3. Gendered Transformations

6. Transformations of Gender and Gendered Transformations

I sobbed and sobbed after my wedding. I couldn’t stand to be away from my father. I fled home whenever I could, and I would stay there for days and days on end, until someone from my father-in-law’s house would come to get me. Then I would sob and sob again. But slowly you visit less, you cry less. And now, in old age, there is hardly any more connection with my father’s house.

After the blood stopped, my body dried out. Even if I wanted to [have sex], I wouldn’t be able to. I had four kids, then my blood dried up, and then my body dried up. Now I have desire (lobh) only for food.

The women I knew in Mangaldihi often spoke of their lives in terms of the profound changes that they had experienced in their bodies, and in the kinds of social ties making up their personhoods, over the life course. In this and the following chapter, I take a more focused look at issues I first raised in the book’s introduction: how does aging affect definitions of gender, and gender affect experiences of aging? These questions speak not only to how we think about gender relations in South Asia but also to how the ways the category of “woman” has been constructed in gender theory more broadly. I will explore two important and interrelated themes: first, the ways in which women’s bodies in Mangaldihi were perceived, controlled, and transformed over their lives; and, second, the ways in which women experienced their changing ties of maya.

Gendered Bodies and Everyday Practices

Gender was constructed in Mangaldihi as elsewhere largely through the unceasing work of everyday life, through daily social interactions and sexual relations, through the ways women and men dressed and adorned their bodies, and through people’s movements within and beyond the home. As an anthropologist in Mangaldihi, I first encountered and experienced local constructions of gender at the level of daily practices involving the body, or what Carol Delaney (1991:29) has referred to as the “bodily training” that anthropologists (perhaps especially women anthropologists) must go through when learning to fit into a new sociocultural setting. As a young, recently married woman, I was taught to dress, bathe, interact with others, keep my home, comport my body, and so on as a young village woman and wife does (with some important differences and freedoms because of my anomalous position as a foreigner and researcher).

The specificity and pervasiveness of the everyday bodily requirements that I was expected to observe seemed to me quite unwieldy, unaccustomed as I was to these forms of discipline (though ready to comply quite unconsciously with many of the expectations of my own culture, such as the requirements that women keep their legs together while sitting or be thin). I had to learn to wear saris, to keep my shoulders and legs covered at all times (even when bathing in a public area, as was commonly done), to bathe and change my clothes after defecating or touching anything “impure” (aśuddha), to keep my hair bound in a braid or a knot, to wash my hands after eating, to adorn the part of my hair with the red vermilion of married women, to refrain from keeping the company of men in my home, and so forth. Often it seemed that I could do nothing quite right, and my body was scrutinized for its imperfections and quirks. My skin was becoming too dark: from the Indian sun? from wandering too much beyond the home? I was too thin: would I be infertile, or unattractive to my husband when he rejoined me? My occasional pimples were also causes for concern and comment: were they caused, perhaps, by excessive sexual heat erupting from my body, heat that could not be spent with my husband far away? The process was difficult and at times irritating; but my learning to fit as a woman into village life provided a valuable avenue toward understanding what it was to be a woman in Mangaldihi.

Michel Foucault has written masterfully about how forms of power operate upon the body in modern societies. He argues that distinctly modern forms of power do not emanate from some central source or sovereign figure, but circulate throughout the entire social body via the most minute and pervasive everyday “micropractices,” such as those I have described here—in people’s gestures, habits, bodies, movements, desires, and self-surveillance (1973, 1975, 1979, 1980b, 1980c). Such a notion of capillary power—widely dispersed and anonymous—is particularly useful for analyzing gender relations, for it is through the mundane practices of everyday life that much of the structuring and playing out of gender hierarchies takes place.

As Sandra Bartky (1997:131–32) convincingly argues, however, Foucault himself consistently treats the body as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ. But in fact, in many (or all?) societies—certainly in the American and Bengali societies I know—there are disciplines that operate specifically upon women’s bodies to produce uniquely feminine modalities of embodiment (see Bordo 1993:17–19). These disciplines, moreover, often do not emanate primarily from the kinds of modern institutions that are Foucault’s focus (prisons, schools, hospitals, armies, and the like), but rather from the everyday bodily requirements taught to girls and women within their families and local communities.

I soon discovered that most of my training in my first few months in the village had to do, in the dominant patrilineal discourse of Mangaldihi, with containing, controlling, and channeling women’s sexuality toward a husband, marriage, and fertile reproduction within a patrilineage. These bodily regulations were justified and explained largely in terms of perceived differences in the biologies of the two sexes. Women’s bodies were commonly described to me as more “open” (kholā) than men’s, as well as more “hot” (garam). As a result, women could be viewed as particularly vulnerable to impurity (aśuddhatā) and to engaging in improper sexual liaisons.

As I learned how Mangaldihians managed impurity in their daily lives, I was initially struck by their attitudes surrounding the relative openness of women. It was common for both women and men in Mangaldihi to describe women as “impure” (aśuddha), a quality that seemed to be tied to their regarding women—postpubertal and married women, at least—as more open and exposed to mixing than were men. Although people seemed to view the bodies of both women and men as relatively open or permeable, they saw women as being even more so.

Scholars have long noted that Hindus commonly attribute lesser purity to women. While Lynn Bennett (1983:216) finds the cause in a vague sense of sin and impurity attached to menstruation, Catherine Thompson (1985) adds that childbirth, like menstruation, is linked to female pollution, and that women are viewed as particularly polluting when they are not strongly identified with men. I. Julia Leslie (1989:250–52) also mentions the impurity of menstruation, viewed in many Hindu texts as a mark of both a woman’s sexual appetite and her “innate impurity.” She notes, too, that women are often compared in Hindu texts to Sudras (the lowest of the four varṇas, or caste groups, and defiling to the touch), because like Sudras women have lost the right to upanayana, the initiation ritual that upper-caste Hindu men undergo to become “twice-born” (1989:38–40, 251; cf. F. Smith 1991:18). Frederique Marglin, along with noting the impurity of menstrual blood and the “once-born” Sudra-like status of women, offers a more general interpretation of impurity.^[1] Impurity, she suggests, has to do with violations of the boundaries of the body, as in menstruation and childbirth (as well as elimination, sexual intercourse, and wounds), with which women are presumably more involved than men (1977:265–66; 1985a:44; 1985c:19–20, 63).

In Mangaldihi, I was first exposed to notions about the impurity of women when I was confronted with people’s bathing practices, as well as their attempts to teach me to control my bodily impurities, influxes, and outflows through bathing. Women apparently became aśuddha very easily—after sleeping in a bed (where saliva or sexual fluids may have spilled), touching unwashed clothing, handling unwashed dishes (which are ẽto, permeated with saliva), engaging in sexual relations, giving birth, menstruating, or touching any other impure person or thing. “Impurity” seemed to be defined in such contexts as a condition stemming from inappropriate, unmatched, or undesired mixing, often of bodily substances. Although this definition is similar to that offered by Marglin, it emphasizes inappropriate, unmatched, or undesired body crossings (what I have called “mixing”); as Marglin herself notes (1985b:66), and as I have explored throughout this book, many bodily crossings or mixings—such as ingesting the leftovers of a deity, or sharing food with intimate friends or kin—are not considered impure at all. Furthermore, in locating impurity in “overflows which cross the boundaries of the body,” Marglin assumes that the body is ordinarily a “bounded entity” (1985b:67; cf. Marglin 1977, 1985a:44, 1985c:90), becoming impure whenever its boundaries are “violated.” This assumption does not match local conceptions of the body or person (both male and female) as ordinarily relatively open and permeable.

The women I knew reacted to the perceived impurity of their bodies in ways that varied considerably. Many women, especially lower-caste women and those who were very busy with work, showed little concern with how pure or impure they might be at any given moment. But in the Brahman neighborhood in which I lived, it seemed that women were continually bathing, and requiring me to bathe, sometimes up to five or six times a day: after I defecated (which unfortunately could occur more than daily, especially when I was suffering from mild dysentery), or visited a lower-caste neighborhood, or came in contact accidentally with some dog-doo, or touched the external panel of a truck carrying a dead body and its mourners to the cremation ground, or returned from a bus trip (where people of many castes and backgrounds mingle closely), and on and on.

I am chagrined to confess, however, that for my first several months in the village, I did not notice that women were much more vulnerable than men to such daily impurities, and thus more frequently subjected to these bathing rituals. Then one day Gurusaday Mukherjee mentioned, quite by chance, that men do not have to bathe after coming into cursory contact with impure things. Men may choose to bathe after defecating or touching unmade beds or lower-caste people, but they do not have to; if they do not, no harm or doṣ will occur (unless, that is, they are going to enter a temple or make offerings to a deity, when special purity is required). I was astounded, not only because I realized that a male anthropologist in Mangaldihi would not have had to spend so many seemingly futile hours bathing, but also because I could not believe that I had been so oblivious to this crucial difference in men’s and women’s daily practices. I spent the next several weeks asking everyone, men and women, why it is that women were more vulnerable to impurity than men.

Their answers led me to believe, as I have already suggested, that most Mangaldihians viewed women as anatomically more open (kholā) than men, and thus more exposed to mixing. Mangaldihians usually explained women’s openness by describing their involvement in menstruation, sexuality, and childbirth—all processes that involve substances going into and out of a woman’s body. For instance, a woman is especially open, and also impure (aśuddha), during her menstrual period.^[2] A girl’s first menstruation marks the beginnings of a state of openness, and thus her readiness for marriage, sexual relations, and pregnancy. Menstruation was viewed as a time when excess blood flowed from the body, and a woman had to be “open” for this to occur. In contrast, a pregnant woman is temporarily “closed” (bandha); women who have stopped menstruating after menopause are permanently closed in this respect.

Sexual intercourse also involves opening a woman, and virgins were sometimes described as bandha. Intercourse, said Mangaldihians, takes place within the woman and outside the man. Sexual fluids or semen (śukra) leave the man at the moment of ejaculation to enter and permeate the woman. Once she has slept with a man, a woman contains some of his substance within her permanently, although a man can sleep with a woman with no real lasting effect. The process of childbirth itself was said to make women impure and leave them dangerously open for a period of one month after they gave birth or experienced a late miscarriage or abortion. To remedy this condition—to close and “dry out” (śukote) her body and womb—a woman had to undergo a drying, self-containing, and separative period of birth impurity (aśauc), similar to that occurring after a death in the family.^[3]

The village women I knew had clear ideas about the relative openness and impurity of women’s bodies. Subradi, a married Brahman woman, told me, “Women are always impure (apabitra), because everything happens to them (oder sab kichu hae)—menstruation, childbirth. These don’t happen to men. For this reason if men touch a Muslim^[4] or defecate, no harm (doṣ) happens to them, and they don’t have to wash their clothes or bathe. But harm happens to a woman.” My companion Hena offered similar comments: “Men are always pure (śuddha). [Especially Brahman men, she explained quickly, but even Bagdi men are relatively pure compared to women.] They don’t menstruate or give birth. Women menstruate, give birth—all that happens to them. Men only defecate, and nothing else.” As Subradi and Hena both put it, things “happen” to women (oder sab kichu hae)—menstruation, childbirth, defecation, and so on. As passive receivers of action, women have a greater vulnerability to outside agents. They are also involved in more processes during which things (bodily substances, even babies) go out from their bodies.

Hena later explained the difference between men and women this way: “[Men] can even come right back from defecating and touch the water jug to drink water! Could we [women] do this? Never!” Another woman said with some sarcasm while discussing the subject with me and a group of other wives, “A Brahman man can even drink alcohol and sleep with a Muci woman [member of the leatherworking caste, the lowest Hindu jāti in Mangaldihi] and no harm (doṣ) happens. A woman never could! This is just the human [or male] system (mānuṣer bidhān).” ^[5] Another woman added, “For men, mixing is OK (miśāmiśe cale) with all castes. No harm or fault happens to them.”

One common north Indian saying illustrates this notion of the openness or permeability of women particularly vividly: Women are like unglazed earthen water jugs, which are permeable and become easily contaminated to such depth that they cannot be purified. Men are like impermeable brass jugs, which are difficult to contaminate and easy to purify (cf. Dube 1975:163, 1988:16; Jacobson 1978:98). Some told me that only when a Hindu man engages in prolonged contact with lower-caste people or non-Hindus—by eating with them, visiting frequently in the same home, or engaging in a long-term sexual relationship—will lasting impurities accrue to the man’s body.

Brahmans in Mangaldihi also often compared women to low-caste people (or Sudras), saying that both were “impure” (aśuddha). Their reasons included the fact that lower-caste people in Mangaldihi were generally not able (even if they had wished, which many did not) to maintain the levels of purity commonly sought by Brahmans. For instance, they lacked sufficient clothing to be able to change soiled clothes during the day. They also lacked the time required to bathe repeatedly, as their days were filled with labor. Furthermore, because many Bagdi men and women worked outside of the home as field laborers or domestic servants, they were required to mix more indiscriminately with a diversity of people and jātis, often even cleaning the dishes or unwashed clothing (impure from defecation or menstruation) of others. According to dominant Brahman discourses, then, women and Sudras were “open” and subject to impurities in some of the same ways. In addition, neither women nor Sudras could wear the sacred thread indicating the “twice-born” and pure status of an upper-caste male.

A final point made to me about women’s relative openness emphasized not their receptivity but their diffusion. It is women, people told me, who nurse children, cook, fetch water, feed and care for household gods, and handle on a daily basis all sorts of household things. That is why women, rather than men, must take the most care in regulating their mixings with others, lest they exude impurity or unwanted substances onto the household things and members they feed and care for.

Such notions about the relative openness of women’s bodies are not uncommon cross-culturally. Thus Carol Delaney (1991:38) finds that in Turkish society the male body is viewed as self-contained whereas the female body is relatively unbounded. Renne Hirschon (1978:76–80) writes about the ambiguous nature of female “openness” in Greek society, while Jean Comaroff (1985:81) notes the relative lack of closure of female bodies among the Tswana of South Africa. But we must remember that in this community of north India, even the male body was not usually considered to be wholly bound; it was only relatively bound compared to the greater openness of the female body.

Another distinctive characteristic of the female body, according to many I knew, was its “hot” (garam) nature. Heat was viewed in Mangaldihi as an element of all mixing and mutuality in social life, including sexuality, attachment, love, and maya, as well as anger and the messy mixings of daily impurities. When people spoke to me of the heat of women’s bodies, they most often were referring to female sexuality.

Both men and women, people told me, produce heating (garam) sexual fluids—uterine or menstrual blood (ārtab,rakta) and semen or seed (śukra). Both male and female sexual fluids are highly distilled forms of blood derived from the cooking of food within the body. But women have more sexual heat than men, at least during their postpubertal and premenopausal years, as is demonstrated by menstruation, which results from an overabundance of hot blood periodically draining from the body.^[6]

For this reason, people generally agreed that it was safe, even desirable, for women to have regular sexual relations within marriage, as a way to expend and regulate bodily heat. But men had to be more careful to engage in sexual intercourse with only moderate frequency. While complete abstinence for men could lead to excessive bodily heating, very frequent sexual activity, nocturnal emission, or masturbation could result in excessive cooling and an unhealthy depletion of male vitality, even premature graying or impotence.^[7] Many women told me that their husbands thought it best to have intercourse only once a week, although some had engaged in sexual activity almost every night during their first year or two of marriage (thereby causing some husbands concern).

The real danger for women and their families of this greater sexual heat attributed to women seemed to be the possibility of sexual liaisons outside of marriage. Sexuality within marriage, if not unduly excessive, was auspicious and desirable, both for the sake of pleasure and, even more important, for creating children and carrying on the family line. Marglin (1985a, 1985c:89–113) makes the important point that although female sexuality in the Hindu world is impure, it is also inherently auspicious. Marglin’s Oriya informants also note that the separation required of women during their menstrual periods is designed not merely to prevent women from contaminating others but also to express reverence for women’s creative capacities and to allow them, respectfully, to rest (1996:161 and passim; Marglin and Mishra 1993; Marglin and Simon 1994). In Mangaldihi married women spent much of their daily lives enhancing their sexual and reproductive powers (as well as their attractiveness for their husbands)—by wearing red (a symbol of heat, sexuality, fertility, and menstrual blood): they applied red vermilion to the parting of their hair, wore red bangles and saris, and painted red āltā on their feet.^[8] Brides-to-be and pregnant young wives were also often fed especially well in their households; they were given delicious heating and nonvegetarian foods in order to enhance their bodily heat, sexuality, and fertility.

