Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Only a small fraction of India's girls are involved in
dowry
deaths
, but the practice is not declining. According to
the Indian government, in 1985, the number was 999; in
1987, 1786 women died at the hands of vengeful husbands
or in-laws; in 1989, 2436 perished; in 2001, more than
7000 women died; and in 2009, it was reported that 8383
women died from dowry deaths. These fi gures report
only confi rmed dowry deaths; many more are believed to
occur but are reported as suicides, kitchen accidents, or
other fatal domestic incidents.
The power relationships that place women below
men in India cannot simply be legislated away. Govern-
ment entities in India (federal as well as State) have set up
legal aid offi ces to help women who fear dowry death and
seek assistance. In 1984, the national legislature passed the
Family Courts Act, creating a network of “family courts”
to hear domestic cases, including dowry disputes. But the
judges tend to be older males, and their chief objective,
according to women's support groups, is to hold the fam-
ily together—that is, to force the threatened or battered
woman back into the household. Hindu culture attaches
great importance to the family structure, and the family
courts tend to operate on this principle.
Recognizing that movement away from arranged
marriages and dowries among the Indian population is
slow in coming, the journalist and talk show host took
the issue of dowry deaths
to the global scale
—to generate
activism in the West and create change at the local scale
in India. Ling explained that the place of women in India
has changed little. She described women as a fi nancial
burden on the bride's family, who must save for a sizable
dowry to marry off the woman. Ling describes the dowry
as a fi nancial transaction; through marriage the burden
of the woman moves from the bride's family to her hus-
band's family. Yet Winfrey and Ling interviewed a woman
in India to show that global change can help make local
change possible. Nisha Sharma was to marry in front of
1500 guests in a town just outside of the capital of New
Delhi. On her wedding day, the groom's family demanded
$25,000 in addition to the numerous luxury items they had
already received as dowry (including washing machines, a
fl at screen TV, and a car). Nisha's father refused to pay, the
man's family became violent, and Nisha called the police
on her cell phone. She has become a local hero and is also
an example in the West of how to beat the dowry deaths
using global technology, in this case, a cell phone.
India is starting to see the impact of its booming econ-
omy and growing proportion of educated young women
and men in well paid jobs on marriage. The number of love
marriages is on the rise (Fig. 5.18), and many couples in
love marriages are meeting on-line in India. The number of
divorces is also on the rise with 1 in 1,000 marriages ending
in divorce in India today, which is one of the lowest divorce
rates in the world but is also double the country's divorce
rate fi ve years ago. These changes will not necessarily result
in fewer dowry deaths in the short run in India. An article
in
The Times of India
in 2010 explained police in the city of
Chennai, where the information technology boom is in
full swing, reported that a rise in dowry deaths was likely a
result of increasing materialism among the middle class and
an ensuing feeling of desperation for more goods and cash,
coupled with men in less powerful positions, which had led
to more men acting out violently.
Understanding shifting gender relations and power
structures in India is not at all easy. Just as some statis-
tics point to an improving place of women in Indian
society, other statistics confi rm India still has a prefer-
ence for males overall. India's 2011 census reported a
sex ratio of 940 girls for every 1,000 boys, which looks to
be an improvement over the 2001 sex ratio of 933 girls
for every 1,000 boys. However, the sex ratio for children
0 to 6 years old in India was at a record low of 914 girls
for every 1,000 boys in 2011. The 2011 census data sur-
prised many because between 2001 and 2011, while India
gained unprecedented economic growth, the number of
girls ages 0 to 6 dropped from 927 in 2001 to 914 in 2011.
Many pregnant women in India, especially in northern
states, undergo gender-determining tests (ultrasound
and amniocentesis) and elect to have abortions when the
fetus is a girl. Girls who make it to birth may suffer female
infanticide as many parents fear the cost of dowries and
extend little social value to girls.
In India and elsewhere, directing the attention of
people in far-fl ung places to social ills—moving the issues
up in scale—has the potential to create change. Yet prob-
lems cannot really be solved unless power relations shift at
the family, local, regional, and national scales. As the num-
ber of women and men in the middle class in urban India
continues to rise, love marriages will continue to rise, as
well. The number of dowry deaths, arranged marriages,
and divorces in the country will continue to fl uctuate as
power relations shift across gender and scales.
Shifting Power Relations among Ethnic Groups
In Chapter 4, we discussed local cultures that defi ne them-
selves ethnically. The presence of local ethnic cultures can
be seen in the cultural landscapes of places we discussed in
Chapter 4: “Little Sweden” in Kansas or the Italian North
End in Boston. In many places, more than one ethnic
group lives in a place, creating unique cultural landscapes
and revealing how power relations factor into the ways
ethnicities are constructed, revised, and solidifi ed, where
ethnic groups live, and who is subjugating whom.
Three urban geographers, John Frazier, Florence
Margai, and Eugene Tettey-Fio, tracked the fl ow of peo-
ple and shifts in power relations among the multiple eth-
nic groups that have lived in Alameda County, California,
in their book
Race and Place: Equity Issues in Urban America
.
