Most people like you and me connect with the commonality of felt emotions and needs. We feel hungry, happy, sad, loved or unloved and express a larger plethora of feelings through art, theatre, music, painting, photography and words… With these, we tend to connect. And yet, larger structures created over time to offer security and governance to the masses—of which you and I are a part — have grown divisive, and, by the looks of it, the fences nurtured over time seem insurmountable. To retain these structures that were meant to keep us safe, wars are being fought and many are getting killed, losing homes and going hungry. We showcase such stories, poems and non-fiction to create an awareness among those who are lucky enough to remain untouched. But is there a way out, so that all of us can live peacefully, without war, without hunger and with love and a vision towards surviving climate change which (like it or not) is upon us?
Creating an awareness of hunger and destruction wreaked by war is a heartrending story set in Gaza by JK Miller. While Snigdha Agrawal’s narrative gives a sense of hope, recounting a small kindness by a common person, Sayan Sarkar shares a more personal saga of friendship and disillusionment — where people have choice. But does war leave us a choice as it annihilates friendships, cities, homes and families? Naramsetti Umamaheswararao’s story reiterates the belief in the family – peace being an accepted unit. Vela Noble’s fantastical fiction and art comes like a respite– though there is a darker side to it — with a touch of fun. Perhaps, a bit of fantasy and humour opens the mind to deal with the more sombre notes of existence.
The translation section hosts a story by Hamiruddin Middya, who grew up as a farmer’s son in Bengal. Steeped in local colours, it has been rendered into English by V Ramaswamy. Nazrul’s song revelling in the colours of spring has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Atta Shad’s pensive Balochi lines have been brought to us in English by Fazal Baloch. Isa Kamari continues to bring the flavours of an older, more laid-back Singapore with translations of his own Malay poems. A couple of Persian verses have been rendered into English by the poet, Akram Yazdani, herself. Questing for harmony, Tagore’s translated poem while reflecting on a child’s life, urges us to have the courage to be like a child — open, innocent and willing to imagine a world laced with trust and hope. If we were all to do that, do you think we’d still have wars, violence and walls built on hate and intolerance?
Mario Fenech takes a look at the idea of time. Amir Zadnemat writes of how memory is impacted by both science and humanities while Andriy Nivchuk brings to us snippets from Herodotus’s and Pericles’s lives that still read relevant. Ravi Varmman K Kanniappan gives the journey of chickpeas across space and time, asserting: “The chickpea does not care about your ideology, your portfolio, or your meticulously curated identity. It will grow, fix nitrogen, feed someone, and move on without a press release.” It has survived over aeons in a borderless state!
In book excerpts, we have a book that transcends borders as it’s a translation from Assamese by Ranjita Biswas of Arupa Kalita Patangia’s Moonlight Saga. Any translation is an attempt to integrate the margins into the mainstream of literature, and this is no less. The other excerpt is from Natalie Turner’s The Red Silk Dress. Keith Lyons has interviewed Turner about her novel which crosses multiple cultures too while on a personal quest.
Holding on to that idea, we invite you to savour the contents of our February issue.
Huge thanks to all our contributors and readers for making this issue possible. Heartfelt thanks to our wonderful team, especially Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork.
Enjoy the reads!
Let’s look forward to the spring… May it bring new ideas to help us all move towards more amicable times.
The phrase “irony of fate” is usually illustrated with the image of a sailor dying of thirst in the desert. Neat. Canonical. But as a mental exercise, one might try to find others, less obvious, less obedient. For instance, history has no grave for Herodotus, the very man whom Cicero, with the confidence of a Roman who knew how to assign paternity, called the father of history.
No tomb. No urn. No reliably identified city where he saw his last sunrise, or survived (or failed to survive) upto his final day. No one knows now. No one knew three hundred years ago. And judging by the silence, no one was particularly eager to know then either.
What remains are versions. Hypotheses. And the thick, practiced silence of old Hellas.
Thurii[1] gave him his second name, his last one, acquired while still alive. Yet, Thurii never returned the favour. No monument. No plaque. No modest column leaning into oblivion. Athens, meanwhile, built him something closer to a pedagogical complex. It was recommended for students who expected from the Lyceum not only rhetorical muscle but moral posture. Almost a museum. Almost a cult.
