Bride price, dowry, and young men with time to kill: A commentary on men’s marriage postponement in India

Abstract

Rising numbers of young unmarried men in India reflect a marriage squeeze that goes beyond the shortage of brides created by sex-selective abortion. We describe a decline in men’s marriageability caused by their falling economic prospects at the same time as families of brides are increasingly seeking grooms with stable employment. We group young men into those without jobs or much education, those with education but no work, and the privileged few with education as well as employment. This classification resolves some of the seeming contradictions in the qualitative literature on marriage in India. Some of this literature talks about the rising prevalence of bride price and some about the persistence of dowry, while some papers reflect in general on the costs of being young, male, and aimless. Our commentary includes a review of the growing literature on the physiological and (perhaps) consequently behavioural and health outcomes of men’s anomie.

Keywords:

• age at marriage
• marriage squeeze
• young men
• dowry
• bride price
• unemployment
• NEETS
• gender
• youth bulge
• India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Alaka Malwade Basu and Sneha Kumar are both based in the Department of Global Development, Cornell University, USA; Sneha Kumar is also based at the Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, USA.

2 Please direct all correspondence to Alaka Malwade Basu, Department of Global Development, Cornell University, Warren Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA; or by E-mail: [email protected]

3 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the National Seminar on ‘25 Years of the NFHS in India: Lessons Learnt and the Way Forward’, New Delhi, in October 2019; the South Asia Program at Cornell University; and the (virtual) 2021 International Population Conference run by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. We thank participants at all three events for discussion and comments.

4 The associated data set for this paper is available at: https://dhsprogram.com/data/available-datasets.cfm.