Some topics choose you - because you chose them long ago.
I've talked before about women in Afghanistan, often when a group like
Human Rights Watch offers one of their periodic assessments that show
women's condition, outside the protected enclave of Kabul, to be
actually worse, in some ways, than under the Taliban - despite the
heroic efforts of women like Shafiqua Habibi and Sima Samar.
But I didn't expect to hear about them setting themselves on fire.
That's a form of protest often associated with Buddhist monks like Thich Quang Duch during the Vietnam war, echoed by AIDS activists at the Vatican. Then there was the Iranian physician Dr. Homa Darabi, who set herself aflame in 1984 to protest the treatment of women under Khomeini.
Now, scores of women in Afghanistan are dying from the flames -- because life in today's Afghanistan is just too unbearable. Will we hear them?
I was used to hearing about deaths like these -- but in nations further east. I'd even written about such burnings in India (essay's at the end of this post), as a prelude to talking about sati and jauhar, practices long-banned, long-venerated, and likely more complex than any Western simplification (including mine) can effectively convey.
But these are deaths explicitly tied to the truths of living in a place like Herat:
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Most of the victims in Herat have been women between 14 and 20 years
old, desperately trying to escape marriages to older men. In a society
where men pay a "bride price," it's often the older men who can afford
more than one wife.
And in a country where war widows comprise a large section of the
female population, relegated to the very bottom of the social and
economic scale, poverty exacerbates the situation.
"I have interviewed women who have married off their daughters at the
age of 11," said Coursen-Neff. "They told me they had no alternative,
they couldn't feed their kids."
In addition to hard economics, political and security concerns also
play a role, says Ayesha Khan of London-based Amnesty International,
referring to the growing but as yet unconfirmed reports of
self-immolation among young women forced to marry "commanders," or
regional warlords.
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Growing reports. Marry this elderly opium king or your sisters will starve. Is that suicide or homicide? What fire in the brain, what short circuit, precedes the use of kerosene? And speaking of homicide, the flames are not always so indirectly lit:
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Activists working among South Asian women have long cautioned that some
female deaths may be ascribed to suicide in order to cover up for
"honor killings" — when women deemed to have "dishonored" the family
are killed — or dowry deaths — when brides are burned for not bringing
adequate dowries into their in-laws' households.
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And as we all know, in some countries (though not India, which to its credit has tried hard to clamp down on such killings, as well as on sati) the perpetrators are legally protected. In Afghanistan,where the GAO - our government's Tiresias -- has described a "deteriorating" reconstruction process (PDF link here). and the police and judiciary alternate between honest struggle, corruption. and fear of the still-active Taliban, those trying to help girls -- like Medica Mondiale, the German NGO described in the Radio Free Europe arucle -- work in direct opposition to local power structures, as well as economic realities. And rhey can only manage to rescue them one by one.
It's tempting to blame the U.S. for some of this, especially since Iraq, Bush's other big "project," has shown such horrific results for women. (If you need a link for that assertion, try this or this.) But I'm not so sure that the poverty and horrific sexism underlying these suicides, these murders, can be laid exclusively - even primarily - at the door of the United States. Still, it's certainly been exacerbated by the way Bush's war turned huge swaths of the country over to the warlords, before diverting both troops and reconstruction funding from Afghanistan to Iraq.
But it's not even an artifact entirely of poverty: affluent families have forced marriage, not to mention dowry murders and suicides. I wonder how these Afghan suicides are covered in Indian news -- and if women there are scornful, indifferent, or feel a chill of recognition.
What I think the journalists covering this are missing the element of protest. The agony that leads to suicide is intensely private -- but the act of self-immolation is meant to be noticed. Meant to call attention to what's going on. Will we hear it?
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Sati, Jauhar and Other Girl Suicides
The widow bathes and puts on two white garments, takes kosa blades in her hands, faces the east or north, performs acamana (sipping water); when the Brahmanas say ‘Om, tat sat’ she remembers the God Narayana and refers to the time (month, fortnight, tithi) and then makes the samkalpa (declaration of resolve). She then calls upon the eight lokapalas (guardians of the quarters) such as the Sun, the moon, the fire, to bear witness to her act of following her husband on the funeral pyre; she goes round the fire thrice, and then the Brahmanas recite . . . may these very good and holy women who are devoted to their husbands enter the fire together with the body of their husband; the woman utters namo namah and ascends the funeral pyre.”
