The “murder” of Vismaya, a medical student, allegedly by her husband, in Kerala’s Kollam district has shocked the people all over the country. The saturation-level coverage of the incident in the social, print and electronic media has raised many questions from the ethical to the sociological to the ecclesiastical.

Vismaya was a victim of the societal norms, under which a married woman’s place was at her husband’s home. And if she returned to her own home because of torture, it would be her parents who would be blamed because they did not bring her up properly. 

Small wonder that she kept it a secret when the boy physically abused her even before they tied the nuptial knot. What provoked him was that he saw her talking to a fellow male student at her college, when he visited her without giving notice. 

In colloquial Malayalam, the word for a girl’s marriage is kettichayakkal (sending away after marriage). The girl is supposed to leave her paternal home for her husband’s home. It is to facilitate this shifting that dowry is given. 

In Vismaya’s case, 1.5 acres of land worth at least Rs 1.50 crore, 100 sovereign gold worth Rs 35 lakh and a Toyota Yarris car that cost Rs 11.50 lakh were given as dowry. The boy who is a vehicle inspector wanted a Honda City, which was more fuel-efficient and was in keeping with his status. 

Since the girl’s father had bought the car on installment basis, he could not sell it and satisfy his son-in-law. What’s surprising is that he found Honda City more desirable than Vismaya herself. 

He would, perhaps, have been happy to receive the dowry even if there was no girl attached to it. How did he get the idea that he deserved such a hefty dowry? 

In the avian and animal kingdoms, it is the male which struggles to please the female species. I wish the boy was shown how the Baya weaver (Ploceus philippinus), a weaverbird, struggles day and night to make the perfect nest. If the female bird is not happy with his nest, she can reject him and there is no family or judicial court to hear him.

Dowry, as we understand it today, is of recent origin. In the Hindu, Islamic and Christian traditions, the men had to either pay bride money or prove themselves in a competition. 

In the Old Testament which the Christian, the Muslim and the Jew consider as sacred, Jacob had to work for 14 long years before he could have Rachel’s hand. The Ramayana tells us how Ram had to break the divine bow to marry Sita.

Today, things stand reversed. Parents of girls have to find ways and means to virtually “purchase” grooms. The super rich buy IAS and IPS officers for their daughters while middle class parents like Vismaya’s “buy” vehicle inspectors. Where is the difference?

In Andhra Pradesh, I am told, boys who prepare for the civil services examination are in great demand in the marriage market. They command a lesser price till they get into a coveted service. Government servants are in great demand because they have a permanent job and they can make more money by way of bribes than as salary.

While I was in Patna in the early eighties, I remember an incident. A boy who worked as a peon in the multinational drug firm Boots wanted a Phillips transistor radio as part of the dowry. 

On the marriage day, he found that there was no radio receiver. There was only a girl, modestly bejewelled. He refused to marry her until the whole village fell at his feet, promising that the radio receiver would be presented to him the next day.

Elsewhere in India, the boy has to give something to the girl at the time of marriage. The Malayali boy is the smartest. He does not have to pay a single penny. Often, the sari the bridegroom gives to the bride in the church is paid for or funded by the girl’s family.

In Kerala, the practice of giving dowry in cash was confined to the Syrian Christian community. Hindus did not give any dowry. Of course, the girl was given some gold jewellery which she wore at the time of the wedding. Muslims had their own practice of paying bride money. 

The tragedy is that, today, the followers of every religion and belonging to every caste practice the system of dowry.

In Vismaya’s case, the boy would have been happier if he was given the price of the car in cash. That he used to mention that the car was not fuel-efficient meant that he wanted some money also to fill the fuel tank. Her father might have even financed his fuel purchase if he knew that he would go to any extent to extract his pound of flesh.

As I mentioned, this was not the situation in Kerala earlier. The Malayalam word for dowry is Sthreedhanam (girl’s property). The Syrian Christians in Kerala were governed by the Travancore Christian Succession Act, 1917. Dowry was legal at that time.

Before any Christian marriage, there used to be a meeting at either the house of the boy or the girl where close relatives and the priests of the two churches to which the couple belongs were invited. It is at this meeting that the dowry amount and the date of marriage were announced. The money was handed over by the girl’s father to the boy’s father at this meeting. They signed the church register also.

Before the marriage took place, the details of the marriage, including the amount of dowry, were announced at the two churches on two Sundays. The girl’s father was expected to give the church 1 per cent of the dowry and the boy’s father 2 per cent. If the dowry was Rs 10,000, the church would get a total of Rs 300.

The dowry so given had certain inbuilt security provisions. If, for any reason, the marriage collapsed leading to divorce, the boy had to return the whole dowry amount. If, suppose, there were revenue recovery proceedings against the man, even the government could not touch the dowry amount brought by his wife. It was considered her property, not her husband’s.

