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A Democratic Bazaar: Dowry Deaths in India

Vaidehi Joshi

Extended Essay

October 9, 2007

Word Count: 3835

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Abstract

Within the past two decades, various humanitarian and human rights organizations have brought forth the issue of dowry deaths or so-called bride-burnings in India. A modern-day societal practice that the global community is just now learning about actually began with the antiquated practice of dowry, which began thousands of years ago. The issue is a highly controversial one as the practice of dowry has been blamed for female infanticide and the increasing gender gap in present-day India. Dowry is also highly debated because many believe that its original intentions were not evil, but instead that various social pressures caused it to morph into a violent practice. This paper seeks to investigate what caused the dowry system to have survived in modern day India?

The paper begins by introducing the dowry as a gift or as compensation. It continues to examine the main societal impacts on ancient Indian society, analyzing the influence of the ancient text of Manu, precolonial, post-Aryan, and post-British thought. The second part of the paper focuses on the evolution of dowry from its establishment to its modern day practice of bride burnings, emphasizing the influence of the British on India as well as the effect of consumerism and materialism on present-day Indian society. The paper continues to analyze the role dowry plays in India today, and attempts to measure its current effects and implications on the country and its people. Finally, the paper seeks possible solutions to the issue presenting the idea that both legal and social change must occur in order to improve the current situation.

The paper acknowledges that while the intentions of dowry do not seem to be violent, consumerism allowed the dowry system to evolve into a form of social extortion, causingthousands of deaths and profoundly impacting the country and her people.

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Table of Contents

I. Introduction 4

II. Dowry Origins 4

III. Dowry Death Evolution 10

IV. Dowry Death Today 15

V. Dowry Death Solutions 17

VI. Conclusion 17

VII. Works Cited 19

VIII. Annotated Bibliography 20

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I. Introduction

A country dedicated to non-violence and vegetarianism, India has been known as one

of the more peaceful civilizations of our time. Yet within this seemingly calm society

lurks an underlying social malady unknown to many people around the world today,

despite the fact that it affects thousands of Hindu women every year. Dowry is not

only responsible for several thousands of bride deaths per year, but also for female

infanticide and the increasingly large gender imbalance in India today. Yet what has

caused the dowry system to have survived in modern day India?

II. Dowry Origins

Based in religion, dowry has morphed into a modern day practice. While the actual

dates of origin are unknown, the first recorded case of a dowry death occurred in

1979. It is likely, however, that bride burnings occurred frequently before this case, as

it was only in the 1970s that human rights organizations began to expose this practice

(Joseph & Sharma, 34). Primary sources are often lacking because people are

unwilling to talk about dowries.

The origin of dowry and its purpose are currently in conflict, contributing to its

perversion. There is no universal agreement as to the intent of dowries because such a

statement would have influenced dowry practice in the 20th century. One school of

thought contends that dowry’s purpose was a form of gift-giving, while another

supports the view that it is a form of payment.

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Dowry has been recognized as “female property…largely confined to movables”

(Goody & Tambiah, 68). Urmila Sharma, author of various essays and books on

political thought, says “dowry…is regarded as a form of pre mortem inheritance

which women receive when they leave the parental home at marriage. Sons…receive

the immovable property…daughters traditionally did not inherit land” (69). Veena

Talwar Oldenburg, author of Dowry Murder found dowry “an index of the

appreciation bestowed upon a daughter in her natal village, and the ostensible

measure of her status in her conjugal village” adding, “in the absence of demands

from the groom’s family, a bride’s dowry is reckoned as purely voluntary” (9).

Opposing this view, Sharma argues that “dowry compensates the groom’s family for

the addition of a depended non-productive member” (67). Sharma asserts that dowry

goods is “wealth that goes with women. Women are the vehicles by which it is

transmitted rather than its owners”, and adds that this idea is “contrary to the

dominant ideology and the terminology of traditional Hindu law” (70). She adds, “the

Hindu bride’s dowry…will not…bring her economic power” (66). Thus, it seems

from this viewpoint, the wealth is far more central than the woman herself, and “her

worth…is measured by the gifts she brings with her. In this exchange of goods

between two households, the woman is almost incidental” (Ammu & Sharma, 33-34).

