127

CHAPTER III

Selfhood and the Reformed Widow in Parvatibai Athavale’s Hindu

Widow: An Autobiography

The reconstitution of gender that took place in the nineteenth century recontoured the

figure of the companionate and educated wife, as seen in the preceding chapter. Simultaneously,

the nationalist discourse on gender also reconfigured the obverse of the faithful wife - the chaste

widow, in order to reckon with the charges of inhumanity laid at the door of Hindu orthodoxy by

the colonial and missionary rhetoric of the times. Many attempts have been made to explain and

also explain away the miserable condition of the upper-caste widow. Her plight is at times

attributed to a male phobia of the lascivious wife who, to get rid of her husband, might easily

poison him. Manu is convinced about the intrinsically fickle nature of women who hate husbands

and are bent on giving themselves to even the ugliest of men. The wretched state of widowhood

is therefore seen as a deterrent to potential husband-killing.1 The absolute control and tyranny

exerted over the wife under the guise of pativrata dharma too is seen as engendering a male

terror of the potential for retribution that women had when compelled to abide by stringent codes

of wifehood. This fear is allayed by the harshest of punishments as a deterrent reserved for

upper-caste women in the symbol of the abhorred widow. As Judith Butler says, it is by first

creating a dreaded “zone of uninhabitability” for “abject” and excluded beings that the limit of

the subject’s domain and claim to autonomy and to life is constituted.2 This can be easily

understood to be true of the upper-caste widow.

In order to comprehend the ideology behind the institutionalisation of the hateful figure

of the upper-caste widow, it is necessary to turn to the Shastras that enjoin enforced widowhood
 128

on Brahmin women. Also, with regard to the current study, the consolidation of the caste

exclusivity of Brahmins through the harshest of measures reserved for their widows during the

Peshwa government’s rule and its subsequent repercussions during colonial rule too need to be

explored. Folk tales, vratas and festivals, literature, discursive writings of the nineteenth century

along with a glance at the history of the times help us to locate the imbrication of the highly

debated figure of the nineteenth century Brahmin widow in the discourse of nationalism and

colonialism.

Widowhood can be better understood in the context of the various prescriptions and

proscriptions of the Shastras. It is often believed that “just as a snake-charmer forcibly draws out

from a hole a snake, so a chaste wife snatches away her husband’s life from the messengers of

death and reaches heaven with her husband.”3 A study of the vratas and festivals of Hindu

women along with an analysis of the folk tales and oral culture of Maharashtrian women

consolidates the view that ensuring the longevity of the husband’s life is vested in the chastity,

steadfastness and devotion of the pativrata. Dr. Jayant Athavale notes the observance of

Mangalagouri by newly wed girls on every Tuesday in the month of Shravart for five to seven

years after marriage which is supposed to ensure the husband’s long life.4 The ritual feeding of a

married woman and exchange of kumkum, glass bangles, mirror and comb5 too show the

anxiety of married women to ward off the spectre of widowhood, burdened as they are

ideologically with the onus of preventing the husband’s death.

Often treated as ogresses, widows were accused of “eating up” the husband. Ironically,

and without any feeing of contradiction, this allegation, as seen in Shevantibai Nikambe’s novel

Ratanbai could be made by senior widows like Kakubai too, themselves the victims of collective

abhorrence as accursed husband-eaters.6 Folk tales of Maharashtra are replete with the icon of
 129

the pativrata who wards off widowhood with her piety and exemplary life. In “The Unwanted

Wife”, the pious wife spumed by her husband, is empowered to save his life while on a voyage,

by miraculously saving the sinking ship.7 In “The Story of Mangala Gouri” a woman who is a

devotee of the deity Gowri deflects the potency of a girl’s curse that her daughter should become

a child-widow.8 Thus, a failure to cling on to this auspicious state of maangalya bhagya by the

power of the pativrata, is seen as an indictment of the wife, who now becomes responsible for

the death of the husband. This cardinal sin, to use an inappropriate Christian term, has to be

therefore punished with the most abject of social roles - that of the upper-caste widow,

condemned to either death as a sati or death-in-life, divested of all social respectability. Actual

and perceived inequities within the familial and socio-religious hierarchies were sought to be

countered by wishing widowhood (not death) on the woman seen as a threat. Vidyut Bhagwat

explores, for instance, Eknath’s song about a woman’s exasperated and quite humorous cry to

Goddess Amba to make her nagging sister-in-law a widow.9

Added to all this is the belief in the past sinfulness or bad Karma in previous lives that is

punished by widowhood in the present one. This life therefore has to be patiently borne to ensure

a better deal in the next life. Religious expediency capitalises on this notion of guilt for past sins

and skillfully deflects attention from the present life. It also contains the widow’s sexual

potential to disrupt social norms, by making her agonise over the earlier ‘sinful’ life and then pin

her hopes on the next life. Cham Gupta writes about the widow’s sexuality:

What was most valuable to the husband in his lifetime turned into an awesome
menace to his community after his death. Outside the protection of the domestic
identity of the chaste female, the widow represented both an invitation and a
threat. Ascetic widowhood thus remained the highest model.10

Luce Irigaray, in a largely western context, wonders how a woman’s multiple locations of

sexual pleasures can be accommodated within a patriarchy that sees women as a “commodity” or
 130

an “object of transaction” for male pleasure.11 But the upper-caste wife, whose very existence

was seen solely in terms of her devotion to the husband, could never risk exhibiting any sexual

initiative for her own sake. A good wife had very little sexual autonomy outside the role of the

compliant and sexually accommodative wife, whose prime duty was to facilitate pleasure for the

husband. Such a wife is recognised as 1padminf, or the woman who while enticing her

husband sexually, was also seen as chaste since by doing so, she was only following her dharma

as an ideal wife. The death of the husband/god perforce implied the sexual death of the widow,

who now atoned for her ‘sin’ and repressed her delegitimated sexuality by rigorous and

disciplined austerities, penance, prayers, fasting and abstinence. In analysing the perceived

repression of sexuality in the nineteenth century, Foucault pertinently notes that sex is placed in a

binary system by power, such that the licit is seen in relation to the illicit.13 The laws of

prohibition, which according to Foucault are used by power over sex, can be understood in the

context of the widow for whom sex was forbidden, at least in theory, since the female body now

had access to innumerable ways of sexual pleasure dissociated from the sanitised regulation of

sex in marriage. According to Manu, the widow ought to subsist on flowers, roots and fruits and

never mention the name of a stranger male. She had to show forbearance until her death, observe

vows, be celibate and remain chaste.14 The Vrddha-Harita too is explicit about the ways of

curbing the widow’s sexuality by austerities:

She should give up adorning her hair, chewing betel-nut, wearing perfumes,
flowers, ornaments and dyed clothes, taking food from a vessel of bronze, taking
two meals a day, applying collyrium to her eyes; she should wear a white
garment, should curb her senses, and anger, she should not resort to deceits and
tricks, should be free from laziness and sleep, should be pure and of good
conduct, should always worship Hari, should sleep on the ground at night on a
mat of kusa grass, she should be intent on concentration of mind and on the
company of the good.15
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Such an exhaustive list was calculated to quell the widow’s spirits to such a degree that even if

she desired, she would hardly have enough strength to transgress sexually. The caste exclusivity

of Brahmins resided in the stringent suppression of the upper caste widow’s mind and body and

banishing her to a marginal existence. Gender norms were ruthlessly enforced by the State to

maintain upper-caste dharma during the Peshwai. Uma Chakravarti notes that the last Peshwa,

seen as a debauch who married eleven times inclusive of the one contracted while on the verge

of death, still suffered no contradiction in doing his ‘duty’ of enforcing Brahmanya by

imprisoning a widow for committing ‘adultery.’16

Interestingly, the Dharmashastras prescribe a strikingly similar regimen for three

categories of women - the chaste wife whose husband is away on a journey, the adulterous wife,

and the widow. All three are strictly told to abjure ornaments, collyrium, flowers, attractive

clothes, perfumes, chewing of betel and laughing loudly. All three have to emaciate their bodies

by eating less and are expected to give up social interactions. What looms large -in the

background of all these three categories of women is the missing husband to protect whose

sexual monopoly over the wife, all kinds of injunctions have been laid down. What binds these

states of womanhood together is the fear of a radical disruption of the stringent sexual norms

enjoined upon the minds and bodies of women that aid the smooth functioning of a patriarchal,

patrilineal society.

The materiality of the ideology of widowhood also manifested itself in economic

deprivation in the way the widow was reduced to a household drudge, deprived of any real

control over the husband’s share of property, and denied an equitable share of resources

including wholesome food. The collective social schooling of the widow was such that she

internalised notions of inferiority and lived out a life of self-abnegation. Her labour too thus
 132

came very cheap with minimum maintenance and maximum exploitation. As Charu Gupta

notes, the widow was a “cook and a servant, a nurse and a housekeeper.” Prem Choudhary also

analyses the materialistic basis behind the enforced levirate marriages performed between the

widow and the husband’s brother. This remarriage of convenience, at times to an infant husband,

whom the widow would have to raise first, was often against the will of the widow. It was a neat

closure to the threat of land alienation as well as the loss of the labour of the widow. In short, it

was expedient to harness both the reproductive and productive labour18 of the widow to the cause

of patriliny and patriarchy. As Uma Chakravarti notes of the productive labour of Godubai or

Anandibai in the Karve communal household, widows were quite often treated as a “mobile”

labour force, “shunted” from one household to another in a distant place where their labour was

needed to manage houses in the absence of an active, working wife.19

Yet, no amount of self-effacement, renunciation and exhaustive labour could safeguard

the widow from being unceremoniously evicted from the affinal home on the slightest pretext

even while they were legally entitled to a vague kind of maintenance. This unstable and

precarious position of widows often left them very vulnerable, with no space they could

legitimately lay claim to as their own. Parvatibai’s autobiography conjures up a picture of

destitute widows subsisting on the meagre offerings in temple precincts and left to the sexual

mercy of lecherous religious mendicants.20 Swati Ghosh analyses the institutionalised way in

which many widows in nineteenth century Bengal were deported to pilgrim centres like Benares,

Vrindavan, and Mathura on a meagre monthly allowance, and left to eke out a livelihood by

dubious means. She traces this strategic way of getting rid of this “social eyesore” who was akin

to the prostitute and who indulged in adultery and abortions, to the emergence of nationalist

patriarchy in Bengal. It revolved around the concept of the ‘new woman’ from which the widow
 133

was excluded.21 This argument about the very convenient way of sending widows into social

oblivion and making them invisible under the pretext of spirituality can be extended, by tracing it

also to the Dayabhaga school of inheritance practised in Bengal wherein the widow was a

shareholder in the affinal property. Banishing her to the periphery in the name of religion was

one way of depriving her of this share, just as coercing her to commit sati had been a century

back before it was legally abolished.

