Labrys
estudos feministas/ études féministes
janeiro/ junho 2006 -janvier / juin 2006
Bayaanchi Jaat: Gender, Class and Dowry-Related Violence in Urban Maharashtra
Dr. Susan Dewey
Abstract
The Marathi language term “baayanchi jaat” roughly translates as “of woman caste”, and speaks to the vast socio-economic inequalities which women are forced to negotiate on a daily basis throughout the Indian subcontinent. Drawing upon case studies of violence against women, including murder, committed by their in-laws in order to extort more dowry from their maternal families, this article addresses the intersection of class, gender and dowry-related violence against women. While illegal, the giving and receiving of dowry, essentially a payment, whether in the form of cash or material goods, from the family of the bride to the family of the groom prior to the marriage, is still all too common in contemporary India. This discussion of why this system persists helps to shed light on solutions to violence against women related to dowry.
Throughout my work in urban India, I have often heard the expression “bayaanchi jaat” in Marathi, the language of the state of Maharashtra, a region in western India. Although a phrase with multiple, nuanced meanings, it roughly translates as “of woman caste”, and speaks to the vast structural inequalities that women have to negotiate on a daily basis as a result of their gender. In July of 1998 I was conducting fieldwork in urban Maharashtra with women’s advocacy groups. Specifically, I was interested in dowry-related violence and its causes. I had free access to all of the records of the organizations regarding this subject, but in this paper I have chosen to elaborate on a single case that occurred while I was conducting research.
Kavita Matgaonkar (not her real name) was married in January of 1998. She was a middle class Maharashtrian woman in her early twenties with a B.A. in biology. At the time of her marriage, her dowry included approximately $4,000 in gold jewelry, $5,000 cash, several dozen new saris for all the female members of her husband’s family, and a color television set. At the time, this was an adequate dowry for a middle class woman’s family to give. Kavita relocated from Pune to Mumbai to live with her new husband’s family after her marriage.
About two months after the marriage, Kavita began to be harassed by her in-laws. They demanded that she ask her parents to provide funds to buy a new apartment in a certain neighborhood in Mumbai, something that was well beyond the means of anyone in either family. Kavita insisted that her parents could not afford it, but her mother-in-law was adamant. She continued to badger Kavita until she was forced to ask her parents for more money. Kavita’s parents confirmed that they could not afford to finance a new apartment for Kavita’s husband and his family, but offered to pay a large sum of money instead.
Kavita’s in-laws took the money, yet continued to ask for more. They insisted that Kavita was a poor cook, a bad housekeeper, and that she was not a good wife to their son. Kavita’s husband, meanwhile, had little to say about anything in the matter. When Kavita’s parents could no longer afford to give the family further payments in order to keep them happy, Kavita’s in-laws threatened to send her back home. Horrified at this possibility, which would bring shame on the family, Kavita’s parents borrowed still more money in order to pay Kavita’s in-laws.
Around April of 1998, Kavita’s parents began to notice that the normally amiable Kavita had become withdrawn. She no longer seemed interested in maintaining relationships with friends or even with her family. Three months later, Kavita was found dead. She had third degree burns covering her body. Her in-laws claimed that the burns were caused by Kavita’s carelessness in the kitchen.
Unfortunately, the women’s advocacy groups with whom I worked were not alerted to the situation until after Kavita’s death. The police handled Kavita’s case swiftly, arresting her in-laws under a clause of the 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act. When I left India in August 1998, the case was still pending trial. Still, the situation described above makes little anthropological sense without a theoretical framework to guide it. Situational analysis will help us to understand just what transpired in Kavita’s home.
Max Gluckman pioneered situational analysis as part of his theoretical advances made at the Manchester School. Gluckman’s most famous example of situational analysis is his 1958 Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand, which analyzes a series of events that occurred in a single day. Situational analysis purports to make clear conflicts inherent within a group through the observation of how social actors behave in a single given situation. In his Zululand example, Gluckman reveals the deep divisions that crosscut European and African relations in Zululand:
The contradictions become conflicts as the relative frequency and importance of different situations increase in the functioning of different organizations. Rapidly the dominant situations are becoming those involving African-White relations, and more and more Zulu behave as members of the African group as opposed to the White group. In turn, these situations affect intra-African relations (Gluckman 1958:26).
As such, it is evident that through his analysis of African and European behavior in cooperating at the ceremony at the bridge, Gluckman is able to demonstrate how conflict is an ever-present force within the community. In bringing the conflict to the fore, Gluckman also presents us with a deeper understanding of how the greater structure of the Zululand functions. This belies Gluckman’s structure-functionalist roots.