With two different views on dowry, it is difficult to determine whether “a secure

future” or “a transfer of responsibility of the girl” is bought/sold between families

(Minturn, 328).

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A major issue concerning the origin of dowry is that “there was and is no single body

of traditional Hindu law”, making it difficult to trace back the intentions of this social

practice (Goody & Tambiah, 74). The Law Code of Manu, a basic law code for

Brahmin men, is the most viable sacred text used to pinpoint the origins of dowry. It

has been heavily criticized by feminists for its content pertaining to women. The text

implies that women have only one rite: marriage. It states, “a wife, a son, and a slave,

these three are declared to have no property. The wealth which they earn is acquired

for him to whom they belong” (The Law Code of Manu, VIII: 416). While feminists

find this degrading to women, Oldenburg disagrees stating, “in his [Manu’s] eyes, a

woman’s right to own, control, and dispose of her own wealth, given to her by her

family and her husband or his family, was unarguable. Her husband had neither

control over nor the right to inherit this wealth if she predeceased him” (20). Another

law states, “In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her

husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent”

(The Law Code of Manu, V: 148). Oldenburg disputes this statement as well arguing,

“there is no confusion if we understand that Manu was referring to the sexual and not

economic control of women, though it has been misinterpreted by those who wish to

prove that women are not permitted control over their own wealth”, implying that the

meaning could have been misinterpreted to create a social view that was not Manu’s

intention (20). Other textual evidence supports respect of women stating, “no father

who knows [the law] must take even the smallest gratuity for his daughter”, implying

that the woman ought not to be treated as a form of transferable property (The Law

Code of Manu, III: 51). It continues to state, “when relatives foolishly live off a

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woman’s wealth…those evil men will descend along the downward course” implying

that men should not to use the woman’s property brought into the marriage (The Law

Code of Manu, III: 52). This excerpt can be applied to dowries as the text dismisses

the manipulation and extortion of women’s property as seen in modern Indian society

and condemns any man who misuses a woman and her property. Manu adds that “if

they desire an abundance of good fortune, fathers…husbands…should revere their

women”, dismissing any form of violence towards women and instead supporting the

respect of women.

Dowry was not always seen as a major topic of discussion and until this century, was

not a precursor of violence and domestic abuse. Today however, The Indian National

Crime Bureau attributes 6,787 deaths to dowries in the year 2005 (Chapter 3: Violent

Crimes). This practice has pervaded Hindu society since before the time of the British

Raj, who ruled the subcontinent from 1858 until India’s independence in 1947.

Urmila Sharma states, “traditionally, dowry in India was regarded as a burden for the

bride’s parents but an honour for the bride” (62) and even before the time of the Raj,

“marriage was the time for which women aggressively saved and invested”

(Oldenburg, 86).

Oldenburg finds that “in precolonial India, dowry was not a ‘problem’ but a support

for women: a mark of their social status and a safety net” (4). Dowries did not cause a

great deal of apprehension and “only uncustomary demands” would turn “a

daughter’s wedding, the most anticipated event in a parent’s life, into a nightmare”

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(90). Instead of a practice filled with anxiety and dread, “the practice of dowry was

bound by rules of honor and mutual respect between bridetakers and bridegivers in

the Punjab of the 1850s” (Oldenburg, 76). There were few cases of angry father-in-

laws demanding more money from the bride’s family; instead, “where however little

or much the bride’s father had to offer, the groom’s father was ‘honor bound to

accept’ it” (Oldenburg, 75). When the citizens of the towns Dharmnagri and Jhakri

were asked about dowries, they said that “in the ‘old days’…parents simply gave

what they could afford and their daughter’s in-laws would accept it without question”

(Jeffery & Jeffery, 69).