Yet another wretched dimension of widowhood is the stigma of inauspiciousness

attached to the very sight of a widow. This “domestic enemy” was often consigned to the

“darker recesses” of the house22 and kept out of mischief. However, it must be observed that

though inauspicious, the widow’s labour within the house and kitchen could still be extracted

from morning to night since, the Shastras, quite conveniently, never include her person as

ritually polluting or impure. What might appear paradoxical in the twin factors of augury and

purity is deftly glossed over by making the widow simultaneously ritually pure and socially

inauspicious. This took care of the toil involved in domestic labour and it also succeeded in

depriving the widow of social status. With no attendant ideas about this inherent contradiction,

the collective scorn of upper caste society was heaped on the widow, who was more inauspicious

and loathsome than the untouchable, yet good enough to slog within the inner domain. Social

guilt, anxiety and culpability for the subhuman condition of the widow can be traced in the

transfer of the feeling of self-abhorrence from the community, to the person of the widow and

can be seen as an attempt to absolve the collective conscience of Brahminic society. According

to the Skanda puranas, the widow is so inauspicious that no success can be had in any

undertaking if one sees her. A “wise man should avoid even their blessings like the poison of a

snake.”23
 134

Thus a terrible and dreadful image of the widow is an ideological construct that is

calculated to serve as a deterrent to anyone, including widows themselves and men seeking her

society. That even such a monstrous image of the widow might not actually prevent sexual

liaisons was anticipated in strictures that sought to make the widow a self-regulating creature by

invoking piteous pictures of the deceased husband writhing in hell even if she happened to sleep

on a cot. According to the Kasi J^ianda of Skandapurana, “the tying up into a braid of the hair by

the widow leads to the bondage of the husband; therefore a widow should always shave her

head.”24 While the widow is effectively defeminised by denying her access to all those

accessories that might accentuate her attraction as a woman, the unsexing or “castration” 25 of the

widow by tonsuring her is not sanctioned anywhere else in the Shastras, as Kane observes,

including the Manusmritis. P.V.Kane is of the opinion that tonsuring of widows did not develop

until the tenth or eleventh century A.D. and that this stricture is a later interpolation that might

have been intensified by the Buddhist influence of tonsuring female ascetics to keep them chaste.

It is quite another matter that even this ‘castration’ is ineffective in saving the widow from

predatory men, usually within the home 26 or from their own sexual desires.

Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha in the first volume of Women Writing in India, record in a

biographical note, the retort of a learned Telugu saint-poet of the nineteenth century, Tarigonda

Venkamamba who was coerced to submit to the shaving of her head following her widowhood:

“What right do you have to make me shave my head and sit in a comer? I am married to God,

and no one can make me a widow.”27 By claiming the status of a married woman, Venkamamba

defied society by adorning herself with flowers and ornaments and thus escaped the degradation

of widowhood. But others who could not thus manage to deflect social norms had to internalise
 135

notions of fate and their own sinfulness and tamely submit to demeaning rituals which they often

found worse than even death.

Ashis Nandy observes that the cruelty of men towards other men and women, is exceeded

only by the cruelty that women inflict on other women.28 But while this may certainly be so,

patriarchal ideology and material compulsions also combine in such responses by women, co­

opted within the structures of Brahminic patriarchy. In the eponymous novel Nabha by

Nanjanagudu Thirumalamba, socio-religious fear of the power residing in the luxuriant hair of

the widow is echoed in the words of the brother’s wife who insists that the widow’s hair be

shorn: “What adorns a woman best? Isn’t it her hair? If we allow the hair to add to her youth and

beauty, one can only imagine what will become of her. Vile practices are only helped by long

and plentiful hair.”29 Married women thus anxiously sought to distance themselves from the

unfortunate widows through cultural and physical markers that emphasised the stark contrast

between different categories of women.

Rassundhari Devi in her autobiography Amar Jiban confesses after becoming a widow:

“Having your head tonsured is worse than death”, and adds that it is “both shameful and sad”

that “[e]ven if a woman with a hundred sons is widowed/ She is regarded as most unfortunate by

the people.”30 She still was not exempt from societal surveillance of her sexuality. Anandibai

Karve, a child-widow, writes about her futile bouts of crying at being “shamed and humiliated so

much” and wondered what sin she had committed to be so punished. Comparing the difference in

the experience of men and women regarding tonsure, she writes that men had the privilege of

pampering themselves by massaging oil on their tonsured heads - a luxury that women could not

afford, for lack of time and the feeling of shame attached to the act. As a consequence, she

writes, widows like herself “would be impatient to pour water over the head and rush indoors,
 136

11
and would have to endure the irritation quietly. Even death seemed preferable at such times.”

In fact, her widowed elder sister who worried beyond limit about her daughter’s future,

succumbs to death, finding the rigour and humiliation of widowhood too much to bear.

Though the figure of the widow is calculated to evoke pity, it would be a mistake to

conclude that she was devoid of all redemptive power. In fact, the status of widowhood at times

conferred mixed blessings on women caught in “the tensions of conjugal life”, and was a “step

towards greater autonomy and self-reliance.”32 After her widowhood, Parvatibai herself grabs the

opportunity to tour America, leam English, and improve her own personality. Rassundhari Devi

too does not seem to see the death of her husband as a very great calamity and accepts it with

equanimity. The position of the older widow can be gleaned from auto/biographical, discursive

and literary writings of the period. The mother of adult sons had a greater sense of security,

respect and achievement, besides being able to wield greater clout in decision-making and

guiding family members. Dhondo Keshav Karve’s widowed mother for instance, inspired great

awe in her sons and was their source of comfort in making crucial decisions. This regard for the

older widow can also be attributed to their strength of character in single-handedly raising

children and, more so, to their endorsement and faithful practice of the rigid disciplining

conventions of widowhood. They also functioned as disseminators in the self-regulatory

discourse of widowhood. The Foucauldian localisation of power that pervades all relationships,

allows for the interchange of positions of power even within entrenched hierarchies. In the

capacity of mother-in-law, the widow’s authority was restored. So also, according to norms of

deference, not even the son could demonstrate his affection for either his wife or his children in

her presence. Elderly widows are also portrayed as being manipulative and seeking to ensure

their power over new entrants, as seen in the autobiography of Ramabai Ranade. But then,
 137

quite often such dependent widows could only resort to scheming and petty tussles for power

within the home. Vanaja Dhruvarajan analyses women’s role in maintaining patriarchal

structures manifested in the competition, betrayal and mutual punishments of women, as

symptomatic of an anxiety to show loyalty towards the male members, in order to gain

acceptance.34

The practice of Sati or widow-burning, also called sahamarana and sahagamcma, is,

according to Vedavyasa-smriti, an act wherein “a brahmana woman should enter fire, clasping

the dead body of the husband”, failing which she should “emaciate her body by tapas.”35

However, though there are references to Sati in the Mahabharat, the Shastras again are silent

about widow-burning. The large incidence of Sati in provinces like Bengal are attributed by

Kane to the practice of the Dayabhaga school of inheritance that entitles even sonless widows to

inherit the husband’s share of the joint-family property and which hence prompted relatives to

get rid of them through Sati by appealing to their love for the husband.36 However, the “death

wish”37 for the widow, harboured in familial and social circles could culminate in the

performance of Sati by glorifying the act and promising heavenly bliss to the widow. A point to

be observed here is that not all acts of Sati are accepted as proof of the steadfast love and sheer

physical courage of the burning widow. Quite often, Satihood was conveniently foisted on them

to give a neat narrative closure to their lives. For instance, an anonymously published article by a

widow reveals that the death of a widow on account of fever and harsh treatment after the demise

of the husband, was passed off as an act of love and grief for the dead husband. Similarly, a

glory akin to that of Satihood again elevated the suicide of a widow who jumped off the roof of

her house to escape the horrors of widowhood, even though there had been absolutely no love

lost between the ever-quarrelling couple.39 Krupabai Sattianadhan gives a nuanced picture of the
 138

conflictual relationship between an orthodox community and the transgressing, learned widow.

The latter pays for her learning by being forced onto the pyre of her husband, from which she

flees into the woods to become a feared and hated object.40

The stereotype of the burning widow received the attention of the West through travel

writings in the early years of the East India Company. Kate Teltscher records the response of

travel writers who often felt that the widow got her “just desserts” for being unfaithful and for

even having the potential of killing the husband. The fate of this burning sati was similar to that

of the English widow. The latter too was condemned to be burnt for treason if she plotted to kill

her husband.41 Teltscher also comments on the account of Jean Tavernier depicting the Sati as

the passive, frightened victim of the devilish, greedy Brahmin priests, out to grab her jewellery

like vultures.42 Such images set the imperial stage for the noble act of rescuing this pathetic

figure of the burning widow from the horrifying practices of the natives. It legitimated British

rule over an uncivilised race and validated economic depredation of the colony in the name of a

civilising mission. While there is absolutely no defense of the reprehensible practice of Sati, the

political dimensions of the abolition of Sati and other acts of saving the Hindu woman can be

seen as exercises wherein, in the words of Gayatri Chakravarthi, white men were saving brown

women from brown men.43 Mary Daly, impressed by Katherine Mayo’s controversial Mother

India, expressed her indignation over sati as a “horror show” and as “ritual murder”.44 While

there is certainly no getting away from this charge, critics like Ketu Katrak question such

simplified critiques that fail to simultaneously interrogate the dubious role of imperialism in

women’s subordination.45 Chandra Talapade Mohanty too accuses western feminists of

essentialising the experiences of Third World women and serving the imperial mission by not

questioning colonialism.
 139

Constant denigration of the cultural practices of the natives resulted in a nostalgic return

to an imagined golden past of a superior civilisation. Incipient feelings of nationalism made

reformers feel the need to cleanse the nation of its “harmful customs” and restore it to its pristine

Aryan stage and thereby rise in the esteem of their colonial masters. These harmful “customs”

were however seen as necessitated by Muslim depredations and onslaughts on Hindu

womanhood, thereby revealing the native male intelligentsia’s anxiety to exonerate Hindu

religious practices in their own eyes and in those of the critical colonial masters. Ranade blamed

the mixing of the pure Aryan race with the “primitive” races from South India as being

responsible for the degrading “customs” surrounding the lives of women.46

The plight of the widow became the central concern of nineteenth century writing -

especially male-authored works that sought to assuage a collective feeling of guilt at the blatant

social hypocrisy and religious double standards operating with regard to the fate of widows and

widowers. Vidyasagar for one, was horrified that almost senile men, having sired countless

children and lost countless wives, could still marry nubile girls with impunity and social

approval, while even little girls widowed in childhood were compelled to comply with enforced

and rigorous widowhood. Both Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar,

influenced by Western reason and enlightenment, perceived the pathetic position of the upper-

caste widow and sought ways to enlist help from the colonial regime in combating orthodoxy.

But the reformers’ rhetoric perforce had to be based on Shastric interpretation of tradition and

the use of a register very familiar to the orthodox. Vidyasagar argued that widow remarriage

would mitigate social crimes like foeticide and infanticide, and would help channelise the

repressed sexuality of the child widow in a legitimate manner.47 But recommending the practice

of customs of the “chotolok” or the lower castes, for the “bhadralok” was, as Sekhar
 140

Bandyopadhyay feels, a move that was bound to be squashed by orthodox Brahmins.48 In their

earnest endeavour to ameliorate the plight of the widow, these male reformers took recourse to

tradition. Roy argued against the act of Sati by reminding the community that it was not entirely

sanctioned by the Shastras and that the widow should instead, lead a chaste, celibate life of self-

abnegation.

The colonial government, ever cautious not to antagonise the dominant Brahmin males,

was expedient enough to seek authentic Shastric interpretations on the issue. It also desisted from

preventing the performance of the Sati, if convinced that it was a genuine case involving the

widow’s volition. Lata Mani notes that in the debate between the reformers, the orthodoxy and

the colonial government, the widow was the “site” on which tradition was battled out.49

Rajeswari Sunder Raj an also problematises the feminist dilemma of seeing the sati as either

victim or agent. She writes that to open the way for a meaningful intervention and to demystify

sati, it is essential to acknowledge and contest the discourse of the female subject of/in pain.50

Ultimately however, the efforts of well-meaning reformers only succeeded in bringing

about a paltry number of highly debated widow remarriages after legislation. The Act did not

change the scene much in an entrenched patriarchy that resented intervention of any sort that

might mitigate its control and ownership of upper-caste women. The sense of sin attached to

even the remarriage of child-widows was strong as seen in the remarriage of Dhondo Keshav

Karve and Anandibai. While Professor Karve’s life was constantly under threat, the couple was

socially ostracised and their families excommunicated in his native town of Murud.51 The

stranglehold of Brahminism in Maharashtra, especially owing to the erstwhile rule of the Pune

Peshwas brought out the contradictory nature of reform. Ranade, a supporter of widow

remarriage, was compelled by his allegiance towards his orthodox father, to marry a girl of
 141

eleven. Vishnushastri Pandit was however, one of the few who dared to marry a widow. Karve

himself gave up all illusions of conscientising people and instead concentrated on empowering

widows through education. The Widows’ Home begun by Karve was also to counter the

threatening Christian influence of Pandita Ramabai’s school for widows.52 The widows who

were otherwise shunned by all, were nonetheless needed by the community to assert its

inviolable religious boundaries that were now seen as being breached at the Pandita’s Home. The

Widow Remarriage Act of 1856 also froze and codified Shastric law while ignoring local

cultural practices. In the process, the Act worked to the detriment of even those widows from

lower castes, traditionally never debarred from remarriage, who now perforce had to give up

their share of the deceased husband’s property.53

To complicate matters, upward social and caste mobility prompted lower castes to give

up emancipatory gender practices and imitate Brahmin rigidity in preventing widow remarriages.

