A Democratic Bazaar: Dowry Deaths in India

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A Democratic Bazaar: Dowry Deaths in India
Vaidehi Joshi
Extended Essay
October 9, 2007
Word Count: 3835
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Abstract
Within the past two decades, various humanitarian and human rights organizations
have brought forth the issue of dowry deaths or so-called bride-burnings in India. A
modern-day societal practice that the global community is just now learning about
actually began with the antiquated practice of dowry, which began thousands of years
ago. The issue is a highly controversial one as the practice of dowry has been blamed for
female infanticide and the increasing gender gap in present-day India. Dowry is also
highly debated because many believe that its original intentions were not evil, but instead
that various social pressures caused it to morph into a violent practice. This paper seeks
to investigate what caused the dowry system to have survived in modern day India?
The paper begins by introducing the dowry as a gift or as compensation. It continues
to examine the main societal impacts on ancient Indian society, analyzing the influence of
the ancient text of Manu, precolonial, post-Aryan, and post-British thought. The second
part of the paper focuses on the evolution of dowry from its establishment to its modern
day practice of bride burnings, emphasizing the influence of the British on India as well
as the effect of consumerism and materialism on present-day Indian society. The paper
continues to analyze the role dowry plays in India today, and attempts to measure its
current effects and implications on the country and its people. Finally, the paper seeks
possible solutions to the issue presenting the idea that both legal and social change must
occur in order to improve the current situation.
The paper acknowledges that while the intentions of dowry do not seem to be
violent, consumerism allowed the dowry system to evolve into a form of social extortion,
causingthousands of deaths and profoundly impacting the country and her people.
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Table of Contents
I.
Introduction
4
II.
Dowry Origins
4
III.
Dowry Death Evolution
10
IV.
Dowry Death Today
15
V.
Dowry Death Solutions
17
VI.
Conclusion
17
VII.
Works Cited
19
VIII.
Annotated Bibliography
20
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I.
Introduction
A country dedicated to non-violence and vegetarianism, India has been known as one
of the more peaceful civilizations of our time. Yet within this seemingly calm society
lurks an underlying social malady unknown to many people around the world today,
despite the fact that it affects thousands of Hindu women every year. Dowry is not
only responsible for several thousands of bride deaths per year, but also for female
infanticide and the increasingly large gender imbalance in India today. Yet what has
caused the dowry system to have survived in modern day India?
II.
Dowry Origins
Based in religion, dowry has morphed into a modern day practice. While the actual
dates of origin are unknown, the first recorded case of a dowry death occurred in
1979. It is likely, however, that bride burnings occurred frequently before this case, as
it was only in the 1970s that human rights organizations began to expose this practice
(Joseph & Sharma, 34). Primary sources are often lacking because people are
unwilling to talk about dowries.
The origin of dowry and its purpose are currently in conflict, contributing to its
perversion. There is no universal agreement as to the intent of dowries because such a
statement would have influenced dowry practice in the 20th century. One school of
thought contends that dowry’s purpose was a form of gift-giving, while another
supports the view that it is a form of payment.
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Dowry has been recognized as “female property…largely confined to movables”
(Goody & Tambiah, 68). Urmila Sharma, author of various essays and books on
political thought, says “dowry…is regarded as a form of pre mortem inheritance
which women receive when they leave the parental home at marriage. Sons…receive
the immovable property…daughters traditionally did not inherit land” (69). Veena
Talwar Oldenburg, author of Dowry Murder found dowry “an index of the
appreciation bestowed upon a daughter in her natal village, and the ostensible
measure of her status in her conjugal village” adding, “in the absence of demands
from the groom’s family, a bride’s dowry is reckoned as purely voluntary” (9).
