“Bengali Bridal Diaspora”

Although I was born in Philadelphia, I spent the first twenty-two years of my life growing up in Calcutta (now Kolkata), the capital city of the Indian state of West Bengal. Consequently, I retain an abiding long-distance interest in the community of Bengalis, the people of West Bengal. This interest drew me to an interesting article in the January 30, 2010 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly: “Bengali Bridal Diaspora: Marriage as a Livelihood Strategy” by Ravinder Kaur, a sociologist at the Humanities and Social Sciences department of the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.
Here are some excerpts from Prof. Kaur’s article:

My observations and research show that Bengali brides are to be found in almost all parts of the country today, especially in the northern region. …

While cross-regional and cross-cultural marriage appears to be occurring more often in general … many more such brides happen to be Bengali who seem to be migrating to far-flung and culturally strange, rural destinations away from their own homeland. …

There also seems to be a long history of Bengali women migrating out (or being pushed out) for marriage. …

The question then is – what are the underlying reasons for this Bengali bridal diaspora? Or, what in the language of traditional migration studies is the “push factor” behind Bengali women marrying outside their own state and culture? What compels Bengali parents to give their daughters in marriage, often over long distances and into regions and families where they have no prior social networks and where daughters, being cultural and social strangers, will consequently find little support if they have difficulties with their marital families?

Prof. Kaur points out that the sex ratio—or, the number of females per 1000 males—is lower in the northern Indian states of Haryana (861), Punjab (874), and Uttar Pradesh (898) than in West Bengal (934), but chooses not to emphasize this as the underlying cause of the Bengali Bridal Diaspora phenomenon. Instead she implicates higher relative poverty and higher relative demand for dowry in West Bengal. Prof. Kaur shines a harsh light on the social consequences of West Bengal’s high relative poverty:

Bengal remains one of the poorest states in the country despite land reform and a socially committed state government which has ruled in continuity for nearly three decades. More than 40% of people remain below the poverty line, signalling the failure of development and the precariousness of livelihood for large numbers of families, especially their female members. Data shows that most women marrying out are from poor rural or urban working class families. … They are reduced to marrying men who are not exactly prosperous. … In the bride-receiving societies, the perception is that such men could not find local brides because they did not have sufficient land or were jobless. Given the shortage of local brides in Haryana and Punjab, such men are unable to compete in the local marriage market and are forced to look outside the state – and West Bengal is a popular destination for seeking brides.

And as for the practice of dowry, wherein grooms—in what are typically arranged marriages—gallantly insist on large cash and non-cash payments from the brides’ families:

The father of one Bengali bride from Hooghly district, married to a low caste man from a village in Utah district of UP [Uttar Pradesh], explained that it was poverty that made them send their daughters away. Further, the demand for dowry by Bengali grooms made it impossible for them to marry their daughters locally. Another reason seemed to be the unattractiveness of local grooms. One mother who had sent two daughters to UP said that, she has to support financially the one daughter who was married locally to a Bengali groom. Very significantly, the long distance marriages that Bengali women enter into are “dowryless” and even the marriage expenditure is taken care of by the needy groom. Thus, economically, such marriages are nearly costless for the girl’s parents while a local marriage would be a significant drain on household resources.

I found Prof. Kaur’s article to be an eye opener. It makes a convincing argument and does a great service in illuminating the social consequences of the economic hell that West Bengal is going through.

However, I wish there were more facts in the article. I wanted more cold hard data on inter-state marriages and on comparative dowry trends in India. Also, I would have liked some testimony from the brave Bengali brides. How have they been faring in their faraway homes? Do they feel abandoned by their parents who chose to send them away to distant lands? Do they blame anybody? And what do their husbands feel about their geographically marooned wives?

Finally, in the absence of more income and wealth data on the northern Indian husbands of Prof. Kaur’s Bengali brides, I am not entirely convinced that the low sex ratio in the northern states has little to do with the Bengali Bridal Diaspora phenomenon. Sure, the northern husband may not ask for a dowry from his Bengali in-laws. But is that because he is richer or is that because he is desperate for a bride on account of being the resident of a low sex ratio state? Conversely, why would a Bengali man ask for a stiff dowry? He may be poor—and greedy!—but he probably knows that other Bengalis are poor too and that, therefore, he could end up without a mate if he insisted on a high dowry. Bengal’s higher female-to-male ratio may be at least part of the answer to this conundrum.