Death by Fire: Sati, Dowry Death and Female Infanticide in Modern India - Tapa dura

The Indian village of Deorala in Rajasthan is neither remote nor feudal. There is running water and electricity, and the villagers have had television for over twenty years. On 4 September 1987, before a crowd of several thousand people, mostly men, a young woman dressed in her bridal finery was burnt alive on her husband's funeral pyre. The apparent revival of an ancient tradition opened old wounds in Indian society and focussed world attention on the status and treatment of women in modern India. The ancient practise of sati - the self-immolation of a woman on her husband's funeral pyre - was outlawed by the British administration in India in 1829. Since Independence, the practice was widely believed to have died out. The fate of eighteen-year-old Roop Kanwar changed that perception. Mala Sen, the author of the acclaimed biography of Phoolan Devi, India's notorious Bandit Queen, explores the reality of life and death for women in modern India in a study which is both illuminating and terrifying.

This book is part journey through the India that the author knows and loves, part exploration of the enigma that India still remains in the minds of many. Starting with Roop Kanwar, she enters the worlds of three women: a Goddess, a burned bride, and a murderess and shows how, in this society in which ancient and modern apparently comfortably co-exist, there is increasingly cause for real alarm. She creates an image of a state in which political turmoil is constantly at the surface, and in which the role of women is being constantly redefined.