Widow - Widows in Indian Culture

Widows in Indian Culture

In India, there is often an elaborate ceremony during the funeral of a widow's husband, including smashing the bangles, removing the bindi as well as any colorful attire, and requiring the woman to wear white clothes, the color of mourning. Earlier it was compulsory to wear all white after the husband was dead, and even a tradition known as sati was practiced, where the newly widowed woman would throw her body onto her husband's burning funeral pyre and immolate herself.

However, in modern-day culture the norms for clothing have gradually given way to colored clothing. Sati practice has been banned in India for more than a century. The ban began under British rule and is much owed to the persistence of the social reformer Ram Mohan Roy, who asserted that sati was a means of showing status rather than a universal ritual in India, and said, "there are other ways of doing it than by burning wives."

Certain matrilinear communities, the most notable being the Nairs from Kerala, not only allow, but encourage widow remarriage. In these societies, children retain the family name of the mother, and women were permitted to divorce and remarry if they wished.

Read more about this topic:  Widow

Famous quotes containing the words widows in, widows, indian and/or culture:

    Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns; the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake.
    Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 14:28,29.

    This will make widows wince. But fictive things
    Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    The Indian remarked as before, “Must have hard wood to cook moose-meat,” as if that were a maxim, and proceeded to get it. My companion cooked some in California fashion, winding a long string of the meat round a stick and slowly turning it in his hand before the fire. It was very good. But the Indian, not approving of the mode, or because he was not allowed to cook it his own way, would not taste it.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements, and modes of culture only!
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)