‘Kitchen accidents’ are still common

Book: Dowry Murder: Reinvestigating A Cultural Whodunnit
Author: Veena Talwar Oldenburg
Penguin
344 pages
Rs399

Recently, at a provision store, I overheard a well-dressed, middle-class woman talking loudly into her mobile phone. Nothing unusual, except that she mentioned that her sister-in-law had got burnt the previous evening while cooking in the kitchen. Apparently, the gas stove or the pipe was faulty. But the woman on the phone went on to say, “Fortunately, we were not blamed, and bhabhi is fine.”

The relief in the speaker’s voice was very apparent. Strangely enough, no one else in the shop found this conversation odd, nor was the lady ruffled in the least bit. It was an ordinary conversation on an ordinary morning in an ordinary neighbourhood. This may have been a genuine accident, but it has long been known that “kitchen accident” is euphemism for the domestic murder of women. The horror of the violence against women is mundane and common — there is nothing extraordinary about it and it is silenced. Not enough can be said about it.

In Dowry Murder, Veena Oldenburg discusses the violence perpetrated on women, especially brides, by their in-laws in the persistent demands for dowry. Her documentation deals with Punjab. She traces the history of this horrific practice from the 19th century till the 1980s, when dowry deaths were daily news on page 3 of all the major newspapers. During this time, the Delhi Police expanded the mandate of its women’s cells to deal with dowry cases. With her meticulous research, Oldenburg delves into archives — official and family, activist records at Saheli, the women’s rights NGO in Delhi, personal anecdotes, and interestingly, revenue data files in Punjab.

According to her, “the transformation of the basic relationship between peasants and their land and the simultaneous codification of customary law…became central in altering the texture of women’s lives, their implicit rights and entitlements in their families as daughters, wives and widows, by making men something they had never been before: sole proprietors. The new reality of peasant proprietorship produced new perceptions of gendered rights in land, and these were recorded as ‘customary’ and were codified as inexorable law.” According to the author, with the increasing demand for dowry, there is an increase in female infanticide or the missing girl child.

There are chilling accounts like those of Mridula and dowry victims like Ranjana, Aziza, Maya, Savita and those of the author herself, as she dips into her diaries of the 1960s, recording and remembering her nasty first marriage at the age of 19. No history of women is ever complete without the personal voice. It is the only way in which it is accessible or can be retold. Yet, the horror of these stories or the extent of violence and hatred vented upon women can never be discussed enough, as these cases continue to happen on a daily basis, and are rarely recorded.

Dowry Murder was first published in 2000 in USA to critical acclaim. The new Indian subcontinent paperback edition published a decade later has been revised to make it “accessible to the reading public far beyond the specialised niches of academia.” Yet surprisingly, it makes no mention whatsoever of young brides rebelling against the heinous practice of dowry as Nisha Sharma did in 2002. An account of it is now included in school and college textbooks. The extensive bibliography also ignores seminal books like Subhadra Butalia’s The Gift Of A Daughter and Seema Sirohi’s Sita’s Curse: Stories Of Dowry Victims. Having said this, Dowry Murder gives a good textual overview of evolving legal issues like the changes to the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, and the root cause of much of the violence against women across India.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is a consultant editor