-- Radhunandana, Sudhi-tattva
She goes round the fire thrice singing songs, in this description from the seventeenth century of a ritual enshrined in the international imagination.
Girl suicide in India is different from girl suicide anywhere else.
and it is the same as anywhere else.
For of course the bulk of most contemporary suicides are the same everywhere, in the 21st century—poisoning shooting gassing ourselves over broken love affairs illnesses Weltschmertz indigestion. But even today Indian women kill themselves in ways either sanctified or caused by other sanctified traditions.
Just like Indian suicide overall, Indian female suicide goes far beyond traditions in other countries. It also bears a precise, definable and harrowing relationship to the state of women in India.
Not that any country on earth has a particularly wonderful track record with women—witness the United States and its war on welfare mothers and those who choose not to become mothers; China with its female infanticide; Iran stoning women for wearing lipstick—but India’s is, how you say, impressive.
Female mortality rates, from all causes, are higher than male from birth until age 34; literacy rates for women range from 9 percent to 39 percent; eight percent of girls aged 10 to 14 and 50 percent of women between 15 and 19 are already married. Despite female politicians here and businesswomen there, India still offers many women a life that is nasty and brutish, if not short (or foreshortened).
Most marriages are either arranged by parents or certainly negotiated with the males’ status and the womens’ dowry in mind (the dowry, originally meant to entitle a woman to her own funds, twisted into an instrument of torture for both sides). While middle-aged men can no longer legally marry and rape 5-year-old girls, as once was true, they continue to marry much younger women into their dotage.
Even for those with young husbands there is the mother-in-law dynamic, the enmity ridiculed in American sitcoms here institutionalized into a life-or-death struggle. The young couple lives with the groom’s parents, the girl powerless except for the clout of her young husband—and her very existence, as new breeder, disempowers the older woman of the family. The older woman will watch to make sure the dowry is paid in a timely manner, will disrespect the clothes manners of the new girl, will accidentally forget to invite her to dinner.
The fear that rules each woman in turn, that once her husband dies she is utterly powerless, becomes a drag on the family, a household slave. Less true now than in years past, when in some villages widows were forced to chant for hours for a cup of rice. In the 1930s one man confessed to a journalist, “We husbands so often make our wives unhappy that we might well fear they would poison us. . . . therefore did our wise ancestors make the penalty of widowhood so frightful.”
is it any wonder? as the old song goes? that many women choose to opt out?
Dowry suicide first.
Every year, a significant number of young married women die in “kitchen accidents” involving kerosene. “Oh dear, very sorry, my sister-in-law seems to have got burnt up.” Dowry agreements often involve installment payments, some of these thus no doubt outright murders when the price wasn’t paid, bizarrely akin to the repossession of a television set.
Others are the result of weeks or months of harassment and threats by in-laws, the husband himself and other relations. If young Sunita’s parents don’t pay up, her life is hell—she is stuck serving the rest of the family, gossip behind her back and loud in front of her. Her husband flaunts his infidelities or takes it out on her in bed; her serving at the family table is suddenly smaller; she dreads the day her husband finds out her father does not, in fact, have any more money to give.
These burnings have abated somewhat since 1991, when a law was passed requiring an investigation if of a young woman married less than a year should die under suspicious circumstances (the entire family to be placed under arrest). I don’t know if the law has stopped the occasional burning to death of mothers-in-law—the instrument of oppression then giving up, or the revenge of the oppressed focused on the wrong target. In any event police corruption can ignore the law, as with the Mehtas’ little crisis, even when the girl involved is a teenager.
I can feel her numbness, grayness spreading across her limbs, her whole support system cut off from the weight of the lost dowry. The pain of the flames is dull, though she hates the smell of the gasoline: a small shock like an orgasm through her system when she feels her hair catch fire. (It makes sense that fire would be an element in so many Indian suicides, with Kali the goddess of chaos, Siva the god of destruction both bathed in fire, crematoria a thriving industry.)
Speaking of crematoria, we may as well get to sati, the ritual described above by Raghuananda, and its vicious little cousin, jauhar.
Sati, also known as suttee, is perhaps the most famous of all Indian suicide traditions, defined by Webster’s as “the act or custom of a Hindu woman willingly cremating herself or being cremated on the funeral pyre of her husband, to show her devotion to him.” Tell me that wasn’t written by a man.
