Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime

268 Pages·2002·0.94 MB·English

by  Veena Talwar Oldenburg

3
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Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oldenburg, Veena Talwar.
Dowry murder : the imperial origins ofa cultural crime / by Veena Talwar Oldenburg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN---; ISBN ---(pbk.)
. Wives—Crimes against—India. . Uxoricide—Economic aspects—India.
. Dowry—India—Criminal provisions. . Hindu women—Crimes against—India.
. Hindu women—India—Economic conditions. . Caste—Political aspects—India.
. India—History—British occupation, ‒. . Great Britain—Colonies—India.
I. Title.
HV..W O 
.''—dc 2001045770
        
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
on acid-free paper
For Mummy and Kaku
and in memory of my father, Baljit Singh,
whose intervention enabled
this work

In, on a quiet spring afternoon in New York, the phone rang in my study and
a television journalist asked me if I knew anything about “bride burning” or
“dowry murder” in my native India. I did not, but I did offer some thoughts on sati,
or widow burning, along with a reading list. No, the journalist insisted, an Indian
documentary on this issue was to be aired as a segment of an important national
weekly news show, and the television channel was looking for informed comment.
My own memories of an experience in the summer of were still surprisingly
fresh, but they appeared dated and so utterly unconnected with dowry that I said
nothing. That denial and the subliminal provocation instigated this book.
I confess to having repressed my private suspicions about this wholly new yet
chillingly remembered style of violence that appeared to have become a trend.
The culprit (or culprits) used kerosene oil and a match to burn the woman to
death; the motive was easily ascribed to marital conflict arising from demands for
more dowry, in cash and/or as valuables, by the new husband and his family.These
violent events were reported as kitchen accidents, involving the rather dangerous
pressurized kerosene stoves in common use in Indian kitchens, from which other
women, not just brides, and men as well frequently sustain accidental burns. Only
in a very few cases of a young wife’s death were the police actually summoned to
the scene to file a report. Until the earlys, few such cases were investigated,
and in even fewer was murder detected. Certainly no one had been convicted of
the crime. Because violence in the home, even murder, was unofficially part of
the private sphere, suspicion, innuendo, and speculation whispered in private con-
versations seldom became evidence in a court of law. There would be no reliable
witnesses, since the mother-in-law was usually implicated as the perpetrator,
often with a sister-in-law or even the husband himself as accomplice, and the
crime occurred behind closed doors.
The day after the documentary was shown, colleagues and students at the
small liberal arts college where I then taught besieged me with questions. They
had seen the footage—a graphic depiction of a bride engulfed in flames, perhaps
even the charred corpse—and they demanded answers. Appalling as the incident
portrayed in the documentary might have been, it seemed clear that the U.S.
media had seized an opportunity to make a spectacle of “the Orient,” in this case
India. I had become used to being brought to account for any Indian happening,
good or bad (but chiefly bad). But never before had it been so difficult to deal with,
because this time I had no satisfactory rebuttals. I tried to suggest that this could
just be murder, an ordinary crime of passion or greed, as occurs against wives and
girlfriends everywhere, and particularly here in the United States. No, they were
quite sure that nothing they had seen could pass for a geographically or culturally
neutral event. The burning death was perceived as fraught with deep Hindu reli-
gious and cultural significance.Dahejor dowry and its relationship to the Hindu
caste system were portrayed as the key to understanding this crime. The narrator
in the documentary had made it very clear that the Punjabi bride had been burned
to death because she had not brought enough dowry to her husband’s home, thus
provoking a disappointed mother-in-law to douse her in kerosene and set her on
fire.
Incidents of bargaining over dowry were not unheard of, but such behavior
was customarily considered shamefully and unambiguously wrong. That matters
had come to such a pass that brides were gruesomely immolated alive sounded
like a postcolonial society’s worst nightmare come true. This new crime against
women was called “dowry death,” and it was ironic that it made its appearance a
quarter of a century after the passage of the Prohibition of Dowry Act in . I
vaguely remembered watching V. Shantaram’s Hindi film Dahej from the late
s. It was a melodramatic tale, replete with singing, dancing, and pontificating,
whose plot served as a vehicle to depict the evils of the dowry system. Though I
was aware of the abuse of the custom, in the Indian context dowry also consti-
tuted a women’s independent right to property and prestige. The burning of a
bride to death for not bringing a dowry that satisfied the greed of a groom’s fam-
ily was a monstrous perversion of the meaning and function of the custom.
