INDORE: Furious at their daughter for eloping with a man from a " lower caste ", a family in Jhabua carried out her "last rites", tonsured their heads and burned in a symbolic pyre everything she had left behind .The Bariya family of Bori village carried out the funeral of their daughter Kusum on Sunday, 15 days after she ran off with Nanu Dangi , her college mate and a resident of Bhabhra village, about 60km away.Kusum had eloped after telling her family that she was going to college, say sources. Her family filed a missing person’s complaint with Bori police station, and started enquiring with her college friends. When they found out that she had eloped with Nanu, they went to Bhabhra village along with police.Kusum, who is 20-years-old, was produced before the SDM court in Jhabua, where she gave a statement that she had married Nanu Dangi on her own wish and wanted to live with him. She was allowed to go. But her family couldn’t accept it."Our uncle was furious and asked the family to prepare for her funeral as she is dead to us. He kept saying that he didn’t send her to college and educate her only so that she would get married to a low-caste boy," Shamu Barioya , Kusum’s sister, told TOI.The funeral rituals included a mourning session in which family members cried over her "death". Villagers from nearby areas were invited to join the ‘funeral procession’ after which a pyre was lit on an open ground. Her books, clothes, photos and trinkets were burned in the funeral pyre. Men shaved their heads and "mrityu bhoj" was also held, in which villagers and community members were served food.

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