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Ornaments of Power: A Subversive Look at Two Widows of Indian Fiction

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Ornaments of Power: A Subversive Look at Two Widows of Indian Fiction

Sagnik Yadaw


   
   t 
 ।  o   
i। (19)

Pisima's Jewellery will breathe the sighs of her soul. We don't need those.

(From Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's Goynar Bakso.)

k  - -  -  -!я -  #$, %,    e

я' j j  )!
-   

! । !*  sp 


 eii  
 
- । (76)

There were eight to ten rings with white-red-blue-green gemstones, necklaces, bangles and a pair of

shining crimson ruby earrings in the box. I understood that these were the earrings that Podipisi had

told me to give my mother in the dream.

(From Lila Majumdar's Podipisir Bormibakso.)

In a consumerist society, the practice of reading does often entail “knowing” a book

before opening it. From quotes like the ones above, to reader reviews, celebrity blurbs,

stardom of current authors and the labelling of the ancient ones, this knowledge that

accumulates over an unread text is, among other things, the result of the expectations of

literary tropes and the semantic consciousness of the reader – both of which are borne out of

the predominant discourses of the time. For the subversive writer, it is this knowledge that is

challenged by the authorial intent in a disruption of tropes, a reconfiguration of meaning.

When Aparna Sen's cinematic adaptation of Goynar Bakso made me aware of the

novel, the plot of a widow's ghost and her Jewellery box interpreted itself as a tale of

yearning and woe, of unfulfilled desires, and perhaps most prominently, of perennial

victimhood. I was an urban secular Indian male, about to explore traditional India and its

Hindu brahmanical patriarchy that stands on the economy of denial – no other alternative was
 Yadaw|2

imaginable. So what came as a surprise was Mukhopadhyay’s treatment of the figure of the

widow. In roughly a 100 page, the novel tells the story of three generations of Bengali

women, linked by a family line, paranormal connections and a jewellery box. In the Mitra

household, the new bride Somlata is the first to discover that Rasamayi, the widow Pisima

has passed away. Before she can convey the news to the family, Rasamayi's voice orders her

to hide the former's Jewellery box (16). From then, it is a tale of haunting told through

Somlata's perspective and is juxtaposed with the narrative of Boson, Somlata's daughter, who

she believes to be a reincarnation of Rasamayi. The enigmatic figure of the ghost widow is,

of course, the most engaging element in the novel, and despite her remembrances that capture

fragments of a tortured life, she is hardly ready to be defined by the sentimentalised rhetoric

of victimhood. Her relationship to her Jewellery box is not merely one of desire, but that of

power as well – a power her name seemed to hold until the end of the narrative.

Goynar Bakso had reminded me of another story of a box of jewels that I had read as

a child. It was a tale of some lost family treasure but all I could recollect was the charismatic

figure of Podipisi with a club and her stern stare that had made a cow give curd rather than

milk for three days (Majumdar 51). Upon search and revision, I found that what I had taken

to be the weakness of my childhood memory was the literary genius of Lila Majumdar who,

in an act of subterfuge, had made use of the trope of lost treasure in children's fiction to

represent the subversive figure of the Bengali harridan widow. Despite her marginal status in

a traditional Bengali family and their Patrilineal family-history, Podipisi, by connecting

herself with a lost treasure, carved her own space as a mythic figure in their collective

memory and is remembered as anything but a victim.

Thus, despite belonging to decisively different genres, these two stories displayed a

similarity from a stylistic point of view in their amalgamation of the real, the fantastic and the

phantasmic that let a narrative be formed around the trope of the Jewellery box while
 Yadaw|3

revisiting the question of desire and power. Foregrounding the spectral presence of the widow

in the Indian family history, the texts presented a site of resistance and constant struggle

between the margin and the centre that can be spelt out in the politics of jewellery. It was an

intriguing discovery. Yet it hardly needed mention that the relationship of Indian widowhood

and jewellery is a relationship of absence that generally went well beyond the body of the