This asymmetry conveniently feeds the supporters of the so-called Periclean Scraper theory. According to them, Herodotus died not in some conveniently barbarian elsewhere, but in radiant Athens itself. Symbolic. Elegant. As the theory goes, he was removed along with other initiates into Pericles’ grand ideas by men who had begun to feel less like assets and more like liabilities. Or worse, witnesses.
We are not inclined to dignify such conjectures by reinforcing their place in history. Still less to supplement them with later interpolations produced by interested hands. These surface periodically in northern Aegean archives as lists or tables.
Yet one fact remains stubbornly intact. Herodotus was involved in the founding of Thurii.
A “common” colony, raised almost at the site of ancient Sybaris. Almost. Instead of theatrically restoring the legendary city of pleasures and refined excess (the Sybaris that gave its name to an entire philosophy of living), Thurii was assembled in haste, shoulder to shoulder with the ruins.
It was populated by Athenian volunteers, new settlers, descendants of Sybarites by blood or coincidence. Every day they walked through the ruins of yesterday. Every evening they returned to today. Dour, makeshift Thurii, assembled without taste or patience, it was like a punishment for former luxury.
The only unresolved detail was the addressee of that punishment.
Herodotus’ role in the final phase of Athenian democracy remains opaque. So opaque that one is tempted to suspect the opacity was the point. Too many moments in his biography coincide neatly with zones where documents stop leaving footprints. From fragments, partial transcripts, unsigned notes, and a couple of discreetly scraped tablets, the following version has been reconstructed. Its coherence is provisional. Responsibility for interpretation rests with the reader.
Pericles ( 495BCE–429BCE), Ancient Greek statesman and general.Herodotus (484 BCE – 425 BCE), Ancient Greek historian and geographerFrom Public Domain
Pericles acted with the confidence of a mature servant of democracy. His concept of an external threat (Persia) was remarkably versatile. It justified emergencies, softened expansion, and wrapped ambition in collective security. The threat itself worked better than any actual invasion. While others clung to the marathon, Pericles spoke of the future. A unified alliance of poleis, decisions made swiftly, centrally, and preferably in his office.
In practice, matters were simpler. The democratic faction wanted more. Territory, tribute, votes in foreign councils. Everything else was rhetorical upholstery. Their opponents could read subtext too, so Pericles began by clearing the flanks at home. The Areopagus was “reformed,” officially. Thucydides and his circle were removed next, with minimal explanation and maximum finality.
In the end Pericles remained one of the ten Strategoi[2], exactly as the constitution prescribed. But he alone decided. The others attended meetings, signed when prompted, nodded often. Formally, it was a democracy. In reality, a political singularity noticed by everyone and addressed by no one, because addressing it would have required rewriting the rules.
Only then could the Idea of a greater Hellas[3] be carried beyond the sacred city.
Herodotus arrived in Athens the way one arrives when one’s biography has already begun to resemble the synopsis of a tragedy. Still negotiable, but increasingly reluctant to change genre. There had been an attempted coup in Halicarnassus. It failed, but failure in Athens was judged alongside the elegance of the leap itself. Exile followed. He sailed with the Athenian fleet. More excursion than service, but the checkbox mattered. What he brought back was not heroism so much as stories, trimmed, calibrated, arranged with care. Athens was perpetually hungry for narratives, especially those that began as personal experience and ended as matter of state.
Pericles learned of him long before shaking his hand. By their first meeting, Herodotus had already been tested in conversation, whetted at banquets, evaluated through third parties of both sexes and varying loyalties. When Pericles finally invited him, first informally, then into his office, Herodotus was already half-installed. They spoke like men who had been reading the same books for years and drawing incompatible conclusions. Herodotus offered careful directness, still marketable. Pericles listened, then made the small, economical gesture Athenians read fluently. This man would be allowed closer.
From that moment on, Herodotus ceased to be merely a gifted interlocutor and became part of the infrastructure. His notes were quietly reclassified as “auxiliary material for decision-making.” He began to appear at discussions of issues that officially did not exist, meetings without agendas, where unrecorded questions were discussed and ideas could not to be seen walking alone in daylight.
It was elegant. Herodotus believed he was being heard. Pericles ensured he was being used. Athens congratulated itself on the illusion of mutual benefit. In conversations with Pericles and those nearest to him, Herodotus eventually let slip two places that unsettled him by their scale, precision, and absolute dissimilarity to anything he had encountered among any monuments created by human.
