Gender, Caste and Matchmaking in Kerala: A Rationale

for Dowry

Praveena Kodoth

ABSTRACT

The matrilineal castes of northern Kerala consider dowry demeaning and

resort to it only in ‘exceptional’ circumstances. In local discourse, dowry is
transacted when women are considered ‘old’ by the standards of the marriage
market, where over-age is a condition reached usually on account of what is
considered a deficit of a normative conception of femininity. Dowry is prac-
tised openly only by poor and socially vulnerable households, as the relatively
affluent could mask dowry with hidden compensations. This article explores
the ways in which gender mediates matchmaking and generates a residual
category of women for whom dowry is openly negotiated. Open negotiation
on the margins of the marriage market expose the terms of exchange in ‘re-
spectable’ society, where matchmaking strategies reveal the emphasis placed
on conjugality and on caste in the social construction of women’s interests
and identity. Up to the mid-twentieth century, matrilineal women derived
their identity from their natal families. The political economy of marriage in
Kerala brought a new emphasis to bear on conjugality and on caste, which
generated new restrictions on women and produced a rationale for dowry.

INTRODUCTION

Dowry has become an important basis of matchmaking in the south-western

Indian state of Kerala, better known for its development experience and
its matrilineal traditions. Until around the middle of the twentieth century,
formalization of marriage among the matrilineal castes was not elaborate and
matchmaking involved few if any exchanges of gifts or unilateral transfers
of goods or cash (Aiyappan, 1944; Fuller, 1976; Gough, 1961; Mencher,
1965). The existing evidence of the spread and growing scale of dowry comes
almost entirely from southern and central Kerala (AIDWA, 2003; Kodoth,
2007; Lindberg, 2001; Osella and Osella, 2000). My fieldwork in northern

I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal for challenging criticism
and useful suggestions that enabled substantial revision of the paper; to Jonathan Parry, Chris
Fuller and Annu Jalais for discussions; and to Janaki Nair, J. Devika and V. Santhakumar for
comments. Earlier versions were presented at the London School of Economics and Political
Science as the Sir Ratan Tata Fellowship lecture (1 September 2006), and at the Centre for
Development Studies, Trivandrum (19 January 2007).
C Institute of Social Studies 2008. Published
Development and Change 39(2): 263–283 (2008). 
by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St.,
Malden, MA 02148, USA
264 Praveena Kodoth

Kerala 1 indicates that the matrilineal castes not only deny dowry but also
consider it demeaning. This article is based on primary material collected
from a village in the northern midlands (here called Belur), the adjoining
taluka town and the district headquarters, where the commercial marriage
agencies, marriage bureaux and brokers were located. The data relate to the
major matrilineal castes in the region, the Nairs and the Tiyas, and were
collected over two phases in 2001 and 2005.
Dowry and stridhanam are used interchangeably in the northern midlands
to refer to negotiated and/or demand-based property settlements from the
bride’s family as the basis of a marriage. People acknowledge dowry pay-
ments in ‘exceptional’ circumstances, usually in the case of women who
are ‘age over’, a phrase used locally in English to denote women who are
considered above the preferred age of marriage. As marriage is imperative,
over-age is a condition reached only by women with ‘disadvantages’, in par-
ticular the lack of ‘healthy good looks’ or sometimes a difficult horoscope.
Thus, in local discourse, women generate demands for dowry substantially
on account of a deficit of normative femininity. However, my analysis sug-
gests that dowry is openly entertained for women marked by a combination
of poor economic, social and normative feminine attributes, whereas relative
affluence is likely to result in hidden compensations. The denial of dowry is
also drawn into a tension with expectations of a girl’s eventual entitlement by
way of an inheritance, or in terms of gold jewellery, suggesting ambivalence
towards dowry rather than full-fledged resistance. 2 Thus, open negotiation
is only the tip of the iceberg. Those who do not transact dowry or do not
make hidden compensations use matchmaking strategies that compromise
reciprocity through the differential valuation of brides and grooms. They
also adhere strictly to the endogamous boundaries of caste. In this context,
a deficit of normative femininity is only the ostensible rationale for dowry.
Dowry has deeper roots in the compulsion to bring women under conjugal
patronage, within a social framework that ties women’s interests and identity
to conjugality and to caste. Rejection of dowry in north Kerala is thus distinct
from the feminist position that dowry is an affirmation of patriarchy or even
a liberal position that it is a social evil.
An ideological emphasis on conjugality serves to enforce women’s entry
into marriage but also restricts their ability to separate, divorce or remarry and
raises the need to monitor their sexuality. Two factors are worth mentioning
here. Firstly, men are better able to delay marriage by drawing on the higher
acceptable age of marriage, the legitimacy of pursuing an occupation with

1. Kerala was constituted in 1956 from the British residencies of Travancore and Cochin and
the directly-administered British districts of Malabar and Kasargod taluk of South Canara,
both part of the Madras Presidency. In this article, northern Kerala refers to north Malabar.
2. Suggesting ambivalence, the Brahmans in urban and rural Pune maintained that dowry
was demeaning and the resort of the uneducated, but also saw it as a compensation for the
education of boys (Benei, 1995: 36).
Gender, Caste and Matchmaking: Dowry in Kerala 265

earning prospects and, crucially, a less substantive identification of their

interests with marriage; moreover, divorce and remarriage are more easily
condoned for men. Secondly, until the reform of personal law in the first
half of the twentieth century, the matrilineal castes were caricatured for their
‘permissive’ sexual institutions, particularly women’s ability to enter and
exit sexual arrangements, which contributed to colonial legal interpretation
of the customary forms of sexual association as not marriage but concubinage
(Kodoth, 2004). Custom sanctioned serial monogamy for women and poly-
gyny in northern Kerala. Pre-marital sex, particularly among cross cousins,
was condoned and pre-marital conception was legitimized post hoc if it was
not known to have breached the norms of jati (social rank) (Gough, 1950).
Dowry is rooted in the political economy of marriage. This challenges
the mainstream story of development — typically, that radical institutional
change over the early to mid-twentieth century shaped an egalitarian basis to
families and fostered gender parity in social development (see Parayil, 2000).
Importantly, institutional change enabled the transfer of patriarchal authority
from an older framework of jati and agrarian relations to modern conjugal
institutions, which include strict endogamy, monogamy and restrictions on
women’s claims to divorce and remarriage. Class struggle and community
movements spurred by left and enlightenment ideologies refuted jati and
existing agrarian relations, which had ‘privileged’ higher ranked men also
allowing them sexual access to lower ranked women. Community move-
ments envisioned modern caste identities within new and rigid endogamous
boundaries. In this process, men gained new kinds of power over women of
their caste and individually over their wives, as their principal guardians, the
sole legitimate custodians of their sexuality and protectors of their property
(Kodoth, 2004). 3
The cultural coding of dowry in northern Kerala, where a demand for
dowry does not speak well of a man, renders it rather specific. Elsewhere
in south India, mobility and consumerism have transformed social identi-
ties among middle and lower castes, turning dowry into an institution that
affirms the value of a man, where previously equal status marriage among
close kin had kept the practice at bay (Kapadia, 2003). 4 The predominant