Gluckman’s students Victor Turner and Fred Bailey also employ situational analysis in their work. In his 1957 Schism and Continuity in an African Society, Turner utilizes the concept of situational analysis along with employing his own theoretical innovation, the social drama. Turner examines seven social dramas that illustrate the way in which the Ndembu matrilineage sometimes causes conflict. He observes that, “Beneath all other conflicts in Ndembu society is the concealed opposition between men and women over descent and in the economic system” (Turner 1957: 89).
Turner’s analysis of conflict within the matrilineage mirrors Bailey’s situational analysis presented in his 1994 The Witch-hunt, or The Triumph of Morality. In Bailey’s ethnography, the social analysis of the events following the unexpected death of a young village girl named Sushila of malaria reveals underlying tensions in the community surrounding caste and ideas of proper behavior. Tuta (whose name means ‘broken’ in Hindi) the washerman, is blamed for Sushila’s death in the end:
Tuta was the victim of the sirdar’s manipulations, because Tuta was rich enough to be worth plucking and was a marginal person, low in the caste hierarchy, and, as his son said, stood alone. On the other hand, he was a Washerman who had risen to a level of prosperity above that appropriate to his status. Therefore to bring him down was to do something good for the moral order (Bailey 1994: 204).
Bailey’s situational analysis thus reveals that because Tuta the washerman had violated the caste order by achieving a certain level of prosperity, the community punished him. From the above three examples of situational analysis, it is clear that this method helps to illuminate conflicts that underlie everyday situations, as well as to get at a deeper understanding of what is really transpiring in a given situation. Following the lead of Gluckman, Turner, and Bailey, then, I will now turn to a situational analysis of the events surrounding Kavita’s death, first framed by kinship.
The harassment and subsequent murder of Kavita by her avaricious in-laws was certainly aided by her structural marginality within India’s kinship system. Family life in India is fairly ritualized, even more so than in most cultures. Every individual has a specific role to fill, and specific duties that come with that role. The role of the mother-in-law is to train the ‘childish’ young bride to fit her new role as mother and household worker. Any cruelty that is committed by the mother-in-law is viewed as the cruelty of life itself (Naipaul 1990: 179). The role of the daughter-in-law is to be meek and submissive, and to try to ease into her new life as painlessly as possible.
Many theories have been postulated as to why a mother-in-law, often a victim of harassment from her own mother-in-law in her youth, would harass her daughter-in-law. It has been suggested that the mother-in-law uses her daughter-in-law as an outlet for the frustration she has had to internalize throughout her life. Stories of mothers-in-law hiding the cooking pots of their daughters-in-law and then berating them for ‘losing’ the pots are common throughout India (Bagwe 1995: 89).
The most common form of abuse that a mother-in-law will use with her daughter-in-law is criticism. In a study of battered women, emotional abuse that includes ridicule was considered to be the worst form of abuse in terms of its effects (Aguilar and Nightingale 1994: 37-38). As such, it may be the case that Kavita’s mother-in-law used the best technique possible in order to push her young daughter-in-law into demanding more and more funds from her parents.
It is also interesting that newly married men are often powerless to speak to their mothers against their ill treatment of their wives. To further bias the husband against his new wife in the joint household, traditional filial respect prevents him from intervening in altercations between his family and his wife. Thus husband in the joint family cannot object to any ill treatment of his wife because he is dependent on his father’s income (Verghese 1990: 168). This fosters an environment in which a young man is forced to defer to his parents’ wishes, even if it means compromising the safety of his wife.
We can clearly this that this is what happened in Kavita’s case. Her husband said nothing about the demands his parents made on Kavita’s parents. Although he may have been a genuinely insensitive man, it is more likely that his own structural marginality prevented him from doing so. By utilizing situational analysis, the marginality of different social actors (such as Kavita’s husband), which was not immediately obvious, becomes clearer. Situational analysis also reveals the contractual nature of arranged marriage in this case by showing how kinship and notions of kinship were manipulated in order to gain wealth.
When a new bride enters her patrilocal home, she occupies a structurally marginal position. Custom mandates that she be younger than her husband; the average age of a woman at marriage in India is 18.7 years, while for a man it is 23.4 years. Marriage is incredibly important in India, with only 0.8% of all women divorced (Chauhan 1995: 138).