Tarabai Shinde records the percolation of Brahminic patriarchal ideology in all sections of

Maharashtrian society.54 However Hiroshi Fukazawa in his study of medieval Deccan observes

how this move to break Brahminical exclusivity in its harshness towards widows, was stiffly

resisted by Brahmins who insisted that the lower castes could not enjoin enforced celibacy on

‘their’ widows. Fukazawa shows the significant role played by the State in entrenching caste

practices during the reign of the Peshwas. While favouring the Brahmins with ritual, social and

economic superiority over other castes, this superiority also imposed severe caste restrictions on

Brahmins to prove their exclusive status. Upper caste widows thus bore the brunt as markers of

caste exclusivity by having to lead a life of enforced widowhood, chastity and rigid austerities

that would be held in high esteem, and which yet could not be imitated by lower castes. The

Peshwas actively resisted any move by lower castes to enforce widowhood on their women by
 142

not permitting such upper-caste practices.55 Uma Chakravarti very pertinently analyses the

failure of the Brahmin male reformers to radically question the structural ways in which

patriarchal ideology worked against widows - the economic deprivation of over-worked and

under-fed widows and the systematic ways in which men were privileged over women in

wielding power and enjoying privileges denied to women, especially widows. She notes that

despite their “humanist rhetoric”, upper caste reformers in Maharashtra were loath to question

material and ideological gender asymmetries and were glad to exonerate religion by blaming

“customs” and traditions.56 Besides, the alacrity with which Maharashtrian Brahmin men closed

ranks when it came to the question of their caste and class hegemony57 exposes a similar

lopsided and limited gender agenda to ameliorate the cause of the widow, a ‘passive’ subject

perceived as voiceless and lacking in all sense of agency. It was Jotirao Phule who tried to

provide shelter to pregnant Brahmin widows who were shunned by all in a futile attempt to wish

away the problem of sexually trangressive widows. If however, the figure of the upper caste

widow filled male reformers with a sense of guilt and unease, for the orthodox, she was the

civilisational triumph of a Hindu nation that confirmed the spiritual superiority of our traditions

over the grossly materialistic modernity of the West. The widow, glorified as a paragon of virtue

and ascetic self-abnegation, rather than evoking either sympathy or guilt, stood as a cultural and

religious marker for all that was pure and exemplary in Hindu tradition. The revivalists resisted

tooth and nail all reformist attempts to implement humanist reforms for widows.

Nonetheless, historians have observed a marked change in the attitude to the widow’s

sexuality in the early decades of the twentieth century. With a rise in militant Hinduism and a

consolidation of Suddhi and Sangatans advocated by reform-oriented associations like the Arya

Samaj, the nation began to be constructed as a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ with Muslims being seen as the
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threatening, lecherous ‘other’. Charu Gupta records the “demographic politics”58 of Hindu

nationalists in the way Muslims were perceived as abducting gullible Hindu widows, depleting

Hindu numbers and swelling the country with Muslim population. 59 This numerical

preoccupation of the Hindus made them redeploy and valorise the latent, erstwhile negated

sexuality of widows in the cause of the regeneration of the Hindu nation. The Hindu widow was

now encouraged to marry so as to provide many strong male children to increase the supposedly

dwindling population of Hindus. The discourse of nationalism was used now to harness the

reproductive capacity of the Hindu widow. In Ekadasi by Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, this

anxiety of abduction of Hindu widows by Muslim's is seen in the life of a child-widow observing

with great devotion, Hindu traditional observances like ekadashi, even after her marriage to a

Muslim. The writer portrays the protagonist as such a faithful adherent of Hindu customs, that

the doctor in the story, is forced to acknowledge the rationale of the Suddhi Movement.60 But in

agriculture-based regions like the Punjab and Haryana, where dominant lower castes like the Jats

followed the pratice of levirate or Karewa, the Brahmins followed suit and got their widows to

cohabit with the brother of the deceased husband. Thus, as Prem Choudhary has analysed, the

productive and reproductive labour of the widow was harnessed within the affinal home and

fears of fragmentation of land and property were allayed.61 In fact, the widow who refused to

remarry was ridiculed and accused of sexual promiscuity.

Rajul Sogani in The Hindu Widow in Indian Literature traces the stages in the changing

social perception towards widow remarriage. Sogani observes that the earliest Maharashtrian

novel on this theme, Yamuna Parvatan by Padmanji Mulay, and later on Pan Lakshvan Khon

Gheto by Hari Narayan Apte explore widow-exploitation and strongly condemn tonsuring of

their heads 62 With increasing nationalist zeal for reform among the male intelligentsia, novels
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like Indirabai by Gulavadi Venkatarao, Sansar by R.C.Dutt, Jusantar by Shibnath Shastri and

Murola by Debiprasanna Rai Choudhary end with marriage of the widow with the man she loves.

Sogani adds that these writers were eager to show that society was actually changing.63

However, with rise in nationalist feeling, the widow was now exhorted to sublimate her

sexuality, inspire young men in national regeneration, prove to be a loving mother-figure, and

sacrifice her own interests in the cause of serving the nation 64 Novels like Premchand’s Pratieva

and those by Tagore and Saratchandra Chatterjee did not upset social conventions and though the

theme of love is explored, the narrative closure of their novels did not allow widow remarriage.65

In contrast, Sogani says, women novelists prefer not to dwell on the issue of widow remarriage.

Instead, they plead for improvement in their condition, their education, financial independence,

inheritance rights, the right to work for a living and a more dignified place in society.66 Sogani

attributes Maharashtrian women’s preference for autobiographical and discursive writing to

romances, to the strong influence of Brahminism, with a deliberate cultivation of “a spirit of

intellectual detachment.”67

A survey of literature and discursive writing, especially by women is a veritable treasure-

trove of the figure of the widow. The literary and discursive writing of the period chosen for this

study shows a rare sensitivity in depicting the liminality of widows in Brahminical society.

Rakhmabai, who wrote anonymously to The Times of India as a “Hindu Lady”, indicts Shastric

law for making the widow a “social leper”, “unbeloved of God and despised of man - a social

pariah and domestic drudge.”68 She was astute enough to perceive the material exploitation of

the labour of the widow even while the widow herself was an accursed creature to be avoided

like the plague. She wonders at the inhumane ways in which a six-year old child could be treated

as harshly as a sixty-year old widow with absolutely no concessions for the former. Perhaps
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Rakhmabai could afford to stand outside patriarchal Brahmin discourse and critique it on account

of her own location within the Sutar caste. Likewise, Tarabai Shinde, placed in the Maratha

caste, found it easier to mount a blistering attack on Brahmin males. She roundly denounced

male hypocrisy and double standards regarding widowhood and the social castigation of a widow

Vijaylakshmi for committing infanticide. In a fiery attack on the blatant privileging of widowers

over the hapless widows, she fumes that widows had a better right to live than widowers, since

they had to fend for their children. On the other hand, those men who recommended Sati for the

widow ought to be burnt on the pyres of their wives. She angrily wonders why men should be

allowed to remain alive and marry immediately after the wife’s death. She writes: “Why do you

want to survive your wives? To knead cow dung and pat it into cakes for your own cremation?”69

Yet another instance of feminist consciousness is evident in Cornelia Sorabjee’s account of a

widow who fought tooth and nail to wrest control over the management of her estate from the

paternalistic British Government that insisted that widows following purdah were helpless and

had to be brought under the Court of Wards. The spirited and independent widow spurns the

patronising offer to manage her affairs, and retorts: “in my opinion, I could not do worse with

bandaged eyes, and hobbled feet, than you do with your eyes open and limbs unfettered.” 70

Placed outside the retributive scope of upper caste men, Sorabjee’s Parsi-Christian identity

helped her attack the stock figure of the wily Brahmin priest. Padma Anagol has documented the

growth of a feminist struggle for their material rights in the manner in which countless widows

defied native patriarchal limitations by making optimum use of the colonial juridico-legal

machinery to their own advantage. They also protested against policies of the colonial

government that were discriminatory and paternalistic.71 Most of the women who wrote in this

period did not share the concerns of the male reformers regarding widow remarriage and
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preferred to see the widows as more independent women who could acquire skills for their

living.

Bahinabai Chaudhari, in an autobiographical poem on her widowhood and the ordeal of

being defeminised, shows her grit and courage in girding up to face life in the new unsavoury

garb of widowhood. Her spirit cannot be quelled by being shorn of the marks of marriage.

Running out of tears, she writes: “The vermilion mark/ is wiped off my forehead; / only the

tattoo remains/ to welcome fate/ The bangles are broken,/ but the wrists can still/ wrestle with

fate.”72 However, a scathing attack on social and religious orthodoxy of Brahmins comes from

two anonymous pieces - a speech and a newspaper article that appeared as the appendices to

Baba Padmanji’s novel on widowhood entitled Yamuna Parvatan. The speech on the plight of

widows blames parents for giving away little girls in marriage to widowers in their sixties. The

author wished that this practice would cease and that widows be encouraged to marry again.73

Uma Chakravarti’s analysis of the essays written by the widows like Radha Inamdar in

the Poona Home shows the marked way in which personal “experience” of widowhood offers an

insight quite different from the “knowledge” of male reformers and the male preoccupation with

channellising the repressed sexuality of widows.74 Comparing tonsuring of the head to rape, she

writes that the widows found this practice utterly repugnant and degrading. Among the woes of

these widows were the feeling of being policed constantly by family members for deviation from

norms of chastity, drudge labour, awareness of being marked off from other women in the house

through attire and appearance, seduction of widows by rapacious men within the family, and

being coerced into self-deprivation.75

But by far the most significant analysis of the material and ideological oppression of

widows comes from Pandita Ramabai who blames Hindu religion and upper caste patriarchal
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structures for the abject condition of Brahmin widows. Her immense scholarship, knowledge of

the Vedas and the gendered, casteist slant of the scriptures made her acutely sensitive to the

structural ways in which widows were oppressed among the upper castes. She quotes from some

ethical teachings to explain the general misogyny towards all women and towards widows in

particular:

Q. What is cruel?
A. The heart of the viper.
Q. What is more cruel than that?
A. The heart of a woman.
Q. What is the crudest of all?
A. The heart of a sonless, penniless widow.76

Ramabai was thus aware of the graded misery of widows, the most abject enslavement

being reserved for the last category above mentioned. Pandita Ramabai was also astute enough to

trace the misery of the child widow to the societal double standards that allowed aged widowers,

particularly among kulin Brahmins to marry little girls without any social curb, leaving them

widowed soon after.77 Ramabai mounts a scathing attack on avaricious Brahmin priests who

“devour widows” houses’ and entice poor ignorant widows through emissaries to leave their

homes, and then after robbing them of their belongings, and tempting them to yield to their

“unholy desires”, “hire them out to wicked men”.78 This courage to take on the orthodox Hindus

again could have come from her location as a Christian convert, outside the punitive reach of

priests who could have otherwise ostracised her. Besides, being the widow of a Sudra and having

no other kin who could be vulnerable to the ex-communicating ploys of Brahmin orthodoxy, she

could exploit her liminal position and empower widows to regain their rightful place of dignity,

selfhood and self-worth in society.

