IN THE NAME
The spurt in the number of “honour killings” in Tamil Nadu in recent years is a stark indicator of the growing clout of patriarchal caste
groups.
IT IS A LOSS SO CRUEL. FOR 25-YEAR-OLD N. Nandish, a Dalit man, and 23-year-old S. Swathi, who belonged to the Vanniyar community (a Most Backward Caste, or MBC), life was slowly returning to normal after they got married at a temple on August 15, 2018, and registered the marriage a month later. The couple braved extreme hostility from Swathi’s family, which believed that with the marriage the family honour had been compromised and caste sanctity violated. The couple decided to settle down in Tamil Nadu’s Hosur town, which borders Karnataka and is about 50 kilometres from Soolakondapalli village in Krishnagiri district, where their families lived.
The couple, who had also sought protection from the police, went missing on November 10. Nandish’s brother N. Shankar lodged a complaint at the Hosur police station, which registered a case of “missing persons” and faxed photographs of the couple to police stations in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Three days later, the Hosur police station received a message from the Mandya police station in Karnataka that Nandish’s body had been recovered from the Shivana Samudra river. Two days later, Swathi’s body, in a highly decomposed state, was also found.
Preliminary investigations revealed that Swathi’s family had lured the couple to their village with the promise that their marriage would be solemnised with traditional customs. They then took the couple to Karnataka, where they strangled them and threw the bodies into the river. The girl’s body bore multiple hack wounds. Her head was shaven, apparently in an attempt to shame her, and her womb, with a three-month-old foetus in it, had been ripped open. Both the bodies bore signs of abuse.
Swathi’s father, Srinivasan, and his relatives were arrested for the crime. Shankar told Frontline that Srinivasan’s relatives and other members of his caste had goaded him to kill his daughter and her husband. “We took all precautions but failed to save them,” he said.
The incident is just one example of “honour killing”, a euphemism for casteist murders wherein people who consider themselves protectors of caste and culture zealously safeguard caste endogamy by killing young men and women who marry out of caste. A spike in such killings, numbering about 200 in Tamil Nadu since 2013, is testimony to the existence of a society that frowns upon and suppresses an adult’s right to choose their spouse.
One such murder that hit the headlines was that of