A Law Made Divorce Legal in India. An Anthropologist Argues It Also Helped Bury the Grief for Its Dowry Dead

Every 80 minutes or so, a woman in India dies in a dowry-related incident. In 2022 the recorded figure passed 6,500, which is higher than it was in the late 1980s, when mothers filled the streets with photographs of their burned daughters and demanded that the killing stop. The demands have gone quiet. The dying has not.

That gap, between a death toll that keeps climbing and a public silence that has settled over it like dust, is what the anthropologist Kriti Kapila set out to explain. Her answer, published in the journal Public Culture, is uncomfortable, because it points not at neglect but at a law that was supposed to help.

Dowry, the payment a bride’s family makes to the groom’s at the time of marriage, has been illegal in India since 1961. Women who cannot meet the escalating demands of their husband’s family face abuse, and in thousands of cases each year, death, sometimes staged as a kitchen accident with a loose sari and a kerosene stove. For a while, in the 1970s and 80s, this provoked something extraordinary: the first time women in India mobilised as women, and as mothers of daughters. Kapila found those years preserved, oddly enough, on a gallery wall in London.

Last winter she stood in Room V of a Barbican exhibition of Indian art, in front of twenty black-and-white photographs by the feminist photographer Sheba Chhachhi. Elderly mothers holding portraits of dead daughters; one lone woman seated outside India’s Supreme Court, litigation files strewn around her.

When the clock came for marriage

Much of the surrounding show still felt current to Kapila, who grew up in India through those decades: the religious violence, the bigotry, the heavy hand of the state. But these particular photographs marked a break with the present. They captured a kind of public grief that has, since then, more or less vanished, and the puzzle of where it went sent her back to 1955.

That was the year of the Hindu Marriage Act, which made divorce legally possible for Hindu couples for the first time. On the face of it, a straightforward win. Kapila’s argument is that it also did something strange to the machinery underneath.

Here you have to follow a slightly awkward thread. In north Indian tradition dowry was never quite a price tag; it sat inside a slow ritual logic of caste, purity and pollution, an exchange between families meant to stretch across generations and never fully settle. Then the law put a clock on marriage. Once a marriage could be dissolved within a single lifetime, the open-ended reckoning collapsed into something finite and calculable, and dowry came loose from its old moorings. “Dowry came loose with it,” Kapila says, “and once free of its ritual logic, it stopped being a structured gift and started behaving like a commodity, with demands that grew until violence followed.” A premium on the male child, priced by his caste, his education, his earning power.

Which is roughly why the protests happened when they did. Newfound legal equality gave mothers, for a brief window, the standing to name their daughters’ deaths in public as an injustice rather than swallow them as private misfortune.

Nobody left to march against

By the 1990s, Kapila argues, two shifts closed that window almost entirely. The first was grim: the staged kitchen accident gave way, increasingly, to suicide. When a bride takes her own life there is no external killer standing on the street to march against, and the grief turns inward, into private shame. The second was technological. As prenatal sex testing spread, families gained a pre-emptive option, aborting female fetuses before birth, and India’s 2001 census logged the result with brutal clarity: just 927 girls for every 1000 boys, with the old northwestern preference for sons now seeping across the country. You cannot, after all, hold a protest against yourself. When the decision to eliminate a daughter is made by her own natal family, the very people who once wept on the courthouse steps, the possibility of public mourning is extinguished at the root.

To make sense of this, Kapila leans on the philosopher Judith Butler, who argued that a life has to be recognised as grievable before its loss can register as a loss at all. Butler was writing about the ungrieved dead of war; Kapila’s claim is that India’s missing daughters have slipped into that same category, present in the statistics, mourned privately if at all, but no longer able to summon anyone into the street.

It is worth being clear that this is one scholar’s genealogy, an argument rather than a settled finding, and Kapila builds it from theory. Other researchers have pinned the retreat of the dowry movement on the professionalisation of activism into NGOs, or on the slow absorption of these deaths into a clogged court system; Kapila doesn’t deny those forces so much as insist they’re not enough, since neither, she points out, has made a dent in the scale of the killing.

What makes her account land is the thing she noticed on that gallery wall. Those photographs are proof that there was once a moment when this killing was seen plainly as killing, with a public face and a set of demands attached. The women in the frames are still holding up their daughters’ portraits.

Frequently Asked Questions