As such, we can view Kavita as entering a situation as a structurally marginalized stranger to the family. Relocating from her natal city of Pune to her husband’s family’s apartment in Mumbai meant that she was completely alone for the first time in her life. After marriage, it was expected that Kavita’s own kinship and friendship networks be secondary to those of her husband’s. A situational analysis of the events leading to Kavita’s death framed by a discussion of kinship, then, allows us to see how the this was allowed to happen.
Of course, the issue of “allowing it to happen” does not escape the minds of the parents of young women like Kavita. Parents play an important role in the dowry process, as over 95% of marriages in India are arranged. In one study, 59% of parents in Delhi who gave dowry did so because they felt it would make their daughter’s life easier (Chauhan 1995: 154-161). When Kavita’s parents gathered the goods and cash worth approximately $10,000 to give as her dowry, it is likely that they did so in order to ensure her good treatment from her in-laws.
Unfortunately, the kinship system in India structurally does not place a very high value on daughters-in-law. For example, one family ended their description of the dowry that their daughter’s in-laws had extorted from them by saying, “We felt relieved as each daughter was given away” (Bagwe 1995: 95). Families with two or more daughters and no sons are often looked upon with pity.
This view of young women as a liability is best expressed in Marathi, Kavita’s first language. In Marathi bayanchi jaat means ‘of woman caste’, and is sometimes used to justify less-than-favorable treatment of women (Bagwe 1995: 5). The question then, in Kavita’s case as well as others, is that as long as parents view their daughters as liabilities (economic and otherwise), how can their in-laws be expected to see them any differently?
A particularly notable event surrounding Kavita’s death was her parent’s borrowing money in order to prevent her in-laws from sending her back to her natal home. Following Gluckman, Turner, and Bailey, it is clear that at this point underlying conflicts within the larger kinship system are revealed. Kavita’s returning home would have meant bringing shame onto her family. The conflict for Kavita’s parents, then, was how to minimize harassment of their daughter and damage to the family’s collective self-respect. This, of course, reflects upon the larger scheme of Indian kinship rather than just the case of Kavita’s family.
When parents first learn that their daughter is being abused, they generally advise her to learn to adjust to her new compromises. If this fails, the bride’s father will try to discuss the situation with his daughter’s new family. Her father would then seek the intervention of respected members in the community in order to assure that his daughter will be better treated in the future. Even if all this fails, very few parents would allow their daughter to return to her natal home (Gandhi 1991: 54).
Returning to the natal home means that a woman is unfit to be a wife, the role she has been prepared to fill for her entire life. This brings implications of sexual misconduct, which reflects badly on the parents of the returning woman. The social stigma of having a daughter who is estranged from her husband, for whatever reason, is greater even than that of having an unmarried daughter well past marriageable age still at home.
Viewed in this light, it is clear that the kinship system in which Kavita found herself by accident of birth was structured in such a way as to place her in an unfasvorable position. I will now turn to a situational analysis framed around a discussion of religious systems. Kavita’s life was framed within a Hindu religious system, and thus my discussion will be centered on this system.
Dowry is an issue of such enormity partially because of the importance of marriage in the Hindu Sanskritic religious tradition. It is a stage through which everyone must pass on the way to moksha, or enlightenment. In fact, kanyadaan (‘the gift of the virgin’) is one of the ten paths a man may take in order to achieve moksha (Krishnamurthy 1981: 26). Kanyadaan is one of the eight Vedic forms of marriage. It involves the gift of a daughter to a man her father has chosen after dressing her in costly clothing and jewels (Verghese 1980: 99).
It is this form of marriage that comes closest to the notion of marriage and dowry that pervades India today. It is interesting to mention that in the textual version of kanyadaan, nothing is mentioned about dowry. The bride is dressed and decked with jewels according to the wishes of her father, but not the family that she is marrying in to. The jewels and clothing may be her dowry, but it is nothing like the dowry of today. Kavita’s $10,000 dowry, which was by no means excessive (or even extravagant) for her middle class family, exemplifies this.
The other seven forms of marriage mention nothing about including a large dowry (Verghese 1980: 99); this is important because it shows that dowry as it exists today is more of a modern phenomenon. We can thus see Kavita’s situation as a unique product of an urban economic situation, a subject that will be further addressed below in my discussion of situational analysis as framed by economic systems.
The Dharmshastra also mandates that women be carefully guarded throughout their lives:
Nothing should be done by a girl, or by a woman advanced in years, even in her own dwelling place according to her own pleasure. In childhood a female must be dependant upon her father, in youth upon her husband. Her lord being dead upon her sons. A woman must never seek independence (in Augustine 1982: 139).