It was an even octagonal platform, a night’s march east of Tyre, made of marble cracked by age, yet laid so carefully, and on such a foundation, that no one, however motivated, managed to pry out blocks or grind it down into reusable rubble. The vacant expanse, roughly the size of four Athenian quarters, stubbornly refused conversion into cheap building material. And also a pyramid sunk deep into sand, referred to as Shaytep by locals. Later it was imitated with scholarly enthusiasm by Egyptians who inherited the territory above it. Its accessible chambers suggested the scale of a ten-story palace, if such a structure could ever make sense as habitation. Immense, curiously pointless, poorly translated allegories, it had the same heavy geometry, the same sensation that it was not built for people.
The locals knew nothing. Those who called them tombs did not argue with those who believed them to be stations of the gods. But one detail struck Herodotus as well as Egyptians, Persians, border tribes – all speaking different tongues had the same conviction – structures like these existed elsewhere.
No one had seen them. No one had mapped them. Yet everyone “knew” they must be there. Drunken sailors’ tales from the inhospitable north. Evening stories about distant shores of the Pontus. No names. No coordinates. Only background noise, the shadow of something once called knowledge.
Then there was Lampon, a seer, a priest, an interpreter of higher meanings knew how to speak with the gods or at least how to simulate the effect convincingly. In Athens he was respected not as a person but as a function. He had a lifelong right to dine in the Prytaneion, where the Council of Five Hundred formalised the will of the people. Lampon had access without election as he was said to have authority delegated directly from the sky. His task was to ensure no decision passed that might anger Olympus. A dizzying appointment for a supervisor overseeing assemblies theoretically designed to lack any single supervisor.
Lampon stayed close to Pericles, intimately close. Either Pericles believed in signs, or he understood the value of myth and knew how to deploy it. The two are not mutually exclusive. On the square, the people saw a priest and heard a voice as to who stood behind that voice remained speculation.
It was almost certainly Lampon who conceived the idea, layered like honeyed pastry. He compiled all reports of megalithic structures, convened a council of moderately learned men to interpret them, dispatched colourfully dressed priests with sombre escorts to the empire’s edges. And made the big announcement.
Athens, the statement would go, had recovered forgotten pre-literate knowledge. The knowledge of how to turn piles of stone into defensive infrastructure. Or, with fewer syllables, a wonder-weapon. Against it, Persian arrows and anonymous triremes would amount to little more than wind in a vineyard.
Domestically, it was signal geometry. Parallelograms of fact intersecting triangles of legend, with the Athenian party standing at the centre beneath the slogan. We read stone better than anyone. Anyone asking unnecessary questions simply would not be invited to the next symposium.
Externally, it was never about hoisting a catapult atop a pyramid. It was about saturating every diplomatic front with a myth. Athenian hegemony was not merely foreign policy. It was access to ancient knowledge, to a power beyond imagination.
Beneath the ornamentation lay the real goal – to ensure recalcitrant polies[4] would arrive voluntarily, bread and butter in hand, at a confederation where Athens controlled the bread, the butter, and the ledger.
Pericles did not merely approve Lampon’s hypothesis. He sealed it with an official nod and an unofficial proceed until it smoked. Marketability mattered more than the truth. If more than three neighbouring poleis believed it, it would cease to be a local myth and begin to function.
Herodotus received two sets of instructions. The written one was to collect and systematise material on the Greco-Persian Wars. Paperwork for the Academy and the gullible. The oral one was simpler – to locate traces of the “ancients” across the edges of the oikoumene[5], and try not to damage them too badly while taking measurements.
What would be done with the material was not explained, not out of mistrust, but pragmatism. Knowledge without leverage becomes ballast. And Herodotus already carried enough weight — nobility. faith in democracy coupled with dependence on his own authorial voice. Throughout the expedition, whose geography we know in exhausting detail, he sent Lampon encrypted reports with exemplary regularity about the locations of structures of titanic scale and improbable forms.
The earliest reports were meticulous, almost embarrassingly enthusiastic. As if he were seeking revelation in massive forms. He analyzed slab placement, light behavior, hypothetical priestly processions, even the dietary preferences of imagined builders. But by the eighth object the style thinned. By the tenth it collapsed into two lines, as if the text itself had grown embarrassed.
