Torn between the familiarity of India and her family on the one hand, and the excitement of moving to England on the other, she was quite pleased when her new husband showed off the house in which they would be staying to her. ‘This is yours ‘, he said. She did not know it then, but that house was to be her prison.

The young Kiranjit spoke little English when she moved in with her husband Deepak's family in London. Almost immediately her husband began to abuse her, setting the tone for ten years of the most horrible cruelty. Kiranjit explains in an interview with a newspaper reporter that she kept quiet about the abuse because she was wary of spoiling the excitement her family had for her. She hoped it was simply his youth and immaturity, and that he would soon stop.

But it did not stop; he pushed her about, pulled at her hair, dragging her around the house. He would hit her, and drop heavy pans on her feet. Shunned by his family and secluded from the world by her non-mastery English, she grew very lonely. She was treated like a slave, often not allowed to eat with the family, not allowed to drink coffee, not allowed to eat chillies simply because she enjoyed these things. His family was sometimes sympathetic but there was nothing they could do as Deepak also threatened them with violence. At night, she stayed up in bed right next to him at night, paralyzed from the terror of nightly rape; unloved and alone.

With time, the lonely Kiranjit was comforted by the birth of two boys. Now she had someone to love and take caer of, but still the beatings did not let up and were often carried out in plain sight of her children. Finally, one night after she had made her husband's dinner and gone to sleep, he woke her up to demand money. She refused to give it to him, so he proceeded to try and break her ankles by twisting them. Then he picked up a hot iron and held it threateningly to her face. After a protracted struggle and another severe beating, he fell asleep exhausted. But Kiranjit did not sleep, she was infused this night with an all-consuming rage, borne of 10 years of the most intense and lonely terror. Approaching his bed with a can of petrol mixed with caustic soda, she poured the mixture over his feet, and then lit him up with a candle. She said later that she could not see an end to the violence, and had decided to show him how much she hurt. She explained that she thought that with his feet burned he would not be able to chase after her, that she would be able to get away from him when he chased after her.

Rescued and rushed to the hospital, the severely burned Deepak lasted all of five days, before he died. The attempted murder that had been indicted on was now changed to a full murder charge. She pleaded not guilty, but with a passionless defense, and a prosecution that decided to paint her as the wife jealous over her husband's infidelities, she was quickly found guilty and sentenced to a life in prison.

Luckily for Kiranjit, her case caught the attention of the Southall Black Sisters, a group who worked for Asian women in the Southall ghetto of London. Convinced that her abuse had represented sufficient grounds for a partial defense on the grounds of provocation, they began a campaign to free her from prison. It was made clear at her appeal that she had not been informed of the possibility of taking a plea of manslaughter in place of the murder charges.

Although the judges rejected provocation as a defense, they conceded that the way in which provocation had been treated traditionally was not sufficient in this case. They in turn accepted the then new idea of cumulative provocation, an important step in the defense of battered women, for whom murder was often a reaction to extended periods of intense abuse rather than singular acts of provocation. Radically also, the judges accepted that the time period between an act of provocation (in Kiranjit's case two hours after the beating she got from her husband) was not necessarily a cooling off period, and that a victim of provocation could instead have their anger boil over in that time. It was on the grounds of diminished responsibility however that the case was won, with the court accepting evidence that at the time of the murder, Kiranjit had suffered from a severe depression.

Her successful appeal set a historic precedent and her's is a widely read case by law students around the Commonwealth. A precedent was set that women who are pushed to murder by continued and severe domestic violence should not be regarded as cold-blooded killers. Kiranjit Aluhwalia was set free after pleading guilty to a charge of man-slaughter, which the court ruled she had served during her previous incarceration.

Ms Aluhwalia was the subject of a movie starring Ashwarya Rai that premiered this April. The movie is available for download or streaming here.