Opposing this view, Sharma argues that “dowry compensates the groom’s family for
the addition of a depended non-productive member” (67). Sharma asserts that dowry
goods is “wealth that goes with women. Women are the vehicles by which it is
transmitted rather than its owners”, and adds that this idea is “contrary to the
dominant ideology and the terminology of traditional Hindu law” (70). She adds, “the
Hindu bride’s dowry…will not…bring her economic power” (66). Thus, it seems
from this viewpoint, the wealth is far more central than the woman herself, and “her
worth…is measured by the gifts she brings with her. In this exchange of goods
between two households, the woman is almost incidental” (Ammu & Sharma, 33-34).
With two different views on dowry, it is difficult to determine whether “a secure
future” or “a transfer of responsibility of the girl” is bought/sold between families
(Minturn, 328).
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A major issue concerning the origin of dowry is that “there was and is no single body
of traditional Hindu law”, making it difficult to trace back the intentions of this social
practice (Goody & Tambiah, 74). The Law Code of Manu, a basic law code for
Brahmin men, is the most viable sacred text used to pinpoint the origins of dowry. It
has been heavily criticized by feminists for its content pertaining to women. The text
implies that women have only one rite: marriage. It states, “a wife, a son, and a slave,
these three are declared to have no property. The wealth which they earn is acquired
for him to whom they belong” (The Law Code of Manu, VIII: 416). While feminists
find this degrading to women, Oldenburg disagrees stating, “in his [Manu’s] eyes, a
woman’s right to own, control, and dispose of her own wealth, given to her by her
family and her husband or his family, was unarguable. Her husband had neither
control over nor the right to inherit this wealth if she predeceased him” (20). Another
law states, “In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her
husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent”
(The Law Code of Manu, V: 148). Oldenburg disputes this statement as well arguing,
“there is no confusion if we understand that Manu was referring to the sexual and not
economic control of women, though it has been misinterpreted by those who wish to
prove that women are not permitted control over their own wealth”, implying that the
meaning could have been misinterpreted to create a social view that was not Manu’s
intention (20). Other textual evidence supports respect of women stating, “no father
who knows [the law] must take even the smallest gratuity for his daughter”, implying
that the woman ought not to be treated as a form of transferable property (The Law
Code of Manu, III: 51). It continues to state, “when relatives foolishly live off a
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woman’s wealth…those evil men will descend along the downward course” implying
that men should not to use the woman’s property brought into the marriage (The Law
Code of Manu, III: 52). This excerpt can be applied to dowries as the text dismisses
the manipulation and extortion of women’s property as seen in modern Indian society
and condemns any man who misuses a woman and her property. Manu adds that “if
they desire an abundance of good fortune, fathers…husbands…should revere their
women”, dismissing any form of violence towards women and instead supporting the
respect of women.
Dowry was not always seen as a major topic of discussion and until this century, was
not a precursor of violence and domestic abuse. Today however, The Indian National
Crime Bureau attributes 6,787 deaths to dowries in the year 2005 (Chapter 3: Violent
Crimes). This practice has pervaded Hindu society since before the time of the British
Raj, who ruled the subcontinent from 1858 until India’s independence in 1947.
Urmila Sharma states, “traditionally, dowry in India was regarded as a burden for the
bride’s parents but an honour for the bride” (62) and even before the time of the Raj,
“marriage was the time for which women aggressively saved and invested”
(Oldenburg, 86).
Oldenburg finds that “in precolonial India, dowry was not a ‘problem’ but a support
for women: a mark of their social status and a safety net” (4). Dowries did not cause a
great deal of apprehension and “only uncustomary demands” would turn “a
daughter’s wedding, the most anticipated event in a parent’s life, into a nightmare”
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(90). Instead of a practice filled with anxiety and dread, “the practice of dowry was
bound by rules of honor and mutual respect between bridetakers and bridegivers in
the Punjab of the 1850s” (Oldenburg, 76). There were few cases of angry father-inlaws demanding more money from the bride’s family; instead, “where however little
or much the bride’s father had to offer, the groom’s father was ‘honor bound to
accept’ it” (Oldenburg, 75). When the citizens of the towns Dharmnagri and Jhakri
were asked about dowries, they said that “in the ‘old days’…parents simply gave
what they could afford and their daughter’s in-laws would accept it without question”
(Jeffery & Jeffery, 69).
