Izzat Has No Daughters: How Women Pay the Price of Honour

“They kill us in the name of honour – but whose honour is it, if not the men’s?” That was Kausalya Shankar, an Indian women’s rights activist who survived the brutal 2016 caste-based “honour” killing of her husband, Sankar, in Tamil Nadu. The couple had married across caste lines – she from the Thevar community, he from the Dalit Pallar caste. When her family hired men to murder Sankar in broad daylight, Kausalya refused to bow to silence or fear. She testified against her parents in court, ensuring convictions for the killers, and later became a campaigner for inter-caste marriages and women’s autonomy.

Some inherit land. Some inherit legacy. In South Asia, women inherit honour – not as pride, but as punishment.

Izzat. The word rolls softly off the tongue, as if made of silk. But in too many homes in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it clangs like iron against bone. It is whispered over newborn daughters, screamed at teenage lovers, and carved into the headlines of yet another “honour” killing. Izzat sounds like virtue but behaves like a verdict.

It is not merely a social construct – it is a geography mapped onto women’s bodies. It is treated like an heirloom men possess – but women must protect with their lives. From the courtyards of rural Uttar Pradesh to the mountainous valleys of Kohistan, a woman’s conduct, chastity and conformity are seen as repositories of familial dignity. Her body becomes the vessel through which men negotiate respect, lineage, even political allegiance.

The irony lies in its inversion: while men own honour, women are made to become it. Their silence, movement and desires are disciplined into symbols of respectability, their bodies transformed into the moral scaffolding of patriarchy. This gendered idea of honour is not timeless in its cruelty – it has merely adapted, reshaping itself through Partition’s wounds and the postcolonial hunger to appear modern while remaining in control.

Partition's bitter legacy for women

During the Partition of 1947, the bodies of women became literal battlegrounds upon which “honour” was reclaimed and avenged. As historian Urvashi Butalia recounts in The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Viking, 1998), over 75,000 women were abducted, raped and mutilated across modern-day India and Pakistan. Families, fearing “dishonour”, often killed their own daughters rather than allow them to be taken by men of another religion.

Also read: India Is in an Existential Crisis Because Criminals of Partition Went Unpunished

In Punjab, Sikh families drowned their women in wells. Muslim families slit throats before fleeing. Hindu women leapt into flames. These were not isolated incidents but acts sanctioned by collective sentiment – “Better dead than defiled.” One haunting testimony from Butalia’s book describes a father leading his daughters to the village well: “He said, ‘Our honour must not fall into Muslim hands.’ The daughter smiled. She jumped first.”

The state later reinforced this logic. India’s Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949, mirrored by Pakistan’s Recovery of Abducted Persons Ordinance, 1949, aimed to “restore” abducted women to their “rightful” religious communities – denying them any choice if they had remarried or converted. In these formative years of nationhood, the idea crystallised: women are vessels of social dignity and their violation is shame incarnate.

Decades later, the ghost of Partition persists – in dusty courtrooms and remote valleys of Pakistan’s Kohistan District. In 2012, a mobile video surfaced of five young women clapping while two men danced during a wedding celebration. What followed was an extrajudicial order by the tribal jirga: all five women and two men were sentenced to death for “dishonouring” the community. The camera that captured their joy became their death warrant. Their laughter became evidence. Despite international outrage, justice stumbled. The case lingered for years, entangled in silence, intimidation and threats. Even after reports confirmed their murders, officials insisted the women were alive. The state’s complicity in preserving male honour over female life was complete.

And once again, men decided what “honour” meant – and who must die for it.

Surviving abuse and loss  

In 2014, in front of Pakistan’s Lahore High Court, Farzana Parveen Iqbal – pregnant and eloping with the man she loved – was stoned to death by her father and brothers. Police records show her father’s defence was chillingly simple: she had “dishonoured all our family by marrying without [our] consent”. Four family members were later convicted.

Across the border, India repeats the same story in different accents. Khap panchayats – local caste councils – justify killings in the name of “family reputation”. Neha Rathore, a 23-year-old woman from Greater Noida, met such a fate in 2024. A day after she married her boyfriend at an Arya Samaj temple, Neha was strangled to death with the same blue dupatta she had worn for her wedding.

