LITERARY REVIEW

The Rage of A Woman

The landmark trial that changed the way we see gender-based violence

In 1979, 24-year-old Kiranjit Ahluwalia, a native of Punjab, went to the United Kingdom to marry a man she had met only once named Deepak. They were married for a decade and she conceived two boys. One evening in 1989, while her husband was sleeping, Ahluwalia poured a mixture of petrol and caustic soda over the bed and set it alight. She specifically targeted Deepak’s feet, and as he screamed from being burnt alive, Ahluwalia ran into a garden with her three-year-old son.

Deepak suffered severe burns over 40% of his body and died 10 days later in hospital from sepsis. Ahluwalia was arrested for murder, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison.

During the trial, Ahluwalia revealed that for the entire duration of her marriage, Deepak was violent and had repeatedly abused her. She suffered marital rape, was deprived of food, and severely beaten in front of her children. She tried seeking help from her family but was turned away on the basis of “family honor.” She tried running away but was found by Deepak, brought home and unforgivingly punished.

Describing her act on that fateful night, Deepak had threatened her life with an iron rod. She had had enough. She said she mustered all her courage to show him how much pain he inflicted on her. By burning his feet, he could not escape. He’d be incapacitated to come after her. She wanted to punish him. Her intention was not to commit murder.

“I couldn’t sleep, I was crying so badly. I was in pain, physically and emotionally,” she told the BBC in an interview in 2019. “I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hit him the way he hit me. I wanted to hit him so he could feel the same pain I was feeling. I never thought further. My brain had totally stopped.”

The court did not see it that way.

The prosecutors saw Ahluwalia’s act as premeditated. The fact that she knew how to create napalm and waited for her husband to fall asleep to commit the act showed she had time to think, to plan, and to execute. They dismissed the fact that she had been brutally abused, suffered long-term trauma, that there were hospital records of her injuries, as well as eyewitnesses to the domestic violence.

Ahluwalia was a foreigner, barely spoke English, and had poor legal representation. She accepted her punishment but her case grabbed the attention of Southall Black Sisters (SBS), a non-profit women’s organization based in Southall, West London, England. SBS fights to defend the human rights of Asian women who are the victims of domestic violence and in campaigning against religious fundamentalism.

SBS, backed by Justice for Women, pressed for a mistrial and in 1992, on grounds of insufficient counsel. Ahluwalia’s conviction was overturned, reduced to manslaughter (by then she had already served the given time in prison) and set free. This became the landmark case that introduced the world to the terms battered women syndrome, provocation, and diminished responsibility.

Soon after Ahluwalia’s release, many other women — all victims of domestic violence — were granted a retrial, many of them were set free.

To this day, SBS remains an advocate for women’s justice. Speaking to BBC reporter Krishna Khakhria, Ahluwalia has this to say looking back at over four decades since the historical moment: “I had full confidence in British law. I thought the British law is a modern law and they would understand me, how much I suffered. They never understood how many years I suffered.”

This becomes an important basis to amending the legal framework that protects women to this day. Though the fight remains an uphill battle, Ahluwalia’s case opened the door to new conversations about how women are perceived in the eyes of gender-based violence.

As a former lecturer, I taught Media Studies and Media Ethics. Through those modules, I tried my best to speak the language of cinema with my young students to discuss current affairs. The purpose was to find a common ground, to make them see that despite the ocean of media offerings out there, there were gems that could educate them on what was important to heal society.

It was through movies and documentaries that my students were able to profit from their screen time, learn to surf and scroll with guidance and sound purpose. It also gave them valuable content to discuss in class and among their friends. Perhaps I’m an optimist, or perhaps being a former teacher, I cannot help but think of ways to supplement education. But I know that removing social media from the younger generation would be impossible. However, guiding them ways to find nuggets of information on a global platform where knowledge is unlimited, could be a superpower — if harnessed correctly.

For example, the landmark case of Ahluwalia was made into a 2006 movie Provoked: A True Story, starring Bollywood legend Aishwarya Rai. This was a powerful and strategic move considering around 30% of women have experienced domestic violence from their partners at least once (cited by the World Health Organization), while around 55% of women living in Asia have experienced partner violence in their lifetimes (taken from the Asian Development Bank Institute).

Through movies alone, I’ve encountered and taught many landmark cases that proved how nascent modern societies are in regards to democracy, freedom and human rights. My students asked me, why is this important? I told them it’s critical in helping them define and shape their future governments and to amend public policies. Voting for their leaders and head of states is one civic duty and a leap of faith, but what happens next requires a bigger network of support and intelligence. For this, the onus is on them.

As a teacher molding the minds of the future, I found it powerful to use movies to connect to pivotal case studies students would otherwise dismiss, find boring, or flip the pages of thick, intimidating textbooks at the college library. And while schools can continue to ban books, it’s harder with the multitude of avenues via social media. That can be an advantage more than a disadvantage — a teacher’s superpower.

For example, my previous literary review on Counter Arts shed light on French actress and director Mélanie Laurent’s The Mad Women’s Ball based on the book Le Bal Des Folles by Victoria Mas. Prior to that was a retrospective analysis of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace on Netflix.

