May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (9 page)

Sita insisted that she had remained pure. “I am not what you take me to be,” she implored. “Ravana’s body touched mine as he carried me off, but am I to blame for that?” She requested that a funeral pyre be built, but when she threw herself into the flames, the gods miraculously rescued her. This was divine proof of her innocence.

Sita’s ordeal has left an indelible mark on the relationship of Indian women to fire, which remains a major feature of their spiritual lives, a cause of their death and a symbol, in the end, of one of the most shocking forms of oppression. What follows is the story of two Indian women, Surinder Kaur and Roop Kanwar, both of them victims of fire and Hindu tradition. One of them is lucky to be alive, the other is dead.

Surinder Kaur is a Sikh, illiterate, the mother of two, from a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Delhi. In 1983 she almost burned to death in her own home and accused her husband and sister-in-law of setting her on fire deliberately. She lived to tell her story, but like most personal tragedies in India, hers remained largely
unknown; no famous lawyers or outraged women’s groups came to her side. At her request I have changed her name.

Roop Kanwar was a member of the traditional warrior caste of Rajputs, with a high school education, from a small village in Rajasthan. In 1987 she died in the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre. Her death shocked the nation, was deplored by the prime minister, and was partially responsible for the ousting of the chief minister of a state government.

In both cases, I spent weeks trying to learn what really happened to cause the violence but finally had to accept that the truth could probably never be known. Surinder Kaur may have been burned by her husband and sister-in-law, or she may have immolated herself. Roop Kanwar may have been forced to her husband’s pyre, or she may have chosen to die. Whatever the case, both were victims of a society in which women are not only burned to death but are raised to see self-immolation as their only escape from miserable marriages—or, worse, as an act of courage and religious inspiration.

ON AUGUST 12, 1983, ON A GRAY, SWELTERING DAY AT THE END OF DELHI’S
monsoon, Surinder Kaur, the thirty-year-old wife of a scooter-cab driver, was doused with kerosene and set on fire. The burning occurred at her home, in a small, dark entranceway leading from her front door to an inner courtyard. She ran screaming out into the street, her clothes on fire, and threw herself into a pool of water that had collected there from the heavy rains. Her husband lifted her out of the gutter and drove her in his scooter-cab to a nearby hospital, where she was admitted with burns over 60 percent of her body. In India, with wounds like these, most people die. Remarkably, Surinder lived, although she would have deep, permanent scars on her legs, arms, neck, upper chest, stomach and back. Only her breasts and face were untouched. These facts, at least, were not disputed. Beyond that, the stories wildly diverged.

Surinder claimed that her husband and his sister had tried to burn her to death. They were angry, she said, that she had not brought more dowry to the marriage. “My husband was holding my hair, and my sister-in-law poured the kerosene on me,” she told me angrily. Then her husband guarded the door while her sister-in-law lit the match. Based on this account, the police charged Surinder’s husband with assault and her sister-in-law with attempted murder. The case has languished in New Delhi’s Sessions Court for years.

But the husband and the sister-in-law maintained that Surinder’s burns were self-inflicted and that she had framed them as revenge for her unhappiness in the house. The sister-in-law said she was having tea upstairs when she heard screams from below. “She was shouting, ‘I’m burning, I’m dying,’ ” the sister-in-law told me. The family had never asked her for any dowry, Surinder’s husband and sister-in-law said, and in any case, she had brought them nothing.