But the qualities of sexuality and heat could be very dangerous outside the context of marriage and the patrilineal family line. According to both male and female informants, women were even more likely than men to be unable to resist a sexual urge and be thrown into promiscuity. This perception has long been common throughout India. For instance, Ved and Sylvia Vatuk (1979:215) quote a version of the ballad of the “Lustful Stepmother” popular in Uttar Pradesh in the mid-1940s: “King, there are thousands of old books describing lust, and all agree that 17/20ths of lust belongs to women, 3/20ths to men. That is why you cannot trust her. She has so much power in her body!” Marglin (1985c:60) similarly finds that among the Brahman temple servants in Puri, “women are believed to have four times the sexual power of men.…They are thus four times more likely than men to be unable to resist a sexual urge.” And indeed, many women I knew did speak in general terms about the potential of women to succumb to sexual urges; yet when speaking of their own experiences, almost all described the men in their lives as pursuing sex more fervently than they. Several of E. Valentine Daniel’s male informants similarly commented that although women have more sexual desire than men, they are better able than men to control themselves (1984:171–72). Consensus on these matters is thus difficult to reach.

Most in Mangaldihi seemed to agree, however, that the consequences of women engaging in sexual relations outside of marriage could be grave. An unmarried girl who has sexual relations and whose pregnancy becomes known ruins her reputation and that of her natal family, seriously jeopardizing her own and any younger sisters’ chances for marriage. Mangaldihians told me that in earlier times such young women were thrown out of their households or even killed in order to protect the family’s reputation (though no one could supply a specific instance of such extreme action). Nowadays a pregnant girl’s family will usually try to find out who made her pregnant; and if the man is unmarried and of the same caste, her family will pressure his family into taking the girl as a wife, or at least providing a sizable sum of money for her future dowry—attempts that are not always successful, as a boy’s family can use various strategies to duck responsibility, including blaming the whole affair on the natural promiscuity and sexual voracity of the young woman (Lamb 1992). Brothers or a savvy mother may also intercede early on to get the girl an abortion or induce a miscarriage, sometimes successfully keeping the whole matter a family secret. But no family wants to bring a child into the world who could not grow up as part of a father’s family line and who would be a perpetual reminder of his mother’s indiscretion. In the one case I knew in which an unmarried girl did give birth to a near full-term baby, the baby was immediately killed and buried on the outskirts of the village. According to letters I still receive from the family, the young woman and her younger sisters, years later, remain unable to marry.

A married woman might find it easier to hide an extramarital liaison, because a resulting pregnancy could be her husband’s. (One village woman’s two children, for example, looked distinctly like one of the main temple priests, not her husband. A few furtively gossiped to me—had I noticed?—but publicly people seemed to look the other way.) From a traditional perspective of patrilineality, however, the consequences for such a woman and her household were equally serious. To understand why, we must look briefly at local theories of procreation. In Mangaldihi, as in West Bengal and Bangladesh generally, conception was said to come about through the mixing of the man’s “seed” (bīj), contained in his semen (śukra), with the woman’s uterine blood (ārtab) within the womb (garbha), which is often referred to as a “field” (kshetra).^[9] The child produced from this union could be called the “fruit,” or phal. It is the man who is responsible for planting the “seed” of the future child in the womb or “field” of the woman. The seed is generated from the father’s blood, and so by passing his seed on to his child, the father passes on his blood (rakta). The woman also contributes blood to the fetus and child, for she nourishes it with first her uterine blood and then her breast milk, both of which were viewed as distilled forms of blood. But it is the father—both men and women in Mangaldihi agreed—who is the one actively responsible for generating the child through producing and planting the “seed.”

By passing on his seed, the father also passes on his baṃśa, or family line, to his child. At the time of conception, if the parents are married the mother has the same baṃśa as the father, since a woman becomes part of her husband’s baṃśa at marriage. Nonetheless, Bengalis say that it is fathers, not mothers, who provide a baṃśa for their children. The forefather (ādipuruṣ) of a baṃśa is the “root” (mūl) male, and the family line ascends upward from this root through a line of fathers and sons, like a very long-growing and many-branched bamboo.

If a married woman has sexual relations with a man other than her husband, his sexual fluids and bodily substance enter her permanently. Not only is she thus tainted by a stranger or an “other” (parer) man’s substance, but she could pass his residues on to her whole family—when she nourishes her children in her womb and with breast milk, when she cooks for her husband and household members, and when she makes offerings to the ancestors. Several Brahman women told me, too, that ancestors will not accept food offered by an adulteress (cf. Marglin 1985c:53). And obviously, if a married woman becomes pregnant with another man’s seed, she threatens the continuity of her husband’s and his ancestors’ family line, for the child born to the family will not be sprouted from the same male line of “seeds.” So Marglin (1985c:66–67) describes the views of those in neighboring Orissa: “A woman, like a field, must be well guarded, for one wants to reap what one has sown and not what another has sown.”

For men in Mangaldihi, chastity was also regarded as a virtue. Men who openly engaged in extramarital affairs could be said to have a “bad character” (caritra khārāp) or a “bad nature” (svabhāb khārāp). But the merit or demerit resulting from a man’s sexual behavior affected mostly himself, not his household, ancestors, or the continuity of his family line.

Countermeasures: Containing the Body

Because of the perceived potential dangers of a woman’s openness and sexuality, women and girls in the Mangaldihi region were taught by their senior kin to discipline their bodies—to attempt selectively (in certain contexts, especially in public and around men) to close themselves; they relied on spatial seclusion, cloth coverings, binding the hair, special diets, and the like. These disciplining techniques seemed to aim primarily at controlling and channeling a woman’s powers toward desired ends within a patrilineage. Dominant discourses indicated that a woman’s body was in most need of control or containment between the onset of puberty and marriage, as well as during the early years of marriage, because a woman was most vulnerable to violations—sexual and otherwise—of her body and household during those times.

One way of controlling a woman’s vulnerability was through physical isolation. Prepubertal girls and boys enjoyed a relative freedom of movement through all the spaces of the village—walking to the primary school on the village outskirts, running to various stores on errands, playing in dusty lanes and on the banks of ponds. By the time girls graduated from the village’s primary school, however, their spheres of movement became increasingly constricted. Most upper-caste and some lower-caste girls did venture beyond the village to attend high school (except during the four days of their menstrual periods); but they were expected at other times to remain largely within their own neighborhoods; lower-caste girls might fish or work in the fields, but always accompanied by their mothers or other female kin. Within their neighborhoods, unmarried girls still spent time out of their own houses, as they sat in the courtyards or on the doorsteps of their neighbors’ homes, talked, played with friends, and watched people come and go. Girls of this age also often went on brief errands for their elders—to pick up a little sugar or a few matches, or to bring water from the pond or hand pump (attached to a tube well). But gradually, except if working out of the home with other women, they were pressed to confine themselves more strictly to their own homes and neighborhoods.

After women married and moved to their śvaśur bāṛi (father-in-law’s home), their spatial domains contracted even further. Especially when newly married, a wife would rarely go out of the house at all, save her journeys once or twice a day (accompanied by other household women) to the fields to defecate and to a pond to bathe. Gradually, the demands of daily work required that most married women venture out of the house—to fetch water, to wash dishes, or (if the woman was of lower caste) to work in the fields or in other people’s homes. Married women also congregated frequently at village temples to perform vrata rituals for the well-being of their households. And in the late afternoons when their household tasks eased, married women occasionally made brief visits to a neighbor woman’s home for tea, or sat on a front doorstep talking with other women and children. But other than such necessary or brief interludes, married women confined their movements largely to the interiors of their homes: cooking, cleaning, caring for children, and talking among household members and guests.

Men, in contrast, lived and moved relatively “outside” (bāire) throughout their lives. The young men of Mangaldihi, both married and unmarried, congregated together in groups in the village’s most public and central places, as well as on the village’s outer peripheries and beyond. Young men gathered for hours every day at the village tea shops, read the daily newspapers at the central library, hung out in front of the two new video halls, sat in groups in the central village green, played soccer on the playing field on the village outskirts, sat on the paved road by the bus stop watching people come and go, and had “picnics” in the village’s outer fields. These were places where women rarely ventured, and I often longed to be able to join them there—their activities looked fun and free. Hena agreed; but she advised me not to go. Men also made frequent outings to towns and villages beyond Mangaldihi, whether commuting to work or buying and selling goods in larger markets.

Women were also contained by their clothing, which covered their bodies and neutralized their sexuality. Young village girls wore knee-length, light cotton “frocks,” which were gradually replaced with full-length salwar-kameez (pantsuits) and then saris as the girls passed through puberty and reached marriageable age. It was improper for married women, and mature unmarried girls, to expose too much of their bodies, including their calves and shoulders. Some girls found the transition to these more modest and restrictive forms of clothing quite disturbing. Choto described how horrible she felt when her parents first began to make her wear a salwar-kameez and veil to cover her legs, shoulders, and chest whenever she left the neighborhood. She had begun to develop earlier than her friends and could not understand why she had to wear these new clothes, why her body had suddenly become a private and shameful thing. Married women also covered their heads with the ends of their saris (as a ghomṭā, or veil) whenever they were in the presence of senior men in their husbands’ households and villages. This veiling, performed as an act of respect and avoidance, served a double function: it protected men from overexposure to women’s power and it protected women from unwanted male advances (cf. Papanek and Minault 1982).^[10] For their part, men had a wide range of clothing available to them. Many who could afford it and those who commuted to jobs in cities enjoyed wearing Western-style shirts and trousers. But when days were warm and when they were casually hanging out at home or in tea stalls, or when they went to work in fields, most men wore lungis (informal loin cloths) or dhotis: cloths wrapped around the waist, with chest and calves exposed.

As a measure to curtail excessive openness, women were also expected to bind their hair, keeping it in braids or tied up in a knot. Women ordinarily bound their hair whenever going out in public, and in fact in my early days in the village people would disapprovingly wonder why I kept my hair loose or “open” (kholā), until I gave in and began routinely to tie my hair up. It was particularly important to bind the hair during menstruation, presumably to counter the woman’s excessive openness during this period.^[11]

Some women also employed cooling diets (avoiding “hot” foods such as fish, garlic, and onions) to close their bodies and restrain their sexuality. This regime was followed after childbirth (when a woman’s body is dangerously open), after becoming a widow (when a woman has no legitimate means of expending sexual energy), and sometimes after entering puberty (especially if a girl suffers from acne, a condition said to come about from excessive sexual heat erupting through the skin). The bathing practices described above were also intended to contain the body (controlling its influxes and outflows) by purifying it of unwanted intrusions and by preventing these substances from entering women’s households.

These countermeasures, particularly spatial seclusion and veiling, are known in much of north and central India as “purdah,” a word literally meaning “a curtain.” ^[12] The term (pardā in Bengali) is not commonly used in the Mangaldihi region of West Bengal, but women’s daily practices often did create a protective “curtain” around them. These practices functioned to contain a woman’s most important and intimate interactions within her household, and to channel her sexual and reproductive powers toward her husband and toward extending his patrilineage. A gentle, middle-aged Brahman priest illuminated their significance when he told me, “Women have more power (śakti) than men, but their powers come from serving others, not from acting alone.”

Competing Perspectives: Everyday Forms of Resistance

How did women in Mangaldihi feel about all these forms of bodily training? Until recently, many ethnographies of gender in South Asia left the impression that women silently and compliantly accept a monolithic set of cultural values about the polluting and dangerous dimensions of their bodies and sexuality.^[13] More recent work, however, has sought to uncover the ways in which many women are able to critique, reinterpret, or resist such dominant ideologies, through their songs, stories, gestures, and everyday practices (e.g., Raheja and Gold 1994, Das 1988, Jeffery and Jeffery 1996). Gloria Raheja and Ann Gold (1994:10) incisively argue (also citing Das 1988): “[T]o assume that such characterizations [of the polluting and dangerous dimensions of women’s bodies] define the limits of women’s self-understandings and moral discourse is to ignore or silence meanings that are voiced in ritual songs and stories…and in gestures and metamessages in ordinary language throughout northern India.” Submission and silence, furthermore, do not necessarily indicate an unequivocal, fully internalized compliance or modesty; they may at times be conscious and expedient strategies deployed by women.^[14] In Mangaldihi, the women I knew presented alternative visions and practices of the female body, working around and subtly challenging (even as they often voiced and acquiesced to) the kinds of dominant ideologies I have been describing thus far.

At the same time that I was taught by many of the women in my neighborhood how to manage my body—by bathing, being cautious about what I touched, binding my hair, and so forth—I was also taught how to get around some of these restrictions in more subtle or private ways. Though many women appeared to be meticulous about matters of purity, others seemed to observe these strictures just enough to avoid criticism, without having fully internalized or accepted notions about the dangers of female impurity. For instance, on several occasions when I and a female companion were returning from visiting a low-caste or non-Hindu (Muslim or Santal) neighborhood, my companion would whisper to me as we approached our neighborhood, “Let’s not tell anyone that we touched anyone there—then we won’t have to bathe.” I should note, however, that this happened most often if the woman accompanying me was unmarried—indeed, only once did a married woman propose such a plan. Apparently women felt increasingly obligated as wives to comply with expected standards as they took on more responsibilities of upholding the household, cooking, caring for deities, and so on.

On another occasion, a young woman friend suddenly had to defecate just as we were about to catch a bus to make a trip to town. Whereas most in the village relieved themselves in the fields, my landlord let me make use of their fancy outhouse; it was a small brick building with two chambers, one for urinating and one for defecating. My friend suggested that she would use that outhouse (since she was with me) and said that if anyone noticed her going in, she would say that she had just gone into the urinating chamber (an action that would not require her to bathe), because she did not want to have to stop to bathe and change her clothes before going to town. “Great idea!” I said, happy to know that some women played with the rules. (I had previously thought of that same trick with the outhouse myself.)

Another example of a woman who did not seem fully to accept public notions about the gravity of female pollution was provided by a pilgrim on the bus tour I took from Mangaldihi to Puri (see chapter 4). The dominant ideology in the region held that menstruating women were not fit pilgrims and should not enter temples. One morning, however, some used menstrual rags were found in a corner of the bathroom of the pilgrim’s guest house where the group had stayed the night. Some older women began exclaiming, “Chi! Chi! What a great sin (mahāpāp) to go on a pilgrimage while menstruating!” but then the matter was dropped. I later happened to find out who the menstruating woman was. She admitted to me that she realized that her period might begin on the pilgrimage, but she had really wanted to go. She added that she believed that no harm (doṣ) would occur, because her devotion (bhaktī) was pure (pabitra). (I was a bit relieved to hear this, because my period had unfortunately begun on the journey as well.)^[15] As far as I could tell, she successfully kept the matter a secret, and none of the other women made any real effort to discover who the source of the rags was.

Even those who maintained strict bodily purity sometimes acted for reasons more complex than a simple acquiescence to the official views about female bodies. For instance, there was one Brahman woman in our neighborhood who was known to be extremely “finicky” or “fastidious” (khũtkhũte) about matters of purity. She was continually washing her hands, bathing, changing her clothes, and scrubbing the house. She made her two daughters bathe and change their clothes each time they reentered the home from school or play. She resisted touching other people or things, even her own daughters, except when necessary. Other women told me, as a partial explanation, that her husband was having a long-term, public affair with a low-caste woman, whom he kept in a separate home on the borders of the village. Perhaps maintaining an extreme state of bodily purity was the only way available to this woman to gain some control over her own body, and to close herself to the intrusions the other woman and her husband were making into her life.

I also encountered a wide diversity of women’s perspectives and practices surrounding female sexuality, some of which subverted dominant patrilineal ideologies. Sexuality was a common and welcome topic of conversation among women, especially when a new bride was present. This gave women the opportunity to crowd around and probe her about her new sexual experiences: How was she enjoying it? How many times had they done it? One new bride, with her husband’s apparent approval, came to ask me for tips from my own culture or experiences on how a woman can increase her sexual pleasure.

