Status indicators: Configuring caste within religious and regional markers

Signifiers of regionality, caste, and religion have been grouped together as status indicators. Their inclusion in matrimonials evince shifting status hierarchies based around caste and class. This category, specifically caste, was most frequently mentioned across all newspapers. Cross-regional readings of matrimonial columns confirm advert generators and respondents were predominantly from upper and middling castes of the aspirant middle classes. In the three systematically sampled English-language newspapers, Tribune, Hindustan Times, and The Hindu, regionality, family names, or caste were listed 2,222 times. Almost all matrimonials stated the seeker’s caste and expressed a preference for a particular caste or sub-caste. References to caste, signalled in a variety of ways, were significant for maintaining endogamous and exogamous functions of marriage. One outcome of late nineteenth-century colonial legislative attempts to legally define marriage, through shoring up brahminical ‘Hindu’ and elite ‘Muslim’ practices and the concomitant delegitimizing of low-caste customs, was the imitation of upper-caste endogamy.Footnote ⁵⁸ Advertisements distinguished between ‘Brahmin’ and ‘Non-Brahmin’ matches or included specific castes or gotras. Gotras are exogamous subdivisions within castes which prohibit intermarriage between members descended from common ancestors. Often, a family’s gotra was included to avoid intra-gotra marriage. Kshatriyas and Vaisyas also adopted and expressed gotras in imitation of brahminical practices.Footnote ⁵⁹ Internal divisions within a caste became less important so that many adverts referred to ‘any sreni’ (grades within a sub-caste), indicating a willingness to marry across caste subdivisions.Footnote ⁶⁰ Signalling gotra or sreni, thus, was a means of conveying broader caste aspirations and attempts at upward class mobility through intra-caste rather than inter-caste marriage. In this way, matrimonials also functioned as sanskritization engines in the pursuit of ideal caste matches.Footnote ⁶¹

Broader regional references were employed as families began to use cross-regional dailies to cast wider nets of partner selection for specific caste matches. Regionality, in this study, refers to regions mentioned in advertisements rather than the correspondence addresses that accompanied matrimonials. Regional identity could indicate familial ancestries, racial affinities, or local caste affiliations. In The Bombay Chronicle, for example, matrimonials requested matches for ‘Hindoo’ Maharashtrian girls while indicating ‘no caste distinction’.Footnote ⁶² In The Hindu, Vadama, a subsect of the Iyer community of Hindi-speaking Tamil Brahmins, was referenced to highlight northern origins. Surnames were used as status-signalling strategies signifying regional caste identities and family ancestries. Deriving from traditional occupations ascribed to castes or geographies, surnames had become mandatory for colonial bureaucratic identification. Gyanendra Pandey has explored how upwardly mobile Dalits attempted to neutralize, minimize, or reject caste identification by adopting names tied to places of origin, unmarked administrative positions, higher caste appellations or dropped surnames altogether.Footnote ⁶³ Such modernizing efforts are also observable among some aspirant middle-class groups, even as surnames, alongside caste, continued to signal status—‘Saxena’ and ‘Ahulwalia’ appeared frequently in Hindustani Times and Tribune.Footnote ⁶⁴ Within the mercantile Baniya caste across the United Provinces and Punjab, Agarwals distinguished themselves from Oswals and discriminated against Agraharis because their women engaged in selling work.Footnote ⁶⁵

Similar caste innovations operated transregionally within gradually shifting notions of class-caste identities. Denzil Ibbetson’s analysis of Punjabi castes had noted a rivalry between mercantile castes of Khatris and Aroras in the 1880s.Footnote ⁶⁶ Although these tensions gave way to new class affinities among professional Khatris and Aroras in newly developed towns across West Punjab, some customs of biradaris (familial kinship networks) persevered.Footnote ⁶⁷ As Tandon observed, ‘Khatris still married only Khatris, and Aroras other Aroras, but there were no longer so strict about the right sub-castes’ so that families married those of the same social standing.Footnote ⁶⁸ Despite the consistent appearance of caste restrictions in matrimonial columns, newspapers did function as inter-regional vehicles for opening up rather than solely consolidating middle-class caste distinctions from the late 1940s.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although matrimonials for those outside of middling castes were rare, the matrimonial column as a matchmaking forum was a generative one that enabled access to an array of marital and social mobility options within an expanding middle class seeking well-placed matches.

Matrimonial data suggest that families searching for brides were willing to offset caste, regional background, and familial status against the appearance of women. In Tribune, The Hindu, and Hindustan Times, physical attributes of potential brides outnumbered references to status categories (see Table 3). Female physical attributes also featured disproportionately more than caste, regional, and family indicators in The Bengalee and Amrit Bazar Patrika. Men were more likely to mention their caste, regional base, or family names (1,246 times compared to 976 times for women). For men, higher frequencies of status references suggest that marrying a lower-caste woman did not affect familial status as much as a woman marrying ‘down’, and that female appearance held greater currency in assessment hierarchies. Gendered hypergamy (marrying a daughter ‘up’ into a superior status) was an imitable practice among many castes across India.Footnote ⁷⁰ Shudha Mazumdar’s memoir reveals the impact of brahminization among upper-castes: her kayastha mother-in-law only agrees to consider a lower-caste girl for her brother-in-law because Shudha warned her that another girl may be ‘blessed with lineage’ but ‘lacking in looks’.Footnote ⁷¹ Malhotra and Durba Mitra also note that this practice left a surplus of unmarried women on one end and marriageable men at the lowest levels—rules were often breached at lower levels so that men could marry women outside their caste.Footnote ⁷² This surplus also fuelled the ‘competition for husbands’, the power dynamics of which played out within matrimonials and dowry negotiations (discussed below).

Table 3.

Comparative breakdown of categories and attributes

In advertisements that did not mention caste preferences or sub-caste restrictions, the seeker’s caste was still specified to indicate an adherence to caste stratification. These inclusions indicated preferences or anticipated desired responses without explicitly making requests. One matrimonial in The Bombay Chronicle from 1940 wanted ‘a bridegroom, well educated self supporting and of advanced views for a Bride of Maratha community … No restrictions of caste’.Footnote ⁷³ While specifying there were ‘no restrictions’, the advertisement listed a specific racialized, regionalized caste preference. Phrases such as ‘caste immaterial’ or ‘no caste restriction’ came to feature consistently in Tribune and Hindustan Times.Footnote ⁷⁴ The rise of such phrases was provoked by caste and social reform associations campaigning against the strictest forms of caste discrimination. The Arya Samaj (f. 1875), for example, aimed to reform caste practices. Yet, founder Dayanand Saraswati still discouraged caste admixture so that, as Malhotra puts it, ‘the biradari of the Arya Samajists helped in finding suitable grooms for young marriageable daughters from among a more commodious high caste group’.Footnote ⁷⁵ This was certainly the case for matrimonials in the Lahore-based Tribune. Therefore, matrimonials that specified caste immateriality often did so to signal reformist views among certain middle-class groups, even if this was limited to self-presentation on paper alone.