But according to Oldenburg, dowries are not “the cause of the increase in violence

against women, whether in the form of female infanticide or today’s ‘bride burning’”

(4). Instead, she believes that the increased emphasis on dowry and ensuing bride

burnings were caused by the “profound loss of women’s economic power and social

worth” which Oldenburg argues occurred during the colonial period of British

colonization as “a direct consequence of the radical creation of property rights in

land” (3).

The dowry phenomenon has also been attributed to the fact that “women rarely

receive a fair share of their parental property even when they have legal rights to

inheritance” (Joseph & Sharma, 34). Oldenburg adds to this idea by stating “the

modern notion of property that underlies the present-day pathology of dowry owes its

origin to the exclusion of women from property rights in land as fashioned by the

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British” (8). She went one step further to state that the Aryan influence had deep roots

in shaping Hindu society and social practices. She found dowry in northern India

(largely influenced by Aryans) rather different compared to dowry in southern India

(less influenced by Aryans). In comparing north and south India she states, “both

share the custom of dowry, but the south seems to be less prone to the pathological

strain of the north, where the custom of virilocal marriages (that is, the bride leaves

her own home to live in the household of her husband) cuts across caste and class

lines” (8-9), adding that “the non-Aryan wife is said to have had greater rights in the

property of the marriage, e.g. half share of the corpus on divorce or her husband’s

death” (90). In contrast with the south, northern Indian weddings had the bride’s

family giving a larger portion of dowry because it was there that “hypergamous

tendencies prevail” and the unevenness in monetary payments helped “buttress the

status superiority of the wife-takers over the wife-givers” (95). She also adds that

while the bride’s family seemingly ‘gives away’ their daughter the bride, they are also

barred from various family events and are not allowed to participate in many social

customs with the wife-receivers, or the groom’s family. She concludes that “north

India presents us with the paradoxical situation that the wife-givers are persistent gift-

givers and lavish hosts” but are “excluded from intimate social contact with the

receivers, as that would smack of equality” (97). From these findings, the Aryan

influence can be deduced to a factor causing the social viewpoint that placed one

group (the wife-takers) severely above the other group (the wife-givers), causing an

enormous shift in equality between the two groups.

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Thus, the original intentions of dowry are quite varied. Manu’s text provides us with

examples of how dowry was at first founded, and social pressures explain how it

evolved into a “pre-mortem inheritance” which “remained legally and formally in her

[the bride’s] possession” (Goody & Tambiah, 64). The arrival of the Aryans and

British explain the evolution of the female inheritance into a form of measuring social

status and wealth. Yet from this, we are left to wonder as to how “a strongly spun

safety net” was “twisted into a deadly noose” of bride burning (Oldenburg, 10).

III. Dowry Evolution

After examining the origins of the practice of dowry, it is necessary to search for the

social pressures that caused it to morph into a violent practice of bride burning via “a

cultural ethos in which brides can be viewed as objects to be passed from one social

group to another, both as a means for the procreation of children and as vehicles for

aspirations to social prestige” (Sharma, 73). With the arrival of the British East India

Company in 1600 and the eventual reign of Britain in India, “imperial policies created

a more ‘masculine’ economy and deepened the preference for sons that fostered the

overt or hidden murder of girls. The establishment of property rights for peasants,

inflexible tax demands and collection regimens, and a host of other imperial measures

prepared the ground for worsening gender inequality which, in turn, increased the

vulnerability of women to violence in both their natal and marital homes”

(Oldenburg, 4). While Oldenburg supports the idea that imperialist pressures were

responsible for causing dowry to turn violent, she also believes that “the subtext is

about sexuality” and states “to this we must add the growing dominance of material

