PK Thomas was reluctant to speak about his daughter, Jisemol, when I first reached out to him over the phone. “What is left to say?” he asked. There was little I could say to that.
It was just over two weeks ago, on April 15, that Jisemol (34) was found dead, allegedly by suicide. Her body, along with those of her daughters aged five and one, was found in the Meenachil river in Kerala’s Kottayam.
Thomas had already spoken to the press about it, and he was sure that his daughter was driven to suicide by her husband, Jimmy, and his family. Thomas accused them of harassing her for dowry and shaming her for her skin colour. According to him, Jisemol also feared that the cycle of violence would continue for her daughters, too.
Even without knowing her personally, it was hard to forget Jisemol — a Kerala High Court lawyer and former president of Kottayam’s Mutholy panchayat, who felt so reduced to how her husband allegedly saw her body that nothing could help her feel worthy of life.
I tried to reach out to Thomas again, this time with the help of a colleague who gently urged him to meet. A few days later, he agreed.
Sitting on the stairs leading to the front door of his house, Thomas recalled, “One day, when I met Jisemol after work, she had a swollen bruise on her forehead. I knew Jimmy hit her, but she admitted it only two days later. I told her several times to come home. She would just smile and say her husband would change his ways, that she was praying every day.”
Thomas had still not removed his daughter’s nameboard, which stood tall near the main entrance of their home. It said ‘Adv Jisemol Thomas, BA., LL.B’ in bold letters. He was exhausted — from grief, from the numerous recountings of his daughter’s death. But he pushed himself anyway, hoping that it would bring his child closer to justice.
“When she lost her first pregnancy to a miscarriage, Jimmy and his mother blamed Jisemol’s body and appearance for it. Jimmy would hit her and say she had to pay him more dowry because she was not fair,” Thomas said, tearing up. Jisemol had stopped responding to phone calls and text messages on April 14, and on the next day, the bodies of her children, along with hers, were recovered from the river.
“Jisemol’s elder daughter was dusky, and the younger one had a milkish skin tone. She always feared that her kids would also be discriminated against, like her,” Thomas added.
A few weeks later, Jimmy and his father, Joseph, were arrested for domestic violence and abetment to suicide.
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data released in December 2023 says that over 6,000 cases of dowry deaths were registered in India. However, what the numbers do not reflect is the complexity of dowry harassment and marital cruelty. In Jisemol’s case, the persistent abuse was deeply connected to her skin colour — an aspect of her identity she had little control over.
This pattern of deaths is not confined to Kerala alone. A cursory glance at the reportage of body-shaming-related suicides shows similar incidents across states. In 2023, TNM reported the death of 27-year-old Soundarya in Hyderabad, also killing her 18-month-old twins Nitya and Nidarsh. Her parents told us that her husband, Gandam Ganesh, body shamed her and harassed her for dowry.
The impact of such body shaming and skin colour shaming, which inflicts irreversible trauma on the spirit of several women like Jisemol, to the point of driving them to death, remains largely uninvestigated despite its prevalence in most families.
In November 2024, the Kerala High Court emphasised that comments about a woman’s body by her in-laws or husband’s relatives amount to cruelty, as they can severely affect her mental health. Though the woman who submitted the said petition did not wish to reveal details, she told me that shaming was a huge part of the harassment she endured in her marital home, prompting her to seek divorce.
But very few women are equipped to leave before things become worse. While the law recognises harassment in the name of physical attributes as cruelty, the practice continues to be normalised, driving many young women to extreme mental stress and, in tragic cases, death.
J Sandhya, a senior advocate and activist who was also a member of the Kerala State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, pointed out that we often only recognise extreme physical assault as serious violence. “The perception of body shaming or skin colour shaming in itself as violence, even by women themselves, is very recent,” she said.
What Sandhya is referring to is how a patriarchal society like ours normalises a certain expectation about women’s looks. “Women are made to feel that their worth depends on their face or body. If they do not check those boxes, they are subjected to taunts,” she added.
A cursory glance at matrimonial advertisements reveals that most grooms seek out brides who are ‘light-skinned’ and ‘homely’. This is accompanied by prescriptions of what caste and social class are acceptable. In the case of Jisemol, Jimmy’s proposal came through a matrimonial website meant exclusively for Knanaya Christians, a sect that strongly prohibits marrying outside the community.
“Initially, they did not say anything about her looks. I later figured that Jimmy had been looking to marry for a long time, and nothing was coming through,” Thomas said. “But once my daughter went to his house, everyone started mistreating her. They demanded more money as dowry because of her skin colour.”
Jisemol was allegedly not allowed to use the gas stove, even when she was seven months pregnant. Thomas said that her mother-in-law insisted she use the traditional firewood stove, which is far more labour-intensive.
What became evident from his recollection is that Jisemol was shamed for her physical appearance from the beginning of the marriage, but it was only after the violence escalated to physical abuse that she even started getting concerned about it. It also points to how non-compliance with a certain mould of beauty makes women more susceptible to dowry harassment.