But according to Oldenburg, dowries are not “the cause of the increase in violence
against women, whether in the form of female infanticide or today’s ‘bride burning’”
(4). Instead, she believes that the increased emphasis on dowry and ensuing bride
burnings were caused by the “profound loss of women’s economic power and social
worth” which Oldenburg argues occurred during the colonial period of British
colonization as “a direct consequence of the radical creation of property rights in
land” (3).
The dowry phenomenon has also been attributed to the fact that “women rarely
receive a fair share of their parental property even when they have legal rights to
inheritance” (Joseph & Sharma, 34). Oldenburg adds to this idea by stating “the
modern notion of property that underlies the present-day pathology of dowry owes its
origin to the exclusion of women from property rights in land as fashioned by the
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British” (8). She went one step further to state that the Aryan influence had deep roots
in shaping Hindu society and social practices. She found dowry in northern India
(largely influenced by Aryans) rather different compared to dowry in southern India
(less influenced by Aryans). In comparing north and south India she states, “both
share the custom of dowry, but the south seems to be less prone to the pathological
strain of the north, where the custom of virilocal marriages (that is, the bride leaves
her own home to live in the household of her husband) cuts across caste and class
lines” (8-9), adding that “the non-Aryan wife is said to have had greater rights in the
property of the marriage, e.g. half share of the corpus on divorce or her husband’s
death” (90). In contrast with the south, northern Indian weddings had the bride’s
family giving a larger portion of dowry because it was there that “hypergamous
tendencies prevail” and the unevenness in monetary payments helped “buttress the
status superiority of the wife-takers over the wife-givers” (95). She also adds that
while the bride’s family seemingly ‘gives away’ their daughter the bride, they are also
barred from various family events and are not allowed to participate in many social
customs with the wife-receivers, or the groom’s family. She concludes that “north
India presents us with the paradoxical situation that the wife-givers are persistent giftgivers and lavish hosts” but are “excluded from intimate social contact with the
receivers, as that would smack of equality” (97). From these findings, the Aryan
influence can be deduced to a factor causing the social viewpoint that placed one
group (the wife-takers) severely above the other group (the wife-givers), causing an
enormous shift in equality between the two groups.
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Thus, the original intentions of dowry are quite varied. Manu’s text provides us with
examples of how dowry was at first founded, and social pressures explain how it
evolved into a “pre-mortem inheritance” which “remained legally and formally in her
[the bride’s] possession” (Goody & Tambiah, 64). The arrival of the Aryans and
British explain the evolution of the female inheritance into a form of measuring social
status and wealth. Yet from this, we are left to wonder as to how “a strongly spun
safety net” was “twisted into a deadly noose” of bride burning (Oldenburg, 10).
III.
