Every year in India, many thousands are killed in marriage-payment disputes. Why does this war on women persist?
On September 21, 2021, my mother sent a message to my extended family’s WhatsApp group: “Neeti had a heart attack and suddenly passed away—too tragic!” Neeti was a daughter of her sister, and someone I’d known all my life. But my cousin and I inhabited different worlds. I was born and raised in suburban New Jersey; she was a lifelong Delhiite. To me, Neeti and her identical twin, Preeti, exuded an urban glamour. At weddings, they sported chic, oversized sunglasses and matching, pastel-colored Punjabi-style outfits. Their faces looked a lot like my mom’s: long, with prominent cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Where Preeti was garrulous and expressive, though, Neeti was quieter, more guarded, more likely to keep her struggles to herself.
Could she really have had a heart attack? We all found that strange. Neeti was known in the family as a fitness freak. At the age of forty, the mother of two, she taught yoga and regularly spent time in the gym. When the Hindi-language television channel ABP News reported her death, it chose to represent her with clips of her working out—jump-squatting, doing pushups with her hands balanced on dumbbells.
Other circumstances were perplexing, too. Neeti’s father and brother told my mother that, on the day of her death, her then twelve-year-old daughter, Jasleen, had found her unresponsive in the early morning. Jasleen asked her father, Pawan, and her paternal grandparents, who lived with them, to take Neeti to the hospital, but they did not. So Jasleen called Neeti’s siblings—Preeti and her brother, Sumeet—and her fitness trainer. Preeti and her husband, along with the trainer, rushed Neeti to the hospital; Sumeet met them there. They thought it was odd that Pawan hadn’t brought his wife to the hospital himself, but he said later that he was delayed because his mother had fallen, from distress.
By all appearances, Pawan was a gentle, respectful husband. He had soft, boyish features and was forever courteous, quick to greet people with prayer hands and to bow at the feet of the elderly. Still, the situation was suspicious enough that Sumeet and his father requested an autopsy.
The results came in on September 25th. Neeti had a matchbox-size wound on her chest and lacerations inside her mouth. Parts of her lungs had hemorrhaged and collapsed. Blood had leaked into her neck tissue. Tiny purple spots covered her tongue and brain—signs that blood vessels had ruptured from a buildup of pressure. Her hyoid, a U-shaped bone that sits between the jawbone and the neck vertebrae, was fractured. Neeti did not die of a heart attack, the report indicated. She had been strangled.
In 1979, more than four decades before Neeti’s death, protesters poured through the streets of New Delhi with a simple message: Stop burning women. As usual, hundreds of young brides had died in fires that year. Yet now some of those victims were becoming the martyred faces of a new movement. There was Shashibala Chaddha, who was pregnant when she burned to death, and Kanchan Chopra, who was found dead the day after police rebuffed her brother’s attempt to alert them about her plight. The most consequential may have been Tarvinder Kaur. Like Neeti, Kaur was a Sikh woman who lived in Model Town, a well-to-do neighborhood in North Delhi. On May 15, 1979, she was watching television when her mother-in-law allegedly drenched her in kerosene and her sister-in-law set her ablaze with a match. She ran from the room screaming and was driven to a hospital, where she survived just long enough to record a statement with police. The attack was said to have followed five months of bullying, needling, and belittling. She had brought to the marriage a decent dowry—the payment demanded by a groom’s family—which included cushions, crockery, an armoire, and a television set, but her in-laws considered it scanty. According to reports at the time, they wanted gold, cash for their business, and a two-wheeled scooter, and they did not hesitate to tell her. (Kaur’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law were acquitted.)
Until 1979, such deaths were almost always registered as accidents—ascribed to malfunctioning kerosene-burning stoves—or as suicides. Kaur’s death might have gone unnoticed were it not for Stree Sangharsh, a new women’s-rights organization. Its members held a demonstration that snaked through Model Town to Kaur’s in-laws’ house, where activists chanted, “Women are not for burning!” The protest attracted media coverage, inspiring similar rallies elsewhere. By 1983, the Indian Penal Code had been amended to include Section 498A, which punishes cruelty to women by their husbands or in-laws.