Within English-language matrimonial columns, religion was not mentioned as often precisely because religious identities were assumed from caste and gotra inclusions. Newspapers included matrimonials from various religious backgrounds (Christians, Hindus, Jains, Muslims, and Sikhs) with some regional fluctuations such as Sikh matches predominantly appearing in Tribune. Matches remained broadly bound by religion. Many Sikh families, particularly in Tribune, sought Hindu or Sikh matches of the same caste and excluded Muslims and Christians. This corresponded with other patterns of cross-religious caste-based marriage in Punjab—among Agarwals, Jains and Hindus would often intermarry.Footnote ⁷⁶ Muslim advertisers also delineated general markers of religion (like ‘Sunni’), specific caste groupings (like ‘Syed’), and foreign lineages such as Afghan or Persian descent.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Ismat and Tehzib-i-Niswan, while Muslim identities were assumed, matrimonials often delineated descent such as requests for a youth of ‘sharif noble lineage’ for a girl of ‘eminent Afghani lineage’ and a bride from a ‘nawabi or ruling khandaan’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although restrictions on endogamy were not as stringent among Muslims, groups who claimed foreign ancestry, such as Sayyids, Shaikhs, and Pathans, generally only allowed men to marry ‘lower’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Ashrafi elites justified distinctions that marked them against ajlaf or atraf (lower orders) by deploying Islamic jurisprudence as precedence for marrying among equal groups.Footnote ⁸⁰ In matrimonials, these markers of social stratification were expressed through consistent requests and requirements for matches of ‘sharif khandaani’—referring to ashraf lineages as well as to ‘good character’.Footnote ⁸¹ These inclusions sought to maintain caste within a broader Muslim identifier rather than specific religious practice or belief.

Although matches themselves remained bound by religious categories, correspondence practices suggest that modern matchmaking often drew on cross-religious networks. For instance, a Tribune advert from 1950 features a Brahmin seeking a bride with correspondence to be made with a hakim (Muslim medical practitioner).Footnote ⁸² Such cross-regional communications were facilitated by innovations in print, like the matrimonial column, from which the emergent ‘All-India’ approach to matchmaking can be discerned. As status criterions demonstrate, the matrimonial method was not illimitably capacious but encouraged intra-caste marriage within an appropriate ‘All-India’ middle class.

Professions, wealth, and educational markers

The Salary/Property/Wealth category in the study refers to individual wealth, employment, or familial income (Table 3). Aside from status categories, the most valuable acquirable assets for men to sell in matrimonials were financial markers, indicated through salaries or professions—those seeking grooms echoed these preferences. Professionals, including professors, businessmen, lawyers, engineers, doctors, commercial and industrial executives, and students, predominantly featured in advertisements alongside landholders and landlords. The most coveted professions—particularly between the 1920s and 1940s when there was increased employment precarity spurred by the Depression and the Second World War—were ‘permanent’ government service or ‘imperial service’ positions.Footnote ⁸³ Sarkari naukari (government employment) was also appropriate for middle-class ashraf and upper-caste groups. It included roles in the Indian Civil Service or revenue collection, with salaried work signifying permanent service, immovable property, and financial stability.Footnote ⁸⁴

Within the competitive marketplace of the matrimonial column, a groom’s individual wealth was increasingly noted and desired. Advert-placers articulated preferences for grooms who were independent or had ‘independent income’, elaborating on earlier references to ‘well-settled’ matches.Footnote ⁸⁵ Stock phrases such as ‘well-to-do’ or ‘highly connected’ became customary. Seekers were also not shy about requesting or disclosing salaries framed as monthly incomes, net revenue, property values, and pensionable income. In Tehzib-i-Niswan’s matrimonials, seekers for both brides and grooms often delineated specific monthly salaries. Stipulating individual earnings, as a measure of worth and strategy for increasing desirability, was partially born out of regional legislative wranglings about familial wealth and joint property ownership articulated by educated professional classes since the 1890s.Footnote ⁸⁶ The contents of matrimonials suggest that men’s earning potential was deployed as a way to bargain for specified coveted physical attributes. A 1940 advertisement in Tribune, for instance, wanted a ‘fair, educated and attractive tall girl for Mohammedan Gentleman self supporting income about Rs.600-p.m’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Overall, for men, profession and wealth held greater currency than listing education, although foreign graduates were proffered and preferred. Educational markers were self-evident for some professions but, crucially, male financial ability and stability was a vital measurable competency within advertisements. In comparison, education was a clear asset for women: referenced 619 times in Tribune, 72 in The Hindu, and 385 in Hindustan Times. Across the systematic sample, female education was stipulated 1,076 times in contrast to 703 male references.

Female education was more capacious, with matrimonials featuring a wider scale of attainment: ranging from stating a girl was ‘educated’ to precise indicators such as S.L.L.C (secondary school leavers certificate), matriculated, middle pass, or graduates. The prominent use of abbreviated forms may be due to the expense of placing adverts (at cost per word). It is also likely that readers amassed knowledge about explicating female education within the matrimonial schema. Women’s education had transformed into a status symbol, possessing aspirational value and signalling modern values in a period when female educational reform was continually debated. Across Urdu matrimonials, references to varying levels of ‘taleem’ (education) regularly appeared, reflecting shifts in female education to meet the requirements for Western-educated professionals.Footnote ⁸⁸ Alongside this trend, however, some still adhered to home-schooling customs, particularly among poorer middle-class and older sharifi families. One Ismat matrimonial required a Muslim girl who ‘was educated from home’ and another in Hindustan Times assured that ‘all education imparted at home, not in any school’.Footnote ⁸⁹ These two approaches to pedagogy have been explored by Barbara Metcalf and Shenila Khoja-Moolji.Footnote ⁹⁰ The former charted two corresponding strands among Muslim reformers in the late nineteenth-century; ulama (Islamic scholars) distanced themselves from European influences, while some social reformers engaged with European critiques and adapted Western models.Footnote ⁹¹ Such cleavages in pedagogical views are also well-documented in memoirs and fiction which debated the role of schooling for cultivating ‘better wives and mothers’.Footnote ⁹² Among Hindus in Maharashtrian society too, there were deep divisions over forms of educational instruction but the prevailing consensus was consistent with other regional positions: women were to be educated to prevent conjugal breakdown between highly educated husbands and illiterate wives.Footnote ⁹³