destitute widow. In fact, it should be clarified at the beginning that in no way will I try to

suggest an alternative history of subversive empowerment or present the two texts as a

challenge to the prevalent notion of the trauma of widowhood. But it is of some concern that

the politics of representation that encourages us to see the oppressor/oppressed in a rigid

binary in effect naturalises victimhood and petrifies systems of oppression. Though

continuing to place her in the realm of the unheimlich, the peculiarities of these two

narratives grant us an opportunity to explore the glitch in that system whereby the figures in

the margin may disrupt, if not trespass into the central order. Acknowledging the privileged

position of the textual subjects as upper-class Hindu widows, my paper then attempts to posit

an exercise in thought that regards the jewellery box as a locus of dynamic power and takes

pleasure in how the use of jewellery in hegemonic patriarchal discourse can create fissures

through conflicting oppressive strategies.

Gold Chains & Silver Bands

An inescapable part of the hegemonic discourse of Patriarchy, the act of feminine adornment

has been highly problematised in feminist studies. In any patriarchal society, men gained a

sense of their own identity through their activities in the public arena whereas women were

defined primarily by their appearance (Negrin 124). In his theory of Jewellery, sociologist

Georg Simmel saw this as a natural trait of women whose ornaments were what weapons
 Yadaw|4

were to man and who were eternal passive actors, deriving their pleasure by adorning for

others:

[W]omen's private property generally develops later than that of men and,

originally, and often exclusively, refers to adornment. By contrast, the personal

property of the male usually begins with weapons. This reveals his active and

more aggressive nature: the male enlarges his personality sphere without

waiting for the will of others. In the case of the more passive female nature,

this result – although formally the same in spite of all external differences –

depends more on the others' good will . . . . The fundamental principle of

adornment is once more revealed in the fact that, under primitive conditions,

the most outstanding possession of women became that which, according to its

very idea, exists only for others, and which can intensify the value and

significance of its wearer only through the recognition that flows back to her

from these others. (343-344)

Though Simmel should be accused of essentialising a long bestowed cultural trait,

anthropologist Pravina Shukla notes something similar in the Indian context:

Ornament is the right and responsibility of a wife while her husband is alive . .

. Once [single women] have married, acts of self-adornment are linked

inextricably with the husband. For many women . . . it becomes impossible to

separate the desire to be ornamented with the desire to please one's spouse.

(qtd. in Russell 35-36)

This relation between jewellery and passivity is a traditional one that is more clearly

exhibited in the history of slave ornaments1. The body of the woman, much like the body of

the slave, is the site of conquest and the use of jewellery as a means of physical incapacitation

is a historical practice. In containing and constricting the movement of the female body, what

Europe achieved with the corset and China with the lotus feet, India achieved with the

spectacular Solah Shringar2. In Hindu society, the singular obsession with the body of the
 Yadaw|5

married woman as the ideal one to be adorned betrays not only the objectification of the bride

but the normativity of married identity. Instead of a single wedding band, an Indian wife

might wear a bindi on her forehead, a piercing in her nose, a gold chain with or without a

thali or marriage pendant around her neck, glass and metal wrist bangles, anklets with or

without bells, and rings (Pendergast 1: 104). Along with the sheer weight of the jewellery, the

clattering of bangles and the bells on the anklets serve to track her movement and help

enforce old taboos against wives coming in contact with their brothers- or fathers-in-law

(Russell 36).

Beyond such outright agendas of domination and control, the value of jewellery acts

as a means of objectification that continues to the urban present. Following the works of

Sandra Lee Bartky, Angela King’s understanding of the female body as the Foucauldian

docile body3 is rather insightful in this context. King writes:

Turning woman into an ornamented surface requires an enormous amount of

discipline and can cause discomfort, not to mention untold feelings of

inadequacy. It cements woman’s status as body, confirming her role as

primarily decorative. (36)

Thus, though female adornment may seem a traditional social norm whereby women are in

possession of wealth, the politics of jewellery inverts that potential by qualifying and

commodifying the body and turning it into an extension of that wealth.

