There is considerable evidence that dowry payments in India have not only increased over the last
five decades, but that the custom has spread into regions and communities where it was never
practiced before. The aim of this thesis is to understand why these changes have occurred.
A particularly influential explanation is that rising dowries in India are concomitant with
population growth. According to this interpretation, a population increase leads to an excess
supply of brides since men marry younger women. As a result, dowry payments must rise in order
to clear the marriage market. Reductions in the equilibrium age difference will tend to equalize
the excess supply of women in the marriage market. It has been reasoned that the severe social
and economic pressures associated with older unmarried daughters imply that households of older
potential brides are willing to outbid the families of younger brides and that this competitive
interaction places upward pressure on dowries. The first substantive chapter of this thesis
explicitly models the dynamics of dowry payments when population grows. It points out some
difficulties in making the theory reconcile the main observations relevant in the context of
demographic change. In particular, there exist conditions under which population growth can
cause dowries to decrease if the model is constrained from generating an increasing number of
unmarried women.
An alternative explanation is provided in the subsequent chapter which takes into account
the phenomenon of caste. The explanation posits a process of modernisation which increases the
heterogeneity of potential wealth within each caste. The new income-earning opportunities
brought about by development are predominantly filled by men and as a result grooms become a
relatively heterogeneous group compared to brides. If we perceive dowry as a bid that a bride
makes for a groom of a certain market value, an increase in heterogeneity of grooms will increase
the spread of dowries. Men who become more eligible in the marriage market will receive higher
dowries, whereas the payments will decrease for those who are less eligible; however, average
dowries may remain constant. The explanation as to why dowries also increase for the relatively
less desirable grooms, and in turn average dowry payments necessarily increase, relies heavily on
particularities of the caste system.
Although there are numerous studies of the dowry phenomenon in India, research
pertaining to the custom of dowry in the rest of South Asia is relatively sparse. The aim of the
final chapter is to study dowry payments in Pakistan. Since an exploration of how they have
evolved through time is not possible due to limitations of the data, the analysis focuses instead on
the present role of dowry payments. The investigation concludes that the dowry phenomenon in
Pakistan is similar to that occurring in India.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9828 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Anderson, Kristin Siwan |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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