A marked difference can also be observed in matrimonials from the 1920s in the emergence of ‘domestic skills’ as a separate category. ‘Domestic skills’ were referenced more frequently in the 1940s and 1950s. ‘Educated’ references in earlier advertisements alluded to culturally sanctioned household-related education comprising household management, cooking, arithmetic, and reading religious texts and regional languages.Footnote ⁹⁴ Later, as more women attended school and pursued further or higher education, domestic prowess needed to be demarcated on its own terms. This shift was the ongoing consequence of the devaluing of women’s labour among lower and middling castes as well as the articulation of supposedly traditional concepts of femininity which hampered women’s participation in an increasingly capitalist economy.Footnote ⁹⁵ Out of 20 matrimonial adverts in a February 1950 issue of Tribune, six specifically requested brides to be ‘well-versed in household affairs’, often coded as ‘HH’.Footnote ⁹⁶ In Ismat, brides needed to be ‘experienced in household affairs’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Many matrimonials highlighted that the seeking bride was both educated and skilled in housework, reinforcing female education as a status symbol.

Language proficiency also held high premiums for girls in the marriage market. The ability to read and write in Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi featured as valuable attributes and requested assets in the 1920s.Footnote ⁹⁸ A linguistic hierarchy appeared in matrimonials. In Tribune, Hindi became a greater selling point than Urdu or Punjabi. From the 1930s, knowing English also began to signify ‘modern’ matches.Footnote ⁹⁹ A 1937 advertisement for an ustani (female home tutor) situated above a matrimonial in Ismat suggests English education was also coveted among North Indian Muslims.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ ‘Angrazi taleem’ (English education) had been a contentious issue at the beginning of the twentieth century, as women wrote about the loss of religious education alongside the necessity of learning English.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In 1907, the state-led inclusion of rudimentary English in ashrafi curriculums for well-to-do women in Bhopal had been a radical innovation.Footnote ¹⁰² However, English education and even higher education in the marriage market came to be seen as a vital asset.Footnote ¹⁰³ Generally, a modicum of education, whether schooling, domestic skills, or language proficiency, became desirable across matrimonials.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, women’s professions were rarely requested due to their perceived limited earning potential. Middle-class familial expectations often dictated that brides would not work after marriage beyond volunteer or social work. Although women’s professions were listed and requested disproportionately less than those of men, they were not completely absent. Doctors, teachers, and headmistresses were numerously referenced. From the 1940s and early 1950s, women graduates and ‘medicos’ also emerged as selling points (with male doctors requesting ‘lady doctors’).Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Age, child marriage, and widow remarriage

Age of seekers or desired matches was one of the indices most likely to be included in matrimonials, second only to status indicators. Age was conveyed using precise quantifiers or contextual measures such as ‘young’, ‘middle-aged’, or ‘grown-up’. Measuring and recording ‘age’ as a legal, cultural, or biological entity has been vociferously debated by historical actors and historians alike.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Ishita Pande has shown how, although colonial law-making took for granted defining and recording age with chronological precision, age was often approximated.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In matrimonials, female age requests generally ranged from 15 to 20 but male ages were much more variable. The youngest precise age mentioned for a girl was 13 years of age (with girls being statistically younger in Hindustan Times). Debates around child marriage and the age of consent, which first appeared in the context of conversion, evince why these age listings for girls were common.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The high-profile case of Rukhmabai culminated in one of the major social legislative enactments of the nineteenth century, the Age of Consent Bill of 1891. This Bill raised the age of consent for girls from 10 to 12. Child-bride Rukhmabai, born into an educated Shudra family, had been married to Dadaji Bhikaji (aged 20) when she was 11 years old, but the marriage had not been consummated as Rukhmabai reached puberty in her mother’s home.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In 1884, Bhikaji, having not claimed marital rights for 15 years, filed for the restitution of conjugal rights at the Bombay High Court. Rukhmabai was initially acquitted as she had not consented as a child. But, upon Bhikaji’s appeal, the judge succumbed to widespread pushback—including virulent opposition from upper-caste groups who endorsed early marriage as a central endogamous tenet—and ordered her to reside with her husband.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Under the doctrine of restitution of conjugal rights, a colonial transplant from English ecclesiastical law, sympathy generally lay with husbands and was instrumentalized to safeguard male control.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In July 1889, another case highlighted the violence of child marriage: 35‐year‐old Hari Maiti was accused of murdering his 11‐year‐old wife Phulmani Dasi who suffered horrific sexual injuries as a result of pre-pubertal rape and haemorrhaged to death.Footnote ¹¹¹ This case further foregrounded issues around the health and mortality of child brides. Both cases unleashed powerful regional and transnational debates about early marriage, ill health, and conjugal disequilibrium.Footnote ¹¹² In the Tamil region, society and pre-puberty marriage was largely confined to Brahmins and the child marriage question generated more controversy there partly because of ongoing tensions about the place of Brahmins in Tamil society.Footnote ¹¹³

After further deliberation into the twentieth century, the Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA) or Sarda Act was passed in 1929, fixing the age of marriage for girls at 14 and boys at 18. This enactment may explain why 13 was the youngest age observed for girls in matrimonials. Families could claim that they were looking for suitors for daughters turning 14. During the winter of 1929 and 1930, Bengal experienced a wave of child marriages with parents taking their last chances to arrange pre-puberty marriages for their daughters.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Families could also subvert the CMRA in advertisements by employing ‘marriageable age’—a coded term exclusively referring to females. It signalled a girl’s physical development and reproductive capacity as well as domestic training. Over time, the phrase ‘marriageable age’ diminished as specifying exact ages became popular, reflecting shifts in modern age quantification and the appropriation of precise terminology as part of a clearer sales pitch in matrimonials.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Yet, determining and proving age remained an issue; an article published in the periodical Nur Jahan (Lahore) pointed out that the law was unenforceable without the universal registration of births.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Age remained a highly gendered, unequal variable in the marriage market, with one advertisement describing a ‘highly cultured graduate’ as a ‘spinster’ at the age of 35.Footnote ¹¹⁷ This disparity placed even greater pressure on families to continue to fix the marriages of daughters early, particularly among castes that valued hypergamy (especially Kulin Brahmins). Upper-caste families would be anxious to marry daughters early precisely to foreclose the impact of limited choices. Some legislators had even pushed for an amendment to exempt Brahmins from the CMRA because of these pressures.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Early marriage had also been practised to protect against forcible abduction in regions like Punjab.Footnote ¹¹⁹ At the same time, child marriage was gradually abandoned by upper-caste middle-class groups but continued be popular among poorer, low-caste Muslims and Hindus because parents were unable or unwilling to ‘undertake maintenance of daughters for longer periods’.Footnote ¹²⁰ CMRA breaches, therefore, were difficult to prove and deliberate deflations of age occurred in cases of unmarried girls approaching puberty whose parents sought to avoid social censure.Footnote ¹²¹ Requesting photographs in matrimonials often helped ascertain age fabrications before in-person meetings were sought.

