BRIDES ARE NOT FOR BURNING -Dina Mehta
BRIDES
ARE NOT FOR BURNING
-Dina
Mehta
Dina Mehta(born 1961) is a Parsi
novelist and an award- winning dramatist, her play" Brides are not for
Burning" received an international award from the BBC in 1979, "Getting
away with Murder"(2000) and "Brides Are Not For Burning"(1993)
are full of complexities of modern life. Dina Mehta and Manjula Padmanabhan
seem to be engaged in a serious attempt to bring about a positive attitudinal
change in women towards themselves as well as in society towards women. Dina
Mehta is an accomplished Indian writer in English who raises her voice in
protest against a host of crimes against women such as the evil of dowry,
female foeticite, rape, child abuse, subjugation of women, and so on.
Domestic violence against women is
certainly not isolated to India. The official rate of domestic violence is
significantly lower than in the US, for example, where, according to UN
statistics, a woman is battered somewhere in the country on average once every
15 seconds. In all countries this violence is bound up with a mixture of
cultural backwardness that relegates women to an inferior status combined with
the tensions produced by the pressures growing economic uncertainty and want.
In India, however, where capitalism has fashioned out of the traditions of
dowry a particularly exposed nexus between marriage and money, and where the
pressures of mundane life are being heightened by bordering social split, the
violence takes correspondingly brutal and grotesque forms.
Laxmi as the eldest daughter had to
stop her own studies in preference to taking care of the younger siblings. She
is married off by her typical middle- class father who gives her dowry beating
his capacity but her in-laws, in spite of being prosperous begin to persecute
her for extracting more for her parental home. After five years of her marriage
they start blaming her for bearing no child. Her husband is impotent, but she
is considered as unable to conceive. The tragic and pathetic tale of Laxmi is
not only her own suffering, but it is the part of numberless women's lives
whose sufferings in Indian Patriarchy strike the playwright's sensitivity and
she feels compelled to look at the domestic violence in a broader perspective.
It is our patriarchal social arrangement which has marginalized woman
within and without home as subordinate, slave servant and what not. A woman's
social respectability is resolved by her relationships to men. A daughter is
known by the name of her father and a wife by the name of her husband. Gender
manifestation in our society is omnipresent in such ways that most of us are
not even aware of their gender-rooted expressions in language, norms and
conduct. Social thinkers like Marx observed the oppression of women as attributed
to the materialization of personal property. Starting in conjugation with
manipulative class relations, the alteration resulted in the oppression of
women in various forms inside and outside the socio-familial world that has
persisted even today.
The play emphasizes society's answer to the issue of bride-burning
through lack of action which seeps into each and every stratum of society.
Malini, the inconsolable sister of Laxmi puts an effort to bring justice to her
dead sister but the responses of Anil, her brother and others make it clear how
the society would like to wear the grab of silence after of inhuman act of
bride-burning has been committed. This is clear from what Anil states.
"Come on Malu. She is gone now. Let her go. She is beyond pain, beyond redress.
Malini: But not beyond retribution"
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