The Unfettered Body

There is, however, a female body in Hindu religious discourse that escapes this hegemonic

system of aesthetics – a body not objectified but abjected, cast out of the threshold of gender-

intelligibility. In a historical study on the institution of widowhood, Suryakumari notes how

around 200 AD, the growing influence of ascetic norms in ancient Indian society led to a

steady opposition to widow remarriage (11). But Hindu brahmanical patriarchy had
 Yadaw|6

interpellated women from a phallocentric perspective that is predicated on their married

identity. Hence widows presented themselves as an anomaly that had to be relegated to “the

Other”. Indeed, Vidua, the Latin term for widow, which comes very close to the Sanskrit

vidhávā, has a root meaning of “to place apart” (Buitelaar 1). Consequently, the image of the

widow is crafted as the anti of the image of the bride, the language of their oppression

becoming an inverted mirror image of the oppression that constructs traditional womanhood

in Hindu society. As a commodity, the Hindu bride is deified as wealth through the image of

Lakshmi; the widow, on the other hand, becomes the husband-eater, the Rakshasi. The paper,

in fact, explores the variant dimension of this parallel but before her demonisation, we must

first understand the defeminisation of the widow. In her essay “What Bengali Widows Cannot

Eat”, the celebrated food historian Chitrita Banerji informs her readers:

Hindu Tradition in Bengal holds that the widow must strive for purity through

deprivation. In contrast with the bride, who is dressed in red and, if family

means permit, decked out in gold jewellery, the widow, regardless of her

wealth and status, is drained of colour. Immediately after her husband's death,

other women wash the sindoor (the vermilion powder signalling married

status) from the parting in the widow's hair. All jewellery is removed, and she

exchanges her coloured or patterned sari for the permanent, unvarying uniform

of the thaan, borderless yards of blank white cotton. (98)

To control and contain the ungoverned sexuality of the widow, the laws of Manu prescribes

for her a regime of harsh and continuous self-flagellation and self-deprivation4 while to

enforce the ban on remarriage, she must also endure the process of sensual and aesthetic

mortification that entails divesting the body of all ornaments5. Cloaked under the rhetoric of

asceticism, this latter act, however, problematises the identity of the widow and liberates her

from the conventionally gendered restraints. While making the widow into a living spectre,

the Brahmanical patriarchy can no more see her as a body. Thus Hindu religious discourse
 Yadaw|7

finds itself at a crossroad here as an overt form of oppression comes in conflict with a covert

one and the unadorned body of the widow becomes unfettered.

Sonar Kouto

While acknowledging the hegemony and the crisis of identity, this reading of the somatic

mortification of the Hindu widow allows for a more dynamic understanding of jewellery

beyond the politics of desire as the unworn ornaments recede back to their material wealth,

becoming the widow’s means, her Stridhan. Before the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 made

ownership absolute, the conception and rights of women’s property differed with different

schools of Hindu law. Stridhan, however, was an integral concept in all of them. Following

the ancient authorities of Manu, Narada, Vishnu, Katyayana et al., Gooroodass Banerjee, in

his exhaustive work on Hindu women’s property, defines Stridhan as the sum of the gifts

obtained by a woman from her relations, her ornaments and apparel and the gifts obtained

during her wedding (282). In any patriarchal society that fetishises woman’s body, ornaments

will doubtless form a significant part of women’s gifts and in fact the Mithila School

categorises ornaments as the tenth variety of Stridhan, following, like others, the dictates of

Manu who considers the ornaments worn by women to be their property (Banerjee 292). Yet

for the Hindu woman, such license never challenges or subverts the hierarchical structure of

the patriarchal family. Following the law of Katyayana, we can find how for the married