3. Colonial state intervention through criminal and civil laws generalized higher caste restric-
tions on divorce to all women, assuming that they were monogamous for life even while
permitting male polygamy, thereby granting men new powers (Sen, 2003: 471).
4. Among the lower castes in north India, dowry has emerged in association with new ideals
of conjugality, fostered by state legal and developmental processes. Parry (2001) shows
that employment in a public sector steel plant in central India raised marriage prospects
for young men, giving them certain access to dowry, but also enforced caste endogamy
and rendered marriage stable. In contrast, casual workers in the informal sector were more
likely to engage in inter-caste and multiple sexual associations. Kapila (2004) maps the
transformation of the Gaddi, a pastoral people in northern India, who, as they settled down
and gained access to modern education and employment, abandoned multiple institutions
of marriage and adopted dowry.
266 Praveena Kodoth

tendency across India has been for the more educated and wealthy to lead
the way in the adoption of dowry or for the lower castes to follow the upper
castes (Beck, 1972; Kapadia, 1995; Nishimura, 1998; Parry, 2001; Srinivas,
1996; Srinivasan, 2005; van der Veen, 1972). In contrast, dowry has emerged
at the lower end of the class hierarchy in northern Kerala. This experience
does not accord with the dominant explanations of dowry either as a mode of
devolution of property or pre-mortem inheritance (Tambiah, 1989; Upadhya,
1990) or as an aspect of gift-giving relations that regulated kinship (Raheja,
1995; Vatuk, 1975). Nor does it support the theory that dowry has expanded
through the influence of kanyadana as an ideology (in which a girl is con-
ceived of as a gift and given in marriage with other expensive gifts), and
the adoption of its forms of marriage as a mode of achieving upward social
mobility (Benei, 1995; Kapila, 2004: Parry, 1979, 2001; van der Veen, 1972).
Dowry demands, and/or the inability to achieve marriage, cast a shadow
of indignity upon a section of women in north Kerala, but their marginality
only exposed the terms of matchmaking in respectable society. It showed that
respectability was achieved on gendered terms tied to the social construction
of conjugality as central to women’s interests and identity. Thus, dowry was
the price that poor and socially vulnerable families were called upon to pay
for aspiring to the markers of respectability in sexual discipline, endogamy
and stable marriage. In the process, ‘disadvantaged’ women from families
which were unable or unwilling to pay, had to contend with the possibility
of enforced spinsterhood or sexual liaisons that were condemned. 5

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MARRIAGE

A modern framework of caste regulates matchmaking in Kerala. Today, ‘Nair’

is a readily recognized endogamous category across Kerala but until the early
to mid-twentieth century it comprised subgroups, which maintained regional
distinctions and neither inter-dined nor inter-married. In the jati order, Nair
subgroups were positioned below the Nambudiris (Malayala Brahmins) and
women of Nair and higher ranks had sexual associations with Nambudiris
(hypergamy) and reciprocal ties with men of equal rank. In the colonial
period, hypergamy was intertwined with superior rights over land granted
to the Nambudiris. Community reform challenged both as exploitative and
shameful and sought comprehensive reform (Kodoth, 2004). 6 The Tiyas

5. The Nagarattars of eastern Tamil Nadu witnessed a sharp rise in cash payments at marriage
from the 1960s, restricting the marriage chances of girls from poor families: ‘Both the
married woman’s respectability and the egalitarianism between the wife taker and wife
giver are secured by such a drastic measure’ (Nishimura, 1998:138, 207).
6. In north India, hypergamy was closely linked to the practice of dowry. Inter-caste hypergamy
in Kerala was not accompanied by dowry, but it added to a scarcity of grooms among the
Nambudiris, who anyway followed a form of primogeniture that permitted only the eldest
male sibling in a family to marry within the caste. Thus, it accentuated dowry in reciprocal
marriages among Nambudiris.
Gender, Caste and Matchmaking: Dowry in Kerala 267

of north Kerala were considered on a par with the Ezhavas of southern and
central Kerala in colonial administrative records, drawing largely on a similar
occupational profile. They were placed outside caste (the four-fold varna
system) as untouchable. With little to lose by way of social rank, a section
of Tiya women in the towns of north Kerala had liaisons with European
men, gaining significant upward mobility in the process. The community
proscribed these unions only in the late-nineteenth century when it began to
reform (Puthenkalam, 1977).
Nair and Tiya men had received early access to modern education and em-
ployment creating new community elites who pioneered reform (Kodoth,
2004). They sought to build new links by bridging subgroup and re-
gional distinctions and setting up broad-based caste identities with a pan
Kerala scope. Crucial to the crafting of modern caste identities was the
need to frame a new marriage regime that would enforce male responsibi-
lity as husbands and fathers and bring women under conjugal patronage,
thereby extending recognition and protection to them primarily in their ca-
pacity as wives. These concerns were evoked explicitly. Reform furnished
the outlines of an argument for the transfer of a woman’s property at marriage
to her husband: 7 ‘It is the husband’s responsibility to protect the property of
his wife. . . So long as our marriages want for legal sanction the husbands
of Nair women will resort to irresponsible ways’. 8 A reformer-legislator un-
derscored marriage as the principal aspect of women’s interests. ‘Unmarried
women are a burden and could hinder moral pursuit. Besides as marriage
also has a desirable cultural aspect, as far as possible we should strive to
see that women are married’. 9 Far from seeking to render women powerless,
reform defined their subjectivity within a conjugal regime, posing the con-
jugal unit as the ‘natural’ site of affective ties and thus most conducive both

