Transcriber: Radha Patel Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
The month of September 1942 is etched in my memory.
It was a few weeks before my twelfth birthday,
and my father had just died.
My mother, who had no professional training,
found it very hard to spend the fees for our school fees.
And my three brothers and me,
she took the help of friends and scholarships
in order to educate us.
She didn't make a difference between my brothers and me.
All she wanted was that all of us should excel.
When I was 20, I had a semi-arranged marriage,
and my husband was posted, in 1954, to England,
and I went with him.
And I took advantage of being there for three years and studied law.
When I returned to India,
I was required to train with a senior before I could practice law.
So I decided I should get the best lawyer,
join the best lawyer,
and I zeroed down on someone called Sachin Chaudhary.
But it was extremely difficult to get an appointment with him.
After great difficulty, I did,
and I was full of trepidation when I went to meet him.
But I put on a brave front, just as I am doing now.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
He had some idea why I had come,
but he wanted to be completely clear.
So I told him that I wanted to practice law
and I wanted to join his chambers.
He was not in favor of women joining the law,
so he tried to dissuade me.
He said,
"Young woman, instead of joining the legal profession,
go and get married."
(Laughter)
So I said to him,
"Sir, I am already married."
(Laughter)
"Then go and have a child," he advised.
"I already have a child."
(Laughter)
"It's not fair to the child to be alone,
so you should have a second child."
(Laughter)
I said, "Mr. Chaudhary, I have two children."
(Laughter)
So, taken aback for the third time, he said,
"Come and join my chambers.
You're a persistent young woman, and you will do well at the bar."
After about 20 years of practice,
I was appointed a judge at the Delhi High Court,
and in 1991,
I was the first woman to be chief justice of a state high court.
(Applause)
As I mentioned earlier,
I was 20 when I got married,
and my fiancee and his family never demanded a dowry or anything else.
We had a simple celebration.
We served vanilla ice cream and salted cashew nuts.
But we still had fun, and we enjoyed ourselves.
So, you can see, that you don't need anything extra.
But I, now, I'm happily married for the last 64 years.
(Applause)
Every woman, every mother, wants her daughter to be married.
And when she meets a young man,
she tries to size him up to find out if he's a suitable boy.
But at the back of her mind is worry.
Does he want a dowry?
If so, how much?
In fact, it's the curse of dowry
that makes parents not want to have girls.
In the old days, when girls and boys didn't have equal inheritance,
a young girl was given stridhan, which is bride's wealth,
at the time of her marriage.
It was something that was passed from a mother to her daughter
and consisted of jewelry.
It was her personal property.
But even that was often taken away by the bride-groom's parents
and given to the groom's sister when she was getting married.
So the bride had nothing.
Slowly, the prevalence of dowries started.
This meant gifts were given
not only to the bride
but to the bride-groom and to his family.
And demands, dowry demands,
were negotiated at the time of an arranged marriage.
Parents were worried as to how they would meet these demands,
which sometimes increased from day to day and from hour to hour
as the wedding date approached.
Sometimes, just as the wedding ceremony was about to take place,
a fresh demand would be made.
It was a great trauma for parents,
especially those who had more than one daughter.
They were bankrupt, spent more than they had,
and the extortion sometimes continued even after the wedding.
So instead of loving their daughters and wanting to have them,
they considered them a curse.
And they resorted to something like female feticide
or female infanticide.
In order to prevent this evil of dowry,
an act was passed.
It was called the Dowry Prohibition Act,
1961.
Before the act, dowries were displayed openly.
After the act, the displays stopped.
But the giving and taking of dowry continued,
and the demand for ostentatious functions and feasts
by the bride-groom's family,
to be paid for by the bride's family,
continued.
This was really terrible.
And very few parents
would reject a young man
if he or his family demanded a dowry.
Most would not,
even though they knew it was illegal to give or take a dowry.
Let me give you an example.
The year was 1991.
A very senior Supreme Court of India judge
had arranged his daughter's wedding.
I asked him,
"Are you going to give a dowry?"
Remember,
this was 30 years after the passing of the Dowry Prohibition Act.
He was quiet.
And then he said,
"I'll tell you the honest truth.
