Some modern-day practices are anachronistic. Most traditions, like it or not, in fact, are. There are few primeval rituals steeped in as much societal perversion as is the exalted Indian, nay South Asian, custom of giving, taking and killing for dowry. Every year, both in India and in non-resident South Asian communities settled across the globe, thousands of young brides are grotesquely murdered in, what are, ironically dubbed "dowry disputes". The word "dispute" is a redundancy. It does not matter whether the bride's family were willing partners in the give-and-take game in the first place. India ought to be a land of snake charmers and rope-trick magicians.

Himendra Thakur, the Boston-based chairperson of the International Society Against Dowry and Bride-Burning in India, takes the help of statistics to highlight his argument in the preface to the collection of a dozen essays on various facets of the issue. To bring out the macabre in the practice, Thakur compares the enormity of the crime to the worldwide toll taken by landmines. Landmine accidents kill/maim about 26,000 people every year. Eighty per cent (about 21,000) of these are civilians. On the other hand, dowry and bride-burning kill/main nothing less than 25,000 young women annually in India alone.

He also quotes some banal statistics published by the Indian government's National Crime Bureau which reports about 6,000 dowry deaths from many parts of India every year. As Thakur avers, "this is due to gross under-reporting; the reality is much worse". It certainly is. "The number of dowry deaths per million Hindu population more than doubled from 3 in 1987 to 7 seven years later. Compare this with the rise of Hindutva forces in India during the same period, and the results are self-evident. The highest intensity of dowry deaths is found in Delhi, followed close on its heels by Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and other North Indian states. The reported number of dowry deaths in the states of Maharashtra and Assam are said to be inflated by settlers from North Indian states. As Indians, primarily Hindus, migrated to the United Kingdom and North America, they took the malaise with them and practiced it as religiously as did their zealot brethren back home.

Myths and false notions about the dowry menace shroud the issue all over. The notion of greed, for instance, is linked to the influence of Western consumerist culture. However, as Julia Leslie points out, greed in Western cultures has not led to dowry demands and to the burning of women. Moreover, dowry is seen to be evil only when the groom's family is unabashedly avaricious. In other words, the giving of dowry by the bride's family is a forgone, acceptable conclusion. So much for give and take.

Fighting against the practice becomes difficult when women themselves justify the custom. The boycott of dowry marriages by Manushi (a women's NGO led by Madhu Kishwar) failed to cut much ice with the women themselves. As Leslie quotes Kishwar as saying, "Why should they be forced to give up a dowry, they argued, when they knew their parents would not give them a share in the family estate? If I did not have a means of ensuring that daughters got their due share in parental property, what business did I have to prevent them from getting dowries? In their view, it would only serve their brothers' interests, as they would get an even larger share of the inheritance."

Daughters cling to the dowry because it is their only parental inheritance. Fathers and brothers would rather pay the dowry than give a daughter or sister equal inheritance rights. As Kishwar continues, "A perusal of the parliamentary debates in the years preceding the passing of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, is very instructive in this regard. Mean were united across party lines in opposing equal inheritance rights for women on the ground that it would create discord between brothers and sisters. In other words, they virtually admitted that a key element in the asserted harmony between brothers and sisters is the disinheritance of the women. While some brothers accept their obligation to give dowry, few are willing to concede inheritance rights to women."

[This book was originally published by Trentham Books,London. £14.95]

Toward the end of World War II, a young American woman named Hannah M. Turner was serving in a Red Cross Clubmobile unit in northern Italy. One evening she was asked to report to one of the medical aid stations, to help with the wounded who were waiting to be evacuated by truck and ambulance to a rear hospital. "Most of the men were not even conscious," Mrs. Turner recalled in a letter she wrote me in 1996, "but I knelt down by one who was, looked at his dog tag to see his name and, holding his hand, I looked at him and said something. I don't remember what. Then he said, "If you could have anything right now, what would it be? I don't mean anything abstract...something physical, something you could put your hands on." And without a second thought, I said, "An issue of the New Yorker magazine." He looked stunned, then he started to laugh and his eyes lit up and I found out he had been a student (Dartmouth, I think) when he enlisted after his brother was killed in the Pacific. But what he really wanted to talk about was the New Yorker. So we reminisced about our favorite cartoons and writers and spent perhaps fifteen minutes in another world, one that was familiar and funny and far, far away from that one."