Hindu woman, Stridhan has been traditionally divided into “Saudayika” and “Asaudayika”6

with shared rights of alienation with her husband (Prakash 274). Beyond that, she is

internalised as a passive extension of the family circle with no individuality of her own. In

this context, Tagore’s short story “Manihara” seems an excellent marker of patriarchal

discourse to reflect the fate of the self-centred bride who can consider her gifted jewellery not

her family’s, but her own. In the story, while the authorial voice leaves little space to question
 Yadaw|8

the greatness and the benevolence of the master/husband-lover, the educated readers are

encouraged to break the sexist rhetoric and sympathise with Manimalika’s fixation for her

jewels in an unhappy marriage. Yet her legal right to her possession, that could have elevated

her as an autonomic self, remains a subject that is systemically overlooked. For the Hindu

widow, on the other hand, the right of alienation of her Stridhan is absolute and unrestricted,

irrespective of the fact whether it has been acquired prior or after the death of the husband

(Kumari 27). Standing outside the family circle, she has every opportunity and causes to

assert her identity if she is able as, unlike the bride, it is her validation of existence.

Thus if Hindu religious law had colluded with the Indian family structure to

equivocate with the promises of female power, the dictates of widowhood allow that power to

be realised to some extent. The stigma of an inauspicious self and the rigid behavioural and

ethical code (Nair 235-236) that ostracise the widow from the sphere of the family places her

in a risky liminality between oppression and autonomy (Sarkar 102) where jewellery acquires

a subversive cultural significance. The occasion of this paper is the witnessing of that

subversion through the two texts where the figuration of the jewellery box as a locus of

female power and influence is a radical transformation from its traditional role as a weapon

of patriarchal domination. To mark this turning, I wish to invoke a trope from the Bengali

folktales. I had mentioned earlier how cultural discourses of Hindu society imagine the

widow as the husband-eater, the Rakshasi – a demoness who is sometimes known to hide her

disembodied life force in a magical golden vessel, thus allowing herself to cheat death. As

abjected Rakshashis, the wealthy Hindu widows guarded their chest of jewels with a similar

sentiment, depending on them to sustain their existence on the margin and bestowing upon

them a positive significance.

 Yadaw|9

Resisting Silence

In “Talking Back”, Bell Hooks writes “Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed,

the colonised, the exploited . . . a gesture of defiance . . . . the expression of our movement

from object to subject” (29). Hooks here invites us to consider Voice – the quintessential

metaphor in feminist discourse that represents agency through embodied experiences, self-

assertion and protest. Voice becomes a central subject in any critical discussion of Goynar

Bakso where the narrative is distributed between the subjective experiences of three women.

Yet neither Somlata in her uncritical reiteration of heteropatriarchal discourse nor Boson in

her naive progressive rhetoric of separatist feminism ever truly challenges patriarchal

representation. Their narrative agencies mark their status in a changing Indian family with a

conformist gesture. With the figure of the widowed aunt, however, Mukhopadhyay explores

the trope of voice in all its subversive elements.

In both the ritual spectacle of Sati and the ascetic code of abstinence, the Brahmanical

objective of silencing a widow is apparent. Her marginal position in the family circle not

merely shuns her from the domain of sight but takes away her voice. Consequently, the

prevalent narrative representations that voice the plight of the aged widow often remain

hesitant of corrupting the rhetoric of victimhood with a less than admirable character. Yet

Goynar bakso introduces Rasamayi as a spoilt shrewish old woman who exercises a voice of

power in the family. Somlata recounts, “* *

 o . 
  
 u
e
) )

0,
 
'
 1  ।   e
я 
 

2
” (“Sometimes when something is

wrong, she would yell from the second floor for the whole house to hear. I haven’t heard so

loud a voice anywhere else”; 14). In her first encounter with Somlata, it is again her voice

that exercises power through aggression and the authority of wealth and status:

   u
e
 o  

3 4
- । 2! 5 e-' 2 $
  %




-  । e 0n

 5 i
- ।
n   e a 
 Y a d a w | 10

9-
o   , e a я 
0
)2 я e
- . . . . :  
'



  u

i 2!
 %
।
;i e 
' 9-
2   !
-। (14)

One day after the wedding, she invited me to her room and put a very heavy

pure gold necklace on me. Up till this, all was well. But then she made such

insinuating remarks! So insulting that I had tears in my eyes . . . . she was

apparently not at all happy about bringing a bride from a beggars' family.

