Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. Well, how do I describe the book? Have you read The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins or Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood? If you have, let me say that Burial Rites exists in the same bookish sphere as these two. It is a book that brings to the fore society’s age-old love for witch-hunts in its various forms.

There is something dark, oppressive, yet enticing about Burial Rites that keeps you hooked. It is based on factual events like Alias Grace, which elevates its significance and has an element of mystery, like The Confessions of Frannie Langton, which makes it eerie and thought-provoking at the same time. 

All three books are about women who worked as servants either in a household or on a plantation. These are stories of women whose lives depended on their masters. From their bodies to souls, they were properties of men owing to the latter’s position in society. The books shed light on an era where the lives of women were not really their own.

What happened to them, who understood and saved them, were all contingent on the stories believed about them. It also was determined by how women were perceived in society. If they were too bright or beautiful, ambitious or opinionated, it was easy to pin crimes on them or punish them. If they were not married by a certain age, then it was even easier to condemn them. If they deviated from the accepted template of dumb damsel in distress, they were cunning and worthy of being executed whether they committed a crime or not. There were no qualms about sentencing them to death. In fact, it was taken up as an opportunity to teach other women a lesson, for the women to dare not do anything that didn’t fit with what was ordained for them by God or society.

And while these books are fictional representations of what happened centuries ago, some form of this control or rather the sport of witch hunt still exists today. These are stories of control and power, all mostly resting on men. We still live in a society where women’s rights are the first casualties of chaos, not men’s rights but women’s. So the underlying fear the women from these stories lived with throughout is not something unknown in the real world of today as well. All women have experienced it in varying degrees. There may be exceptions but exceptions do not form a majority and that matters.

If women deviated from the accepted template of dumb damsel in distress, they were cunning and worthy of being executed whether they committed a crime or not.

Our love for witch-hunts, what do I say about that? I was only in school when every other news article was about Monica Lewinsky. I still remember how she was portrayed as a woman who has done something wrong. Witch-hunt, hers was the first I had witnessed but understood only much later. She wasn’t put to death like Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the protagonist of Burial Rites, but she might as well have been. It is still called the Monica Lewinsky Scandal but not the Bill Clinton cheated Scandal. Funny, isn’t it? Her life was disrupted but he went on living and still does like a man who hasn’t erred. Then a few years back I came across a post about how the veteran actress Rekha was blamed for her husband’s death. But these were famous women living in the public eye. Imagine the countless women who have faced some or the other form of these witch-hunts in silence across the world.

It’s almost as if when tragedy befalls a man, the next natural course of action is to blame the woman in his life. But of course, should the said man do anything to a woman, he is innocent until proven guilty. And this isn’t something that happens only now. It has been intrinsic to human society for aeons now and stories like Burial Rites prove that. Yes, we perhaps have more laws to support us now but the fight is still an uphill one fraught with complications.

It's almost as if when tragedy befalls a man, the next natural course of action is to blame the woman in his life. #Women Share on X

But that is also not really the point I’m trying to make, at least not in its entirety. It all comes down to how differently we look at men and women. If women are remotely accused of anything “wrong”, we are made an example of or at least an attempt is made to do so. But what happens to men?

Think of a very popular sportsman who is only going places despite rape allegations. Think of a 30 odd-year-old man whose mistakes in life and bad habits were attributed to the woman in his life and publicly too. This is perhaps the reason why books that bring out this raw aspect of women’s lives even though set in an era far removed from our own, end up moving us so.

But again, I digress because it is such a subject. So, on to the book! 

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent is a biographical, historical fiction that tells the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a servant in Iceland who was put to death after the murder of her employer. Sadly, she was also the last woman put to death in Iceland. It is the story of a woman who was pronounced guilty because she didn’t fit into the picture of a coy woman.

She dared to love and sleep with her employer because the latter led her on and stimulated her thirst for learning new things. She was in her 30s and unmarried which was looked upon as a fault because something must have been wrong with her or else why wouldn’t any man find her worthy of being a wife or a mother?

That she didn’t crumble in front of the authorities was her sin too. No, she was silent and strong and that led her to be convicted, to being made an example of. The man convicted with her, who killed her master was young so it was assumed that she must have coaxed him to do the evil deed. Yes, even though he confessed to doing it himself. She was the cunning old maid not making a display of remorse or any attempt to win her already lost cause, which must have meant she was guilty, right? The truth was she was marked from the moment she was born into the circumstances she was. Story of the lives of countless women throughout ages, no?

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent is a biographical, historical fiction that tells the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a servant in Iceland who was put to death after the murder of her employer. #BurialRites Share on X

Well, that is one of the reasons this book is so disturbingly good. Give it a try. I listened to it on audible, so you could too. And if you do, read or listen to it, give a thought to how we as a society are today towards women. Yes, we might not be as brutally put to death by law as Agnes Magnúsdóttir was but there are moments and judgements that we face in our daily lives that makes one think, doesn’t it? It makes one wonder as to how many more centuries it will take for our need to make an example out of women who do not fit a particular mould to eventually vanish. How many more years before we are treated as humans and not some custodian of subjugation and demureness? How many more years when the sport of witch-hunt in its various forms vanishes from the face of this earth?