Culturally embarrassed, pedagogically nonplused, yet deeply stirred for rea-
sons that will unfold, I knew the time had come for me to examine the alleged cul-
tural roots of this crime. Yet the decision was not an easy one. The departure
from my previous work—on the history of colonial Lucknow—into the relent-
lessly agrarian Punjab would require learning a whole new world. The differences
between Oudh and Punjab in northern India were at least as acute as those a Eu-
ropean historian might see between England and Ireland. Besides, the subject was
morbid. Investigating and explicating women’s powerlessness, rather than the op-
posite in which I so firmly believe, also angered me. After several false starts and
setbacks and several intermittent spells of research and writing (between semes-
viii ◆ Preface
ters with staggering teaching loads and the impositions ofreal life), this inner nag-
ging eventually led to this book. My hope that the ordeal would at least be brief
was also belied.
In writing this book, I have found it impossible to assume the persona of the
omniscient historian-anthropologist and objective narrator who stands outside
history and merely distills a clear and odorless account from what the documents,
voices, and memories of events reveal. Neither can I be intimidated by the post-
modernist critiques of ethnography and reject the genre of women’s narratives
entirely. My personal experience became inevitably and inextricably meshed with
my research into “dowry murders,” and the line between participant and observer
faded. Therefore, I must disclose at the outset that I am deeply implicated in this
history as one of its subjects—as a bride, as an academic and occasional activist,
and as a witness to three decades of worsening violence against women—and I
will rely not only on my training in the methods of history and anthropology but
also on the self-conscious, feminist perspective I developed through my own en-
counters with this pathology.
When I was growing up in a large extended family where four generations of
women gathered almost daily, until I was fifteen, I became attuned to listening to,
or rather overhearing, the conversations of women about their own and other
women’s happy or tragic betrothals and marriages and the conscious ideology
that informed their judgments.
Mydadi(paternal grandmother) and my dada(paternal grandfather) presided
over a large extended family. Dada was a wealthy businessman—a cotton mill
owner and hotelier—who permitted an apartment building he owned to be filled
with the influx of dadi’s relatives from the Punjab after the partition of India in
and even managed to employ several of them in jobs in his various enter-
prises. Dada and dadi had three sons, the eldest of whom was my father; the
household included their wives and a daughter, with grandchildren added as time
went on. I was the eldest grandchild of what was finally to be a brood of eleven.
It was an assortment of dadi’s three daughters-in-law, other female relatives,
friends, and neighbors who gathered on winter afternoons and summer evenings
to gossip, knit, and exchange recipes and folk wisdom.
A tragically ugly family partition and my admission to the hostel of Irish
Catholic Loreto Convent College in began the second phase of my training
for becoming a woman in an upper-class, convent-educated Indian milieu. The
three and a half years of college were a lesson in coping with the mixed signals of
a postcolonial society. We were to be chaste, segregated from men, in a convent’s
sense of sex segregation, and prepared by the curriculum to become very literate
women but not quite career women. Neither needlepoint nor science and math-
ematics were offered at the B.A. level, and rebelliousness was sternly crushed. All
authoritarian institutions breed their own underworlds, and a few of us consti-
tuted ours—we highlighted our subversion with forbidden Urdu couplets and
Preface ◆ ix
love songs from Hindi cinema, and the occasional sly imbibing of gins and tonic.
We were allegedly being prepared to fill the role of the good convent-educated
wives that were in high demand in the marriage market beyond our walls, even
as our strongest bonds of love and trust were with other women. Our role mod-
els lived in the fictional worlds of Jane Austen and George Eliot, and quotations
from Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson peppered our conversations. The intense homo-
sociability and Romantic poetry were a far cry from the compulsory destiny of
arranged marriage that awaited most of us.
InI finished college and within months consented to an arranged mar-
riage with a Punjabi man that proved disastrous. The misalliance, which lasted for
ten stormy months, might have more easily ended in murder than in a legal an-
nulment, as it did. This is arguably the best qualification I have for embarking on
this project. The telling of my own story over time to disparate confidants, such
as friends, relatives, and students, created different recensions. After it was over, I
was compelled to tell the story to my mother, and finally I wrote an account of
the events for my lawyer, who saw a devious legal route out of the mess. Each lis-
tener drew from me an untidy and disjointed narrative that varied in depth, detail,
and emphasis, as I intuitively edited details and incessantly rearranged the pieces
from the time they were first picked up. My listeners’ questions framed and re-
framed the sequence of events that precipitated the breakup in that harrowing
day-after-day conflict between my husband, his family, and myself.
Now, more than three decades from the horror of that first marriage and half
a world away, I can dispassionately analyze the complications of the events and
comprehend the sexual and psychosocial pathogens that infected the relationship.