My search for Surinder began during my first year in India. That summer I had come to my benign conclusions about arranged marriage, yet I sometimes wondered if I had too tolerantly interpreted an essentially repressive tradition. My editors in Washington, familiar with reports about “bride burnings” in India over the last several years, gave me a chance to explore the darker side. They asked me to find a woman who had lived through a bride burning and was willing to tell her story. Their request turned out to be more difficult to fulfill than I expected, simply because most women who are victims of bride burnings in India do not survive. If a woman does not die right away, she usually succumbs to infection in a substandard hospital a few days later. The police say the low survival rate helps to make the practice a popular form of murder. Bride burning is also grimly expedient. Guns and knives are expensive, but kerosene exists in every Indian household and rarely leaves a trail of solid evidence. Prosecutors find it difficult to disprove the usual argument made by the in-laws, who testify that the burning was a stove accident or a suicide. Since it has taken place behind closed doors, there are no witnesses. Usually the burning occurs in the first year of an arranged marriage, after it has become clear that the bride’s parents will not meet the demands of the in-laws for more wedding gifts. Once the woman is disposed of, a new bride, who presumably will fulfill the dowry demands, is found. Sometimes in-laws ask for cars, videotape recorders and thousands of dollars.

It was not until the late 1970s that the terms “bride burning” and “dowry death” came into use in India, when a handful of feminists began protesting against the occasional case that became known to the public. One of those early activists was Subhadra Butalia, a college lecturer in English literature, whose life changed in October 1978 when she witnessed a bride burning across the street from her home. “I had just finished lunch when I heard screams coming from the opposite house,” she told me calmly one evening as we sat in her living room. “There had been a quarrel going on before.” She looked into the large glass windows of the house—it belonged to a rich industrialist—and
saw the flames. “It was like a pyramid of fire,” she recalled. The woman was taken to the hospital, and she gave a statement that her husband, her mother-in-law and her grandmother-in-law had burned her. She died fourteen days later. Subhadra Butalia testified for the prosecution at the trial, but a murder conviction by a lower court was overturned on appeal. “I was very disturbed,” she said. “I used to see this girl. Sometimes you establish a communication with a person without talking to them. She had a small baby. I thought that I should talk to the colony people and do something about it, but everyone was very indifferent. They said it was a domestic matter.” Frustrated, Butalia decided to write an article that would help publicize the case and discovered, while checking through back copies of newspapers, that an ominous number of women had been dying in “stove accidents” each year—in 1975, almost one a day in New Delhi alone. Dowry, Butalia wrote in the subsequent article, was “a social malaise that has assumed alarming proportions.” By 1983, the number of deaths in New Delhi had nearly doubled, to 690, catching the attention of the Western news media. The CBS program
60 Minutes
turned up to report on the phenomenon. In 1987, the government released figures in Parliament that showed that the cases of registered dowry deaths nationwide numbered 999 in 1985, 1,319 in 1986 and 1,786 in 1987. These figures almost certainly do not reflect the actual number of dowry deaths in a country where most people do not report domestic violence. In India, violent deaths are common, but the dowry death statistics are especially startling because they are even higher than those for deaths caused every year by terrorist activity in Punjab, which is considered the most serious threat to Indian national unity.

Feminists and police officials could not determine whether the number of dowry deaths was increasing or whether more were being reported. There was also debate on whether dowry alone was the reason for the murders. Dowry seems to have been an Indian tradition since ancient times, although in the Sanskrit religious texts there are only perfunctory references to parents who gave away daughters “decked with ornaments” at the time of marriage. Indian historians say dowry coexisted with the custom of “bride price,” which was a relatively small sum of money paid by the boy’s family to the girl’s parents as compensation for the loss of their daughter and also as the price of her labor in the house and fields. Bride price was generally favored by the lower castes, particularly in northern India, while dowry became the preferred practice among the upper castes. Gradually,
dowry spread to almost all castes, whereas the custom of bride price was generally confined to tribal groups. Indian social historians attribute the spread of dowry to the desire of the lower castes to emulate the upper castes, and to the spread of prosperity. As a village family’s wealth increased, it became a matter of prestige to keep women off the land. In such a family a woman, who had once been an asset, involved in harvesting the family fields, became, like Bhabhiji, a virtual shut-in—a liability who had to be unloaded for a price.