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II

Parvatibai was bom in 1870 in the village of Devrukh, in the Konkan. Her father, as Rev.

Justin Abbot tells us, was a man noted for his piety and her mother was known for her efficiency.

Like the other girls of her time, she too did not receive any education, as it was considered

inauspicious for a girl to study. Early in life, Parvatibai became a widow, with all its attendant

markers, like a tonsured head and the widow’s dress. She had a son whom she had to bring up.

At the age of twenty six, she began to work at the Widows’ Home at Hingane, a suburb of

Poona, founded by her brother-in-law, Professor Dhondo Keshav Karve, an eminent social

reformer of her time. She simultaneously desired to gain knowledge that would help her in the

service of the Home. She travelled to several places and delivered public lectures in her efforts to

raise funds for the Home. In 1912, she took a rather bold personal decision not to shave her head

and faced the criticism of an orthodox society.

She then undertook a very harrowing voyage to America in order to learn English and to

know their methods of education which might be useful back in India. Having no money and no

one to rely on, she worked as a housemaid and tried to leam English at close range. She then

worked as a dishwasher for a hospital and suffered from a breakdown in health. After working at

several places, she got an opportunity to address women in the Hotel Astoria and in distinguished

Women’s Clubs, pleading the cause of India’s women. She also went to London and Paris for

brief visits before returning to India. In her autobiography, she also gives her views on several

issues related to women that were debated in those days.

Parvatibai Athavale, like other Indian women autobiographers, did not wait for the genre,

as Meenakshi Mukherjee says, to be “domesticated” by men and for “indigenous forms to be

developed.” Parvatibai’s autobiography lacks the sophistication that a university degree

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conferred on male writers. However, Parvatibai and other women using the genre of

autobiography “did not self-consciously think of their attempts as literary projects.”79 Apart from

the proclaimed wish to gamer the support of other widows in the cause of the nation’s

regeneration, Parvatibai also wrote in order to enter into a dialogue with readers, as Jasbir Jain

would put it with reference to women writers. Meera Kosambi writes that she “hardly assumes a

subject position” and that with other women autobiographers, exhibits “low self-worth” because

these autobiographies were “normatively intended to be instrumental.”80 But for a woman to

wield the pen to craft a selfhood, despite protestations of noble and selfless motives, is by itself

an act of defiance and self-assertion. For an upper-caste widow, it is also fraught with the

dangers of the politics of writing. It also entails an initial alienation of the self - a “fracturing of

the communal identity in order to write the ‘I’ into prominence” before the two can be

reintegrated in the text.81 Though self-effacement seems to set the tone of the text here as also an

endorsement of erasure of the self as normative for a widow, a close reading pf Hindu Widow:

An Autobiography reveals an odyssey of the self that to a large extent excludes others. The

autobiography never dwells for long on either the husband or the son, or any other person for that

matter. It is her quest, her ceaseless efforts that she writes of, of course judiciously sprinkled

with her advice to other women, for effect. Unlike what is usually expected of women’s

autobiography in a conflation of gender and genre, Parvatibai refuses to wallow in emotional

scenes. The narrative is almost stark in the absence of any description of nature either. In that

sense, the autobiography is most unfeminine, but quite in keeping with the expectations of a

Brahmin widow. However, beneath the display of self-abnegation lies a subtext that like a

“palimpsest” reveals underlying illicit experiences and a preoccupation with personal growth.

This reveals what Porter Abbot calls the drama in the “performative” act of writing the self - the
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“dissimilarity between identity and discourse.”82 Multiple facets of her selfhood get woven into

the fabric of the narrative - the ignorant and hard-working girl-child, the reluctant child-bride,

the unassuming wife who is silent about her husband, the grief-stricken widowed mother, the

earnest would-be-social-reformer, the diligent student, the sincere maid and many other roles.

A close study of the autobiography of Parvatibai Athavale reveals her personal

experience of widowhood and the ways in which this awareness is simultaneously a “schooling”

in the “humanist rhetoric” of the male reform agenda and a deviation from it. It shows her

personal aspirations towards transcending the limitations of widowhood, and the strategies used

in the development of personhood as also the construction of selfhood in a society that frowned

on any individualistic assertion of the self. While it casts light on her observation of the lives of

other widows, her critique of Brahminic patriarchy also unveils some gaps and silences in her

construction of widowhood.

For a clearer perception of the impact of widowhood on the consciousness of Parvatibai,

it is very essential to know her experience of marriage, since widowhood is its obverse. The

autobiography reveals her mother’s anxiety to get the overgrown eleven-year old Parvatibai

married off to whoever would accept her, since they had transgressed social norms by not getting

her married much earlier. Societal surveillance of the sexuality of the unmarried girl is

manifested in the way neighbours would goad the mother: “What a big girl she is, and not yet

married?”(Hindu Widow: An Autobiography. 8 - emphasis added; the text is hereafter

abbreviated as HW when in parenthesis). This collective social anxiety about the potential power

of female sexuality revolves around the threat to the purity of caste and patriliny and is dominant

in literature in the common belief that an unmarried girl would soon give herself to whomsoever

she willed. Thus, when an alliance materialises with a lame man earning a meagre fifteen rupees
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per month in the Customs Office, with no kin to call his own, Parvatibai’s father gratefully

accepts it as a godsend. Besides, her opinion and consent regarding her marriage to a lame man,

is obviously never sought, since such a thought would never occur to the desperate parents of the

bride, worried that they would be tormented in hell if they failed to get her married before

menstruation. She says: “I was not at all pleased with the marriage arrangements, but I said

nothing” (HW, 11). The socialisation of the girl into a non-person still does not mitigate her

resentment at the unequal match. Though anxious not to be a burden to her mother, Parvatibai

still could not get herself to enjoy the music, food and other festivities of the wedding.

It is small wonder then that in her autobiography, she allots merely one paragraph to

dutifully describe her husband as a virtuous man and knowingly or otherwise, waxes enthusiastic

instead about her wonderful relationship of sisterhood with a woman called Ramabai Joshi in

their commonly shared home. Could one be charitable enough to attribute this reticence to

disclose the intensity and quality of her relationship with her husband/God to the customary

silence imposed upon wives open to the public gaze? Or is it more likely that her painful

experience of motherhood and her lukewarm response regarding her marriage dampen her spirit

towards the institution of non-consensual, indissoluble child-marriage? The pain of the young

wife in bearing, rearing and worse, losing children is expressed in these words: “In my fifteenth

year I had a son bom, but he lived only for a day. This experience of mine when I was but fifteen

years of age, was a very difficult one, and a physician’s aid was required... before I was twenty

years of age I had given birth to three children” (HW,13). Unlike in the case of Ramabai Ranade,

there is no glorification and deification of the husband in glowing terms. Silence of this kind

acquires its own significance.

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Reverting to the subject of Parvatibai’s widowhood, her claim that she was not interested

in a second marriage and hence had no desire to follow in her widowed sister Anandibai’s

footsteps, is symptomatic of the performative aspect of crafting a selfhood. This disavowal could

be because she had no desire to stir a hornet’s nest on a highly controversial social subject,

especially in the wake of the moral horror experienced by her mother on this issue. To accept

prima facie her explanation, it could be her way of channellising her energy or her libido into the

larger cause of national regeneration rather than diverting it into the care of one family alone. Of

course in her refusal to be tempted into a second marriage, it could also be, as Uma Chakravarti

says, that she claims an agency over a domain which in reality she had no access to, owing to the

dearth of enterprising men who would venture to marry a virgin widow, let alone the mother of a

son.83 Parvatibai’s firm resolve to remain celibate could also be because marriage was not a very

attractive proposition for a person who never portrays a mutually satisfying relationship with her

husband in the first place. The death of the husband is recorded perfunctorily with no emotional

space wasted on this highly significant event in a Hindu woman’s life. In spite of the stigma

attached to the figure of the widow, she might prefer the safety of widowhood to the risks that

another marriage might entail, what with her earlier traumatic deliveries and having to court

poverty and run a household on a very modest budget.

The stigma of remarriage was in any case, not less harsh than that of widowhood. In fact,

with no in-laws to either support or taunt her in her present state of widowhood, she could at

least look forward to a sympathetic acceptance from both her parents and her newly remarried

sister. In this context, it is worthwhile to dwell on yet another liminal figure among women that

would seem to privilege the negative comfort derived from the relative safety and certainty of

widowhood, however heartless it might sound. Kashibai Kanitkar very sensitively portrays the
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figure of the deserted wife, whose miseries and insecurities are at times worse than those

suffered by widows. One such abandoned wife in the novel Palkicha Gonda. is a girl called

Dwarki who reveals how she lives in an “in between state”, belonging to neither the world of the

suvasinis nor that of the widows and was often prevented from participating in any ceremony

owing to the ill luck she was supposed to portend.84 In short, Parvatibai’s autobiography, on

close reading, reveals widowhood as a far more viable option than the risks involved in a

marriage. Even in agrarian societies like Haryana where widow marriage was more the norm

than the exception, the widows themselves often preferred to retain their share of the property

and live independently rather than get embroiled in yet another patriarchal relationship of

Karewa. In her own case, widowhood turns out to have more emancipatory potential, autonomy

and the possibility of self-growth than would have been possible in the narrow constricting role

of the ideal wife. The control exerted over the latter by the husband and the affinal family could

be very stringent, especially in the case of the bride, her status being the lowest in the family

hierarchy.

This of course, is not to glorify her widowhood, since it was one state indeed any

pativrata would dread to even think of. In fact, Parvatibai’s autobiography too reveals the

degradation attached to this state and the constant humiliation she had to face in the form of

discrimination and indifference towards the disfigured widow. It also reveals the agony of her

parents regarding their three widowed daughters. Yet interestingly, this sorrow did not include

the position of her brother, who too was a widower, since the peculiar social problems of

widowhood obviously excluded men: “Thus with three widowed daughters our parents felt the

burden of a deep sorrow” (HW, 15). This “deep sorrow” however, did not stop her mother from

expressing her disgust at her daughter Anandi’s remarriage. Her strongly orthodox mind could
 154

not dissociate the sense of sin attached to it, coupled with the humiliation of being ostracised

even by the lowly barber and the washerman. The hold of tradition over even a mother’s

affection for her daughters is evident in the way she is even prepared to lose Parvatibai to the

possible contraction of cholera at Benares, rather than leave her in Bombay under the disgraceful

and seductive influence of Anandibai. Here, it is clear that being a mother was secondary to her

social identity and her compliance with religious strictures. For Parvatibai’s mother, her

children’s widowhood and even death seemed preferable to the ignominy of a second marriage.

Of the two therefore, for many, widowhood seemed less of a disaster than witnessing a widowed

daughter’s marriage. Karve’s mother even while personally accepting his marriage to a widow,

had to display displeasure for public consumption.

While on the issue of widow remarriage, Parvatibai’s views on widow remarriage are

apparent in the way her narrative voice merges with that of her father’s, in the case of her sister

Anandi’s remarriage. This remarriage of the virgin widow was acceptable to them, despite the

social ostracism they had to face, thus reminding us of the views of Dayanand Saraswati, Gandhi

and Tilak on this issue - that the remarriage of virgin widows was acceptable. Parvatibai herself

professes her resolve to remain single as she had already experienced the “bliss of married life”,

unlike her sister - this “bliss” obviously referring to the sexual experience of a married woman.

