1. Marriage Or Prostitution: How Can
You Possibly Price The Priceless?
By Nidhi Khurana

2. The Exchange of women
• Levi Strauss in ‘Elementary Forms of Kinship’ emphasized the
women as the “ultimate gifts” involved in creating of alliances
and networks.
• According to him, the flow of women is essential to social
integration, and groups are held together by giving and
receiving daughters, sisters and wives. .
• But this is not to be forgotten that Levi Strauss’s account is
based on a huge ethnographic observations, which conclude
that women are just exchanged.
• The “exchange of women”, which he does explain, is
considered to be the archetype of marriage, almost in every
part of the globe.

3. Dowry a much talked issue
• Parents spend extravagantly to get their daughters married
off to a good husband.
• They present their daughters decorated like a gift to the
groom.
• However, in a scenario, where women are turning into scarce
objects with males outnumbering females as per the 2011
census, the institution of dowry, it seems will collapse in the
near future.
• This institution makes sense on account of the compensation
it offers to the girl’s parents, but if we contemplate closely, is
this not another kind of prostitution, institutionalized
prostitution to be precise?

4. That bargain
• Recently, in Madhya Pradesh, in the districts of Ashoknagar
and Guna, some cases have been reported in which women
were sold to the grooms in return for some cash and cattle.
• The girls involved were mostly minors in the age group of 14
to 16.
• These girls were sold at a meagre amount of thirty to fifty
thousand or in return for a buffalo.
• Well, seriously? They are humans and not objects that have
such low prices.

5. Marriage is a sacrosanct contract or a
sexual contract?
• With institutions like dowry and bride wealth, the contract
loses all it sacredness and reduces itself to a sexual contract
based on monetary exchanges.
• It can be considered to be a sexual contract especially in the
cases of bride price because traffickers usually buy brides and
sell them in the other states or overseas, after satisfying their
own sexual needs.
• These women belong to the lower classes and their parents
have no option but to sell them in return for some money
that can sustain their life for a little while.
• What else can they do when the cost of raising a daughter are
rising like anything, when there is a little chance that parents
can protect their daughters from the eyes of the man ready
to wither her gullible being.

6. When everything fails
• Sadly, the state has also not been doing anything to protect
the interests of the women belonging to the weaker and poor
sections of the society.
• When it can let the rapists flout without impunity, when
traffickers can go unnoticed, there is no way we can stop
crimes against women.
• Feminists’ movements have also failed to subsume the
interests of these women in the mainstream agenda.
• And while the Indian society itself carries on its hypocritical
nature of worshipping and exploiting women at the same
time, the only question which looms in my mind is- How can
we possibly price the priceless

7. • Read more on Youth Ki Awaaz at http://bit.ly/16aLE2I