ABSTRACT
Being a widow in the Indian context is usually a harrowing experience and deeply influenced by class, caste and religious positions. The author examines the lives of widows as a category of single women in the Northwestern state of Punjab, which is home to the green revolution and also identified as part of the patriarchal heartland earlier in this volume (see Chapter 1). Cultural practices such as chadar chadhaana, in which widows are remarried to their brothers-in-law to prevent fragmentation of the family, and competing claims to agricultural land are common in this region. This chapter attempts to document the experiences of widows as a category of single women in terms of their treatment by their families and communities in ways in which issues related to religion, caste and class intersect with the singleness of widowed women to make them socially, economically, politically and culturally vulnerable. Narratives from this chapter show how the toxic landscape of post–green revolution agrarian issues, increasing substance abuse, unemployment and rigid patriarchal control, combine to create a context within which widows face oppression at every level of the family, the community and the state.