Marital ages and widow remarriage were also connected issues in the marriage market. Laws for widow remarriage had been proposed in the 1830s but the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act was not passed until 1856. This was due to brahminical orthodoxy converging with British judicial opinion.Footnote ¹²² Upper-caste opponents worried that such a law would confuse upper-caste Hindus with inferior castes and tribes among whom remarriage was common.Footnote ¹²³ Colonial courts readily accepted that marriage for Hindu women was a monogamous lifelong sacrament.Footnote ¹²⁴ Low castes also started to restrict widow remarriage as a means of upper-caste emulation.Footnote ¹²⁵ Another element of the Remarriage Act that limited the prospect of remarriage was section 2—the forfeiture of the deceased husband’s estate upon remarriage—which was applied to all Hindu widows.Footnote ¹²⁶ Lucy Carroll observed that the application of forfeiture by the High Courts of Bengal, Bombay, and Madras to all Hindu widows, despite differences in customary law, was part of the broader ‘Brahminisation of the low castes and the Hinduization of tribals’.Footnote ¹²⁷ These impediments as well as upper-caste emulation meant that widow remarriage remained a social taboo well into the twentieth century. Early marriage also partly fell out of favour among privileged upper-caste groups to mitigate or, as Deboshruti Roychowdhury puts it, avoid the ‘risk’ of widow remarriage.Footnote ¹²⁸

Although widow remarriage is generally considered to be the least effective colonial-era social reform, matrimonials columns did become a forum for providing matches for widows. Shudha Mazumdar touches upon the opportunities afforded by the matrimonial in her memoir: a young child widow, whose parents ‘bravely sent out an advertisement’ in a popular daily, garnered a response from a college student in Calcutta.Footnote ¹²⁹ She describes the social opposition the man faced, including threats of disinheritance, stating that ‘in spite of the Widow Remarriage Act and the fact that many reputable men sponsored the cause, the remarriage of widows was not looked upon with favour’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Like the respondent from Calcutta, widows, second husbands, and supporters often faced violent intimidation, abduction, social ostracism, and disinheritance.Footnote ¹³¹ Ostracization often extended to remarried widows’ female relatives too.Footnote ¹³²

No advertisements requesting matches for widowed Muslim women appeared in the sample. Widow remarriage was rare among sharif upper and middle classes, despite its scriptural permissibility and attempts by Muslim social reformers to allay cultural strictures, like Altaf Husain Hali’s poem Munājāt-e Bewa (A Widow’s Prayer), which appeared in 1884, and novels like Nazir Ahmad’s Ajamā (The Widows) (1891) and Muhammad Ahsan’s Jam-i-Zahr (The Cup of Poison) (1909).Footnote ¹³³ Yet, advertisements seeking matches for widows did appear more frequently in newspapers. It was a popular forum for reformist organizations advertising multiple matches at once and preferring same caste matches like the Vidhva Vivah Sahaik Sabha (Widow Marriage Assistance Sabha) and the Arya Samaj.Footnote ¹³⁴ Notably, matches for widows, from both willing seekers and respondents, were for ‘virgin widows’. This was not wholly unexpected as controlling the sexuality of child widows had been a central concern of the Hindu intelligentsia—in mid-nineteenth-century debates, reformer Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar had been most perfervid about recovering their reproductive capacity.Footnote ¹³⁵ During the 1920s, newspapers like Amrita Bazar Patrika also encouraged widow remarriage and gainful employment as a way of combating alleged conversions or abductions of Hindu women by Muslim men.Footnote ¹³⁶ By indicating a willingness to marry ‘virgin widows’, many male seekers would not only open up a selection pool of younger matches but also foreclose undesirable marital outcomes and signal their positionality vis-à-vis reform efforts.Footnote ¹³⁷

Terms like ‘virgin’ and ‘bachelor’ were employed in gender-specific ways in matrimonials—‘bachelor’ denoted an unmarried or young male whereas ‘virgin’ was exclusively reserved for women to convey that a bride was single, unattached, or a virgin widow. Comparably, multiple advertisements in Tehzib-i-Niswan requested ‘do shiza’ (a virgin) matches while ‘jawan’, meaning young or youthful, was used to describe male seekers.Footnote ¹³⁸ This terminology was part of the construction of a new form of an older conservative patriarchy that implicitly expected men to be experienced while explicitly binding respectability and honour to female bodies and behaviours. The marked difference from traditional patriarchy here is the expectation of monogamous conjugality, if not sexual fidelity, from men.Footnote ¹³⁹ As Sarala Devi of the Tagore family notes in her diary, although polygamy for Hindu males was legal, educated men only took another wife in exceptional circumstances such as an ‘existing wife fail[ing] to produce a son’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Compassionate companiable marriage, thus, was a feature of modern marriage and brides were expected to conform to behaviours that sustained the conjugal couple.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Reassurances of monogamous conjugality began to feature in matrimonials in the interwar period. In this context, age also became an issue that needed to be explained for older men seeking brides, often widowers or those looking for subsequent wives. Those seeking second marriages stated several reasons for doing so, including the first wife’s consent, her inability to conceive, or separation.Footnote ¹⁴² Widowers indicated whether children had been born out of first marriages using ‘no issue’, indicating the percolation of British legal language into the Indian marital lexicon.Footnote ¹⁴³ Old(er) men often clarified concerns about health conditions, virility, and potential impotence as families began to express requirements for healthy, strong widowers.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Assessing health and beauty

