Can a society truly claim to oppose dowry while continuing to treat marriage as an unquestionable marker of respectability? What would it mean to respond to dowry deaths not only with outrage, but with the courage to imagine different ways of living, loving, and belonging?

It is always the extreme forms of violence that unsettle the public conscience. Images circulate, testimonies emerge, anger intensifies, and demands for justice grow louder. For a few days, grief appears collective. Yet, almost as predictably, the moment passes. The spectacle of outrage fades, while the social world that produces such violence remains remarkably intact and even glorified. Marriage continues to be celebrated as aspiration, security, prestige, and inevitability, even as the economic transactions surrounding it remain deeply normalised.

Dowry may be publicly disavowed in principle, yet it is routinely reframed through the language of “gifts”, status, family honour, or the assumption that a man, as the economic provider, is entitled to compensation.

Weddings continue to function as performances of social worth, where financial display is not merely tolerated but admired. Conversations around daughters still carry the language of burden, settlement, and responsibility, revealing how deeply marriage remains tied to economic and social anxieties. In such a context, violence within marriages cannot be understood as an aberration alone;........

© Indian Express