There are intersections of fact and figures in India that are too hard to ignore:

In a survey of 1,200 babies born in one year among the Kallar caste near Madurai in Tamil Nadu in South India, 600 were girls. 570 of those were dead within days of being born. Causes of death were varied and questionable.

An abortion clinic in a town in Central India gave the following annual statistic. Out of 8,000 abortions, 7,000 were female foetuses. The exception being that of a Jewish woman who wanted a daughter.

Every year between twenty and thirty thousand women in India allegedly die in what are called dowry cases. The scooter or colour television promised by the bride’s family was not delivered and the girl was punished with death or disfigurement.

60% of women in Indian prisons are over 60 years old. They are almost without exception the mother-in-laws of alleged victims in dowry cases.

In most rural areas of India there is a literacy rate of only about 20% among women.

India’s population of over a billion is approximately 70% rural.

Mala Sen, already seen in India by some as a radical figure for having taken on the subject of Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen, has wrapped herself around the subjects of the opening statistics, sati, dowry death and female infanticide in modern India. But this is not a book specifically about those three things. It is a very personal account of one woman’s reactions to three horrific crimes against women in India. The first is sati and the case of Roop Kanwar, a young bride of 18, who committed sati in 1987, in the village of Deorala in Rajasthan. The second is dowry death. Maria Selvi, a dark-eyed beauty who looks after Sen when she stays in the hill station of Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, tells Sen the utterly horrific story of how she was drenched in kerosene by her husband and set alight. Selvi did not die though her life was torn apart. The third is about Karrupayee, a young woman from the Kallar caste in Tamil Nadu, the first woman in India to be convicted of murdering her baby daughter. Sen follows these three stories and intertwines her own. She unravels each one like a detective, her writing deft in its use of detail. As the reader you are never quite sure whether a fact is just an etching of description or a major piece of the jigsaw. It fast paces the book.

There are many graphic things that choke you, others that are utterly depressing. A line from Roop Kanwar’s aunt combines many of the sentiments that Sen tries to explore on her journey. The old widow tells her: ‘If you expect nothing you will never be disappointed.’ And it is this worn out acceptance of the uneducated, voiceless role of women in 70% of India that leaves such a bitter taste. Mala Sen has not ranted as an enflamed feminist, even though so many of her childhood friends in India have become key figures in the feminist movement. She has clearly shown in the telling of her tale that the women of India are, in many cases, as guilty as the men of perpetuating the horrendous crimes against humanity shown in the opening linking statistics.

(originally published in The Times March 2002)