Section 498A is one of many legal provisions designed to protect Indian women; others include the Hindu Marriage Act (1955), the Dowry Prohibition Act (1961), and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (2005). Despite these laws, women’s status in India seems to have progressed little. In 2022, India ranked a hundred and thirty-fifth out of a hundred and forty-six countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, behind Bangladesh (seventy-first) and Sri Lanka (a hundred and tenth) as well as Islamic monarchies such as Brunei (a hundred and fourth) and Saudi Arabia (a hundred and twenty-seventh). Such indicators can prompt questions like the one posed by the Guardian a decade ago: “Why is India so bad for women?”
Yet referring to India as “bad for women” risks replaying the colonial game of vilifying an entire subcontinent through accusations of inherent misogyny. India is wildly diverse, home to hundreds of languages and more than a sixth of the world’s population. It includes societies, such as the million-strong Khasi, that tend to prefer daughters to sons. To go by 2018 numbers from the World Bank, the country’s female-literacy rate, at sixty-six per cent, is lower than that of Eritrea, but there’s a lot of regional variation; female literacy in the southern state of Kerala is above ninety per cent.
India also has a long history of struggles against patriarchy. As far back as the fourth century, writers from the subcontinent have questioned inheritance rights that excluded women. Having grown up in a Sikh household, I am familiar with critiques by Sikh gurus, or prophet leaders, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sikhism’s third guru, Amar Das, is said to have condemned sati (in which a widow was thrown or threw herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre) and the imposition of the veil and to have appointed women as missionaries; he also forbade female infanticide, as did the tenth guru, Gobind Singh. Still, Sikh history is also a testament to the feebleness of injunctions like these. The first maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Ranjit Singh, had a harem of twenty-two wives, and, upon his death, in 1839, his chief wife, three other wives, and seven consorts burned on his funeral pyre. The Indian state of Punjab, where the majority of the world’s Sikhs live, has one of the most skewed sex ratios in the country, reflecting patterns of infanticide and prenatal sex selection; it may be among the most dangerous places in the world to be conceived female.
Patriarchy, sexism, misogyny: all seem implicated in this war on women. Such terms are weighty and absolute. Patriarchy speaks of power over women, sexism of discrimination against women, misogyny of contempt toward women. Each afflicts women in India, as elsewhere. Yet none quite captures the dynamic here. Tarvinder Kaur said she was attacked by two women; what doomed her, as a woman from another lineage, was neither the enforcement of male power nor a generalized form of gender-based hostility but a peculiar complex that fuels female infanticide, domestic violence, and dowry deaths: a perception that women are burdens. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called women “the supreme gift,” but in much of India a woman is a financial strain, a liability whose upkeep requires recompense. “In youth, she eats less bread,” a North Indian proverb goes. “In adulthood, she eats her parents’ flesh.” The effort to save Indian women is more than a battle against violence—it is a campaign to establish the social worth of half of a nation’s population. Why has it been so hard?
Ravneet (Neeti) Kaur was introduced to Pawandeep Singh Sawhney in 2001. Neeti was about twenty years old; Pawan was about twenty-five. Their parents had decided that they would be a good match. They went for a walk at Gurdwara Nanak Piao, a famous Sikh temple in Delhi, after which Neeti informed her father that she was not interested.
“We could get our logo emblazoned on ten thousand crappy pens that barely write, then scatter them to the four corners of the earth?”
Cartoon by Meredith Southard
“She was forced by everybody to say yes,” Preeti told me. The alliance looked promising. Pawan, an only son, was well mannered. Like Neeti, he came from a family of affluent business owners. His grandfather was politically connected, and respected among Delhi Sikhs.
“ ‘Our sister will be happy over there, since there is no one else, no brother,’ ” Sumeet said, recalling his parents’ reasoning. In accordance with the “patrilocal” customs common throughout India, a bride moves in with the groom’s family. Pawan’s uncle and grandfather lived in the same building, on a different floor. But, in her new household—two and a half miles away from where Neeti’s parents resided—it would be just the four of them: Neeti, Pawan, and Pawan’s parents.
