BANGALORE, India —
               Every day, year after year, women grotesquely disfigured by fire are taken to Victoria Hospital’s burn ward here in India’s fastest-growing city. They lie in rows, wrapped like mummies in white bandages, their moans quieted by the pain-obliterating drip of morphine.
          Typically, these women and thousands like them have been depicted as victims of disputes over the ancient social custom of dowry and as symbols of the otherness of India, a place where lovely young brides are doused with kerosene and set ablaze for failing to satisfy the demands of their husbands’ families for gold, cash and consumer goods that come as part of the marriage arrangement.
          But most women on the ward never mentioned dowry when explaining why they were burned.  Some, like Radhamma, 25, described accidental injuries caused by cheap pump-action kerosene stoves that are often shoddily made and lack even the most basic safety features.
          Others, like Geetha, 20, offered harrowing testimonies, supported by a growing body of new research, that place them right in the international mainstream of brutishly mistreated wives. The use of fire as a weapon, which seems so exotic, is simply expedient: kerosene, a ubiquitous cooking  fuel here, is a cheap, handy weapon, much like a gun or a baseball bat in an American home.
Geetha, who like many south Indians has only one name, is a survivor on a ward where most die, but it would be hard to call her lucky.
          As she related her story, she held her head immobile, barely moved her lips and turned only her dark eyes on a visitor to avoid stretching the raw, burned skin on her neck. Her wizened mother caressed her long brown hair, which spread out on a pillow like a mermaid’s under water.
          Geetha explained that she had been the pampered baby in a family of 10 children who had rarely been expected to cook or clean. Marriage was a rude shock.
          Like most brides in India, Geetha moved in with her husband’s family after an arranged marriage. That was in 1999. Within months, Geetha said, her husband and mother-in-law began beating her with whatever they could grab — a kitchen ladle, a broomstick, a stalk of sugar cane — because they believed that she was shirking her housekeeping duties.
          “All the scoldings and beatings were to correct my mistakes,” she said.
          One morning her husband ordered her to do all the chores before he returned home to the slum where they live on the outskirts of Bangalore.
          She sifted stones from the rice, fetched the water, washed the clothes and fed her husband’s nephew. But she said she had not yet spread a dung mixture smoothly on the front step by the time he got home.
          “I had done everything except this,” she said. “But he was angry with me.  He said I was lazy. He said if he could get another wife, she would do everything.”
          That afternoon, as she walked toward the kitchen, she said, she felt something splash on her back. Then she burst into flames. When she turned around, she saw her mother- in-law holding a kerosene can and her husband with a matchbox.
          Her mother-in-law, Kempamma, a petite, gray-haired woman, and her husband, Kumar, a slight man with a sweet smile, denied that they had attacked Geetha. Rather, they said, Geetha poured the kerosene on herself in a suicide attempt.
          Out on bail and working at a stand where he makes sugar cane juice using a hand-cranked press, Kumar, 25, said Geetha had been a disobedient wife who “talked back to me.”
          She did not make the special dishes his relatives liked. She did not treat his mother with proper respect. She did not prepare his breakfast on time. Sometimes, he said, she refused to do the heavy work, like heating water for his bath.
          “When she did not listen to me and I was angry, I would hit her,” he said.
          “Most of the time I would just scold her.”
          Violence against wives is a common problem in India, as it is in many societies.
          More than half of married women justified wife-beating in a recently released survey of 90,000 women sponsored by India’s Health Ministry, most commonly for neglecting housekeeping and child-rearing duties, showing disrespect to in-laws, going out without a husband’s permission or arousing a husband’s suspicions of infidelity.
          In a second survey of 10,000 Indian women, financed by the United States Agency for International Development, more than half of the women said violence was a normal part of married life. Again, the most common reasons given were a wife’s perceived failures to perform household duties.
          The larger survey estimated that at least 1 out of every 5 women had experienced domestic violence, while in the smaller survey 2 in 5 reported such abuse.
          Dozens of surveys taken around the world have found that from 10 to 50 percent of women have experienced domestic violence — and that the most common reasons were related to wifely shortcomings.
          The smaller Indian survey also found that dowry was a factor in the violence, though less important. Twelve percent of the women said they had been harassed for dowry, which is generally given at the time of engagement and marriage but is sometimes demanded later.
          The survey was one of eight on domestic violence in India paid for by the development agency, supervised by the International Center for Research on Women in Washington and released in the last year and a half.