Surely the splendour of the house had turned my head.

While Rasamayi’s power to express such contempt may lead us to a simple conclusion of

class oppression, the peculiarly marginal position of Rasamayi demands a closer look where I

wish to inspect the ceremonial occasion of their meeting. In her book Women and Jewelry,

Petra Ahde-Deal discusses how, in a broad sense, the ownership of jewellery is ultimately

retained by the family and the women, who transfer it from generation to generation, act as

keepers (136-138). The passivity of such system that keeps any generation of power in check

is, however, destabilised with the presence of a widow who does not participate in the

adorning process, and hence, does not pass on her jewellery so much as bestow it. So while

the scopophilic gaze is averted by the defeminisation of the body, the power of the widowed

mother-in-law to bedeck and, in the process, bind her daughter-in-law is a masculine act. This

is clearer in Aparna Sen’s adaptation of the novel which spends a whole scene on the

welcoming of the bride. There we find Rasamayi (Moushumi Chatterjee) performing the

ceremony in a crude masculine fashion, unveiling and assaulting the bride Somlata (Konkona

Sen Sharma) as she weighs her own jewellery like an experienced Goldsmith. As the scene

ends, Sen shows her opening a sheet of paper where her dear jewels are listed and from which

she crosses out the gift given to Somlata. Though such scrupulous attention may be explained

as the result of years of obsession, they also do suggest a considerable power that the

jewellery wields in Rasamayi’s home. To quote from the novel again: “

   o e
 Y a d a w | 11


 e p
- । %  e 

=
>

   5? oi  
-! p. @

 ” (“The family had pinned some hope on Pisima's jewellery. Maybe those jewels

could have breathed some life in their draining wealth”; 25). Amidst the family politics of a

refugee Bangal house of illustrious past and incompetent heirs, Rasamayi’s jewellery box

thus becomes the marker of her status that grants her alone the space of the whole second

floor. The newlywed Somlata never sees her come down from the top floor yet assures the

reader that “i
i #  tB” (“She is the absolute mistress of the house”; 10).

Rasamayi herself is keenly aware of this source of her influence as she informs Somlata in a

conversation:

1
-, 
e # 
- ।

 ।   k
-  2
 । oi
яi
  
' 9 i % । i

* 
 '। (43)

But I heard that you were the head of the family.

Bollocks! All they cared for was the box of jewellery. It earned me shelter in

my own father’s house. Otherwise, they would've kicked me out.

Such dependence and a cloistered lifetime spent obsessing over them (17) transform

Rasamayi’s unworn ornaments into a fetish which she cannot abandon, not even after death.

Thus besides being ordered to hide the jewellery box by the corpse of Rasamayi, Somlata is

repeatedly visited with the glimpses of a figure, clad in white (21, 25). Yet, it is important to

distinguish that it is the jewellery box which is being haunted, not Somlata who is entrusted

with it. Despite being an illegal preserver of the family wealth, she, in fact, can only consider

the ornaments in terms of capital for her in-laws. While one may rightly argue that such

honesty reveals character, it also betrays the married woman’s assimilation into the family

which is more apparent in Somlata’s decision to sell her own jewels during emergencies. For
 Y a d a w | 12

Rasamayi, on the other hand, the jewellery can become intensely personal without defying

the religious prohibition.

In her discussion of feminist jewellery, Rebecca Ross Russell shows how it can be

utilised as a narrative medium7 with which to privilege voices that have historically been

suppressed (Russell 120-127). While Russell bestows such power to contemporary feminist

jewellery, Rasamayi’s traditional ornaments seem, in a different way, to allow her to voice

her own self, even becoming the only relic of her life and her past as the ghost/memory of the

widow narrates her ungratified desire:

e 
' !C>

u ?  ,   %' %я। oi
 я91,

5!
u  0? p e-!   -. . .
я D!
 -, 

   k
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2- ।
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-। 2 o

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- । 2 

t ।
я-5 3
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 i  ।


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- । G j
- । 
    
- 2

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4
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 ?!