Geodesy and geometry remained precise. His team continued to perform duties in full compliance with instructions and payroll. But metaphors vanished. Comparisons evaporated. The rhetoric crumbled. The stones remained. The words did not.
Lampon followed the change with mounting concern. Some blamed fatigue, barbarian cuisine, women insufficiently trained in Hellenic desire. But Lampon was not convinced.
Herodotus’ second arrival in Athens was calm, without excessive praise. His report to Lampon was scheduled without urgency, for the evening. The time when architecture becomes philosophy and political maneuvering turns into liturgy. This meeting has been reconstructed below as per the authors’ assumptions.
“We’ll pour the wine ourselves,” Lampon smiled. “So, did you bring us an oracle from the barbarians?”
“I did,” Herodotus said. “The oracle, and the barbarians.”
He did not elaborate.
Lampon pressed gently. Herodotus replied, almost apologetically. “I’m avoiding language. When you try to describe what was created outside description, you don’t move closer to understanding. You build a private labyrinth of words and find a sign reading Museum Closed.”
“At first there were words,” he admitted. “Epithets. Analogies. Cyclopean observatories. Celestial surgery. Shafts draining souls to Sirius. But these similarities are projection phantoms. My culture reflected onto something without a reflective surface.”
Lampon asked what changed.
“We see a monument like an unsolved equation and immediately insert familiar context,” Herodotus said. “Circle means cult. Twelve means zodiac. Stone means ancestors lacked better materials. And we’re satisfied because we’ve obtained an answer that stops thought. That isn’t research. It’s mental self-fertilization.”
“So you went looking for a different answer?”
“No. A different question.”
A pause, then. “If you want to understand a shadow, you don’t stare at the object. You examine the source of light. I looked at the invisible craftsmen. At the light they emitted so we could amuse ourselves by drafting plans in the shade of their buildings.”
“How do you encode emptiness?” he added. “The impulse faded. I accepted the emptiness as it was. And I began to write accordingly. As a witness, not an apologist.”
Then, unexpectedly clear, as though rehearsed to the point of premiere. “They caught the wind not for movement, but for taste.”
“That’s all?”
“I found not an explanation,” Herodotus said, “but an understanding. That if among the ancestors there was one whose mischief outweighed his fear, he said: let’s place the stones like this. By the stars. Or the other way around.”
“And others followed,” he continued. “Not because they understood, but because it felt exciting. Amusing. New. And it spread, like a fire no one meant to light, but everyone enjoyed feeding.”
Lampon pressed. “You reduce the work of titans to a game?”
“A game,” Herodotus shrugged. “Or play. Or fashion. Rituals without gods. I searched for depth where there was only the width of a moment. Sometimes a dolmen is just a dolmen. The imprint of laughter that has gone silent.”
Lampon looked inward, auditing the contents of his guest’s soul. He found no deceit. Herodotus had tried earnestly to assign cult and function to chaos. Each new structure replied: “No. Nothing. Calm down.”
By the tenth, the traveler had calmed down.
In practice, however, Thurii happened.
The initiative came from the democrats, formally from Pericles’ associates, informally perhaps from Pericles himself. Here the fog thickens. Was this merely bureaucratic arrhythmia, or the final phase of a longer operation? The sponsor colony’s paradox remained. It did not eclipse Sybaris. It multiplied despair by forcing a daily view of its ruins.
It was there that Herodotus acquired his enduring epithet, the Thurian. It was there, tradition says, that he unified his Histories, at least in the “recommended” reading. The sequence gently guides an inexperienced reader toward the conclusion that the author prioritised events that glorified Hellas. Everything before appears as clay, material to be kneaded into anonymous coating for tablets meant to record the “truly significant” milestones.
Later editors, we now know, divided the work into nine books. Another irony. A life devoted to weaving disparate accounts into a chain. Successors dismantled it into links, then displayed them in whichever sequence proved momentarily convenient.
For a time Athens mentioned Thurii only occasionally, as one recalls a long dinner with dull relatives. Then something occurred to pull Herodotus back into the field of managerial imagination.The answer is disarmingly prosaic.
The old man decided it was time. Not to die. To speak.
Publicly. Before an audience. With scrolls and a lectern, and that expression professional speakers wear just before and do you know what else? Publication was discussed. Workshops began calculating margins.