Some women (married and unmarried) had sexual relations outside of marriage, and seemed to be able to manage them with no serious consequences. I met one such amorously involved woman, whom I will call Keya, on my first afternoon in Mangaldihi. Shortly after I had deposited my few household belongings in the small mud hut in which I was to reside, two married women whom I guessed to be in their early thirties came to pay me a visit. We chatted for a little while about this and that, and then Keya, to my surprise, asked me how to say the names of the male and female sexual organs in English. I told her. She smiled with pleasure, and then began to say the words loudly while laughing with her friend; she repeated them for the rest of the afternoon, as they returned to their household work. (I was only slightly comforted by the hope that no one else, other than we three, would be able to understand what she was saying.) I later found out that probably some of her eagerness to discuss sexual matters in this strangely public yet surreptitious way stemmed from her engagement in a clandestine love affair with another married young man of the village. Her own marriage had been arranged against her will to a man considerably older than she was; he had married her after his first wife, her own sister, had died while he had been attempting to give her an abortion (I never knew precisely how or why). Keya had never been particularly romantically inclined toward her husband—nor he toward her, from what I could gather. In large part, her role in the marriage consisted of caring for her husband’s children by her sister. One way that she could gain some degree of pleasure and agency in her life was through taking a lover. (Once, when her husband was out of town for a few days, she borrowed one of my lace American bras.)

In the one case I encountered (mentioned above) in which an unmarried girl, “Mithu,” did become pregnant with tragic consequences, it is important to note that criticisms of the village women focused not on the ruined chastity or sexual promiscuity of the young girl (accusations voiced by the young man’s family, in an attempt to thrust all blame squarely on her) but rather on the unforgivable naïveté of a young woman and her mother who did nothing to terminate a pregnancy before it became public. Underlying the village women’s discourse seemed to be the notion that the virtue of a woman is tied not only or even primarily to traditional notions of chastity but also to the strategic capacity (or lack thereof) of a woman to construct a virtuous public image or “name” (nām). These conversations led me to realize that many of the women I knew strove to maintain an appearance of self-containment, purity, or chastity not so much because they believed that they were more sexually dangerous or impure than men, but because they understood that maintaining such a public image was the only way for them to preserve both their own honor and that of the men and women in their families whom they cared about.

Their complex, multilayered perspectives seemed to resonate with those of Dadi, the mother-in-law of the evocative film Dadi’s Family. Remembering her earlier years as a young wife, Dadi speaks in her resolute and thoughtful mode: “I piled on the yeses, but I did what I wanted to do.” Resistance must often be subtle. I do not want to deny the felt oppressiveness of many of the ideologies and practices that did discipline and control local women’s bodies, movements, and lives, or to exaggerate or romanticize their capacities to resist. At the same time, it would be wrong and misleading to overlook the ways that women in Mangaldihi did in many contexts reinterpret, play with, subvert, and critically evaluate the disciplining practices and ideologies that otherwise often served to control their bodies and lives.

The Changes of Age

Older Women

If one of our aims, as scholars of gender in South Asia and elsewhere, is to complicate our understandings of the structuring of gender relations, then it is important not only to look at the multiple, competing ways that women imagine and interpret, resist, and criticize dominant ideologies of gender in their societies, but also to examine the ways that women’s bodies, identities, and forms of power (or subordination) are perceived to change over the life course. Women’s bodies and identities in north India do not stay the same throughout their lives. A few scholars have acknowledged the shifting roles that Indian women assume within their households and families, as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, and mothers-in-law. But almost no work has been done on how women’s bodies are perceived to change over a lifetime, and the concomitant social and political implications of these changes (an exception is S. Vatuk 1992). As a result, ethnographies of gender in South Asia (including the earlier pages of this chapter) have tended to give the impression that local definitions of female embodiment revolve centrally around sexuality, fertility, childbirth, and menstruation, and that categories of gender are tied to differences between women and men perceived to be fixed and dichotomous. In Mangaldihi, however, as I first mentioned in the introduction, women were believed to undergo significant changes in their somatic (and related social) identities as they aged, in ways suggesting that to analyze local definitions of gender by concentrating only on women during their married and reproductive years would lead to seriously flawed conclusions.

According to the villagers, women experienced a relative closing and cooling of the body as they entered into postreproductive phases of life. Thus the qualities of “heat” and “openness” that were often used to describe female bodies in fact pertained to women during their premenopausal (and postpubertal) years only. Such bodily cooling also meant that older women could freely give up most countermeasures of purdah, or “curtaining” and containment, that many had earlier practiced. Menopause in and of itself did not constitute a very highly marked or visible transition in women’s lives in Mangaldihi.^[16] It was important; but many of the changes that went along with menopause (namely, a cessation in sexual and reproductive activities) usually began earlier, as women married off their children and moved to the more detached, celibate peripheries of household life (see chapter 4). Menopause nonetheless added an important dimension to an aging woman’s bodily and social transitions: a “closing” of the body and, with this, an increased purity and freedom of interaction.

The process of menopause, which was called a “stopping (or closing) of menstruation” (māsik bandha hāoyā), was perceived to entail a cooling, drying, and relative closing of the woman’s body. As menstruation involves the release of excess sexual-reproductive heat, so the stopping of the menstrual flow marks a depletion and cooling of this heat, and thus a decrease in (hot) sexual desires and reproductive capacities. Women said that after menopause, their bodies had become cool and dry and they no longer felt the heat of sexual desire. Early on in my stay, I asked Choto Ma if old people were hot or cold. She teased me at first for asking such a silly question. “Of course the bodies of young people like you are hot,” she said, and her knowing smile indicated that she was referring at least in part to sexual heat. Then she added seriously, “Old people are not hot like that.” Her friend and sister-in-law, Mejo Ma, added: “When you get old, everything becomes closed or stopped (bandha). That which happens between husband and wife stops. Menstruation stops. And then when your husband dies, eating all hot food stops as well.^[17] This is so that the body will dry out and not be hot (jāte śarīr śukiye jābe, garam habe nā).”

Bhogi Bagdi also spoke to me of the cooling and drying of her body after menopause. She enjoyed sitting in the narrow, dusty lane in front of her house talking about sex, using vulgar language, and teasing the young people who visited her about their sexual practices. So I asked her one day if she still had sexual desire. She answered quickly (as I reported in an epigraph to this chapter): “No, of course not! After the blood stopped, my body dried out (rakta bandha hāoyār par, śarīr śukiye geche). Even if I wanted to [have sex], I wouldn’t be able to. I had four kids, then my blood dried up, and then my body dried up (deha śukiye geche). Now I have desire (lobh) only for food.”

Although most women began to refrain from engaging in sexual and reproductive activity before menopause, menopause nonetheless signified for women a complete stopping of sexual-reproductive processes—not only of the activities themselves but of the capacities to engage in them. The nature of the body thus fundamentally changed.

This cooling of somatic heat in conjunction with the cessation of menstrual flow could, some said, be accompanied by an increase in the heat of anger (rāg). Several mentioned that although old women no longer feel the heat of sexual desire, they do become easily “hot” or angry in the head (māthā garam hae jāe). While these might appear to be references to what we label “hot flashes,” these sensations did not seem to be a culturally recognized phenomenon for Mangaldihians. I asked quite a few women about feeling warm during menopause, and only two mentioned that they had experienced this: one described a feeling of “fire” (āgun) in the head, and the other spoke of having “hot ears” (garam kān). More told me instead that women can become easily angry (also a “hot-headed” state) in older age. This transfer of heat from sexuality to anger did not seem to be viewed as gender specific, however: it could happen to older men as well (cf. Cohen 1998).

For women, the significance of this transition lay in their change to a state of increased purity, coolness, and relative boundedness of the body. It was at this point, after a woman’s menstrual periods had stopped and especially if she was widowed and upper caste, that a woman was considered to be “pure” (śuddha or pabitra), comparable to a deity (ṭhākurer moto), and in some ways “like a man.” The perception that postmenopausal women are in significant ways “like men” can also be found elsewhere in India (e.g., Flint 1975) and in other societies, such as the Kel Ewey Tuareg of northeastern Niger (Rasmussen 1987) and the Bedouins of Egypt (Abu-Lughod 1986:131, 133). When I would ask why, village women would explain that old women no longer menstruate, no longer give birth, no longer have sex, and (especially if they are upper-caste widows) no longer eat hot, nonvegetarian (āmiṣ) foods. This makes them continually “pure” (śuddha) like men, who also do not menstruate or give birth; and it makes them similar to the dominant deities of Mangaldihi as well (Syamcand and Madan Gopal, forms of Krishna), for these gods were only served cooling, vegetarian foods and were, of course, kept in a state of purity.^[18] Furthermore, it was particularly postmenopausal widows who were described as “pure” and manlike, presumably because they were categorically free from the hot and female activities of sexuality and wifehood.^[19] A married older woman, even if not sexually active, was still a wife (sadhobā, “with husband”), after all; and she continued to be associated with sexuality, fertility, and marital relations as long as she adorned her body with auspicious red vermilion and wore red-bordered saris, as a proper wife should.

According to local opinion, the sexual heat and desire (kām) of men also wanes in old age. But as men never have as much sexual heat and desire as women in the first place, their transformation toward increasing asexuality is not as dramatic. E. Valentine Daniel (1984:165) describes a similar perspective offered by a resident of Tamil Nadu. According to this informant, the sexual fluids (intiriam) of a male remain qualitatively and quantitatively the same throughout life. A woman, in contrast, produces vastly more sexual fluids than a man throughout most of her life, but about ten to twelve years following menopause she begins to produce only the smaller amount that a man does.

Young and older women alike in Mangaldihi spoke of the process of stopping menstruation and becoming more like a man as a positive one. In the United States, menopause is popularly conceived as a largely negative experience that signifies an irreversible process of female aging, with its loss of youth, beauty, and sexuality, and is accompanied by painful “symptoms” such as hot flashes and diseases such as osteoporosis (e.g., Lock 1982, 1993; E. Martin 1987). When I asked women in Mangaldihi what they thought about the end of menstruation, however, they almost uniformly replied that it was a good thing (see also S. Vatuk 1992:163–64). Ceasing to menstruate meant being free from the hassles of monthly bleeding and impurity, being able to travel (without fear of causing an embarrassing mess on a bus or train), being able to go on longer pilgrimages (without fear of bringing menstrual impurities before the deities), and being able to cook for temple and household gods whenever one liked—all practices (village women noted) available to men throughout their lives.^[20] By the beginning of this phase, most women also felt that they had had enough children (except those widowed at a young age and not remarried, who could not expect to bear children anyway); so loss of fertility was not experienced with regret. A few women who had not yet stopped menstruating even complained to me, “Why do my periods keep coming? My time for stopping has come.”

As women experienced menopause and a relative closing and cooling, they also made changes in how they dressed and adorned their bodies. As I mentioned in chapter 4, men and women both tended to wear more white and dress more simply as they entered old age. But the transformation in modes of dress was most striking for women. From wearing mostly red and other bright colors and adorning their bodies with jewelry, hair ribbons, and perfume in their young and newly married years, women in Mangaldihi in their later years took to wearing mainly the cool color of white and relinquishing bodily adornments. Older nonwidowed women could still wear saris with red-colored borders, and they continued to wear marriage bangles and red vermilion in the parts of their hair; but as their children married, they also increasingly wore saris that were predominantly white, as a sign of their older and postreproductive status. Most also gave up other forms of adornment, claiming that it was no longer appropriate or necessary for them to highlight their physical attractiveness. They thus avoided wearing fancy silk, polyester, and newly starched saris in favor of worn, simple cotton ones, and they limited any jewelry to perhaps a simple everyday chain and small pair of earrings.

Women whose children were largely grown and who were past childbearing also frequently quit wearing blouses under their saris, except when going out of the neighborhood or village. Blouses were mandatory for younger women to cover their breasts and shoulders (and even the sleeveless blouses now popular in India’s cities were considered improperly revealing in Mangaldihi); but older women would say to me that for them, wearing blouses was an unnecessary kind of “dressing up” (sājāno). Older women began to reveal their calves much more, hiking their saris up to their knees on hot days and leaving off their petticoats. Khudi Thakrun frequently wandered around the village with her breasts and calves entirely exposed, her white sari simply tied around her waist (much as a man would wear a dhoti or loin cloth), and her breasts, wrinkled and long from nursing nine children, hanging down almost to her waist (see photograph 1 in chapter 3). Older Brahman widows commonly began even to wear men’s white dhotis in place of saris. Furthermore, women could increasingly relax their veiling practices as they advanced in seniority, pulling saris over their heads only on more formal occasions when senior male kin (whose numbers were decreasing) were present (see also U. Sharma 1978:223).

Covering the body reduces warmth and is a barrier to interaction; decorating the body attracts and invites attention. Both actions were thought appropriate in younger, sexually active women but inappropriate (as well as unnecessary) in older, postreproductive women. Nakedness, too, was interpreted in two different ways, depending on the life stage of the woman: it was sexually provocative in the young, and a sign of asexuality in the old.

Sylvia Vatuk (1992:164–67) similarly describes how older women with married children in western Uttar Pradesh and Delhi wear white and light-colored clothing and avoid adorning their bodies. She finds these practices to be seemingly paradoxical social constraints imposed on the sexuality of older women: Why, if older (postmenopausal and postreproductive) women are thought to be asexual, should their sexuality be controlled or constrained by restrictions on dress and physical adornment? My interpretation here is somewhat different: the modes of dress of older Indian women do not constitute a kind of personal or social “constraint” on an older woman’s sexuality as much as they express her relative asexuality. Although the cool, white, simple clothing of an older woman plays a part in transforming her into an asexual person (and thereby controls any lingering sexuality that would be considered inappropriate at this stage of life), it also serves as an index of an asexuality that, in Mangaldihi at least, was regarded as occurring naturally.

As women entered postreproductive life phases, they also transformed their gender by altering their spatial movements. As already noted, women were fairly domestic with little outside wandering as postpubertal unmarried girls, and then became very domestic and largely confined to their houses as wives. But as their daughters-in-law began to take over domestic work, and especially as they became widowed, older women spent more and more time out of their homes. Dressed in white, they roamed through village lanes visiting each others’ homes, playing cards, congregating on the cool floors of temples, and sitting on the roadsides or by storefronts watching people come and go. They also frequented public rituals, plays, and other events that younger wives were often too busy or confined to attend. They traveled beyond Mangaldihi, paying extended visits to married daughters’ homes and going on pilgrimages to faraway holy places. These external wanderings were facilitated by the cooling, closing, and decreasing sexuality of older women’s bodies (whether natural or imposed), for they and their families no longer found it necessary to control and constrain their bodies and interactions. In these ways, being older struck me as a very freeing, open, and pleasurable phase of life for women.

Older Men

Men in Mangaldihi did not undergo nearly as marked a transformation in their modes of dress and spatial movements over their lives; nor were their sexuality and bodily natures as dramatically transformed. Just as it was impossible to tell from his clothing whether a man was married or single (for men wore no outer signs of marriage, as women did), it was also impossible to tell whether a man was “senior” (buṛo). Around Mangaldihi, the traditional dress of men at any life stage was a white dhoti and panjābī (long shirt) for everyday or more formal wear, and a colored lungi for casual wear. This clothing could be worn by younger and older men alike. Fashionable and well-educated younger men often wore Western-style slacks and shirts, and it remains to be seen whether they will continue wearing the same kind of clothing when they become senior.

Men, moreover, were seen to be living and moving relatively “outside” (bāire) throughout their lives. Older men who had reduced their economic responsibilities and had more free time often congregated together in public places, as older women did. But these older men’s groups differed little from those of younger men, who also used their free time (which for many was plentiful, especially during seasons of agricultural lull) to gather together in public places.