Using situational analysis, we can see Kavita as a new bride in Mumbai, newly (ideally, anyway, she did have a degree) dependent upon her husband and his family. Conflict is inherent in this situation.
Religion further mandates that Kavita and those like her assume a new role as sacrificer in many ways, and the pativrata ideology is perhaps the most powerful. This term means ‘complete dedication to one’s husband’. In Hindu Sanskritic tradition, women who are pativratas can earn moksha (enlightenment) through their intense dedication to their husbands. In fact, the five wives of Hindu Sanskritic tradition that women are taught to admire- Sita, Draupadi, Tara, Ahalya, and Mandodari- all reached enlightenment in this way (Dhruvarajan 1989: 27).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Kavita’s death is the manner in which it occurred. Kavita was burned to death, allegedly by a kitchen accident. Roughly sixty percent of victims of dowry-related violence die of burn-related injuries, as Kavita did (Ghadially 1988: 167). The use of fire to commit murder is an interesting choice. It is highly inefficient, considering the amount of time it takes to kill a victim by burning. It is also a highly conspicuous form of murder given the tightly packed housing arrangements which most urbanites such as Kavita and her in-laws share.
This considered, it has been suggested that the use of fire a murder weapon is religiously symbolic, albeit in the collective Hindu unconscious (Stone and James 1995: 130). Fire symbolizes ritual purification in Hinduism. Because Hindus are virtually the only group in India that commits dowry-related violence, there is a possible link between death by fire and the religious significance of fire as a purifying agent. In the Hindu epic Ramayan, the hero’s pious wife Sita walks through fire to prove her devotion to him. The goddess Sati Devi similarly proves her love to her divine husband Siva by leaping to her death into a ceremonial fire. Even the marriage ceremony itself involves walking around a fire seven times. Of course, there is also the well-known sati tradition that also involves death by fire.
Using situational analysis, it is possible to see Kavita as the unfortunate victim of both a religious system that tends to marginalize women. Situational analysis also allows us to see the conflict in society between the Hindu-Sanskritic religious tradition and the secular police force; it is essential to remember that Kavita’s in-laws were arrested for her murder, and thus religious systems are structurally subordinate to legal systems.
The third and final vantage point from which I will discuss the events leading up to Kavita’s death is that of economic systems. Economics is probably the most important factor influencing the behavior of Kavita’s in-laws; essentially, they wanted as much money as they could get from her and her family. As such, it is useful to discuss the economic function of dowry.
The Dharmshastra (literally, ‘the study of religion’) sets forth a set of rules surrounding dowry. Written around 200 B.C., this book defines dowry as stridhaan, or woman’s wealth. There are six parts of woman’s wealth as defined in the Dharmshastra: gifts to the bride before the wedding, gifts to her in the bridal procession, gifts of love to her, and gifts to her from her father, brother, or mother. It is clear from this that these gifts are the property of the bride. Even the inheritance of the dowry is specified. If the bride dies, her dowry goes to her “unmarried daughters, married indigent daughters, married daughter who is well provided for, daughter’s daughter, daughter’s son, son’s son, husband…” (Goody and Tambiah 1973: 89).
From the above passage, it is clear that dowry is ideally meant as inheritance for women. From a purely economic standpoint, this makes sense, as dowry is most commonly found in areas that practice intensive agriculture with large domestic animals plowing the land. These societies tend to be those in which property is inherited patrilineally, and thus women have little or no access to finances of their own (Goody and Tambiah 1973: 51).
Dowry, then, does not make much ‘sense’ anthropologically in urban India. Women, such as Kavita, who had a B.A. in biology, often have their own resources from employment. Yet it is the urban middle class in Maharashtra that is most likely to give dowry, and also to commit dowry-related violence. This has an enormous effect on urban middle class women, who incidentally have the highest rates of suicide and depression in India (Krishnamurthy 1981: 19).
The existence of a middle class is a relatively new phenomenon for India. Its emergence is the result of the globalization of India’s economy, which was strictly state- controlled until the 1980s (Kulkarni 1993: 45). The globalization of the economy, combined with exposure to American and European products and media, have made (some) urban Indians desire a global identity. Essentially, this group of 100 to 350 million people all desire goods and services that were simply unavailable in the closed economy of their childhood (Sharma 1996: 311).