Dowry Evolution
After examining the origins of the practice of dowry, it is necessary to search for the
social pressures that caused it to morph into a violent practice of bride burning via “a
cultural ethos in which brides can be viewed as objects to be passed from one social
group to another, both as a means for the procreation of children and as vehicles for
aspirations to social prestige” (Sharma, 73). With the arrival of the British East India
Company in 1600 and the eventual reign of Britain in India, “imperial policies created
a more ‘masculine’ economy and deepened the preference for sons that fostered the
overt or hidden murder of girls. The establishment of property rights for peasants,
inflexible tax demands and collection regimens, and a host of other imperial measures
prepared the ground for worsening gender inequality which, in turn, increased the
vulnerability of women to violence in both their natal and marital homes”
(Oldenburg, 4). While Oldenburg supports the idea that imperialist pressures were
responsible for causing dowry to turn violent, she also believes that “the subtext is
about sexuality” and states “to this we must add the growing dominance of material
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values in a burgeoning middle class of some two hundred and fifty million people, in
which the multivalences of gender in Indian society have been overlaid by the binary
construction of the first and second sex in the colonial value system” (225). In other
words, Oldenburg believes that a new set of values set in by the colonialists changed
the way Indian society viewed the two genders, ensuing in one being regarded as
‘better’ than the other. She affirms that prosperity in India changed everything; with
an increase in wealth, women were no longer needed to work in the fields, allowing
them to focus their time on the home. The result was that “compensation or dowry
had to be paid”, as the worth of women which was once measured in labor was now
seen in the form of money (Oldenburg, 24). She adds that “Cash and property began
to play an increasing role in the composition of dowries as land became a marketable
commodity in the colonial period and its value rose exponentially. The practical
concern of families was to insure for each of their daughters a husband from a
comparable family” (10). She continues, “As large chunks of the subcontinent fell
under the domination of the colonial government, a revolution in property rights
transformed the social and economic world of the peasant. The introduction of the
idea of land as a commodity…gave men precise, titular ownership…the customary
rights of women were the heaviest casualties of this transformation of a peasant
economy into and unevenly modern and capitalistic one” (20-21). As seen from her
research, a new interest in property ownership evolved as land became more and
more valuable; thus, property became very precious, and as men were the only ones
who were allowed to have property, women lost their foothold and rights in society.
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In the past century, consumerism added to the growth of dowry demands. This
consumer culture combined with “the availability of larger disposable incomes
amongst the middle class” caused an economic boom which explains why “the
wealthiest groups have the most to gain from the custom of giving large dowries”
(Joseph & Sharma, 34). It was also responsible for moving “dowry wealth up the
status hierarchy” which eventually led to various other crimes against women, such as
female infanticide and sati (the self-immolation of a widow); these customs continue
“among wealthy families who would be most able to support daughters and widows if
it were not for the dowry drain” (Minturn, 130). Commercialized agriculture also
played a role as “Children’s survival chances…improved dramatically”. As
consumerism entered rural areas, dowry demands increased and “Parents
felt…enmeshed in an increasingly competitive and materialistic marriage market in
which the stakes were constantly shifting” (Jeffery & Jeffery, 69). The cause of
corruption in the marriage marked is difficult to isolate; rather, there appear to be
several contributing factors. Oldenburg explains, “The colonial finger pointed at
Hindu culture, whereas present-day Indian activists and media blamed
Westernization, which increased materialism, greed, and a desire for consumer goods,
and commercialized human relationships” (5). Added to this was a spell of
depreciation of women as “status now translated into material wealth” (Oldenburg,
179). Quoting Rai Bahadur Bose, Oldenburg found that the devaluing of women
“appeared to be rooted in the ‘predominating but erroneous idea of women being
inferior to men [which] indirectly helps this evil practice [dowry] to continue in our
society, by undervaluing the worth of our girls in the marriage market’” (179).
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Yet Urmila Sharma contends that the increase of dowry demands was due to “the
large scale injection of cash into isolated hill areas after the First World War” (72).
Further, she asserts that “the relaxation of ritual and social barriers to marriage”
removed various restrictions from women allowing dowry property to “provide a
qualification for women to marry upwards into high status families” (72). This theory
explains why dowries were in far worse condition in northern India, as the south was
known for strict marriage restrictions. Sharma explains that “the erosion of some
caste restrictions which we find in certain urban classes has really had the effect of
introducing hypergamous competition among women in groups where it did not exist
before…based more on socio-economic factors than ritual aristocracy. With this
loosening…of conventional restrictions on marriage, dowry becomes more and
more…the criterion by which one respectable girl…is deemed more desirable than
another” (72). Dowry demands have evolved into a form of assumed concession;
Sharma adds that when arranging a marriage even today, “negotiations are conducted
on the assumption that the groom’s family’s expectations and the bride’s family’s
capacity to give will be roughly matched” (64). Most women do not seem to argue for
control of their marriage or of their own property, and as Sharma found, a woman
who “claimed her share of land would seem greedy” (69). In addition, “the dowry
brought in by a bride…was no longer preserved as a woman’s exclusive wealth” but
was instead used by the husband’s family (Oldenburg, 180). Women had not only lost
their value and rights, but they had also lost control over their own lives and property.