Ironically, education and affluence encouraged rather than discouraged the practice. A college boy, instead of adopting what the West would call an enlightened view, came to see his diploma as a sign of increased worth, enabling his parents to demand more dowry for him. Young men in the elite Indian civil service generally commanded the highest prices, followed by the sons of prosperous business families. Dowry was outlawed by Parliament in 1961, but the law failed miserably in trying to eradicate the practice. In the last two decades, fueled by a consumer boom among the new Indian middle class, dowry has spread like an epidemic to communities that never practiced it before. And its purpose has changed. No longer is it seen as a collection of wedding gifts to help a couple start a new life; instead, it is a way for the groom’s family to elevate its economic status. In three and a half years in India, I asked women and men all over the country about dowry, and the answer was almost always “No, we didn’t have dowry until the last few years.” As Shanmugam, a village weaver in the state of Tamil Nadu, explained: “Some of the people in the area have started private businesses, and they are a little bit more well off than the others. These people demand dowry from the bride’s parents. Seeing this practice, others also demand.”

In order to find a bride burning survivor I could talk to, I set out one January morning in Delhi with Renuka Singh, a good friend who was working on her doctorate in sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her dissertation was about the status of women among different castes, income groups and religions in Delhi, so Renuka had contacts with feminists and the social welfare organizations in town. A lawyer she knew had given her the name and address of Nirmala Kumari, a young woman who he said had survived a bride burning. The lawyer told Renuka that the woman had just been discharged from the burns unit of Safdarjang Hospital and was now recuperating at home.

We followed the directions to a complex of three government-built
concrete high rises, all of them overlooking a landscape of scrub brush and dust, and began searching for sector IV, flat 42. We soon realized that the address we had didn’t make sense, and decided we would have to knock on the door of flat 42 in each of three buildings. We spent most of the next hour roaming the stairwells. We passed hanging laundry, breathed in the smells of cooking oil, and startled children, who stared at us as if we were a pair of visiting seals. Renuka, in her deep-red wool shawl and delicately tailored Indian tunic and trousers, called a salwar kameez, was almost as much of a curiosity as I was. The first of the three flats was dark, tiny and cold. No, the woman said, she didn’t know Nirmala Kumari. As we headed for the second number 42, I wondered if Nirmala Kumari’s face would be scarred, and imagined her coming to the door with a baby on her hip. I pictured her as thin, shy, with a dupatta covering her head. But no, said the second woman, there is no Nirmala Kumari here. The people in the third number 42 had never heard of her either.

Out of flats but with most of the morning still ahead, Renuka and I drove to Safdarjang Hospital to see if Nirmala Kumari was still there. The government-run hospital, which had one of the biggest burns units in the city, handled a large number of dowry cases. Renuka and I walked into the general ward of the burns unit, dingy under the glow of dull fluorescent lights, and found bed after bed of men and women, but mostly women, with hideously blackened faces, swollen and distorted beyond recognition. Some did not look human, and many were completely wrapped in bandages. The most serious cases were lying naked under what looked like inverted metal cradles that had been covered with blankets. People who are burned very badly cannot withstand even the weight of a sheet. I wondered how many of the women were dowry cases, but they were much too sick for me to consider approaching them.

Renuka and I found the nurse on duty, and I asked why so many women were in the ward. “Not all of them are dowry cases,” she said, “but there are so many, so many.” We inquired about Nirmala Kumari. “I remember her,” the nurse said right away. “She was in bed forty-eight.” Renuka and I were startled. After our hunt at the apartment complex, we had begun to wonder if Nirmala Kumari even existed. It was quite possible that Renuka’s lawyer friend had given us the wrong name. Here was the first proof. The nurse flipped briskly through her record book, a ledger with entries written entirely by hand, and soon found what we wanted. “Nirmala Kumari,” the entry
said. She had been admitted on November 16, 1985. She was twenty-five years old, and had been burned over 55 percent of her body. I followed her entry across the page, to the right-hand column and saw this: “Expired 25/11/85, 6:20
P.M
.” Renuka and I were looking for a woman who had been dead for five weeks.