Mineke Schipper’s ‘Widows: A Global History’ looks at widows and widowhood through time, space, cultures

An exploration of the customs, rituals and injunctions that frame widowhood practices worldwide and across ages is an ambitious but extremely important step for writing global history. This small volume by Mineke Schipper more than accomplishes that purpose. It moves thematically, covering a vast range: the patriarchal regimes within which the disciplines of widowhood are embedded, mourning rituals and mortuary beliefs, dietary and sartorial changes among widows, the climate of suspicion and surveillance to ensure her sexual chastity, and last, but not the least, the impediments to her property inheritance.

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The last chapter usefully recounts how contemporary widows partly overcome and partly are made to continue with the customs.

That widowers outnumber widows and that widows are made to live under far greater constraints has been practically a worldwide phenomenon. The author pulls together evidence from ancient and modern African, European and Asian societies, using proverbs, legends and chronicles, artwork and literary sources, to establish this point and to demonstrate that this difference flows from an ingrained and near-universal sexual asymmetry, which has continued and, in some cases, even strengthened over time. But the chapter suffers from a lack of historical and geographical contexts that underpinned the manifold discriminations against widows: what did patriarchy specifically signify in different ages and cultural systems? Surely, its practices could not be uniform.

The chapter on death ritual — ‘Parting’ — contains snippets on mortuary beliefs and practices. It is interesting to see how an Ashanti and a Hindu widow have to tend to the husband’s corpse in similar ways and observe great austerities. But there is no indication of the belief systems from which such observances emanate. For Hindu widows, the austerities continue lifelong — in diet, dress, self-mortification and total sexual abstinence, for, Hindus believe that she is doing penance for misdeeds in her past birth or for some hidden misdeed in the present. Is the situation identical for the Ashanti? What about Muslim and Christian widows? And the Indian tribal communities?

In the chapter on mourning, we have, once again, very interesting material from diverse cultures: from ancient Iraq where the widow grieves for the loss of the man who had “watered her womb” to Queen Victoria’s prolonged and severe mourning practice, to mid-20th century Japan where a war widow is instructed in an ironic haiku verse to weep for her soldier husband, to mention a few.

Some practices seem to be self-improvised expressions of sorrow, some are mandatory regulations; the differences are not sufficiently underlined. We wonder if mourning customs for loved ones who are not the husband were necessarily different everywhere.

The heterogeneous instances are pulled out of far too many situations. Though fascinating, they are too numerous to make deeper sense of. It seems clear, however, that the mandatory loud lamentations are prescribed for, or expected from, women and widows alone while men escape the burden. The author does not clarify what kinds of masculinity or femininity norms lie behind this.

It seems that in several mainstream cultures, the widow’s dress changes at the outset of widowhood: black for the Christian widow and white or maroon for the eastern and western Indian ones, respectively. But while the diversities are interesting, we are not told what the colour codes signify, nor how long the mourning attire continues.

Stigmatising the widow by barring her from all ceremonial and festive occasions seems to be quite pervasive across cultures. But there is no hint if the timeline is identical for all. In segmented societies like Victorian England or Hindu India, were widows of all classes and castes expected to follow the same rituals? Certainly, lower caste custom did not prescribe lifelong chastity.

The notion that the dead need the living to join them in their journey to the after-world has been a striking feature of many ancient cultures. But, for the Egyptians, this extended mostly to servants and slaves of the royal figures, or even pets or useful animals. It was not necessarily a duty of the wives. Among Hindus, on the other hand, up to the 19th century, and sometimes beyond, immolation on the funeral pyre of husbands was reserved for widows alone. There is a sense of timelessness about the narrative; and widowhood appears not just uniform but also unchanging in most cases. One would like to know how and why it changed and in which ways.

An important chapter describes the economic vulnerability of most widows: though I suspect that with age, the widow of a grown-up son would enjoy a rather privileged status at home than a younger widow, or even a young wife. Some widows were suspected of being prone to witchcraft and that probably blocked remarriage or sexual self-fulfilment.

Despite the undoubted wealth of material and density of research, some key gaps persist. We are told little or nothing about Muslim practices and beliefs. Nor is there any mention of the custom of levirate, where widows were coerced into taking a second husband from within the matrimonial family.

The book covers a large ground in terms of time, space and cultures. It is also a tale well told. Sadly, the final impression, despite the many satisfactions, is that of a bricolage: of under-analysed factual fragments which are skilfully stitched together.

— The reviewer is Visiting Professor, History, Ashoka University