Julie Mughal, Fairfield University Director, Jesuit Universities Humanitarian Action Network (JUHAN), Assistant Director, Center for Faith & Public Life
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India, home to over 1.3 billion people, is beautiful and beguiling; colorful and chaotic. As I was soon to find out, India often challenges your every sense in its intensity, complexity and contradictions. Over winter break, seven JUHAN (Jesuit University Humanitarian Action Network) students and three alumni immersed themselves in India for two weeks through a trip sponsored by Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life with a local non-profit and service learning partner, Montage Initiative, and the Indian non-profit, Guild for Service, a long standing agent for social change for women in India, especially widows.
After the first week of the trip we left Delhi, shrouded in smog, and headed 100 miles south to the pilgrimage city of Vrindavan. While I looked out the bus window, I kept waiting for the urban sprawl to end and yet, for mile upon mile, as we wound our way out of the city’s perimeter, there were slums, endless garbage piles and impoverished families. So pronounced was this sprawl that I did some research only to find out that Delhi is designated a “mega city,” the globe’s second most populous metropolis with 25 million inhabitants according to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ (DESA) Population Division.[1]
Most striking were the countless children who were not in school but on the side of the road playing cricket with makeshift bats, or the more unfortunate ones trawling through garbage heaps to pull out anything that could earn a rupee or two. I thought of my own children half a world away, who benefited from a good education and numerous extracurricular activities. What would happen to these children on the side of the road without an education? Would they forever be trapped in the slum? And, what about the girls who had less chance of escaping and were more likely to be married off young, illiterate and poor?
These were the thoughts that troubled me as we traveled toward the Ma Dham Shelter for widows. At the shelter we would learn about the opposite spectrum of the life cycle, the care of elderly widowed women. Strikingly, both ends of this continuum represent the struggles that are often faced by a woman in India from the beginning of her life to her death.
The Ma Dham Shelter was founded by Mohini Giri in 2008. Giri, a tireless advocate for widow’s rights in India and on the global stage, is herself a widow who experienced discrimination as well as suffered as a young girl when her mother was widowed young. “May you be a wife forever,” [2] is a blessing bestowed on brides in India – with good reason. Becoming a widow in many parts of the world, including India, is a curse. Widowhood is often seen as the punishment for a past sin and widows are inauspicious social outcasts at best and evil omens, at worst. According to the Loomba Foundation report produced in 2015, there are an estimated 46 million widows in India which count for almost one-fifth of the globe’s 258 million widows. [3] These are the invisible women of the world who are often absent from development agendas, government reports and important world milestones such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
As the miles passed, a more rural landscape replaced Delhi’s sprawl. Then suddenly, as we approached the entrance to Vrindavan, the childhood home of Lord Krishna, a beautiful city began to unveil itself to us. Rising out the fields on the outside the city stands a 141 foot statue of the Hindu Goddess Durga, the mother of the universe and the fierce protector of mankind. Her eight arms fight against evil and look to bring righteousness to the world. Unfortunately, her protection has not yet extended to the widows of Vrindavan whose streets are home to some 16,000 widows[4]. Vrindavan, also known as the “city of widows,” is a draw for these women who either seek out the city or, more likely, are abandoned by their family under the premise that they will achieve moksha, the release of the soul from the cycle of life and death, in this most holy place.
Not far down the road, beyond Durga’s statue, we pulled into a haven for a small number of Vrindavan’s widows. What first strikes you about Ma Dham’s Shelter in Uttar Pradesh, is the waving, bright yellow mustard fields on the side of the peaceful access road that welcome you as the shelter comes into view. Upon our arrival, we were greeted first by a group of young school boys, all clad in red sweaters who sang for us, as fragrant flower necklaces were draped around our necks and our foreheads were each lightly touched leaving a dot of red, the traditional bindhi. We were then warmly greeted by the widows, who touched our hearts to their very cores during out stay. Yells of the traditional “Radhe, Radhe” were repeated over and over as we each received embraces from open arms, smiling faces.
Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a book, Land Without Hats, documenting my own widowhood, as well as the situation of the widows who I encountered during my work with Save the Children. For the book, I interviewed widows from Haiti to Afghanistan and beyond, discovering a world of women whose lives were lived on the margins, at best, and in abject poverty and shame, at the worst. I had come to India prepared to once again find widows living in crippling deprivation having survived terrible circumstances. However, what I found at Ma Dham’s shelter was a story of healing, dignity and, yes, joy. After three days of visiting the shelter, I decided to write about what I saw knowing that there were literally millions of widows in India living outside the walls of the ashram subjected to the cruelty of social death, poverty beyond our ability to comprehend and despair. But this time I wanted to tell a story of hope – and the small promise of a project that makes a big difference in the lives of the women it touches.
The women I met at the Ma Dham Shelter defied my every expectation. They were certainly not like any other widows I’d encountered in remote areas of South Asia, in the terai region of Nepal, the far-flung, swampy region of Nasirnagar, Bangladesh or in Haripur, a Pakistani city near the Afghan border on the Karakoram Highway. Let me explain. It is still commonplace for widows to be rejected by their husband’s family, to be cast aside or chased out by their own families and to be shunned as an economic drain and a harbinger of evil – a bad omen – by the society at large. Customary practices often force widows to wear white, and to live ascetic, unadorned lives. While sati, the burning of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, is no longer legal, there are other ritualistic ways that widows are forced into a social death.