Sharma reveals that brides have “little control over the way in which dowry is given
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and received. As they become older they participate…as receivers and redistributors
of dowry” (63). She continues to say that “a certain amount of status can be ‘bought’
by a girl of undistinguished family who marries into a better family by means of a
large dowry” (64). Women in rural villages in India have “realized that daughters are
more expensive now than they were in previous generations…daughters put new
burdens on the family finances, which in turn added to the importance of incoming
dowry wealth” (Minturn, 327).
The mindset of Indian society has greatly evolved from the 16th century that one
village woman commented, “People these days don’t want a bride. They want
wealth.” (Jeffery & Jeffery, 72). Oldenburg suggests that “the potential for the custom
[dowry] to be converted into blackmail or extortion had increased in an increasingly
male-dominated world” (171). Today, the situation as described by one village
woman is that “those who cannot afford to give big dowry to their daughters do not
get proper treatment…if the dowry is not big, even those girls who are beautiful,
educated, and talented are sometimes sent back by their in-laws and are never taken
back, or they murder her and tell people that she either committed a suicide or died
accidentally of fever or during childbirth or caught fire in the kitchen, etc.” (Minturn,
122). Even the reporters covering this topic have found that “what emerges as crucial
from this scrutiny of deaths by burning is a total lack of a woman’s status in her
husband’s family or in her own, in the eyes of law or in the eyes of society” (Joseph
& Sharma, 36).
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IV. Dowry Death Today
Today, dowry has “come to be regarded as [an accepted] social evil by Hindus
themselves…which no-one knows how to stop. Parents who bewail the need to
accumulate dowry for…daughters are unlikely to…refuse it when …their son
[marries]” (Sharma, 71). Indians are aware about the implications of this social
practice, and so are many others; “British colonialists stressed its cultural roots in a
benighted Hinduism with its rigid caste system; Marxists see it as a retrograde
economic institution; and feminists see gender discrimination in it because women
are given dowries but not a fair share in family property” (Oldenburg, 8). Even
Gandhi “denounced the ‘evil custom’ regularly” and “advocated that women
wait…until they found groom who would not demand gifts” (Oldenburg, 8). Parents
“lamented the evils of dowry and asserted that the Indian government should ban it.
Yet there is legislation ostensibly intended to do just that: The Dowry Prohibition Act
was passed in 1961 and an Anti-Dowry Amendment Act in 1984” (Jeffery & Jeffery,
69). It is argued that “the protective legislation passed for the benefit of women was
aimed at protecting them from the presumed ill effects of their own cultural practices;
it did little with respect to the ravages of new economic policies” (Oldenburg, 4).
There were some improvements; “Indian social reformers took a broadly similar view
and, after Independence, laws were passed officially restricting marriage expenditure.
But like…other well-intentioned legislation, these laws have not been
enforced…many…are not aware that they exist” (Sharma, 71).
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Dowry has not vanished. Although people often criticize the practice, it is
“inconceivable not to try to give one [a dowry]” (Jeffery & Jeffery, 70). Perhaps the
problem lies in the fact that most women do not have another choice; the only way to
get a good husband and live comfortably is to comply to the demands of the groom’s
family – often the only way to avoid domestic violence as well. The majority of
Indian women practice dowry even though many do not support it; another issue
involved in this is that dowry is very hard to ban (Minturn, 326). One woman stated
that “Dowry cannot be stopped. Those who want to will give stealthily” (Minturn,
121). One would think that education would help stop this practice, but this often is
not the case; “although the desire for upward mobility has encouraged them [the
middle class] to educate their women, a supposedly liberal education has not shaken
deeply internalized beliefs about the status of the woman within the household”
(Joseph & Sharma, 34). On the contrary, “middle-class girls themselves…are
encouraging these changes, since they take up…jobs to ‘earn their dowry’”
(Oldenburg, 36). “Young women themselves are complicit in making their dowries
bigger and fatter” (Oldenburg, 36) says Sharma, adding that “property divides women
among themselves” (73).