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values in a burgeoning middle class of some two hundred and fifty million people, in

which the multivalences of gender in Indian society have been overlaid by the binary

construction of the first and second sex in the colonial value system” (225). In other

words, Oldenburg believes that a new set of values set in by the colonialists changed

the way Indian society viewed the two genders, ensuing in one being regarded as

‘better’ than the other. She affirms that prosperity in India changed everything; with

an increase in wealth, women were no longer needed to work in the fields, allowing

them to focus their time on the home. The result was that “compensation or dowry

had to be paid”, as the worth of women which was once measured in labor was now

seen in the form of money (Oldenburg, 24). She adds that “Cash and property began

to play an increasing role in the composition of dowries as land became a marketable

commodity in the colonial period and its value rose exponentially. The practical

concern of families was to insure for each of their daughters a husband from a

comparable family” (10). She continues, “As large chunks of the subcontinent fell

under the domination of the colonial government, a revolution in property rights

transformed the social and economic world of the peasant. The introduction of the

idea of land as a commodity…gave men precise, titular ownership…the customary

rights of women were the heaviest casualties of this transformation of a peasant

economy into and unevenly modern and capitalistic one” (20-21). As seen from her

research, a new interest in property ownership evolved as land became more and

more valuable; thus, property became very precious, and as men were the only ones

who were allowed to have property, women lost their foothold and rights in society.

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In the past century, consumerism added to the growth of dowry demands. This

consumer culture combined with “the availability of larger disposable incomes

amongst the middle class” caused an economic boom which explains why “the

wealthiest groups have the most to gain from the custom of giving large dowries”

(Joseph & Sharma, 34). It was also responsible for moving “dowry wealth up the

status hierarchy” which eventually led to various other crimes against women, such as

female infanticide and sati (the self-immolation of a widow); these customs continue

“among wealthy families who would be most able to support daughters and widows if

it were not for the dowry drain” (Minturn, 130). Commercialized agriculture also

played a role as “Children’s survival chances…improved dramatically”. As

consumerism entered rural areas, dowry demands increased and “Parents

felt…enmeshed in an increasingly competitive and materialistic marriage market in

which the stakes were constantly shifting” (Jeffery & Jeffery, 69). The cause of

corruption in the marriage marked is difficult to isolate; rather, there appear to be

several contributing factors. Oldenburg explains, “The colonial finger pointed at

Hindu culture, whereas present-day Indian activists and media blamed

Westernization, which increased materialism, greed, and a desire for consumer goods,

and commercialized human relationships” (5). Added to this was a spell of

depreciation of women as “status now translated into material wealth” (Oldenburg,

179). Quoting Rai Bahadur Bose, Oldenburg found that the devaluing of women

“appeared to be rooted in the ‘predominating but erroneous idea of women being

inferior to men [which] indirectly helps this evil practice [dowry] to continue in our

society, by undervaluing the worth of our girls in the marriage market’” (179).

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Yet Urmila Sharma contends that the increase of dowry demands was due to “the

large scale injection of cash into isolated hill areas after the First World War” (72).

Further, she asserts that “the relaxation of ritual and social barriers to marriage”

removed various restrictions from women allowing dowry property to “provide a

qualification for women to marry upwards into high status families” (72). This theory

explains why dowries were in far worse condition in northern India, as the south was

known for strict marriage restrictions. Sharma explains that “the erosion of some

caste restrictions which we find in certain urban classes has really had the effect of

introducing hypergamous competition among women in groups where it did not exist

before…based more on socio-economic factors than ritual aristocracy. With this

loosening…of conventional restrictions on marriage, dowry becomes more and

more…the criterion by which one respectable girl…is deemed more desirable than

another” (72). Dowry demands have evolved into a form of assumed concession;

Sharma adds that when arranging a marriage even today, “negotiations are conducted

on the assumption that the groom’s family’s expectations and the bride’s family’s

capacity to give will be roughly matched” (64). Most women do not seem to argue for

control of their marriage or of their own property, and as Sharma found, a woman

who “claimed her share of land would seem greedy” (69). In addition, “the dowry

brought in by a bride…was no longer preserved as a woman’s exclusive wealth” but

was instead used by the husband’s family (Oldenburg, 180). Women had not only lost

their value and rights, but they had also lost control over their own lives and property.