At Ma Dham’s Shelter, I was greeted by widows sporting unapologetic bright colors. Meera Khanna, the Joint Secretary of the Guild for Service, author and lifelong advocate of women’s rights, told our group, “Only the women’s husband has died, the color of her life has not gone away,” and noted that the Guild turns away donations of white saris, the traditional dress of widows signifying an absence of color in her life. It is not just the absence of joyful bright colors of saris and shalwar kameez that identifies a widow. In large swaths of South Asia, it is also the absence of jewelry, shaved heads, and replacement of the vermilion vindoor, or red mark in the parting of a married women’s hairline, with white ash. All of these humiliating practices identify a widow as an outcast and reduces her status in the eyes of those around her.
Thankfully, these cultural taboos have all been shattered at Ma Dham’s Shelter, as once the glass bangles were shattered on the wrists of widows. It is truly beautiful to see the widows, most of them elderly – or looking much older than their actual ages – in bright purples and emerald greens, stunning yellows and sun-burst oranges with their long braids and beautifully decorative jewelry dangling from their ears or studded in the side of their noses. They looked striking and feminine – something taboo for most widows of the sub-continent.
In an all-important word, the shelter restores dignity to the widows, a dignity that was abruptly taken from these women the day they lost their husbands in this patriarchal environment fueled by thousands of years of socio-cultural discrimination and attitudes. The women we met at the shelter were all survivors of terrible ordeals. They had arrived at Ma Dham’s Shelter by different paths, small remnants of the persons they had once been. What the students and I found were a group of women full of life and a large capacity for love.
There was one widow in particular who I felt an immediate bond with despite our many differences of culture, language and age. She appeared every morning with a big smile, a welcoming hug and a greeting of Radhe, Radhe! I questioned how the human spirit could continue when one has been forced to leave one’s home, rejected by loved ones, family and friends, cast aside as a bad omen?
I began to call my elderly friend dadi, or granny, as a sign of endearment, the same name my children once called their Pakistani grandmother. Dadi was obviously a respected elder in the group and had the honor of leading the early morning Hindu prayers before breakfast. She had carved out a life for herself at the shelter – a life different from the one she had previously lived, but a life of dignity and respect which she would not be afforded outside these walls. Indeed, what was striking was the unwavering faith each women possessed as well as their warmth. It is hard to imagine that they had been sent away by their families, surely considered a sign of bad luck and a drain on the family resources.
Yet, it was curious for me to discover that some of the 60 residents visited their families, some on a yearly basis. Once shamefully sent away, abandoned or rejected by their own children, they were welcomed back as visitors to their former homes – but not permanently. If they are not allowed to hear the joyful shouts of their grandchildren year round, thankfully they do hear the laughter of children every day at the Guild-operated pre-school located on the grounds of the shelter. It is an ideal arrangement this combination of young and old which offers unparalleled benefits to both groups. For the widows, it is an obvious source of joy and for the young pre-school boys from the surrounding villages it is developing a vital cohort of young India men who will know that widows are not bad omens and deserve dignity and respect. This provides a small glimmer of hope that the future may hold better days for the widows of India and for other forgotten widows the world over.
When I first began researching my book in 1998 just after my first husband died, there was little, if any, disaggregated data specifically geared to address the plight of widows. Much of what existed was anecdotal information gathered from the few programs on the ground that benefited this invisible group. In the almost 10 years since Land Without Hats was published, some progress has been made. On June 23, 2011 the United Nations inaugurated the first International Widows Day recognizing the plight of millions of widows globally. There are now national and global statistics, or at least estimates, on widows – an important first step. Additionally many countries, including India, have enacted legislation, pensions and special programs for widows as have non-profits who have not just helped widows but made it a priority to provide special assistance to female headed-households. Yet, more is needed – much more.
As the visit to this most amazing ashram came to end, I stopped to reflect on my experience in the beautiful Hindu temple on the shelter’s grounds. The morning was foggy and the structures were shrouded in a primordial mist which left the small temple outlined in shadows. As I approached and removed my shoes, I noticed one of the widows was praying inside the temple. I didn’t want to disturb her but she immediately took my hands and showed me how to pray to Krishna. It was a moment like no other. At some instants in your life, there are human connections across culture, religion and time that are strong and undeniable.
Later when I thought back to this moment, I found a beautiful sentence that Mohini Giri wrote in her book, Living Death: Trauma of Widowhood in India, which seemed to capture the future that is within our grasp: “The flow of water from Ganga and Yamuna have seen thousands and thousands of widows silent cry. It is high time to take action against atrocities perpetrated on the silent suffering of half the population.” [5] This is also my hope for the widows of India and the millions globally – that the cry be heard to bring about change, justice, dignity and joy to widows’ lives.
Sources:
[1] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2015). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, (ST/ESA/SER.A/366) (New York: UNECA, 2015), 13.
[2] Mohini V. Giri, Living Death: Trauma of Widowhood in India (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2012), 19.
[3] Risto F Harma, Global Widows Report 2015 (London: The Loomba Foundation, Mar. 2015), 30.
[4] Harma. Global Widows Report 2015, 70.
[5] Giri, Living Death: Trauma of Widowhood in India, 115.
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