Murder, Marriage, and the Machinery of Male Mediocrity

Marriage, in this land, can be a license to kill.

- Ravi Shankar

Indian patriarchy is not just oppressive, it is homicidal. Every 90 minutes, a bride is strangled, burned, or bludgeoned to death by the very man society commands her to worship as pati-parmeshwar. These are everyday eruptions of a system where fragile men weaponise pseudo-machismo to mask their insignificance. Patriarchy is not some neat hierarchy of roles; it is a theatre of cruelty, a grotesque ritual in which women’s bodies are made sacrificial altars for male anxiety. In Greater Noida, Nikki Bhati despite bringing a lavish dowry, was set ablaze by her husband Vipin and in-laws with her six-year-old son watching—a nightmare that will haunt him for life. Tanu Rani in Hapur, married to Rahul Kumar, was killed after enduring relentless dowry demands. Reshma Begum in Cachar, mother of two, beaten to death by her husband over dowry. The men in question are not gangsters or psychopaths. They are clerks, farmers, shopkeepers. None of them wore the mask of a cinematic villain. They looked like your neighbour. They spoke like your cousin. They smiled at weddings, folded their hands at temples. This is Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil in Indian clothing: not devils, but mediocrities, killing as though they were stomping on an ant. Evil, in India, is scarily mundane; it sits at the dinner table, counts the gold bangles, and calculates how much more can be squeezed.