7. Marriage mediation of women’s property rights gradually made way for matchmaking on
the basis of property bargains or dowry and introduced a new marriage market dynamic. In
a 1923 essay in a journal from Travancore, Padmavathy Amma flays the emerging modes of
trading on the marriage market which reserved the highest dowry for the most educated and
well-employed men (Devika, 2005). The association between modern education and dowry
has endured since the colonial era. H.T. Prinsep, a member of the committee that inquired
into Kulin polygamy in 1866, underlined the role of higher education in raising dowry rates
in Calcutta (Srinivas, 1996: 164).
8. Parameshwaran Pillai, a prominent reformer from Travancore speaking to an audience in
north Malabar in 1928, the year comprehensive legislation was enacted in Travancore which
was extended to Malabar only in 1933 and 1956 (Kodoth, 2004).
9. Machchingal Krishna Menon was speaking at the Travancore–Kochi Joint Nair Conference
in 1947. He pointed out that higher education reduced the chances of women getting married.
As a legislator he had called for information about the marital status of Nair women, which
showed that while 50 per cent of school finalists and 40 per cent of intermediate-pass
category were married, only 20 per cent of graduates were married (Nasrani Deepika, 1947:
3).
268 Praveena Kodoth

to ‘morality’ and to the growth of capitalist enterprise. 10 Their efforts paved

the way for legislation, which instituted monogamy, spousal and patrilineal
inheritance and maintenance rights. Eventually, the matrilineal castes were
incorporated into the Hindu code in 1955–56, but free divorce was protected
as a custom. Subsequently, the Kerala government referred the clause on
divorce to the first law commission, which recommended restrictions, de-
scribing divorce on unilateral grounds ‘as opposed to public policy’ and not
in ‘consonance with ordinary notions of decency and morals’ (Government
of Kerala, 1972: 1–3). A bill introduced in the state assembly in 1973 to
restrict divorce was, however, dropped as Parliament moved to allow mutual
consent as a ground for divorce. The Kerala Joint family (abolition) Act,
1976, eliminated the legal conception of matrilineal property, a source of
power and property outside marriage to which women had privileged claims.
Agrarian transformation proceeded alongside family reform and culmi-
nated in the land reforms of 1970. This enabled the mostly male ‘heads’ of
tenant families to gain title over land. In the decades that followed, not only
did men register higher occupational mobility than women; women were also
seen to withdraw from paid manual work (Kodoth, 2007). Anthropologists
have documented the elaboration of a conjugal regime over the twentieth
century: Ezhava men ‘began to regard it a shame for their women to go out
and work. Even those who could ill afford to do so withdrew their women
from outdoor work, due to the newly engendered sense of respectability’
(Aiyappan, 1944: 122). 11 There was a new emphasis on pre-marital virgin-
ity of women and sexual constancy in marriage among the Nairs in central
Travancore (Fuller, 1976: 149). In the 1990s, Menon (1996) who studied a
village in central Kerala noted that ‘it is no longer considered “respectable”
for a woman to divorce her husband and it is difficult for a woman to remarry,
whether she is divorced or widowed’.
The growing importance of class distinction and the difficulty in negotiat-
ing dowry with one’s own kin steadily undercut the basis of customary cross
cousin marriage (Puthenkalam, 1977). Since the 1980s, dowry levels have
soared along with parental ambitions for bridegrooms who are migrants
in the Gulf or in other parts of the world (Kodoth, 2007). In the closing
decades of the twentieth century, working class matrilineal families in south-
ern Kerala were mobilizing dowries by alienating land received through the

10. The belief that matriliny was detrimental to capitalist enterprise has had a long innings.
In 1881, William Logan, a well-known colonial administrator in Malabar, pointed out that
matriliny prevented the accumulation of wealth as it placed men in a false position with
their natural inclinations pointing in one direction (their wives and children) and custom in
another (sisters and their children). Nair reformers in Malabar rehearsed this theory even in
the 1930s (Kodoth, 2004: 43).
11. Social reform in the 1910s and 1920s corresponded to a sharp decline in female agricultural
labourers in Malabar (Kodoth, 2004). Significantly, women’s work participation in Kerala
was lower than the all-India average over the second half of the twentieth century (Kodoth,
2007).
Gender, Caste and Matchmaking: Dowry in Kerala 269

land reforms and social security benefits from factory employment to pay
for bridegrooms, who were likely to ‘shelter’ their daughters as full-time
housewives. Some of these families had begun paying dowries in the 1950s
(Lindberg, 2001). People interviewed in the northern districts said they were
increasingly coming under pressure to pay dowry ‘to ensure a good future
for their daughters’ (AIDWA, 2003: 179).
Why was dowry denied by the matrilineal castes in north Kerala but rou-
tinely transacted as the basis of marriage in the south? The regional di-
mensions of matriliny and community reform offer some clues. Matrilineal
reformers in Travancore admired the Syrian Christians for their commercial
success and attributed it to their family, which was not only anchored to
marriage but also sanctioned dowry (Fuller, 1976). 12 In contrast there was
resistance in north Kerala to doing away altogether with matriliny, slowing
the pace of reform. The Nairs were the principal landlords in the region and
sought to preserve their property interests (Kodoth, 2004). Further, matrilin-
eal women in north Kerala resided in their husband’s home after marriage
without either losing property rights in their natal family or raising the in-
stitution of dowry (Gough, 1961). Thus reform meant less dramatic change,
but also provided less ground for rationalizing dowry.

BELUR, NORTHERN KERALA

The village of Belur is in the northern midlands of Kerala, a region that

witnessed intense agrarian struggle in the early to mid-twentieth century
alongside the emergence and consolidation of Left politics. The land reform
of 1970 had a significant influence on redistributing land and power among
former tenants, who constitute the middle sections of society today and in-
clude the Nairs and Tiyas (Kodoth, 2007). Reflecting the extent of change, by
2001 Belur had only one household from the previous land-owning elite that
owned up to 20 acres of land. Some villages in the region boasted of a voter
base of 90 per cent and more for the Communist Party of India (Marxist)
(henceforth CPM or the Party). However, Belur was relatively heterogeneous
with entire localities identified with the Muslim League and sometimes the
Congress party. The Left alliance wrested control over local government
only in the mid-1980s, building on the land reform and trade union expan-
sion since the 1970s. The Tiyas and lower castes formed their main support
base.
Matriliny was the rule rather than the exception in north Kerala. The major
social groups — the Tiyas, Nairs and Mappila Muslims — among others,
practised matriliny. The Nair reform association of the early twentieth century