Word of this reached Lampon not as a fresh wind but as a warm exhalation of antique panic. Ready for readings was enough. He knew how easily Herodotus could forget the boundary between narration and confession when listened to attentively. The danger was not a direct accusation. Herodotus was no enemy. Far worse, he was a witness. In the vortex of his diegesis[6], scraps of geography, personal reflections, unapproved versions could be swept together. Everything Pericles had ordered to be formulated, but not pronounced.
The decision was swift. Herodotus was summoned to Athens. The pretext was patronage. A chair. An audience. A laurel wreath and a lifetime bust. Perfect timing. If there were readings, let them occur at the center of the world.
And on the way back, a stone, rain, a robber, a horse — the classic, well, age after all. In modern terms, something we would call prevention. The Greek lexicon offered a more refined word. Hygiene. If nothing else, the Hellenes knew how to keep a narrative clean. Thus, according to proponents of the Scraper theory, the true story of Herodotus ends. Pericles methodically erases associates from the commemorative board.
His work survived, though not without excisions, and the factual foundation thinned accordingly. Speculation about conjecture and truth continues to feed professional unmaskers.
Pericles never obtained his diplomatic wonder-weapon. No column trembled under an egregore’s vibration. Instead, two blocs of poleis emerged, welded by paranoia and ambition, and the Peloponnesian War followed. An internal conflict of unprecedented scale, like a culinary dispute between the two heads of a single serpent.
As if that were insufficient, a plague disembarked in the Piraeus — classical symptoms with a metaphysical aftertaste. Pericles himself exited through an emergency door politely opened by the Queen of Epidemics.
Lampon, however, seems to have drawn a different conclusion — divine retribution for attempting unauthorised access to the gods’ toy chest. He dissolved his name into topical comedies and administrative archives.
Time, as is well known, is not the enemy of knowledge, but its only victor.
The pyramids sink deeper each year, as if the earth were ashamed of their nakedness. Island statues once mistaken for fallen heroes increasingly resemble quirks of terrain. The blurrier the outline, the freer the hypothesis. The fewer the features, the louder the voices eager to explain.
Perhaps this is how history repaid Herodotus. Monuments built in the style of titans (?) simply fade just as the meaning of their existence once faded, just as Herodotus of Thurii himself faded, leaving behind only a controversial image.
Andriy Nivchuk is a Ukrainian-born author with a background in IT engineering. He spent fifteen years working as an artistic photographer in Paris and now lives in Ukraine.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Bibliography
Herodotus (life, association with Thurii, traditional framing of the Histories)
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. —Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950)
This is one of the dedications that precedes the narrative of Mineke Schipper’s non-fiction, Widows: A Global History. Her description of misapprehensions and the darkness around widowhood, as well as the actions that have been taken and suggestions on how more can be done to heal, weave a narrative for a more equitable society.
Starting with mythological treatment of widows, the book plunges into an in-depth discussion, not just with case studies but also with a social critique of the way these women are perceived and treated around the world, their need to heal from grief or a sense of devastation caused by their spouse’s death, concluding with stories that reflect the resilience of some of those who have overcome the odds of being repulsed. It is a book that inspires hope… hope for a world where despite all stories of misogyny covered in media, there are narratives that showcase both the human spirit and humanity where the ostracised are moving towards being integrated as a part of a functional social sphere.
Schipper, best known for her work on comparative literature mythologies and intercultural studies, navigates through multiple cultures over time and geographies to leave a lingering imprint on readers. She writes: “In Book V of his Histories, Herodotus (485-425/420 BCE) described life among the Thracians: Each man has many wives, and at his death there is both great rivalry among his wives and eager contention on their friends’ part to prove which wife was best loved by her husband. She to whom the honour is adjudged is praised by men and women alike and then slain over the tomb by her nearest of kin. After the slaying she is buried with the husband.” And yet she tells us of the dark past of Europe, “A Polish text asserts with great certainty that, after the burning of the body of her husband, ‘every wife allowed herself to be beheaded and went with him into death’.” She tells us stories of wife burning, killing and dark customs of yore across the world that seem like horror stories, including satis in India. The “motivation” is often greed of relatives or customs born of patriarchal insecurities. She contends, “wherever desperate poverty reigns, widows are at an increased risk.”
She argues: “The story is much the same everywhere; widows who are well educated know what rights they have or are able to find the right authorities to approach with their questions, while women with little or no education continue to suffer from malevolent practices.”