By the 1930s, as mentioned above, exchanging photographs had become standard procedure in many cities. Shudha Mazumdar recalls asking for photographs to assess and investigate truth-claims: ‘No longer did I run to see alleged beauties’ but requested ‘candidates … send photographs first’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Photographs were a crucial verification stage used to assess health and beauty within a marriage marketplace plagued with concerns over physical and reproductive health. Some diseases like smallpox left physical marks on the skin and denoted ill-health, including sight loss, but could also mark out survivors as immune (having no legible marks was just as suspect).Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Another visibly symptomizing disease was tuberculosis with markers of rosy lips, pale complexions, and thin figures.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In twentieth-century India, although fairer skin was idealized, waxen-like or white translucent complexions were not. Paler complexions, associated with unsanitary and unhealthy environments, marked the body as ill and potentially reproductively defective.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Ill-health affected colouring so that glowing lighter skin, in comparison to a drawn, darkened appearance, became associated with good health. References to healthy appearances in matrimonials relied on readers’ experiential knowledge to tease out subtler references to colour.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This was not limited to women alone. As part of her defence in refusing to cohabit with Bhikaji, Rukhmabai had cited his employment instability and poor health—Bhikaji was at the intermediary stage of tuberculosis.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Healthier matches generally suggested a particular kind of lifestyle and availability of resources (food, medicine, and disposable incomes). Many matrimonials, therefore, requested photographs alongside brief biographies with the tactic requirement that health histories should also be disclosed.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Between 1915 and 1950, matrimonial columns reveal a divergence in the aesthetic specifications of, and for, men and women: healthy grooms and beautiful women were the most valuable. A corpus of aesthetic and physical markers emerged in matrimonial columns. In this statistical study, physical attributes accounted for a substantial portion of the total desired criteria for brides and grooms.Footnote ¹⁵² Physical attributes were mentioned almost three times more for women (at 1,425) than for men (506 times). Although men’s health was referenced considerably more than their appearances, women’s health and beauty consistently superseded that of men (except for men’s health in Tribune). Aesthetic markers based on bodily physique also emerged—women were required to be ‘slim’, ‘tall’, ‘smart’, and ‘well-built’. In comparison, men were predominantly described, rather than sought, as ‘slim’, ‘tall’, and ‘well-built’. In Urdu advertisements, matrimonials described or asked for proposals from khoobsurat (beautiful) girls, and the soorat (appearance) of both men and women was often referenced.Footnote ¹⁵³

A discerning viewer could use photographs to determine skin shade before agreeing to in-person meetings. Studio lightening helped to illuminate fairer complexions in photographs, but excessive light absorption could also pose problem for darker skins.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The systemization of skin shade in matrimonials also signalled the specific commodification of the female body. Fair skin was a highly prized attribute in matrimonials, expressed through overt references as well as a coded lexicon. Indices of colour and complexion included ‘fair’, ‘good’, ‘white’, and ‘wheatish’. Across the newspapers and periodicals, there was a huge gender disparity between the number of times women’s skin colour was listed as a preference and selling point compared to men. The proportionally high number of colour specifications in The Hindu was not unexpected in the context of South India.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Perceptions about the darker skin shades of South Indians, against their North Indian counterparts, were sustained by ethnographic colour assumptions and visual and textual caricatures and stereotypes.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Fairer skin, carrying cross-regional privilege, emboldened specific types of regional marital preferences in advertisements, increasing in frequency in the 1940s and 1950s. For instance, a South Indian Brahmin widower desired ‘a fair virgin widow’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ These cross-regional skin colour preferences have lingered, spreading to poorer groups in contemporary India. Reena Kukreja’s study of Hindus and Meo Muslims in Rajasthan, Bihar, Odisha, and West Bengal shows that colourism in cross-country marriage operates through sustaining casteist assumptions about darker skin tone as an identifier of low-caste status.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Fair complexion as an asset for men also began to appear in matrimonial columns, although considerably less frequently.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Skin colour did feature in marriage negotiations before the advent of matrimonial advertisements—many memoirs of women include (often passing) references to how skin colour affected marriage prospects. However, references to fairness permeated across the marriage market with the textual development and consolidation of the matrimonial and its standardized lexicon. Mazumdar’s bridal search for her brother-in-law reveals how physical attractiveness was often synonymous with fairer or lighter skin colour as well as how skin colour was measured against other attributes and competencies. She remarks that one ‘advertised maiden’ had beautiful manners, was clever, ‘had clear-cut features and a good figure, but alas was dark!’Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Mazumdar favoured this candidate as ‘possessing breeding’ but decided that her brother-in-law would ‘naturally prefer a fairer bride’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The girl’s skin colour, perceived as an undesirable physical trait, was the deciding factor, despite other valuable assets. The commodification sanctioned by photographs and physical requirements did not go uncriticized. Rochona Majumdar notes that writer Debendra Chandra Basu Mullick had lambasted Bengali matrimonials for treating men and women as objects to be bought because partners were now selected ‘after thoroughly scanning through a string of girls’ photographs’.Footnote ¹⁶² Nonetheless, by the late 1940s, fairness was consistently referenced as a desirable, value-laden attribute in the matrimonial schema.Footnote ¹⁶³

Shifting requirements and measuring ‘progressiveness’

Matrimonials also became incubators for a multitude of gendered behaviours which would later be assessed in interviews. Mazumdar remembers rejecting one prospective match due to her manners: ‘when she rose to salute us, she stood a couple of inches above—a disqualification for a younger sister-in-law’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Gendered behaviours and ideals of domesticity were framed as accomplishments—‘accomplished’ became a popular term in matrimonials from the interwar period. Other gendered terms included ‘cultured’, ‘modest’, ‘well-behaved’, and even ‘submissive’. These phrases were listed 886 times compared to 118 references for grooms who were described using terms like ‘ambitious’, ‘moral character’, and ‘good habits’. More importantly, men were required to have good, high, or bright prospects. Some matrimonials included lengthy lists of gendered behaviours alongside desired physical appearance: one advertisement stated that a prospective bride should be ‘educated, good-looking, appealing, beautiful, mannered and cultured, fair complexion, slim and delicate but healthy, of respectable family’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Matrimonial columns were discursive sites in which concerns about the consequences of social reforms on marital and familial structures were articulated. Some advert-placers sought ‘not Westernised’ and ‘home-loving’ women.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Anxieties around female visibility in public spaces percolated into matrimonials, provoking attempts to mould a specific modern and cultured sensibility: women were to be educated but simple, modern but modest, able to socialize outside their circle, but cultured and not Westernized. In Bengal, Majumdar identifies this new ideal of womanhood as intimately tied to a refashioned urban Hindu middle-class aesthetic.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Such aesthetics of idealized womanhood translated, in numerous ways, across the urban middle classes. These gendered, unequal requirements, increasingly proscriptive in mid-twentieth-century matrimonials, were another way in which a particular kind of female body was being constructed within Indian civic projects.