Neeti and Pawan were married on November 25, 2001. The wedding was lavish and lasted five days. Although eight hundred guests were expected to attend the reception, throngs of well-wishers streamed in, forcing the caterers to feed more than a thousand people. The couple went on to have two children: Japleen, born in 2002, and Jasleen, born in 2009.
The marriage had its issues. Pawan’s family, despite their apparent wealth, were frugal, particularly with Neeti. She was given a skimpy allowance; she later sold chocolates and worked as a yoga teacher to earn money. But no marriage is perfect, and the money issues, though annoying, never struck Preeti as something that could endanger her sister. (Pawan, citing an ongoing legal case, declined to be interviewed; his parents did not respond to a request for comment.)
Neeti’s death changed how people thought about the relationship. Within hours of the postmortem’s release, Pawan was brought in for questioning. According to the police transcript, he described Neeti’s death as an accident following an altercation. He said he resented her for all the time she spent at the gym. The night before her death, Pawan recounted, he and Neeti got into an argument about Jasleen, who was often at the gym, too. The couple exchanged heated words, then ate and slept.
At 1:30 A.M., Pawan got up. “I was the one who woke her up and asked why she had spoken to me like that,” the transcript reads. “She woke up, frightened, and screamed, and so I covered her mouth. She pushed me back, and I told her to be quiet. The child is beginning to move. I said the child will wake up.”
“Did you have a feeling she was dead?” he was asked.
“No. What would be the reason for that feeling? I had not hit her in that way. I just put my hand over her mouth so that she would not scream. When she pushed me back, then I punched her.” Later, when asked why he did not take Neeti to the hospital, he replied, “I felt at the time that she had fallen. I mean that she lay down on the bed, and so I became silent. It might be a blood-pressure reason, so she will be fine in the morning.”
In India, the use of force—custodial torture—isn’t uncommon during police interrogations for murder; at the same time, testimony obtained through torture cannot be presented as evidence. Sumeet told me that Pawan was “thrashed,” and Pawan later alleged that police pressured him to confess. But I received conflicting reports about whether he was coerced and about the admissibility of the transcript.
Neeti’s father believes that what happened was long in the making. He told police that Neeti came to him a month before her death: her in-laws wanted, among other things, a car and new furniture, and expected him to give them 2.5 million rupees (about thirty-four thousand dollars). He told her that he didn’t have the cash on hand and needed a couple of months. On September 19th, two days before she died, Neeti came to him again, crying and insisting that her in-laws “can do anything.”
Her death, he maintains, is the culmination of two decades of exploitation. Throughout the marriage, her in-laws demanded money and luxury items, and, year after year, he acquiesced, hoping that he could buy his daughter protection. He gave the police jewelry-store receipts, along with invoices showing that he had paid seven hundred thousand rupees for a car in Neeti’s name in 2001 and 2002. He also revealed that he sent her seven hundred and fifty thousand rupees in 2020. Dowry demands like these are illegal in India, and Pawan’s family has denied making them. (Pawan acknowledged receiving the seven hundred and fifty thousand rupees but says he paid the money back.)
“We were taught, Adjust a little, just don’t argue,” Preeti told me, recalling the sisters’ upbringing. A married woman is supposed to reset her expectations, to learn to comply with her new family’s ways. “We saw our parents getting adjusted, my mother getting adjusted,” she said. The lesson was: “Everybody, we all ladies, adjust.”
Such socialization is typical. For many Indians, divorce is unthinkable. Parents urge daughters to stick it out, hoping that time, money, and children will make their situations bearable. My mother went through something similar. Like Neeti, she had an arranged marriage. She had just completed a master’s degree in English literature at the University of Delhi and was looking forward to teaching when a proposal arrived at her parents’ house, in Kashmir. The matchmaker was a figure of importance. Her parents trusted him and wanted to keep him happy. So, without consulting her, they accepted the offer.
This was around September, 1975. My mother was turning twenty-one. A couple of months later, on a trip to Delhi, she met her fiancé for the first time. “There was nothing about him that attracted me to him,” she said. She begged her father to cancel the engagement, and, at a friend’s suggestion, even threatened to kill herself. He refused to acquiesce. “It was, like, We have to keep it this way in order to preserve the family’s honor, in order to minimize the impact on my siblings,” she recalled.
