May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons by Elisabeth Bumiller Page B

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—andsaw 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