я91  1
   

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 ।  o 
 i   G я
 2
 !> -।

(48)

Do you think the men in this house are all saints? All rascals, scoundrels all.

Do you think your father-in-law, brother-in-law stay behind? Every one of

them has one or two kept women. . . . They make merry themselves and leave

me in the house to play with the “jewellery box” toy. Stupid that I was, I

played on. We had a servant called Ramkhelaon. I was growing up then, tides

rising in my body. . . . Finally one day, I batted my eyes to that Ramkhelaon.

 Y a d a w | 13

He came at the dead of night. I wanted to let go of all the rules of widowhood

that day and sin to the heart's content. My body was burning. I was waiting like

a tigress for its prey. Right at that moment, the silly man slipped at the last step

of the stairs. What a racket after that! What beating your uncle-in-law and

father-in-law gave the man! They threw him out! The abstinent young widow

sister remained thirsty while, on the very next day, they put on perfume and

went out to their mistresses.

This is a direct assault on patriarchal hypocrisy, a voice Rasamayi earned in her life through

her powerful position which, behind all familial affections, depended largely on the wealth

she possessed in a refugee house of fallen aristocrats.

The voice of the ghost widow, however, becomes most subversive with Rasamayi’s

paranormal provocations of infidelity to her daughter-in-law in an effort to vicariously relive

her life. With an admirer in her life, Somlata has to suddenly endure whispers of desire that

tell her to sin:


o 
 
'। '  %52 ,
2
।  %   , 

5

 0। (65)

Even the Gods did it. Read the Mahabharata, you'll see. Body is like a river,

everything flows away.

 b я  o %  ।  
J % 0।  :


 0। 

!2,
2
। (68)

Ritual, penance, caste, religion – all those are dirt. Let everything wash away.

Then, cross the river. You'll see then, what joy!

The remarkable rhetoric of both these quotations is in their claim to religious authority and

familiar images of Hindu spirituality to argue for a deeply irreligious act – a voice that allows
 Y a d a w | 14

Rasamayi to expresses her subversive subjectivity, disrupting, in the process, the order of

Hindu brahmanical patriarchy.

Queering bodies

Unlike the disembodied voice of Rasamayi, Majumdar’s Podipisi survives mainly through

her mythified image. As the child narrator, inspired by his uncle’s story, begins his quest to

find the Burmese box that was lost a hundred years ago, he is encountered with the exploits

and tall tales of the legendary Podipisi that includes preparing chochchori from grass for the

Governor-General of India (14), scaring a cow so it gives curd rather than milk for three days

(51), and extorting the Burmese box from her dacoit uncle (16-21). In its hope to discover the

lost Burmese box, the family has sustained the legends of Podipisi in its history, forging a

figure that is negotiated through fantasy, memory and the cultural stereotype of the Bengali

harridan widow.

But the notion of ownership – traditionally connected with men in a patriarchal

society – has, in turn, influenced the representation of Podipisi, creating an image that is not

only defeminised but masculine. In “Performing Jewellery”, Carolina Gimeno has put forth

the idea of contemporary feminist jewellery as Queer Apparatus8 that allows polyvalency of

meaning and disturbs the identity of the wearer from a performative approach. Though being

used in an entirely different manner that risks its very functionality, it is pertinent that the

promise of Podipisi’s jewellery serves to attempt something similar. Thus the grandmother’s

bedtime story for the child narrator may begin with: “


 i -

- , i я
- ।
я

 u9 
 !  e

- 
5я
2 ” (“What wide chest Podipisi had, what

enormous hands! She used to have half a seer of milk with a quarter of soaked grams for

breakfast every morning”; 51). Counting the immense club she hides at her back in the

narrator’s dream, such representation of Podipisi seems to resemble more a portrait of a

 Y a d a w | 15

muscleman than an old woman. Her description by Panchumama, the uncle of the child

narrator, is another instance of gender inversion where Podipisi’s virility is compared with

that of a lion (14). This enforced masculinity, in my view, mitigates the memory of the

widow as an owner of wealth in a patrilineal ancestry, allowing her myth to flourish under the

quest of an enigmatic chest of jewels.

