respect because enactment of the Shariat Act, 1937 disallowed
women a share in arable land. If women were guaranteed
property rights, there would be no reason for substantial
marriage transactions as a woman’s husband and her inlaws would know that at the appropriate time she would
secure her share of the family property. Since the social
arrangements in place at the moment deny women that
right, a woman’s in-laws demand a share of the family
property in the form of dowry and many girls themselves
desire that they be given a good dowry.
which implied that a woman was a precious commodity and
the parents must be compensated for parting with her. Over
time, the evil of poverty has been percolating down so that
today even the poor parents are sometimes called to shore
up a huge dowry. This has worsened the situation of women
and made their parents to cuff up resources even if they
can ill-afford to do so. As this development has taken
place, incidents of dowry deaths and dowry-related violence as well as female foeticide have registered a remarkable rise.
The dowry argument has relevance for explaining female
foeticide and female infanticide among the propertied sections of society. It cannot explain the incidence of female
foeticide or female infanticide among the lower classes that
do not own property and cannot afford to pay dowry. One
has reason to believe that the prevalence of female foeticide and female infanticide requires a separate explanation.
One part of this explanation may be their grinding poverty
and their sensibility that a girl child can be an additional
burden to raise since she will eventually go out of the
family. In conclusion, let me say that there has been too
much concern in the public debates and researches to
come up with a grand and universal explanation for the
prevalence of female foeticide and female infanticide. We
should instead be looking for a series of approximate and
inter-related factors which can explain its prevalence
among different social classes. Only then this phenomenon
would be better understood.
It is obvious that dowry, particularly in the pernicious form
in which it has come to prevail in modern India, is closely
linked to the problem of female foeticide. Since parents fear
that they would have to pay a huge amount of dowry (demand which has been multiplying over time with the intrusion of a capitalist economy) and feel that they would find
themselves unable to bear that burden, they prefer to ensure that they do not have a girl child. And, if a girl child is
born, they prefer to kill her soon after birth for the same
reason. Earlier dowry was practiced by the higher castes,
particularly Brahmins, and other castes either had a more
attenuated form of dowry or did not give dowry at all. Many
of them had the opposite practice of paying bride price
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