Murky Water

Liberal people in the West and elsewhere are often justifiably critical of the unfair treatment of women in some Muslim societies. But the even more egregious unfairness towards women in the Hindu societies of India has not provoked proportionately vocal censure. Deepa Mehta’s recent film Water, which was nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar but lost, could help to remind the world of the unusually cruel treatment that women in general and widows in particular have had to endure in Hindu societies.

Unfortunately, Mehta’s film is set in 1938 and, consequently, it cannot highlight the awful fact that Hindu widows continue to this day to be treated with a malevolence that is unimaginable in civilized nations. Even today the remarriage of widows remains exceedingly rare.

An aunt of mine became a widow in the late 1970s when she was in her twenties. None of the elders in our family considered, even for a second, the possibility of arranging a second marriage for her. I remember asking my grandmother why no arrangements were being made for my widowed aunt’s remarriage. With some amusement at my naïveté, my grandmother pointed out that given the abundance of never-married girls to choose from, no man would ever consider marrying a widow.

(In case you are puzzled by references in the last paragraph to marriages being arranged, let me clarify that most marriages in India are “arranged marriages.” The parents of the boy or the girl advertise in the classifieds, responses are screened, astrological charts are compared, meetings are arranged, terms are negotiated, and, if all goes well, the wedding takes place on a date judged auspicious by the almanac or the family priest or astrologer. Arranged marriages are by no means peculiar to India. In fact, many non-western societies continue to have arranged marriages. When I joined Long Island University in 1990, I shared an office with Prof. John Petrakis who told me that he had had an arranged marriage back in his native country, Greece.)

Maybe my grandmother was right. Maybe as the Indian sex ratio, which is currently about 930 women for every 1000 men, continues to fall (as a result of—it is widely speculated—selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect and murder of female infants) a time will come when the marital prospects of widows will improve to a point where it would be the conventional social expectation that a widowed woman would remarry.

Another reason for optimism is that, as the institution of arranged marriages frays and Hindu men and women begin to emulate western mores and actively seek out their mates, the remarriage prospects of widows will very likely improve. The family grandees who arrange Hindu marriages have been keeping widows out of the mating game. When arranged marriages crumble and disappear, never-married boys and girls, divorced men and women, and widows and widowers, will all jump in together into the mate-finding mosh pit and every widow will finally be able to play the game on the same terms as everybody else.

Let me wind up this post by drawing attention to a few historical references in Water that I thought were quite shaky.

First, in at least two references, the film singles out Raja Rammohan Roy, a Hindu reformer, as the leading crusader for the right of widows to remarry. This is not quite true. Roy (1772–1833) had led the fight against sati, a horrendous Hindu institution whereby women were forced to burn themselves to death on the fires that were lit to cremate their just-deceased husbands. (If you are asking yourself what kind of people could even conceive such a thing, the answer is: My kind of people!)

The fight for the legalization of widow remarriage was waged primarily by Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891). Vidyasagar was a reformer from within, in the sense that as the Principal of Sanskrit College, Kolkata, he led a group of scholars who went through Hindu religious texts to prove that the subjugation of women in Hindu societies had no religious sanction. According to Wikipedia entry on Vidyasagar,

Vidyasagar proposed and pushed through the Widow Remarriage Act no XV of 1856. In December of that year Shreeshchandra Vidyaratna, a teacher at Sanskrit Colege and Vidyasagar's colleague, contracted the fist marriage with a widow under the Act. Vidyasagar was materially involved in arranging this wedding, and he campaigned tirelessly to implement the Act in society, offering to officiate as priest at the marriage of widows since orthodox priests refused. He encouraged his son to marry a widow and established the Hindu Family Annuity Fund to help widows who could not remarry. He financed many such weddings, sometimes getting into debt as a result.”

Water should be congratulated for reminding people about Raja Rammohan Roy. But its historical error manages to simultaneously devalue Roy’s far greater achievement in putting an end to sati and at the same time deny Vidyasagar the credit he deserves on the widow remarriage issue.

The film ends on an upbeat note with a collage of scenes evoking a wave of optimism linked to the emergence of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement, and the imminent departure of the British from India. The impression is created that things would finally change for Hindu widows when the British packed their bags and left. This struck me as an absolutely risible howler in addition to being an unworthy attempt to end an otherwise unremittingly gloomy film on a high note. The plight of the Hindu widows had nothing to do with the presence of the British, and the departure of the British from India—momentous as it was in numerous ways—could not seriously have been expected to make any difference to the oppression of Hindu widows. The mistreatment of Hindu widows is one sin that Indians can never blame the Brits for. This particular cross is for Indians alone to bear.