Dowry Deaths : India Brides Still Facing Fiery Ordeal

On a hot and dusty day last month, 25-year-old Meera Bai was doused with kerosene and burned to death in a New Delhi suburb.

On the same day, thousands of celebrating Hindus gathered in a small Rajasthan desert village to honor Roop Kanwar, 18, for climbing onto her late husband’s cremation pyre to die in flames, rather than face life as a widow.

The two events happened about 100 miles apart on a map. They were different in many respects.

One took place in a crowded housing project on the outskirts of the Indian capital. The other occurred in a village that has more camels than cars.

Almost Commonplace

Police believe that Bai, the mother of three young children, was murdered--set ablaze by her mother-in-law and sister-in-law in another of the terrible dowry deaths that are almost commonplace in urban India.

Kanwar’s death was a suicide, nominally voluntary. At least she walked under her own power to the sandalwood pyre and placed her dead husband’s head in her lap before she was ignited in the centuries-old Indian tradition of sati.

Yet in both cases, young women were consigned to flames. They died, feminists say, as modern martyrs to the medieval rules of domesticity that still dominate the lives of many Hindu women.

“One of the truest measures of a nation’s advancement,” Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said in a speech shortly before his death in 1964, “is the state of its women.”

Little Has Changed

For much of the time since then, India has been ruled by a woman, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter. But, if the events of that hot and dusty day in September are any evidence, little has changed at the lower levels of society to improve the lot of the nation’s women.

Neighbors say that Bai, the mother of children aged 4, 3 and 18 months, lived for much of her life by the selfless Hindu code of marriage outlined in the ancient religious texts.

According to one of these texts, the 11th-Century “Padmapurana,” even if a woman’s husband “is offensive in his manners, is choleric, debauched or immoral; if he is a drunkard or a gambler; if he raves like a lunatic, . . . whatever his defects may be, a wife should always look upon him as her god and should lavish on him all her attention and care. . . .”

“She never complained about her husband--even when he was bad,” said a middle-aged woman who lived across the street from Bai’s apartment in the Dilshad Garden housing project. Bai’s husband, an automotive mechanic named Tulsi Ram, had a reputation as a drunk.

But then, suddenly, Bai broke with the code. She quarreled with her husband, to whom she had been married for five years. The next day, Sept. 16, she was dead.

Her husband and his family say her death was a suicide. Investigators from the Crimes Against Women Division of the Delhi police classified it as a “dowry killing,” one of the homicides or “forced suicides” that take the lives of young wives in the Indian capital at the rate of almost two a day. Her mother-in-law and sister-in-law have been arrested but not formally charged.

Often a Dowry Dispute

Such deaths are called dowry crimes because they sometimes occur in the course of a dispute over the outlawed but still prevalent dowry, the money paid by a bride’s parents to her husband’s family in nearly every marriage. But, as in the case of Bai, they are usually rooted in a complicated mixture of poverty and the lowly status of the wife in Indian families.

“Small houses, living in only one room, frustration, competition, poverty--these are the main causes of what we call dowry deaths,” said Jai Kumari, an assistant police commissioner assigned to investigate Bai’s death.

There are few secrets in the hive-like housing complexes that ring the Indian capital. Large families live in one-room apartments stacked like matchboxes. Kitchens consist of a slab of concrete, a porch or a balcony exposed to the sun, where the wife spends much of her time bent over a kerosene stove. Water is available for two hours a day from a community tap. Electricity is a sometime thing.

Nevertheless, these modest dwellings are treasured in housing-starved India. Most of the several thousand inhabitants of Dilshad Garden waited years to get one. They paid the equivalent of $25 to get their names on a government housing list and $300 to move in when their names came up.

Liquid Asset

Once they own the apartment they can resell it for about $4,000, a small fortune in India, where per capita income is less than $300 a year. The temptation to take the money preys on the families, and the possession of an asset so instantly redeemable makes them vulnerable to loan sharks and hucksters.

Because there are few secrets, everyone in Dilshad Garden soon knew that Bai’s husband had sold the couple’s tiny apartment without consulting her. He had accepted a down payment.