Like catching flies with honey, movies have proven to be a powerful textual and visual language for my students. Movies and documentaries are well-invested, creative production that become solid takeaways. These formats allow the students to individually and collectively reflect, rewind, review, examine, dissect, arbitrate and to repeatedly share on a single device. What I love most about the process is seeing my students mature in a short span of time. They’re exposed to ways to express their thoughts, to transcend global social spheres at minimal cost.

The case of Ahluwalia was important because many of my students came from homes that nested gender-based violence. Some of my students were direct victims, had parents who were abused and abusive, while many others knew someone living in fearful situations. Above all, through the case, and many like it, they learn how it takes a society to define and vote for its culture and civil discontent. Through such knowledge, they can learn to build their defense adequately, to fight with justice, and avoid being noisy, empty vessels.

The case of Ahluwalia forced the British legal system to improve its judicial awareness of abused women and the concept of provocation. A startling reality at the time was that the entire legal system spoke and examined crime from a male logic and viewpoint. To the court, what happened at home stayed at home. Marital rape was unheard of, likewise with what transpires in an abusive marriage.

Pragna Patel, the founding member of the Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism, shared how it was a new discourse to make the court see Ahluwalia’s case as a long-term, aggravated victim: “We tried to speak to her lawyers at the time and tried to educate them on her cultural context. Why would someone like her not have found it easy to leave a violent abusive marriage.” There is the concept of family honor and shame that was poorly understood outside the social context of Asia which puts victims in tortured silence.

There was also the flawed argument that the duration between Deepak’s final threat to Ahluwalia and her setting him on fire, would have allowed her a “cooling off” period instead of a “boiling up.” Such was the simplistic way the victim’s situation was perceived at the time. Ahluwalia’s plea of provocation — which is a partial defense to murder — failed during the initial trial because the law demanded an immediate incident of provocation that acted as a trigger to a loss of self-control.

“The prosecution suggested she was motivated by jealousy due to her husband’s affairs and the gap between the argument and her retaliation was long enough for her to calm down and think rationally about her actions,” explains Patel. “That was a major moment in the history of women’s struggles against violence in this country, particularly in relation to minority women because it was the first time that minority communities had to reflect, accept and recognize that gender-based violence exists, and that some of the way we treat women is partly responsible.”

I look at the faces of my students and I see encouraging hope light up when we discuss cases like Ahluwalia’s known in legal literature as R v Ahluwalia (1992). Like them, Ahluwalia left her home to seek a better future. She did what was expected of her, and had no idea her life would be at stake, denied by the people she trusted — this includes the legal system designed to protect “the innocent.”

Ahluwalia recalls, “When I got my life sentence and my trial solicitor said there were no grounds of appeal, that was a big blow. I had no lawyer, no family, I ended up with a life sentence. I lost everything.”

Ahluwalia’s retrial and release set a historic precedent — the court accepted that women who are victims of abuse may have more of a “slow-burn” reaction when provoked, rather than an immediate response. Ahluwalia was suffering from depression throughout her marriage, and it also sent the message that women who kill as a result of severe domestic violence should not be immediately ostracized.

The biggest takeaway from the case is how it paved the way for society to acknowledge not just the differences in physical strength, but in ways anger or rage is built up that could lead to diminished responsibility. Taking into more serious account the psychological factors of how a woman is forced to commit murder as a form of self defense from provocation, it was about the social and political realities in which men and women find themselves, and the failure of state agencies to take domestic violence and abuse seriously.

According to Harriet Wistrich, director of Justice for Women, Ahluwalia’s case was pivotal in the early 90s as it brought to the fore the issue of victims of domestic violence who kill as a form of self defense (as opposed to merely suffering). “In legal terms these cases brought changes by introducing such concepts as slow-burn provocation and cumulative provocation.”

Prior to R v Ahluwalia, according to the legal framework, the provocation defense was translated as a defense based on male standards — men who lost control and responded with anger. Women were perceived to endure abusive conduct over a longer period. This would accumulate to a stage when they would ultimately lose control. What was missing were the potent reasons for a woman’s defense: the abusive, coercive, controlling and constraining context in which abused women kill. The discriminatory law did not allow for the social, cultural and economic reasons that can prevent exit from abuse.

According to Patel, The Coroners and Justice Act 2009 abolished the defense of provocation and replaced it with loss of control, “which better reflects women’s reality while not being lenient on men who claim that they lost self-control due to adultery or in anger.”

Experimental psychologist B.F. Skinner theorized that a person’s behavior is “conditioned” or developed as a result of experiencing the consequences of prolonged imposed behavior and learning from it. In the case of Ahluwalia, she had no other form of fighting against her abuser (after all other forms of help had failed) other than to inflict the very method he inflicted on her for a decade — violence, pain and suffering. In her case, she refused to stay helpless, to worsen her PTSD, hence the battered women syndrome.

The night Ahluwalia set her husband on fire was her way to say she wants to survive. That alone is a powerful form of action — and a voice of reason.

Upon her victory, it needs to be said that Ahluwalia was not proclaiming that her plight gave her a license to kill, but based on her context, it should warrant her — and the many women in her situation — the dignity, safe space and opportunity to be understood of her dire circumstances. She was fighting unusual circumstances with an unbalanced state of mind that made her less answerable for a crime on the grounds for a reduced charge. Let’s not forget, Ahluwalia was also a mother trying to protect her young.

In 2007, Kiranjit Ahluwalia and co-author Rahila Gupta released the book Provoked: The Story Of Kiranjit Ahluwalia published by HarperCollins.