“Nothing to Go Back To” – The Fate of the Widows of Vrindavan, India

Lys Anzia -WNN Features

A widow living in a compound for widows at Vrindavan, India

Widow of Vrindavan. Image:©Tewfic El-Sawy, "White Shadows"

“In many conservative Indian Hindu families, widows are shunned because they’re seen as bringing bad luck. Superstitious relatives even blame them for their husband’s death. The widow can become a liability with no social standing, an unwanted mouth to feed. Often they’re cast out of the family home,” said foreign correspondent Trevor Bormann in a recent June, 2007 interview with Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Dr. Mohini V. Giri, for the ABC – Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Once the widows of the Hindu holy city of Vrindavan lose their husbands their life “becomes zero,” says Dr. Giri, director of the Guild of Service in New Delhi. A widow herself, and tireless activist for women’s rights in India, Dr. Giri works specifically today for the “empowerment of marginalized women and children.”

“According to the Dharmashastra, the sacred Hindu legal text, covering moral, ethical and social laws, widows are expected to devote the remainder of their lives to the memory of their husbands,” says humanitarian photographer, Tewfic El-Sawy, after he visited the poorest ashram of Vrindavan. “By renouncing life’s luxuries and by withdrawing from society, critics of this practice have declared that such women are living a form of suttee, the now-outlawed practice of burning widows alive on the dead husband’s funeral pyre,” El-Sawy added.

“Imagine in front of a group of my relatives as large as this one, my bangles are smashed, my hair is shaved, my bindi removed,” Dr. Giri said before a conference for grief and renewal at the University of New England, Office of Multicultural Studies and Women’s Studies Department in 2005. “They are forced to wear white saris. Saddest of all is that they are often removed from their children and families, and abandoned,” continued Dr. Giri.

For many women in this culture, the loss of a husband can be an upheaval beyond belief. It can be a one-way ticket to isolation, poverty and despair. For thousands of women it can also mean a journey to a place unique in India - to a town considered very holy in India called Vrindavan.

In Vrindavan, India, women of all ages who have become widows are waiting for the moment they, too, will follow their husbands to the fields of death.

The widows in Vrindavan today can be found on the streets, in ashrams and other centers in Vrindavan. Vrindavan has over 4,000 temples today and many ashrams. The approximate number of widows living in the holy city today numbers over 20,000.

The latest national census counts widows living in locations across the Republic of India with numbers that reach millions. The largest number of widows currently living together in ashrams located in northern India are in Vrindavan.

Conditions in some of the ashrams of Vrindavan go from terrible, where sexual use and trafficking of younger widows occurs, to better ashram houses set up by leading women activists, like Dr. Giri and the Guild of Service, that encourage greater dignity for widows through better health care, by gaining learning skills like sewing and weaving and literacy training.

At Mathura ashram in Vrindavan conditions are critical as widows, abandoned on the death of their husbands with no resources of their own, appear with no chance for education, no protection from possible rape and no chance for a better life. They face situations of hunger, starvation and negligence as they try to survive with only one small plate of food a day.

These widows, many times, are deserted and admonished by the families of their husbands, leading them to leave and seek shelter away from their home in the ashrams of Vrindavan.

“It’s unbelievable that families would abandon their mothers. . . ,” said Dharan Mandrayar, a filmmaker who has been criticized by the press in India for the controversial subjects in his movies. His film “White Rainbow,” follows the “real life” story of a Vrandavan widow. “White Rainbow” was created as Mandrayar was “called to action” as he witnessed the living conditions of the widows of Vrindavan.”

Deepa Mehta is another filmmaker who has sought to bring the darker story of the widows of Vrindavan to the screen. Struggling against the protests of the town people of Vrindavan while trying to film, Ms. Mehta continued on with her production and moved the location to complete her movie. Her film “Water,” which was released in 2005 was later nominated for a U.S. Academy award. It shows life searingly through the eyes of an eight year old childbride named Chuyia, who became widowed on the death of her much older husband. It follows, too, the older-yet-young and beautiful widow, Kalyani, who is sold for sexual services as she is finally befriended by a young lawyer, a man who is a student of Mahatma Ghandi.

Although India’s widows today are not forced to die on the death of their husband – in ritual sati – by burning to death on their husband’s funeral pyre, they are still forced to undergo daily ritual humiliations, to beg for alms each day chanting, to live completely apart from society, to live lives of extreme poverty, lonely for their children, alone and hopeless. Younger widows, with no chance of remarrying, face strong cultural disapproval within their own families. They often flee dangerous hostile family situations or abuse.

Rising problems with widows and their husband’s family after the death of their husband can sometimes include sexual abuse from a husband’s brother or father, starvation or abandonment.

Once young beautiful widows have arrived at Vrindavan, in some of the bhajanashrams today, they sometimes face the terrible fate of sexual trafficking and sexual exploitation as the ashrams try to produce more money.

The only other alternative, to life in Vrindavan, for many of these widows is a life lived on the streets as a beggar in their own home region living under the humility of those she knows. Some of the ashrams today are also scattered with diseases like tuberculosis, dysentery and STDs. Most often, in the poorest ashrams medical help is virtually non-existent.

Most of the widows of Vrindavan are categorized today in India as war widows, political widows or religious widows.