The implications of an entire country for the most part accepting this practice is “seen
as the prime, if no the sole, explanation for two other practices…the fatal neglect of
female infants and the selective abortion of female fetuses” (Oldenburg, 3). In the
various communities and regions that dowries are prevalent, there have also been
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“adverse sex ratios” as well (Oldenburg, 22). In 2001, UNICEF reported that for
every 1000 boys in India there were only 927 girls (Gupta).
V. Dowry Death Solutions
Change can happen through a transformation of India’s laws and/or social attitudes.
Legal changes includes the return of dowry goods to women in case of divorce or
death and granting women a solid form of inheritance. Social change could be
enforced by the free choice of a marital partner, regardless of caste, without dowry.
Some suggest a social viewpoint that ought to be implemented is the idea of a
daughter as permanent resident of her natal home (Oldenburg, 224) or the elimination
of the arranged marriage system (Oldenburg, 181). An important realization however,
is that “it will be difficult to do anything unless women cease to be divided amongst
themselves” as dowry-givers and dowry-takers. Until women “cannot realize
common cause as women…their interests appear forever divided” (Sharma, 72).
VI. Conclusion
Over the course of thousands of years of history, different imperial powers and social
influences have shaped modern-day Indian society. Changing views of women
occurred with a final culmination into a society driven by consumerism and
materialism. This blend created a mindset that linked status with wealth; thus the
dowry that was once justified and used as a form of security and inheritance for
beloved daughters morphed into a form of advancing social status via wealth. A
society that once respected women now devalues and uses them as vehicles of wealth.
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The country which once practiced non-violence now is responsible for thousands of
bride deaths a year, all of which are responsible for various other social ills today.
The most all-encompassing solution presented is that due to a preexisting idealization
of social status, the introduction of consumerism, materialism, and industrialization
caused a new mindset to envelop the Indian Hindu society, thus linking status and
wealth, causing the dowry that was used as financial security for the bride to be
converted into a vehicle of social status which has now evolved into a form of social
extortion. This allowed not only thousands of deaths in the name of dowry to occur in
India each year, but also culminated in the practice of female infanticide, creating an
extreme gender gap in the world’s second largest country. Perhaps the most
irreversible aspect of this practice however, is profound impact that it left on India’s
societal mindset and its treatment of women throughout the course of 5,000 years.
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Works Cited
1. "Chapter 3: Violent Crimes." Crime In India - 2005. 04 Aug 2006.
National Crime Records Bureau. 8 Oct 2007
<http://ncrb.nic.in/crime2005/cii 2005/CHAP3.pdf>.
2. Goody, Jack, and S.J. Tambiah. Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge Papers
In Social Anthropology Ser. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973.
3. Gupta, Alka. "Female Foeticide in India." Media centre. 2007. UNICEF India.
8 Oct 2007 <http://www.unicef.org/india/media_3285.htm>.
4. Jeffery, Patricia, and Roger Jeffery. Don’t Marry Me to a Plowman. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, Inc., 1996.
5. Joseph, Ammu, and Kalpana Sharma. Whose News? The Media and
Women’s Issues. New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, 1994.
6. Minturn, Leigh. Sita’s Daughter’s: Coming Out of Purdah. New York,
NY: Oxford UP, 1993.
7. Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. Dowry Murder. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2002.
8. Sharma, Urmila. Dowry In North India: Its Consequences For Women. Ed.
Renée Hirschon. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1984.
9. The Law Code of Manu. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. New York, NY: Oxford
UP, 2004.
10. Vreede-de Stuers, Cora. Girl Students In Jaipur: A Study in Attitudes
Towards Family Life, Marriage, and Career. Assen, The Netherlands:
Royal Van Gorcum Ltd., 1970.