His place of work was almost two hours by bus from Dilshad Garden. He had wanted to move closer, and closer to the home of his mother, Devi Ram. Like many Hindu men, he had a very close relationship with his mother.

It is an irony of the Hindu culture that only after a woman’s son marries does she acquire a measure of respect and power. Indian mothers-in-law, adored by their sons, rule households with an iron hand. Often the man’s wife becomes little more than a servant for his mother.

Extreme Sexism

It is through the mother-in-law, one woman against another, that the most vicious aspects of Indian sexism are realized. In many cases the mother-in-law, making up for a lifetime of abuse, hounds a wife into suicide or actually kills her.

Bai did not share her husband’s wish to be closer to his mother and workplace. She threatened to move with the children back to her own parents’ home. The couple argued loudly on Sept. 15. The next day, the husband’s mother and sister came to the apartment, and at about noon that day neighbors heard Bai scream. When they looked out, they saw her covered with flames.

She died that night of burns that covered her body from head to knees. But before she died, she told doctors that her mother-in-law and sister-in-law were responsible for her fatal burns.

“She said one of them poured kerosene on her and the other lit the match,” said Jai Kumari, a policewoman with 23 years’ experience.

Kumari questioned the husband, his mother and sister in a grimy office on the eighth floor of police headquarters. Tulsi Ram told the policewoman that he had gone to a corner tea shop with the children when the “accident” took place. The mother and sister said they were in the apartment having tea when they heard Bai’s screams.

The mother and the sister could not explain why Bai accused them--perhaps out of spite, the mother suggested.

She had lost a daughter-in-law. Tulsi Ram had lost a wife. The frightened baby in Ram’s arms on the eighth floor of police headquarters, sucking at her father’s little finger, had lost a mother.

‘A Business Deal’

According to Subhadra Butalia, a retired university lecturer who is president of Karmika, an organization of working women devoted to stopping dowry deaths, the backdrop to such killings is that marriage in India is seldom for love and companionship.

“It is more or less a business deal,” she said. “So from the moment a new wife steps into a home, she faces hostility and no sympathy. There are no bonds between husband and wife.”

In consequence, dowry deaths are seldom crimes of passion. They are more often characterized by the absence of passion, by alienation and cold, businesslike calculation.

It was such a killing nine years ago that caused Butalia to create Karmika, an organization “for women in distress.” Among other things, Karmika counsels women in how to get a divorce, a practice unheard of in traditional Hinduism.

The incident that moved her to action began as a noisy dispute in a family in her middle-class neighborhood. A family of shopkeepers had suddenly come into money: One of several brothers had made a fortune manufacturing television sets. As is customary in India, the wealth and increased social status were shared by all the brothers, including one who was Butalia’s neighbor.

Standing in Marriage Market

But this brother and his mother and grandmother brooded. He had been married in leaner times. His parents had arranged a marriage in keeping with his modest means and had received a modest dowry from his bride’s family. But now that his family had become prosperous, the man’s standing in the marriage market had increased. He could easily get a wealthier and more beautiful woman.

Resentment of his current wife erupted into open hostility. She was given no money to spend. She was ordered about like a slave. Finally, on Oct. 18, 1978, Butalia heard screams from the street below.

“I looked out,” she said, “and saw fire--a glob of fire running down the street.”

The running fire was the rejected wife. Fourteen days later, she died of her burns. Largely because of Butalia’s testimony, the mother-in-law was convicted of setting the woman on fire and was sent to prison. It was a rare triumph for justice in a dowry death.

Unnatural Causes

Parliament last December enacted a law, the Dowry Death Amendment, that requires police officers and a judicial magistrate to investigate every unnatural death of a woman married less than six years.

But only a handful of convictions have been obtained. Few witnesses come forward. Some deaths may be accidental because women wear nylon saris while cooking near kerosene and oil. The police are often forced to build their case on the victim’s “dying declaration.”

So far this year, only 35 people have been charged in dowry death cases. Six of them have been charged with murder, four with “abetment to commit suicide,” which is difficult to prove, and 25 under the new amendment.

Yet every day there are stories in the newspapers dealing with the deaths of young wives, often reduced to the barest details:

“Radhika, 23, died of burns” (Indian Express, Sept. 10).