Sharma reveals that brides have “little control over the way in which dowry is given

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and received. As they become older they participate…as receivers and redistributors

of dowry” (63). She continues to say that “a certain amount of status can be ‘bought’

by a girl of undistinguished family who marries into a better family by means of a

large dowry” (64). Women in rural villages in India have “realized that daughters are

more expensive now than they were in previous generations…daughters put new

burdens on the family finances, which in turn added to the importance of incoming

dowry wealth” (Minturn, 327).

The mindset of Indian society has greatly evolved from the 16th century that one

village woman commented, “People these days don’t want a bride. They want

wealth.” (Jeffery & Jeffery, 72). Oldenburg suggests that “the potential for the custom

[dowry] to be converted into blackmail or extortion had increased in an increasingly

male-dominated world” (171). Today, the situation as described by one village

woman is that “those who cannot afford to give big dowry to their daughters do not

get proper treatment…if the dowry is not big, even those girls who are beautiful,

educated, and talented are sometimes sent back by their in-laws and are never taken

back, or they murder her and tell people that she either committed a suicide or died

accidentally of fever or during childbirth or caught fire in the kitchen, etc.” (Minturn,

122). Even the reporters covering this topic have found that “what emerges as crucial

from this scrutiny of deaths by burning is a total lack of a woman’s status in her

husband’s family or in her own, in the eyes of law or in the eyes of society” (Joseph

& Sharma, 36).

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IV. Dowry Death Today

Today, dowry has “come to be regarded as [an accepted] social evil by Hindus

themselves…which no-one knows how to stop. Parents who bewail the need to

accumulate dowry for…daughters are unlikely to…refuse it when …their son

[marries]” (Sharma, 71). Indians are aware about the implications of this social

practice, and so are many others; “British colonialists stressed its cultural roots in a

benighted Hinduism with its rigid caste system; Marxists see it as a retrograde

economic institution; and feminists see gender discrimination in it because women

are given dowries but not a fair share in family property” (Oldenburg, 8). Even

Gandhi “denounced the ‘evil custom’ regularly” and “advocated that women

wait…until they found groom who would not demand gifts” (Oldenburg, 8). Parents

“lamented the evils of dowry and asserted that the Indian government should ban it.

Yet there is legislation ostensibly intended to do just that: The Dowry Prohibition Act

was passed in 1961 and an Anti-Dowry Amendment Act in 1984” (Jeffery & Jeffery,

69). It is argued that “the protective legislation passed for the benefit of women was

aimed at protecting them from the presumed ill effects of their own cultural practices;

it did little with respect to the ravages of new economic policies” (Oldenburg, 4).

There were some improvements; “Indian social reformers took a broadly similar view

and, after Independence, laws were passed officially restricting marriage expenditure.

But like…other well-intentioned legislation, these laws have not been

enforced…many…are not aware that they exist” (Sharma, 71).

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Dowry has not vanished. Although people often criticize the practice, it is

“inconceivable not to try to give one [a dowry]” (Jeffery & Jeffery, 70). Perhaps the

problem lies in the fact that most women do not have another choice; the only way to

get a good husband and live comfortably is to comply to the demands of the groom’s

family – often the only way to avoid domestic violence as well. The majority of

Indian women practice dowry even though many do not support it; another issue

involved in this is that dowry is very hard to ban (Minturn, 326). One woman stated

that “Dowry cannot be stopped. Those who want to will give stealthily” (Minturn,

121). One would think that education would help stop this practice, but this often is

not the case; “although the desire for upward mobility has encouraged them [the

middle class] to educate their women, a supposedly liberal education has not shaken

deeply internalized beliefs about the status of the woman within the household”

(Joseph & Sharma, 34). On the contrary, “middle-class girls themselves…are

encouraging these changes, since they take up…jobs to ‘earn their dowry’”

(Oldenburg, 36). “Young women themselves are complicit in making their dowries

bigger and fatter” (Oldenburg, 36) says Sharma, adding that “property divides women

among themselves” (73).