A situational analysis framed within the economic system of Kavita’s situation as a member of the Mumbai middle class makes it clear that Kavita’s in-laws viewed her and her family as a good resource of funds, albeit through the illegitimate vehicle of extortion. It is also notable that her dowry included a color television set, an object of great middle class affection. Kavita’s in-laws’ biggest demand, however, was an apartment in Mumbai. This final demand gives us the greatest insight into the reality of the situation.
A piece a legislation called the Rent Act is largely responsible for the outrageous cost of housing in Mumbai. Over fifteen million people live in Mumbai, a number equivalent to the entire population of Australia (Mitter 1991: 29). Housing is at a premium in the city, and the existence of rent-controlled buildings as a result of the Rent Act only makes this worse. As a result, any housing in Mumbai that a middle class family will be able to afford will be substandard. In areas of this space-constrained city, land costs as much per square foot as in New York City or Tokyo.
Kavita’s parents, in their extortionate demand for a new apartment in Mumbai, were thus articulating a common middle class desire for respectable housing. As such, situational analysis seen through the lens of economic systems allows us to have a glimpse of Kavita’s in-laws as also being structurally marginalized. Unable to afford adequate housing, they chose to exploit the only easy source of financial return that they had access to: their daughter-in-law.
Situational analysis has thus allowed us to view Kavita’s situation from three different perspectives, all of which bring out specific highlights in her case. Sadly, however, none of the three really help to make any more sense of why Kavita, who was once a real, living woman, had to die for the sake of greed.
WORKS CITED
Aguilar, Rudy J. and Nightingale, Narina N. 1994. “The Impact of Specific Battering
Experiences of the Self-Esteem of the Abused Woman”, Journal of Family
Violence 9: 1 (35-45).
Augustine, John. 1982. The Indian Family in Transition. Delhi: Vikas Publishing
House.
Bagwe, Anjali. 1995. Of Woman Caste. London: Zed Books.
Bailey, Fred. 1994. The Witch-Hunt, or The Triumph of Morality. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Chauhan, Richa. 1995. Dowry in Twentieth Century India. Unpublished SUNY Stony
Brook dissertation.
Dhruvarajan, Vanajal. 1989. Hindu Women and the Power of Ideology. Granby, MA:
Bergin and Garvey.
Gandhi, Nandita and Nandita Shah. 1991. The Issues at Stake. Delhi: Kali for Women.
Ghadially, Rehana and Pramod Kumar. 1988. “Bride-burning: The Psycho-Social
Dynamics of Dowry Death”, in Ghadially, Rehana, ed. Women in Indian
Society. Delhi: Sage Publications.
Gluckman, Max. 1958. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Northern
Rhodesia: Rhodes-Livingston Institute.
Goody, Jack and S.J. Tambiah. 1973. Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Krishnamurthy, S. 1981. The Dowry Problem. Bangalore: G.K. Ananthram.
Kulkarni, V.G. 1993. “The Middle Class Bulge”, Far Eastern Economic Review, 14
January.
Mitter, Sara. 1991. Dharma’s Daughters. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press.
Naipaul, V.S. 1990. India: A Million Mutinies Now. New York: Viking.
Sharma, Satya. 1996. “The Cultural Costs of a Globalized Economy for India”,
Dialectical Anthropology 21: 3 (299-316).
Stone, Linda and Caroline James. 1995. “Dowry, Bride-Burning, and Female Power in
India”, Women’s Studies International Forum 18: 2 (125-134).
Turner, Victor. 1957. Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu
Village Life. Manchester: University of Manchester.
Verghese, Jamila. 1980. Her Gold and Her Body. Delhi: Vikas Publishing House.
Biography
>Dr. Susan Dewey is a Cultural Anthropologist with over a decade of field research in South Asia, dating from her first encounter with the subcontinent as a sixteen-year-old exchange student. Currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at DePauw University, her most recent research focused on sex trafficking in post-Soviet Armenia in her capacity there as Consultant on Gender and Counter-Trafficking for the United Nations. Her broader research questions center on how macro-economic changes at the state level impact women's bodies, and has led her to research sites as diverse as the Hindi film industry, lesbian activist groups in Bombay, Sri Lankan refugee camps and post-Soviet Armenia. Dr. Runkle is the author of two novels, the first of which was published in New Delhi by Haranand Publications, as well as Making Miss India Miss Universe: Constructing Gender, Power and National Identity Onstage, forthcoming from Chronicle Books.
Labrys
estudos feministas/ études féministes
janeiro/ junho 2006 -janvier / juin 2006