I found that, in the seventeenth century, practically all propertied families in São Paulo endowed every one of their daughters, favoring them by giving dowries far exceeding the value of what their brothers would inherit later on. Thus the question remains: what led individual families to change their customs regarding dowry? And they changed remarkably. Yet entail, monopolies, and privileges were abolished legally, whereas the dowry was not abolished legally, it disappeared in practice. My hypothesis at a general level is that the institution of dowry was among the many fetters to the development of capitalism, such as entail, monopolies, and the privileges of the nobility, of churchmen, and of army officers, that disappeared as the influence of industrial capital spread worldwide.
Why did a practice that had been considered a duty stop being a duty, or, conversely, why did daughters lose the right they had previously enjoyed of receiving from their parents the wherewithal to contribute to the support of their marriage? Despite the many historical and anthropological studies about dowry, to the best of my knowledge this is the first analysis of its disappearance. Do these happen even today? It is for the readers’ to judge. All these are woven to make an interesting reading and an insight into the rural life that once existed in Kerala, the state which has the sobriquet “God’s own country”. The story has exploitation of women, skewed romances, a wrestling match, marriage brokering, school teachers, Church pastors, and so on. Several people and social factors controlled how life proceeded for Marria in that society. Read how Kunj managed to marry her and from then on how Marria became a “living dowry” for his family.
Kunj, a school dropout was deeply in love with a beautiful girl, Marria. The time scale of the story spans from the 1930’s to the next millennium with three generations in focus. This fiction is set in Nedumanoor, in south Kerala, an imaginary village.
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