This attitude while assuring the deceased husband the perpetual sexual fidelity of his widow

reflects the entrenched and conservative Brahminical stranglehold in Maharashtra in maintaining

upper-caste exclusivity enjoined on the minds and bodies of Brahmin widows. Parvatibai does

not appear to be capable of questioning male hypocrisy in the double standards for men and

women in practising celibacy. She applies a different yardstick, albeit through the narratorial

perspective of her father, in the matter of the proposed remarriage of her brother and of Professor
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Karve from the one used for herself. Here, celibacy is not advocated in their case, because, in

the words of her father, both these men had extremely attractive traits of character and hence,

they ought to remarry. It is quite another matter that as a woman, Pandita Ramabai did not share

this enthusiasm about Professor Karve who she felt was ill-matched for her favourite student

Anandi, what with his short stature, frail body, inadequate salary and a twelve-year old son from

his previous marriage.85 It must be remembered that a thirty three year old widower like Ranade,

a little hard of hearing and with rather poor eyesight, had been coerced immediately to marry an

eleven year old Ramabai. The Shastras too enjoin a man to remarry in order to fulfil his domestic

obligations of the household. We observe here a selective and gendered application of notions of

social reform for women wherein a guilty conscience prompts reformers to make token

reparations at least in the case of virgin widows, while never stopping to radically interrogate the

gendered sexual anomalies in Brahminism per se, as often pointed out by Uma Chakravarti. Hari

Narayan Apte’s novel Pan Lakshan Khon Gheto evokes this disparity. The young widowed

heroine Yamuna is forcibly tonsured by her Mama in his indecent haste to consummate his own

remarriage with a girl-bride.86 Gandhi therefore preferred not to endorse widow remarriage and

instead insisted that the widower too remain celibate and conserve sexual energy. Again, it is

difficult to dissociate the authorial voice from her father’s voice, when he says on seeing

Anandi’s infant son, “It is a wicked custom to prevent child widow remarriage, thereby depriving

our country of those who might become pillars of strength to her” (HW, 19). We see here a

traditional reiteration of the purpose of a woman’s life as a mother. This reiteration links the

modem idea of widow remarriage to a nascent militant Hindu nation’s regeneration through the

birth of strong male children in order to counter the perceived threat of the freely proliferating

Muslims as well as to save the enslaved nation-mother from the clutches of foreign yoke.
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Anandibai’s remarriage and motherhood shows the expediency of Brahminism in harnessing the

reproductive capacity of widows to the superior cause of the nation. Thus virgin widows

converted into legitimate mothers of sons toiling for Bharatmata, serve also as what Rada

Ivekovic and Julia Mostov call “territorial markers” 87 to distinguish the Hindu “self’ from the

Muslim “other”. Scholars like Ashis Nandy, Charu Gupta and Mrinalini Sinha have written

about the psychology of the nation in terms of femininity and masculinity. The lowly widow thus

elevated to a sanctified position, also reflects the anxiety of a denigrated and emasculated subject

nation to exhibit a resurgent masculine might through the unabashed use of feminine symbols to

ensure it. The feminised body of the nation was thus to be rescued by the brave sons of the

motherland.

Apart from the remarriage of Anandibai, Parvatibai registers very significant ways of

comprehending widowhood that are very different from the guilt-ridden and lop-sided male

responses to enforced widowhood. It is evident from the autobiography that Parvatibai either

lacks the intellectual tools to effectively mount a critique of male hypocrisy or prudently chooses

not to discuss the blatant double standards involved in the remarriage of Brahmin men and

women. However, being a victim herself in this cultural degradation of widows, she is all

sympathy for the lot of other widows. Her knowledge of the miseries of widows is gleaned by

travelling across the length and breadth of the country, especially to pilgrim centres like Udupi,

Mathura, Varanasi and others. The reader gets a heart-rending picture of widows, many of them

little girls, clad in tattered clothes, clamoring hungrily for a tiny morsel of prasad and whiling

away their lives, inevitably in the midst of lecherous men (HW, 44-45). Parvatibai therefore very

aptly expresses her concern in the hope of evoking sympathetic responses from the community.

She writes about the urgent need to rehabilitate these marginalised widows in suitable Homes
 157

that would shelter them and free them from a “slavery that exists in the sacred places of India

under the guise of securing for them spiritual riches” (HW, 45). She does not expect them to be

mere recipients of kindness. She insists that they take their rightful place in society and lead

fruitful lives as contributors to the functioning of civil life. She confronts the reader with the

stark reality that the widow’s body is a gendered one which, to quote Meenakshi Thapan’s view

of the embodiment of women, is the “site of violence, exclusion, and abuse.”88

Here it is pertinent to note that her autobiography was ostensibly meant as an inspiration

for other widows to take up the cause of the nation through social work. Her immediate target

audience therefore comprised of widows. But she could not expect to antagonise male readers

too, with whom she seems to be in a persuasive dialogue in the autobiography. She would

therefore have to project an altruistic image of herself too as a selfless worker rejecting any

remuneration for her work. She displays an anxiety common to many women - an anxiety not to

appear as competing in any way with men for jobs, since that would have quickly evoked a male

backlash and snuffed out further efforts to bring women, especially widows, out of the closet of

the home. Padma Anagol points out this female strategy of bringing women into the mainstream

by cloaking it in the “rhetoric of the more acceptable concept of service to the family, society

and nation”, while simultaneously avoiding stridency in demanding equal rights and pay for
go
women.

As analysed earlier, the perpetuation of the superiority of Brahmins was sculpted through

the disfigured person or rather, non-person of the widow, by subjecting her to the trauma of

tonsuring her head and erasing her femininity. As a constant symbolic reminder of the cessation

of her sexuality, she would have to don coarse white or dull maroon saris and enter into the

“orbit” of “sartorial shame” and “cultural national authenticity”90 that would paradoxically
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exhibit the nation’s cultural pride in its rigorous enforcement of a widow’s asexuality.

Parvatibai’s trauma of the tonsuring ritual is conveyed through a tautly controlled but poignant

narratorial perspective that allows the reader to gauge how distraught she was on being

compelled by tradition to accept a new normative of femininity - one that was to mark off

widows from other positive ways of being a woman. While she calmly divulges the eventuality

of her husband’s death to the reader in a sentence or two, she gamers readers’ sympathy for her

new, defeminised look by using the narrative device of sharing her experience as a widow, shorn

of hair and all other signs of the state of mangalya, through the eyes of her infant son:

“Why are you wearing this reddish sari, and where has your hair gone?”
Overcome with emotion, I would reply, “My hair has gone with your father.” To
this he would say, “Then let us go where he is”. At such times the condition of
my heart was such as only those can know who are widows with children. Others
cannot know it (HW).

‘Others’ here would include nationalists and reformers, all of whom were male. This narrative

ploy saves her from making any explicit references to her own anguish as a woman and yet

touches the hearts of the readers by the sudden and stark transformation to a non-feminine mode.

It shows her helplessness at the inability of language to fully express a state of mind that was

uniquely experienced by widows and hence was incomprehensible to others.

This narration also discloses the dual burden of a disfigured widow suddenly reduced to a

non-person and its harrowing impact on the emotions of her infant son, which again fills her with

an awareness of her own helplessness in assuaging the bewilderment of her son. She is thus

forced to submit herself to a dehumanising custom and to watch the impact of this almost

grotesque change in her appearance on a vulnerable child, without possessing the power to

challenge the demeaning ritual. Apart from her powerlessness is also her guilt bom from her
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enculturation into the notion of sin regarding the act of widows letting their hair grow. It took her

years to outgrow and disrupt this ideology. She writes that it was only after many long years,

during which she acquired an education and expanded her intellectual horizons by her

interactions with Professor Karve, that she became aware of the need for widows themselves to

“assert their right to their own heads” and refuse to be tonsured (HW, 47). This was indeed a

radical departure that wrested control over the widow’s body from the male priests parading as

moral enforcers of religion, and returned it to where it actually belonged - to the widow herself.

This restoration of the dignity of the body ruptured the collective social control that pinned the

widow’s body down in its vicious grip. It paved the way for a more enabling way of

reconstituting the normative female body of the widow, bom of an awareness that had hitherto

been shrouded under layers of mystification and religious injunctions.

Yet, this crucial disruption comes as a gradual shift in her consciousness which does not

lead to an immediate revolt on her part. She acquiesces with the custom of shaving her head for

many years before she takes the courageous step of growing her hair - courageous because of her

willingness to bear the calumny she had to face from several quarters. An ever vigilant social

monitoring of widows is manifested in the way several people cast insinuations about her secret

motive behind the act of growing her hair. The questions indicate a collective upper-caste social

panic about the possibility of Parvatibai deciding to marry again, presaged, as is presumed, by

her reverting to her pre-widowed way of dressing, though on a simple scale. Her narrative does

not explore the virtual lack of suitors in the case of an ageing Brahmin widow though. In any

case, what prevented her earlier on from immediately putting an end to her humiliation was her

fear that she would never have been accepted as a social worker and therefore would not have

succeeded in her mission of collecting funds for the widows’ home. More importantly, her fear
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of the adverse impact of social vilification of the mother on the tender mind of her young son

made her bide her time for her son to grow mature enough to withstand the onslaught of caste

members on his mother’s character and suspected passions (HW, 53-54). This apparent

acquiescence to a demeaning ritual while patiently waiting for the opportune moment to register

her protest, is one reason why Parvatibai could be successfully recuperated within traditional

society. In fact, she redefines the notion of passivity by remaining within the normative limits of

widowhood only in so far as it served her purpose and by casting off the limits by her free

choice, when she could afford to do so. It also indicates the severely cramping socio-cultural

conditions under which the incipient feminism of Parvatibai had to be curbed for years before

asserting itself. This reflects the social vulnerability of affective bonds between parents and

children that prevents Parvatibai from exercising her will earlier.

Parvatibai’s autobiography not only throws a glance on her own disfigurement, but also

incorporates the plight of other widows. The person who had begun the text on an apologetic

note now asserts that her experience as a woman, as a widow, and as a social worker entitled her

to authentically share her views with others who stood to gain from her words of wisdom. She

asserts: “I have a full personal experience of the degradation connected with customs to which

widows are subjected.” Again, she says in reference to the tonsuring of widows’ heads: “What

must be the state of a child-widow’s mind as she sees about her what she cannot enjoy. No one

can understand it who has not become a widow in her youth...To remove this evil, it is not

enough to hold occasional Social Conferences in the large cities” (HW, 49-50). Her words

referring to the intellectual zeal of social reformers imply that the male social reformers could

never truly know the colonisation of a woman’s body at the hands of dehumanising rituals

calculated to discipline and control her. She resents their appropriation of an arena that belonged
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to women and makes a dig at other male social reformers for never practising what they

preached. Her public life in the cause of the Widows’ Home negates the notion propounded by

Partha Chatterjee that women’s agency was to be found only within the context of the home

through the evidence of their autobiographies.91 She thus decries the holding of inane

conferences by male reformers without actually addressing the problems of widows. More

pertinently, she is able to zoom in accurately on the reasons for the widow’s lack of initiative in

reclaiming her own body. Tonsuring of widows under the pretext of renunciation of the world,

she writes, “is being imposed on helpless, ignorant and wholly dependent widows” (HW, 49 -

emphasis added). She is thus sharp enough to comprehend that the seeming passivity and

acquiescence of widows to their own defeminisation is a result of the material compulsions that

subordinate a powerless widow to the ideology of normative widowhood.

