Suzanne Powell and Dr. Valerie Hudson, Political Science Department
I left on my field study with the goal of learning about the practice of widow abandonment by placing it within the larger social, political, and economic structure of Hindu India. I surmised that widow abandonment was creeping down into the traditionally less-orthodox South India because low caste groups were trying to prove just how Hindu they were – trying to legitimize a move into the upper, more pure high caste ranks. I sought to understand the practice by understanding how women fit into Hindu ideology, how they perceived themselves as a result of living in such a society under such a belief system – intentions and assumptions gained from the reading I did of the current research on the topic.
My intentions and my research changed once I was in the country and realized that in the state of Andhra Pradesh, as far as I could learn, widow abandonment was not practiced, widows did not wear white saris, widow remarriage was not banned, and many people, though nominally Hindu, did not ever speak of reincarnation or pollution – basic tenants in Western understanding of the religion. It was clear that if the basic purpose of anthropology, my chosen discipline, was to learn and teach what it meant to be human in a culture, it was not succeeding as far as Hindu widows were concerned. There was a large gap between the published research and what was actually going on in the everyday lives of these women.
In order to discover what was happening, I began to collect the oral histories – the personal narratives – of low class Hindu widows, most of whom lived in a fishing village in Visakhapatnam. One of the biggest advantages to such an approach is that I spent a lot of time with the same small group of women who eventually began to open up to me and share their opinions and feelings with me. I also was able to follow up on information we had discussed at earlier interviews and piece together a longitudinal picture of how a person grows up in a culture, how that culture affects a person at each stage of life, and how a culture can evolve over time so that major life events mean different things to individuals.
Though all missed their husbands, some women saw the customary 5 month mourning period after their husband’s death as suppression – it limited them from earning money for their money or doing as they wished, another saw it as a luxury she couldn’t afford, and yet another still had not left her home but for religious purposes since her husband’s death some 20 years before.
The second advantage to collecting personal narratives over other methods like participant observation and survey collection is that I was able to learn what widowhood meant to these women, how each of these women experienced this major life change, and how these women perceived the ramifications of such a life event. It was their perceptions of life that most interested me since they cannot be formally observed and are what create personal reality. For example, to these women it did not matter what was legally allowed to them. What mattered was being socially or morally (understood as being essentially the same thing) permissible.
Widow remarriage has long been legally allowed in Andhra Pradesh, but not one of the women I talked to would ever have done it because they all had children. Each confirmed that if a woman’s husband dies while they are childless it is alright, even encouraged, for them to remarry, but it is morally reprehensible if the woman is left with children. Several explained that it was because no man would want to take care of another’s children and they would be abused or kicked out after the second marriage. Others simply said it was not right for a woman to do so after she had given birth to another man’s children and would explain no further.
I met a pair of sisters-in-law named Enkamma and Pidamma. Enkamma’s husband died 10 years ago, Pidamma’s only a few months. Says Enkamma, “If a widow eats three times a day, wears a good sari people will say it is because she is going out to see a man. Traditional women are afraid of this. Married women go out with other men but no one says anything because they have husbands at home. A widow does nothing wrong and there is suspicion.” She also says that she would have liked to get remarried but she stopped herself because she needed to look after her children. In such instances, a widow’s actions are not dominated by what she physically can or cannot do, but by the perceived social repercussions.
But getting even this much information proved to be more difficult than I had originally thought it would be. The women were at first distrustful of my intentions and kept demanding compensation for their work and for me to sponsor their children’s educations. While their need was at times very real, I also learned that begging is something of a game with the villagers. They compete to come up with the best story and greatest need since they know how they look to people who come to visit their village. Where once they would moan and slap their supposedly-empty bellies, they later began to let me know of their real worries and concerns – worries that mostly dealt with their children’s futures.
The oral histories I gathered show that individuality is key to understanding human experience. The true nature of a cultural phenomenon is only fully understood through a person’s relationship to it. Like India itself where a person cannot possibly understand it if all they see are the major tourist sites or only one city; so, too, is Hindu widowhood inexplicable if all that is shown are national statistics or only how it effects, for example, family economics