She has covered the stories that reflect the need for the welfare of widows, of how early marriages lead to widowhood even in today’s world ( “ Every year around twelve million girls under the age of eighteen get married, one in five of all marriages.”), of social customs like dowry, which can be usurped by a widow’s spouse’s family, of steps that are being taken and changes that need to be instituted for this group of women often regarded in the past and even in some places, in the present, as witches. In fact, she has written of such ‘witch villages’ in Africa, which have been developed to help widows who have been treated badly and turned away from their homes. Such stories, she tells us prevail all over the world, including India, where widows are sent or go to Varanasi.
She asserts that despite these efforts, “there is often still a significant gap between declarations of gender equality and their day-to-day enforcement and application.” She ends with case studies of four women: “Christine de Pisan, Tao Huabi, Laila Soueif and Marta Alicia Benavente examples of widows who dared to fully throw themselves into a new life following the death of their husbands.” And with infinite wisdom adds: “We cannot change history, but we can look to the past with new knowledge and to the future with new eyes.” She concludes with a profound observation: “Time does not heal sorrow, but out of the centuries-old ashes, grief, strict commandments and prohibitions, new prospects can also rise. The fact that every person’s life is finite makes every day unique and precious. The same goes for widows.”
In this interview Mineke Schipper (née Wilhelmina Janneke Josepha de Leeuw), an award-winning writer from Netherlands, tells us what started her on her journey to uncover the stories of this group of people.
What got you interested in widows as a group from around the world? Why would you pick this particular group only for a whole book?
Yes, whence this topic? The widow had been a tiny part of Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet. Women in Proverbs From Around the World (Yale UP 2004), an earlier book I wrote about proverbs referring to women’s lives, from girl babies to brides, wives and co-wives, mothers and mothers-in-law, grandmothers and old women. It was a long and breathtaking study about more than 15,000 proverbs, collected over many years, apparently widely appreciated and translated with two relatively recent editions published in India, in English and in Marathi. For those interested: the complete collected material is accessible and searchable at www.womeninproverbsworldwide.org, including proverbs about widows. That small but striking section about widows had made me curious, but other books, as it goes, pushed ahead, before I came back to them. In January 2020, I had to look up something in that book about proverbs, and the pages about widows looked so weird that I proposed the widow as my new topic to my Dutch publisher who responded enthusiastically.
You have written of so many cultures and in-depth. How long did it take you to collect material for this book and put it together?
All over I found obvious warnings and distrust viz a viz a woman whose husband dies. Interestingly, a widow was associated with death—and a widower was not. Take heed, suitor, when you replace the dead husband in the widow’s conjugal bed! Better not! Was it the fear that she had killed him? Or the creepy thought that the dead man’s hovering ghost was still hanging around? A widow was supposed to mourn intensely over her husband, preferably the rest of her life. In the meantime, proverbial messages openly expressed the widower’s happiness at the news of his wife’s death: ‘Grief for a dead wife lasts to the door’ (all over Europe) or ‘A wife’s death renews the marriage’ (Arabic). I came across well-known names—such as Confucius, Herodotus, Boniface, and Ibn Battuta—and lesser-known names of early travellers, historians, and philosophers with their commentaries on widows, compulsory or non-mandatory prolonged mourning, voluntary or prescribed chastity, and a surprisingly common choice of suicide as the best option for her. Amazingly many widows obediently followed their husbands to death. In all continents, monuments and documents witness how women joined dead men—buried or burnt alive, hanged, strangled or beheaded, drowned, stabbed or shot. A preference for strangling was inspired by the idea that the victim would enter the next world ‘intact’. So, from the narrow diving board of no more than a few dozen proverbs I plunged into the hidden history of widowhood for about three years.
How do women perpetrate the victimisation of widows? Would you say that widows as a group are more victimised against than other groups of women?
Conceptions about women as interchangeable objects were widespread. If a woman was ‘no longer of use’, a man would need to get a new one, much as you would do with a broken watch, rifle, knife or whip. A man cannot or will not do without a wife, but what about when the tables are turned? The need to present women without husbands as inept and dependent must have been great. A widow managing all by herself was rather met with obvious disapproval. Widowhood has traditionally been associated with emptiness. In Sanskrit, the word vidhua means ‘destitute’, and the Latin viduata (‘made destitute, emptied’) is the root of the word for widow in many European languages, including Witwe (German), veuve (French) and weduwe (Dutch).