One of my close relatives took a dowry of Rs 10,000. In due course, they had a daughter. That was when the wife and his parents realised that he had an affair with a nurse in Mumbai. The marriage ended in divorce. He tried not to return the dowry, as he had already spent it. Ultimately, he had to return the money.

My own sister was married off. The dowry she was given at that time was much more than what I and my two brothers and one sister would have received if my father’s property was equally divided. Between you and me, there was nothing to divide. I will come to that in an instant.

The Travancore succession law had one major flaw. If a person died before his property could be divided, his daughter would get either a share of the property or Rs 5,000 whichever was less. 

The amount was fixed in 1917 when the monthly salary of a school principal was less than Rs 10. The amount should have been increased to Rs 1 crore or Rs 10 crore or Rs 1000 crore. My mother’s elder sister received a dowry of Rs 150, a big sum those days.

When a Kerala lady, Mary Roy, married a man of her own choice, she fell out with her brothers who were not ready to give her an equal share of her father’s property. Under the law, she was entitled to get only Rs 5000 or the share whichever was less. With that kind of money she could have bought only a second-hand Vespa scooter, as I found to my own chagrin.

She went right up to the Supreme Court which declared the Travancore law ultra vires of the Constitutional provision of equality. It also declared dowry as illegal. There are, now, national laws under which giving or receiving dowry is a cognisable offence 

Mary Roy, mother of The-God-of-Small-Things author Arundhati Roy, was hailed as a great liberator of women. She suddenly became an icon. Did her victory end in the abolition of dowry? No, it did not. Rather, dowry became a secret deal between the girl’s father and the boy’s father. Among the losers was the church because it could no longer demand 3 percent of the dowry amount.

Since there is no proof of either giving or receiving dowry, the girl cannot get back the money if the marriage collapses. As I mentioned, my relative had to return Rs 10,000 to his wife at the time of divorce. 

If he were alive today, he could have obtained a dowry of, say, Rs 50 lakh, divorced his wife, paid her nothing other than alimony and married the woman he was secretly in love with. In short, dowry went underground.

On the first or second anniversary of the historic Supreme Court judgement, I wrote an article in the Indian Express where I worked in the mid-nineties saying that the verdict in the Mary Roy case adversely affected the interests of the Syrian Christian women of Kerala. 

The doughty lady responded with a stinging letter in which she called me a male chauvinist pig (MCP). Her letter was published in full and I took her comment as a compliment. The situation in Kerala has become worse with dowry deaths becoming the order of the day. The tragedy is that there is no discussion on how to end it.

If I have a daughter and if I give her some money to settle well in life after her marriage, what is wrong in that? Today, I can’t give it legally because I will be accused of giving dowry. Earlier, church documents were there to prove that dowry was given. My point is that there should be a signed agreement under which the boy officially accepts the money and the ornaments.

If the marriage fails, he is duty-bound to return the money and the jewellery to the girl. Now, let me tell my own story. I received Streedhanam when I got married. The amount was announced in the church. The money was invested in a new house we built which is now in my wife’s name.

Thanks to Mary Roy, my wife could have claimed a share in her father’s landed property as he died intestate. No, we did not as we had no moral claim to do so having received her share in cash in the seventies. Nobody disputes that a daughter has as much right as a son in her father’s property.

If a person living in a single-room flat in Delhi wants to marry off his elder daughter by giving her some money and ornaments, what is wrong in that? Should she wait till the parents die so that the flat can be sold and the proceedings equally divided among the siblings? 

By then she might not even be alive or might not even need the money. The same person would have needed the money when she got married. Dowry is not as simple a thing as the word suggests.

I am not an admirer of the former Kerala Women’s Commission chief M C Josephine. I always thought that she was not competent to hold the post as her body language was detestable. However, one statement she made did not get the attention it deserved. And that is that dowry given should be in the name of the girl.

If Vismaya’s husband can beat her in public even before he married her, how could it be believed that he would not forcibly take the money from her hands or account? So, what Josephine said is not the solution. 

The solution lies in making all such transactions transparent. Let there be a proper law to define dowry and make the transactions under the law transparent and legal. 

Why is gold smuggled into India, mostly from the Gulf countries? Gold smuggling will stop once gold prices in India and the Gulf are the same. The other day, I bought a camera and a lens at a price lower than in Japan and Germany, the countries of their origin.

Once transparency is introduced in all marriage-related transactions, allegations of cheating will end. Equally important, boys should be brought up in such a way that they realise that nothing is more valuable than a wife who has unlimited interest in his welfare. In that case, he will not complain about Toyota Yaris. There was a time when marriages were made in heaven, now they are made in showrooms!

ajphilip@gmail.com