The term dowry death is such a coy term for murder. Dowry murders, were mostly carried out by fire. Young brides whose marital families were unhappy with the dowry they brought, would pour kerosene on young women and burn them alive. Sometimes, they would lock these women in the kitchen to prevent escape and we can only assume they listened to the screams of the person in the throes of this torture. Later, they would claim that a kerosene stove had malfunctioned and exploded, causing accidental death or that this was a suicide. Sounds pretty grisly doesn’t it? At their peak, there were 5,000 such dowry murders a year in India.

Many parents consigned their daughters to such deaths, thanks to a belief that a woman’s body belongs in her husband’s home and no matter what—“doli mein jayegi aur niklegi toh arthi pe” (she will enter in her wedding palanquin and leave on her funeral pier). Her return would be a matter of dishonour and shame. Imagine the desperation and isolation of that thought, for the woman.

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When young people choose something their parents oppose, the alienation becomes needlessly extreme. This is more true for young women, who frequently find themselves emotionally and socially isolated if they exercise some kind of agency over their bodies, in matters of love or desire. This creates an unhealthy desperation and a tendency to get stuck in abusive contexts. 

We do not know right now how to interpret the terrible murder of Shraddha Walkar. But the indecent excitability of using her death to tell women this is what happens if they don’t stay within the limits of community and parental authority is not only unkind, but inaccurate. As the history of dowry murders and the intimate partner violence statistics of NFHS 5 discussed in this column just two weeks ago show, people treat the bodies of women who live within norms viciously too. Our society desperately needs more compassion and less judgemental attitudes to its young people.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com