12. Until large-scale migration to Malabar began in the first half of the twentieth century, Syrian
Christians were concentrated in Travancore and Cochin, whereas Malabar accounted for the
majority of Muslims in Kerala.
270 Praveena Kodoth

was defunct; those of the Tiyas limited themselves largely to running temples
in two major towns. By contrast, the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana
Yogam (SNDP) and the Nair Service Society (NSS), associations founded
in southern Kerala among Ezhavas and Nairs respectively, had expanded
following an influx of southern Ezhavas and Nairs since the early twentieth
century to settle mostly in the eastern highlands of north Kerala. They had
units on the fringes of Belur and in the taluka and district towns, which
reached out to locals through services related to marriage. However, local
Tiyas and Nairs identified the SNDP and NSS with the settlers and were
wary of them.
Belur is visibly agricultural with wide valleys and sloping hillsides that
support paddy and garden cultivation respectively. By the time of the field-
work, households had diversified their income and the younger generation
was increasingly turning to service sector jobs in construction or more skilled
occupations, although not often as qualified professionals. As part of the
study, a census was carried out in early 2001 of the 306 Nair and Tiya house-
holds in three wards (local government electoral divisions) of Belur. 13 The
residence pattern followed the lines of caste and religion surprisingly closely.
The first area had near equal numbers of Nair and Tiya households in sep-
arate but adjacent localities. The landholdings derived from former tenancies
from a Nambudiri landlord. Significantly, the Nairs here were mostly from
the lower subgroups and many families had members who had migrated to
urban centres in India in search of low-skilled work during the second half
of the twentieth century. Today, the younger generation hold formal sec-
tor jobs in teaching, para-military forces and lower cadres of the army, and
sometimes in the Gulf. The rare Tiya house in the Nair locality was built
with Gulf remittances. The Tiya households were on poorer quality land
and distinctly less well-to-do. The second area was predominantly Nair but
more heterogeneous, with those from previously landed elite interspersed
with lower subgroups. By the second quarter of the twentieth century, these
families had gained access to formal sector employment as teachers and
in government service, and many of them had migrated out of the village.
The third area was predominantly Tiya, former tenants of Muslim trader-
landholders and relatively poor but upwardly mobile. There were a handful
of Nair households on its outer edge. In this area, several Tiya families had
less skilled migrants in the Gulf. This was apparent more in the profile of
bridegrooms than that of the brides’ father, reflecting the recent nature of
the change. The Tiyas controlled toddy tapping (extraction of sap from the
coconut bud which is then consumed as liquor), which is widely considered
their caste occupation but is also an important source of livelihoods and the
mainstay of the trade union movement in Belur.

13. I followed this up with detailed interviews with members of ninety of these households.
However, my fieldwork was not limited to these localities alone.
Gender, Caste and Matchmaking: Dowry in Kerala 271

Politics, Caste and Dowry

The first time I was told of a dowry transaction in Belur, it was presented
as an exception. Ramani, a Tiya woman of over sixty, told me that there
was a demand for dowry when her younger sister married an Ezhava man
from a settler family nearly twenty-five years ago. Marriages across regional
identities appeared only on the fringes of social arrangements. The boy had
chanced to see the girl, who worked in a co-operative bank, and took an
interest in her. During marriage negotiations the boy’s family asked for Rs
40,000 in cash, a reformist wedding ceremony with scriptural rites upheld
by SNDP and that the girl’s family join the SNDP. The marriage was agreed
upon; the boy’s family agreed to bring the priest and the girl’s family facili-
tated an unusually long wedding. However, there was no question of the Tiya
family joining the SNDP. As Ramani said, ‘how could we? When we already
had a sanghatana (association)’. Following her father, an early adherent of
the CPM, the family was committed to the Party.
The CPM entered into the social lives of its adherents in much the same
manner as the caste associations. It had excellent credentials in matchmaking,
with an extensive network in the region that facilitated quick and trusted mar-
riage inquiries. Informally, it facilitated the organization of marriage among
supporters’ families, even raising funds where necessary. As a senior mem-
ber of the CPM local unit explained, the Party had inherited the institutional
position traditionally occupied by community elders or intermediating au-
thorities such as village chiefs: ‘Further north in parts of Kasargod, temples
or kazhakam [community forum] wielded influence and their authorization
is sought to conduct weddings. Where the Party is strong such associations
do not wield authority. Here even non-Party families come to us because we
can resolve problems’. Officially, the CPM was against both caste and dowry
but in matchmaking its leaders and adherents not only did not question caste,
but also conformed rigorously to the requirement of endogamy. A younger
CPM leader and employee of the local co-operative bank had carried out
several matchmaking inquiries on behalf of the Party. He said, ‘I have not
grown so much as to discard caste altogether’. Far from resisting the inter-
ests of family/caste, the Party usually toed their line even chastising young
people of adherent families who sought to make ‘love’/inter-caste matches
and relenting only when they found it impossible to bring them around. Its
members admitted that they were unable to prevent dowry payments, but
also sympathized that it allowed ‘unfortunately placed’ girls to achieve a
marriage.
In contrast, the caste associations witnessed and sought to enforce prop-
erty agreements, swore by caste endogamy and persevered to popularize
a reformist sacramental form of the wedding. Their officials rationalized
endogamy primarily in terms of cultural compatibility fostered through
shared customs and rituals, which they believed bound a marriage together
and allowed it to endure. According to them, inter-caste connections were
272 Praveena Kodoth

