“Dowry” refers to marriage gifts. Yet dowry gifts are not “free gifts”. Instead, dowry is part of the system of total services that is instrumental to the development of the marriage contract. Dowry in South Asia bears its own peculiarities that yield insight into the institutional analysis of the gift. First, it is strictly non-reciprocal, which begs the question – why are dowry gifts given when there is no expectation of return? Second, while dowry gifts have become economically irrelevant around the world, prospective South Asian grooms have continued to demand increasingly larger dowries. While mainstream literature based on neoclassical economics and formalist anthropology discusses dowry as groom-price, its ahistorical approach fails to account for the evolution of otherwise non-capitalist dowry systems in modern capitalism. In this chapter, we apply a substantivist methodology, where the economy is regarded as embedded within a social and cultural context, to investigate questions related to the continued prevalence of dowry in South Asia despite non-reciprocity and market incursions.