In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Paulo Freire asserts that only the oppressed could

bring about any change in their condition, by opposing oppressive practices, since the oppressor

was too dehumanised to save either himself or his victim.92 Likewise, Parvatibai believed that

only widows would be able to decide what was best for themselves regarding practices like

tonsuring of the head. She is convinced that shaving of the head should be completely voluntary

and widows, who feel otherwise, should themselves object to this practice and refuse to submit

to the barber’s razor. Regarding the tonsuring of widows under the pretext of advocating a

spiritual life of renunciation, she sees no earthly or heavenly gains to be had in tonsuring widows

against their will when they themselves have absolutely no inclination towards spiritual

renunciation (HW, 49). Her autobiography shows the meaninglessness of the spiritual space open

to widows only in the privacy of the home in the midst of other happy couples, with no other

higher religious aspirations than those concerning the salvation of the husband’s soul.93
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Coming from a woman like Parvatibai who on an earlier occasion had harshly criticised a

widow at the Home for her decision to grow her hair, this change was commendable. Very

pertinently, she tries to sensitise the readers to the graded ways of being a widow. Being an

unattractive old widow might ward off unwanted male attention. But humiliation and frustration

were in store for the older widow indoctrinated into viewing tonsuring as a religious necessity.

She notes that barbers discriminated against aged widows and preferred to shave the nubile ones.

The sexual overtones of this kind of preference for young widows by barbers, is left to the reader

to gauge. She therefore writes persuasively that only male relatives, like the widow’s brother,

should be asked to shave her head, if custom did not let the widow grow her hair (HW, 50). In

this regard it is interesting to note Jotirao Phule’s call for a barbers’ strike against the tonsuring

of a widow’s head. His genuine concern for the plight of widows notwithstanding, we perceive a

marked difference in the two stances. Phule’s call implicates widows as passive recipients of

social change while Athavale sees them as active agents asserting their rights as women. She

therefore boldly exhorts widows to resist forced tonsuring. She urges them to grow their hair

instead, in the way she did, and to refuse to go about life with a sad demeanour.

Like other male moderate reformers of her time, she too blames “customs” for the

hapless plight of widows usually rationalised as a defensive Hindu response to Muslim

depredations in the past. For Parvatibai to articulate a more radical critique of Brahminical

patriarchy, she would have had to carve a space for herself “outside the fold” of the community

to borrow Gauri Vishwanathan’s phrase, and the protection of the family, which would be next

to impossible, except in the case of converts like Pandita Ramabai and women like Rukhmabai

and Tarabai, who did not belong to the upper caste of Brahmins and who did not have much to

lose anyway. Moreover, to question the practices and tenets of Hindu religion outright would be
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to court the risk of being branded a “betrayer”, a “traitor” by self-appointed “patriots” of Hindu

nationhood as seen earlier in the accusations leveled by Tilak at Pandita Ramabai for her bold

condemnation of the misogyny in the Shastras.94 She cannot even therefore afford to write of the

British as a “countervailing” force that could redress gender wrongs within the community. In

any case, the colonial government had all along been too wary of jeopardising their own

commercial and political interests to take up cudgels for upper caste women, especially widows

and invite the wrath of the socially and economically powerful Brahmins.95 Even the Mughal

emperor Aurangzeb had refused to break caste norms on appeal by Mangs and Mahars against

the commonly upheld upper-caste Hindu practices.96 Incidentally, even Gandhi despite his deep

sympathy and respect for the widow, felt that “incalculable harm” would be done to the nation if

“the holy life lived by widows” became a thing of the past.97

As for her own widowhood, it is a setback which Parvatibai challenges and capitalises on.

In spite of, or rather, because of her widowhood, she is able to cast off the narrow domestic role

of a housewife and move towards greater individuation of her personality, even if in the context

of the Widows’ Home. She refuses the role of the widow as the “quintessential wretch”. She now

evades the patriarchal power of husbands to subordinate wives to their whims and desires. For

instance, the Maharani of Cooch Behar, Sunity Devi in her autobiography displays an abject lack

of personal freedom and is completely at the mercy of her high-handed husband.98 Rassundhari

Devi too saw her married life as a “cage” that required her to practise purdah even before her

husband’s horse.99 Therefore Parvatibai, while having to suffer privation and degradation as a

widow, is able to use the agenda of social reforms to convert her personal misfortune into an

opportunity for a new social identity. Widowhood surprisingly, confers on her an androgynous

position, wherein she could move unescorted across the length and breadth of the country and
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parley with men on the position of widows, with no fear of being under the “panoptic” social

gaze that might withhold other women from any dream of travelling alone and meeting people.

Recuperated within the nationalist framework of working selflessly for the cause of widow

rehabilitation, she escapes the vigilant and suspicious control exerted over every movement of

women, especially married women, ostensibly for their protection.

She utilises this freedom to give impassioned lectures, lobby with people, and use her

skills of networking to further her personal and public aspirations. She does what she urges other

widows to do - take their rightful place as worthy members of society. She wonders at her own

commendable achievement of collecting around seventy thousand rupees for the Widows’ Home

and thus feels a tremendous sense of self-worth. It gives her the courage to stand up for herself

when criticised by envious men who could not digest the fact that a mere woman, and an ageing

one at that, should be ‘selfish’ enough to wish to travel all the way to America. Playing the role

of the self-abnegating widow to the hilt, Parvatibai hastily reassures potentially disapproving

readers that she had only noble intentions in going to America. She would work for a living in

America and learn English and also about American institutions for the sake of the Widows’

Home. She cannot help observing sarcastically though, that far more men visited foreign

countries than women ever did. It is quite another matter that she does not really succeed in

mastering English, nor in collecting an earth-shattering amount for the Widows’ Home, though

she would like to construct her visit to America as a great success. It would never do for a mere

widow to admit, even to herself, to anything less noble than the cause of the nation that

motivated her to go abroad in the first place.

With the passage of time and the obvious demonstration of steadfast devotion to her

deceased husband, a widow is able to wield greater influence, especially in her family. It is
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Parvatibai’s unquestioned position as the mother of an adult son that allows her to make

decisions regarding his marriage to a girl of her choice, despite his initial reluctance. It is again

her indirect influence that prompts her son to take up the cause of the Widows’ Home and make

it his life’s mission. In this capacity, she is definitely not like the peripheral figure of the

powerless nubile child widow who is shunned by all. Rather, she occupies centre-stage in

charting the course of her son’s life. With age, acquiescing to sacred widowhood thus has its

perks, even if it is too heavy a price to pay.

If we sift carefully enough through her profession of selfless service of the nation’s

widows, we also get to see another side to Parvatibai the reformer - a side that is normally

denied to the widow and which she herself refuses to acknowledge in her projection of her

persona in the autobiography. This is her constant effort towards self-improvement for her own

sake, towards attainment of a personhood and a sense of power that education, especially

knowledge of English conferred on a person. Western notions of the private self and personhood

are frequently posited against the public role of women. According to this view, the expression

of one precludes the other i.e., women in public offices constantly underplay the significance of

asserting a private self in the genre of autobiography.100 In this context, as seen in Parvatibai’s

autobiography, the aspirations of the private self are embedded within the matrix of the public

persona, even if obliquely expressed. Her personal aspiration to acquire a greater degree of

power through knowledge is evident in her earnest efforts to learn English, ostensibly, to help in

her public work. She goes to great lengths to fulfil this desire. Her voyage to America, while

largely for the acquisition of English and to learn about Western institutions, is also at a

subconscious level, a matter of personal achievement she had “never dreamt” of. When she gets

the “golden opportunity” of seeing the sights of the capital city Washington, she is elated about it
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since she had “given up hope” of seeing it. Naturally, she is not at all averse to mixing pleasure

with business. She enjoys the hospitality of the Irish Miss 0‘Reilly, who arranges a “beautifully

decorated” room exclusively for Parvatibai and which gives great “delight” to her. Parvatibai’s

opinion is constantly sought on what might please her. She constantly writes about how “happy”

she felt there and how she would have gladly spent the rest of her life in the “pure, happy home”

of the O’Reillys (HW, 127). This is not at all surprising, considering the relative freedom she

experienced in America from the usual constraints that cramped the lives of widows in India. She

does not feel overtly guilty to accept more milk and fruits than the other three indigent students

with whom she stays for some time, on account of her age and delicate constitution -

concessions that could never be made for widows in India. She writes enthusiastically about

being invited to afternoon tea and dinner clubs, about attending meetings, calling on influential

women in America and most of all, the honour of getting to speak at the prestigious Sororis

Club.

She also writes about the “luxurious” living arrangements at the Baldwins where she

stayed more as a companion than as a maid. She basks in the love showered on her in an almost

equal relationship - a thing usually in short supply when it came to widows back home. In fact,

she pointedly refers to the despondency into which widows sank in India, whereas single women

in America found umpteen ways in which to be engrossed happily and constructively (HW, 123).

It is another matter altogether that it took ages for a patriarchal state to grant suffrage and legal

rights to American women. She writes about seeing the Buddhist temple at Colombo, the

Women’s University at Tokyo and the luxurious hotel at San Fransisco where she was put up.

Her journey to England and France, never truly there on her itinerary, was definitely not for

altruistic reasons of serving the Widows’ Home. However, she makes half-hearted attempts to
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couch her desire to see foreign lands as an endeavour to raise funds for widows. Such a desire

and experience of luxurious living conditions could not be accommodated under the strictly

monitored austerities supposed to be practised by widows in India. Thus, beneath the saga of

suffering, sickness and heroic struggles of an individual in an alien land, the autobiography also

gives glimpses of individuation and joy experienced by a ‘mere’ widow to whom such pleasures

were forbidden otherwise. She notes with satisfaction the close bond of sisterhood that she

shared with many people in America, used as she is to either being ignored, ridiculed, or stared at

as a museum piece in India.

It was Anandibai’s remarriage and her own education that radically changed the contours

of her otherwise predictably mapped out life of enforced widowhood. This event proved to be a

“new birth” for Parvatibai. Otherwise, there would have been a predictable closure to her social

life, marked by pilgrimages, prayers and a constant blaming of her own fate, as she herself puts

it (HW, 27). In a society firmly entrenched in the belief that education for girls would definitely

end in their widowhood, Parvatibai, as a girl, had absolutely no dream of acquiring any education

other than the one considered proper for girls. Ramabai Ranade too was deprived of education as

a child, owing to this fear of widowhood. As she narrates her life’s story, Parvatibai shows her

awareness of the gender discrimination and stereotypical roles that girls had to not only put up

with, but also internalise. While speaking of the absence of schools for boys, she says in the

same breath that “of course, there was none for girls.” She writes:

At that time no one in our village discussed such a question as female education.
If we girls learnt how to properly arrange for the worship of the idols, how to
pound and shell the rice, how to properly remove the plates on which the family
had dined, and how to bathe and care for the younger children, we were thought
to have obtained all the education that was necessary for a girl (HW, 4).
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The deep-seated Brahmin fear of the learned woman who could revolt against the tyranny

of a patriarchal religion was thus minimised with efforts to inculcate an indifference to, if not an

aversion for knowledge bom of the fear of widowhood. Writing about the illegitimacy of

women’s desire for education in a patriarchal set-up that revolved solely around the needs of the

husband/God, Tanika Sarkar says that the transgressive act of educating oneself was seen as an

immoral act. The educated woman who no longer needed a husband was therefore conflated with

the immoral one. Besides, this education also carried the risk of adultery through secret

assignations made with other men. Tanika Sarkar writes: “the immoral and the educated women

have both symbolically cancelled out the husband: widowhood is a physical embodiment of the

consequences”.101 In any case, the difference between the word ‘rand’ which meant widow, and

the word ‘randi’ used for a prostitute, are so slight as to be easily interchangeable. However, as

far as Parvatibai’s education at the rather late age of twenty-six was concerned, she had nothing

to lose, having already lost her husband in spite of her ignorance. The nationalist agenda of

women’s education thus helped Parvatibai immensely in gaining confidence in herself as a

t

person, and instilled in her a missionary zeal to help in the nation’s regeneration by working for

the uplift of widows: “It was the education I received that made questions revolve in my mind, as

to the real meaning of the country of India, her national life and what is needed to be done for the

national uplift” (HW, 27).

