Hello everyone, it is I, your Feisty Indian Aunty who just watched the Indian documentary House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths with horror, sadness, and utter insanity at this true story. You might have read about it in the news, but back in 2018, in Delhi, India, 10 bodies were found hanging from the steel roof of a house, while an eleventh, that of an old woman, was found strangled to death next to a bed. The house was surrounded by neighbours, by people living in close proximity to one another, and yet no one saw anything, no one heard anything, no one knew what happened.
Three generations of one family died on that day.
The bodies were discovered when a concerned neighbour, seeing new milk bottles collect outside the home, goes inside to see what why no one was up that morning. Stunned by his discovery, he calls the police, kicking off investigations into one of the most perplexing crimes in recent Indian history. It looked like suicide. But no one could figure out why a seemingly normal, well educated, and functioning family would kill themselves in what seemed to be a well-planned and carefully executed event.
The case was eventually closed, but it left a trail of unanswered questions, something that Leena Yadav hopes to address with this three part documentary.
House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths is more concerned with the why of what happened rather than the how. We already know a lot of the forensic detail from the police investigation into the suicides.
From journal entries, we know that the crime was instigated by the family’s younger son, Lalit, who took charge of the family following his father’s death, and who was said to be “possessed by the spirit” of his dead father. We know that it took place just days after the engagement of one of the daughters. And we know that the family attempted a “badd puja” – a religious ceremony invoking a banyan tree, that led to their untimely deaths.
Those are the facts of the case. But why this happened remains a mystery.
Across the three episodes of House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths, we are taken on something of a deep dive into the lives of this family, seemingly normal on the outside, but haunted by psychosis and patriarchal oppression, both of which reinforced and legitimized by way of religion.
India is a deeply religious nation where signs and superstitions are rife and believed by everyone. It is also extremely hard to convince people that mental illness exists. It is just not a subject that is spoken about publicly. In fact, in many families, anyone who was mentally unstable would just be hidden away for fear of embarrassment. It is, unfortunately, something that still happens today, despite the enlightenment of the younger generation.
This isn’t the story of one strange case. This is the story of what can happen when a society fails to address the the very real issues that plague it, and hide behind tradition, family secrecy, superstition, and religion. What happened to these 11 people was, to me, a failure of society. It was caused by our refusal to question orders when they are stamped with a religious decree. It was caused by our fear of simply talking about and seeking help for our mental health issues.
Documentaries like this one are a dime a dozen in the United States and Europe. We don’t see enough of them from our part of the world. Be it in India, or Malaysia, or Indonesia, I think investigations such as this one, which are journalistic and dramatic in equal measure, go a long way to helping shift our discourse on difficult issues. The only way we can mitigate something like this from happening again is to keep talking about the whys. And sometimes it takes good TV to make that happen.
This is good TV. This is something you should watch and then talk about.
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