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Why the DU honour killing is not shocking

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Ananya Bhattacharya
Ananya BhattacharyaNov 24, 2014 | 11:05

Why the DU honour killing is not shocking

Take One. First year; a women's college in North Campus, Delhi University. A petite, uncannily quiet girl steps into the college hostel after a lengthy dos-and-don'ts' discussion with her parents. She is given a room with two other first years, much like the hostel norm. A Music (Hons.) student, this girl ends up attracting a lot of muffled whispers, thanks to her reluctance in talking to anybody save the basic conversations with her roommates. Her roommates, out of concern, inform the warden of her unnatural silences. After the first few months, the other first years who have stepped out of their homes for the first time ever, have settled down in their new lives, and are seen mingling with others. This particular girl, however, is still as quiet as she was on Day One. Concerned eyebrows are raised in the hostel meetings, and the warden finally decides to step in to ask her what the matter was. Two days later, the girl disappears from the hostel. No sanctioned leaves, no visit to the local guardians' on record. Few witnesses say that right after her classes, the girl's parents came to visit her - and without bothering to inform anyone in the hostel, she is taken back to her native place, somewhere in Haryana. Her cupboard in the hostel is still locked; the mattresses and her belongings still on the bed; signs of habitation all around her area of the three-seater. Her roommates are questioned; and no satisfactory answer comes out from them. All through the rest of the year, the bed stays unoccupied; the cupboard locked. Till date, no one knows what happened to her after her parents took her away. She never spoke to anyone either in the hostel or to her other college-mates or any teacher. As far as the college is concerned, the admission was cancelled after a year of no-shows from the student.

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Take Two. Same hostel; a different room. A gregarious-to-say-the-least girl walks around the hostel in the shortest of shorts imaginable, even by women's hostel standards. She goes around saying over-enthusiastic 'Hi's to people all around - a girl thoroughly at ease with herself in her new residence. Over the course of the three years of graduation, one spots her with several boyfriends, all around the area near the college. The one among these boyfriends, who makes it to the final few days of the girl's third year in the college, ends up talking marriage to her. The girl shudders at this extremely indecent proposal; a few days later, her parents land up at the hostel gates. Someone who happens to cross her room on that day, sometime in the afternoon, sees her getting dressed in a heavily-embroidered saree and forehead-to-toe jewellery, etc. Curious passersby are finally treated to the piece of news they had been waiting for all day - the girl comes out, in giggles, to inform her hostel mates that her parents were in town to take her to see a guy, and since the guy couldn't enter a woman's hostel to see his bride-to-be, she had to be dressed up and taken to his place. The next day, once the parents are safely out of her line of vision, the boyfriend re-surfaces. One spots her coochie-cooing with him outside the hostel, in between informing him of her 'adventure' the previous day. Once college's over, gazillion photos on Facebook inform her friends and acquaintances that she is married. No, not to the boyfriend. He was a Brahmin; she, not. Bridging caste barriers is something that, she said later, she could never have done. Her parents "would have chopped her to pieces and fed her to the dogs".

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Take Three. A women's PG somewhere in Noida. A two-seater; two women; one - working, the other - studying animation at a private institute. The working woman - from her first day in the PG - finds her roommate sobbing herself to sleep every single night. After a week of incessant muffled sobs wrecking her sleep, the woman decides to speak to her roommate. The girl breaks down; says that she had come to Delhi to study - against her parents' wishes; and now that she had spent her first month away from home, her parents wanted her to shift back. After a few weeks of even more crying on the girl's part, her parents say that she didn't have to shift back home as long as she visited them once. The moment you decide to feel a bit grateful at her parents' change of decision, there comes a bolt from the blue - the girl's cousin calls up to warn her that her parents had already chosen a groom for her, and the ruse of calling her home 'just one time' was actually to get her married off. The packed bags lie that way for the next two days as the girl fills buckets crying over her fate. Her roommate soon discovers that she had shifted to a different PG right after coming to Delhi, so that her parents wouldn't be able to trace her and take her back home forcibly. Finally, when the parents realize that nothing is working and that she has been tipped off, the threats begin. She is asked to come back, else her Delhi relatives would ensure that she is sent back, come what may. After a few days of the hullabaloo robbing the sleep of the landlord of her PG, the girl is asked to shift out. She does so in a few days, and snaps all communication with everyone. No one knows whether or not she managed to give her parents the slip.

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These are not stories of a fictional Dystopia. These are incidents that I've been a witness to, through my Delhi life of eight years. A college, where the Indian Feminism movement found its footing, housed in its hostel girls who belonged to families and homes where uttering that F-word is worse than killing their own children. And the teachers, the students - all of us ended up as mute spectators of these incidents because we were helpless in the face of ignorance. No one KNEW where the first girl had been taken to - let alone doing something about her. In the second case, all of us spent adequate amount of time listening to heart-rending tales of how the girl's parents were forcing her into a marriage she could care the least about. We tried drilling in tales of Feminism into her head; and all the while, a wistful smile of resigned acceptance of her fate played on on the face of the girl. She confessed that she wanted to keep up a facade of happiness in front of her parents - and inside the hostel, too - because her parents had asked people to keep an eye on her. To inform them of any sign of unhappiness on their daughter's face; and she would be taken to task. As far as the third girl is concerned, I tried to get in touch with her for days after she left the PG, but to no avail. The phone number is still switched off; and the girl nowhere on any social networking site.

So, when the news of yet another honour killing shakes Delhi - Delhi University - to its core, it doesn't really come as a surprise for a lot of us pass-outs. Girls like Venky's Bhavna Yadav come to the capital, learn to dream, dream of a flight towards freedom from regressive mentalities. Back home, the story doesn't change, no matter how many girls tie knots outside their castes. One either ends up as married right after third year - to save her own life - else ends up being killed. No amount of breast-beating, chest-thumping Feminism and Modernity lectures can do zilch to change even an iota of the realities back at the homes of these girls. They graduate with brilliant marks, only to end up as someone's battered daughter-in-law, in some corner of Uttar Pradesh. And others end up as ashes, flouting the family honour diktats.

Last updated: November 24, 2014 | 11:05
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