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Book Name:Sita’s Curse Author:Seema Sirohi Publisher: Harper Collins India Price: Rs 295

THE BURNING BED

A report from The Hindu: "Expressing serious anguish over the increasing incidence of dowry deaths, the Supreme Court has asked all trial courts and High Courts in the country to deal firmly with such cases and ensure deterrent punishment for such crimes.

A Bench comprising Justice Y.K. Sabharwal and Justice H.K. Sema said the practice of giving and demanding dowry was a social evil, having a deleterious effect on the entire civil society and had to be condemned by the strong hands of the judiciary. The Bench noted that despite amendments in the Dowry Prohibition Act providing for deterrent punishment with a view to curbing the increasing menace of dowry deaths, the evil practice continued unabated."

Seema Sirohi’s book is a study in horror, and through horror it performs a task that has not yet been performed. An expose of the brutal face of dowry destruction. Historically dowry had a legitimate purpose. It was given to a daughter to enable her to support herself independently in her husband’s home without making demands on her new family. It was supposed to provide for her pocket money, allowing her to buy herself anything she fancied, it was supposed to provide her with utensils to eat on and jewellery to wear. It was also supposed to remind her in laws of her own importance as a person. Over the years, however, the meaning of dowry began to change. It was transmuted into the bridegroom’s due for having brought an extra mouth into the family and from bridegroom’s due it became the price of the bridegroom, a symbol of how eligible and valuable he was as opposed to the inferior woman. From there began all the problems. The bride’s parents had to hand over the dowry since it was a matter of izzat – they had to prove that they and their daughter were worthy of consideration by the groom’s family. And from there the infamous histories – Tagore stories of grooms holding families to ransom, refusing to step up to the marriage mandap unless a certain sum was paid or threatening to return home with their party and so ruining the bride’s reputation and chances of making another marriage for good. The deaths. however started relatively late – or at any rate, made news relatively late.

In the 1980’s the papers began to report a spate of bride burnings. These gradually grew in intensity until anti dowry advertisements began to be visible in the papers: a group of grooms shown in stark black and white like cattle at a market with placards around their necks stating their dowry demands. Engineer Rs 2 lakhs, Doctor Rs 4 lakhs and so on. If it wasn’t money, it was cars, colour TVs and wardrobes – demands disguised, as Sirohi’s book makes amply clear, as pleas to make life more comfortable for the bride.

Figures on the subject vary widely. In 1995, the National Crime Bureau of the Government of India reported 6,000 dowry deaths. A more recent police report stated that dowry deaths had risen by 170 percent in the decade to 1997. However, unofficial estimates listed in a 1999 article by Himendra Thakur "Are our sisters and daughters for sale?" put the number of dead at 25,000 women a year, with many more left maimed and scarred as a result of attempts on their lives. Now, decades later, dowry deaths have disappeared from the national consciousness, ‘even though thousands of women continue to be burnt, poisoned, electrocuted or are forced to commit suicide every year’. Sirohi’s book is an attempt to focus the national consciousness back to the subject and convey the enormity of the problem.

She has chosen to do this, after intensive research, through the tragic stories of six women. Women from different backgrounds and different cultures. As Sirohi says, dowry is not an essentially Hindi problem. She cites historical examples to back her statement – Aurangzeb demanding the fortress of Ramgiri on the marriage of his son to a princess from Golconda, Akbar setting the example when Jehangir married the daughter of Raja Bhagwan Das. Catherine of Braganza, the non Indian, Catholic example, marrying Charles II and bringing with her the island of Bombay as her dowry.

There are surprises in the stories for those who thought that dowry was an evil restricted to traditional middle class families. The story of the Ambatis, American residents and friends of Bill Clinton, who chose a bride from India and humiliated her on every possible occasion, while refusing to reveal her true identity to their acquaintances and friends in the US. Archana is one of the few fortunate women in the book who did not lose her life, but her ordeal gave her a shatteringly different perspective on the way families of performing sons survey brides for those sons.

The book is not pleasant to read, especially for a woman, but then it is not intended to be. Even the style is stripped down to its bare bones, a non-style kind of reporting. Facts, figures and details of humiliation and horror. In most of the cases, the authorities were slow to act, preferring to believe that the women were lying. A cellphone toting lawyer apparently told Sirohi," A man knows his circumstances, a woman expects hers to change and improve with marriage. I don’t believe men kill their wives for dowry. In most cases it just happens." In most cases, women are objects of contempt, commodities that can be disposed of once they lose their value, while the men are injured, misled. And, of course, shockingly, these sons have the full support of their mothers and sisters, the people in the next room who claimed not to hear screams, who insisted that their bahus were depressed or demented all in all unworthy of the men they married.

The value of a book like this lies in whether it can be used as a weapon against the evil that it denounces. Whether the effect it produces on the reader is strong enough. Sita’s Curse is definitely a powerful denunciation of a malpractice that has been tolerated far too long.

Even as I write I read in the paper of a 21-year-old software engineer, Nisha Sharma. Half an hour before her wedding a friend calls from the mandap saying that the bridegroom and his party are agitating for a Maruti Esteem and 21 lakhs, threatening to leave if their demands are not met. They have already beaten up her father. With a wedding minutes away, the girl does not lose her nerve – she calls the police. And they come and arrest the bridegroom.

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