Sanjukta has posted about India Together’s innovative project to promote dowry-free weddings through their Say no to dowry pledge drive. They provide free invitations in an electronic catalogue, with the logo you see in the bottom right corner.
She ponders,
I wonder how many people know about it and even if they know will they ever have the good sense to actually say NO to dowry. I have noticed the affluent educated class in India have been inventing new ways to give and take dowry. True they don’t call it a ‘dowry’. For eg. the other day I heard, the groom’s family did all the arrangements of the wedding and asked the bride’s parents to simply pay up their share in cash. Not a dowry, since you are not spending anything in the wedding its just your share of the usual wedding expenses, fair play eh?
I’m also curious to know how they have publicised their initiative–is it only among their readership, or a wider audience? It’s true that the dowry issue is still alive and kicking, albeit in different forms. I hope India Together will be sharing the results of this initiative with us! Their dowry page is pretty outdated, but this article on ‘Why Dowry Won’t Die‘ is definitely worth a read.
Dowry is a symptom of a deeper disease that relates to how our society values women. The original concept of streedhan was based on providing a newly wed girl with some things that she could cherish and call her own. Today this concept has been vulgarised to symbolise all the things that not even the bridegroom, but his family want to have as their own.
Customs like dowry can end only when the people involved, the young men and women, decide to go against the tide, demand simpler weddings and say a firm “no” to the vulgar demands that constitute a dowry. Marriages may not be made in heaven, but they should not end up sending people into the hellhole of lifelong debt and misery.
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