Hindu American Foundation [HAF]

HAF OBJECTS TO WASHINGTON POST COVERAGE OF DOWRY AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

On March 27, 2005, The Washington Post printed an article entitled “For Bride, Dowry Is Deal Breaker” that inaccurately attempted to attribute cultural violence against women and the practice of dowry to Hinduism. On April 3, 2005, HAF responded with a condensed version of the below letter.

In calling dowry an ‘age-old Hindu tradition’ in “For Bride, Dowry Is Deal Breaker”, Sunday, March 27, 2005, John Lancaster displays ignorance of both Hinduism and the origins of dowry. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Professor of History at the City Univesity of New York, shows in her book "Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime", that 'these killings are neither about dowry nor reflective of an Indian culture or caste system that encourages violence against women. Rather, such killings can be traced directly to the influences of the British colonial era. In the precolonial period, dowry was an institution managed by women, for women, to enable them to establish their status and have recourse in an emergency. As a consequence of the massive economic and societal upheaval brought on by British rule, womens' entitlements to the precious resources obtained from land were erased and their control of the system diminished, ultimately resulting in a devaluing of their very lives.'

Two things ought to be clear. First, the extreme devaluation of women reflected in abhorrent practices such as dowry, female infanticide and female foeticide can be traced directly to colonial policies that in fact reflect the poorer social status of women in Victorian England than in then contemporary India, where women did have property rights. Second, much depends upon how problems get defined intellectually and these crimes are properly judged today as individual crimes rather than ‘hindu crimes’, much the same way as spousal-killings in America are not analyzed as a religious/cultural crime despite that fact that statistically the percentage of American women victims of spousal killings are at least as high as the percentage of Indian women victimized by dowry-deaths.

See “Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism”; Routledge, 1997; by Uma Narayan, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College.