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The emblematic woman is inevitably
imbricated in this celebratory history as the focal object
around whom the past is woven and who provides cohesion and
continuity to this past.
The
pre-eminence of the emblematic woman in history has meant that
the "real lives" or the lived experiences of women
have been sieved out as extraneous, irrelevant and in some
instances even anomalous to the main story. Nowhere is this
embeddedness of women in an unsullied past more evident than in
the complex discursive practices around the figure of the widow,
which made itself apparent most recently in the controversy over
the filming of Mira Nair’s "Water" in Varanasi. At a
time when Hindu cultural superiority was at its most aggressive
pitch, with a Hindu bomb lending it more pugnacity, a focus on
the Hindu widow threatened to add an embarrassing dissonance to
the construction of a glorious Hindu culture.
Uma Chakravarti
and Preeti Gill wonder why "Water" evoked the kind of
response that it did, given the fact that a long history of
writing, in various genres and languages by men and women, from
the beginning of the 19th century shows that incidents of
exploitation of widows were routine in the lives of young widows
and were in fact openly acknowledged as such. The anthology
painstakingly puts together documents which show how the
"oppressed category" of the widow, the
"shadow" or krishnapaksha of womanhood, figures
in history initially as a subject of male legal and social
discourse, symptomatic of the "guilt" of the emerging bhadralok,
and simultaneously, as a preponderant theme of creative social
writing.
The early
writings on the "status" of the widow were, however,
marked more by rhetoric rather than any analysis of the social
and economic structures which sustained and throve on her
oppression. It was not until the women’s movement in the last
quarter of the 20th century that feminist scholarship changed
the terms of the discourse to replace rhetoric with an analysis
of the relationship between ideological and cultural practices,
the manner in which caste, class, community, religion and region
mediate in specific constructions and experience of widowhood,
and how widowhood was enmeshed in the production of
"national", "religious" and importantly,
"male" identity, community and camaraderie.
The anthology
traverses all these phases and facets, combining the textual and
prescriptive with the experiential, giving the volume a depth of
substance and analytical rigour. Spread over three sections, the
collection coalesces extracts from the prescriptive legal and
religious texts, both classical and modern, with lived
experiences of widows as found in personal narratives and images
of widowhood deriving from fiction.
The extracts
which form the prescriptions, injunctions and laws for widows,
are drawn from a selection of texts, including the Dharmasutras
and the Dharmashastras, particularly the Manusmriti,
which have historically provided the authoritative framework
determining the life of the widow.
The 19th
century debates around child marriage, sati, enforced
widowhood, and the remarriage of widows take shape in the
extracts from the writings by some of the more ardent social
reformers, including Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, who argued for
widow remarriage on the practical ground that the shastric
prescription of brahmacharya was difficult to practice in
the kaliyuga, and that marriage having been prescribed as a duty
for women in the shastras, was after all in consonance with
religion.
The extracts
indicate change over the centuries from the time when levirate
marriages were prescribed to a point where enforced celibacy was
enjoined upon the widow. Ultimately, they aimed at controlling
the sexuality of the widow and by making celibacy a condition
for deriving maintenance from the dead husband’s property, the
consolidation of property rights in favour of the male head of
the family.
The excerpts
from Tarabai Shinde’s essay "Stri Purush Tulana",
written is response to an article which appeared in Pune Vaibhav
pertaining to the criminal case against a Brahmin widow charged
with murdering her illegitimate son, Pandita Ramabai’s book,
The high caste Hindu widow, Rakhmabai’s letter, "A Hindu
Lady", and especially Anandita Devi’s work, "Agomoni",
bring out the intensity of feeling against the condition of
widows and reformist preoccupation with their remarriage.
Anandita Devi’s
writing in particular is a poignant invective against a
scriptural tradition "written by men", which by
eulogising the "pure and celibate widow clad in whit"’,
occluded the gruesome nature of the rituals which immediately
followed the death of her husband, and the "wretched"
life to which she was condemned thereafter. Describing the widow
as the "living dead", she questions the right of men
to "destroy the precious lives of so many women, reserving
at the same time the right of women to resist — no body asked
for our opinion when these scriptures were written"..
Whereas the
scriptures prescribe a "pure and celibate" modular
form for widows, as the "renunciator" whose social
existence is "transcendental", the lived experiences
bring out the ambiguity of her social membership. From one
moving narrative to the other, and through the fictional images
deriving from social reality, one is exposed to the diversity
and complexity of the experiences of widowhood.
This diversity
and complexity is, however, interwoven in the common experience
of loss, deprivation, helplessness and hopelessness. As the
structural counterpart of the sumangali, the auspicious
married woman, she was to be excluded from all occasions which
celebrated life and vitality.
The sexuality
of the widow was sought to be harnessed by subjecting her to a
strict daily regime of prayer and household drudgery. At the
same time, however, her sexuality was seen as a constant threat,
and as "Shei Samay, Sunil Gangopadhyaya’s moving story of
the child widow Bindubasini, she was more likely to be seen as
an aggressor, tempting and "corrupting" men by her
"evil arts".
Interspersed
with stories of oppression and deprivation are stories and
narratives of survival and resistance.
The story of
Anandibai Karve’s attempts to educate herself in Bombay and
her remarriage in 1893 to D.K.Karve, the struggles of a dalit
widow to educate her daughter, the asceticism of the widows of
Vrindavan enabling them to overcome their destitution, the story
of Shanti, a widow of the 1984 riots, of Mary Kaul, whose
husband was killed by militants in Srinagar, are heart rending
narratives of personal loss, and overwhelming bitterness at the
betrayal they suffered from their own families, from society and
community.
Deep somewhere,
exists, however, an indomitable urge to give it back to the
oppressors in the same measure, as seen in Mahasweta Devi’s
"Rudali", or withdraw from participating in her own
oppression as brought out most poignantly in the refusal by
Sarasu, the Brahmin widow in "Vaadmalli, who favours warmth
and "satisfaction of natural instinct" to remarrying
and becoming a "victim of sacrifice".
Sarasu’s
condemnation of the "bloodthirstiness" of a society
which "gloats over her purity" and her subsequent
questioning of her status, "Does she not have any rights in
society"…"What is her status? A status of a country
citizen?" or a mere "Hindu woman…a dumb creature…
(who) lives by trusting her parents, husband and
forefathers", provides in a way a criticism of the
preoccupation of the male reformers with widow remarriage and
their lack of concern with the terms of women’s social and
political membership.
It is towards
this restoration of their subjectivities that this anthology is
devoted. Every single piece in the collection is distinctive,
yet knits well into the collection as a whole. Some of the
excerpts in the last section, leave the reader asking for more.
The anthology as a whole is a
powerful statement against patriarchy and the layers of
oppressive practices, exclusions and powerlessness it creates to
sustain itself.
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