The implications of an entire country for the most part accepting this practice is “seen

as the prime, if no the sole, explanation for two other practices…the fatal neglect of

female infants and the selective abortion of female fetuses” (Oldenburg, 3). In the

various communities and regions that dowries are prevalent, there have also been

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“adverse sex ratios” as well (Oldenburg, 22). In 2001, UNICEF reported that for

every 1000 boys in India there were only 927 girls (Gupta).

V. Dowry Death Solutions

Change can happen through a transformation of India’s laws and/or social attitudes.

Legal changes includes the return of dowry goods to women in case of divorce or

death and granting women a solid form of inheritance. Social change could be

enforced by the free choice of a marital partner, regardless of caste, without dowry.

Some suggest a social viewpoint that ought to be implemented is the idea of a

daughter as permanent resident of her natal home (Oldenburg, 224) or the elimination

of the arranged marriage system (Oldenburg, 181). An important realization however,

is that “it will be difficult to do anything unless women cease to be divided amongst

themselves” as dowry-givers and dowry-takers. Until women “cannot realize

common cause as women…their interests appear forever divided” (Sharma, 72).

VI. Conclusion

Over the course of thousands of years of history, different imperial powers and social

influences have shaped modern-day Indian society. Changing views of women

occurred with a final culmination into a society driven by consumerism and

materialism. This blend created a mindset that linked status with wealth; thus the

dowry that was once justified and used as a form of security and inheritance for

beloved daughters morphed into a form of advancing social status via wealth. A

society that once respected women now devalues and uses them as vehicles of wealth.

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The country which once practiced non-violence now is responsible for thousands of

bride deaths a year, all of which are responsible for various other social ills today.

The most all-encompassing solution presented is that due to a preexisting idealization

of social status, the introduction of consumerism, materialism, and industrialization

caused a new mindset to envelop the Indian Hindu society, thus linking status and

wealth, causing the dowry that was used as financial security for the bride to be

converted into a vehicle of social status which has now evolved into a form of social

extortion. This allowed not only thousands of deaths in the name of dowry to occur in

India each year, but also culminated in the practice of female infanticide, creating an

extreme gender gap in the world’s second largest country. Perhaps the most

irreversible aspect of this practice however, is profound impact that it left on India’s

societal mindset and its treatment of women throughout the course of 5,000 years.

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Works Cited

1. "Chapter 3: Violent Crimes." Crime In India - 2005. 04 Aug 2006. National Crime Records Bureau. 8 Oct 2007 <http://ncrb.nic.in/crime2005/cii 2005/CHAP3.pdf>.

2. Goody, Jack, and S.J. Tambiah. Bridewealth and Dowry. Cambridge Papers

In Social Anthropology Ser. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973.

3. Gupta, Alka. "Female Foeticide in India." Media centre. 2007. UNICEF India. 8 Oct 2007 <http://www.unicef.org/india/media_3285.htm>.

4. Jeffery, Patricia, and Roger Jeffery. Don’t Marry Me to a Plowman. Boulder,

CO: Westview Press, Inc., 1996.

5. Joseph, Ammu, and Kalpana Sharma. Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues. New Delhi, India: Sage Publications, 1994.

6. Minturn, Leigh. Sita’s Daughter’s: Coming Out of Purdah. New York,

NY: Oxford UP, 1993.

7. Oldenburg, Veena Talwar. Dowry Murder. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2002.

8. Sharma, Urmila. Dowry In North India: Its Consequences For Women. Ed. Renée Hirschon. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1984.

9. The Law Code of Manu. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. New York, NY: Oxford

UP, 2004.

