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Literary Review
Behind representations
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Shadow Lives documents the lived experience of widowhood in counterpoint to the `knowledge' produced on the `subject' by male reformers. A review by INDIRA CHOWDHURY.
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UMA CHAKRAVARTI'S earlier work alerted us to the need to shift attention away from "knowledge" produced on widowhood by male social reformers to the lived experience of widowhood as described by women. In this book, co-edited with Preeti Gill, she documents that experience. The editors have a rather ambitious project in mind: to provide what they term "an archive, albeit, a limited one", on how widowhood is understood, experienced and represented. This beautifully produced volume, with an attractive cover, has three parts. Part One includes extracts from traditional prescriptive texts, portrayals of the widow in classical literature as well as 19th and 20th Century documents. This archive, as the editors are aware, suffers from a certain unevenness because of its dependence on known available sources, with Bengal and Maharashtra dominating over other regions. Part Two has extracts from autobiographies, diaries, oral narratives of widows from across regions; personal narratives of victims of Partition, prisoners and migrant labourers. The final part, by far the most commodious, includes the fiction of Pudumaipithan, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Premchand, Rabindranath, Razia Zaheer and Mahasweta Devi, to take a random sampling.
The volume could prove useful for framing courses on women's studies for Indian universities, as also for South Asian and gender studies Departments abroad. But the immediate context of its production, the Introduction tells us, stems from the political need to address the strident Hindutvavad of present-day India that disrupted and stalled altogether the shooting of Deepa Mehta's "Water", a film about young widows in Varanasi. The incensed Introduction, however, nowhere mentions the name of the director or when the incident occurred. The nature of public memory being what it is, the inclusion of this information in a footnote would have ensured that the future scholar or the non-native reader appreciates the resonance of the volume's opening rhetoric.
One wishes that the Introduction included a discussion contextualising the implications of the "prescriptive codes", "injunctions" and "laws" of Part One. The sources range from the Dharmasutras (c. 500-200 B.C.) to Tryambaka's 18th Century text, Stridharmapaddhati. Except for Tryambaka, we are not told which translations were used for the early texts. A significant omission given that feminist scholars have demonstrated how Orientalist scholars constructed a "Hindu" tradition out of a diverse plethora of traditions, texts and byabasthas in colonial India. Indeed, one expects a scholar like Uma Chakravarti to help us understand how a so-called "Hindu" tradition came to be identified exclusively with textual knowledge. What was the relationship between texts and ritual practices? The figure of the frail-bodied, widowed goddess Dhumabati from the Dashamahavidya of Bengal could have been included demonstrating the contradictory pulls in the portrayal of this figure.
Parts Two and Three bring out the productive tensions between personal narratives and fictional representation. Many possible ways of juxtaposing the selected pieces suggest themselves. The narratives of the widows of Vrindavan could be read in ironic contrast to the protagonist of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Drabomoyeer Kashibash — an unusual widow who returns to her village, unable to settle down in Kashi. An interesting correspondence reveals itself between the mid-wife Chhoti Devi and her fictional counterpart Phaniyamma of M.K. Indira's novel. In fact, one wonders why the introduction does not adequately emphasise the complex relationship between the patriarchal control of the widow's sexuality, the exploitation of her labour as household drudge and her permissible mastery of birthing practices. This could become a possible entry-point into the widow's understanding of sexuality and bodily functions. It is impossible to do justice to a volume so large in its scope in a short review, but one must give credit to the editors for bringing together a substantial and complex body of writings on and about widowhood. The book would have gained substantially from a glossary and a bibliography of secondary sources on the subject.
Shadow Lives: Writings on Widowhood, Uma Chakravarti and Preeti Gill, Kali for Women, 2001, p.xii + 489.
The writer is the author of The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal.
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