Hannah Turner was recounting her experience to me because of a one-sentence author's query I had placed in the New York Times Book Review, asking to hear from "longtime readers" of the New Yorker who would be willing to fill out a survey about their relationship with the magazine. I felt there would be a sizable response, but I certainly didn't expect nearly seven hundred cards and letters to come back, saying, as if in unison, "I thought you'd never ask!" Many of the people who replied -- including Mrs. Turner -- didn't want to wait for the survey and put their thoughts and experiences down right away. Seven clusters of questions, most of them open-ended, were sent out to all the respondents. Remarkably, almost half of them took the time and effort to complete the survey, some going on for three or four single-spaced pages.

You couldn't imagine a survey about Mademoiselle, Popular Mechanics, or U.S. News and World Report eliciting this kind of response -- but, then, the New Yorker, since its beginning in 1925, was never like any other magazine. In a review of Brendan Gill's book Here at the New Yorker in the New York Times Book Review in 1975, John Leonard called it "the weekly magazine most educated Americans grew up on." He went on: "Whether we read it or refused to read it -- which depended, of course, on the sort of people we wanted to be -- it was as much a part of our class conditioning as clean fingernails, college, a checking account, and good intentions. For better or worse, it probably created our sense of humor." More than that: the New Yorker did more than any other entity to create "our" sense of what was proper English prose and what was not, what was in good taste and what was not, what was the appropriate attitude to take, in print, toward personal and global happenings. "The New Yorker cartoon" and "the New Yorker short story," meanwhile, transcended mere genres and became cultural categories, the very names implying a specific kind of aesthetic lens on experience.

And more than that: the New Yorker resonates throughout the culture. To understand this, one need look no further than the press coverage given to the abrupt resignation of Tina Brown as editor of the magazine in the summer of 1998. The New Yorker at that point was a weekly magazine that had lost money for thirteen consecutive years, that had a modest circulation of eight-hundred-odd thousand, that (creatively) was awkwardly suspended between the Standards and Ideals of its classic version and the up-to-the-minute cocktail of glitz, hype, and topicality brought in by Brown when she arrived in 1992. Yet the New York Times put the story on the front page -- above the fold; Time magazine devoted six pages to the departure of Brown and her replacement by New Yorker writer David Remnick.

Typography offers a more subtle -- indeed, a by and large subliminal -- sign. The New Yorker's first art director, Rea Irvin, designed a distinctive display type for the magazine that has since then been known by his name. With the widespread adoption of computer typesetting in the 1980s, Irvin type, with minuscule variations, became available to any designer who wanted to suggest, however improbably, a product's upscale urbanity. And so it can be seen, to name just a few examples, in the logos for the television show Frasier; for the department store Bergdorf Goodman; for the Atlantis Hotel in the Bahamas; for the cover of Alice Munro's book of short stories The Moons of Jupiter; and for a new model of Cadillac called the Catera. (The Catera went further, using in its ads in the New Yorker and elsewhere a New Yorker boldface body type in addition to the Irvin display type.)

The surveys I got back gave flesh and blood to the notion of the bond between the New Yorker and its readers. Every one of the respondents -- most of whom lived outside the New York metropolitan area -- described a deep connection to the magazine, usually pedagogical and always personal. As one wrote, "What I'm probably trying to say is that I've always felt sort of nourished by the New Yorker, finishing an issue feeling not only entertained (transported in some cases) but enlightened, learning something about a subject that was written by a master of his craft...Hersey, McPhee, Flanner, Angell. A glorious list!" Many made some variation of the statement that life without the New Yorker was unimaginable (and so most of them kept up their subscriptions despite the changes made by Tina Brown, which were disliked by a vast majority). Often, they reported making the symbolic link tangible, through physically holding on to their old New Yorkers, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. A surprising number (12 percent, to be exact) reported taking the further step of using the covers for various artistic or decorative purposes, as if it were important for the New Yorker to be permanently visible in their homes. One woman wrote, "I've framed covers, used as folders whole covers, papered walls and covered chests, boxes, tins, and frames with cut up covers." People said they used New Yorker covers to paper the walls of a bathroom; a stairway; a summer cottage; a utility room; a wall in the guest room; a closet wall; and a closet-turned-wetbar.