Having a story ofmy own sensitized my ear to the silences and subtexts in the sto-
ries of others. It became a habit to explore other people’s meanings of being a
wife. I was a primed sleuth who discovered the papered-over cracks and gently
probed the layers of shame and concealment in the narratives of women similarly
damaged by experiences in their married lives.
In the summer of in Delhi, when many more “bride burnings” were re-
ported on the front pages of national newspapers, I was to make my first foray
into the world of feminist activism. I spent the next academic year in India to ex-
plore what had by then become the best-known fact, after sati, about Indian
women. At one level I was a “foreign” scholar whose project had to be approved
severally by the Education, External Affairs, and Home Ministries of the Govern-
ment of India. At another I was an Indian woman with a “complicated past.” I
knew that I had not come lightly to probe the problematic relationship of vio-
lence and gender in Punjabi households in northern India.
A clarification is essential at the outset: the burning of wives is neither an ex-
tension of nor culturally related to the notorious practice ofsati(or “suttee,” as
the British called it), the voluntary self-immolation of widows on the funeral
pyres of their husbands. The resonance may be confounding—the burning of
x ◆ Preface
women, the blurred line between suicide and murder—but the differences are
significant, and they point to a serious devaluation ofwomen in present-day India
in spite of a century and a half of progressive legislation on women’s rights. Sati
was socially countenanced suicide because the widow perceived herself as having
failed in her ritual duty to ensure the longevity of her husband by using her spe-
cial power, or shakti. The rituals that a widowwould follow to join her husband
on his funeral pyre are adequately described and commented upon elsewhere; suf-
fice it to say that it drew its cachet as a publicly witnessed act that generated social
awe, status, and religious merit for the widow and made her the virtuous wife in
death.
“Bride burning,” on the other hand, is murder, culpable on social, cultural, and
legal grounds, executed privately, and often disguised as an accident or suicide.
Burning a wife is, perhaps, even more appalling than poisoning, drowning, stran-
gling, shooting, or bludgeoning her, but it is patently chosen for the forensic ad-
vantage it has over the other methods, rather than for Hindu mythological or
mystical reasons, as some reporters in the United States are fond of claiming. It is
also relatively simple to execute. The crime occurs in the kitchen, where the
lower- and middle-class housewife spends a lot of time each day. Kerosene stoves
are in common use in such homes, and a tin of fuel is always kept in reserve. This
can be quickly poured over the intended victim, and a lighted match will do the
rest. It is easy to pass off the event as an accident since these stoves are, indeed,
prone to explode (as confirmed by consumer reports). The now ubiquitous and
inflammable nylon sari is only too wont to catch fire and engulf the wearer in
flames. Signs ofstruggle do not show up on bodies with percent or more third-
degree burns. The young widower, who has equipped himself with a cast-iron
alibi, is soon in the marriage market again looking for a new bride with perhaps
an even handsomer dowry. Most often it is the mother-in-law, with or without her
son as a direct accomplice, who obligingly does the deed. The reason for this, I
would argue, is that the son (often the breadwinner for his widowed mother)
must remain innocent of all suspicion and therefore eligible for remarriage as an
unfortunate widower. His income-earning activities are also not interrupted,
should the event actually be investigated as a crime. This poses difficult questions:
Are Indian women victims of their culture or agents of a crime they inflict upon
other women? Is dowry murder a cultural crime? This book sets out the equally
complicated answers.
The search for answers and the attempt to write them down has been a long
and involved one and not without mishaps. On the happier side of the ledger are
the numerous intellectual and material debts I accrued, for which my gratitude is
boundless. First and foremost I must thank the Social Science Research Council,
for its generous and repeated support of my research in England in the summers
of ,, and the entire year in ‒. The American Philosophical Soci-
ety provided an enabling grant that supported my research on female infanticide
Preface ◆ xi
in England on my two trips there in ‒. For the extensive work in India I
had a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies at the Uni-
versity of Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution for a fellowship for research in
India for ten months in ‒. I spent an invaluable year among prominent
feminist historians, with the inspiring leadership of Catharine R. Stimpson, as a
Rockefeller Humanist-in-Residence in ‒at Douglass College of Rutgers
University. In ‒, a Baruch College Scholar Incentive Award and the City
University of New York’s Research Foundation’s Out-of-Cycle Award allowed me
the time and supplemented the necessary funds to complete the basic research on
the historical aspects of this project.