But it is to be noted that while her education could be harnessed to the reconstruction of

the nation, it was in no way capable of radically challenging patriarchal assumptions. Unlike

Pandita Ramabai, for whom knowledge of the Vedas and other scriptures proved to be an eye-

opener, Parvatibai’s education was of a rather limited scope. It did not equip her to mount a
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sustained and radical critique of Brahminic patriarchy which was so well entrenched that few

women could wrest a subject position for themselves.

Also, her acquisition of education was in the face of the customary discrimination and

alienation that a tonsured, deglamorised widow could expect to experience. Her autobiography

documents the ways in which she rebelled against being consistently sidelined both by the

teachers and other pupils as an anomaly owing to her widowed attire. Wearying of such

treatment, she refuses to go to school. Acutely conscious, and perhaps a little bit resentful

towards the display of wealth by other rich wives encouraged by modem husbands to acquire an

education, Parvatibai is acutely conscious of her own desexed looks: “I was a shaven widow

from the Konkan and my clothes were none of the best” (HW, 22). These other ladies must have

avoided her on account of the deep chasm in class and marital status coupled with the fear of

contact with an accursed widow. She also records the initial cultural prejudice she faced when

audiences showed a marked reluctance to listen to a lecture by an inauspicious widow whenever

she stood up to speak about the Widows’ Home. This contempt and indifference might also have

influenced her to shed the garb of the widow and grow her hair when she could afford to do so.

In fact, her tour to America legitimises her buying of six Gujarati silk saris - a far cry from the

coarse, heavy dull maroon she had felt compelled to wear for years.

Again, it is to be noted that it is Parvatibai who conveys her parents’ misery at the plight

of the three widows. She explains to the reader that it was for their sake that she cast aside her

own sorrow and put up a semblance of a cheerfulness she did not feel in reality. It is for their

sake she says, that she philosophically accepted her lot without exhibiting her own grief.

Incidentally, in the course of the narrative, five years of her life as a young widow are collapsed

into a single sentence. The narrative thus reveals how Parvatibai’s status as a widow is mediated
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by her familial relationship as a daughter. This gap speaks volumes about the uneventfulness of

her life and also about the unpleasantness associated with being a widow.

However, despite Parvatibai’s belief in the undiluted sorrow of her parents, from other

accounts,102 it is evident that the parents were not averse to using the productive labour of the

widowed daughters, their concern for the widow notwithstanding. Uma Chakravarti astutely

recognises the exploitation of the “mobile labour” of Anandibai as a widow, caught between the

contesting claims of her parents and her brother to her labour. The latter ostensibly wished to

educate his sister, while in reality he also wanted to use her service in the communal kitchen in

Bombay. Parvatibai too must have slogged for her parents, though interestingly, she is silent on

this issue of the labour of the widow as a drudge, exploited within the family. She is ready to

give the reader her experience of the harrowing and back-breaking labour she willingly and

dutifully puts in as a dishwasher in the U.S., though. This reticence to mention the

unmentionable - the material exploitation of the labour of the dependent widowed daughter can

be traced to the need to shield the natal family from the adverse judgement of readers. The

honour of the family particularly that of a reformer like Parvatibai, demanded that it be portrayed

always as an affectionate one ever concerned about the physical wellbeing of the widow. The

constraints and awkwardness of the genre here, call for concealment, underplaying and posturing

in order to shield the family and to craft an acceptable projection of one’s own personality.

In this matter of drudge labour, it is pertinent to note with reference to the autobiography,

that it was not the widow alone who slogged for others. Parvatibai’s mother too was

overburdened with the care of twelve children and many domestic animals, apart from other

chores in the house and her work in the fields. She mentions that this labour so exhausted her

mother that it made her very irritable towards the children. Karve’s biography shows how
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Anandibai too as the wife of Professor Karve was left to fend for herself and her children most of

the time in his absence in the cause of the Widows’ Home. She had to put in long hours of hard

work in the communal kitchen too. This is the case with Rassundhari Devi also. However, the

quite obvious difference between the labour of the wife and that of the widow was that while the

former did it more out of a sense of duty and affection for her family and shared in the power,

prestige and wealth if any, of her husband, the latter had no such dividend to look forward to.

Widows toiled with no sense of personal power in the affinal home and were often treated with

suspicion reserved for outsiders.

While on the labour of the widowed sisters Anandi and Parvati, there is a rather different

perception of the notion of work that Parvatibai gives to the reader in her autobiography -

different from the usual experience of widows resigned to toiling from dawn to dusk for

ungrateful relatives, without any material or affective compensation. In fact, Parvatibai imbues

the idea of labour with a kind of nobility by dissociating it from the materiality of monetary

returns. By giving up her claims to any pay for her labour in the Hingane Home for Widows,

Parvatibai transforms the notion of drudge labour into useful, constructive work in the cause of

the nation’s marginalised widows. She raises her work to the level of selfless service and

constructs her identity as a significant social reformer in her own right. In a way, she fits into the

mould of the sacrificing penurious widow. Yet, this notion of sacrifice is rather different from

the stereotypical depictions of self-abnegating widows, since it is out of her own choice that she

dedicates her service in the interest of the nation and not merely out of a false consciousness of

spirituality. This elevation of labour to a socially productive one helps her shake off the tag of an

abject, helpless widow and fills her with a sense of purpose that raises her in her own esteem and

that of others. Her labour gets her social visibility, usually a male preserve, while the drudge
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labour of widows within the home always remained invisible and unrecognised. To this extent,

therefore, her willingness to labour for others is personally satisfying and emancipatory.

However, it must also be noted in passing, that her assertion about being able to feed fifty

widows daily with her efforts, does not augur very well for the self-image of the widows who

then become the recipients of Parvatibai’s charity (HW, 62).

Besides, it is worth remembering that while Parvatibai claimed to labour absolutely

selflessly for the widows’ home, her autobiography helps us glean other motives too lurking in

the background. The text makes it amply clear that if there was one thing that she as a penurious

widow was anxious about, it was the education and upbringing of her son. She constantly shows

her awareness of being left absolutely no financial, material security by her deceased husband,

who had had to maintain his family on a meagre income. Her sense of self-worth ebbs with her

dependence on her parents first, and later on, on her sister and brother-in-law. She reveals her

feeling of guilt at burdening them with the education of her son and constantly dwells on her

need to personally provide for her son’s upbringing. Thus, her incessant efforts towards the well­

being of the widows are also her way of contributing her share to her brother-in-law’s humanist

endeavour and thereby vindicating herself in his eyes. Ultimately, there was, therefore, a

materiality to her labour.

Nevertheless, Parvatibai’s autobiography departs from the expected trajectory of the

victimised and exploited widow who had no free choice in either the nature or extent of her

labour. On the contrary, far from wanting to shirk labour, she seems anxious to portray a side to

herself that positively thrived on the challenge of fruitful work. For her, sitting idle was tortuous,

as she explains in the episode where her sister punishes her for refusing to go to school by not

assigning her any work throughout the day. For her, a life without gainful work was a “prison-
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like” condition that she strained against with determination. Likewise, she lets the reader know

how diligent and hardworking she was in her account of her stay at an official’s house at

Dharwad on one of her umpteen fund-raising campaigns. She discloses that though she was

treated like a queen and not allowed to do any work, she wearied of the rest and she won her

hosts’ hearts by readily doing the commonest of household duties. She closes this incident by

relating that she had passed the test given by the hosts and was soon accepted as a sister (HW,

43). Similarly, while in America, she gives many other instances wherein she gladly labours and

wins her employers’ trust by her faithful service. Of course, she gets paid for her labour and

chooses where to work, which again makes it different from the kind of drudgery other widows

accepted as their fate. This attitude might have been influenced by her early initiation into the

rhetoric of labour at the hands of her mother. Besides, it might also be the survival instinct of the

subaltern mind of an indigent widow whole-heartedly embracing the dominant ideology of work,

so as to make herself indispensable and thus acquire a semblance of power. However, in a

feminised and gendered division of labour, she feels equipped only to take up such chores as

cooking and care of the house and children, a domain that fell to the lot of women. Leela Dube

speaks of work division based on gender according to which domestic work - menial, dirty

household work and childcare - falls in the feminine realm. These norms are internalised by

women and the values of tolerance and self-restraint are imbibed as worthy of a woman. As

Dube says, it is within this “givenness” of gender roles that women manipulate, express

resentment, or use their deprivation and self denial and turn it into sources of power. 103 From the

autobiography of Parvatibai, it can be observed that she chooses to convert her own deprivation

and self-denial into a source of power.

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For good measure, she also ensures a space for her work in public memory through the

seemingly self-effacing act of writing her autobiography. In any case, Parvatibai differs from

even the other upper caste men in her attitude to the dignity of labour. She has a refreshing

unconcern for ‘polluting’ herself by her labour in the homes of the meat-eating mlecchas. By

harnessing her labour to the reconstruction of the nation, she redeems herself from the

humiliation of the inauspicious widow. Then again, it should be remembered that in her own

country, she had made innumerable forays into the male-dominated public arena while on her

fund-raising quests and had appropriated a space and a speech reserved for men. Her

innumerable lectures to male audiences show how easily she could slide between typically male

and female domains of work. Her capacity to bear hardships as a woman helps her tide over

many trying situations in America, especially as a dishwasher in a hospital. In fact, when accused

of flouting tenets set for a Brahmin woman and polluting herself by her labour, she deftly

changes the very definition of a Brahmin to include her Jewish employer, the high-minded

Mr. Baldwin as one (HW, 106).

But this does not indicate that she ever had any intentions of giving up her own caste and

its practices. As a Hindu widow in far-off America, she had a point to prove to the nation by not

capitulating to insidious attempts to convert her, especially after Pandita Ramabai’s conversion

to Christianity. She hangs on tenaciously to her ancestral religion when faced with the threat of

conversion during her lonely stay at a Home for aged missionary priests. As a seemingly helpless

widow, Parvatibai might have aroused hopes in the mind of an aged proselytising missionary, of

converting her. According to him neither she nor her country could expect salvation without

accepting Christ. She cleverly subverts his missionary rhetoric and asks him to empower her

with the English language so that she could read the Bible and decide for herself which religion
 175

she ought to practise. This was a deliberate ploy to circumvent the missionary’s racist, civilising,

christianising mission, by using yet another of the white man’s tactics - the anglicising mission.

But as she had vowed before leaving India that she would never leave the religion of her

ancestors, this was her way of using the imperialist’s agenda to suit her own purpose of learning

English. It would never do for her to follow in the Pandita’s footsteps and forfeit her claim to

being the pure widow upholding Hindu religion. The ‘resourceful’ widow is one imaginative

way of fashioning a self for the approval of critics back home.

As discussed elsewhere, Brahminism sought to perpetuate itself by the rigorous discipline

prescribed for its widows, as opposed to the more emancipatory possibilities for widows of lower

castes. Parvatibai as an upper-caste widow in an alien land was therefore the cultural bearer of

the pure, sovereign inner domain of the nation. While she had rebelled against bodily humiliation

by growing her hair, she could never think of polluting herself by changing her vegetarian diet.

As Partha Chatterjee says in The Nation and its Fragments. Indian men could afford to capitulate

to the western culture and give up practice of certain habits. But in women’s encounters with the

West, no such concessions could be granted since they were perceived as the nation’s custodians

of culture and religion.104 These caste restrictions which she willingly practises, however drain

her of energy in her efforts to find food that a Brahmin widow could safely consume. As an

epitome of pure widowhood, Parvatibai reveals her great anxiety to communicate to the ever

vigilant reader, her Herculean efforts to safeguard her culture. She misses no opportunity, to

communicate to the native reader her indifference to her own precarious health brought about by

the constant difficulty in procuring ‘pure’ food. Quite often, she survived on a little milk, some

bread or just a packet of peanuts. In any case, as an upper caste widow, she was not expected to

either pamper her palate or incite her ‘baser’ instincts by consuming other kinds of food. She was
 176

expected to subsist on meagre fare, just enough to keep body and soul together. Enough caste

concessions had already been made for a mere widow crossing the seas, at a time when even

more vocal and powerful men had stayed back to avoid ostracism.