She got married in February, 1976; two years later, she and her husband moved to the United States, where they both got jobs at an insurance company. But the relationship became unbearable until, in 1981, my mother decided to leave. She remembered talking to her father on the phone. “He was, like, ‘No, no, no, no. I don’t even want to hear about it. You have to go back. Think about what will happen to your siblings. Think about what will happen to you.’ The same words he had used when he had forced me to get married—now he was giving me the same reasons to stay in this very unhappy, very bad marriage. I told him that it didn’t matter anymore, because I had already left.”
The differences between my mother’s story and Neeti’s help clarify why women have it so hard in parts of India. Unlike Neeti, my mother was still childless. When she left her first husband, she had a well-paying job. She could live on her own. She had escaped a social network in which divorce was vilified. She had support from friends, family members, and social services in the U.S.
These are not inconsequential differences. Ask people the reasons for women’s troubles in India, and they point to a cluster of patriarchal norms. The fact that, after marriage, a wife tends to move in with her husband’s family corrodes her support system and discourages parents from investing in daughters as opposed to sons. Women are often urged not to work, and their absence of an income deprives them of bargaining power within the household. And divorce, though legally recognized, is still treated like a blight on a family’s honor, tainting the marriage prospects of the divorcée, her siblings, and her children. Even if women escape abusive relationships, a lack of professional training can make it hard for them to live alone.
Dowry, or groom price, worsens the situation. The institution flourished in ancient Greece, in Sung-period China, and in medieval Western Europe, but today South Asia is one of its few remaining strongholds. Dowry usually emerges in highly stratified societies, like caste-structured India and colonial Latin America, whereas the reverse convention, bride price, is more likely to appear in communities with less socioeconomic differentiation, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Some critics object to the way “paying” for a bride seems to commodify women, but there is little evidence that bride price harms women’s well-being. Dowry, in contrast, encourages two forms of violence. “When you have too many girl babies there is female infanticide,” a woman from rural Tamil Nadu told researchers in 2005. “If too many girls, there are too many marriages, and too much dowry problems.” Second, expectations surrounding dowry have spurred husbands and their families to mistreat women in order to obtain payments. According to a U.N. study, forty to fifty per cent of female homicides in India result from dowry disputes. Neeti’s death may be among them.
India’s patriarchal customs conspire to trap women in marriages. According to the World Health Organization, between a quarter and a half of all Indian women suffer intimate-partner violence, yet only about one per cent of marriages end in divorce. Although divorces are increasing, especially in urban areas, India’s divorce rate is still among the lowest in the world.
These norms have deep roots. Both around the world and throughout the subcontinent, women seem to be treated worse in places where their labor has traditionally been less valued. If a region has a history of plow agriculture—which benefits from male-associated traits like grip strength, upper-body strength, and bursts of power—it tends toward male-skewing sex ratios and lower female labor-force participation. In northwest India, my family’s ancestral home and a land where the plow rules, a proverb sums up the effects: “Who can be satisfied without rain and son? For cultivation, both are indispensable.” Another proverb is blunter: “One whose son dies is luckless. One whose daughter dies is fortunate.”
Some development experts have been convinced that affluence would dissolve oppressive norms and practices. A leading proponent was the political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who argued that economic development produces freedom and tolerance. In 2018, a few years before his death, he published the book “Cultural Evolution: People’s Motivations Are Changing, and Reshaping the World,” which summarized his theory and reviewed evidence from cross-national survey data. “As societies become wealthier, threats to survival recede and people become more tolerant of gender equality and social diversity,” he wrote. He predicted that “a process of intergenerational value change that has been transforming the politics and culture of high-income societies . . . is likely to transform China, India and other rapidly developing societies.”
At first blush, Inglehart’s thesis seems to have been borne out. Between 1981 and 2018, the share of Indians living in extreme poverty fell from about sixty per cent to eleven per cent. During that same period, female literacy grew from roughly twenty-five per cent to sixty-six per cent. In the four decades since 1981, meanwhile, the proportion of females enrolled in secondary school soared from a fifth to nearly four-fifths, closing the gap with their male counterparts.