Nonetheless there have always been plenty of widows who have lived wonderfully independent lives, but this is not the image seared into the public consciousness. The notion that a woman is unable to live her own life after the death of her husband is an amazingly deep-rooted one. The Japanese word for widow (mibōjin) literally means ‘she who has not yet died’, that is, a widow is simply sitting in Death’s waiting room for her own time to come. Interestingly, the status of widower on the other hand was usually so short-lived and temporary that some languages even lack a word for it all together!
What makes widows more vulnerable than others?
Every widow has her own story, but social systems play an important role. In traditions where goods, land and property are inherited through the mother’s family line with matrilocality, a groom comes to live with his bride’s family, although this often ended up working out slightly differently as men were not best pleased with this living arrangement, so in reality there would be negotiation. However, over the centuries patrilineal systems, lineage and inheritance significantly became the dominant system. According to the patrilocal rules, a man had to remain ‘at home’, a system which to this day obliges countless brides to move in with their parents-in-law, an environment foreign to them. They are forced to comply with the demands and expectations of their family-in-law, while the husbands remain comfortable in the familiar surroundings they grew up in, with major consequences for the lives of women who become widows. This patrilocal living situation has often resulted in greater inequality between marital partners and harsh rules for widows, often preventing a wife from any material heritage after her husband’s death. According to the work of evolutionary psychologists, married women who live with or in close contact with their matrilineal family run a significantly lower risk of violence in the form of (physical) abuse, rape and exploitation than those who move in with their husband’s family. This is all the more true for a widow with a distrustful family-in-law who accuse her of killing her husband, a danger that is greatest in areas where poverty reigns.
At a point you have said, “The Aryan period, which preceded later negative social developments, saw a differently structured society in which there was more space for women: to a certain extent women had religious autonomy, they were entitled to education at all levels (with some even becoming celebrated authors), they participated in public life and also held important positions… However, by the year 200 AD, their position had considerably worsened.” Do you have any idea why their condition worsened in India? What were the ‘negative social developments’ you mention?
In matters of religion the woman was increasingly dependent on the services of her husband or of priests, possibly also on her sons or male relatives, to carry out the rituals she required. Simultaneously she became largely excluded from all types of formalised education. This lasting effect can be seen even today in the global difference in the rate of female and male literacy. The negative stance towards women in India dates back to Brahmin commentaries of ancient Vedic texts, which referred to women as lesser humans; widows subsequently occupied an even lower rung on the social ladder and were forced to work hard towards their religious salvation through extreme asceticism. One example: ‘At her pleasure [after the death of her husband], let her emaciate her body by living only on pure flowers, roots of vegetables and fruits. She must not even mention the name of any other men after her husband has died.’ (Manusmriti Kamam 5/160) Patriarchal relations have developed gradually in different parts of the world and at different times, but not everywhere in the same rigorous forms.
In the Abron-Kulango culture in the northeast of his native Côte d’Ivoire, you have told us “[B]oth widows and widowers were required to accompany their spouse to the next world” but eventually due to societal realisations, such practices stopped. Do you think this can happen in other cultures too. Have you seen it happen in other cultures?
As far as I know, such practices do not exist anywhere anymore. The most problematic obstacle for the rights of widow’s in less-well off regions is the unfortunate combination of illiteracy, fear of witchcraft and covetous in-laws, particularly during periods of mourning and grief. The good news is that even in the most unexpected places initiatives are emerging to help inform women in rural areas of their equality before the law. Self-aware widows become inspiring role models; conscious of their rights, they share their knowledge with others so that more of their fellow widows can find the right legal aid when injustice rears its head.
Would you hold as culprit people who enforce the death of widows? Would you address these people too as criminals in today’s context? Please elaborate.
It wouldn’t help much to do this! Marriage is still frequently presented as the utmost peak that a woman can achieve during her life. From this supposed top spot married women often still look at single and widowed women in a new light—with pity, contempt, suspicion or even hostility: they are out to seduce your own husband! When death comes calling, not only men’s but also women’s negative feelings easily bubble up from the morass of fear at the dreaded prospect of becoming a widow. Over the centuries such reactions towards widows have become part of the constrictive hierarchy meant to keep so many women in their place.