Nonetheless, there were subtle signs of distinction between older and younger men’s dress and spatial domains. Older men tended to dress more simply, while younger men were more preoccupied with looking handsome and appearing in fashion. Mangaldihi’s younger men tended to oil their hair more frequently, to get new haircuts that they kept nicely combed, and to wear shoes and newer clothing. It was not uncommon for a young man to ask me if he was looking good. Older men, like older women, usually wore more simple, well-worn cotton clothing, frequently went without shoes, and paid less obvious attention to their appearance.

Furthermore, as a senior village man became increasingly weak or infirm, he would spend more and more time in the household, sitting or resting on a cot in a corner of the courtyard or on the veranda, watching the household activities, receiving occasional visitors, and sometimes looking after small children. Therefore, as women were transformed in older age to become more like men in their bodily natures, spatial movements, and outer wanderings, men in a way became more like women—increasingly domestic and confined to the home.

People in Mangaldihi clearly used the body to define gender, but they did not rely on a male/female distinction based on dichotomous and fixed physiological differences, as is presumed in much contemporary feminist theory, which takes female physiology, sexuality, and reproductivity to define “woman” as a category across time and space (cf. Moore 1994:8–27; Nicholson 1994; Ortner 1996:137). Rather, the interrelated somatic, social, and political identities of gender—expressed and experienced via bodily regulations, spatial movements, dress, and perceived physiological processes—changed in profound ways over the life course. These changes made women (especially by late life) in some ways “like men,” and men in some (though less acknowledged) ways like women.

Women, Maya, and Aging

As women’s bodies underwent important changes as they aged, what about the ties of their maya? Did the relative openness of women throughout much of their lives mean, for instance, that women, compared to men, were more connected to others, more entwined in a net of maya? Not exactly. At least, no one offered me precisely this explanation, though women in Mangaldihi perhaps even more than men did value crowded togetherness, seeking to work together, bathe together, and eat together, as Margaret Trawick (1990b:73) also found among the women she knew in Tamil Nadu.^[21] The main difference between women and men with regard to maya was that women’s ties were unmade and remade at a greater number of critical junctures in their lives, not only through aging and dying, but also in marriage and widowhood. The most important connections of males were made only once and tended to endure throughout and beyond their lifetimes, while those of females were repeatedly altered—first made, then unmade and remade, then often unmade once more.

In the dominant patrilineal discourse of Mangaldihi, women were said to be capable of such changes because their bodies were naturally more open than men’s. The same traits of openness and permeability that made young women vulnerable to impurity and sexual violations could also be viewed as making women well-suited to marital exchange. According to one piece of proverbial wisdom, a woman would fare best if she were malleable like clay, to be cast into a shape of his choice by the potter (her husband), discarding earlier loyalties, attributes, and ties to become absorbed into her husband’s family (cf. Dube 1988:18).

The positions of boys and girls in their natal families were differentiated from infancy and childhood. Infants of both sexes were initially connected with their kin and village by a ceremony to mark the first feeding of rice (annaprāśana). But male children were distinguished by the greater scale and elaboration of that ceremony, and among the upper castes by several other subsequent life cycle ceremonies of “marking” or “refining” (saṃskāra) (Lamb 1993:348–63). Among Brahmans, marriage thus might be the eighth connection-making ceremony for a boy, but only the second for a girl. During each of the male child’s saṃskāras, the family would perform a nāndīmukh, a ritual offering to the ancestors meant to introduce and formally connect the boy to his patrilineage.

While the boy was commonly identified as a growing node of the patrilineage (baṃśa), meant to extend the patriline into future generations, a girl was often spoken of as a mere temporary sojourner awaiting her departure in marriage. Thus, she would have no ancestor-connecting nāndīmukh performed for her in infancy or childhood; only at her marriage were the ancestors asked for their parting blessings. Sayings, nursery rhymes, and everyday conversations conveyed to a daughter the unmistakable message that her stay in her parental home was short. I heard Mangaldihi girls at times singing lightheartedly a popular Bengali lullaby that struck me as painfully affecting:

	Rock-a-bye baby, combs in your pretty hair
	The bridegroom will come soon and take you away
	The drums beat loudly,
	The shehnai is playing softly
	A stranger’s son has come to fetch me
	Come my playmates, come with our toys
	Let us play, for I shall never play again
	When I go off to the stranger’s house.[22]

A phrase I would often hear was “A daughter is nothing at all. You just raise them for a few days, and then to others you give them away.” People spoke of daughters as “belonging not to us but to others.” The young girl who worked for me, Beli, said to me once: “If you’re going to have children, you shouldn’t have a daughter. You have to give a daughter away to an other’s house (parer ghar).” Expressions from other regions of India convey similar sentiments: “Bringing up a daughter is like watering a plant in another’s courtyard,” goes a Telugu saying (Dube 1988:12) heard also in Uttar Pradesh (Jeffery, Jeffery, and Lyon 1989:23). Girls in Kangra, northwest India, hear that a daughter is a bird “who after eating the seeds set out, will fly,” or a “guest who will soon depart” (Narayan 1986:69). Such sentiments do not imply that girls were unloved or unwanted. In fact, parents in Mangaldihi wanted to keep their daughters; they just couldn’t. They seemed to love and cherish their daughters with an added intensity and poignancy in anticipation of their pending departure.^[23]

Men in Mangaldihi, in contrast, usually resided—save perhaps for brief periods of work in other cities—within the same community and on the same soil where they were born. This is why, some men said, it is so difficult for them to loosen their ties of maya at the end of a lifetime, for they have become so deeply embedded within a family, community, home, soil. Among the several families I knew who had settled in Calcutta apartments after fleeing East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) at the time of partition, men spoke of having been forced painfully to cut apart the ties of their maya prematurely, as a woman does in marriage; they viewed the years following independence and partition as very “separate,” “independent,” and maya-reducing times.

For girls in Mangaldihi, it was through marriage that they became most marked and that the ties of their personhood were substantially unmade and remade. Throughout the three-day wedding, the bride would be made to absorb substances originating from her husband’s body and household. She rubbed her body with turmeric paste with which he had first been anointed, she ate leftover food from his plate, she absorbed his sexual fluids, she moved to his place of residence, and there she mingled with his kin and mixed with the substances of his soil. The bride’s surname and patrilineal membership (baṃśa) would also be formally changed to those of her husband. In this way, her marriage was generally interpreted as obscuring and greatly reducing, although not obliterating, the connections she once enjoyed with her natal home. She would no longer refer to persons of her natal family as her “own people” (nijer lok) but rather as her husband did—as her “relatives by marriage” (kuṭumb); for she was said to have become by marriage the “half body” (ardhānginī) of her husband (see also Inden and Nicholas 1977:39–51; Sax 1991:77–83).

For a girl, then, preparing to marry was in some ways like a first confrontation with mortality. The young brides who spoke to me anticipated the pain of cutting so many ties with their natal families, homes, and friends with dread, not comprehending how they would ever survive such an ordeal. These conversations were similar to those I had with older people about the separations at death. During the months preceding her wedding, my companion Hena would say to me through tears, “Your father gives you away. He makes you other. He wipes out the relation.” She would also purposefully pick quarrels with me in order, she said, “to cut the maya” a bit before her actual departure.

Many analyses of Hindu marriage have long stressed that a bride’s transfer to her marital kin is a complete break.^[24] More recently, however, anthropological studies of kinship and gender in India have pointed to evidence of a woman’s continuing ties to natal kin. William Sax (1991:77–126) and Gloria Raheja and Ann Gold (1994:73–120), for instance, argue that many writing on Indian social structure have for too long overemphasized the view of marriage as a complete transformation of a woman (an argument often grounded largely in textual analyses), overlooking other perspectives that stress that a woman’s ties with her natal kin and place can never be entirely effaced (see also Dube 1988:18; Jacobson 1977; Raheja 1995).

In Mangaldihi, too, women and men both agreed that however neglected, violated, or abused their earlier ties might be after marriage, a connection does remain forever between a married daughter and her natal kin. Just as maya cannot be suddenly and completely cut in aging and dying (see chapters 4 and 5), neither can the “pull” (ṭān) of maya, “of blood,” or “of the womb” between a girl and her natal home be wiped out entirely through marriage. Some of the rituals of marriage even served to affirm a departing bride’s natal ties. Marriage was the only time (save once again, four days after her parents died) when a girl’s nāndīmukh, ritual offering to her maternal and paternal ancestors, was performed in her name. On the day before her wedding, too, a bride would eat rice that she had collected uncooked from twenty-five neighborhood houses, to affirm her mutual ties with other village women even as she prepared to depart.

A married woman’s practices after the wedding were also crucial. According to Mangaldihians, the extent to which a married woman would be able to sustain valuable ties with the people of her father’s home depended largely on the amount of contact she succeeded in maintaining with them, through visiting and gift giving. During the first few years of marriage, young brides would often spend weeks or even months at their fathers’ homes, returning eagerly whenever natal kin came to call for them. Married women commonly returned to their natal homes for the birth of their first child and on special ritual occasions, when married daughters and sisters were summoned; these included the largest annual Bengali festival, Durga Puja (worship of the goddess Durga during her annual visit to her father’s home); Jamai Sasthi (day for honoring a married daughter’s or sister’s husband); and Bhai Phota (day on which married and unmarried sisters honor their brothers). Most married women thus had two houses they could call home—their bāperbāṛi (father’s house) and their śvaśurbāṛi (father-in-law’s house).

Maintaining these ties depended on negotiation as well as luck (her natal family’s interest in her, the supportiveness of her in-laws in allowing her to leave, the distance between the two homes, the financial resources required for travel and gift giving). A married woman could not decide to visit her natal family on her own; she had to wait for someone from her father’s house to come call for her. Women, though, sometimes sent letters or messages to their father’s homes, asking to be called for. Some secretly stowed away change or an extra petticoat to give to their mothers when visiting.

We see here that to understand women’s positions within families we must take into account not only patrilineal lineage, or baṃśa, but also maya, affection. Baṃśa is one thing (unmarried girls are in their fathers’ baṃśas; married women in their husbands’); but maya can be something different—imaged in terms of “love,” ties of the “womb” and of “milk,” gifts given, and time spent. Maya here can even be thought of as offering an alternative discourse to that of patrilineal kinship.

A married woman’s persisting connections of maya with her natal kin notwithstanding, Mangaldihi villagers still stressed the transience of a woman’s relations with her natal home. Mothers and wives emphasized this fleetingness at least as much as fathers and husbands did. Most mothers had known such separations from personal experience, and at each visit after marriage (whether their own or others’) they might relive their earlier feelings. Most said that they felt always the pain of having the ties of their girlhood and family belittled or ignored in their husbands’ homes. They spoke of the early years of marriage as a very vulnerable time, when they felt unattached, alone, lonely, homesick, even afraid. Choto Ma told me, “I sobbed and sobbed after my wedding. I couldn’t stand to be away from my father.” The “woman’s point of view” was not simply that the ties of a woman to her natal home could not be effaced, as Sax (1991:83) suggests, but rather that these ties were often gradually and painfully ignored and attenuated, even violated. Women even more than men were acutely aware of women’s tenuous relation to families and places—because they were the ones who most directly experienced the pain of having their natal substance devalued.

But as a woman lived in her marital home for many years, bore and raised children there, brought in daughters-in-law for her sons, experienced the births of grandchildren, and made friends among the other village wives, her ties gradually came to be more and more like a man’s, deeply embedded within one household and place. Most older women told me that even their lingering connections with their natal homes slowly faded, as they visited less and formed stronger ties in their marital homes (cf. Jacobson 1977:276–77). In telling her own life story, Choto Ma spoke of how a woman eventually “cuts the ‘link’” with her parents. “First she’ll cry a lot,” she said, “as I did. I sobbed and sobbed after my wedding.…But slowly you visit less, you cry less. And now, in old age, there is hardly any more connection with my father’s house.” A woman’s marital home would gradually become—in both her own eyes and those of others—no longer simply a śvaśur bāṛi, or “father-in-law’s house,” but her home. By old age, many women for the first time had gained a sense of an enduring emotional and substantial connectedness to one home, a sense of a rightful place there, and a concomitant degree of power and authority over others. In these ways—as in how the nature of their aging bodies was perceived—older women’s experiences and identities became, in significant respects, like men’s.

We have observed in this chapter how perceptions and experiences surrounding gender were complex, fluctuating, and multifaceted. Mangaldihi women’s and men’s experiences of gender over the life course make it clear that it would be highly misleading to think here of men and women, maleness and femaleness (and purity and pollution, power and powerlessness) as static and neatly opposing categories. This important point has been made by other recent feminist theorists. Sherry Ortner (1996:116–38) looks, for instance, at the intersections of class and gender in Sherpa society, arguing that “analysis focused through a polarized male/female distinction may produce distortions at least as problematic as those which ignore women and gender in the first place,” by masking the kinds of structural disadvantages that certain categories of men share with many women (p. 132). Chandra Mohanty (1991) similarly examines the problems (inherent in much Western feminist discourse) in positing a universal category of “women” and assuming a generalized notion of their subordination. Such an analytical move problematically “limits the definition of the female subject to gender identity, completely bypassing social class and ethnic identities” and the specificities of history, nation, and context (p. 64).^[25]

Looking at age can likewise give our analyses of gender a valuable multidimensionality and specificity. Mangaldihi women’s experiences of their bodies and sexuality, of expected forms of discipline and control, and of their positioning within families all shifted in profound ways over their lifetimes. “Women” were thus constructed in a variety of social and political contexts that existed simultaneously, altered with time, and were overlaid on top of one another. Looking at age in these ways fruitfully trains our gaze on flux, multivocality, and contradiction and provides insight into the complexities, ambiguities, and many dimensions of what it is to be a woman, and a man.

Notes

7. A Widow’s Bonds

It’s better not to get married at all than to be a widow. It’s better not to get married at all. If you never marry, then at least you have the people from your father’s house.

How many kinds of pain we suffer if our husband doesn’t live in our house! Just one pain? No. Pain in all directions. Burning pain; agony. Clothes, food, mixing with others, laughter, all of that ends.

Widowhood was the last phase of life for most women in Mangaldihi. The older women whose lives I have described over the previous pages—Khudi Thakrun, Bhogi Bagdi, Choto Ma, Mejo Ma—were mostly in this stage. They had almost expected to spend part of their lives as widows, since girls were younger than their husbands at marriage, generally outlived them, and usually did not remarry.

Widowhood was also a dreaded time of life. Depending on her caste and age at widowhood, a woman could expect to face any number of hardships. Her economic condition might be precarious. She might be forced to grow old childless, with no one to care for her. She might experience the wrenching emotional pain of losing a loved spouse. She might be considered by others to be dangerously inauspicious. And, especially if a Brahman, she would be pressed by her kin to wear white clothing; avoid all “hot,” nonvegetarian foods; eat rice only once a day (an amount that left her almost fasting); avoid bodily adornments; and live in lifelong celibacy. Until recently, many Brahman families also required their widows to shave their head (a practice some of the most senior Mangaldihi widows still observed) and to sleep on the ground. In contrast, a man who lost his wife was not expected to observe any special practices and was usually encouraged to remarry. If not already senior and retired, he generally did. Thus in Mangaldihi, in 1990 out of 335 households there were only thirteen unremarried widowed men, but sixty-nine unremarried widowed women.

I take a look, in this final substantive chapter, at widowhood—both as an important dimension of women’s experiences of old age and as an illuminating means of continuing to explore local gender constructions. How were women defined, perceived, and controlled—by themselves, and by others—when they were left without a husband? What do these perceptions and practices of widowhood tell us, ultimately, about gender?

Becoming a Widow

When a husband died in Mangaldihi, his wife was taken by other widows of her household or neighborhood to a pond where she would perform the ritual to make her into a widow or bidhobā, literally “without a husband.” Married women and unmarried girls were forbidden to watch the highly inauspicious ceremony (lest it cause their own future widowhood), so I describe the ritual here based only on what several widows reported to me.^[1] Many still shuddered, thinking of that horrible day.

