Indians Celebrate a Bride's Feisty "No!"

[Guest guest]

NOIDA, India (Monday, May 19, 2003) - The musicians were playing, the

2,000 guests were dining, the Hindu priest was preparing the

ceremony, and the bride was dressed in red, her hands and feet

festively painted with henna.

 

Then, the bride's family says, the groom's family moved in for the

kill. The dowry of two televisions, two home-theater sets, two

refrigerators, two air conditioners and one car was too cheap. They

wanted $25,000 in rupees, now, under the wedding tent.

 

As a free-for-all erupted between the two families, the bartered

bride put her hennaed foot down. She reached for her royal blue cell

phone and dialed 100. By calling the police, Nisha Sharma, 21, a

computer student, saw her potential bridegroom land in jail and

herself land in the national spotlight as India's new overnight

sensation.

 

"Are they marrying with money, or marrying with me?" Sharma asked

Friday, her dark eyes glaring under arched eyebrows. In the next

room, a fresh wave of reporters waited to interview her, sitting next

to the unopened boxes of her wedding trousseau.

 

After fielding a call from a comic book artist who wanted to bring

her act of defiance on May 11 to a mass market, she said, "I'm

feeling proud of myself."

 

"It Takes Guts to Send Your Groom Packing," a headline in The Times

of India read. Rashtriya Sahara, a major Hindi daily, said in a

salute, "Bravo: We're Proud of You."

 

"She is being hailed as a New Age woman and seen as a role model to

many," the newspaper Asian Age wrote next to a front-page drawing of

Sharma standing in front of red and green wedding pennants while

flashing a V sign to cameras and wearing a sash over her blue sari

with the message "Anti-Dowry."

 

"This was a brave thing for a girl dressed in all her wedding finery

to do," said Vandana Sharma, president of the Women's Protection

League, one of many women's rights leaders and politicians to make a

pilgrimage last week to this eastern suburb of Delhi. "This girl has

taken a very dynamic step."

 

India's new 24-hour news stations have propelled Nisha Sharma to

Hindi stardom. One television station set up a service allowing

viewers to "send a message to Nisha." In the first two days, 1,500

messages came in.

 

Illegal for many decades in India, dowries are now often disguised by

families as gifts to give the newlyweds a start in life. More than a

media creation, Sharma and her dowry defiance struck a chord in this

nation, whose expanding middle class is rebelling against a dowry

tradition that is being overfed by a new commercialism.

 

"Advertisements now show parents giving things to make their

daughters happy in life," said Brinda Karat, general secretary of the

private All India Democratic Women's Association, referring to

television commercials for products commonly given in dowries.

 

"It is the most modern aspects of information technology married to

the most backward concepts of subordination of women," Karat

continued in a telephone interview. Last year, she said, her group

surveyed 10,000 people in 18 of India's 26 states.

 

"We found an across-the-board increase in dowry demand," she said.

 

Much of the dowry greed is new, Karat said. In a survey 40 years ago,

she noted, almost two-thirds of Indian communities reported that the

local custom was for the bridegroom to pay the bride's family, the

reverse of the present dominant custom.

 

According to government statistics, husbands and in-laws angry over

small dowry payments killed nearly 7,000 women in 2001.

 

When Sharma's parents were married in 1970 the situation was

different. "My father-in-law did not demand anything," her mother,

Hem Lata Sharma, said while serving tea and cookies to guests.

 

For the Sharma family, the demands went far beyond giving the young

couple a helping hand. Dev Dutt Sharma, Nisha's father, said his

potential in-laws were so demanding that they had stipulated product

brands.

 

"She specified a Sony home theater, not a Philips," Sharma, an owner

of car battery factories, said of Vidya Dalal, the mother of the

bridegroom, Munish Dalal, 25.

 

Sharma Jaikumar, a telecommunications engineer and friend of the

Sharma family, said as the press mob ebbed and flowed through the

house: "My daughter was married recently, and there was no dowry. But

anyone can turn greedy. What can be more easy money than a dowry? All

you have to do is ask."

 

With Dalal in jail for 14 days, pending formal charges of violating

India's anti-dowry laws, the bridegroom's family has disappeared.

Before going underground, they charged that Nisha Sharma had had an

affair with a student at her university and that she had a "mark" on

her back, implying that she had contracted a disease.

 

Dev Dutt Sharma bought two sets of each electrical appliance. One was

for the couple. The other was for the groom's older brother who had

headed the household after the death of their father. The $25,000 was

to go to the bridegroom's mother.

 

A believer in arranged marriages, Dev Dutt Sharma had found the

bridegroom by placing a classified ad in two of New Delhi's elite

English-language newspapers, a common practice here. On Friday, he

recommended that fathers of brides check the bona fides of

prospective in-laws. His potential son-in-law was not a computer

engineer, he said, but a computer instructor. The mother was not a

vice principal of a private school, but a gym teacher. That fact came

home to him Sunday night when Dalal slapped him across the face for

refusing her demand for cash.

 

"The slap was so tight that she made me realize that she really is a

physical training instructor," Sharma said Friday, rubbing his left

cheek at the memory. "The finger marks of her slap, later after four

hours, figured in my medical legal examination."

 

"Then Savitry Devi spit on my face," he continued, referring to the

bridegroom's aunt. When the police came, Dev Dutt Sharma said, they

spent an hour calming the wedding party, giving the bridegroom and

his family ample time to escape.

 

Three hours after the brawl, when the bride's father was registering

his complaint at the police station, a television crew from the Aaj

Tak news channel happened to be at the station.

 

"With the pressure of the media people, the police went to the boy's

house and arrested him," Dev Dutt Sharma said.

 

On Friday, the Sharmas had no regrets about their expensive wedding

collapsing in chaos. "People say now it will be very difficult to

marry my daughter again," Sharma said. "But I thought, if trouble is

starting today, tomorrow may be worse. It could be killing. I

thought, let the money go."

 

Unfazed by the loss of her fiance, Sharma said that since Monday she

had received 20 to 25 marriage proposals, by cell phone, e-mail and

letter.

 

Source: International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/96694.html

By James Brooke NYT