The more urgent question is not why the anti-dowry law hasn't worked, but why the killing has stopped generating the kind of collective grief that once brought thousands of women onto the streets. That disappearance is not accidental. It has a structure.
Dr Kriti Kapila, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Law
09 July 2026
Why India stopped mourning its dead daughters: King's research reveals the hidden structures behind dowry's deadly silence
A woman in India dies in a dowry-related incident every 80 minutes. New research asks why nobody is marching about it.
New research from King's College London has found that the uneven unfolding of a post-independence law designed to free Indian women from the constraints of Hindu kinship inadvertently created the conditions in which their killing could go publicly unmourned.
Dr Kriti Kapila, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Law at the King's India Institute and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, School of Global Affairs, King's College London, says this explains why, despite more than 6,500 dowry-related deaths recorded in India in 2022 alone, the mass protests that once defined the issue have disappeared entirely.
Dowry - payments made by a bride's family to the groom's at the time of marriage - has been illegal in India since 1961. Women who fail to meet escalating demands from their husband's family face abuse, and in thousands of cases each year, death.
Last August, Nikki Bhati, a 28-year-old from Greater Noida, was set alight by her husband in front of their six-year-old son. The attack was filmed and shared on social media. Protests briefly erupted in Delhi before fading within days.
That structure is the Indian marriage and its rootedness in caste ideology, which the Constitution aimed to dismantle. Her research begins with the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, which made divorce legally possible for Hindu couples for the first time. "Dowry came loose with it," says Dr Kapila, "and once free of its ritual logic, it stopped being a structured gift and started behaving like a commodity, with demands that grew until violence followed."
Newfound gender equality made it possible for women to protest against dowry-killings in the 1970s and 1980s, but this was short-lived.
By the 1990s, two further shifts made protest impossible. First, dowry murders staged as kitchen accidents gave way to suicides, leaving no external perpetrator to march against. Secondly, the spread of sex-selective abortion - which India's 2001 census revealed had produced a child sex ratio of just 927 girls per 1,000 boys - gave families a pre-emptive alternative that removed the possibility of protest entirely, because the decision to eliminate daughters was being made by the natal family itself.
"The social architecture that once made daughters' deaths publicly grievable has been systematically dismantled – by capital, and then by the unanticipated consequences of legal reforms that were meant to do the opposite," says Dr Kapila.
The study is published in Public Culture, one of the world's leading social science journals.
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Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Law