Many advertisements from the late 1930s also self-presented modes of ‘progressiveness’, suggesting emergent modern subjects based on male choice. Mazumdar commented on how youths were ‘choosing their own brides, at least having a look at the girls’ before decisions were made.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Self-selection or individual input held transformative capacity for the demands men could make in advertisements, some of which conformed to conflicting ideas about modernity and progress. Five key strategies were deployed to express ‘modern’ values and desires: English or foreign-returned descriptors; ‘progressive’ indicators; social capability signifiers; individualized traits and hobbies; and relocation choices. From the mid-twentieth century, associations with foreign education, domicile, and travel began to hold a greater premium in matrimonials, with grooms often citing future prospects abroad.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Even a decade or so earlier, such markers had worked in reverse: Mazumdar recounts that her brother was rejected by a landowner because orthodox Brahmin pandits raised objections against her father and brother having crossed the ‘kala pani’ (black water) to Europe.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Such an empirical shift from impediment to asset reflects an urbanizing society in flux, coming to terms with multiple modernity routes. One route to performing this urban modernity was achieved through appropriating an acquired loaded and coded lexicon that described seeking grooms and their preferred brides as reformed, cosmopolitan, liberal, advanced, and highly modern.Footnote ¹⁷¹ These trends suggest that matrimonials became ‘totems of status aspiration’ for middle classes across India.Footnote ¹⁷²

Western-educated grooms also began to expect spouses to socialize in certain public spaces which filtered into indicating social capability signifiers—some advertisements wanted a ‘society girl’ or a lady ‘fit to move in the highest society’. Families anticipated and responded to this trend by exhibiting female social prowess in interacting with Indian and English society.Footnote ¹⁷³ Alongside the cultivation of new womanhood(s) and ideals of marriageability, mid-twentieth-century matrimonials also gesture to some instances of female choice and mobility through references to relocation and professions. One 1931 advertisement in Hindustan Times delineates that an educated, modern bride ‘should be allowed to proceed with her husband to England for further education’ whereas another from Tribune in 1940 asks for ‘an accomplished match willing to go to Kenya’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Inclusions of ‘should be allowed to proceed’ and ‘willing to go’ suggest emergent notions of individualized choice—women and their families could at least articulate their preference for staying within communal and familial networks even if this was not the deciding factor in marital negotiations. Advertisements that indicated a family’s ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive social views’ while considering ‘virgin widows’ and ‘no dowry’ matches also appeared to confirm greater choice.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ However, such matrimonials often consolidated earlier parochial views of spousal selection in the sheer specificity of their requirements.

Ramifications of Partition

As one of the largest voluntary and forced migrations in human history, with around 14.5 million people migrating within four years, the 1947 Partition of Punjab and Bengal also impacted matchmaking.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In matrimonials from 1950, anxieties about matches in Punjab can be observed and newspaper advertising was a viable option for finding matches among Punjabis whose intraregional relationships had been disrupted due to relocation and Partition violence. Hindustan Times includes matrimonials from West Punjab refugee families and those indicating that ‘Punjabi refugee Brahmin girls’ would be considered.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Both Hindustan Times and Tribune featured more advertisements actively seeking or showing willingness to consider matches from refugee families, specifically refugee girls. Appeals to national duty in the ‘rehabilitation through marriage’ policy, which was pursued by the government as a solution to gender-based sexual violence, could explain the presence and preference for such matches.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Securing refugee brides without familial support networks also meant that it would be easier to assert control and extract labour from brides in the conjugal home. One advertisement specifically preferred a ‘displaced, deserted and stranded girl in unfortunate circumstances’.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Descriptions such as ‘displaced’, ‘poor’, or ‘refugee’ appeared alongside reassurances about the good health or healthy-looking appearances of refugee girls seeking matches. Visible health markers, as signifiers of reproductive capacity, thus, remained important.

Pakistani matches also occasionally appeared in columns, suggesting the malleability of cross-border matchmaking between India and Pakistan in the immediate post-Independence period before the imposition of stricter border regimes.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Some scholarship has explored the fates and mobilities of women in cross-border marriages across South Asia; however, further research on mid-twentieth-century cross-border matchmaking has yet to be undertaken.Footnote ¹⁸¹

Overall, across matrimonial columns between 1915 and 1950, marital negotiations involved articulating and competing for assets and competencies. The consolidation of the standardized matrimonial format was simultaneously informed by and impacted how marriage payments were brokered.

Debating dowries

Despite becoming the dominant form of monetary marriage exchange, dowry’s popularity as a vehicle for amassing capital from brides’ families did not go uncontested. Liberal and reformist journals had started to print critiques in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, specifically opposing egregious demands. In 1914, the story of Snehalata Mukhophadyay was oft-repeated in and beyond Bengal, and, subsequently, across historical scholarship.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Snehalata, from a poor Brahmin family in north Calcutta, committed suicide because her parents could not afford the excessive dowry requested. In her memoir, Mazumdar describes another case of a personal acquaintance, Suri, who was the eldest of five daughters. She was an ‘eligible in every respect’ but had no dowry and suffered ‘tongues wagg[ing] about her family keeping her unwed. Eventually her father mortgaged their home, and the ensuing financial constraints caused domestic tensions that led Suri to soak her sari in kerosene and ‘set herself on fire’.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Snehalata’s and Suri’s tragic deaths were two of many reported dowry-related suicides. Not all commentary was sympathetic—Snehalata was variously cast as immoral and a ‘new woman’.Footnote ²⁰⁶ However, much printed literature beseeched the public to learn from the violent sacrifices of Snehalata and other dowry suicides.Footnote ²⁰⁷

Many female-authored articles in the interwar period also condemned dowry expectations. Notably, they were responding to an uptick in conservative opinion. Some used Snehalata’s death to condemn dowry as a modern commercialized innovation in order to advocate for earlier marriages,Footnote ²⁰⁸ whereas others used her death to reframe girls as a ‘burden’, advocating for inheritance rights for women.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Social worker and teacher Charushila Mitra (1882–1979) and teacher and reformer Kamini Roy (1864–1933) both foregrounded the extractive function of dowry in Bengali women’s periodicals. Writing in Bamabodhini Patrika, Mitra called for ‘an immediate end to undesirable customs’ such as child marriage and dowry because they jeopardized the nation, while in Bangalakshmi, Roy argued that eradicating dowry was the last to be tackled in the triad linking child marriage, joint family, and dowry.Footnote ²¹⁰ Both argue that the sacrament of marriage had ‘become a commodity acquired through monetary exchange’ likening the buying and selling of grooms to a ‘slave market’. Footnote ²¹¹ Mitra’s analysis got to the heart of the financial hardships faced by girls’ families: ‘everyone has to bear the burden of a daughter’s marriage, but all seem to forget this while extracting huge amounts with proper interest as dowry from the bride’s family’.Footnote ²¹²

