Dowry Murder

Dowry is often pointed to as the reason wives and baby girls are killed in India, but Veena Oldenburg contends that this explanation misses the mark. She places the cause not in dowry itself or in the caste order, but in the policies that British rule imposed during the colonial period.

Before colonial rule, Oldenburg explains, dowry operated as a resource run by women for women. It gave them standing within their families and a dependable fallback in times of crisis. British administration upended the agrarian economy and the wealth tied to land, stripping women of their claims to those resources and weakening their control over the arrangement. Over time, the result was that women's lives came to be valued less. Following the paper trail that colonial officials left behind in Punjab, Oldenburg argues that these officials blamed the killings on the defects of Hindu caste society, while their own agrarian policies were causing widespread hardship.

The book then turns to present-day bride burning. Drawing on her own memories and on nearly a year of work at a women's shelter in the mid-1980s, where she handled dowry cases, Oldenburg examines violence against wives and daughters-in-law in modern India. She connects past and present, the personal and the political, and asks readers to reconsider common assumptions about women's rights to property and economic security.

Written for readers interested in colonial history, South Asian society and gender studies, the book combines archival research with a critical look at how colonial rule shaped ideas about women and violence.