Can sati be justified[1](even though they are deemed illegal as is suicide) by saying the widow immolated herself willingly? Please explain.
The social pressure on widows must have been immense, but we are living now and no longer in the past. It is true that in poorer regions far out of the reach of cities, countless numbers of widows still have to traverse a long road towards a humane and dignified existence. However, instead of justifying the willingness to immolate herself as her own choice, it is better to insist on the positive news that, after the loss of their partner, today not only men but also women have the right to stay alive and further explore their own talents and new possibilities.
You have told us dowry started as a European custom. Is it still a custom there as it is in parts of South Asia, even if deemed illegal? Was it brought into Asia by Aryans/colonials or a part of the culture earlier itself?
The dowry is the gift that the bride’s family would contribute to the couple’s new home. Even though colonisation may have reinforced this ancient custom, but in many communities, it was already a custom and still is in many parts of the world. In Europe it stayed on until the late nineteenth century. In cultures where the bride provided a dowry, the death of a wife would bring benefits to a widower, as a new wife with a new dowry would enrich his home with new assets such as silver tableware, jewellery, bed linen and other valuables. For centuries, among Christians, divorce was forbidden, and from the perspective of widowers the prospect of a second chance provoked a sense of euphoria, as expressed in quite some sayings where his sadness does not go beyond the front door. Across Europe such messages confirm a husband’s profit of his wife’s death: ‘Dead wives and live sheep make a man rich.’ (French; UK English). However, most widows were denied such liberating feelings or didn’t experience any profit from the change. Often, they did not even allow themselves to get over her loss and indulge in any new freedom. They usually were subject to the paralysing fear of other people’s gossip.
In many places a widow who remarried would even lose entitlement to her own dowry or other input she had contributed to her marriage. Many women who remarried felt unable to invoke any right they had on the property of their deceased husband. Little wonder, therefore, that widows were heavily discouraged from remarrying, for example in China. The use of far-reaching laws still re-enforced the highly recommended chaste and sexless existence of widows after the death of her husband. Of course, the considerable number of child marriages in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia easily robbed child widows from the legal rights wherever they had. According to the World Widows Report, the situation for widows with children is still exceptionally alarming in many parts of the world. Daughters, in particular, remain a huge problem in traditions where women have to contribute a dowry when daughters get married. For this reason alone, poorer parents have a preference for sons: they are more likely to inherit from their father’s family, while their widowed mother can expect little.
Has the condition of widows across the world improved over time? Please elaborate.
Over the centuries far too many widows have been convinced that their only future was conditioned by their dead husband. In my book there are examples from different areas of courageous widows who changed their own lives. Looking around in one’s own neighbourhood, there are always exemplary models of independent widows who do not let themselves be deterred by the doom of whatever prejudiced people think or say.
All emancipation starts with the opportunity to acquire knowledge, but if we are to believe what tradition tells us, women had little need for that, based on an assumption that knowledge did nothing to encourage and promote female obedience, and even less for virtue. ‘Knowledge goes before virtue for men, virtue before knowledge for women’ is an old saying in Europe, while a Chinese saying also agrees that a woman without knowledge is already doing very well. The fact that this message has had such a wide-ranging effect can be seen in the vast difference in levels of education and training among boys and girls in global education statistics.
What did a man look out for when it came to finding a wife? In order to facilitate control over women, various warnings have been passed down to men. One such proverb found the world over clearly expresses this sentiment: ‘Never marry a woman with big feet.’ It comes from the Sena language in Malawi and Mozambique. In China, India and other parts of the world, I came across literal iterations of this proverb. In spite of geographic or cultural distances and differences, this saying reflects a widespread consensus: hierarchy in male-female relations seemed to be essential, and someone had to be in charge. Should he become the main breadwinner for the duration of their married life, his wife will be even more dependent on him.
Significantly the big feet metaphor points to male fear of female talents and power. Hardly surprising therefore that becoming a widow was the worst possible catastrophe for women. Worldwide the solidarity between wives and widows is growing and literacy support within local communities as well, while the former unwavering prejudices against widows are shrinking, and more and more widows with big feet do manage. The old anti-widow stronghold of local prejudice is slowly but surely crumbling into ruins. We cannot change history, but widows can look to the past with new knowledge and into the future with new eyes and new hope.
Borderless 