The Terms She Never Chose to Live by

The dowry demand is typically presented in public discourse as an anachronism, a stubborn remnant of a less enlightened India that education, urbanisation, and explicit legal prohibition have somehow failed to dislodge, a framing that mistakes the institution’s most explicit expression for a departure from it. But is dowry an aberration within the institution of marriage, or the institution’s own operating logic, followed to its economic conclusion?

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