Basing Her Book On Rich Empirical Date And In-Depth Interviews With More Than 550 Widows From 14 Villages In Seven States, The Author Analyses The Social And Economic Challenges Widows Pose To The Social Order.

This book analyzes how French dramatists reproduced certain images of India such as the burning widow, the lowly pariah or untouchable, and the exotic 'bayadere' or dancing girl in four plays and one ballet written from the eighteenth century through the twentieth centuries. Addressing questions of Orientalism, the book also argues that it was because the French lost their Indian colonies to the Briish in the eighteenth centuries that India became a part of the French literary imagination.

This work has deep bearing on the socio-economic condition of widows in Indian sub-continent where the discrimination against them is still rife. This marginalisation cuts across religion, caste and class barriers to make it an India, though the dimension and the degree may vary in rigidity. The book while giving an overview of the status of widows, focusses on the marginalisation peculiar to individual regions and specific kind of widows. It is indeed a rich and comprehensive compilation of contributions by eminent social scientist who have made even an academic assessment of impact of recent armed conflict in Jammu and Kashmir and Kargil on those who bore the brunt of endless mental and physical agony. Undoubtedly the assessment of each author is unique and Scholarly. The whole book would be very useful for teachers, scholars, students and social activists, intellectuals and socials scientists both in India and abroad.

Vidarbha—the parched heartland of central India—has become the foremost site of farmer suicides in the country. These suicides are the most striking indictment of the neglect of agriculture by the state. But the story of the farmers’ distress does not end with their death—it lives on in the experience of their widows who struggle to survive in the shadows. Widows of Vidarbha tells the story of 16 such widows who have been invisible to the state, the community, and even their families, and talks of their lost dreams, their diminished worldviews, and their helpless surrender to the conveniences of patriarchy. These narratives throw light on the dark and desperate corners of their invisible world, one that reflects the state of farm widows across the country.

This heart-wrenching book on widows in contemporary India delves into multiple forms of material and emotional deprivation including a most oppressive kind of renunciation forced on the widows living in Varanasi and Vrindavan. Seeing the things from the suffering women's perspective, it questions the exclusivity of their renunciatory life prescribed by the Hindu Dharmashastras. Among other things, this work argues powerfully that the widows need a measure of social security for their sheer material survival, as they have for long been subjected to humiliation, neglect and blatant exploitation. In spite of modern India's constitutional provisions which grant equal rights to women, a large section of these women continue to suffer due to the heterogeneous and hierarchical nature of our social structure based on most glaring forms of socio-economic inequalities. The plight of widows is very pathetic because of the longstanding hold of orthodoxy, obscurantism and superstitious beliefs. Besides cruel frustrations of widowhood, the widows suffer from severe social, economic and cultural deprivations. Concerned with social and economic conditions of widows and their dependent children, this empathetic study seeks to understand: What are the overwhelming problems of widows? Do the widows think that widowhood has affected their social life in a cruel way? How do the widows cope with the changing times and changing society? Besides providing insight into the socio-psychological aspects of widowhood, this study investigates the people's attitude towards the widows and their own self-image. The book also elucidates and suggests ways and means to be adopted by the state, civil society organizations and the people as a whole in order to change the mindset of the widows and reorient them to take life in their own hands instead of being passive beneficiaries of others' charities.