Between the twilights

by Cornelia Sorabji

But all Indian widows do not rule estates. What then of the rest? What of the ordinary widows, of the highest caste, for instance, the type of woman who, in the olden days, would have fed the flames of the funeral-pyre bound to a husband’s corpse? What of her.

For the most part she lives the life of a willing drudge in the house of her mother-in-law. “For it is so alone now,” as one explained to me, “that we can win merit for our lords.”

I have never forgotten the agony of this little lady, sent home to her own mother to live in luxury, robbed of her chance of service.

It is not, I think, untrue to say that the orthodox Hindu widow suffers her lot with the fierce enjoyment of martyrdom and a very fanaticism of selflessness. But nothing can minimize the evils of that lot. After all, a widow is a thing of ill-omen, to be cursed even by those who love her. That she accepts the fact makes it no less of a hardship. For some sin committed in a previous birth the Gods have deprived her of a husband. What is left to her now but to work out his “salvation,” by her prayers and penances to win him a better life-place in his next genesis? So even the “cursings” of her are in their way a satisfaction. They are helping her to pay her debt to Fate.

For the mother-in-law what also is left but the obligation to curse, exaction of that debt? But for this luckless one her son might still be in the land of the living.

Now, how shall I make it clear that there is no determined animosity in this attitude? The person cursing is as much an instrument of Fate as the person cursed. Are we not all straws blown by the wind of Fate, and of our own past actions? Little room is there in Hindu ethics for the sense of personal responsibility for wrong-doing.

Indeed, the widow is often, especially as she gets on in years, and in the house of her own mother, a person loved in spite of her fatal gifts of ill-luck. She fills the place of a good home-daughter, is at the service of everyone, from the eldest to the youngest. Often she is a devotee, most religious, and greatly supported by the consolations of her faith. She will herself say on some occasion of rejoicing: “Let me not be seen, I am luckless.”

And there is certainly no denying that the sum of self-sacrifice which she represents is, at its best, some solid good to a nation—the salt leavening the lump. One can imagine how the practice of suttee helped to maintain this high Hindu ideal of altruism, so comparatively easy was it to face that one final act of pain and of glory. But in these days, and under the petty tyranny of a mother-in-law, the altruism of the little widow is worn threadbare.

It is all very well in theory to assert no personal animosity towards her whom you hold it a religious privilege to curse, and to burden with every unpleasant duty imaginable. Your practice is apt to mislead. Even Hindu widows are but human, and a lifetime of such dissembling of love must leave them slightly bruised at the foot of the stairs.

Again, with the laxity of modern times and the lapses from orthodoxy, there comes to the chief sufferer the wonder whether after all she is dealing vicariously in this spiritual rialto; whether she is buying gifts for her husband after all. The morbid consciousness that she is a thing of ill-omen gnaws at her. Admit the doubt and you admit inability to bear what is put upon her; you admit discontent, consciousness of hardship, of ill-treatment. Yet all these tyrannies, this very doubt, has the march of time brought to the Hindu widow. There lies the tragedy. From whatever cause, she is losing faith in her own sacrifice, in her old attitude towards life; and therefore is she to be pitied indeed.