Lampooning dowry
Sometimes, fabulously original contributions to hoary debates just get missed by the media. Two new videos funded by business consultant Sunil Alagh are a brilliant parody of dowry but they have been ignored.
Savagely satirical in the way they turn the tables on men, turning them into ‘objects’ that, like the scooter and the TV, have been paid for by the bride and are therefore for her use, they are Alagh’s contribution to the government’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (Save Your Daughter, Teach Your Daughter) campaign to empower women. Apart from two articles, one in Scroll and one on a women’s website, the videos have generated no media interest to speak of, much less a debate on the merits of the message.
In one video, a bride is shown about to go for a ride on a scooter with her husband. The woman's father-in-law tells her contemptuously that she had better think again because he needs the scooter to do his chores.
The bridge retorts: “I'm the one who paid the quoted price. I gave you the scooter as part of the dowry I brought so I own the scooter and your son. Ask nicely, and I might let you use my things.”
The second video too alters the usual image of a new bride in her in-laws’ home, namely, tense, eager to please, everyone’s doormat. It shows her in the kitchen with her mother in law who is goading her into asking her parents for a new fridge.
The bride says her parents only recently gave a sewing machine. ‘’What is this? Do I have to give monthly installments or what?” asks the young woman. The mother in law’s reply is why not? The wife answers: ‘Well, monthly installments are only for objects, so if you expect monthly installments from me, that means your son is an object I can use as I wish’.
The videos, made by Red Carpet Entertainment, are short, punchy, and well-crafted. The settings, characters and dialogue are realistic. The acting is under-stated. The director is spot on when he uses words like EMI which the younger generation, even of poor Indians, are familiar with but which flummox the mother-in-law who asks ‘’EMI? Woh kya hai?” and it has the bride pronouncing ‘use’ as ‘yooj’.
But what is important is the hard hitting message that takes dowry and turns it into something that pathetic in-laws take, not realizing that in doing so, they are turning their sons into objects that the bride has effectively purchased.
The videos make fun of the in-laws, mock what they have done and suggest that anyone who takes dowry is a fool. It turns the assumption underlying dowry, namely that a woman has no value unless she comes loaded with cash, jewellery and electrical goods, on its head by saying that, if she does indeed come to her new home with these items, she has in effect ‘bought’ the bridegroom.
This is a refreshing change from the earnest, fuddy-duddy, anti-dowry sermons normally churned out by the government. They have not worked in 50 years. Nor have all the draconian anti-dowry laws on the statute book.
This is not to say that these videos will banish dowry but surely no one would argue with the fact that mocking and discrediting a custom is more likely to succeed than moral exhortation. Ridicule is a powerful weapon. No one likes looking foolish and a man certainly looks like a fool when he trades in his self-respect, honour, and dignity for a fridge.
Yet the one or two articles that have appeared on the videos criticize the videos for implicitly accepting the fact of dowry, missing the point completely. Presumably, these critics prefer the traditional, literal and bog standard sermon in which audiences are told ‘dowry is bad and you must not demand it’. Yes, these two videos do not say anything so obvious because they are trying to attack the issue from a fresh, oblique angle, that is, to satirise the custom, give the woman the upper hand as the ‘buyer’ and poke fun at the bridegroom as the woman’s property.
‘’The point I’m making is that by asking for a dowry parents are putting their son up for sale so I’m saying if you’re OK with putting your son on the market for the best price, that’s OK but is that what you want to do?,” said Alagh.
When someone tries a fresh approach to an old social evil, it would be quite nice if the media took an interest and wrote about it. If a friend had not happened to send me a link, I would never have heard about them. In contrast, the 2013 Tanishq ad which challenged stereotypes by featuring a dark-skinned bride who was marrying for a second time, generated a lot of media coverage.
Luckily, even with the media’s total neglect, the videos are doing all right - two million hits on Facebook and around 230,000 views on YouTube. They are being shown on Doordarshan and INOX cinemas are doing their bit for women’s empowerment by showing them without charging Alagh anything.
I hope they eventually get the wider media attention they deserve. If nothing else, they might inspire a younger generation of film makers and ad makers to be more savage in denouncing social evils.
(Amrit Dhillon is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi)