Dowry Claims and Bride Prices

“13 year old daughter sold to a 35 year old man”…….. “Young housewife burnt alive for dowry……. “Woman ends life due to dowry harassment”. Every morning our newspapers are full of such heart-rending and tragic incidents. Such cases are either hushed up by the in-laws by suborning the witnesses and authorities or in other cases not even pursued by the parents of the victim. As a result, most of the times, such incidents remain uninvestigated by the police who then record the death as “A Cooking-Stove” accident, having been assisted towards this conclusion with “a wad of rupees”. But the main issue over here is not the corruption of the officials in fact it is the system and the practices leading to such mishaps that need to be examined and the illegal systems and practices abolished. As far as my opinion is concerned both the dowry system and the bride price system as practiced in our society and culture are illegal, absurd and completely unjustified.

Now practiced primarily in Asian cultures, the dowry system originates from the ancient Greece, Rome, India and Medieval Europe. Bestowing dowry, then, involved the transfer of wealth in the form of money and/or property from the bride’s parents to the bride and its sole purpose was to provide a degree of financial autonomy to a bride who, otherwise, had no right to property at all. Today, however, people have changed both the meaning of dowry payment as well as its purpose. These days it simply means the transfer of wealth from the bride’s parents to the groom and his family, moulding marriage into a commercial transaction where a groom and his family instead of searching for a suitable life partner seek the status of the probable candidate so as to ensure a healthy dowry. This puts a lot of pressure on the middle and the lower classes who are either forced to give away all their savings or to take loans with heavy interests on them in order to meet the demands of the groom’s family. Increasingly inflated dowry payments are sometimes six times the bride’s family’s annual income. Thus most of the middle and lower class families find it extremely difficult to get their daughters married. The greed of dowry has reached to such an extent in our society that the brides bringing less dowry with them are tortured, humiliated, harassed and even killed by their husbands and in-laws. This sort of exploitation is strictly prohibited in Islam. In fact Islam has given women an edge over their husbands in so far as it obliges the bridegroom to pay meher(Its a gift as well as the amount of money that has to be given to the bride in case of a divorce. It can be a small amount or a large amount, depending on the financial situation of the groom) and maintain wife in a decent way. Still dowry practice is a common phenomenon of our society where Muslims dwell in majority.