Formally banned by the British in 1829, still practiced in kitchens and rural funeral pyres, sati bears some relation to the immolation in pyramids of a pharaoh’s servants and other I-will-follow-my-master sort of suicides. Sati is named after a goddess who followed her husband into the flames (do goddesses die?), divided between sahamaranam, where the woman is burned next to her husband’s corpse (woman or girl, in its heyday five-year-old widows were consigned to flames), and anumaranam, when it occurs afterward.
The practice emerged in the Vedic era (2000 B.C.) and was developed to a high art by, of course, the Brahmins—the highest caste, most concerned with keeping the purity and fertility of its females of the highest order, also as the priestly class the most enamored of exotic ritual.
The husband is dying the funeral pyre is prepared, with some precious possessions although all precious metals go immediately to sons and brothers. The prayers and chants begin. By the time the husband’s body is cold the woman the girl has been prepared. Her entire life, she has been told, will culminate in this moment, the best way to accumulate good karma (what next step for a Brahmin woman? to be reincarnated as a man?). Her fine sari far rivals her wedding clothes.
She goes thrice around the fire.
If she is a child she may protest as she is brought to the flames; as a teenager she will either rebel or romanticize it, like the American children the virgins of Milethos the teenagers by the Palatine walls. As a grown woman she has seen how widows are treated and fears that more than she fears death.
Unlike some feminists I do not doubt the descriptions of women with triumphant smiles as the flames rise, the suicide chocolate rising in their bloodstreams, thinking of divinity like some manic Joan of Arc. Neither do I doubt the feminists’ own accounts—women captured after escaping the pyre and being thrown on it in restraints, little girls screaming to get out get out get out. (Many of those tiny widows, however, were already so physically weak they may not have minded. Medical records from the 1920s show seven year old newlywed girls with shattered hipbones and raging infections, from “consummation” with the old men who had taken a dowry from their parents.)
As with Masada, the forcible element does not prevent the veneration of the practice—thus the “sacred shrine of Sampati Sati” in Bihar state, where in 1928 a girl named Sampati Kuar, age unspecified, was forced into the flames by relatives then punished by the British. It’s now a place of pilgrimage, Lourdes-like miracles attributed to prayers at the murdered girl’s cremation site. The authorities are trying, with mixed success, to prevent the same thing happening at the death site of Roop Kunwar, who died in 1986 in Rajasthan (probably forced into the flames as well). We are incorrigible in worshiping our suicides.
Roop Kunwar’s death, as well as other rumored more recent sati, took place in Rajasthan, where the practice was always the most widespread—where frequent wars left many more girls than boys and many more soiled girls from military rape. It was there that the practice then extended to all the female relatives of the defeated, either in a massive pyre or quick one-day suicide cluster. This has been described in some texts as “the only way for the women of a community to protect their virtue.” i.e. avoid rape, like St. Pelagia (why is suicide, across cultures, the only holy self-defense?).
The Fort of Jodphur, in Rajasthan, contains the handprints of women in the midst of jauhar—running round and round and round the fire, faster and faster, racing each other. As the ritual is described. I must confess I imagine them laughing, We have suckled them weaned them fed them sucked their dicks sent them to war bound their wounds and we are tired. Now we can leave this place sanctified by fire. a huge fuck-you to fathers brothers husbands as well as would-be conquerors.
Echoes then of Milethos and Masada both, the refusal to be conquered yet again, the only way to protect our lives is to end them.
As always I find myself dancing in between the most serious feminists, who see every single instance of sati and jauhar as an egregious example of coercion and oppression, and the conventional scholars who romanticize it as “a sign of devotion” and, even now, give great play to news stories about obscure satis in rural villages, where the woman, they report, will not be stopped.
Neither gives enough play to the suicide as rebel, able to turn oppression inside out, to take the opportunity of escape with jubilation and rage. The same elements of Hinduism that support the caste system—the insignificance of a single life, mitigated by the thousands of lives available to any one person—make the potential for jubilation that much greater. Even amid the flames.
Visitors to India who wish to witness jauhar are out of luck, unless they happen upon some extremely nasty fighting in Jammu and Kashmir and a family that has not forgotten the fifteenth-century tradition. Those looking for sati may have to seek out one of those rural sites where it still happens in all its glory, with singing and dancing and gilt-laden funerals.
On the other hand, visit enough kitchens and look for young unmarried women being preyed upon for dowry disasters, or widows being starved by their in-laws. Kerosene, it seems, is used frequently for cooking in India, and the woman doesn’t have to wait to go thrice round the fire.
Just don’t try this at home.
unless you have to.