All about dowry & arranged marriage

Hello! Last week, people in my class busy talking about dowry and arranged marriage. Sound serious, right? Hmm, were they start planning to get married? Whoa, seemed like it's not time yet..hehe..

Actually, we were discussing two stories that brought about dowry and arranged marriage in Indian tradition as the highlighted issues. A Question of Dowry and Everything's Arranged were stories that we had to attend to in order to come out with a viewpoint that those stories tried to convey. We had to support our viewpoint with the evidences found in the two stories. It was like writing a position paper or participating in debate. We worked in groups of five. By the way, my group members were Guhan, Kumutha, Fonyi and Husna. My group harmoniously labeled as 1 Malaysia as all races were there.

Each group came out with different viewpoints based on how they perceived the issues. My group agreed that society expectation on Indian arranged marriage and its implication was the subject that matter in the two stories. In the story A question of Dowry, Sivasothie, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ramachandran did not have any right to voice out her opinion regarding her marriage. Both her parents did the talking about the arrangement of the marriage even on dowry. The future husband of Sivasothie, Thiruchelvam was so demanding that he asked for pricey dowry. Mrs. Ramachandran who was very concerned about society's view agreed with Thiruchelvam and wanted to continue the marriage. However, Mr. Ramachandran had told Thiruchelvam about the soggy land that they wished to be the dowry caused Thiruchelvam to call off the marriage.

In the story Everything's Arranged, it dealt with face value. Rukumani's mother who really concerned about society's view had destroyed her own daughter happiness. She wanted Rukumani to be married to her chosen future son-in-law, Deva, but she later found out that Rukumani had going out with the boy before the marriage. Therefore, Deva's mother asked for an unreasonable dowry so that Rukumani could not afford to provide the dowry. In order to save their family's face value, high valued dowry became an obstacle for the marriage.

Thus, from the stories we could see that many fixation were to derive. For example, the choice was not in the bride's and the bridegroom's hands, there was no love affair allowed before marriage and the importance of dowry in Indian tradition.