Other Cultures

Different societies and cultures have different attitudes towards love and marriage. Even within our own society there are different views. For instance, some people would say that marriage is outdates; some that pre–marital sex is wrong; some that abortion is wrong. What are your views on these topics?

A minority group with its own views on marriage living within our society has even greater problems. The following newspaper article describes an investigation into the feelings of Asian girls living in London who are faced with their parents’ traditions of arranged marriages and dowries.

Love is … a blind date and a colour tv

A.wilson

On Sangeeta’s twenty-second birthday her parents began to talk of finding her a husband. They were very gentle about it. They assured her they wouldn’t push her into anything, that she would have half an hour to talk to the boy in order to make up her mind. Sangeeta, born and brought up in south London, does not object to the idea of an arranged marriage, but there is one aspect of it which fills her with revulsion.

“I refuse to be sold off. If there is any question of my parents paying a dowry for me I shall refuse to marry. I shall hold out as long as I can”.

But she added ruefully, “I’m afraid that in the end I may have to sacrifice my principles for the sake of my parents. The trouble is that when you’re thirty there aren’t very many boys who want to marry you. You find yourself landed with some fat middle-aged creep”.

Traditionally, when a girl of the Patel community married, her parents gave a dowry to the parents of the bridegroom. The transaction took place discreetly, out of sight of the young couple, and only their parents knew how much money changed hands. Today the practice is illegal in India, but in the Asian community in Britain it is a thriving business. Many girls feel they are being “sold off” for a colour television or a washing machine, but they are alone and isolated in their desire to abolish so profitable a custom.

Recently, several of them came together quite accidentally at the end of an Indian dance rehearsal for the borough of Wandsworth’s Asian Week. They started talking about arranged marriages within their own families, laughing about if and telling their own experiences. Then their grievances against the dowry began to emerge and they started to discuss seriously how they might fight it. Greta Amin, a community worker who was present at the rehearsal, encouraged them to launch a campaign to abolish the dowry altogether.

Two meetings were held, attended by fluctuating numbers of girls between the ages of l6 and 22, some still at school, some at college, and some who had been working for a few years. They tried to recruit support by leafleting Saturday morning shoppers around Clapham and Tooting, running advertisement slides in the Asian cinema and producing a pamphlet on the history of the dowry.

To their disappointment the publicity campaign had very little effect among their own age group. People laughed at them. Their mothers were patronising. “You’ll understand when you get older that we want to do our best for you”, they said. “Besides, what can a handful of girls do about changing our ancient custom?”

Within the close-knit villages of the Patel community in India, the dowry was originally given if a boy from a prestigious family wanted to marry a girl socially his interior. The girl’s parents would pay money and gold as an insurance for their grandchildren and the future of their own stock. By marrying above herself the girl would be getting a better deal for her children than she had had as a child.

The dowry itself was the financial security behind the marriage. There was no registration of marriages so the ceremony was always widely publicised and each guest invited would give chanta, a small sum to supplement dowry. The dowry would be further balanced by the money they boy brought to the marriage and by the assumption that he would support his wife throughout their life together.

All this is easier to accomplish in India where everyone knows the children of other Patels, but here, where Patel families may be scattered between London, Leicester Bradford, and Birmingham, it is difficult for parents to find suitable husbands for their daughters.

The dowry system operating among the Patel community in Britain is having two serious effects. First, it means more and more Patels are marrying into other communities and castes against their parents’ wishes simply to avoid the dowry. Second, poor families who pour all their life savings into a dowry for their daughter may be crippled by the dowry payment as, within an increasingly materialistic society, grater demands are made upon them.

In a recent case, the bridegroom turned to the bride’s parents in the middle of the marriage ceremony and said: “You’ve got to give me a car. Otherwise I’m walking out right now”. The parents persuaded him to go through with the wedding on condition they bought him a car the next day.

The economic circumstances which originally made the dowry a sensible institution are likely to have changed so much within Asian families in Britain that there is no longer any reasonable justification for it. In India married women do not work, but in England they may have been financially independent before marriage and will probably continue to work afterwards. This means they bring their own savings to the marriage and these may be fairly substantial.

A girl lives at home until she is married and pays nothing for her board to her parents, so her expenses are few. The fact that she will probably continue to work after marriage is a strong argument in favour of abolishing the dowry, and working Asian girls are among the foremost abolitionists: they do not ask their husbands to support them unaided.

The bride’s economic independence is open to exploitation by the bridegroom’s family. She may have to pay her own savings to her husband’s parents as part of her own dowry. “I love my own parents and I shouldn’t in the least mind giving my savings to them”, explained Purnima, another of the Wandsorth group, “but I resent the idea of handing my money over to strangers”.

It is the boy’s family which does all the haggling. The girls insist that their own parents only want to make them happy. “We don’t have any social life before marriage outside our immediate family. We certainly don’t have boy friends. No one forces marriage on you: you can see ten or twelve boys if you want to before you have to choose. The boy comes to your home and you are able to meet him, then if you like him you become engaged.

“The engagement ceremony takes place at his home and is paid for by his parents. Then follows a one or two–month period of engagement. It is not usually longer than that because the parents are scared you might get to know him properly and not like him”. This solemn consideration is accompanied by peals of giggles.

The question of marriage starts cropping up after a girl is twenty, but it all happens in strict order. A second daughter is not allowed to marry before her older sisters and this obviously puts pressure on the eldest in a line of girls to marry early. Many girls marry between twenty-two and twenty-four. “If you leave it later than thirty people start talking. They think there must be something wrong with you. You get a bad name”.

Besides, after a while the girl feels she must hurry up and choose. If her parents are not well off and cannot afford to pay a good dowry the pressure may become acute. A poor family with beautiful daughters will manage well enough, but looks count for a great deal and if the family is poor with ugly daughters they may have great difficulty finding husbands for them. A rich ugly girl will usually get by.

Western notions of love and sexual compatibility are absent from the whole transaction – indeed, many girls go to their weddings with only the haziest idea of what sex is. this is not something the Wandsorth girls seek to change: they have lived in Britain long enough to doubt the efficacy of western systems of choice in marriage, and insist that their campaign against the dowry is in no way a protest against the arranged marriage itself. Geeta Amin does not agree with them. “The dowry is linked with the institution of the arranged marriage: by fighting it they will eventually realise that the whole system must go”.

Another Wandsworth girl, Priya, recently returned from a visit to her family in India, found that traditions are changing there far more rapidly than they are here.

“I was amazed to be told by my great-aunts”, “You don’t have to marry a Patel, you know”. Whereas my mother, who lives in England, is anxious not to cut her children off from their roots. She is extremely liberal in other ways and I feel if we were all in India she would not have the preference for an arranged marriage which she clearly has here. “People come to Britain and they may be traditional by nature. They get stuck in small enclaves and they don’t develop: they cling to the security of their traditions. For many of them, particularly the Asians from East Africa, their only security is money. My sister had an arranged marriage and is very pleased that she did. She says it makes her children feel more secure

“But I believe the dowry operates against women in every way. Girls are constantly aware of being put on display. If a woman gives birth to a girl it is no great cause for rejoicing, and although parents obviously love their daughters there is terrific pressure on a girl to marry fast and get out of their way. There is also a particular shortage of boys in our community, because a mother may give birth to girls and then as soon as a boy is born she knows she can stop having children.

“The worrying thing is that my mother told me when she was young she believed the dowry would die out with the next generation – when she herself became a parent. But it has not died out, and now we are saying the same thing – only this time we are determined to carry our campaign as far as we can.