inherently fragile and thus undesirable. Caste associations saw marriage as

pre-eminently their terrain. Not surprisingly, the CPM perceived them as a
threat to its social base. However, in seeking to keep the caste associations at
bay and for fear of losing its social base, the CPM had accommodated caste.
In maintaining that they did not practise ‘dowry’, local people were re-
jecting matchmaking on the basis of property settlements. It was readily
acknowledged that girls were given gold jewelry. People associated dowry
with Muslims and with the settlers, whether Christians, Ezhavas or Nairs.
The Muslims generally acknowledged that dowry was draining the resources
of poor families. Settler Christians, Ezhavas and Nairs usually admitted that
a girl’s family transferred property to her marital family at the time of her
marriage but represented it as her ‘share’ of natal family property. How-
ever, settler parents in the eastern highlands spoke of such transfers with a
sense of pride, a substantial dowry reflecting their achievements in difficult
conditions after migration. Families in the midlands were more wary of ex-
pressing such sentiments, but there was frequent slippage between ‘share’
and ‘dowry’. For instance, the SNDP was in the process of starting a marriage
bureau in late 2005, to provide matchmaking services, and a regional official
explained that requests had come from their units as people were now paying
a considerable amount to marriage brokers, who charged a commission of 5
to 10 per cent of the dowry (including gold, cash, land and other articles).
He pointed out that if the dowry was Rs 100,000 and a car, the commission
could run to Rs 20,000 and more. In the early part of our conversation he had
emphasized that settler Ezhavas did not pay dowry but transferred a woman’s
share of property at marriage. He said the only difference between locals and
settlers was that the former gave their girls inheritance rights in addition to
gold already given at marriage while the latter gave a share of family property
at marriage, which included gold.
The President of an NSS unit on the periphery of Belur, himself a local
Nair, said the local attitude to dowry amounted to lack of transparency and led
to ‘unnecessary tension’. ‘The couple benefits when a property settlement
is made at the time of marriage. Otherwise. . . the younger generation is kept
waiting and this gives rise to ill feeling towards parents. Eventually children
may find themselves waiting for their parents to die’. The manager of the
district branch of a large scale marriage bureau who was from southern Kerala
endorsed the views of the NSS unit President. He was aware of cases where
negotiations had broken down due to dowry demands. In an extreme example
— a woman of forty-two — the bureau had suggested three possible matches.
The woman was employed in a co-operative bank and her parents, who had
paid money to get her the job, didn’t find the matches suitable: one involved
a widower of forty-eight who had asked for dowry; another a divorcee who
they thought was not of good character; and the third a man of fifty-two,
who they didn’t like. ‘They were willing to wait’, he said to me in a manner
suggesting that they were doomed. According to him, the bureau received
a surprisingly large number of applications from parents of Nair girls who
Gender, Caste and Matchmaking: Dowry in Kerala 273

were over-age, which was not the case in southern Kerala. He went on to
contrast the systematic planning towards a girl’s future in the south, where
parents planned a girl’s education and training towards marriage and built up
resources systematically to pay dowries (see Osella and Osella, 2000) to the
north where parents seemed to wake up rather late to the need to ‘marry off’
their daughters. The ‘wisdom’ of a marriage-centred approach towards girls
carried the expectation that parents should be flexible in the ‘best interests
of their daughters’.

Negotiation of ‘Exchange’ at Marriage

‘Exchange’ through matchmaking depended on the valuation of masculine

and feminine qualities but also an assessment of the property status of pos-
sible partners. Adherence to codes regarding dowry and caste is an aspect of
‘respectability’. Local Nairs and Tiyas view property settlements at match-
making as a betrayal of ‘trust’. A landed Nair father had refused a proposal
for his doctor son, which included an offer of a well-known hospital in the
district town and cash. Such offers entail a risk of losing the son altogether
through a gradual process of his shifting allegiance to his parents-in-law.
Instead, the son had married an information technology student with a sim-
ilar family background, gauged importantly in terms of class. Despite this
refusal of property settlements, however, property concerns are at the core of
matchmaking. There is a range of manoeuvres to ascertain class/family back-
grounds and to secure the property claims of potential brides and grooms.
A rigid preference for marriage within the region made it easier to gather
reliable information. Conventional channels of matchmaking — family net-
works, close associates and political parties, particularly the CPM — carry
‘trust’. Marriage inquiries routed through the CPM are particularly instruc-
tive. The President of a co-operative bank, one of the few well-employed
older women in the village, had got her daughter married at barely nineteen
years. She wanted her daughter to study further, but the proposal had come
through the Party, she said with finality. The desirability of the proposal was
posed as self explanatory, underlining the ‘trust’ it carried.
The number and sex composition of siblings in a family is an important
consideration. An only daughter is perceived with mixed feelings by the
family of the potential groom; she gets all the property (adichu mattuka) but
is likely to be accustomed to getting her own way. If a son and a daughter
is seen as the preferred combination, too many daughters and no son is
the worst. Sons/brothers are expected to take responsibility for their parents
and to discipline their sisters. For instance, a brother could force a reluctant
girl to return to her husband. Similarly, parents of girls would be wary of
a prospective groom who was an older son with several unmarried sisters.
This is seen as a huge responsibility. These factors are used to evaluate and
protect the property claims of potential brides and grooms but they also serve
as informal guarantees that marriages will endure.
274 Praveena Kodoth

The custom of giving gold jewelry to girls has made way for more ex-
plicit expressions of property concerns. Gold was considered a gift of af-
fection and emphatically not a dowry. It was not usually subject to negotia-
tions, but generous gifts brought a girl and her family prestige. Expectations
brought pressure to conform but were subject to several factors, includ-
ing the relative socio-economic position of the families and the standards
observed in the locality and among close relatives. Indirect signals are some-
times used to convey the expectations of the bridegroom’s family — me-
diators, for example, would slip in a word about gold given in an earlier
marriage in the boy’s family. But they are avoided when using the more
‘trusted’ channels of matchmaking. Gifts of gold in excess of local stan-
dards are a mark of the upwardly mobile. Gulf migration is yet to affect
gold levels dramatically: in the late 1990s, Tiya girls married to less skilled
Gulf bridegrooms — drivers, electricians and mechanics — had received
between twenty and forty sovereigns (one sovereign is 8 grams). On the
other hand, excess of gold could be read pejoratively, as a compensation for
something.
At the higher end, Tiya families that benefited from formal employment
had given up to seventy-five sovereigns of gold. A retired central gov-
ernment employee had given seventy sovereigns to his daughter, who got
married in the late 1990s. He was embarrassed and defensive saying that
they had not intended to give that much but gifts had all added up. He
had only a son and a daughter and both were well-educated. Here, con-
cerns of property and normative femininity were subsumed by the certain-
ties of class and the social profile of the family, which ensured proper
grooming and formed the basis of ‘trust’. A retired Nair school teacher
had given his daughter about fifty sovereigns when she married a school
teacher in the late 1990s. When I probed further, the girl’s mother said that
marriage did not mean they were giving up their daughter. The girl was a
graduate and her brothers were well-educated and employed. However, one
brother, a teacher and an activist of a well-known Left civil societal organ-
ization, said it was fashionable in families like theirs to give a hundred
sovereigns.
Striking a different attitude, the mother of two well-educated girls, who
gave her elder daughter seventy-five sovereigns, said: ‘You saw how dark she
is, so we had to “show” something on her’. The girl, whose father was retired
from the lower cadre of the Army, was married in 2003. Her younger sister
was engaged in 2005 to an engineer working in South Africa. Her mother
added that they could give her less jewelry, as she was attractive. The extra
gold given to the elder daughter was posed as a compensation for a deficit of
normative femininity, but the mother’s words also revealed the internalization
of a social prejudice and a response to it without any external bidding. In this
class, if people negotiated and paid dowry they preferred not to acknowledge
it. Families that lived by wage labour gave ten to fifteen sovereigns of gold,
invariably bought with loans from the local co-operative bank. It was in these
Gender, Caste and Matchmaking: Dowry in Kerala 275