The Widows’ Legacy

Thus in the politics of memory, the widow’s jewellery box becomes a phallic proxy through

which she can carve out her space in the patrilineal family-history. Through her absent

Burmese box, the memory of Podipisi gains the right to claim her legacy, be it in the

subversion of patrilineality where Panchumama commends himself as a proud descendant of

the widow or in her telling resemblance to the widow Khentipisi who, in the family, is called

“




n” (“Podipisi the Second”; 63). Angry at the number of her rivals in searching

for the family treasure, Khentipisi shouts out, “
 я


  ) 
! 


 k

я 
o
- -
-  
'
c! a) k  o a

i। o st , o 
 ”

(“Do u think I don't know all your chicanery! All of you are on the trail of Podipisi's box! Yet

nobody else has a rightful claim on the box. It's Stridhan, it belongs to me”; 67). We can

discern an attempt at an alternative female line of descent here that seems to parody the

system of patrilineal succession. Though the claim is hardly sound in the legal domain, it is

the nature of the property and its history that give such impetus to the living widow’s

insistence.

In Goynar Bakso, this non-normative ancestral legacy is present in Rasamayi’s

unspelt connection with Boson, her granddaughter. While in a similar short story entitled

“Rashmonir Sonadana”, Mukhopadhyay follows this connection with an uncanny physical

resemblance, Goynar Bakso carries a more subtle and poetic effect in replicating Rasamayi’s
 Y a d a w | 16

emotions in Boson without any overtly crude signs of reincarnation. Of course, Somlata, who

does not hear the voice of the widow anymore, seems to believe in truth of such affair and

accordingly asks Boson’s permission before opening the jewellery box even after two

decades:

ei k e


- ।


 a
c !2
D

  , i, я


!

% e яn ।

[...]

. . .
 a !

 я k   । (77-78)

This box was yours once.

Turning away my head reluctantly, I replied, Really! I didn’t know!

Maybe not in this life.

[...]

. . . I am opening the box today with your permission.

The episode is of relevance as it validates Rasamayi’s ownership of the jewellery box,

separate from the family’s wealth even after so many years of her death. Indeed, if in the

conception scene (69-70) of Boson, we find Somlata exorcising the spectral desire of the

unheimlich widow through a surrender to the traditional Bengali familial notion of accepted

sexuality, in economy, she is radically feminist in undermining the patriarchal claim to

wealth and acknowledging the widow through her jewellery.

Conclusion

The tabooed nature of this metonymical connection of widows and jewellery that destabilises

the discourse of Hindu brahmanical patriarchy becomes my justification to explore the

alternative discourse in these two texts. For although the jewellery box, as a locus of power,
 Y a d a w | 17

couldn’t have and can never liberate the widow, it does punctuate the collective narrative of

historical and quotidian marginalisation by sustaining her.

In “The Other Question”, Homi K. Bhabha considers “the facilitating role of

contradiction and heterogeneity in the construction of authoritarian practices” (80) and goes

on to locate such ambivalence in the colonial discourse. Through his work, Bhabha invites us

to see colonialism, not as a perfect system of power, but one with inherent contradictions and

slippage thus inaugurating a postmodern attack against the totalising rhetoric of oppression,

not through a greater investment in the lived experience or subjectivity of the oppressed but

through a closer investigation of the systems of power. In this paper, I have argued for a

similar approach in the domain of gender through an investigation of the conflicting

strategies of Brahmanical patriarchy that resignify the trope of the wealthy widows and their

jewellery box beyond the politics of denial and desire as that of a Sonar Kouto – the magical

golden vessel that allows the body to endure any trauma without risking destruction. After all,

for the Rakshasis, such perverse mode of existence is necessary to be safe from the jab of the

pen and the swoop of the sword.