First, the bereaved woman removed her marriage bangles of conch shell, iron, and red palā, broke them, and threw them into the pond. They were said to have “gone cold” (ṭhāṇḍā). A married woman whose bangles accidentally broke would replace them immediately, lest the broken and cold state of the bangles lead to her husband’s misfortune or death. A married woman never left her wrists bare; a widow’s arms remained empty. The widow then wiped the red vermilion or sindūr from her forehead and from the part in her hair. She had worn these marks as symbols of her married state since her husband had first placed them on her at their wedding. With vermilion the husband had symbolically activated his wife’s sexual and reproductive capacities, and these capacities were supposed to be lost with her husband’s death. If she was wearing red āltā on her feet, she washed it off.

The woman next entered the water for the “widow’s bath” (bidhobār snān), wearing for the last time one of the bright-colored saris she had worn as a married woman. When she emerged from the water she removed the colored sari to don a new white or subdued one. This sari was, when possible, supplied by the widow’s mother’s brother or some other male from her natal home, as a reminder of her natal attachments. From then on, the widow would avoid wearing red, the color of auspiciousness, warmth, sexuality, fertility, and married women. Brahman widows’ saris (and those of some lower-caste widows who chose to emulate Brahmans) were almost entirely white, thinly bordered with dark colors such as deep blue, black, or green. Widows could also wear men’s white dhotis. As I have previously noted, white was regarded as a “cool” (ṭhāṇḍā) color, symbolic of infertility, asexuality, asceticism, old age, widowhood, and death.

A final act in the making of a widow used to be the shaving of the head. In the past, high-caste widows had their heads shaved not just once but biweekly for the rest of their lives.^[2] It used to be said that if a widow’s hair was allowed to grow and be tied up in a braid, it would bind the deceased husband’s spirit to her and to the places of his previous life. Mangaldihians also viewed head shaving as an act of renunciation and of severing ties. Young widows now rarely follow this ritual, but there were several older Brahman widows of Mangaldihi, including Khudi Thakrun, who continued to shave the white hair from their heads every two weeks as a sign of their widowhood.^[3]

After completing their widow-making rituals, Mangaldihi widows took several different paths depending on their caste and life stage. For Brahmans, widow remarriage was absolutely forbidden, even if the widow was a young child who had never lived with her husband.^[4] For all the other caste groups of Mangaldihi, although a woman could ordinarily go through a true marriage ceremony (biye) but once, widows could be remated (usually to a widowed man) by a simpler ritual called “joining” (sāngā karā), which effectively made them husband and wife. However, it was generally only women widowed at quite a young age and who were still childless who chose to do so. Widows with children feared either that they would have to leave their children behind with their in-laws or that their children would not be treated well in their new husband’s home (see also Chen and Dreze 1992:18–19).^[5] Some also expressed a reluctance to relinquish any rights they might have to their deceased husband’s property, felt that they had borne enough children or were no longer of a marriageable age, or had a sense that widow remarriage was improper or embarrassing not only for Brahmans but for their caste as well. Widow remarriage in Mangaldihi, among any caste, was thus relatively rare.^[6]

Widow remarriage in India must also be put into historical context. Although the British implemented the Widow Remarriage Act in 1856, thereby officially legalizing the practice, this bill had the (presumably) unintended consequence of reducing widows’ rights among the lower castes, which had always condoned widow remarriage. The new act brought with it legal restrictions regarding the disposal of the widow’s property and children on her remarriage: these were to remain within her deceased husband’s patrilineage. Many widowed women, now facing a choice between marrying again and keeping their children and property, refrained from remarriage. Thus the economic interest of the high castes in not allowing widows to remarry was firmly protected by the act, and even legally extended across caste lines.^[7]

Those in Mangaldihi who remained widowed had several different options (sometimes none particularly desirable) as to where they could reside. Most widows, especially if they had children, remained in their former husbands’ or in-laws’ homes and continued to find useful work there—caring for children, performing household chores, working in the fields, and so on. If a widow had sons who were grown and married, her rightful place unquestionably continued to be with them even after her husband had passed away.^[8] Childless widows, or widows with very young children, often returned to their natal homes. If not wanted or comfortable in either natal or marital home, then some widows set up a separate household, usually adjoining that of natal or marital kin. Others moved away; north Indian pilgrimage spots such as Nabadwip, Varanasi, and Brindaban, as well as Calcutta’s old age homes, are crowded with widows who feel they have no real family ties.

In West Bengal, a widow (as long as she does not remarry) is legally entitled to inherit a proportion of her husband’s property, to be divided among herself and her sons.^[9] In practice, though, few widows—especially among the upper castes, who as a rule had the most property at stake—actually maintained land in their own names. They either formally or informally passed control of property to their sons, if the sons were grown, or left it in the hands of their fathers-in-law, if the widow and her children were young. A few widows who would have liked to have kept their land told me that although they knew they were legally entitled to it, who would go to the courts to fight? In lower-caste communities in Mangaldihi, where the general sense that women needed to be protected by men was less strong, some widows did manage to maintain control over property or a house. But often not much more than a tiny plot of land was at stake. Thus in Mangaldihi in 1990, there were no Brahman widowed heads of household, but a total of fifteen among several other middle and lower castes (Bagdi, Baisnab, Kora, Kulu, and Muci). Only two of these fifteen, however, were able to support themselves with income from their land; the others had to work as daily laborers.^[10]

After being widowed, Brahman women had to begin performing the restrictive set of widow’s observances (bidhobār pālan) listed above, which include avoiding “hot,” nonvegetarian foods (meat, fish, eggs, onions, garlic, and certain kinds of ḍā); eating rice only once a day (substituting at other times “dry,” śukna, foods such as muṛi, parched rice, or ruṭi, flat bread); fasting on the eleventh day of the lunar month (ekādaśī); wearing white; and giving up jewelry. Because of these dietary restrictions, a Brahman widow’s food had usually to be cooked separately from that of other household members. If vegetarian food so much as touched nonvegetarian food, the widow could not eat it. Therefore, Brahman widows often kept a separate cooking fire and set of utensils for preparing their own food. At feasts, Brahman widows would eat together off to the side or in a corner.

There was considerable variation among the non-Brahman castes in Mangaldihi as to how many, if any, of these restrictions their widows followed. Most all of the non-Brahmans said that their widows did not have to observe them, but several lower-caste (including Barui, Kulu, and Suri) widows I knew said that they chose to wear white and avoid meat, fish, and eggs because they felt it was “proper” for widows to do so, or because, after their husbands died, they had no more “taste,” “need,” or “desire” for meat and brightly colored clothing. After all, Brahmans were the dominant caste in the village, in terms of not only numbers, property, and wealth but also, in some respects, moral codes. One way that members of lower castes strove to raise the ranking of their caste as a whole (or their own personal or family status) was to emulate the practices of Brahmans, a strategy that some scholars have labeled “Sanskritization” (e.g., Srinivas 1952; Singer 1972).

Across caste lines in Mangaldihi, as throughout north India, widows were considered to be inauspicious and thus had to refrain from participating in auspicious life cycle rituals such as marriage. Widows could attend and watch such ceremonies, but they could not perform any of the rituals; nor could they touch the bride or groom, or cook and serve food. Contrary to what Lina Fruzzetti finds in the Vishnupur region of West Bengal (1982:106), widowed mothers in Mangaldihi could not even participate in their own daughters’ weddings.

I witnessed several women become widows over my stay in Mangaldihi and collected the stories of many others who vividly remembered the experience. Entering widowhood is painful and traumatic for most women, who simultaneously lose their husbands and are transformed into other, alien beings. Before moving on to analyze these transformations, I will relate the bitter story of how one Brahman woman of Mangaldihi—Kayera Bou, or “the wife from Kayera”—became a widow many years ago.

Kayera Bou and her husband had been married for about fifteen years, ever since she was sixteen and her husband nineteen, but they had produced no children together. Her husband had been ill with diabetes (“sugar”) for several years before he died, and she stayed by his side constantly nursing him. She told me that her head had become “hot” (garam), or mentally unstable, because of worry about her husband’s health and her childlessness. So her father came one day to take her away for a while to a mental health sanatorium in Ranchi, several hours away by train. Her husband died while she was away. I quote lengthy excerpts from the story she told me to preserve the power of her own words in describing her traumatic transformation into a widow:

And so I came home two months later [from Ranchi]. I came wearing sindūr,āltā, everything. I had asked for it all to be put on, and they all lovingly put it on me for the journey. I didn’t then have any good bracelets for my arms, so I said to my brother who had come to get me, “My husband’s harm (akalyāṇ) will happen. Bring me some bracelets.” I put on the bracelets, without knowing that I would immediately have to take them off again and break them. Our bracelets break [when we become widows]. We can’t wear bracelets any more. When you get married, you have iron bracelets put on you. And sindūr (vermilion in the part of the hair). These are our signs of marriage. Both of these go away. These are both the husband’s things, and both of these go away. For life.

So I came home [to my father’s house].^[11] It was night when I arrived. My father made me some śrbat (sugar water) to drink. But my mother didn’t come, because she knew she would start to cry. I asked where she was, and my father said that she was coming. They were keeping her away because she was crying so hard. My father didn’t want to let me know right away. He said, “Let her rest a bit.” And I was wearing sindūr and āltā! And what a fair complexion I had gained in Ranchi! Then my mother showed up weeping. I didn’t understand anything.

And then what we have to do [the widow’s ritual] was done. Our maidservant took me to the water—my mother couldn’t go. Those whose husbands are still alive can’t watch the kholā-parā (widow’s ritual).^[12] My mother wanted to take me, but no one would let her because my father was still alive. So our maidservant, who was a widow, took me to the water. I had to take off all of those things and be bathed. And when I understood what was happening, I began to sob. I beat my head and cried all night long. I had to be taken to the water, take off all of those things and throw them away, and be bathed. Then where was the āltā? And where were the ornaments? And good clothes? Where was anything? One after another they were all sunk in the water. Everything became surrounded with gloom (kāli). When he left, everything became gloom. Sadness.

When you didn’t get any letters from your husband for a long time [she said to me], I could understand how awful you must feel. A husband is such a thing. I abandoned everything else, and my eagerness was for one person only. I was coming back from Ranchi with such hope and expectation. I sobbed and sobbed thinking of all the hope I had come from Ranchi with, expecting that I would see him again.…

And then they said I wouldn’t be able to eat all that any more. At night they began to take out some muṛi (parched rice) to feed me. My mother was saying, “I won’t be able to give her muṛi. How can I give her muṛi and eat rice myself?” But my father told her that she would have to. My mother said, “No! I won’t be able to. I’m going to feed her rice. Society (samāj)! Let society happen [i.e., let people talk]! She’s my child. I’m going to feed her. Then later whatever happens will happen.”

But out of embarrassment (lajjāe) in front of everyone, she wasn’t able to feed me [rice]. People would have seen and said to her, “Oh, you’re feeding her rice? ” Perhaps my husband’s sister [who was married into that village] would see and say, “You’re feeding her this? ” and then she would go around slandering us and telling everyone that my mother was feeding me. That’s the fault (doṣ) of Bengalis, isn’t it? They go around talking about who’s feeding whom what. While at the same time my mother was saying, “She’s never eaten muṛi in her whole life. I can’t give her muṛi now to chew. She’ll never be able to eat muṛi. ”

Muṛi at night, and vegetarian rice (nirāmiṣ bhāt) in the day. How many kinds of pain we suffer if our husband doesn’t live in our house! Just one pain? No. Pain in all directions. Burning pain; agony. Clothes, food, mixing with others, laughter, all of that ends. If I just laugh with someone? Then others say, “Look! She’s laughing with him. And her husband is dead. Chi! Chi!” And they begin to talk. My husband’s relatives would say all those kinds of things. They would reproach me. They would say, “None of that will happen in our house. You’ve come to our house. You won’t talk to any man.” I lived in fear of them all. I wouldn’t talk to anyone. My health was still good at that time. They thought maybe I would turn my mind toward someone and become infatuated, through mixing. They would tell me not to look at anyone else. That there was no one like one’s own husband. That even to look at another man was bad. Our women have to live carefully like that. Just like unmarried women live carefully, so must widows live carefully. An unmarried girl’s parents must look after her carefully as long as she’s unmarried, and so must a widow’s mother-in-law look after the widow when her husband dies. A widow must live in fear of her mother-in-law.

Everything for us is forbidden. Our food goes, our clothing goes, everything. Decorations, powder, all that. But if I put on a little powder, what will happen? Let them say what they will. They can’t reproach me. I didn’t do anything unjust (anyāe). Then why can’t I fulfill a little fancy like that? And what if I want to wear a good, colored sari? But I can’t wear one; it won’t happen.

I heard many other stories like this one during my time in Mangaldihi. One woman told of how she was married at age two—as used to be common earlier in the century—and widowed at age eight, passing the rest of her life as a widow. Why do widows perform this rigorous set of practices that set them apart from other married women and from their own former selves? What do these practices reveal about the ways in which women, as wives and then as widows, were constituted as persons in Mangaldihi? The remainder of this chapter is devoted to answering these questions.

Sexuality and Slander, Devotion and Destruction

Widows and their families in Mangaldihi presented various explanations of why widows may choose, and their families may press them, to observe these rigors of widowhood. Their reasoning spoke to notions about female sexuality, the importance of honor or a “name,” and the complex bodily and moral relationship between a woman and her husband.

Controlling Sexuality

The most common rationale as to why widows were pressed to eat vegetarian diets and rice only once a day, to fast on the eleventh day of the lunar month, to wear white, and to forsake bodily adornments was that these were defensive measures aimed at controlling a widow’s sexuality. The widow’s diet was said (by men and women, widows and nonwidows) to “reduce sexual desire (kām),” to “decrease blood (rakta),” to make the body “cool (ṭhāṇḍā),” to make the widow “thin and ugly,” to keep her from “wanting any man.” Sadanda’s Ma, a senior Brahman widow, explained articulately: “These eating rules were originally designed to prevent young widows’ bodies from becoming hot (garam) and so ruining their character (svabhāb) and dharma (social-moral order). Fasting is not for either pāp (sin) or puṇya (merit). Doing it doesn’t produce puṇya, nor does not doing it make pāp. It is simply to weaken the body.” A group of Brahman co-wives (or sisters-in-law) expressed similar ideas, agreeing that a widow follows the observances “to make her thin and ugly, and to reduce her sexual desire (kām), since she cannot remarry.” (Their senior widowed mother-in-law listening to us interjected: “It’s very difficult. It’s better to die than do all of that.”) Bhogi Bagdi commented, “If a widow wears a good colored sari, everyone will come to make love to her.”

Recall that dominant discourses within Mangaldihi presented women as having more sexual heat and desire than men. This sexual heat could be particularly problematic for a widow, because (as people put it) her sexuality had been activated and opened through marriage but was now no longer controlled by a husband. Widows also had no acceptable way of dissipating the heat of their pent-up sexual desire. Several villagers commented that women who are accustomed to having sexual relations and suddenly cease have the most sexual desire of all. Many therefore felt that young widows constantly threatened to become promiscuous, injuring their own honor and that of their families and contaminating their bodies and households with the sexual fluids of other men.

In fact, the local prostitutes while I was in Mangaldihi were widows: one Brahman woman (who had actually been expelled by her family from the village and worked in a nearby town), one Bagdi woman, and one Muci woman. They were sometimes called rā–i, a slang term (found in many north Indian languages) translatable as “slut” and used to refer both to prostitutes and to widows.^[13] The double meaning of this term speaks not only to the fact that widows were often considered dangerously promiscuous but also to their precarious economic position. Some young widows, who are supported by neither their natal nor marital families, feel compelled to become prostitutes to survive.^[14]

The Bagdi and Muci widow-prostitutes were both young women who had returned to Mangaldihi to live with their mothers (both of whom were, incidentally, also widows). Prostitute widows fared better in their natal communities than in their marital villages. (In fact, I never heard of a prostitute working from her marital community.) Because a woman, once married, is no longer a real part of her natal family line, her actions do not affect her natal family as much as they would her husband’s family. Her natal family may also be more loving and understanding of the problems she faces. The Muci woman had a small child; perhaps that is why she had not remarried. The Bagdi woman, Pratima, was childless and ordinarily would have remarried, but her only close natal kin were a landless widowed mother and a young brother, neither of whom seemed to have had the means to arrange a second marriage for her. The Brahman widow-prostitute, Chobi, was a childless daughter from one of the most prestigious families of Mangaldihi, but her family members had broken off all relations with her many years earlier and would not even mention her name to me when giving me their family’s genealogical information. When I ended up meeting her, she told me that she preferred her life as a prostitute in town to the life she would have had in the village as a lifelong Brahman widow.