families that a deficit in normative femininity was likely to accumulate into

the basis of open negotiation of dowry.
Gender mediated how levels of education, health and employment were
drawn into matchmaking. Healthy good looks were highly prized in young
women, who generally were better educated (in terms of numbers of years of
schooling) than men. Most girls had secondary or higher secondary qualifi-
cations and many even entered a graduate education, not always completing
it. Education was expected to enhance domestic management skills. Along
with health, it was drawn into inferences about a woman’s capability for her
reproductive roles, ranging from bearing and nurturing children to tutoring
and grooming them. Women’s employment was contingent upon the claims
of the reproductive realm. Preferred jobs were ‘nine to five’ positions in
teaching or clerical posts in the formal sector. These boosted a girl’s mar-
riage prospects. A retired Nair school teacher had paid a cash donation to
get his daughter admission to a teachers’ training course and after that to get
her a job in a private school. In his words, ‘if a girl is employed, would it not
ease her passage through the marriage market?’. Among the poorer families,
respectable jobs included working as technical assistants in hospitals and
para-medical units, as nurses and office assistants, and in the co-operative
weaving units in the area. It was not unusual even in wage labour households
to educate girls up to higher secondary level. In poor families, this was not
enough for the younger generation to break into the preferred formal sector
jobs, but the threshold for matchmaking was lower. A construction labourer
whose twenty-year-old daughter worked as an X-ray technician in a private
establishment pointed out that her employment ‘showed in the frequent [mar-
riage] inquiries for his daughter’.
A man’s marriage prospects depended crucially on his ability to provide
for a family, represented most importantly by income-earning work. Mascu-
line value was affirmed and denied substantially on this terrain. After school,
boys were more likely to drop out than girls and to seek job-oriented skills
in formal and informal ways. Young men’s occupational status and ability to
earn were central concerns of parents of prospective brides. Indicating this,
a senior local leader of the CPM described the status of toddy tapping in
terms of its favourable rating on the marriage market: ‘Enne chethekarane
penna kodukkum (today, a girl may be entrusted to a toddy tapper)’. The
economic securities of toddy tapping, as a protected segment of the informal
sector in Kerala, had offset the dubiousness of its association with liquor and
with a jati-based occupation. Across class, however, there was preference for
men with government or formal sector jobs; but drivers or technicians in the
Gulf with secondary and higher secondary qualifications were married to
women with graduate and even postgraduate degrees. This was usually the
case with middle level Tiya families. Gulf bridegrooms staked their ‘worth’
through brides with prized social and feminine attributes, especially educa-
tion. The CPM leader commented, ‘when the bridegroom is not equally well-
educated, the girls may have their desires, but they do not voice it openly’. In
276 Praveena Kodoth

families with early exposure to higher education and formal sector

employment, parents sometimes expressed a preference against Gulf
bridegrooms.
Education and appropriate kinds of employment honed the marriage
prospects of girls even if people did not always plan rigorously to such
an end. Girls with comparatively higher levels of education and married to
toddy tappers and construction workers had given up informal sector jobs
for full-time domesticity. Male qualifications did not subserve marriage so
substantially. Matchmaking involved multiple trade-offs; for instance, the
family of an army employee had rejected a proposal from an executive in
a private company who was twelve years older than their daughter, a post-
graduate student. The mother said, ‘we may have considered it if he had
a government job but even then a difference of more than ten years is not
desirable’. The desirable age difference was between five and seven years.
Parents of girls began to make inquiries when a girl was close to twenty
and were deeply worried if she reached twenty-five unmarried. According
to the commercial agents, the marriage market ‘cleared’ for boys between
twenty-eight and thirty, making it difficult to find grooms for girls beyond
twenty-five.
Horoscope compatibility was considered mandatory. Older communists
rejected the belief in horoscopes but had conceded to their children’s wishes
to have them matched. Generally, parents were wary when there was a prob-
lem horoscope, particularly chovva dosham, an astrological feature that made
it difficult to find partners. In such cases, they were more willing to make
concessions. When horoscope readings had already caused delays, marriages
had been settled without consulting them futher. A low-skilled Gulf migrant
of nearly forty married a girl who was over thirty without consulting horo-
scopes. Both of them suffered from chovva in their horoscopes. After mar-
riage, the girl had stopped working as a construction labourer. When a person
had chovva, it was the practice to look for partners in a similar situation. A
toddy tapper had already seen thirty girls, all with chovva, but had not yet
found his preferred match.

Defining a Margin on the Marriage Market

So far we have considered matchmaking strategies adopted within the bounds

of ‘respectable’ society. This section deals with households that are forced
to look outside these boundaries in an effort to hold on to at least the ves-
tiges of respectability. People approached the commercial marriage agencies,
marriage brokers and bureaux only after they had explored the conventional
channels of matchmaking, and it was usually a move that signalled difficulties
in matchmaking. Marriage brokers suffered from a poor reputation as being
interested in quick money rather than in ensuring a good match, but there
was also considerable informal interaction with them. Brokers entertained
Gender, Caste and Matchmaking: Dowry in Kerala 277

