Marriage of Hindu Widows PDF Download

Author: Īśvaracandra Bidyāsāgara
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Marriage
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Author: Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231526601
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Before the passage of the Hindu Widow's Re-marriage Act of 1856, Hindu tradition required a woman to live as a virtual outcast after her husband's death. Widows were expected to shave their heads, discard their jewelry, live in seclusion, and undergo regular acts of penance. Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar was the first Indian intellectual to successfully argue against these strictures. A Sanskrit scholar and passionate social reformer, Vidyasagar was a leading proponent of widow marriage in colonial India, urging his contemporaries to reject a ban that caused countless women to suffer needlessly. Vidyasagar's brilliant strategy paired a rereading of Hindu scripture with an emotional plea on behalf of the widow, resulting in an organic reimagining of Hindu law and custom. Vidyasagar made his case through the two-part publication Hindu Widow Marriage, a tour de force of logic, erudition, and humanitarian rhetoric. In this new translation, Brian A. Hatcher makes available in English for the first time the entire text of one of the most important nineteenth-century treatises on Indian social reform. An expert on Vidyasagar, Hinduism, and colonial Bengal, Hatcher enhances the original treatise with a substantial introduction describing Vidyasagar's multifaceted career, as well as the history of colonial debates on widow marriage. He innovatively interprets the significance of Hindu Widow Marriage within modern Indian intellectual history by situating the text in relation to indigenous commentarial practices. Finally, Hatcher increases the accessibility of the text by providing an overview of basic Hindu categories for first-time readers, a glossary of technical vocabulary, and an extensive bibliography.

Author: Ramabai Sarasvati
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hindu women
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Author: Sweta Srivastava Vikram
Publisher: Modern History Press
ISBN: 1615992561
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 73

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ÿ"Sweta Vikram captures bold raw passion, poignant reality and crafts a powerful voice for the voiceless." --Kate Campbell Stevenson, Actor & Producer Wet Silenceÿbears moving accounts of Hindu widows in India. The book raises concern about the treatment of widowed women by society; lends their stories a voice; shares their unheard tales about marriage; reveals the heavy hand of patriarchy; and, addresses the lack of companionship and sensuality in their lives. This collection of poems covers a myriad of social evils such as misogyny, infidelity, gender inequality, and celibacy amongst other things. The poems in the collection are bold, unapologetic, and visceral. The collection will haunt you.ÿ "Nothing short of sacred genius,ÿWet Silenceÿreads with a sensual and dangerous grace. It is a body of work that ushers presence into absence and love into a world that has all but done away with the word."ÿ --Slash Coleman, author ofÿThe Bohemian Love Diariesÿand blogger forÿPsychology Today. "Sweta's poems did a powerful job at highlighting the mental and sexual abuse, violence, loneliness and the pain experienced by millions of widows in India. Why I ask, is being a widow a crime?" --Shruti Kapoor, Founder of Sayfty, an organization that helps women protect themselves against violence "In a gorgeous choir of reclaimed voices, Sweta Srivastava Vikram tells the stories of women forgotten and passed over, women silenced and without choices, women who ?don't exist'--Hindu widows. Through the magical breath of her poetry Vikram not only animates these women's hopes, sorrows, dreams, and defeats, she lovingly restores them to honor." --Melissa Studdard, award-winning author ofÿI Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast. Learn more at www.SwetaVikram.com From the World Voices series at Modern History Press POE005060 Poetry : American - Asian American SOC028000 Social Science : Women's Studies - General FAM001000 Family & Relationships : Abuse - General

Author: Catherine Weinberger-Thomas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226885698
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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"At last, she arrives at the fatal end of the plank . . . and, with her hands crossed over her chest, falls straight downward, suspended for a moment in the air before being devoured by the burning pit that awaits her. . . ." This grisly 1829 account by Pierre Dubois demonstrates the usual European response to the Hindu custom of satis sacrificing themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands—horror and revulsion. Yet to those of the Hindu faith, not least the satis themselves, this act signals the sati's sacredness and spiritual power. Ashes of Immortality attempts to see the satis through Hindu eyes, providing an extensive experiential and psychoanalytic account of ritual self-sacrifice and self-mutilation in South Asia. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in northern India, where the state-banned practice of sati reemerged in the 1970s, as well as extensive textual analysis, Weinberger-Thomas constructs a radically new interpretation of satis. She shows that their self-immolation transcends gender, caste and class, region and history, representing for the Hindus a path to immortality.

