The Dowry Gift in South Asia: An Institution on the Intersection of Market and Patriarchy

Kalpana Khanal and Ruchira Sen

Journal of Economic Issues, 2020, vol. 54, issue 2, 356-362

Abstract: Dowry refers to marriage gifts that are instrumental to the negotiation of the marriage contract. Historically, the dowry gift was constituted by law across the Roman empire. While dowry has become largely irrelevant in Europe in contemporary times, it is still pervasive across the Brahmanical Hindu societies of South Asia. Moreover, what was traditionally token gifts from friends and well-wishers has taken on the form of “new dowry” since the colonial period. “New dowry” is heavily composed of cash and market goods, including land and is frequently accompanied by violence against new brides when their families fail to make larger dowry gifts with higher market value. This article examines the evolution of “new dowry” through a Polanyian lens. Unlike the neoclassical Beckerian approach which takes an ahistorical outlook to marriage as a “market” for matching partners and dowry as a market price, the substantivist lens à la Polanyi investigates the historical evolution of “new dowry” through the advent of market processes in the colonial period and the countermovement of legal reform in the post-colonial period.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00213624.2020.1743145 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mes:jeciss:v:54:y:2020:i:2:p:356-362

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/MJEI20

DOI: 10.1080/00213624.2020.1743145

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Economic Issues from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().