proposals with explicit demands for dowry. 14 They insisted that these cases
were rare, usually involving men who needed cash for a specific purpose and
women who were over-age. Women applicants who were over-age accumu-
lated in the files of the bureaux as against women in ‘normal’ circumstances
who, I was told, ‘moved’ on the market. The brokers had arranged a large
number of matches in the preceding years with dowry and had several clients
on their records seeking dowry. They dealt closely with their clients, knew
why they needed dowry and used this information to further negotiations.
Men asked for dowry usually to meet financial constraints or to make new
investments. Dowries had served to mobilize funds for a sister’s marriage, for
house repairs, to set up independent trades, invest in small businesses, buy
equipment, vehicles etc. and on a few occasions to pay divorce settlements,
which would enable a man to marry again.
One broker had clients who were wage labourers, tailors, drivers and
small-scale traders and who demanded between Rs 50,000 and Rs 100,000.
Even in such cases men could make additional demands. A second broker,
who also ran a tailoring unit, had a thirty-two year old Nair applicant who
wanted Rs 50,000 to invest in his cement business. There were further de-
mands: the girl should be a graduate and not older than twenty-seven. He
refused to consider a match with a girl whose father was willing to pay up to
Rs 100,000, saying she was too thin. In 2005, a third broker, who was more
up-market than the first and second, had arranged a match for a twenty-four
year old Tiya girl from Belur involving a dowry of Rs 100,000. The girl was
the eldest of three daughters; had studied only up to secondary school and
was considered to be in ‘poor health’. The boy did not have a steady job but
the broker described him as ‘capable’. The girl’s father worked in Bombay
and had resources to pay the dowry but only the close family knew about the
transaction, signalling a case of hidden dowry where the girl’s family was
relatively well-to-do.
Women’s disadvantage, which was expressed in terms of physical at-
tributes, the lack of good looks, being too thin or the lack of health (aro-
gya koravae), held another level of meaning. Poor health, I was told by the
marriage brokers in particular, was used to refer to the physical condition
of leanness. In its everyday usage, ‘to become thin’ (melingu poyzi) referred
to a decline in physical appeal. To denote loss of appeal/thinness, people
also used the terms vaduga or onanguka, which mean literally ‘to dry up’.
Fullness of body was an important aspect of the dominant conception of
womanhood, implicating notions of sexual and reproductive potential. The
reference to health did not imply illness or nutritional deficiency but pointed

14. The taluka town bordering Belur was an acknowledged centre for bureaux and brokers who
negotiated dowry. Of the five marriage bureaux with offices in the main market area in
2001, one had closed down in 2005. Three had opened shops on the outer fringes of the
market and one had gone into a new partnership. Brokers were constantly hovering around
these offices. The large-scale bureaux were located in the district headquarters.
278 Praveena Kodoth

to the expected effects on sexuality, reproduction and domestic abilities of

being thin, pale or seeming unenergetic. Normative femininity thus went
beyond an aesthetic conception that was voiced upfront.
In Belur, parents of older unmarried girls not only admitted receiving de-
mands for dowry, but some of them expressed willingness to pay for ‘suitable’
bridegrooms. 15 The mother of a thirty-one year old unmarried girl, Geetha,
was desperate when I spoke to her in 2001 and displayed little reserve in
telling me that she had contacted several brokers. Earlier in the year, a broker
had brought a proposal from a man who demanded Rs 100,000 in dowry but
had no job. ‘Even if we were to mobilize the money’, the mother said ‘why
should we pay when he doesn’t even have a job?’. She felt that the man on
offer was not worth her money, an attitude that the bureau manager in the
district town, referred to earlier, had scorned. Other Nair families, similarly
placed, could not afford the price that was being quoted, but were loath to
lower the standard of ‘suitability’. Such families sometimes resort to mar-
riages with settlers, which involve dowry and lead to sale or alienation of
land, which is their main source of livelihood.
What are the circumstances in which girls grow to be over-age in Belur?
Poor gender attributes were underlined in several cases. Geetha’s mother
identified her daughter’s dark skin and looks as the main problem, but Geetha
had also completed only secondary school. The parents were relatively poor,
combining agricultural labour with work on their own farm for a livelihood.
To emphasize her point the mother showed me a picture of her elder daughter,
who was married at twenty-two after the Gulf bridegroom had seen her on
her way to college and approached her parents. The girl was feminine by
the dominant conception, with fair skin and a well-rounded body. No dowry
was paid. She received little gold, but to meet wedding expenses the family
sold some land. Girls with feminine disadvantage surfaced in households of
toddy tappers and construction workers. Girls considered attractive usually
presented few problems in matchmaking even where the family was not
affluent, although educational qualifications could better their prospects.
Previous marriages in these households indicated that economic difficulties
owing to marriage expenses were eased through marriage loans, which are
earmarked for girls alone, from informal sector welfare funds and from
the local co-operative bank. Horoscope problems could be trying: in the
fieldwork, they figured in three poor households with over-age girls. In
several instances of married girls who had encountered horoscope problems,
their families had struggled to find matches leading invariably to delayed
marriage.

15. There were never-married women of twenty-five and above in thirty-two of 306 households
in my 2001 census of Nair and Tiya households. In five of the thirty-two households these
women were above fifty. One household was not marked by the ‘usual constraints’: in this
family there was a girl of twenty-five who was a graduate with a diploma, working in a
hospital in the district town. Her father had retired recently from government service in
Maharashtra. Some of the households were followed up in the 2005 visit.
Gender, Caste and Matchmaking: Dowry in Kerala 279

Matchmaking problems are heightened by social disadvantage, especially

where poor widows are concerned. 16 Widows with sons of appropriate age
made efforts to arrange ‘exchange marriages’, or a brother–sister pair for one
another. However, there were instances where boys had refused to comply
as it curtailed their choice. Poor widows with no sons were in the most
difficult position. This circumstance affected the marriage prospects even
of girls with reasonably good social profiles as in the case of two of three
unmarried daughters of a Tiya widow and wage labourer. At twenty-six years,
the second daughter was a nurse in a reputable government medical facility in
Bangalore. The youngest daughter had a Masters degree and was looking for
work. The oldest daughter was over thirty. She was considered unattractive on
account of a poor set of teeth and had not studied beyond secondary school.
The family had received marriage inquiries for the second daughter but the
prospective bridegrooms had wanted her to move to their place of residence.
The family depended on her financially for maintenance and to repay a loan
taken to rebuild their house.
The difficulties arising from widowhood showed up even when the family
was a segment of a fairly well-to-do extended family. A Nair widow with two
unmarried daughters of thirty-one and twenty-eight lived with her husband’s
mother in an old style wood-and-tile ancestral house, surrounded by rice and
garden land. The house was ear-marked for the widow’s husband’s sister, who
lived in Bangalore. The husband’s early death had stretched their resources
thin and his widow worked on the family land. The elder daughter was
considered unattractive because of poor teeth and the younger one had dark
skin. The girls had not studied beyond secondary school and neither of them
worked outside the home.
The case of a poor Tiya widow indicated the possible futures of girls in
such households. The widow was a former agricultural labourer who was
too ill to work. The youngest daughter was thirty-seven and unmarried in
2005. She had higher secondary qualifications but worked as an agricultural
labourer. They lived in a visibly poor marshy locality in a small mud-and-tile
house. The mother said that brokers had brought inquiries but ‘people come
and take a look around here and don’t come back’. The two older daughters
had married after they were thirty. The second daughter, Kamala, had gone
to work in an informal-sector tailoring unit in Coimbatore. At thirty-four,
she married a Tamil man she met there but returned home with a daughter
after a year of marriage. She now worked as a tailor from home.

