Book review: Jyoti Atwal,Real and Imagined Widows: Gender Relations in Colonial North India

For the study of gender relations in colonial India, gender historians have mainly focused on the colonial and reformist discourse of the period, critiquing the reforms for fixing ‘women’s question’ in narrow reform paradigms and strengthening newer forms of patriarchy. This work by Jyoti Atwal is in line with the dominant trend in gender historiography. It begins with the colonial and reformist position on widowhood but seeks to understand widows’ lived realities beyond the textual and idealised construction of widowhood in Colonial India. She challenges the monolithic view of widows’ existence by looking at the socio-economic structures of widowhood, the economic deprivations and poverty on one hand and the workings and representations of complex cultural systems that repressed women’s/widow’s sexuality on the other. Through the subject of widowhood, she therefore seeks to highlight the politics of gender alongside the practice of law-making, interventions by law and the customary practices along the axis of class, caste and region.

She focuses on the lives of widows of north India, especially from the agricultural societies, with a clear objective to map the local–regional variety, which she considers has suffered on account of the Bengal centrism in historiography. She begins to map the conditions of north Indian widowhood by looking at the Colonial notions of idealised womanhood/widowhood and how these were constituted by complete dependence on legal–sastric constructs of pativrata in close partnership with indigenous–reformist patriarchy. These notions that shaped public imagination, while the state’s governance of widows’ cases produced idealised widowhood experiences. She therefore critiques the Colonial state and reformers’ engagement with the textual positions on widows, the actual handling of widow’s cases in North West Province (later United Provinces), and its permissiveness.

Proceeding with an understanding of the limiting nature of reformists’ debates that sought to relocate widows solely within marriage, she examines the widowhood and remarriage practices in United Provinces—the eastern and western UP, through the complex caste and customary framework and the socio-economic transformations that took place (holding these to be determining for widowhood in UP, different from the case in Bengal). A point well made is on the overall oppression embedded in the issue of remarriage itself, as it was linked to property relations in landholding castes and to control of women’s labour in laboring artisanal–agricultural castes. The remarriage therefore should not be simplistically seen as a measure improving women’s condition. The practice of remarriage was found alongside gross instances of discrimination and devaluing practices within households. She finds certain low-caste groups exercising more control over women’s labour and sexuality and therefore dismisses the general presumption of ‘low caste-less patriarchy’. Still she would not generalise the case but brings out studies also of widows from low castes where widowhood little altered their economic situation. By bringing in these different cases of caste and sub-caste practices, she avoids oversimplification and monolithic views on widowhood.

Besides, mapping the material aspects of deprivations in widows’ lives, Jyoti Atwal claims to capture widows’ consciousness, largely ignored by scholarship. She bases her discussion, however, on a single autobiographical text of a widow-turned mistress, Priyamvada Devi’s Vidhwa ki Atmakatha (1931) where the widow frankly speaks of her body in desire, the ‘grip of lust’, repression and sexual exploitation of women and of double standards of sexual morality. Through this writing, considering it too radical for the times, she seeks to highlight the differences between the lived and imagined aspects of widowhood. However, by elaborating on widows’ sufferings of varied forms and by various quarters, she too falls in line with what she contests. The problem of stereotyping widowhood with misery which she puts across so forcefully in the beginning remains unresolved; rather much discussion lingers on the real or representational aspects of suffering and abstinence. In a separate chapter, she elaborates on the nationalist politics of representation of the self-sacrificing and suffering widow in the bharatmata iconography and similarly of the post colonial cinematic representation of sacrificing, desexualised but struggling widows, which was the requirement of a suffering yet recovering free nation.

Locating her study in UP and claiming break from Bengal centrism, she, however, needs much more substance for comparison. One point of difference, she claims, is UP government’s dependence on Hindu sastras for reform, as the reformers were outside the official circle. However, the reformist debates and legislations in Bengal, as we know, were also based on sastric prescriptions rather than on principles of humanism and altruistic logic despite reformer’s close proximity with the British. Besides, much of the reformist position she discusses is the usual known aspects of the campaign from Bengal; the UP dimension of the reform is just dealt in four pages. Similarly, her treatment of the account, Vidhwa ki Atmakatha, as representing a different widows’ situation in UP, hardly brings out the difference. One wonders, how the experiences of the widow, originally a Bengali who travels to different places, were typically north Indian. In the same way, the region-wise variation in socio-economic structures of widowhood which she is so keen to establish requires greater substantiation. For instance, she speaks of the difference between the landowning castes in eastern and western UP, by bringing in a single case of Bhuinhars of eastern UP which did not practice widow remarriage while the landowning castes in Western UP practiced widow remarriage of levirate kind.

There are unnecessary digressions, repetitions, incoherent jumps from one point to another, which makes the reading less cogent. The footnotes many times do not match the text. The slips are rather too many. The formulations are initially loose but get crisper towards the conclusion. Nevertheless, the work in many ways hits at the stereotypical image of widowhood created by regimes and the gender politics played on the site of widowhood. Her engagement with the material–cultural complexities, the determining structures and processes offers a significant lead towards understanding widowhood in its multidimensionality.