Look at more indicators, though, and the picture changes. The payment of dowry, which was expected to die out with modernization, provides a telling example. In Europe, marriage payments mostly disappeared with industrialization. India, despite banning the practice in 1961, has witnessed the opposite trend. In the nineteen-twenties, dowry payments occurred in about a third of marriages. By 2008, they were near-universal in rural areas, and many regions had seen alarming rates of dowry inflation.
The expansion of dowry coincides with other worrying changes. Rates of sex-selective abortion appear to have increased in almost all states between 1981 and 2016, especially among wealthy and educated women. Female representation in higher education is rising, yet female labor-force participation, as of 2021, sits at a paltry twenty-three per cent, declining from twenty-eight per cent in 1990. A 2015 study published in The World Bank Economic Reviewshowed that women were less likely to work when their husbands were educated and had high incomes, again underlining the paradoxical effects of affluence. India seems to value women less than when it outlawed dowry, sixty years ago.
Hours after the postmortem was released, Neeti’s two siblings recorded a video on Facebook. Preeti wears a yellow kurta-style blouse. Her eyes are dark. She has the empty stare of someone broken, exhausted, or both. Aside from a couple of sobs, she says very little. Sumeet does most of the talking. He is animated. His long hair is pulled into a tight bun. Although his muscles are thick from a lifetime of weight lifting, his demeanor is supplicating.
“I know you are, but what am I?”
Cartoon by Emily Flake
Sumeet says that Pawan murdered their sister, and calls for a “boycott” on his family. He asks people to bring their abused daughters home, to “eat two rotis less if you need the means to support her.” And he expresses his faith in justice: “Believe me, we have a very good judiciary system. If truth is on your side, and you are on a mission, you will have all the support.”
Pawan was charged under three sections of the Indian Penal Code: Section 34 (“common intention,” suggesting a conspiracy among multiple perpetrators), Section 302 (murder), and Section 498A (cruelty to women). Murder and cruelty to women are non-bailable offenses, meaning that they are grievous enough that bail can be granted only by a court decision. After Pawan’s arrest, his lawyer petitioned the court to release his client on bail. Among his claims was that the postmortem was unreliable and that the allegations of dowry demands were unsubstantiated. Following a hearing, a judge ordered that Pawan be released, contingent on his paying a bond of a hundred thousand rupees (about thirteen hundred dollars), and Pawan walked out on bail.
There’s little reason to think that the judge’s decision to release Pawan was based on anything other than an honest assessment of the situation. Yet judicial bribery is so common in India that courts have a legitimacy problem. Several months after Pawan was freed, the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation alleged that a suspended Delhi judge had amassed unexplained assets of nearly thirty million rupees between 2006 and 2016. Nor is judicial corruption the only problem besetting India’s criminal-justice system. The country suffers from a shortage of judges and police; enormous backlogs are routine, which provides an opportunity for the wealthy and the well connected to influence which cases are pursued. Rather than reforming law enforcement, politicians have exploited the enfeebled justice system to silence opposition and cover up their own bad behavior.
Women suffer as a result. According to the sociologist Poulami Roychowdhury, judges and police in India subscribe to an idealized image of the good woman as a self-sacrificing caregiver, and disparage women who make legal claims. In her recent book “Capable Women, Incapable States,” which draws on ethnographic field work in Kolkata and its environs, Roychowdhury writes that police officers use excuses of shoddy infrastructure and staffing limitations to suppress allegations of gender-based violence or to off-load work onto victims themselves.
Roychowdhury considers the low conviction rate for Section 498A “cruelty to women” offenses—the lowest among all Indian Penal Code crimes—an example of the country’s “unfulfilled promises.” After tracking seventy victims of domestic abuse, she found that women rarely sought legal remedies on their own, deeming law enforcement not just ineffective but dangerous, too. A poor Hindu woman named Hema laughed at the idea of registering a case: “Faced with my husband or the police, I would run towards my husband every time. The police are worse than the thugs they lock up.”