Villagers cited the perceived dangers of women formerly married but now not matched with men in explaining why widows must rigorously discipline their bodies. Eating a vegetarian diet free of all hot (garam) foods—eggs, fish, meat, onions, garlic, heating forms of ḍāl—counteracts a widow’s pent-up sexual heat to help keep her free from illicit sexual liaisons. A diet of cool foods was likewise recommended for those men, such as sannyāsīs or sādhus (ascetics), who had chosen to be celibate. Similarly, people told me, a widow must only eat rice once a day so that her body will become increasingly dry (śukna) and weak (durbal), processes that further reduce her sexual energy, curb her capacities to transact with others, and make her thinner and less attractive to men. Dressed in a plain white sari, bare of ornaments, thin from continual fasting, and perhaps also disfigured by cropped hair, a widow was supposed to become an asexual and unattractive woman.

For younger widows, such cooling and desiccating of their bodies was tantamount to premature aging. Although no one volunteered this comparison to me, when I tried it out on them most seemed to find it persuasive. Widows, like older people, wore white, were expected to cease sexual activity, and experienced the cooling and drying of their bodies. The difference was that older people performed these practices more or less willingly, aiming to loosen their ties of maya and cool their bodies and selves in preparation for dying (see chapter 4). The practices were viewed as in keeping with the natural changes taking place within their bodies and families during the “senior” or “grown” life phase. For younger widows, though, the fetters of widowhood served to transform them socially, before the time naturally determined by physiology, into old women. Several commented to me that older, postmenopausal widows actually would not have to observe the widow’s restrictive code if they did not wish to, because their bodies were naturally cool and dry due to age; but most senior Brahman widows, at least, observed these practices anyway, out of “habit” or aversion to being criticized by others.

Protecting a “Name”

Probably the second most common reason I was given as to why widows felt compelled to observe the widow’s regulations was their wish to avoid slander and to protect the honor or “name” (nām) of themselves and their families. When discussing with me why widows do not remarry, a group of Brahman women chimed together, “Because a household has a reputation, a respect, does it not? People would say, ‘These people’s daughter or daughter-in-law got married twice?! Her husband has already died once, and she’s getting married again?!’” The women added that widows do have affairs; although an affair is “even worse” than remarrying (from the perspective of dharma, or morality), it can take place privately. There is more slander (nindā) from a public remarriage, so that is why widows do not remarry.

When, as we saw above, Kayera Bou’s mother made the painful decision to feed her own newly widowed daughter dried muṛi rather than boiled rice, it was fear of slander, not a conviction of the moral necessity of the practice, that drove her: “My mother was saying, ‘I won’t be able to give her muṛi. How can I give her muṛi and eat rice myself’? But my father told her that she would have to. My mother said, “No! I won’t be able to.…Society! Let society happen! She’s my child.…But out of embarrassment in front of everyone, she wasn’t able to feed me [rice]. People would have seen and said to her, ‘Oh, you’re feeding her rice?’…That’s the fault of Bengalis, isn’t it? They go around talking about who’s feeding whom what.”

I asked Thakurma, a senior Suri widow, “What would happen if you wore a red sari?” Thakurma and her neighbor Bandana answered together, “People would slander! (Loke nindā korbe!).” I continued, “No harm would happen to your husband?” Bandana laughed a little and replied, “No, nothing at all will happen to him. ” Thakurma agreed: “Where is my husband’s harm? He’s gone.” Bandana went on: “Nothing at all would happen to him. He didn’t even forbid her to wear colored saris after he died; he said nothing like that. It’s just that in our country, if widows wear colored saris, they will be slandered (nindā habe), they will feel embarrassed (lajjā habe).”

Widows motivated by a concern for their own, and their families’, reputations did not necessarily internalize the ideologies of a widow’s dangerous sexuality when choosing to accept the terms of widowhood; they rather wished to avoid dishonoring themselves and their kin. Kayera Bou’s words reflected just such a stance: “But if I put on a little powder, what will happen? Let them say what they will. They can’t reproach me. I didn’t do anything unjust. Then why can’t I fulfill a little fancy like that? And what if I want to wear a good, colored sari? But I can’t wear one; it won’t happen.” Widows in the region who reached old age after long lives of ascetic widowhood often earned a great deal of respect for their self-sacrifice and perseverance. Working for that social acceptance and respect, however arduous to achieve, seemed for most more attractive than having to endure slander, and even ostracism, by openly thwarting the codes of widowhood.

Powers of Devotion

A third reason some villagers gave for the widow’s disciplined lifestyle was that widows were continuing to live devoted to their husbands. Girls in the region were in many ways raised to think of devotion to a husband as one of the highest and most appropriate aims of a woman’s life. During her marriage ceremony, a bride would speak mantras and take vows that were to infuse in her a lifelong devotion (bhaktī) for her husband, who was to be to her like a god or lord. In fact, two of the common Bengali terms for “husband”—svāmī and pati—also mean “lord” (cf. Fruzzetti 1982:13). One image of the virtuous wife found throughout north India is that of a pativrata, literally “she who takes a vow (vrat) of devotion to her husband (pati).” Married women in Mangaldihi did expend a good deal of daily effort serving their husbands—cooking, feeding them, supplying water, and so forth. They applied vermilion to their hair, wore married women’s bangles, and performed women’s rituals (meyeder vrata)—all practices aimed toward protecting the longevity and well-being of their husbands.

Even after a husband’s death, some told me, a widow is able to continue to live a life of devotion to him. Gurusaday Mukherjee lectured me on several occasions as to the meaning and purpose of the widow’s regime (perhaps from quite an idealized and traditional perspective, since of course he himself was not a widow): “Even these days, even though many are telling widows that they can remarry and eat nonvegetarian foods, they will willingly, on their own accord, remain as traditional widows, because their minds are focused on their husbands.” Several widows of my acquaintance expressed similar views. Debu’s Ma, a senior high-caste (Kayastha) widow from the neighboring village of Batikar, spoke with a serene certainty about the importance of following the widow’s regime. I asked, “What would happen if you didn’t do these things?” “It’s a matter of dharma (morality, order),” she replied, “ Dharma would be ruined.” “Would your husband be harmed?” “Husband?” Debu’s Ma laughed at first a bit, as if to disagree. Then she went on: “A husband is master, lord (pati) and must be treated with devotion (bhaktī). There is only one husband/lord (pati) in the world. Even though he is dead, he is everything. The sons and wife must live thinking about him. They do this for his blessing (āśīrbād). They do praṇām to his photograph or footprints every day.…A husband is the woman’s guru; he is the highest lord (parampati). If a wife worships and serves her husband, then no other dharma is necessary.” Other widows declared that along with upholding dharma, they could bring merit (puṇya) and good karma to themselves, their sons, their households, and perhaps their deceased husbands, through faithfully observing the widow’s code.

Several villagers also spoke with admiration of those who had chosen to become Satis in the past, burning themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and they compared the wifely devotion of today’s ascetic widows to that of a Sati (which literally means a “good woman”).^[15] The popular myths told by villagers about Behula, a woman who floats down the river of death with the corpse of her husband in her lap, and about Savitri, who wins her dead husband back from Yamaraj, the god of death, portray women who gain incredible, auspicious powers by remaining devoted to their husbands even after death. Both of these illustrative tales are well worth retelling here. Married women and girls in Mangaldihi gathered once a year to perform the story of Savitri and pay homage to her on the fourteenth day after the full moon in the hot summer month of Jyaistha. In doing so they both promoted the well-being and long lives of husbands and gained edification in wifely devotion. On the occasion I attended, a Brahman wife recited the story to about twenty-five other women, reading frequently from the paperback pamphlet Meyeder Vratakathā (n.d., ed. G. Bhattacharjya:62–66). The following is an abbreviated translation of the tale:^[16]

There was a king named Asvapati who ruled a land called Madra. He had a daughter, born to him by the grace of the goddess Savitri, whom he named Savitri. When it was time for her to marry, the king searched in all directions for a worthy groom, but to no avail. Finally, Savitri decided to go out herself to search for a husband, taking several companions with her. They traveled to many places and eventually came upon an ashram in a forest where an old blind man named Dyumatsen lived with his son and blind wife. Dyumatsen had been king of a nearby kingdom, but had lost it to enemies. When Savitri saw this man’s son, Satyaban, she vowed that only he would be her husband.

Savitri returned to her father to tell him of her decision, and the king asked a great seer what he knew of Savitri’s chosen spouse. The seer said ominously, “Savitri’s marriage with Satyaban cannot happen. For within a year after he is married, Satyaban will die.”

The king Asvapati became very distraught and tried to dissuade his daughter from marrying Satyaban. But Savitri was unwavering in her resolve, saying, “Father, he whom I have accepted in my mind as my lord and husband I cannot forsake. I will not be able to marry anyone but him.” And seeing her firm resolve, the king and the seer both agreed that the marriage should take place.

So Savitri was married to Satyaban. Savitri went to live in the ashram of her father-in-law, and began immediately to serve her blind old parents-in-law with much devotion. Savitri soon became beloved to them all. But she herself was stung every night by the memory of the words the seer had told her about the future. She counted every day from the wedding until there were only three days left before the end of the year.

On that day, Satyaban was planning to set out for the forest to bring back some wood and fruit. Savitri pleaded with her mother-in-law to let her accompany him, and after finally receiving permission, she departed into the woods with her husband. Soon Satyaban’s head began to ache sharply and he lay down with his head on Savitri’s lap. He became still with pain and then lost consciousness. As Savitri watched, his life slowly left his body. Evening was coming on, but Savitri was not afraid. She took her husband’s body into her lap and sat there.

Presently Yamaraj, the god of death, arrived and said to Savitri, “Your husband has died. I have come here to take away his spirit (prāṇ). Go now and return to your home to do his funeral rites for him properly.” Saying this, Yamaraj took Satyaban’s spirit out from his body and began walking away.

But Savitri began to follow right after Yamaraj. Yamaraj turned to ask, “Dear, where are you going?” Savitri answered, “God, wherever you take my husband, there I will go,” and she began to plead with him to give her husband’s life back. Yamaraj was impressed with Savitri’s Sati-like^[17] devotion to her husband, and said to her, “Sati! Aside from the boon of granting Satyaban’s life, I will give you any three boons that you desire.”

So Savitri first asked that sight be restored to both of her parents-in-law. Next she asked that her father-in-law regain rule over his kingdom. And finally she asked that her own father, who was sonless, be given one hundred sons. Yamaraj granted each of these boons, but still Savitri did not give up following him. So finally Yamaraj turned to her and said, “I will give you one more boon, other than the life of your husband, and then you will absolutely have to leave.”

This time Savitri asked that she herself, with Satyaban’s semen, would be the mother of one hundred sons. Without thinking, Yamaraj assented, and told her now finally to go on her way. But Savitri responded, “God, how can I give birth to a hundred sons if you do not give my husband’s life back to me?” Yamaraj realized that he had lost in the game of wits (buddhir khelā) with Savitri, and he was compelled to restore Satyaban’s life.

In this way, Savitri, acting as a Sati, gave her parents-in-law back their sight, her father-in-law back his kingdom, her father a hundred sons, and her husband his life.

The Bengali myth of Behula in the Manasa Mangal similarly tells of how a wife’s self-sacrificing devotion brings her husband back even from death. Mangaldihi villagers knew this story well and told it to illustrate the powers of wifely devotion, as well as the merits of worshiping Manasa, the goddess of snakes. The following is an abbreviated reconstruction of the Behula story as it was sung to me over several long sessions by Rabilal Ruidas, the blind senior beggar of Mangaldihi’s leatherworker (Muci) caste, also known as the musician (Bayen) caste:^[18]

There was a man named Cando who had six sons and six daughters-in-law, but because he would not worship the goddess Manasa, the goddess of snakes, she caused each of his sons to die by snakebite one by one. The daughters-in-law thus turned one by one into widows, and soon there was no longer any red āltā on the feet of the house’s daughters-in-law, no jingling of ornaments, and no colorful saris. The house was full of mourning and gloom.

Then a seventh son, named Lakhai, was born to Cando. When Lakhai reached the age for marriage, Cando sent out his servants to locate a suitable bride. The girl Behula was chosen. But the goddess Manasa, still angry, visited Lakhai before the marriage, dressed as an old Brahman woman, and cursed him, declaring that he would die on his wedding night. Lakhai’s father Cando was afraid and ordered blacksmiths to build an iron chamber, so tightly fitted that not even an ant or a breath of wind could enter it. This is where Lakhai and Behula would sleep on their wedding night. Manasa became angry, and she frightened the blacksmith into leaving a crack so that a snake could enter the wall of the chamber.

So the wedding happened with much pomp, and on the wedding night Lakhai and Behula retired together to the iron chamber. Behula prepared to wait up all night long to guard her husband. But even as she sat awake, a snake crawled through the crack and fatally bit Lakhai on the heel. His body was placed on a raft to float down the river,^[19] and although everyone pleaded with Behula to stay, she would not leave his side. She headed down the river toward the land of the gods. Along the way she encountered animals hungry for her husband’s body and men hungry for sexual favors from her. But for six months Behula warded off all of these dangers and persisted in her journey.

Finally Behula, with her husband’s corpse still beside her, reached the place where the river meets the land of the gods. She went to Siva and told him her story, imploring him to restore her husband to life. Siva sent for the goddess Manasa and they made an agreement. Manasa would restore Behula’s husband’s life, along with the lives of his six brothers. In exchange, Behula would promise that her father-in-law and the whole family would henceforth perform pūjās for Manasa.

In this way, Behula brought her husband back to life, gave her parents-in-law back their seven sons, and turned her six sisters-in-law once again into married women.

Behula is perhaps the best-known human figure in Bengali mythology and is considered an exemplar of wifely devotion. Hem Barua describes her feat: “a victory for Behula’s pure devotion, conjugal purity and faith that moves mountains. As an ideal wife she is second neither to Sita nor Savitri. Before the pure chastity and deep devotion of Behula, even heavenly powers bend and break” (1965:16; qtd. in W. L. Smith 1980:117).

A husband’s death would appear to put an end to a woman’s wifely powers of devotion and to be evidence of a woman’s failure (a point I will return to shortly). But there was also a sense, expressed in such popular myths as well as in everyday talk, that if a widow remained devoted to her husband then to some extent she could keep her auspicious, life-maintaining powers alive. Her status as a wife was radically altered, but not entirely effaced. By accepting the lifestyle of widowhood, a woman continued to define herself and present herself to others as a wife devoted to her husband—thereby partially circumventing the reality of her husband’s death.

Powers of Destruction

A fourth factor crucial to understanding the position of widows in Mangaldihi is tied to perceptions of a widow’s dangerous, destructive potential. If a virtuous, devoted wife possesses the power to nurture and sustain her husband, then something must have been wrong or deficient (local reasoning went) in the nurturance provided by any woman whose husband died.^[20] Widows frequently told me that they felt it was their fault that their husbands had died—either because of their failings as a wife, or because of some horrendous wrong performed in a previous life, or simply because of their own personal ill fate (kapāl,adṛṣṭa). Gurusaday Mukherjee gave me a list of conditions that could be considered the fruit of sins (pāper phal), with widowhood at the top of the list, followed by barrenness, the destruction of a lineage (baṃśa), blindness, and being a cow that has to labor in the fields.

Sometimes widows were imaged as devouring creatures. Gurusaday Mukherjee told me that a widow who does not behave properly becomes a vulture (śākun) in her next life, preying on the dead flesh of cows and other large animals. A senior Kayastha widow, Mita’s Ma, who had become blind in one eye told me with grief that she saw herself as a rākshasī, a mythological female creature who devours everything, including people. Her husband had died early and then her son-in-law, leaving both mother and daughter widows. She said mournfully that she had “eaten” these people, and was fearful that she would cause some such disaster again (cf. M. Bandyopadhyay 1990:150). Rumors were spread that Pratima, the young Bagdi widow who had become a prostitute, had poisoned her husband. Another widow, Rani (of the Kora caste), told of how her husband had died “from diarrhea” when they were both still very young. Soon after, in just one day, her two-year-old son sickened and also died. “After that,” she said, “my parents-in-law began pestering me even more. They didn’t want to see any more of me. They called me a poison bride (biṣkanyā). So my brothers came to get me,” and she never went back. A widow can also be feared as a devouring witch, as in Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s story “The Witch” (1990).