I will indeed give a dowry for my daughter
because I cannot sacrifice her happiness and her life.
In my community, she cannot get married without a dowry.
But I promise you, I will not take a dowry for my son."
This is not what I wanted to hear,
but at least it was half a step forward.
So what do you think?
Can the passing of laws change attitudes?
In India, with a very patriarchal society,
changing attitudes and changing mindsets is extremely difficult,
and it's a slow process, but we need to fast-forward it.
I had hoped
that with the succession laws being changed
and daughters getting some inheritance rights,
the law would have had some effect on the evil of dowry.
In 1956,
the Hindu Succession Act was passed,
and in that year,
it was provided in the act that daughters and sons
would get equally
from their father's property which was self-acquired.
This, of course, should have made a difference.
But it didn't seem to have done that.
In fact, women were not willing to assert.
Let me tell you of an incident.
I was a judge at the Delhi High Court.
Three young men came for me and wanted -
their father had died,
he hadn't left a will,
and they wanted their property to be divided into three parts.
I found they had three sisters.
So I said to them,
"I will divide it into six parts because that's what the law says,
and each sibling should get one share."
They protested.
They said,
"Our sisters are married,
our sisters have got dowries,
and they have given us relinquishment deeds."
I was not happy, so I insisted they bring the sisters to court
because I was not sure
whether the sisters had been coerced into giving their relinquishment deeds
or they didn't know the law.
When the women came, I asked them,
"Do you know the law?"
And they said, "Yes."
"So then why are you giving up your share?"
And this is what they said:
"We do not want to have any problems with our brothers
or spoil our relationships with our brothers
because if in the future we need anything of any sort,
to whom shall we turn except our brothers, our natal family?"
So they knew what was happening.
And I said to the young men,
"If you were six brothers,
you would have happily shared and got one-sixth each,
so why are you depriving your sisters?"
But they were adamant,
and their sisters also were not willing to withdraw their relinquishment deeds.
So, though they were aware, they were not willing to assert.
Many people are not aware that since 2005 -
that's almost 10 years ago -
the daughters' rights of inheritance have been widened
and now include not only the self-acquired property of the father
but also the ancestral property -
unless, of course, the father wills away the property to someone else.
So fathers, we tell you,
do not will the property away to your sons or daughters.
Make sure your daughters get their legitimate share.
(Applause)
You know, it reminds me of the story of Sudha Goel
because daughters need to have control of their property,
they need to feel secure,
and Sudha Goel had been given a dowry.
One December night, the neighbors heard her screaming:
"Bachao! Bachao! Save me! Save me!"
So they rushed and forced their way into the flat
and found her in flames.
Her mother-in-law and her husband were simply sitting there.
She said, "These people have killed me.
They have taken my gold and everything."
There are hundreds of such cases in India every year.
How do we do it?
How do we take steps to stop this?
I think that I can summarize it in four words.
First, awareness.
Second, assertion.
Third, attitude change.
And fourth, action.
So, sisters,
don't be blackmailed by - emotionally blackmailed by your brothers.
Don't take dowries; don't take after dowries.
Demand your inheritance.
Brothers, husbands, and fathers,
make sure that your daughter gets her legitimate share.
And make sure that she has that confidence that is important for her.
Do the legal thing, not the illegal.
So when you look forward,
make sure your daughters get what they deserve.
You should not let your daughters down,
and they will not let you down.
(Applause)
So this is the mantra:
Inheritance, not dowry.
Repeat it, act upon it, and get others to act upon it as well.
I'd like to end with an appeal by a daughter to her parents.
"Father, why do you discriminate against me
when I can be as good as my brother?
Mother, nurture, nourish, and educate me,
and you will see that I will not be a burden
but will control my own destiny.
And you will have nothing to fear when Brother is not there.
I will look after both of you in your old age.
I ask only to be treated equally.
Will you not dare?
So that I have the freedom to choose and the right to care
and am no longer the prisoner of my own gender,
unable to resist or retaliate against injustice.
Oh Father, give me a chance.
Just give me a chance.
Oh Mother, break the bonds of tradition
and let me into the sunlight to dance, to dance, to dance."
(Applause)