She belonged to the Teli caste; he was Jat. That difference – two syllables, two hierarchies – was enough to snatch her life. Before dawn, Neha's family hurriedly cremated her and burned her clothes, as if erasure would restore honour. Her father and brother were later arrested, but their silence spoke louder than the evidence: in a world where love defies caste, death is still the family’s preferred apology.

A Dalit boy murdered in Delhi for dating an elite-caste girl. A young woman and her husband found hanging from a tree in Uttar Pradesh after marrying outside her community. Police records label them “personal disputes”, but the families call it “justice”.

Also read: Qandeel Baloch: Unmasking Patriarchy in Death

The Taliban’s return has turned honour into law in Afghanistan. Women who flee abusive husbands are jailed for “moral crimes”. Those who speak out face public lashings. The mere act of seeking freedom is branded as fitna – chaos.

These tragedies are not isolated; they are structural. What is striking about them is that they are not about women at all. They are about men – about the fragile architecture of masculinity that crumbles when confronted with female autonomy. Whether through khap, jirga or sharia, the language of honour across South Asia serves the same patriarchal function: to police women’s autonomy under the guise of preserving social order.

As anthropologist Deniz Kandiyoti once wrote, patriarchy in South Asia “rewards women who uphold the system and punishes those who defy it.” The price of rebellion is public shaming, exile or death. But the reward – obedience – is nothing more than survival. In other words, their purity determines the moral legitimacy of a community. That is why violence against women is rarely about sex – it is about control and maintaining hierarchies of caste, religion and gender.

Counting “honour” killings is notoriously difficult: families and officials rename them into respectability – accident, suicide, personal dispute. The language itself conspires to protect the killer. Even so, India’s crime records now carry a column for “honour”, as though a spreadsheet could measure shame.

In Pakistan, the 2016 murder of social media star Qandeel Baloch by her brother – who claimed she had “brought shame” with her posts – forced parliament to close the forgiveness loophole that once allowed families to pardon killers. The new law requires judges to impose life imprisonment even when relatives seek to absolve the murderer.

Yet society still counts the bodies each year: hundreds of daughters, sisters, and wives quietly erased in the name of reputation. When Qandeel’s brother, Waseem, was asked why he did it, he answered without remorse: “She was destined to die. Our honour was at stake.” He smiled when he said it.

In Afghanistan, the arithmetic collapses altogether. There, the state itself performs the counting by silencing women before they can speak. Statistics can measure corpses, but never the tremor in a woman’s hand as she unlocks her phone, nor the pause before she steps outside, nor the ghost of fear that settles into her breath.

Still izzat, just redefined

What, then, is izzat? Once it was a word of sunlight – of respect, nobility, grace – spoken softly by elders, carried gently in poems, stitched into the fabric of courtesy. Somewhere along the way, it was forged into a blade. Izzat became the currency of control, traded in whispers and upheld with fear. It redrew the borders of belonging along the contours of women’s bodies, turning affection into surveillance, love into law. It became the anthem men sing to drown the tremor of their own insecurities – the sound of fragility disguised as pride. And in its echo, daughters learned to fold themselves into silence, to shrink just enough to fit inside a family’s fragile honour, while sons learned to confuse cruelty with courage, and violence with virtue.

Also read: Internalised Patriarchy: On Seeing My Brother in the Kitchen

The region’s redemption will begin only when izzat returns to its truest form – not as a weapon, but as compassion; not as fear, but as dignity shared by all. Until then, izzat will remain what it has too often been: a ledger that balances itself in women’s blood. For what is izzat, if not fear disguised as morality? A code that teaches men that dignity lies in domination, and women that survival depends on silence. It is the most fluent word in our languages – one we have all been made to speak, even when it means choking on our own tongues.

The women who died in the name of honour did not choose to be symbols. They were individuals with names, futures, hopes. To write their story as one of shame is to erase their humanity. True honour is not in a woman’s chastity, but in a society’s compassion.

Qandeel Baloch once said, “They said I have no shame. But I have courage. That is my honour.”

And maybe, just maybe, that’s where South Asia’s redemption begins – when courage finally replaces control.

Niharika Dwivedi is a student at The British School, New Delhi, passionate about Modern History and Gender Studies.

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