Match Made
LETTER FROM SRI LANKA
On 30 December 2019, a young woman from Sri Lanka’s Northern Province killed herself. While her motivations are impossible to guess, many Tamil websites noted she had recently married and a few speculated that excessive pressure for dowry may have played a role. The end of an anonymous poem which circulated on social media shortly after her death translates as, “If mothers who arrange marriages for sons/ Want to keep their children under their influence/ Why do they send them to wedding halls?/ It is the ruinous dowry system/ That has ruined this beautiful face.”
Women across Sri Lanka have always had strong cultural incentives to marry. In Tamil homes, it is not surprising to hear the proverb “—a woman without a husband