This destructive potential was the primary reason that widows were considered to be so exceedingly inauspicious (amangal,aśubha) and were peripheralized within the family, if not expelled. Conversely, a husband whose wife died was not viewed as culpable or dangerous. I asked Mejo Ma, who had years earlier been married to a man whose previous two wives had died, if she had been nervous about his inauspiciousness when marrying him. She stated matter-of-factly (after admitting that she had actually not been told about his previous wives’ deaths before the wedding), “No one blames a man for his wife’s death; they only blame widows.” Women were thus presented as having an agency that must be carefully controlled. They could use their powers to support and sustain others, but also to destroy.

Unseverable Bonds

The villagers’ reasoning summarized above points to important facets of women’s experiences of widowhood in Mangaldihi and to local constructions of what it is to be a woman. But it does not yet entirely explain how a woman’s personhood—or the ties making up her self—were altered through the death of her spouse, and why a woman’s transformation into widowhood was so different from that of a man.

To understand these issues it is crucial to take into account the kinds of connections women shared with their husbands. It seemed to me that the bodily connections (samparka) and ties of maya between a woman and her husband were believed in significant respects to remain, even after his death. What necessarily endured was not so much the emotional dimensions of maya (some widows spoke of an ongoing emotional attachment to their husbands, and others did not) but people’s perceptions of a woman after marriage: a woman would always be defined in terms of her relationship with her husband, as his “half body” (ardhānginī), even if he died. Thus the widow was in effect married to a corpse, herself half dead. A widow in this way remained perpetually in a state similar to the death impurity (or aśauc) that other surviving relatives experienced only temporarily.

This comparison between the condition of widows and those suffering death-separation impurity first occurred to me as I began to notice their many correspondences (table 8). Widows and older people share many practices, too, but the codes for conduct of widows and death-impure persons are even more similar. Like a widow, persons suffering death impurity were expected to remain celibate; avoid “hot,” nonvegetarian foods; limit intake of boiled rice; restrict their sharing of food with others; and avoid participating in auspicious rituals. Males suffering from death impurity and older, more traditional widows also had their heads shaved.

As discussed in chapter 5, these practices all reduced the likelihood that personal properties would be transferred among people. During the transitional phase of death impurity, the survivors limited their interactions, both in order to separate themselves from the deceased person and to avoid infecting others in the community with their condition. The aim was to cut the lingering bodily emotional connections between the survivors and the deceased, so that the departed spirit as well as the survivors could move on to form new relationships. For other survivors, the practices of death-impurity ended with the final funeral rites after ten to thirty days. But the incapacity and inauspicious (aśubha) condition of the widow was permanent, because her putatively indissoluble merger with him in marriage appears to have made her the “half body” and lifelong soul mate of her husband. When he was dead, her living bodily presence made her not merely a sexual hazard (if she was still young) but also a repulsive anomaly.

Others, such as Parvati Athavale (1930:46–50), Veena Das (1979:98), and Pandurang Kane (1968–75:2.592), have compared the Hindu widow’s practices to those not of death-impure persons but of the ascetic or sannyasi. Some of my informants, too, suggested that a widow is in some ways like a female ascetic. However, this comparison fails to adequately account for the widow’s unusual relationship to death. Manisha Roy (1992 [1972]:146) suggests in passing that Bengali widows are “polluted,” but she does not specify in what way. Recall that those in Mangaldihi did not regard widows as “polluted” or “impure” in the sense of the everyday impurities (aśuddhatā) that stem from menstruation, sexual intercourse, saliva, dog-doo, contact with lower castes, and the like (see chapter 6). Indeed, in this regard high-caste and older widows especially were thought to be uniquely pure (śuddha), because their lifestyles (celibacy, vegetarian diets, being postmenopausal, etc.) made their bodies contained, cool, pure, like those of gods (ṭhākur) and men. I. Julia Leslie’s study of the eighteenth-century Guide to the Religious Status and Duties of Women (Strīdharmapaddhati) by Tryambaka seems to support my assertion, though, that the widow’s condition is similar to that of death impurity (aśauc). Tryambaka writes: “Just as the body, bereft of life, in that moment becomes impure [aśucitaṃ], so the woman bereft of her husband is always impure [aśuciḥ],^[21] even if she has bathed properly. Of all inauspicious things, the widow is the most inauspicious” (qtd. in Leslie 1989:303).

To grasp the peculiar relationship of the widow to her dead husband, we must examine once more the nature of the Bengali marital union. As already noted, in a Bengali marriage the bride is described as becoming the “half body” or ardhānginī of her husband. Both the husband and wife become “whole” through this complementary union, but it is effected by an asymmetrical merger in which the woman becomes part of the man’s body and not vice versa (cf. Inden and Nicholas 1976:41–50; Fruzzetti 1982:103–4). During the marriage ritual the bride repeatedly absorbs substances originating from the groom’s body and household, changes her last name and lineage affiliation to match her husband, and moves to his place of residence. These actions seemed to create an irreversible, indestructible entity made of the husband plus wife: the woman would be part of her husband’s body for life.

The asymmetry generally thus assumed in the marital relation was extreme, for the husband was not considered to be the wife’s half body and, unlike her, was not said to be diminished by his partner’s death. If she died first, his person remained whole and free to remarry; the temporary incapacity of death impurity for him lasted no longer than that of other close survivors. There was, in fact, no commonly used term to describe a widowed man in Mangaldihi, suggesting that male widowhood was not a highly marked category.^[22]

Consistent with this logic, several people told me that even if the woman dies first, her spirit remains bound to her husband and wanders around near him. This would mean, of course, that the surviving husband was not entirely free after all, because he might have to contend with her spirit. It was not uncommon for a man’s second wife to keep a photo of his deceased first wife in the family shrine, for instance, and to anoint it with vermilion every day. She thereby placated the first wife’s spirit and aided the well-being (mangal) of her husband and household. In most respects, though, the widowed man seemed to be quite unhindered. One way to represent these enduring connections of a widow with her deceased husband—in contrast to the relative freedom of the widowed man—is sketched in figure 7.

If people in Mangaldihi viewed persons to be constituted of networks of relations, then women were in a peculiar position: their connections were made, remade, and unmade at several critical junctures over their lives, not only through aging and dying but also in marriage and widowhood. A daughter painfully attenuated her ties with her natal family and place, so that she could move on to form new ties within her husband’s home. Their families’ responses to the deaths of husbands often did even more than marriage to unmake women, mainly through once again curtailing their interpersonal connections with those in their families and communities. The only tie for a woman that seemed to be unambiguously unseverable, within the dominant patrilineal discourse of Mangaldihi, was the one she shared with her husband. That bond, which defined a woman’s very bodily substance and identity, could not be cut by a married woman, even if her husband died. This logic underlay the solitary existence endured by most women in Mangaldihi as widows as the last phase of their lives.

Stories of Tagore: Widows Trapped between the Living and the Dead

I close this chapter by examining three short stories written by Rabindranath Tagore around the turn of the century that powerfully expose the oppressiveness of a system that constructs widows as trapped between life and death.^[23] These stories were not told or mentioned to me by people in Mangaldihi. But as I sat reading them from the serene cottage I had rented and sometimes retreated to in nearby Santiniketan, the town where Tagore had lived and did much of his writing, I could not help being struck by the eloquence and vividness with which Tagore portrayed the condition of local widows that I had been struggling ethnographically to discern.

Tagore focused his short stories on the ongoing social changes and lives of ordinary people during the period of the Bengal renaissance and the rise of nationalism between the 1880s and 1920s. He often depicts the female condition, and the forces that oppress women, with particular sensitivity. For Tagore, as Kalpana Bardhan (1990:14) writes, “the oppressor is ultimately some aspect of the cultural ideology and the social situation in which both men and women find themselves trapped.…The tragedy lies in the distortions that their personalities and relationships suffer under the tyranny of social mores and beliefs.” The three stories I look at treat the suffering of widows within such an ideological system, one that traps them between life and death, barring them from normal, fulfilling social relationships by making them into despised and inauspicious deathlike creatures.

The first, “Mahamaya” (Tagore 1926:148–53), presents the awful, estranged life of a woman who becomes a widow the day after her wedding. The story opens with Mahamaya as a beautiful young woman whose parents, for whatever reasons, have not yet found a suitable groom for her. She is of a Kulin Brahman family, the highest rank of Brahmans. She falls in love with a young man of the village, Rajib, who is a Brahman, but not a Kulin Brahman. When Mahamaya’s father finds out about their love, to protect the rank of the family he immediately arranges an alternative marriage for Mahamaya to a Kulin Brahman man.

This groom is already an old man; he has retired to a hut by the cremation ground where the Ganges flows, waiting to die. The wedding takes place in the hut, lit only by the dim glow of a cremation fire not far off, and the old man whispers the wedding mantras in a voice filled with the pain of his dying. Mahamaya becomes a widow the day after her wedding.

It is decided then that Mahamaya will become a sahamṛtā, one who dies with her husband. Her hands and feet are bound, and she is committed to the cremation pyre. The fire is lit and great flames leap out. But at that moment a huge storm comes upon them, releasing torrents of rain. All of the people gathered to watch take shelter in the hut, the fire goes out, and Mahamaya frees herself. She runs first to her father’s home; finding no one there, she goes to Rajib. She and Rajib determine to leave together.

But Mahamaya never removes the veil, or ghomṭā, of her sari from her face, and she lives distant and estranged from Rajib: her face has been hideously scarred by the cremation fire. The thick veil of her sari does more than simply conceal her scars; it represents the shadow of death and the social attitudes that separate her from others as a widow.

Mahamaya was now in Rajib’s house, but there was no happiness in Rajib’s life. Between them both was only the estrangement caused by Mahamaya’s veil. That small veil was just as everlasting as death, and yet it caused even more pain than death. For the pain of separation in death gradually fades away, but behind this veil were living hopes that stabbed at one every moment of every day. Mahamaya lived behind her veil with a deep, silent sorrow. She was living as if overcast by death. Rajib himself began to feel withered and hindered by having to live next to this silent and deathlike creature in his household. He had lost the Mahamaya that he had once known and had gained instead this silent, veiled figure. (1926:152)

The widow is an inherently distressing figure because she is neither fully alive nor dead. Death is a more complete separation than widowhood; it can be handled and processed through funeral rites, and its pain slowly fades away. But the widow is uniquely disturbing because she stays within society, an ever-present reminder of what could have been. She lives in other people’s households but is forever separated from them by the culturally imposed veil of her widowhood, thus existing permanently overshadowed by death.

The protagonist of a second story, “The Skeleton” (Tagore 1926:63–69), is a child widow who had died many years earlier. Her body had been donated to a school, which kept her skeleton for classroom study. One night a young student was sleeping in a room next to where the skeleton was kept when he heard something enter the room. It was the spirit of the person from whom the skeleton had come. She stayed throughout the night to tell the young man her story.

She had been married as a young child, and after only two months of marriage, her husband died and she became a widow. After looking at many signs, her father-in-law determined that she was, without a doubt, what they called a “poison bride” (biṣkanyā). Her parents-in-law expelled the ominous widow from their house and she returned quite happily to her parents’ home, too young to understand what had happened to her.

There she grew up into a beautiful young woman. Men used to look at her and she at them, and she used to dress up secretly in colorful saris with bracelets on her arms, imagining men admiring and caressing her. Then a doctor moved into the first floor of their house, and she used to enjoy visiting him for carefree talk about medicines and about how to use poisons to help sick people die.

Then one day she heard that the doctor was getting married. On the evening of his wedding, the girl slipped some poison from his office into one of his drinks; soon thereafter, as flutes played, he left for the bride’s house. She then dressed herself in a silk wedding sari, put a large streak of red vermilion in the part of her hair, and adorned herself with all of the jewelry from her chest. She took poison herself and lay down on her bed. She hoped that when people came to find her they would see her with a smile on her lips as a married woman.

“But where is that wedding night room? Where is that bride’s dress?” she asks the listening man. “I woke up to a hollow rattling sound inside of me and noticed three young students using me to learn about bone science! In my chest where happiness and sadness used to throb and where petals of youth used to bloom every day, there was a master pointing with a rod about which bones have what names. And there was no sign of that last smile that I had placed on my lips” (Tagore 1926:68). The story ends here, when dawn arrives and the spirit of the skeleton/widow silently leaves the young man to himself.

The widow in this story is a “poison bride,” causing the deaths of the men she unites with, and she is a lifeless skeleton, with passions and dreams but no means to fulfill them. This pattern—the woman as a poison bride causing her husband’s death and then turning into a skeletal widow—is repeated twice. First the girl is a real bride who is perceived to have caused her husband’s death by her nature as a poison bride, and next she is dressed as a bride who indeed does administer poison to a departing groom. At the end of each sequence, after causing her groom’s death, she becomes a skeleton. Initially, it is her existence as a widow that is skeletal: she is a beautiful woman full of dreams and throbbing life, but she is forced to live without love, fulfillment, and the capacity to unite with others. By the story’s end, the widow has literally become a hollow skeleton that possesses no signs of life or emotion.

A third story, “Living and Dead” (Tagore 1926:98–107), presents a young, childless widow, Kadambini, who is believed by others, and at first believes herself, to be dead, existing in the world only as a ghost. At the beginning of the story, she does appear to die suddenly, and her body is taken quickly to the cremation ground by men from her father-in-law’s house. The men leave her to go off to gather fuel for the fire, and she awakens alone. She had not in fact died, but had only been temporarily unconscious. Seeing the cremation ground around her in the dead of the night, she believes that she has died and that she is now a ghost. She does not know where to go, but she feels that she belongs even less to her father-in-law’s house than to her father’s home, so she returns to her natal village to a childhood girlfriend who is now married. Eventually, when the girlfriend and her husband find out that Kadambini is supposed to have died, they chase her away screaming, calling her accursed and inauspicious. Kadambini then returns to her in-law’s home and there finally realizes, when she holds her beloved nephew, that she is not a ghost. But the people of the household shriek when they see her, pleading with her not to bring misfortune upon their household and lineage, not to cause their only son to die. Kadambini finally drowns herself in a pond, and it is only by dying that she is able to prove to her tormentors that she had indeed been alive.

Here the widow’s existence is compared to that of a departed spirit or ghost (pret). The widow is, as the title suggests, both living and dead, or perhaps neither living nor dead. She does not belong in the world of the living, and yet she is trapped there, as a lonely and inauspicious being. Kadambini ponders aloud about her condition—ostensibly that of a ghost—while at her childhood friend’s house:

Who am I to you? Am I of this world? You are all laughing, crying, loving, each of you engaged in your own business, and I am only watching like a shadow. I don’t understand why God has left me in the midst of you and your worldly activities (saṃsār). You are afraid of my presence, lest I bring misfortune (amangal) into the joys of your daily lives. I, too, cannot understand what relation I have with any of you. But since God did not create another place for us to go, we must keep hovering about you, even after the vital links (bandhan) are severed. (Tagore 1926:104)

Widows, like ghosts, remain hovering around other people’s households, even as in some ways their “vital links” have been severed by death. But like ghosts, widows cannot fully participate in household life; like ghosts, they are frightening and cause misfortune.

