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Dowry System Quotes

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Dowry System Quotes

“The world over, children are being nurtured and raised with dreams and aspirations to secure gold medals and accolades in every field, be it sports, studies, arts, creativity, innovations, ideas, and thinking, most parents in India began saving for their daughter’s marriage since the birth of the girl child. Marriage, is perhaps, seen as the ultimate destiny for a woman and is prioritized over her career, her abilities, her aspirations, and her dreams. Collecting and preserving gold, or expensive items for the dowry is preferred over investing the money in education, a career, or making her self-dependent.”

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Author:Shalu Nigam
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“The culture of senseless violence with impunity is growing because, ironically, though the practice of dowry is illegal on paper, socially and culturally, it is accepted, endorsed, and celebrated with zeal. The religion promotes the evil practice of dowry. The patriarchal culture encourages it, and the market benefits from it. The lives of young women are simply of no significant value. Women are considered as `perishable’, and `disposable’ commodities without dignity or agency by the state, the market, and their families.”

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Author:Shalu Nigam
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“Centuries ago, when Karl Marx wrote exhaustively about the callous exploitation of workers by the capitalist class, he may not have imagined how in South Asia, women as brides would be treated as commodities, pitilessly exploited, and violently murdered in their own homes by their abusive husbands for extorting wealth. As the ruthless oppression of the toiling masses could not be prevented by laws or policies, the merciless torture and murder of women could not be regulated despite establishing a legal mechanism in place. Over the decades, predatory capitalism has irrevocably acquired an altered form, and the free-market approach has devised a new mechanism of manipulation. Similarly, the viciousness of the neoliberal forces, clubbed with patriarchy, feudalism, conservatism, rampant materialism, and excessive consumption propelled by extensive consumerism, is aggravating the desire among men and their families to accumulate quick wealth using marriage as a tool to extract resources from women and their families. The bourgeoisie-proletariat categorization, in the situation of dowry practice, is expanded to include the classification of savagely privileged men versus women – rich or poor, and in urban or rural areas. Women from all backgrounds dreadfully suffer for the material gains of men and their families in a harsh and hostile environment fuelled by the neoliberal, Brahmanical capitalist patriarchy.”

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Author:Shalu Nigam
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“When Gary Becker, an American economist, in his celebrated `Treatise of Family’ imagined a household as a primary site of production of goods and sustenance in the form of child care, meals, and shelter, besides a range of commodities such as health, happiness, self-esteem, security, sexual pleasure, and so on, he disregarded the fact that a family is also a site of reproducing inequalities and sustaining patriarchal values. Becker proposed the theory of a rational `economic man’ who makes choices based on his self-interest, but he has not contemplated the dire situations of exploitation, blackmail, and extortion within marriages in South Asian patriarchal, hierarchical societies where self-interest would turn into insatiable greediness to create an antagonistic situation where an `economic man’, driven by irrational voracity, ends up torturing and murdering `his wife’, and destroying his own family when his arbitrary demands remain unfulfilled”

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Author:Shalu Nigam
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“What is negated is the rhetoric regarding obsession for gold as the dowry is that the parents have a choice to express their care and love for their daughter in a different form where they invest the resources in her education and training to help her acquire skills, nurture her talents, develop her aptitude, build her capacities, and make her independent from the very beginning of her life, so that in case of any emergency, she may face challenges to survive and flourish in any circumstances. Preparing her to get gold medals and accolades in any skill, may be prioritized rather than giving gold at the time of marriage.”

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Author:Shalu Nigam
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“Fanon examined how colonialism is internalized by the colonized and inculcates an inferiority complex through the mechanism of racism. In the same way, the tyrannical mechanism of patriarchy oppresses women not only physically or mentally but also colonizes their minds and shatters their souls through constant emotional, economic, and mental violence. This internalization of inferiority by women themselves in a male-dominated society forcibly compels them to stay in a repressive and a violent marriage. In such precarious situations, with no available critical internal or external support from the wider family network or the state, and no hope left, a woman’s self-esteem collapses, and her humanness is crushed to the extent that she ceases to be a self-motivated person. The calculative presumptions of patriarchy control and overwhelmingly dominate and subjugate women while normalizing and trivializing their brutal torture and murder in the garb of transferring wealth to the daughters in connection with marriage.”

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Author:Shalu Nigam
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