Suzanne Powell and Dr. Charles W. Nuckolls, Anthropology Department
Main Text
As a student of anthropology, my ORCA grant enabled me to work on analyzing and writing up my results from a field study trip I took during the Fall 2009 semester to Visakhapatnam, India. My study focused on collecting oral histories of Hindu windows living in a fishing village just outside of the city limits. While there, I focused on understanding their lives previous to and after widowhood, what being a widow meant in that society, and how they felt about and reacted to the changes that came into their lives with the deaths of their husbands.
When I returned from the field study, I was not sure if I even had any conclusions to write about. I had pages of notes and many audio files from interviews, but I did not know what I was going to with them. It took many hours of coding data, organizing categories of information, and writing out all of the possible claims I could make based on my data before a workable thesis began to form. Once I had my larger argument figured out, I had to go back to writing claims and organizing notes in order to decide how I was going to explain these women and their culture and their lives to others. I was constantly searching for examples to back up my arguments because I was afraid of misrepresenting these women or making false claims about their lives. The following is the summary of the information I collecting from the widows I came to know.
Widowhood comes in two stages in Visakhapatnam, the women explained to me. The first is physical widowhood which happens as soon as a woman’s husband is dead. The second, the stage of social widowhood, occurs three to nine days after the funeral. The new widow is taken by night, blindfolded and led down to the ocean by five other widows who belong to her family who will perform the ceremony. When they arrive, a kerosene lamp is lit atop a piece of driftwood, and the blindfold is taken off. The widow is then denuded of her marriage markers: the glass bangles which she has worn since before her marriage are broken from her wrists and thrown into the ocean, the marriage thread is taken off and burned in the lamp’s flame, and her buttu is rubbed off of her forehead. The lamp is then also thrown into the ocean, and the woman receives a cursory bath with ocean water. The only ornaments that escape are the silver toe rings; she can choose to leave those on if she wishes. The widow is barred from wearing other jewelry for the rest of her life.
The removal of the accessories a married woman wears when she becomes a widow is highly symbolic. The ornaments are not removed because a widow is not supposed to be beautiful or take care of her appearance, though that is true enough; they are removed because the widow needs to be separated from womanhood. The removal and denial of ornamentation to widows is denying them the ability to claim or create womanhood in public. And the widow must now deny herself of all comfort, pleasure, and sociality.
Indian widows dwell in a sphere full of historical, political, religious, economic, and social meaning. But even though a widow is placed in a new context with new roles and responsibilities, she is able to create a continuance of self by taking a conscious stand on her new role by utilizing the moral and value system she maintained prior to widowhood.
By following the rules of proper behavior as laid out by their culture, these widows place themselves in a socially low position which, paradoxically, is the only way to gain some measure of social respect. It is similar to how an apology works – a person has done something wrong in the eyes of another person, and the only way to raise themselves in the observer’s eyes is to humble themselves further through apologizing. A widow who refuses to humble herself after her husband’s death loses even more social prestige than she otherwise would have.
The sociologist Erving Goffman discussed how an individual is split into two parts when engaging in apologies or other work meant to lessen the social stigma against a person, but I believe that he neglected to address the third part the individual is split into when taking part in remedial activities -the part that either agrees or disagrees with the actions taken – the private, personal self. How that third part regards the apology, could reaffirm or alter the meaning of the apology completely. It is this private self that women maintain in the face of social role change which draws upon previous knowledge, experiences, and beliefs to create meaning in social actions. In this way, everything new in a widow’s life becomes a tool in asserting her own identity.
These women exemplify the idea that not only is widowhood experienced on the individual level, but it is also comprehended on the personal level through the lens of an already-created self identity. Widows are not passive members of a culture that dictate who they are or what they are allowed to do at each stage of their lives; they take what their culture says about women and interpret it in unique ways to create new realities within which to navigate. To understand widows, it is necessary to comprehend what else they are because when widows lose their husbands, they change societal classifications without losing their old categories. Widows are women, widows were married, and widows are members of castes and classes. As individual actors, widows give meaning to widowhood by placing it in the context of the rest of their lives. How they approach the role and why they uphold the prescribed behavior and appearance can change the reality of what widowhood is to each of them. By creating reality, these widows are maintaining and reaffirming who they understand themselves to be.