there are cases of separation, divorce is not an option<sup>5</sup> . Some of these features have become less restrictive in educated urban circles, but they continue to be a defining aspect of village life.

Getting one's daughter married is considered an Indian parent's primary duty and to have an older unmarried daughter is a tremendous misfortune with large social and economic costs. However, the costs of getting a daughter married have been steadily rising in real terms across the Indian sub-continent. In the community that we focus on here dowries have been increasing substantially for at least two decades. Dowries<sup>6</sup> among the potters average six times the annual income of a bride's parents, an amount that is consistent with findings from other samples. One possible reason for the rise in dowries is that grooms are scarce. Population growth may have resulted in a surplus of women from large younger cohorts attempting to match with men from smaller older cohorts (Rao 1993, Bhat and Halli 1999). Our respondents provided us with explanations that were consistent with this saying that they were willing to pay (and demand) such high dowries because that there was a shortage of eligible males. One woman listed the eligible males available for her fifteen-year-old daughter and demonstrated that the competition for them was quite severe with thirteen females competing for six males.

Once the wedding is celebrated and the newly married bride has moved to her husband's home, she is not only a bride but also a potential hostage. Since divorce is impossible, under no circumstances can she move back permanently to her parent's home. Thus, violence can be used as a mechanism to extract further transfers from the bride's family. In fact, alll the wife-abusers whom we had in-depth interviews with justified their behavior with "instrumental" explanations, as a means to extract transfers or control resources.

The interviews that we conducted revealed that there was a close link between much of the abuse by the groom's family and the demand for transfers from the bride's family. We will illustrate this link with a brief outline of the case of Sannamma and Raju, a young couple who had been married for about two years. Their parents arranged the marriage vhen Sannamma was 17 and Raju was about 24, and the wedding was celebrated about six months later. Sanamma's parents are relatively rich with about 10 acres of irrigated land, while Raju's were considerably _5_ According the 1991 Indian Census, in this region of India the divorce rate is estimated at 0.3 per cent.

6 The term "dowry" has been used in a number of different ways in the literature. We will employ it to mean a groom-price, a payment in cash and/or kind directly made from a bride's family to a groom's. We will call the reverse transaction a brideprice.

7 This ratio excludes those bride-households that received brideprices, since this community, like many others in the sub-continent, has undergone a transition from paying brideprice to dowry. When brideprice families are included the average dowry is about double the size of annual incomes. These ratios are very similar to those in the frequently analyzed ICRISAT survey which was conducted in two neighboring states (Rao, 1993).

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