16. Eleven of the thirty-two households with women who were considered to be over-age,
belonged to widows, most of who were wage labourers. Of these, two households comprised
unmarried women of over fifty living with their widowed mother. In five widow households,
there were no sons.
280 Praveena Kodoth

Single Women, Sexuality and Wage Labour

In the local scheme of things, when women were unmarried it was be-
cause ‘nobody had come for them’ (arum vanhilla). They were ‘left behind’
(ozhinghu poyathe), signalling that women moved ahead in a substantive
sense only through marriage. Posed thus, marriage is the principal aspect
of the feminine self. It is also the principal source of livelihood for women.
Single women were more likely than other women to be employed, and most
were in wage labour. 17 They entered wage labour as the possibility of an
arranged marriage receded. Since wage labour was perceived as diminishing
a girl’s prospects of making an arranged marriage, girls were likely to spend
a number of years at home ‘waiting’, unless the family was too poor to afford
such a luxury. 18 This introduced a tension between the marriage prospects
of women and their participation in wage labour, rendering the position of
single women rather precarious. It was prefigured in two local sayings: ‘a
woman without a man is like a house without a pillar’ and ‘harm befalls
the leaf whether the leaf falls on the thorn or the thorn on the leaf’. The
informal work place afforded mobility and interaction between the sexes,
fuelling suspicions regarding women’s sexual morality. Own choice or ‘love’
marriages represented the materialization of this fear. Girls sometimes be-
came pregnant in relationships with fellow wage labourers. In one case in the
1990s, a young girl had an affair with a migrant labourer and got pregnant; he
then moved in with her family, which included her widowed mother and her
brother. It was discovered later that he was already married and had a family
in south Kerala. According to her mother, the girl knew this but when she
became pregnant there was little else she could do. Own choice marriages
are thought to reflect poor grooming and could affect the marriage prospects
of younger female siblings. They are also considered inherently fragile as
they lack the structures that enforce discipline. Over the years the Party had
interceded to allow inter-caste and inter-religious marriage, but only after
making every attempt to dissuade the couple. In such cases, Party patronage
may be used to enforce discipline in marriage.
Janaki, an older local activist of the CPM, brought home to me the sense
of shame associated with ‘love’ marriages. Usually sympathetic to the cir-
cumstances of the older unmarried women, she judged the actions of Kamala
(above) very harshly. Reacting to my appreciation of Kamala’s courage in
seeking work far away from home and making her own marriage, she said
‘are you suggesting that women should make run away marriages?’. Janaki
was married at twenty and divorced her husband a year later because he was

17. This was the case in seventeen of the thirty-two households with over-age women.
18. This was the case of a widow with two daughters of twenty-five and thirty; they were all wage
labourers. In one case, a daughter went to work immediately after her secondary education as
her father was ill. In four wage labour households, unmarried daughters between twenty-five
and thirty were not working outside the home, though their education profile was poor.
Gender, Caste and Matchmaking: Dowry in Kerala 281

given to drinking, which she found difficult to tolerate. Back in her natal
family she fell in love with a school teacher of another jati. However, her
father, a respected Tiya traditional healer, refused to consider it and she did
not pursue it any further. Nor did she marry again. Kamala, in contrast, has
crossed all ‘acceptable’ boundaries, married a Tamil man under somewhat
vague circumstances, and then returned home with a child. Even where it
involves dowries, arranged matchmaking carries a certain extent of institu-
tional ‘cover’ that is expected to enforce discipline in marriage. The desperate
moves made by parents to arrange marriages for their daughters using chan-
nels (brokers/bureaux) and practices (dowry) they consider demeaning thus
underscores the importance of conjugal patronage. By signalling the denial
of legitimacy to women outside the frameworks of conjugality and caste,
dowry reveals the devaluation of women.

THE RATIONALE FOR DOWRY

Over the past half a century, dowry has made firm inroads into matrilineal
society in Kerala. In northern Kerala, it retains inferior connotations and is
openly acknowledged only in the case of older unmarried women from poor
and socially vulnerable households. These households have limited options
— either to try to arrange marriages with dowries, or to leave their girls
unmarried and risk sexual transgression. Households with less social disad-
vantage and those under relatively better economic circumstances use dowry
to arrange marriages for girls with a deficit of normative femininity, but
are unlikely to acknowledge it. Relatively more affluent families compen-
sate deficits of normative femininity by giving girls additional gold jewelry,
which is usually not subject to negotiation. At the higher levels of the class
hierarchy, households are less likely to transact dowry or to make other com-
pensations. Here, concerns of normative femininity are subsumed under the
securities of class, social profile and appropriate grooming.
In the absence of dowry or other compensations, matchmaking strategies
throw into sharp relief the differential valuation of femininity and masculin-
ity, even when potential partners have roughly comparable levels of qualifi-
cation. I have attempted to argue that dowry is the logical extension of the
valuation of women centrally in terms of domesticity, sexuality and repro-
duction, and the confinement of all licit expressions of these within marriage
and caste. Thus, it becomes desirable that women seek arranged marriages.
Masculinity is prized for the ability to dispense conjugal patronage, but male
qualifications are not made to subserve marriage. That even men without jobs
could command dowry underscores the importance of conjugal patronage for
women.
Significantly, the caste associations and the CPM subscribe to this mode
of ‘exchange’; the former endorse dowry and caste explicitly and the lat-
ter adopt an attitude of sympathetic accommodation. The state in Kerala
282 Praveena Kodoth

substantially shares the CPM’s position. It intervenes to provide grants to

socially disadvantaged families for daughters’ marriages and introduced a
marriage insurance scheme for girls in destitute families (Sankaranarayanan
and Department of Finance, Kerala, 2004), in an effort to ease the burden of
poor families. Girls’ marriages pose difficulties because they involve expen-
ditures, which include gold and cash dowries, and more importantly because
without them, families risk disrepute. Hence, state handouts could help to pay
dowry and to subscribe to a dominant notion of ‘respectability’. Critically,
the position of the state and the CPM is founded on a refusal to challenge a
conjugal framework held together by reactionary caste and gender ideologies.

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Praveena Kodoth is a lecturer at the Centre for Development Studies, Med-

ical College PO, Trivandrum 695011, India. Her current research is on the
political economy of marriage and the rise of conjugal hegemony in Kerala.