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Literary Review
Chilling narratives
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Death by Fire narrates incidents of socially sanctioned brutality against women in contemporary India, says FLAVIA AGNES.
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POSITIONING herself as a non-resident Indian, Mala Sen tries to connect her Indian past and her English present while she narrates tales of inhuman brutality against women and the social sanction it commands in contemporary India. Weaving together interviews and impressions with news clippings and research studies, her book, Death by Fire, lays out a tapestry of chilling narratives. From the much-publicised Deorala Sati, she moves on to explore the complexities of the widespread but under-reported crime of domestic abuse and from there on to the gruesome murders of female infants among the impoverished tribal communities of Tamil Nadu.
The incident at Deorala in 1987, which evoked both a fundamentalist frenzy in defence of tradition and a public outcry against the glorification of the murder, forms the central theme of the book. Through piles of documentation, layered with anecdotes and interviews, Sen reconstructs the historical event. Gossip and rumours surrounding the incident are added on to the public debate, which are then laced with Sen's own feelings. She describes the eeriness she experiences as she enters the room which Roop Kanwar shared with her husband during her brief marriage of seven months: it is now a storage space, the family's dumping ground. An inner space untouched by the religious hysteria, which gripped the public domain.
Mingled with the divine is the mundane. Dark secrets lie buried along with the sacred ashes. Beneath the surface of communal Rajput pride in the purity of its women at one end and the feminist outrage at official apathy and callousness at the other, lies a third layer. The age old one, of gossip and rumour: "Married on January 17, 1987, the young bride lived with her husband barely for three weeks. ... Rumour had it that her husband was mentally disturbed, suicidal, impotent and unemployed. Roop Kanwar preferred to live with her parents in the city. She had a past love, a young man from Ranchi who was not a Rajput." To wean her away from him, the family is said to have moved from Ranchi to Jaipur and then married her — along with a large colour TV, an enormous fridge-freezer, a gas cooker, a vast double bed, 40 tolas of gold and bank deposit of 30,000 Rupees — to a farmer's son. The book captures the sanction provided by her natal family not only to the public murder but, if there is truth in the rumours, the destructive role played by them throughout her life.
The rumours persist. Ram Rathi, a grandly-moustachioed policeman, reveals in a conspiratory undertone: "She had not loved her husband, in fact she had been having an affair with her childhood sweetheart from Ranchi. Her parents had been appalled when they found ... She became pregnant ... Afraid to confront her parents, she returned to Deorala and told her husband hoping he would accept her back and the child as his own, since he too had to prove his "manhood". ... On hearing all this, her husband tried to commit suicide ... In order to hush up the suicide attempt, his father got his friend and neighbour Dr. Magan Singh to rush him to Sikar hospital where the doctor had contacts." (p.151.) The policeman quickly adds that this is mere "hearsay evidence" and is of no use to the case before the court.
Through the trajectory of the event and the court case, the arrests and the let-offs, a more basic question, while raised in the book, remains unanswered in it. A single woman's death had triggered a barrage of arguments, a string of emotional reactions in a country where dowry deaths had become commonplace, particularly among the relatively affluent and the middle class. Is it due to the historical significance, the anti-Sati movement of the last century? The aura of cultural traditions surrounding it? The growing communalism in the country? The reader is left with her/his confusions unresolved.
While Sati is chronicled through the public debate, domestic violence is recorded through intimate interaction with the housemaid Selvi beside a kitchen fire in Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu. The maid, an unwed mother, was married in her late twenties. The unemployed, alcoholic husband set Selvi on fire in a moment of violent temper. Her pleas for help, her flight to the nearest health centre, bare foot and half-naked with third degree burns, the medical aid in an ill-equipped and unhygienic local clinic, are sensitively narrated. But the author attributes all incidents of domestic violence to dowry and fails to explore the complexity of the issue.
As compared to Sati and domestic violence, the issue of female infanticide is addressed cursorily. It revolves around Karrupayee, a tribal woman from a poverty stricken tribal community, sentenced to life for infanticide. Of her five children, the elder two were girls, the next two, a boy and a girl, who had died soon after their birth. The fifth was a daughter — the one she was accused of killing three days after the birth. Two NGOs had been involved, one with her conviction and the other with the appeal against the conviction. The irony — as a result of her conviction, her eldest daughter had to quit school to look after the younger sibling. Apart from its overt sensationalism, the narration offers little else. Dowry is again extrapolated as the cause of this social evil. While the book makes interesting reading to someone unexposed to the Indian "reality", it fails to engage an informed reader, as the core concerns remain unanswered.
Death by Fire, Mala Sen, Penguin India, paperback, p.270, Rs. 250.
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