Indian Widows 2015


The lives of many widows are hard in India, from this article. Society blames them for their husband's death? Bizarre and so unfair! Yet it hasn't been many years since suttee was outlawed in India. Thank goodness these women have a place for widows where they can live and enjoy life at least to a certain degree. The photographs in this article, unfortunately, can't be reproduced in this blog program, so go to the website below and look at the color shots. It's spectacular.




http://www.npr.org/2015/03/06/390973373/for-india-s-widows-a-riot-of-color-an-act-of-liberation

For India's Widows, A Riot Of Color, An Act Of Liberation
Julie McCarthy
MARCH 06, 2015

"I have no one. I've lost everything. My children are gone, my parents are gone. My husband's family doesn't ask about me. They don't even look for me, they don't even know if I eat," says Manu Ghosh, 85.

That's her above, seen before and after the Hindu festival of Holi at her ashram in northern India.

Manu was married at age 10 and found her way to the northern city of Vrindavan at 37. By that time, she was already widowed and had lost three children, who she says all died prematurely. Manu is one of many widows among the ashrams of Vrindavan whom I met covering this year's Holi festival.

Holi is the festival of colors, culminating in the riotous tossing of powder and water balloons meant to herald the arrival of spring. Bonfires on the eve of this ancient celebration mark the triumph of good over evil and are seen as a chance to forgive. It's celebrated wherever there are people of Indian descent — Bangladesh, Nepal, Guyana, South Africa — but here the celebrations take on the hue of liberation.

Hindu tradition frowns on widows celebrating at such festivals. In some parts of the culture, the women are seen as the cause of their husband's death and relatives believe they should be cast out. The segregation of widows can be so extreme that in some places they are prevented from attending family gatherings, including weddings. Many poor widows are abandoned by their families and left to fend for themselves. According to census data, India is believed to have tens of millions of widows. Thousands live out their lives in the ashrams in the ancient temple-filled city of Vrindavan, popularly known as the City of Widows.

But when the widows of Vrindavan ignore the social taboo and join in the fun, Holi takes on a whole new dimension. Cavorting in the chaos of color, women young and old stand in showers of rose petals and marigolds and playfully smear each other with fuchsia, green and gold powder. With this act of joy, the women fight back against restrictions that have ostracized them.

Photographer Susannah Ireland and I spent two days with the widows as they went through their morning rituals, nimbly preparing blossoms that perfumed the celebrations and shopping for new saris. Widows traditionally wear white, but breaking the mold, they go for a splash of color.


Widows are reclaiming their "womanhood," says Annapurna Sharma, 38, seen fixing her hair in the image above. She traveled 400 miles from Varanasi for her first Holi since her husband died six years ago, and she took the daring step of applying makeup for the occasion.

Urmila Sarkar, 73, balancing blossoms on her head in the image above, says her family wants her to come home, but she prefers to stay at the ashram. "My husband is now Lord Krishna," she says, flashing a coquettish smile.


It's not just color that is tossed around. Petals of roses, marigolds and daisies are meticulously gathered to be thrown into the air marking the beginning of festivities. For the third consecutive year, Sulabh International, an Indian nonprofit group, has helped the widows stage the festivities inside the Meera Sahbhagini Ashram, where they live.


Dancers perform Raas Leela, re-enacting Lord Krishna's playful teasing of Radha, a gopior female devotee who is said to have loved him unconditionally. The ashram widows are often described as Krishna's gopis, having made him the governing force of their lives.

Here's the climax of all their work: the widows reveling in the shower of powder that turned the courtyard a cloud of pink. Some are octogenarians, but these spry widows played pranks that could rival any teenager. They have dance moves to match. They ambush the unsuspecting with the eye-stinging powder. More than once, I missed them coming straight for me. Bam! Another pigment pie in the eye. I worried they'd get sick and that all their frolicking would end badly. But these women are made of sterner stuff, having weathered abuse, rejection, isolation and worse. A little powder was not about to stop them.


Before they played Holi in Vrindavan, there were plenty of tears. Women told me of how their lives broke down, recounting the in-laws who discarded them, the threats of violence from their own sons, and husbands who sold them off to other men. Basana Dasi, 42, was widowed by the age of 15. Dabbing her eyes and nose with her brand new sari, she recalled her mother-in-law saying, "My son is no longer here. What do I do with a daughter-in-law?"

The celebrations are ephemeral. The wounds these women carry will last a lifetime.

During this festival, however, those wounds don't weigh so heavily. For Shakuntala Devi, 65, it was her first Holi in 27 years. Drenched in color, she beamed, "I was remembering the way we used to play Holi in my family." Then she adds, "Today, this is my family."





http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/575795/suttee

Suttee
Hindu custom
Written by: Wendy Doniger
Last Updated 3-2-2015

Alternate title: satī
Suttee, Sanskrit sati (“good woman” or “chaste wife”),  the Indian custom of a wife immolating herself either on the funeral pyre of her dead husband or in some other fashion soon after his death. Although never widely practiced, suttee was the ideal of womanly devotion held by certainBrahman and royal castes. It is sometimes linked to the myth of the Hindu goddess Sati, who burned herself to death in a fire that she created through her Yogic powers after her father insulted her husband, the god Shiva—but in this myth Shiva remains alive and avenges Sati’s death.

The first explicit reference to the practice in Sanskritappears in the great epic Mahabharata (compiled in its present form about 400 ce). It is also mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek author of the 1st century bce, in his account of the Punjab in the 4th century bce. Numerous suttee stones, memorials to the wives who died in this way, are found all over India, the earliest dated 510 ce. Women sometimes suffered immolation before their husbands’ expected death in battle, in which case the burning was called jauhar. In the Muslim period (12th–16th century), the Rajputspracticed jauhar, most notably at Chitorgarh, to save women from rape, which they considered worse than death, at the hands of conquering enemies. The hardships encountered by widows in traditional Hindu society may have contributed to the spread of suttee.

The larger incidence of suttee among the Brahmans of Bengal was indirectly due to theDayabhaga system of law (c. 1100), which prevailed in Bengal and which gave inheritance to widows; such women were encouraged to committ suttee in order to make their inheritance available to other relatives. In the 16th century, steps to prohibit suttee were taken by the Mughal rulers Humayun and his son Akbar. Suttee became a central issue under the British Raj, which first tolerated it, then inadvertently legalized it by legislating conditions under which it could be done, and then finally, in 1829, outlawed it—using the condemnation as one of its justifications for continuing British rule of India.

Suttee was sometimes committed voluntarily, but cases of compulsion, escape, and rescue are known. Scattered instances of it continue to occur, most notoriously in the case of Roop Kanwar, an 18-year-old widow who committed suttee in 1987. The incident was highly controversial, as groups throughout India either publicly defended Kanwar’s actions or declared that she had been murdered.

Wendy Doniger