Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 14:02:26 -0500
From: Partha Banerjee <partha-AT-capital.net>
Subject: Re: "Bride-burning and Dowry Deaths" -- a new book


Here is something that might find relevance to our discussion.

-Partha

__________


"The Bride Burning" by Begum Fatima Shahnaz

"The Bride Burning" is an autobiographical novel about my arranged
marriage in India,  and the subsequent psychic abuse and terror of a
young girl, raised and educated in the West,  who escaped death by
fighting back.  Although my case was rooted in a marriage to a Muslim,
 the cultural discrimination of women is a universal issue on which
this book focuses.  I quote from my introduction to "The Bride
Burning":  "It is about the dualism triggered within the geopolitical
framework of our shrinking globe as old-world tranditionalism
interacts with the struggle for individual rights and the
consciousness-raising of current feminism ...  "The Bride Burning" is
a book of anger:  The anger of a girl involuntarily subjected to
becoming the scapegoat of dualism:  The currents of change and
regression, the stagnation of rigidly inflexible traditionalism and
the absence of family suport- structures in modern self-determinism.
The irrational impulses at work in this power struggle trigger an
odyssey into the mind's insanity and hell.  As the individual is
stripped of power in favor of Group-Think, the collective
self-deception of a system steeped in parochial patriarchies,  a form
of cultural abuse and conditioning occurs:  The woman becomes a victim
of submission, easily losing her sense of self-esteem and personhood.
The manipulators opportunistically exploit the veil of religion and
tradition (distorting the true essence of spirituality,) to suit their
own selfish and greedy interests and motivations of power.  Religion
thus becomes a pretense masking narcissism, egoism,  and hubris.  The
weak and oppressed, primarily women and children,  are scapegoated in
this power-lust.

Continued introduction:  "We are the construct of our outer and inner
environments, our cultural myths and iconogaphy which color our
childhood. For Hindu women in India,  the rite of Suttee was abolished
first by the Muslim emperor, Akber,  then the British in 1829.  Suttee
was the ritual suicide or murder of women on the funeral pyres of
their dead husbands, an act of immolation reserved for the eilite,
for queens.  Nonetheless,  in the last few decades, there has been
throughout India a resurgence and revival of 'dowry-deaths' or
bride-burnings, in which young women are driven to suicide by greedy
and rapacious in-laws disappointed in their dowries.  Fear edges the
silver lining to the Indian mystique:  A fear of death and social
castration, tales of horror tattooed into the DNA of an Indian woman
from birth ... The Bride Burning is the true account of one Indian
girl who fought the forces of heredity, and got away.  But my story is
an ancient one, written in blood on Suttee Gats:  Those who walked
voicelessly to a burning hell, never living to tell the tale.  The
futility of their snuffed lives is scarred into my flesh, branded on
me like a curse:  That legacy of blood, and vices in the wind of
unmourned, forgotten women.  I, Fatima Shahnaz,  shall not be able to
live with myself under this blood-soaked heritage,  these memories of
death. India,  a necropolis of tombs and epic myths, of maharajahs and
fairytales ... Like the queens of our mythology,  I am but foam on the
ocean:  Our story is ash on the wind,  water and air.  For women,
living and dead,  I write this story.  For Suttee,  the Chaste Wife,
I see redemption.  We place ourselves on the pyres of human
conscience;  If not this life,  the next brings release from our trial
by fire...  When our bodies are snatched from us,  tortured, our minds
bent and mutilated,  we find release from suffering within.  We shall
reach the place beyond the fire and burning places.  We touch the
first threshold, the plateau of human understanding at the Great
peaceful aboe in the Himalayas of the soul where no flames touch, and
glacial waters cleanse. Chastened,  purified,  mellowed,  tempered,
we reach the immortal state that transcends boundaries and
confinements defined by men:  We seek the silent spaces, within.  Our
eyes, mirrors of truth painted in the lamp-black of centuries;  our
voices in the wind combing the tombs of kings.  We speak with the
breath of antiquity,  the undying soul of centuries.  That death is a
purifying rite,  the transcendenc of ego, t he acceptance of our own
indeterminacy and tolerance for the diversity of others.  Then,  the
Suttee Bride is the Chaste Wife,  the woman redeemed, relieved of her
earthbound husk, the impurities of Self and selfishness,  a world
fighting fo greed, domination and killing for power.  We hold a torch
in the dark before rebirth. Mankind will not stand by and witness our
burning:  Mankind will not immolate truth.  Looking up to the stars
through preordained doom and millennial tears, we seek the hand that
touches,  the heart that reaches.  Then, we know there is healing.
Then,  the burnings will stop.  And there is delivrence from death,
the immolation of woman."

>From "The Bride Burning" by Dr. Begum Fatima Shahnaz, Ph.D.  Sorbonne
University, France.