Trigger warning: Mentions of death by suicide
A luxury car worth Rs 70 lakh. 300 sovereigns of gold. A wedding that cost Rs 2.5 crore. 78 days later, a dead young woman.
The suicide of Rithanya, a 27-year-old woman from Tiruppur, is being widely discussed on Tamil news channels and social media. The outrage is largely centred on the fact that the bride’s family had to pay so much, but it still wasn’t enough, not quite on the fact that dowry had to be given at all. As always, crimes against women shock us only when they reach magnified proportions. Not that they occur at all, in the first place.
While the public mood is firmly in favour of the victim’s family and her husband, Kavin and his parents have been arrested, there is a disturbing narrative around the crime.
Rithanya, in one of the voice notes she left for her family, had said that she couldn’t imagine living with someone else after having lived with one man already. Her father, Annadurai, repeated his daughter’s words, regretting her suicide, but lauding her for upholding the principle of “oruvanukku oruthi”.
“Oruvanukku oruthi” means monogamy, but the phrase is closely tied to ideas about female virginity and chastity. In this context, it implies that a woman who has been bedded by a man is somehow sullied if she sleeps with another one. Her body, once touched by a man, belongs to him, and she becomes “impure” if she walks out of that relationship and chooses a different partner.
Rithanya’s father was speaking from a place of deep grief, and he may be excused for echoing her words. However, such narratives need to be countered because these views are not restricted to a minority.
In fact, a significant section of society buys into such ideas.
In 2021, a Kerala law student, Mofiya Parveen, took her life over a similar case of dowry harassment. According to her family, she too chose to stay back with her abusive husband, rather than walk away, believing that there was only one man she could live with in a lifetime. In her communication with her family, Rithanya had said, “There is only one man for one woman. In this birth, I got married once, and my life is not good. That’s all. It is over.”
The chilling similarity between the cases of the two outwardly confident young women cannot be ignored. It displays a level of social conditioning that has made these women believe that their “chastity” – a social construct – is of more value than their lives.
Such beliefs actively prevent women from walking out of violent relationships. Not only do they fear public and familial censure, but there is a great degree of guilt and shame that they put themselves through. They are conditioned to think that once a man has seen them naked and has had sexual relations with them, he somehow owns their body. Popular culture, too, promotes such ideas.
In Mani Ratnam’s recent gangster film Thug Life (2025), for example, a young woman jumps off a building just because she’s pregnant and her boyfriend is uninterested in continuing the relationship. She has money and the means, but she doesn’t seem to think that an abortion could be the answer. The shame is too great; the fact that she let down her father is too much to bear; death is the only path ahead of her. The men in her family (Kamal Haasan and Silambarasan) “punish” her boyfriend, but their interrogation is along the lines of why he “touched” a girl from “their” family.
None of the characters, including the woman, views her as a person and not a man’s property. The film’s gaze does not critique this; it merely uses it as a plot crutch. In contrast, the male characters in her family are far from following “oruvanukku oruthi”, but this is romanticised and glamorised throughout the film.
The romantic drama Irugapatru (2023) features three couples. One of the relationships is a clearly abusive marriage, with a husband who constantly humiliates his wife in every aspect and takes zero responsibility for their newborn child. Yet, the film manipulates the viewer into empathising with the male character and has the wife bending to his will. This is portrayed as “love” — as if it’s worth going to any extent to save a relationship. There have been very few films like Lover (2024) which have shown a woman walk away from a toxic relationship and not be vilified for it, even if sex was part of it.
Meanwhile, dowry continues to be normalised on screen with the wedding expenses of a daughter or sister becoming a valid pressing need for male characters to arrange for money — the men who beat up goons and speak up against injustice otherwise don’t question the practice. Getting the girl married at any cost continues to be projected as the priority. The Malayalam film Ponman (2025) is an exception in this regard, as it examines the patriarchal bedrock from which dowry arises and questions the value society places on a woman’s gold over and above her as an individual.
Rithanya’s death is another statistic in the mountain of dowry deaths that have haunted us in recent times. But in the middle of all the outrage, we must never stop digging deep for the root cause of such crimes. Unless we stop viewing women as objects — to be bought, sold, exchanged and bargained over — and start viewing them as human, there is no end in sight for gender-based violence.
The dead woman will still be the same, but the next time, it might take a car worth Rs 80 lakh, 400 sovereigns of gold, and a Rs 4 crore wedding to shock us.
Sowmya Rajendran writes on gender, culture and cinema. She has written over 25 books, including a nonfiction book on gender for adolescents. She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar for her novel Mayil Will Not Be Quiet in 2015.
Views expressed are the author’s own.