Reformist pieces also castigated how dowry arbitrations centred around obtaining prized attributes and circumventing negatively perceived traits in the early twentieth-century market of marriage. In the Tamil women’s magazine Pen Kalvi (Female Education), examined by Sreenivas, one cartoon from 1914 depicts dowry demands on the turbans of diploma-wielding grooms and is captioned: ‘Look here! Our Sons have earned F.A. and B.A. degrees … If you give us the money written on their turbans, we will have our sons marry your daughters’.Footnote ²¹³ Although Snehalata is not specifically mentioned in the cartoon, it depicts girls committing suicide via different methods. A key strategy for reformist writers was to centre the role of education in changing views on dowries, precisely because both female and male education were covetable assets on the marital marketplace. In ‘Amader Samaj’, Mitra asked: ‘[is] the sole aim of a son’s education and his university degree to make him a better commodity in the marriage market?’.Footnote ²¹⁴ Similarly, Roy stated that ‘nowadays, the amount of dowry varies according to the educational qualifications of the groom. A graduate would demand higher dowry than a matriculate’, imploring young men to ‘eradicate such customs’.Footnote ²¹⁵ Both cite prospective grooms’ education level as positively correlating with requested dowry amounts, suggesting how the relational value of education had been commodified in dowry negotiations (often against the physical appearance and skin colour of brides).

Others were more critical of gendered hierarchies within monetary marriage exchanges. Mazumdar discusses how choice and merit should be the deciding factors of both marital decisions and dowry amounts. She recalls her grandmother breaking off a good match for a female family member because the bridegroom’s party had demanded a dowry. Her family insisted that the girl will be wed on her ‘own merits’ taking the ‘gifts we choose’ with her.Footnote ²¹⁶ Gifts were ceremonially exchanged by both families among kayasthas.Footnote ²¹⁷ Her grandmother, taking offence at ‘outrageous tactics to exhort money’, also remonstrated that ‘never have we taken or given money in marriages. These people must be chamars.’Footnote ²¹⁸ Designating dowry demands as a low-caste practice, rather than solely bride-price, reflects reformist opinion on the financial implications of dowry extortion. In fact, like Mazumdar’s grandmother, some commentary specifically tapped into casteist aspersions to show how brides and their families suffered from the exploitative nature of culturally sanctioned gift-giving. In one monthly, Sarajubala Basu lamented on the life of the daughter-in-law who is abused by her in-laws: ‘You, daughter of a low-caste person! Daughter of a chamar! Does my B.A. pass son deserve such low-grade gifts?’Footnote ²¹⁹ Mazumdar’s family’s condemnation of the dowry system may reconcile with the prevailing opinions of the period but also speaks to the unstable nature of monetary marriage exchange whereby only well-off families were able to eschew unreasonable demands.

Simultaneously, however, the implication that a girl should be taken on her ‘own merits’ evinces how valuable traits, as quantifiable assets, could offset dowry demands. The discourse of ‘merits’ as capital fed into the broader language of the marriage market, specifically around female education in the mid-twentieth century. In a 1942 article entitled ‘Give Your Daughter a “Mental Dowry”’ in The Illustrated Weekly of India, the anonymous author compares a dowry of educational assets to a banking account, asking would not a ‘mental savings bank account’ be more useful to a girl? Co-opting the language of material dowry, the author advises parents to build an educational ‘reservoir’ for daughters that would ‘increase of its own accord’. Aligning education with the transactional terminology of the commercialized marriage market, the writer signals the growing currency of female, as opposed to male, education as worthwhile in preparation for a ‘new world that is to come’—a post-war and even a post-colonial world.Footnote ²²⁰

Dowry-signalling and gift-giving

Dowry demands and amounts commonly featured in matrimonials from the 1920s, re-emerging in distinct ways as the format became popular. Critiques of excessive dowries, which had been exacerbated by the commodification of the marriage market, exposed the greed that underpinned many matchmaking endeavours but also produced other trends. Cross-regionally, advertisements from the 1930s and 1940s explicitly sought ‘suitable non-greedy matches’ and refused ‘dowry hunters’ and ‘dowry-seekers’, suggesting a middle-class cognizance of the nascent distaste of monetary-based matchmaking.Footnote ²²¹ Many advertisements, particularly in Tribune, preferred Arya Samajist matches which purported to eschewed dowries.Footnote ²²² However, as Mazumdar’s grandmother’s casteist gripe (above) shows, dowry, as a means of accruing capital, remained tightly bound to performing and articulating class and caste. Seeking families asserted dowries as non-requirements—articulated as ‘immaterial’ or ‘no bridegroom price’—while concurrently highlighting the financial capabilities of suitors.Footnote ²²³ The notable exception were matrimonials placed in the Calcutta-based Amrita Bazar Patrika which continued to list decent dowries or overtly request dowries without spelling out exact amounts in order to maintain bargaining power.Footnote ²²⁴ These demands were consistent with Amrita Bazar Patrika’s broader position on dowry. In the wake of Snehalata’s death in 1914, an editorial in the newspaper had expressed concern that taking anti-dowry vows may lead Hindu boys to disobey their parents and girls to choosing their own husbands.Footnote ²²⁵ Although the matrimonials in Amrita Bazar Patrika appear to be the exception, it reminds us of specific regional dynamics whereby, as Sumit Sarkar puts it, ‘age, gender, and caste hierarchies were all felt to be under threat’.Footnote ²²⁶

In other newspapers across urban India, dowry disavowals were often accompanied by new forms of what I call ‘dowry-signalling’. ‘Dowry-signalling’ refers to the ways in which advert-placers requested payments for marriage through the exchange of other capital, gifts, and material goods without explicating ‘dowry’. As noted above, stating incomes as well as the financial capabilities of brides’ families and grooms’ individual and familial wealth tacitly signalled the kinds of matches that should apply. Photography, as a popular visualizing technology of the middle class, again played a constitutive role in commodifying matchmaking. By the late 1870s, wedding photographs of the conjugal couple were popular. From the 1930s, it became fashionable to feature wedding photographs of newlyweds and society weddings in newspapers. In The Illustrated Weekly of India alone, whole pages were dedicated to making public marriage announcements under headings such as ‘Weddings and Personalities’ and ‘Wedding Bells’.Footnote ²²⁷ These dedicated pages would delineate the professional backgrounds of Indian and English couples. While acting as records of who ‘constituted’ family,Footnote ²²⁸ exhibiting wedding photographs illustrated wealth and dowry-signalled for future matches. As Caty Doty writes of mid-nineteenth-century New York society, wedding announcements in society pages were used to ‘publicly signal where their money was going and what their priorities were’.Footnote ²²⁹ As a globalizing phenomenon, public declarations of marriages, thus, sustained cross-regional class and caste status by signalling conjugal capital flows.