So anxious is she to prove to the reader the ritual purity of a Brahmin widow even in

America, that she ropes in the praise of an American housekeeper in a hospital where she

worked. This housekeeper validates her superior caste status by telling Parvatibai that as a very

‘clean’ Brahmin woman she was not cut out to work in the stench of fish and meat emanating

from the hospital kitchen (HW, 100). How much awareness of the nuances of the functioning of

caste an American woman would anyway have, is worth considering. The genre of

autobiography thus reveals the anxious ways in which a Hindu widow could manipulate her

material, arrange it in a coherent pattern and imaginatively contour her experiences to enhance

her image of ideal widowhood for consumption of an orthodox audience. This text also

elucidates the Bakhtinian theory of polyphonic, dialogic utterances that always indicate the

presence of other voices in constant contestation with the enunciated words. Sidonie Smith and

Julia Watson reiterate this dialogism in women’s autobiography where “heterogeneous

discourses of identity cross the tongue.”105 Parvatibai’s autobiography as the testimony of a

woman and reformer, also incorporates other discourses - of orthodoxy, Brahminism and

patriarchal expectations of widows, in a representation of womanhood as the “bulwarks”

protecting the “uncolonized” space of the home 106 even when abroad.

This brings one back to the nineteenth century reformist preoccupation of Professor

Karve in ameliorating the cause of widows that catapulted Parvatibai from social obscurity as a

mere widow, to the status of a reformer. One tactic usually adopted by the socially-prominent

women of this period, is their idolisation of the more successful male relatives. Ramabai Ranade
 177

had unabashedly declared that she lived as the shadow of her illustrious husband. Parvatibai

likewise looks up to Professor Karve for awakening her to the needs of the nation. She calls him

her “honoured guru” and consciously or unconsciously looks up to him for guidance in her

mission. Jasbir Jain writes that in narratives, the image that women have of themselves as

persons often reflect the male members of their family such that their writings display their own

“surrogate male selves.”107 However, this could be an unconscious strategy to further one’s own

selfhood. This ploy of relying on a strong male mentor helps Parvatibai in not only tackling

adverse comments, but in also actualising her potential for personal growth. She is thus able to

apparently remain within the social limits set on her as a widow, while actually breaking free of

them. Thanks to his support, she escapes from domestic roles. In keeping with a gendered

division of work however, Anandibai could not escape such a role. She was burdened with the

onus of single-handedly bringing up her children and managing all other duties of the home back

in Poona, where she stayed back. When Professor Karve meets with a small accident, Parvatibai

sees it as a personal opportunity to prove her own worth and writes: “Now was the time to show

what I could do” (HW, 33). She insidiously puts herself on par with Professor Karve and the

other male social reformers by declaring that she too was a social reformer with a great deal of

practical experience, since she had worked ceaselessly for the Widows Home.

Thus women were forced to overtly defer to superior male power and make themselves as

self-effacing as possible, even as the text signalled other “subterranean challenges”. This

apparent diminishing of oneself had to be also followed up with an exhibition of strict adherence

to traditional family values. Kadambini, the well-known Bengali doctor constantly had to

demonstrate her great role as a wife and a mother and perhaps underplay her professional role.

Yet despite the great care taken by women working in the public sphere not to antagonise the
 178

community in any way, they still posed a threat to entrenched patriarchy by their very visibility

in public spaces reserved for men. Malavika Karlekar observes that an orthodox editor of a

newspaper called Kadambini a whore, despite her anxious efforts to give importance to her

family. 108 Similarly, Parvatibai, despite the relative freedom from male authority after her

widowhood, could not completely break out on her own without the overarching ‘protection’ of

men, even in America. Besides, the surveillance of the community could occasionally reach

remote places. Nira Yuval Davis observes that among colonised nations, women often display an

ambivalence towards the nation since they are burdened with the task of upholding the

collectivity’s honour, of not bringing shame to the family, the community and a nation already

emasculated by aliens.109 Despite Parvatibai’s indomitable courage and readiness to suffer

extreme hardships, it earns her the ire of a fanatical Bengali youth in America for “wandering”

from house to house seeking domestic work. He equates her position to the slavery of the entire

nation under the British, very conveniently forgetting the drudge labour of countless widows in

his own country. But that for him, would be a matter of course. She cannot escape from the

appropriating influence of nationalism, patriarchy and caste, epitomised in the chauvinistic

Bengali, who takes upon himself the duty of deporting her to India for transgressing caste and

gender norms and for denigrating an already subjugated nation. She is forced to concede to his

argument, for to do otherwise would raise doubts about her own patriotism as a good and pure

widow upholding the Hindu nation’s norms, and also expose to a foreign nation their internal

differences of opinion. It does not occur to her however, to question why the onus of maintaining

the semblance of nationalist unity should fall to her lot and not be shouldered by the priggish

Bengali male. It would have probably been futile anyway to even try.
 179

However, she does manage to subvert his male authority to talk down to her, by boldly

standing up for her convictions in the presence of two other Indian students. She asserts that she

was being sent back against her will and that she did not see anything wrong in honestly working

for a living as a maid. The reader perceives her contempt for the Bengali, when she refers to his

pretence of “great love for his Indian sister” even while he clung to his own “false patriotic

convictions.” She uses the device of waiting meekly for her “fate” while eventually managing to

get the better of the Bengali, without antagonising the Indian men in America. The Bengali had

informed his “Indian friends that he had freed a Maratha woman from slavery in a non-Hindu

home, and brought her to New York in order to send her back to her own country...”(HW, 108).

Apart from acute myopia of gender, the Bengali also seemed to suffer from a convenient

cultural amnesia of indigenous patriarchal tyrannies that made life hell for Brahmin widows. In

any case, the other students saw no violation of the inner domain of Indian culture because of

Parvatibai’s act of working in a non-Hindu household in a foreign land. Thus she notes with a

sense of relief after escaping narrowly from being sent back to India: “my Bengali brother’s

castles in the air fell into ruins” (HW, 110). Thus for a woman, neither marriage nor widowhood

could guarantee absolute autonomy of movement and decision-making. Even in her forties,

Parvatibai was liable to be hauled up by a strange man arrogating to himself the right to talk

down to her for not upholding community norms. This episode serves to remind readers of the

helplessness felt by Parvatibai in the face of a nationalist rhetoric about ‘pure’ widowhood, even

when she was acutely conscious of the unfair and sexist approach of the ‘patriotic’ Bengali male.

Back home in India, Parvatibai gives her views on Indian society. Here, she borrows or

rather sifts and selects ideas from the West—ideas like equality in marital relationships,

cleanliness and efficiency. But she also reiterates an orthodox notion of the essential nature of
 180

Indian women, who needed to guard the citadels of one’s home from the onslaughts of Western

influence. Here she collaborates with the nationalist agenda of cultural rejuvenation and cannot

escape from its hegemonising influence. Besides, it is also a strategy of survival to fight a

system by remaining within it. Geraldine Forbes brilliantly documents the circumspect way in

which Sarojini Naidu placates wary men about suffrage for Indian women, by vehemently

denying that women would ever seek to usurp male roles, power, and prerogatives.110 So too

with Parvatibai, one might say that her stance was a mixture of her beliefs and expediency. We

can see her clinging to some of the old ways while she also gives up certain oppressive practices

like child marriage. Importantly, she grants personhood to the couple getting married and

emphasises the importance of the consent of both. Kripabai and Pandita Ramabai through their

rather defiant stance towards normative practices, are not as readily acceptable as women like

Parvatibai are because of the latter’s ability to be recuperated within this norm of womanhood.

However, like many others, Parvatibai too is able to use the agenda of social reforms to convert

her personal misfortune into an opportunity for a new social identity. Likewise, she criticises

the indiscriminate rejection of all that is good in tradition.

In conclusion, it can be argued that Parvatibai, even without radically changing the

existing situation, managed to achieve all that she might have wanted to, exactly for the reason

that she remained within tradition. Her strategy was to subtly resist stifling aspects of social life

by biding for the opportune moment to register her protest. She redefines the stereotypical notion

of passivity by a clever ploy of using the very existing oppressive systems to her own advantage.

She clings to some of the orthodox ways of life, endorsing at times, traditional views on marriage

and motherhood that definitely detract from a modem pro-feminist interpretation of the text.

Being a woman of her times, Parvatibai would appear conservative to current readers separated
 181

in time and space from the bastion of Brahminical patriarchy. While there is no getting away

from this fact, it is also pertinent to ask ourselves how even in a seemingly enlightened twenty-

first century, gender stereotyping and thought-policing by self-appointed ‘patriots’ can instill fear

in women who dare to occupy spaces that are construed as unfeminine and ‘un-Indian’, to coin a

clumsy term. Militant Hindu nationalism, with all its attendant social, economic and religious

insecurities and frustrations among the lower orders that are roped in to propagate its violent

ideology, thrives on a degrading control of women’s attire, bodily demeanour, social interactions

- in short, her freedom.

To return to Parvatibai’s autobiography, it is true that she is not capable of breaking away

completely from Brahminical patriarchy. Also, it is not wise to unduly romanticise all her

decisions and opinions as being arrived at very self-consciously in a pre-meditated manner.

Nonetheless, as a woman, she subverts many of the limits set on her and aspires towards a better

growth of her personality. She redefines conventional stereotypes of widowhood, labour and

selfhood. Her autobiography reveals how she adeptly uses the strategy of deference to authority

at times, silence that later gets converted into a stinging attack on oppressive practices, and

seeming humility that with time gets translated into a confident assertion of her beliefs. It reveals

the strategic ways in which she successfully inscribes herself as a person, through the use of self-

effacing narrative norms in the autobiography. The reader can discern the multiple locations

occupied by the narrating self in her autobiography. The text reveals her empathy for other

widows. Most of all, it shows how she succeeds in redefining the limits set on widows and rides

the wave of patriotism and nationalism to simultaneously carve out a more enabling personhood

for herself.
 182

NOTES

1 Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India 1600-1800

(New Delhi: OUP, 1997) 53.

2 Judith Butler, “Introduction to Bodies that Matter,” Women. Autobiography. Theory: A

Reader (Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1998) 368-369.

3 P.V.Kane, History of Dharmashastra. Vol. V, Part II (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental

Research Institute, 1977) 1598.

4 Jayant Balaji Athavale and Kunda Jayant Athavale, Holy Festivals. Religious Festivals

and Vowed Religious Observances (Goa: Sanatan Sanstha, 2000) 90.

5 Leela Dube, Women and Kinship: Comparative Perspectives on Gender in South and

South-East Asia (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997) 114.

6 Shevantibai Nikambe, Ratanbai: A High-Caste Child Wife, ed. Chandani Lokuge,

(New Delhi: OUP, 2004) 26.

7 Indumati Sheorey, Folk Tales of Maharashtra (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd.,

1978) 108-110.

8 Indumati Sheorey, Folk Tales of Maharashtra 103-107.

9 Vidyut Bhagwat, “Marathi Literature as a Source for Contemporary Feminism,”

Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 29 (29 April 1995) WS 25.

10 Charu Gupta, Sexualitv.Obscenitv. Community: Women. Muslims, and the Hindu

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11 Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter (N Y: Cornell U P,

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 183

12 Vanaja Dhruvarajan, Hindu Women and the Power of Ideology (New Delhi: Vistaar

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13 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. (London:

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14 P.V.Kane, History of Dharmashastra. Vol. II, Part I, 583.

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23 P.V.Kane, History of Dharmashastra 585.

24 P.V.Kane , History of Dharmashastra 585.

 184

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 185

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