10. Vreede-de Stuers, Cora. Girl Students In Jaipur: A Study in Attitudes Towards Family Life, Marriage, and Career. Assen, The Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum Ltd., 1970.

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Annotated Bibliography

1. The National Crime Records Bureau, located in New Delhi, India, was created to suggest a common format of the maintenance of criminal records throughout the country. They publish often, and have complied various other extensive pamphlets and booklets such as Accidental Deaths & Suicides and Prison Statistics. The Bureau promotes knowledge using Information Technology.

2. Jack Goody is a British Cambridge University social anthropologist who has written and edited books and research papers such as The Character of Kinship and Polygyny, Economy and the Role of Women. Goody has focused greatly on marital and kinship relations and was elected Fellow of the British Academy. S. J. Tambiah also works as an anthropologist at Cambridge University, and has written several academic papers, such as From Varna to Caste Through Mixed Unions and Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand. Tambiah focuses mainly on eastern sociology and has worked in both Sri Lanka and Thailand, as well as Cambridge. Both of these authors are credible sources; their education, experience and objectivity constitute them as reliable in their fields.

3. Alka Gupta is a media consultant for UNICEF India who has reported at various instances for the organizations. Her articles include coverage of the International Learning Exchange and the state of the world’s children. Her experience and detachment in her articles make her a credible journalist and source.

4. Patricia and Roger Jeffery are both Professors in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK. Together they have written various books, such as Population, Gender and Politics: Demographic Change in Rural North India and each have published separately. Both authors are humanitarians who are currently working with the UN. They have had a significant amount of experience on the field and in various countries. These experiences combined with their education and positions held at the University of Edinburgh qualify them as highly credible and reliable sources.

5. Ammu Joseph and Kalpana Sharma have collectively published other books together, such as Terror, Counter-terror: Women Speak Out. They are both editors and have edited various other books and have assisted with other books such as Women And Media: A Critical Introduction. Both live and work in India, validating their accounts and making them credible sources.

6. Leigh Minturn was a professor of social psychology at the University of Colorado faculty for over 25 years. Her work focused on the lives of women and children in the Indian village, Khalapur. Over the course of 10 years, she reported on tradition, health and women's autonomy in the village. Her interaction with villagers in India makes her a reliable source, however her connections with them makes her writings more likely to support the women and children of that town.

7. Veena Talwar Oldenburg is currently a history professor at Baruch College. She is a native of India, and has a Ph. D. in history. She has received various senior research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She has also written

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The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856-77. Oldenburg has taught at Loreto Convent College, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College, focusing mainly on Modern India, British Colonialism, and Women's History in the Third World. Her credibility as a historian is certain. Oldenburg has a deep interest in the politics of gender however, thus her work tends to favor women in gender issues. However, despite this fact, she analyzes and interprets each assertion, supporting each claim with validations, making her a credible and strong source.

8. Urmila Sharma has a Ph. D. in political science from Lucknow University and is constantly engaged in research and writing. She focuses mainly on Humanism in Contemporary Indian Political Thought and is the author of many books in both English and Hindi. She received the U.G.C. Research Fellowship and is the daughter of renowned Indian political scientist Dr. B.M. Sharma. Her background and education combined with her focus make her a reliable and knowledgeable source.

9. Patrick Olivelle is the Chair of the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and a Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions. He has edited and translated the four early Dharmasutras. Olivelle produced an award-winning translation of the early Upanishads, as well as a scholar's edition of them and has won several prestigious fellowships, such as Guggenheim, NEH, and ACLS. His awards and high-held positions as well experience in his field make his translations very reliable and precise.

10. Cora Vreede-de Stuers has written one other books such as Parda: A Study of Muslim Women's Life in Northern India. While most of her books are focusing on east Asian women, many of them seem to be in Dutch, making mistranslations very possible. While she hasn’t written an extensive amount of books, her publications have been used in various anthropologies, making her work credible.