Notes

1. In an article on the early history of Jewellery, Douglas LeGrand notes of the

tradition of bracelets worn by slaves which revealed the name of their owners. Earrings were

worn by slaves of the ancient Rome, and the Old Testament approves of non-removable

earrings as a mark of slavery (King James Version, Ex. 21.2–6; Deut. 15.16–17). In an article

about the history of rings, William Chalfant traces its origin as a symbolic gesture of binding

someone and thus of obedience of the wearer to a higher power. Thompson and Mee’s The
 Y a d a w | 18

Book of Knowledge asserts that the wedding ring began as a symbol that the wife was the

husband’s property (qtd. in Chalfant).

2. Dating back to medieval times, this Hindu wedding custom of bedecking the bride

in sixteen adornments is a prevalent ritual that remains celebrated as part of the Indian

aesthetics. Though different regions of India do have their own specific idea of this custom,

all of them function with the central idea of “beautifying” the bride while covering her in

jewellery from head to toe. While exhibiting the wealth of the bride’s father that will be

gifted as dowry, the ritual also initiates the woman into the mandatory practice of wearing

jewellery.

3. In his Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes how the Eighteenth century

discovered the body as an object and target of power i.e. as the raw material that can be

sculpted for political purposes. To quote, “A body is docile that may be subjected, used,

transformed, and improved” (136). Feminist scholars have sought to question the gender

neutrality in Foucault’s conceptualisation of the docile body while using the concept to

interpret the construction of gender by patriarchal power.

4. Some of the dictates of Manu regarding the life of the widow are as follows:

At her pleasure let her emaciate her body by (living on) pure flowers,

roots, and fruit; but she must never even mention the name of another

man after her husband has died. (V.157)

A virtuous wife who after the death of her husband constantly

remains chaste, reaches heaven, though she have [sic] no son, just

like those chaste men. (V.160)

But a woman who from a desire to have offspring violates her duty

towards her (deceased) husband, brings on herself disgrace in this

world, and loses her place with her husband (in heaven). (V.161)
 Y a d a w | 19

5. The ancient sage Harita, the writer of Harita Smriti, prescribes for the widow that

“[s]he 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” (qtd. in Kane 584).

6. Katyayana, the ancient Indian scholar and Vedic priest, divides Stridhan into two

categories – that over which a married woman has an absolute control called “a loving gift”

or “Saudayika” and that which must have the consent of her husband to be alienated called

“asaudayika” (Prakash 274).

7. Russell brings the examples of Sondra Sherman’s piece “Miss Havisham”, Keith

Lewis’ group of pieces entitled “35 dead souls” and her own works – “On their Shoulders”,

“Eve/Mother Tongue” etc. According to Russell, while we have come a long way from the

erasure of women in history, it takes conscious effort to create feminist narratives within a

society that perceive patriarchy as normative. With its sensual yet yellowed chain and dried

rose petals, Sherman’s “Miss Havisham” uses our idea of the Dickens’ character to confront

the traditional narratives around “old maids”. Russell’s “On Their Shoulders”, on the other

hand, reclaims genealogies frequently overwritten through a narrative piece of sterling silver

and gold cuff bracelet with the names of eighteen powerful women from the Bible etched in

Hebrew and English above a row of eighteen red, orange and yellow sapphires with one

larger garnet (120-127).

8. While performance has always been an integral part of the art of jewellery, it has

made some remarkable strides with the rise of post-structuralism. By playing with the idea of
 Y a d a w | 20

how traditional Jewellery looks like as well as how it functions as the object of male gaze,

feminist jewellers have sought to create contingent meanings which often problematise and

ironically comment on the discourse of femininity. Gimeno presents this process as one of

“queering” that disturbs the normal order of how jewellery engages with gender.

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