When Kadambini is referred to as a ghost, it is as a pret, a departed, disembodied spirit. A deceased person’s spirit ordinarily becomes a pret before it moves on to rebirth and ancestorhood (see chapter 5). During this transitional stage, the pret maintains attachments to its previous life in the world, yearning for food and attention from former relatives and loved ones, until the sequence of funeral rites finally cuts these attachments. The widow similarly is in a transitional state between life and death, but for an indefinite, prolonged period. When Kadambini returns to her in-law’s home, her brother-in-law beseeches her to cut all the “bindings of her maya” (māyābandhan) for the world. He pleads, “When you have taken leave of saṃsār (family, worldly life), then go ahead and tear open your bindings of maya. We’ll perform all of the funeral rites” (Tagore 1926:107). Tagore suggests that widowhood presents a sobering contrast, for society had created no rituals that could release the widow from her liminal condition. So Kadambini finally kills herself, the only act that can free her from her terrible, equivocal condition as a ghostlike widow. Widows in these stories are caught between life and death by bonds that cannot be severed—tied both to their husbands who are dead and to a life now devoid of all pleasurable content.

We see here—in Tagore’s stories, as in the discourses and practices of those I knew in Mangaldihi—a specific vision of a woman’s personhood as being permanently and substantially joined to her husband’s. A woman, once married to a man, was not easily perceived again as separate from him. In the dominant patrilineal discourse of Mangaldihi, women were transformed by marriage—in their emotions and substance—into the “half bodies” of their husbands; their lives were to be eternally devoted to their husbands’ well-being and longevity, just as their bodies were constituted and defined in and through their husbands’ bodily substances. A widow, especially if young, was disturbing not only in her possibly uncontained sexuality but in her liminality—someone who has forsaken her husband by remaining on earth, but who yet cannot ever be truly free from him to move on to form new or independent relationships and identities.

Of course, this was not the only discourse I heard from women (and men) in and around Mangaldihi. As I have stressed throughout these pages (as current postmodern sensibilities would hold), the “culture” of Mangaldihians was not univocal. Some women, and some men, rejected through their talk or practice such visions of the relationship of a woman to her husband, dead or alive, as necessarily all-encompassing. When Kayera Bou wore an occasional pair of small yet brilliant spring-green earrings, she was repudiating the ideologies dictating that a woman without a husband had no reason to dress up (though she was derided by neighborhood girls for doing so). When the young Brahman widow, Chobi, left Mangaldihi to take her own apartment and become a self-employed prostitute in town, she was choosing to reject a life defined in terms of her dead husband, asserting instead her own agency and independence (even if that meant forsaking all ties with former kin). Nonetheless, I cannot deny the force of local ideologies defining women and widows in terms of their husbands, evident in widows’ everyday practices, movements, diets, dress, and self-perceptions. Hena’s statement to me was telling: “If her husband dies, a woman’s life has no more value (dām).”

Yet one of the themes that has been emerging throughout this book is that using age as a category of analysis can provide an alternative perspective. As has already become clear from the stories told and data presented about aging women’s lives (see also chapters 3 and 6), the experiences of widowhood for those widowed at older and younger ages could be profoundly different (see also Lamb 1999). For women widowed at older ages, with grown sons to care for them, daughters-in-law to supervise, a rightful long-term place established in a home, and a body grown naturally asexual with age and thus free—as in the case of Khudi Thakrun, or Choto Ma, or Mejo Ma—widowhood did not generally have devastating social, economic, and emotional consequences. To be sure, these older widows would never be completely free from the inauspiciousness of widowhood, and they could continue for years to feel the emotional pain of losing and missing a husband. For them, widowhood also usually brought with it a transfer of a household’s economic resources and property to the younger generation, and thus their further peripheralization into old age. But widowhood in late life could also be accompanied by increased freedoms and even respect—fewer obligations tying them to the home, an attribution (for Brahman widows especially) of increased “purity” and of “manlike” and “godlike” qualities—which many older widows seemed to end up enjoying. Thus suspended amid the countervailing currents of inauspiciousness and auspiciousness, restraint and freedom, authority and peripheralization, the greater portion of Mangaldihi women lived the last phases of their lives.

Notes

8. Afterword

Seventeen months into my stay in Mangaldihi I commented in my fieldnotes: “Almost everything about life here seems so ordinary to me now that it hardly seems worth describing.” It was getting to be time to go. I went on: “Everyone talks to me constantly now about how I’ll be leaving soon. They tell me that it will be sad for them when I go, that the village will cry for me, that its lanes will seem empty. But they tell me that it will be even harder for me to leave them: After having mixed with Mangaldihi’s people for so many days, after having acquired a household full of things—a janatā stove, a kerosene lamp, a table and chair, a mosquito net, saris (some now worn and faded), a taste for ālu posta, potatoes with poppy seed paste—it will be painful for me to try to cut the maya and leave.”

My last night was spent—with shutters thrown open to a luminous moon and the cooling relief of a night breeze—amid a clamor for all of my things. People came to carry away the accumulated pieces of my household. And then there were tears, especially among the younger neighborhood girls who had become my devoted companions. Is this what it is like to depart in the fullness of life? (Better, perhaps, to disperse things and ties earlier than at the moment of leaving.)

I began this book with several questions—intending to use aging as a lens to explore how social worlds were constituted and taken apart, and gender relations constructed and transformed, in a community of West Bengal, India. One question I opened with, but which I have still not fully resolved, concerns the power or authority of older women in India. The scattered comments that turn up on gender and aging in work on India have focused not on experiences of parting or the relinquishing of things, but on the apparent increasing power of women as they age. In anthropological and historical studies, if older women are discussed at all, they are generally presented as powerful matriarchs who have finally come into their own as senior mothers-in-law within joint families. Susan Wadley, for instance, proclaims: “The rural landowner’s wife reaches her maximum potential as a matriarch of a joint household…, where she can exercise authority over sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren.…It is as senior female of a joint family that the Hindu woman attains her greatest power, authority, and autonomy” (1995:98). Prem Chowdhry goes further, suggesting that older women play a crucial role in upholding the patriarchal order in India that subordinates women: “[T]he older controlling woman who becomes herself a patriarch, imposes authority on behalf of men and perpetuates the patriarchal ideology, forms a class apart” (1994:18).

Do such claims ring true? Should we see the older South Asian woman as, finally, a figure of authority and power? What insights can we gain from focusing, as I have done here, on older women’s—and men’s—lives from the intertwined perspectives of family and kinship, the emotional experiences of aging and dying, changes in the body and sexuality, and the social and economic consequences of widowhood?

My data from West Bengal suggests that in important ways women do tend to gain more powers and freedoms as they age and become mothers-in-law. As female head of the household—after she gives her sons’ marriages, witnesses her own mother-in-law gradually relinquishing authority (or dying), and separates from her husband’s brothers’ households—a woman can enjoy considerable authority and autonomy. She can make decisions about what to cook and how to spend and allocate money, and can direct the activities of daughters-in-law, her own daily movements, and the like.

Moreover, as I suggested at the end of chapter 6, older women in Mangaldihi tend to regard themselves, and to be regarded by others, increasingly as inherent, true parts of their marital patrilines and households. For this reason, it seems natural that older women often come to uphold and enforce some of the norms and values of kinship hierarchies (such as deference, purdah, etc.) that they might previously, as young wives, have challenged or critiqued. If the family or patriline is theirs, then ensuring the compliance of their daughters-in-law or granddaughters ensures their own honor, and that of the family that they have come to be invested in, to care about, to be a part of. In addition, prevalent notions about older women’s bodies and sexuality enable older women to experience the tremendous freedom and relief that comes with having restrictions of purdah and domestic confinement lifted.

The matter is complex and nuanced, however. Significantly, aging for women does not stop with mother-in-law-hood. Wadley acknowledges this point, though she does not elaborate on it, stating that the woman “from ages forty to sixty” is often a significant authority figure in her household, “after which old age begins to take its toll and daughters-in-law gain power” (1995:99). In Mangaldihi, the women who were considered the most “senior” or “increased” (buṛi) were not the reigning mothers-in-law but those who had gradually relinquished their positions of authority in the household to move on to a new phase of life. These women ended up having little overt power in their households.

Yet such a shift was not experienced purely as a loss. Rather, a lessening of domestic powers often meant increased extradomestic opportunities. A woman cannot spend time outside of her home—hanging out all morning with friends playing cards or having tea, or going on pilgrimages and visits to faraway places—if she is the one responsible for managing the household. And Mangaldihi’s most senior women often became much more lax about matters surrounding the control and propriety of junior women. Choto Ma, for instance, would gossip to me about the romantic escapades of her granddaughters and grandnieces, saying with a smile that these girls were not really “virgins” (kumārīs), but only “half virgins.” When I asked her once if she was concerned about all that, she said, still with pleasure, “No. That’s a matter for my boumās (daughters-in-law) now. They are the ones in charge of the household’s women.”

Furthermore, women’s experiences of old age, and their degrees of power and agency, depended a great extent on—and varied greatly according to—their particular family and economic circumstances. The most important factor was whether or not a woman had sons willing to care for her (see chapters 2 and 3). Also important was a woman’s marital status (see chapter 7) and economic circumstances. When listening to older women’s own voices and stories about their lives, I was struck that they spoke much more frequently not of power and the reverence given to them by their sons and daughters-in-law, but of peripheralization and weakening, of pouring out love, wealth, and effort to raise their children and serve their families all of their lives and yet failing, in the end, to receive as much as they have given. Some older women, and men, who had markedly little emotional and economic support from their kin, acknowledged at times that at least their utter lack of kin and material comforts would mean that they could hope to face an easier passage into death and rebirth, that the ties of their maya would not be so binding (see chapter 4).

Thus, we see here that aging for women, as for men, is a highly polyvalent and complex phenomenon, charged with ambiguity. It is too simple to claim that the older Indian woman is a “powerful matriarch”; but it would be equally wrong to deny that aging brings most women certain important forms of power, agency, and freedom. This speaks to a more fundamental point, conveyed in different ways throughout the preceding chapters, concerning an underlying ambiguity or multivalence in the conceptual and practical worlds of the Bengalis I knew. Just as the implications of aging for older women and men were not one-dimensional, so too there was no simple definition of what makes a “man” or a “woman,” or consistent set of life aims and values, or uniform conception of divinity. The everyday lived worlds of those in Mangaldihi (and, one suspects, of all people) were replete with conflicting features, counterstrivings, ambiguities, and paradoxes. As postmodernist critics of anthropological representations have for some time now insisted, ambiguity is not something to be gotten rid of, even in analytic accounts of human behavior. We as anthropologists must be prepared to entertain the probability, the inevitability even, of contradictions and multivocality in the conceptual and experiential worlds of those we seek to understand.

Margaret Trawick (1990b:37–43, 242–58) suggests that in Indian cultural worlds in particular, ambiguity is an especially salient and even cultivated quality. For Tamils, she writes, this ambiguity is what is known as maya. For Bengalis, too, maya can mean ambiguity, multivalence, or illusion. The most everyday, explicit meaning of maya for Bengalis is affection, attachment, or love; but as we have seen, this affection (for other people, for the body, for a home, for a deity) is fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity. Daughters and daughters-in-law are at once “one’s own” and “other.” Ties of maya grow in intensity over a long life, and yet it is in late life when they are the most ephemeral. Maya is something that is desired and cultivated; yet it is also one of the six human vices, that which causes pain and confusion. Maya means love and affection, and is something intensely felt; it also means illusion or ambiguity, that which cannot be known. The Bengalis I knew did not seem to view such ambiguities or multivalencies as problematic contradictions that must be resolved, but rather as an inherent part of everyday living in a complex, diverse, and never fully comprehended world. Like many other anthropologists of my generation, I have been concerned with how to reconstruct such views of “culture” that allow for and heed multivocality, ambiguity, contest, and process. Focusing on the divergent perspectives of age—as well as on gender, and on particular people’s life experiences—has been one way for me to accomplish this.

At the same time, it is important to look for consensus, dominant forms within cultures, and meaningful generalizations. Jean and John Comaroff have argued that an analysis of the shared practices, symbols, and meanings that make up cultures and hegemonies is a necessary part of understanding even those situations in which the significance of signs and practices is contested (1991:21). On the one hand, they argue, we should take some of the lessons of critical postmodernism very seriously, in particular “the admonition to regard culture not as an overdetermining, closed system of signs but as a set of polyvalent practices, texts, and images that may, at any time, be contested.” On the other hand, the Comaroffs insist that it will not do simply to abandon altogether any notion of cultural structure, for we must recognize that “[m]ost people live in a world in which many signs, and often the ones that count the most, look as though they are eternally fixed” (p. 17). Susan Bordo expresses similar concerns about the “taboo on generalization” and “the related contemporary panic over ‘essentialism’” (1993:24). To focus only on multiple interpretations, “heterogeneity,” and “difference” as principles for interpreting culture, history, and texts is to miss important effects of the everyday deployment of mass cultural representations, the ways that dominant forms within cultures and histories do exert force on people, shaping their lives and even their forms of resistance (pp. 24–30, 38–39).

Thus, although I have framed this project in large part as heeding older women’s and men’s voices to find alternative, even contestatory, perspectives on gender, kinship, and personhood in north India, I take issue with postmodernist positions (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1993)^[1] that discard the very possibility of making any meaningful social analyses or generalizations. Not only are we (as anthropologists and scholars of the human condition) drawn to theorize about broader sociocultural forces, such as dominant ideologies, kinship and economic systems, structures of power, and forms of shared cultural identity; mapping these broader forces is also crucial to enabling us to understand particular people’s lives. To focus exclusively on heterogeneity, difference, contest, and the like blinds us to the fact that there are dominant forms that people must contend with within cultures, and that people are fundamentally sociocultural beings.

I have therefore not just examined how, for instance, women at various stages of the life course may critique, resist, or offer divergent perspectives on more dominant kinship and gender ideologies. I have also scrutinized these dominant ideologies, signs, and practices themselves as important for understanding particular women’s and men’s lives, and the ways that their lives are to some extent shaped and constrained by the cultural circumstances in which they live.

Furthermore, I have wanted to explore and acknowledge the ways in which people often self-consciously represent themselves by referring to the shared values, identities, and practices of their “culture.” Certainly many of the Bengalis I knew did so—for example, when speaking about the kinds of “Bengali” family moral systems that in many ways defined aging, gender, and kinship for them (see chapters 2 and 3), or about the meanings that maya has in their “Bengali” lives (see especially chapter 4). People seem to engage in such processes of self-representation particularly when confronted—via colonialism, the globalization of media and the economy, migration, the anthropological cross-cultural encounter—with the cultural and political-economic representations of others. Scholars such as Partha Chatterjee (1993, 1997), Pradip Bose (1995), and others have scrutinized the ways that the elite middle class, during Bengal’s period of countercolonial nationalism, strove to fabricate and uphold what they envisioned to be their “own” cultural-moral order—lodged in the family, in women, in religion, in “tradition.” The project of defining and negotiating a “Bengali” culture, for those living in rural villages such as Mangaldihi, may perhaps be more subtle than it was for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century middle-class nationalists; but it is still going on. And that is just what we should expect, in a multiethnic, postcolonial, and increasingly globalized rural Bengal.

I have taken “culture” here, then, to be partially systematic yet also open-ended; to be coherent, and yet ambiguous; to be power-laden, and yet susceptible to resistance; to be made up of shared meanings, signs, and practices, and yet to be replete as well with divergent perspectives and contests.

Throughout these pages I have sought to use whenever possible the words, stories, categories, and comments of my friends in Mangaldihi, endeavoring to present their lives in a way congruent with their own perceptions. I know, however, that I cannot fully share nor replicate others’ visions, and that the kinds of questions I am asking of the lives of Mangaldihi’s residents were often strikingly different from the kinds of questions they were seeking to answer about themselves, about their own human lives in the world, and about me. Anthropological knowledge is always something produced in human interaction, a two-way process of constructing a particular vision of a certain set of cultural experiences and practices—a process that leaves both parties changed.

As Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992:xii) observes, the anthropological “field” behind every ethnography is “a place both proximate and intimate (because we have lived some part of our lives there) as well as forever distant and unknowably ‘other’ (because our own destinies lie elsewhere).” Any act of “writing culture” is therefore necessarily partial, fragmentary, and biased. But at the same time, ethnography is a deeply felt account of real people’s lives—based on seeing, listening, touching, recording, and sharing experience. And such an account is what I have attempted in these pages, striving to interpret as sensitively as possible a part of the lives of those with whom I lived for some eighteen (very vivid) months amid the dusty lanes and verdant rice fields of the village of Mangaldihi.

Notes