The news cycles are spinning with the greasy, mawkish fervour of a Varanasi funeral pyre. An Indian bride, a mere 24 summers old, is dead. Not from a broken heart, not from a stray monsoon bolt, but from a particularly virulent strain of Indian patriarchy that metastasised into a murder-suicide frenzy. And who's caught in the splatter? Our very own Fleet Street mastodons, their trunks dripping with crocodile tears and cheap moralising.
Let us, for a moment, set aside the tragedy itself. The young woman, whose name will be flung about like confetti at a wedding that never was, died because her in-laws demanded more dowry. More gold. More cash. More shiny things for their puffed-up progeny. When her father, a man of modest means, couldn't produce a mountain of rupees, they allegedly set her alight. Then, in a particularly cinematic twist, the husband and his kin hanged themselves in the family temple. A triple suicide, they say. A blood-soaked finale that would make Shakespeare retch.
But this is not a story about India. Oh no, darling reader. This is a story about us. About the sanctimonious hacks who now pick over the bones like vultures at a roadside carcass. The British press, that august institution that brought you Page Three and the phone-hacking scandal, has suddenly discovered a profound interest in dowry deaths. “Murder-suicide frenzy,” they scream, as if describing a Boxing Day sale at Harrods. “Honour killing,” they whisper, enjoying the delicious frisson of horror.
Where was this moral outrage when our own readers were being fed a diet of xenophobia and hate? When the death of a British Asian woman was reduced to a footnote in the culture wars? The answer, of course, is that it’s easier to tut-tut at a foreign barbarism than to confront the domestic variety. The Indian bride’s death is a splendid opportunity for a spot of cultural superiority, a chance to remind ourselves that we, the enlightened British, would never burn a woman for money. Except, of course, we do. We have our own dowries: the housing ladder, the inheritance, the generational wealth that keeps the have-nots in their place. We just call it something else.
And then there’s the aesthetic. The British media loves a good Indian tragedy because it comes with a built-in colour palette. The flames, the vermillion, the gold. “A Bollywood ending for a Bollywood bride,” one sub-editor surely muttered over his keyboard, before splashing it across the front page. It’s a pornography of grief, a spectacle for the bored masses. The fact that the woman was a human being, with dreams and fears and a favourite song, is secondary. She is now a symbol. A morality tale. A click.
Meanwhile, in the newsrooms of London, editors are frantically commissioning think-pieces. “What can the West learn from India’s dowry crisis?” they ask, as if we’ve solved our own gender violence. The hypocrisy is so thick you could spread it on a chapati. The Daily Mail, that champion of “traditional values,” will no doubt run a piece on how the immigrant community must integrate better, while simultaneously running a sidebar on the best way to cook a curry. The Guardian will wring its hands and prescribe more education, as if education ever stopped a man from feeling entitled to a woman’s body and her father’s bank account.
I am sickened, not by the tragedy alone, but by the theatre that follows. The Indian bride is dead. Her husband, her in-laws, they are dead. And the British press, with its oily sanctimony, is alive and well. It feeds on death. It needs it. For without tragedy, without the occasional foreign horror, how would we ever feel superior? How would we ever sleep at night, dreaming of our civilized shores?
So pour yourself a gin, a filthy, warm gin, and contemplate the headline. “Murder-suicide frenzy.” It sounds almost exciting, doesn’t it? Almost like a holiday. That’s the trick. That’s the art. They make you look, and in looking, you forget that you are just as complicit. You are the audience. You are the consumer. You are the one who clicks, who shares, who weeps for the pretty bride and then moves on to the next story. And the next. And the next.
There is no moral to this tale. Only a body, and the great British press machine, grinding it to pulp.
