The last year of the century has been terribly bewildering. First it was the sight of all those mothers and widows of soldiers killed in Kargil saying how proud they were of their men's martyrdom. Then the fisherwomen of Orissa filled the TV screens, clueless about what they were going to do after the cyclone. And now it is a woman called Charan Shah who burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre in Mahoba.
The police says she committed suicide, the family says she committed sati, the media says the family drove her to it. And the report of a fact-finding group of women says it is all a creation of the media.
All one knows is that destruction stalks our women as though there is no tomorrow. It is not the dwindling numbers of women in India (down to 929 women to 1,000 men at last count) that make you feel a little less real each day. We seem to belong to a country, a language, a culture that does not really give a damn for its poor and helpless.
How does one, sitting in New Delhi, speak authoritatively about and analyse her death at the funeral pyre of a tubercular husband of 30 years? Eventually, it is senseless to ask if Charan Shah was a victim of her family or the State. Neither did a thing for 30-odd years to help the poor woman procure the necessary medication for a totally curable disease like TB, which in turn could have prevented her hellish death by fire.
Bright young feminists like the ones who went there to find facts will surely present a case against the local police and administration. What will such 'fact-finding' achieve in the long run? Nothing except for a few transfers of public officials, who will be glad to get out of the godforsaken zone. People will keep trickling in after the police are gone and continue to crack coconuts and prostrate themselves at the site.
Most Indians no longer bother to think seriously about what will become of us as a terribly sectarian and woman-deficient nation in the next century. We just know we women have to survive the next century somehow. But how? And is only survival enough? We were told as young girls that the soul never dies, only the body does. But the soul, we know, can also die much before the body if one is harassed and pushed beyond all limits. Perhaps that is what happened earlier with Roop Kanwar and now with Charan Shah. They were dead before the pyre was set on fire.
To criticise Charan Shah as an insane or foolish or cowardly woman, one who could not stand up for her own identity and her rights, would be in itself a foolish and cowardly act of sophistry. What rights does a Hindu widow from her background really have? What identity? Do you think if she had either, she'd not have sought and been able to get her husband the medical help he needed?
The local people who came in droves to pay 'homage' to the sati site are said to have entered the village forcibly. Then, we are told, they chanted hymns and cracked coconuts at the spot. These are the badlands of Uttar Pradesh, the dreaded territory of dacoits. The people here have had precious little protection against violence in their daily lives. And many of them are destined to die if not of police bullets, then like Man Shah, of preventable disease turned into terminal ones by endemic poverty. So for most of Charan Shah's neighbours, the law has long ceased to exist and the police that they have not known to protect the poor against the rich outlaws backed by richer landlords and politicians deserves little respect. They feel they must create and tap their own local sources of divine power, for protection and well-being. This is why they will come and bow even to an illegally erected holy edifice for who knows, it may protect them. It will certainly generate good money for the villagers in days to come.
In this they are neither good citizens nor bad; just some of the millions of Indians forced to live hellish lives below the poverty line, perennially at the receiving end of the moral and physical decay that is India at the end of the millennium.
Nor can we in all honesty claim that we know that Charan Shah was alienated from a ruthless local society and killed by its indifference. It is obvious from the crowds that are turning up that both emotionally and rationally she was in touch with a fear that moves inside all of them. That they never turned up to help her and her husband was perhaps due to the fact that they are all equally helpless and disinherited.
When we speak of the history of women's emancipation in free India, of their constitutional rights and empowerment, it's not the history of women like Charan Shah that we have in mind. Women like her have had no visible part in our democracy. Cast out by all of us, for comfort, Charan Shah and her community revert to the suicidally heroic myths from an earlier age. The age of Alha and Udal, the legendary feudal heroes of Mahoba. The brothers who talked of courage, of the sanctity of a poor man's pride and honour in the face of injustice and death. They are still said to haunt the land. To the locals, their ghosts and Charan Shah's aura seem a bigger source of benediction than the institutions of the State. So, I am unable to clap for one honourable minister's politically correct stand, that to prevent such deaths, locals must 'respect' their women's rights and treat girls on par with boys. To pronounce a judgement over Charan Shah's death is difficult. She died as she had long lived, without access to knowledge, basic information, basic medical amenities. When we pause and examine them, all the socio-political options we can extend to a woman like her sound too abstract, too aggressive and too far-fetched in the face of an ageing woman's desperate desire to leap beyond her own terminal helplessness. Her death diminishes us all.