Honour Killings: A shameful aspect of caste ridden society
It's true that parents decide what is best for their children and it's also true that Indian parents get paranoid about their daughter's marriage from the very beginning. But is this so called honour, bigger than their daughter's happiness and life?
NIRUPAMA PATHAK was a 22 years old journalist with a leading English business daily and also an IIMC alumni, the most coveted mass communication institute in India. A small town girl hailing from Jhumritalaiya is no more now because she was a Brahmin girl and the partner she chose for herself was Priyabhanshu Ranjan, a Bihari Kayasth boy, who was her batch mate at IIMC and a journalist with a top news agency. And it’s none other than her own mother who killed her.
Honour killing, as it is popularly known as, killing the family member to save the honour of the family. We must have heard of incidences of honour killing in Haryana where the Panchayat decides to kill the couples who dare to fall in love, but this incident is surely going to be the rarest of the rare case where the girl belongs to an educated family.
It’s true that parents decide what is best for their children and it’s also true that Indian parents get paranoid about their daughter’s marriage from the very beginning. But is this so called honour, bigger than their daughter’s happiness and life? And now that this journalist is dead, her family can hold their head high? Their daughter‘s pregnancy came into news, the killer mom got arrested and surely the so called honour has gone to ashes. If the family had agreed for their marriage, the sorrow of giving their daughter to some other caste would have lasted for a short while, but now the stigma attached because of the murder would last forever.
They probably must have wanted to marry off their journalist daughter to some Brahmin engineer, MBA or IAS and would have given loads of dowry. And this is the reason why most of Indian middle class parents want their daughters to get good education, not because they want them to lead good, independent lives, but to make groom hunting easier.
Her father is a bank employee and both her brothers are PhDs. Her family didn’t mind sending her to Delhi to get a post graduate degree in media, a glamorous field and after completing her studies she was working in the same city; her parents were okay with that too. What they were not okay with was the fact that their daughter was in love with a Kayasth boy whom she intended to marry soon. In some interview her father said “first we should look for the match in our own caste, if there are no options left then only we should look at other castes’’. His statement truly indicates that they are not even guilty of committing this heinous crime.
It’s true that parents decide what is best for their children and it’s also true that Indian parents get paranoid about their daughter’s marriage from the very beginning. But is this so called honour, bigger than their daughter’s happiness and life? And now that this journalist is dead, her family can hold their head high? Their daughter‘s pregnancy came into news, the killer mom got arrested and surely the so called honour has gone to ashes. If the family had agreed for their marriage, the sorrow of giving their daughter to some other caste would have lasted for a short while, but now the stigma attached because of the murder would last forever.
They probably must have wanted to marry off their journalist daughter to some Brahmin engineer, MBA or IAS and would have given loads of dowry. And this is the reason why most of Indian middle class parents want their daughters to get good education, not because they want them to lead good, independent lives, but to make groom hunting easier.
And what if the ideal groom they chose turned out to be a real beast and makes their daughter’s life hell? They would do everything to settle out the matter but the doors to their homes will be closed forever. Once the daughter is married off everything is over, the in-laws house is the place for her, no matter even if she is killed there.
Because the honour of their family is all in daughter’s hand as Sonam kapoor rightly said in Dilli 6 “khandan ki izzat ka theka toh betiyo ne hi le rakha hai “.
Parents have got every right to stop their children from taking wrong decisions. But what was so wrong with the decision that this journalist took? Okay, she was not an “ideal Indian middle class daughter” as she went away for studies and had a boyfriend, but did she deserve to be killed? That girl was financially independent and the man she was in love with was also independent. They both were adults and could have easily married at court, but still they were looking for their parents’ agreement and the boy is surely thinking now that they should have better tied the knot without even informing her parents.
What’s the lesson that middle class working daughters or any girl learns from this incident? That elope with your boyfriend, parents would never understand that we are living in 21st century now and it’s high time that we should shun this caste bias They would never understand that “love marriage” is not a bad idea, it is any day better than arranged marriage with a huge dowry. It is love and understanding that matters at the end of the day! But as they say it take ages to change the mentality.
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