“Housewife, 21, commits suicide” (Express, Sept 11).

A headline in the Express for Sept. 14 said, “Woman Dies of Burns,” and the single paragraph below said:

“Sanno, 19, a newly married woman residing in Kucha Pandit, died in J.P.N. Hospital due to severe burns she allegedly received while cooking on a stove at her house. The . . . police are investigating.”

Higher Than Punjab Toll

During a 12-month period in 1985-86, Karmika counted 610 women who died in this manner in the Delhi district alone. Several Indian feminists commented at the time that the death toll for the period was greater than in the neighboring state of Punjab, where a bloody Sikh separatist movement has been raging.

Fire is by far the most common means of death in these cases. For many women, particularly among the majority Hindu population here in northern India, life is an ordeal symbolized by and often culminated in flames. The idea of fire as the symbol and agent of death is deep in the Hindu woman’s consciousness.

“Even in threats of suicide,” New Delhi psychiatrist Sudhir Kakar said in a recent interview, “she doesn’t say, ‘I will kill myself.’ She says, ‘I will burn myself.’ ”

Proof of Fidelity

Hindu mythology is replete with young goddesses suffering ordeals by fire. Sati, the heroine of the epic “Ramayana,” threw herself into a flaming pyre to prove her fidelity to Rama, her husband.

The “Padmapurana,” the Hindu text that instructs the virtuous wife to treat her drunken husband as a god, also tells her that when her husband dies she should “allow herself to be burnt alive on the same funeral pyre; then everyone will praise her virtue. . . .”

The practice of joining the dead husband on the funeral pyre is called sati (sometimes spelled suttee), after the goddess in the myth. Although sati was banned under British rule in 1829 and later by independent India, it has not been discontinued altogether, as progressive Indians were shocked to learn earlier this month.

On the day Bai met her fiery death, thousands of Indians gathered in a village in the state of Rajasthan to honor the young woman who had “become sati” on her husband’s funeral pyre.

Roop Kanwar was, like her 24-year-old husband Man Singh, a member of the upper-caste Rajput clan in Rajasthan. The sati tradition is still strong among the Rajputs, a warrior tribe whose forts and monuments bear the handprints of women who followed their husbands into the flames.

Widows Scorned

The tradition persists in Rajasthan, among other reasons, because a widow’s life there is extremely difficult. Widows are forbidden to remarry. They must shave their heads and grovel for food in the houses of their in-laws. Seldom are they permitted to return to their own families. They are considered bad luck and prevented from joining in family feasts and celebrations.

On the other hand, a woman who becomes sati is honored above all other women.

“It is a unique honor that no government can confer,” said Lokesh Chandra, a religious scholar and former member of Parliament. “The family will be respected throughout the country. The father will be honored because one of his daughters has committed sati. The family will be a legend for the next hundred years. A great temple will be built on the site.”

Sandalwood Pyre

It was on Sept. 4, in the village of Deorala, 50 miles north of Jaipur in the Sikar district, that Kanwar climbed atop the funeral pyre of sandalwood and coconuts soaked with clarified butter and placed her dead husband’s head in her lap.

They had been married only eight months when Singh died of a ruptured appendix. The husband’s brother-in-law lighted the pyre and walked counterclockwise around it. Witnesses say the young woman cried out for her father but soon succumbed to the smoke and heat.

Twelve days later, on Sept. 16, more than 100,000 Rajputs, the men wearing turbans and swinging swords, gathered in the village for the concluding act of the sati ritual, in which a special cloth is draped over the funeral pyre.

Although the ceremony was outlawed by the Rajasthan government, it was carried out without interruption. Later, several members of the family were arrested and charged with “aiding and abetting a suicide.” Police also arrested another 46 people for attending the sati or being associated with the burning ritual, Press Trust of India reported.

While the ceremony was in progress, the village looked like a carnival. Pictures of the dead couple were sold from booths. A public address system was installed to help locate lost children.

The incident has sparked protests against sati by feminist groups in New Delhi, though they are not the only ones expressing their opinions. On Thursday, for example, thousands of warrior-caste Rajputs defied a government order to stage a rally in the city of Jaipur to honor Kanwar and to protest the earlier arrests.