Author: Jyoti Atwal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789384082987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Real and Imagined Widows: Gender Relations in Colonial North India explores the politico-cultural imagination that formed the subtext of the reformist, nationalist and women's discourses on widowhood from the colonial period to the 1950s. The reformist voice and action on widowhood remained loosely defined so that the 1933 Bill in favour of giving property 'rights' to widows continued to be rejected by conservative Hindus in the United Provinces until 1937, when the debate led by Harbilas Sharda acquired a national status. This book examines the legislative debates on the relationship between sexuality, morality, property rights and widowhood. The volume also explores the world of literate widows of the early twentieth century many of whom were also writers. Some of them were conscious of the lacunae in the reformist agenda and developed a unique critique of their own regarding the economic, social and sexual oppression of Hindu widows. Helped by the emergence of a very active Hindi public sphere in the early twentieth century, they could cultivate a literary language of social protest through their autobiographies, poetry, short stories and novels. The complex connection between the nineteenth-century idea of widowhood and the concept of the anti-colonial Mother India of the 1920s transformed the notion of the ideal Hindu widow into a metaphor for a struggling/recovering nation in post-colonial India. In independent India, Nehruvian socialism uniquely combined with Gandhian moral reformism which continued to produce renewed and reformed cultural codes for widows in particular and for Indian women in general.

Author: Sakuntala Narasimhan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Funérailles - Rites et cérémonies - Inde
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: P. Banerjee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113705204X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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In early modern Europe, the circulation of visual and verbal transmissions of sati, or Hindu widow burning, not only informed responses to the ritualized violence of Hindu culture, but also intersected in fascinating ways with specifically European forms of ritualized violence and European constructions of gender ideology. European accounts of women being burned in India uncannily commented on the burnings of women as witches and criminal wives in Europe. When Europeans narrated their accounts of sati, perhaps the most striking illustration of Hindu patriarchal violence, they did not specifically connect the act of widow burning to a corresponding European signifier: the gruesome ceremonial burnings of women as witches. In examining early modern representations of sati, the book focuses specifically on those strategies that enabled European travellers to protect their own identity as uniquely civilized amidst spectacular displays of 'Eastern barbarity'.

Author: Vatsala Mehta
Publisher: Outskirts Press
ISBN: 1977278310
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Beginning with the broad theme of the Hindu widow and narrowing it down to Gujarati widows, Vatsala Mehta has made a time-sweep through three millennia of Indian social history starting with the Vedas. This historical coverage and analysis of the status of contemporary widow is set up in relation to ancient legalistic pronouncements, caste rules and practices among Gujarati Hindus, and Jains to a minor extent. The assessment ends with the passage of the post-independence Hindu Code Bill partially fulfilling the dreams of social reformers in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is based on her MA thesis, The Hindu Widow with Special Reference to Gujarat, submitted to the Department of Sociology of the University of Bombay (Mumbai) in 1956. The work purports to suggest a link between post-Vedic Hindu jurisprudence, especially in matters of succession and inheritance, the custom of child marriage, widowhood among young women and proscription of widow remarriage. These also led to the diabolical practice of widow self-immolation, or sati, which became widespread especially in certain parts of India. The well-rounded, if brief, encapsulation of major social issues associated with Gujarati Hindu widowhood provides a basis for future examinations along similar lines.

Author: Tanika Sarkar
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253340467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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What are the major Hindu ideas and traditions of India that have shaped dominant conceptions of womanhood, domesticity, wifeliness, and mothering, and of India as a Hindu nation? Tanika Sarkar analyzes literary and social traditions, the elite voices and popular culture that helped create the lived reality of north India today. She explores the proto-nationalist novels of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya as well as scandal literature, rumors, women's memoirs, and the popular press of colonial times for the subaltern ideas that have shaped contemporary India. Sarkar also examines the way earlier Indian religious traditions of saintliness, sacrifice, heroism, and warfare are being subverted or transformed by militant and fundamentalist forms of Hinduism.