          Nata Duvvury, who supervised the studies for the center, said researchers had discovered that dowry had been overemphasized as a cause of abuse. The dowry focus, in turn, distorted responses to the problem.
          “Until we get away from burning and dowry, we’ll never get close to understanding violence against women,” said Veena Talwar Oldenberg, a historian at the City University of New York and an expert on the dowry death phenomenon.
          The Research Center for Women’s Studies in Bombay found that even investigators in all-female police units set up to handle crimes against women in the states of Gujarat and Karnataka often took only dowry-related cases seriously and felt that “private family matters were not a concern of law enforcement.”
          It was horrific cases of brides set ablaze in dowry disputes that galvanized the Indian women’s movement two decades ago and led to criminal laws to punish guilty husbands and in-laws, not only in dowry-related cases but for other physical cruelty to wives.
          But the police, prosecutors and judges have tended to try to squeeze women’s accounts of violence into the box of dowry harassment, researchers say. For that and many other reasons, efforts to prosecute dowry-related violence end with the vast majority of defendants acquitted, official statistics show.
          While dowry deaths, including suicides and murders, have risen to 6,975 in 1998 from 4,648 in 1995, according to official figures, researchers and others in the legal system say they believe domestic violence cases are often inaccurately classified as dowry deaths.
          A female investigator in Karnataka’s anti-dowry unit in Bangalore estimated that only a quarter of the unit’s cases were related to dowry harassment.
          For three years Pratima, a plump, sprightly young woman with a robust sense of righteous indignation, has moved briskly through the Victoria Hospital burn ward, asking the charred, fatally wounded women there why they were burned.
          She is a caseworker for Vimochana, a women’s organization that tracks the cases of married women who die unnatural deaths each year in Bangalore, more than half from burns.
          Their stories of despair are as varied as the bad marriages that produced them.
          Seven women complained of dowry demands. But by far the most common stories — related by more than half of the women — involved drunken, abusive husbands, often irregularly employed.
          One recent morning, Pratima went on her daily rounds but came back frustrated. “How did you get burned?” she asked two new women. Both said stove accidents.
          “Very few open their mouths,” Pratima said.
          There is evidence that stoves can be deadly. Official figures show that 7,165 people died in stove accidents in 1998, and 1,280 of them were men — a fact suggesting that not all of the deaths were a result of hidden domestic violence against wives.
          Cheap pump-action kerosene stoves, used mainly by the urban poor, are the most dangerous, say surgeons and experts.
          R. B. Ahuja, a surgeon who is secretary of the National Academy of Burns in India, an association of burn doctors, estimates that perhaps a quarter of the injuries he sees are a result of accidents with kerosene pump stoves.
          Pratima and Gurumurthy, the doctor who heads the Victoria Hospital burn ward, believe that most of the burn cases they see are actually attempted murders or suicides, but that the women, fearful and dependent on their in-laws, keep the secret. Often a woman like Geetha starts out saying she was burned in a kitchen accident, only to later change her story.
          That is why some women’s advocates here resist the idea that thousands of mostly poor women are dying in stove accidents every year. Women’s groups are pushing for new laws to combat domestic violence. The government is considering a bill that would enable a woman to initiate civil proceedings against an abusive relative and obtain a court order of protection.
          But changing laws will be easier than changing attitudes.
          Geetha believed it was her responsibility as the wife to adjust to her husband’s family. She said she tried to do what she was told. And she never told anyone, not her parents and certainly not the courts, that she was being throttled.
          The youngest of five sisters, she knew that her elderly mother and father, poor subsistence farmers, had gone deeply into debt to pay for her dowry and wedding. “With great difficulty they had married me off,” she said. “I did not want them to know I was suffering. I wanted them to believe I was happy.”
          Even when Kumar, dissatisfied with Geetha, returned her to her natal village four hours from Bangalore, she kept her miseries a secret. “It was to teach her a lesson,” Kumar explained indignantly. “I took her there so her parents would advise her to be obedient.”
          Geetha’s father soon returned her to Kumar in Bangalore. Neighbors who lived in the same slum say they heard Geetha’s husband and mother-in-law berating her. “I advised her to adjust at home if there was any quarrel,” said Gangamma, a matron who lived several houses away.
          Geetha took such advice to heart. Her silence almost killed her.
          Yet even now, struggling to recover from burns on 57 percent of her body, quivering in pain beneath a shaggy brown wool blanket, she expresses no rage against her husband. “What is the point?” she asked.