ABSTRACT
On 18 April 1988, a twenty-three-year-old Dutch Hindustani woman took her life because of the frequent maltreatment by her husband, whom she had married four years earlier. The woman’s family requested that the husband be prosecuted and eventually the case went to trial. One of the charges against the husband was that he had deliberately incited her to commit suicide, using the cultural power given to him as a Hindustani husband. This was a rather exceptional accusation and the court asked for the report of a cultural expert, cultural anthropologist Henry Lamur.