All this was happening in the early days of the computer invasion into the av-
erage home. The Rockefeller fellowship paid for a state-of-the-art laptop com-
puter and dot matrix printer (c. ) that revolutionized my typist-dependent
ways. The leap from writing with a thick-nibbed fountain pen on notepaper to
electronic production of text was liberating, although my spouse, Philip, was not
spared phone calls in his office several times a day from my room in Briavel Hol-
comb’s endlessly interesting home at Rutgers to demystify the workings of func-
tion keys or instruct me on the recovery of pages accidentally lost to the delete
key, or hear me howl at the ether into which improperly named and saved items
would vanish.
The India Office Library and Records with its helpful and knowledgeable staff
made all this possible. It is hard to imagine how many long and tedious hours I
would have expended squinting over the scores of Urdu tracts on dowry and mar-
riage expenses had not Shabana Mahmud gone well beyond the call of desk duty
to help me along and intersperse our work sessions with wine-enlivened discus-
sions of love and marriage. The National Archives of India in New Delhi is a
rather less organized treasure trove, but there encounters with fellow historians in
the canteen more than made up for the long delays between the appearances of
indented files. My several trips to Patiala to consult the Patiala State Archives dur-
ing the Punjab insurgency, where I was often the lone scholar, would not have
been possible without the cheerful, helpful, and commensal staff members who
pulled out files from remembered locations, because the drawers ofthe catalogue
had been looted. I found shelter with colleagues on days the police curfew ended
work early in the afternoon. Every lunch and tea break turned into an informal
seminar about the preference for sons and the military among Punjabi families;
and these conversations found their way into the arguments I make in this study.
There were roadblocks too. In a panic to get to India, where my father’s health
was failing, I hastily left accumulated research notes in the care ofthe kindly man-
ager of the Chelsea hotel where I had rented a room. The hotel changed hands
while I was gone, and when I returned the entire place was under renovation, the
manager had been fired, and the cartons had simply disappeared. This event and
my father’s death blanked out the project for a while. It was not until two years
xii ◆ Preface
later, in , that I returned to the India Office Library to recoup the information
with diminished fervor. I thought I would go mad if I had to read another revenue
settlement report. Yet, it was in going over this featureless terrain of bureaucratic
paperwork again, and collecting and sifting through a mountain of red note-
books, graying photocopies, and yellowing newspaper cuttings that the reticulate
argument that I make here painstakingly emerged. An abrupt change in jobs in
led to another two-year delay, and it was not until another research trip to
England and India in ‒that all the pieces were assembled for me to begin
writing this work. The only positive aspect of these delays was that the fashion of
deploying unintelligible academic jargon paled in the meantime and it was possi-
ble to write, without shame as an academic, in plain English.
My astonishingly brief ten months at Saheli, a women’s resource center in
Delhi, was probably the best immersion course I could have taken in feminist pol-
itics. I made some enduring friendships, learned the vocabulary of Indian feminist
ideas and the legal constraints that prescribed the limits of action or self-expres-
sion. Sitting through the heat and the noise of the traffic bridge overhead, lubri-
cating high-pitched discussions with sweet milky tea, the humor, pathos, heart-
break, and anger of the women mingled to make every day memorable. I am
grateful that I could be there and be with Prabeen, Kalpana, Elizabeth, Savita,
Gauri, Rukmini, and the many others who challenged, questioned, and taught me
so much and reaffirmed my faith in laughter and song. Even our fierce disagree-
ments were productive for me.
Students at Sarah Lawrence College, year after year, in my seminar on the
“Second Sex in the Third World” questioned and refined ideas about women’s his-
tory, about victims and agency, about the politics of the culturally benighted
women in once colonized spaces. Preeta Law, who relocated to Delhi after grad-
uating, tirelessly clipped news items on “dowry death” from journals and news-
papers to keep me current; Heather Lewis, a mordantly philosophic research as-
sistant, kept up a continuous interrogation that helped me refine my own views;
Elizabeth Denlinger brought in fragments of poems and made me rethink things
through. You have my love wherever you are today. A few of my colleagues at
Sarah Lawrence were inspirational, gritty, and eloquent feminists—Grace Paley,
Jane Cooper, Louise Merriwether, Amy Swerdlow, Judy Papachristou, Judy
Seraphini Sauli—and their example and conversations are aglow in my mind.
There are many who read the first draft ofthis manuscript and offered detailed
editorial and substantive comments, and to whom I would like to offer not just
my thanks but also my abashed apologies for inflicting an untidy and unwieldy
manuscript on them. Philip has borne the brunt of these many years when his life
and his space were cluttered with this intermittent work-in-progress. Mandakini
Dubey, a surrogate daughter, and Eileen Haas also combed through the then -
odd pages of a hideously tangled first draft and gave me hope. Patricia Farr
brought her editorial skills and knowledge of an editing program that trimmed
Preface ◆ xiii