Burning Widows, Burning Brides: The Perils of Daughterhood in India

Abstract

H ARVARD ECONOMIST Amartya Sen estimates that there are 28 million women missing from the Indian population, from selective abortion and excess death rates throughout life. Although all the contributing factors-including malnutrition, overwork and lack of medical care-may be said to spring from the same general attitudes, in this paper I wish to focus on the past and current controversies over sati and the campaign for the abolition of dowry and its attendant evils. It is my view that they will persist until single women are accepted in Indian society. India has been independent of British rule for over forty years. At the time of independence, universal adult suffrage and guarantees against sex discrimination were written into the constitution. In theory a secular parliamentary democracy, although highly respectful of religious diversity and control over social custom and family law, the Indian government and much of the national press regard the disabilities and discrimination faced by women with a seriousness not found in most western countries. Furthermore, the exploitation of women has had prominent native critics of the majority religion such as would not have been tolerated in either Christian or Islamic countries. Yet the most extreme forms of brutality towards women have proved stubbornly resistant to all legal and educational attempts to eradicate them. The past few years have seen the continued growth and spread of the practice of dowry which was outlawed in the sixties; the persistence of the domestic violence that has been the subject of surveillance and campaigns since the seventies; and, finally, in the eighties, attempts to reestablish sati as a justifiable practice. I have previously argued that, religious rhetoric aside, sati was an expression of the perceived superfluity of women who were considered unmarriageable in a social context where marriage was the only approved status for women. ' Although this attitude did not change, the imposition of