But Roychowdhury also encountered the opposite response. She was told that women took advantage of legal statutes to abuse their husbands. A judge in the city of Howrah asked Roychowdhury why she studied domestic violence given that, in his view, it “did not exist.” A vocal men’s-rights movement in India now seeks to challenge laws said to favor women, including proposed statutes against marital rape. At the forefront are organizations like the Save Indian Family Foundation, which, in its words, aspires to “expose and create awareness about large scale violations of Civil Liberties and Human Rights in the name of women’s empowerment in India.” Women who report domestic abuse are depicted as scheming, aggressive, and ungrateful.
Neeti’s family did not encounter such resistance, at least not from the police. It probably made a difference that the case was “registered” by Neeti’s father, a man of means; the fact of her death demanded a stronger response than if she had come to the police with bruises. But the criminal-justice system has frustrated Neeti’s family in other ways. Any material handled by a corruptible system can be doctored, and the resultant distrust allowed Pawan’s lawyer to challenge the authenticity of a government document as critical as the postmortem report. The police took a statement from Neeti’s twelve-year-old daughter on the day of her death, but, because it was not collected in front of a judge, it is inadmissible. (Jasleen later claimed the statement was written by an officer.) As the system struggles to enforce its own laws, it isn’t much of a check on the ongoing abuse of women.
In the Hindu epic the Ramayana, the god-prince Rama labors to defeat the demon-king Ravana. Rama’s arrows slice off Ravana’s many heads, but new ones appear in their place. Fighting violence against women, whether in India or elsewhere, can feel just as daunting. The violence is the product of so many interacting forces—dowry, the plow, weak states, corrupt judiciaries, the patrilocal family—that attacking any single factor is bound to be ineffectual.
The norms that oppress women are multiple and various, but in India two seem especially important: the stigma against divorce and a resistance to female independence. As long as women cannot leave marriages, they have less reason to seek the training and professional experience that would enable them to support themselves. Such women are more easily treated as burdens, to be accepted as wives in exchange for dowry; even abused women have little choice but to stick it out. As the cycle continues, women become trapped, while expectations ossify about the ideal wife—subservient and homebound.
Many women recognize this cycle but struggle to escape it. Preeti, for example, wants her daughter to break free. “I cannot sacrifice my daughter now, after losing my sister,” she said. “I don’t want to do this to my daughter. I want her to do something—professionally, business, anything.” At the same time, her daughter should not be “very well educated,” she told me. “If she will get her level a little higher, finding a boy will be a problem.” Besides, Preeti told me anxiously, a husband might feel threatened by a brainy bride, risking “ego issues” and hostility: “I don’t want her to face problems.”
Rama finally kills Ravana by shooting him in the heart, the fateful arrow crafted by a god. The abuse of women cannot be ended with a single blow. Yet legislative action without social transformation has proved strikingly impotent. A culture in which women are not merely devalued but negatively valued can’t be reformed by a few well-drafted statutes.
On September 30, 2021, nine days after Neeti died and four days after Pawan was arrested, the family held her Antim Ardas, or “Final Prayer.” A group of musicians performed hymns at a temple near her childhood home. Barely five months had passed since a wave of COVID-19 infections devastated Delhi. People were still wearing masks, and the event was streamed online.
I watched from a continent away. After an hour and fifteen minutes, the camera panned from the musicians to the attendees. Pawan and his relatives were not present, but I saw my cousins sitting alongside their children, spouses, and parents-in-law. They were encircled by the biradari—the community, the source of judgment and of support. The camera landed finally on Preeti, who sat slumped against a wall. Her eyes, swollen and plum-colored, were shut.
In the background, the musicians performed a hymn written by the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak Dev. A reflection on life’s finitude, it is often played at funerals. The musicians sang about the ephemerality of youth, the wilting of lovely flowers. They addressed a young woman who sees her friends leaving and dreads having to join them. They exhorted her, using her departure for married life as a metaphor for death itself. “Haven’t you heard the call from beyond, O beautiful soul-bride?” they asked. “You must go to your in-laws; you cannot stay with your parents forever.” ♦