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Annotated Bibliography
1. The National Crime Records Bureau, located in New Delhi, India, was created to
suggest a common format of the maintenance of criminal records throughout the
country. They publish often, and have complied various other extensive
pamphlets and booklets such as Accidental Deaths & Suicides and Prison
Statistics. The Bureau promotes knowledge using Information Technology.
2. Jack Goody is a British Cambridge University social anthropologist who has
written and edited books and research papers such as The Character of Kinship
and Polygyny, Economy and the Role of Women. Goody has focused greatly on
marital and kinship relations and was elected Fellow of the British Academy. S. J.
Tambiah also works as an anthropologist at Cambridge University, and has
written several academic papers, such as From Varna to Caste Through Mixed
Unions and Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand. Tambiah
focuses mainly on eastern sociology and has worked in both Sri Lanka and
Thailand, as well as Cambridge. Both of these authors are credible sources; their
education, experience and objectivity constitute them as reliable in their fields.
3. Alka Gupta is a media consultant for UNICEF India who has reported at various
instances for the organizations. Her articles include coverage of the International
Learning Exchange and the state of the world’s children. Her experience and
detachment in her articles make her a credible journalist and source.
4. Patricia and Roger Jeffery are both Professors in Sociology at the University of
Edinburgh in Scotland, UK. Together they have written various books, such as
Population, Gender and Politics: Demographic Change in Rural North India and
each have published separately. Both authors are humanitarians who are currently
working with the UN. They have had a significant amount of experience on the
field and in various countries. These experiences combined with their education
and positions held at the University of Edinburgh qualify them as highly credible
and reliable sources.
5. Ammu Joseph and Kalpana Sharma have collectively published other books
together, such as Terror, Counter-terror: Women Speak Out. They are both
editors and have edited various other books and have assisted with other books
such as Women And Media: A Critical Introduction. Both live and work in India,
validating their accounts and making them credible sources.
6. Leigh Minturn was a professor of social psychology at the University of Colorado
faculty for over 25 years. Her work focused on the lives of women and children in
the Indian village, Khalapur. Over the course of 10 years, she reported on
tradition, health and women's autonomy in the village. Her interaction with
villagers in India makes her a reliable source, however her connections with them
makes her writings more likely to support the women and children of that town.
7. Veena Talwar Oldenburg is currently a history professor at Baruch College. She
is a native of India, and has a Ph. D. in history. She has received various senior
research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American
Institute of Indian Studies, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She has also written
Joshi 21
The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-77. Oldenburg has taught at Loreto
Convent College, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, focusing
mainly on Modern India, British Colonialism, and Women's History in the Third
World. Her credibility as a historian is certain. Oldenburg has a deep interest in
the politics of gender however, thus her work tends to favor women in gender
issues. However, despite this fact, she analyzes and interprets each assertion,
supporting each claim with validations, making her a credible and strong source.
8. Urmila Sharma has a Ph. D. in political science from Lucknow University and is
constantly engaged in research and writing. She focuses mainly on Humanism in
Contemporary Indian Political Thought and is the author of many books in both
English and Hindi. She received the U.G.C. Research Fellowship and is the
daughter of renowned Indian political scientist Dr. B.M. Sharma. Her background
and education combined with her focus make her a reliable and knowledgeable
source.
9. Patrick Olivelle is the Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at the University
of Texas at Austin and a Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions. He has edited
and translated the four early Dharmasutras. Olivelle produced an award-winning
translation of the early Upanishads, as well as a scholar's edition of them and has
won several prestigious fellowships, such as Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLS. His
awards and high-held positions as well experience in his field make his
translations very reliable and precise.
10. Cora Vreede-de Stuers has written one other books such as Parda: A Study of
Muslim Women's Life in Northern India. While most of her books are focusing on
east Asian women, many of them seem to be in Dutch, making mistranslations
very possible. While she hasn’t written an extensive amount of books, her
publications have been used in various anthropologies, making her work credible.