Families pursued alternative dowry routes in matrimonials by employing coded vocabularies. Hindustan Times featured matrimonials that requested dowries in the form of financial support that would support male ambition—one advert solicited responses from ‘only those willing to bear the expenses of his foreign studies or to arrange to settle him in life’.Footnote ²³⁰ Others assured financial incentives such as providing prospective sons-in-law with employment and funnelling economic resources towards training grooms.Footnote ²³¹ Numerous advertisements also declared that the groom was to go abroad for higher education, implicitly signalling an expectation of sponsorship from the prospective bride’s family.Footnote ²³² Occasionally, groom-seeking matrimonials would also advertise female economic independence.Footnote ²³³ For many Muslim matches, dowries continued to coalesce with mahr and the wealth of both parties were routinely included in matrimonials.

Dowry-signalling was also incorporated into cultural gifting. Gift-giving as a rite that legitimizes and recognizes a marriage is an important, almost universal, practice.Footnote ²³⁴ Among Hindus, stridhan, a form of property under women’s control, often came in the form of jewellery. Jewellery is a customary source of female wealth across many South Asian cultures. References to cash, jewels, and familial wealth were used as methods of dowry-signalling, most strikingly in the post-Independence period.Footnote ²³⁵ These gift-giving rituals were not new but reinscribed older practices.Footnote ²³⁶ Daaj and Khat (Punjabi) or jahez (Urdu) forms of dowry, as well as the trousseaus, initiated a lifelong flow of gifts from the bride-giving family to the receiving one, involving marriage payments as well as household furniture, jewels, clothes, kitchen utensils, and cattle.Footnote ²³⁷ In Maharashtra, the custom of hunda (dowry) and an expectation of gifts from the bride’s family remained an unquestioned practice.Footnote ²³⁸

Numerous states had attempted to curb excessive dowry demands by enacting legislation, including the Bihar Dowry Restraint Act 1950, Andhra Pradesh Dowry Act 1958, and Jammu and Kashmir Dowry Prohibition Act 1960. After Independence, debates around dowry, alongside women’s rights to property and divorce, took place within deliberations on the Hindu Code Bills.Footnote ²³⁹ However, a nationwide Dowry Prohibition Act (DPA) criminalizing dowry demands was not codified into Indian law until 1961.Footnote ²⁴⁰ So how do we account for nascent dowry-signalling before dowry criminalization and beyond the impact of reformist critiques and piecemeal state legislative efforts? The answer may lie in the commoditization of marriage itself. Rather than dowries falling out of fashion, dowry was reframed as enumerable assets and subsumed into a self-conscious language of dowry-signalling that appealed to, often nominal, indicators of progressiveness and modernity. In doing so, enumeration mirrored other commercialization trends such as specifically delineating aesthetic preferences, accomplished behaviours, and educational markers.

Crucially, as politician Pandurangi Kodanda Rao noted, the DPA only dealt with ‘consequences and not the cause’, arguing that it did not ‘help to find husbands without it’.Footnote ²⁴¹ Rao also asserted that dowry as a voluntary gift was acceptable but its exaction was ‘anti-social’.Footnote ²⁴² Section 3(2) of the DPA delineated penalties for giving and taking dowries but permitted customary gifts to be received by both parties at the time of the marriage.Footnote ²⁴³ Here was the sticky point in legislating against dowry and subsequent dowry-signalling. Distinguishing voluntary or customary gifts from dowry demands and expectations was a nebulous endeavour, impacting how the enaction of the DPA could contribute to the persistence of unequal monetary marriage exchange.

Gift-giving was also sustained into the late twentieth century, despite the DPA and related enactments. In 1983, a new offence was added the Indian Penal Code of 1860 as the Criminal Law (Second Amendment) Act (CLA) which criminalized wilful cruel conduct of husbands and their families towards wives. The Section 498A definition of cruelty as ‘harassment’ included coercion and unlawful demands for ‘any property or valuable security or is on account of failure by her or any person related to her to meet such demand’.Footnote ²⁴⁴ This came to be referred to as the ‘dowry law’ and cases were filed under the CLA, over the DPA, because it was easier to prosecute for dowry-related crimes than against domestic violence or to seek divorce.Footnote ²⁴⁵ This was followed by a DPA amendment in 1984 which widened monetary marriage payments to include anything given ‘in connection with the marriage’ but still left room for presents given in a non-excessive and ‘customary manner’.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Despite subsequent amendments to the DPA, dowry demands were still difficult to verify. This was partly because, as Robin Wyatt and Nazia Masood note, it did not account for how stridhan traditions coalesced with modern-day marriage transactions.Footnote ²⁴⁷

Deficiencies in legislating against payments for marriage mirrored many of the contradictions that defined the colonial legal-juridical regulation of marriage. In the nineteenth century, colonial state actors had struggled with rigidly defining and circumscribing meanings of marriage, customary rights, and related legislation.Footnote ²⁴⁸ After Independence, the Indian state struggled with defining monetary marriage payments and legislating against what was considered dowry. Specifically, within the DPA and CLA, it was difficult to define exactly what constituted a customary or voluntary gift and if it was given willingly at any time. As Wyatt and Masood’s study of dowry in contemporary India shows, the role of ‘gifts’ often came to be seen as covertly demanded dowry at the point of marital breakdown.Footnote ²⁴⁹

In the 1980s, the expectations of lifelong giving and subsequent violence during the course of marriage posited a linguistic shift in public discourse from ‘dowry suicides’ to ‘dowry deaths’.Footnote ²⁵⁰ The Dowry Prohibition Amendment Act of 1986, honing legislation further, included a section that banned advertisements of dowry.Footnote ²⁵¹ However, with economic liberalization and intensifying neoliberal reforms, acceptable dowries in the form of luxury goods and jewellery continue to appear in contemporary matrimonials, while dowry as capital accumulation has become a poverty-alleviation strategy among poorer and marginalized groups.Footnote ²⁵² The lifelong aspect of gift-giving as a means of accruing capital, thus, was entrenched by modern matrimonial culture in late colonial India and continues to reinforce gender inequalities within marriages across South Asia and its diasporas, comprising forms of domestic violence and even femicide.Footnote ²⁵³