For years, community healthcare worker Netradipa Patil had been making her rounds in rural Shirol, in the Indian state of Maharashtra. She enquired into people’s health and asked how she could be of assistance. One day, she decided to ask an extra question: “How are you feeling today?” She noticed that several women didn’t even reply. Patil was haunted by their blank stares and silence. What made them feel so low? When she returned soon after, she encouraged these women to speak and spent hours listening to their stories. She discovered they were widows who had been harshly ostracised by their communities.
There are more than 55 million widows living in India today. While dealing with the grief and financial loss often caused by losing their husbands, many of these women are pressured into conforming to traditions that have been described as “social death”. Excluded from festivals and celebrations, many are expected to stay in their homes for a year or longer after the death. These restrictions are accompanied by stigma. In some remote villages, widows are expelled from the community and sent to shelter homes.
“None of these rituals make any sense,” says Patil. But in several parts of India, a woman’s identity is still tied to that of her husband. “This tradition goes back several centuries and the reason it’s followed even today is to curb women’s freedom and put restrictions on them.” If a widow fails to follow these rituals, she is shamed. People may even accuse her of never having loved her husband.
Patil was familiar with these customs, but still she was shocked by the women’s stories. “It left me numb,” she says. One woman was a fellow healthcare worker, Lalita Mudshinge. She was in her early 30s when her husband, a tractor driver, died of a heart attack in 2017. Immediately, she was asked to break her bangles, remove the necklace and vermillion mark associated with married women, and refrain from wearing colourful clothes. Furthermore, she was forbidden from participating in weddings, child naming ceremonies and other celebrations.
Mudshinge was prepared for this ostracisation. She also anticipated being blamed for her husband’s death, as many widows are. “I kept all the medical records safely and even the autopsy report,” she says. But despite the evidence that he had died of cardiac arrest, she was still accused by her in-laws and members of the community of playing a part. They also wanted to force her to stay in the house for a year. This was not possible, as Mudshinge, like Patil, worked as a community healthcare worker, which meant regular trips into the centre of the village.
“The men from the village would stalk me in the streets and make bad comments,” she said. The abuse reached a stage where even stepping out of her front door began to feel dangerous. “I was so stressed and scared that I often fell ill,” she says. The social stigma directly impacted her work, with senior staff yelling at her constantly. “Mudshinge was suicidal, depressed, and on the verge of leaving her job,” Patil says. However, within a few years, she was helping her fellow widows and battling patriarchal attitudes in her country. How did it happen?
The fight back begins
It all started with that extra question, “How are you feeling today?” This simple invitation to speak progressed into hours of conversation, as Mudshinge was finally able to explain her plight. Patil gave Mudshinge her contact details and said to reach out at any time. She also started visiting the woman’s home and tried to persuade her in-laws to stop practising the widowhood rituals.
Initially, they were not convinced. So, Patil increased the visits. After a few months, Mudshinge began noticing a change. Her in-laws were more accepting of her leaving the house, and even allowed her to wear jewellery and colourful clothes. Men from the community continued to harass her when she did her rounds as a healthcare worker, but after Patil began accompanying her, she found she was more able to face them down.
Patil was helping five other widows at the time. They were all coping with challenges, and she felt they were not being adequately supported. So she reached out to a fellow healthcare worker in a nearby village. Together, they began to organise awareness sessions for widows.
These healthcare workers understand the plight of widows because they are all women and come from rural communities themselves. They are Accredited Social Health Activists, or ASHA workers. There are over a million ASHAs in India: roughly one for every 1,000 people. They are all female and come from the communities they serve. They do everything from prenatal care to administering vaccines, providing medicines for common ailments and maintaining health records for every community member.
Patil started to team up with more ASHA workers, reasoning that widowhood was a serious public health matter and should be treated as such. At first, nobody came to the awareness sessions. They had to squeeze in talking to the widows during routine community visits. Finally, after around six months of this work, with remote counselling done by phone, a few women started showing up to the sessions. “It was so powerful,” Mudshinge says. “It helped me muster the courage to face the stigma.”
There was still a long way to go, however, when it came to acceptance from the community. That’s when Patil came up with a unique idea. She invited all the widows from the nearby villages and asked a local government official to join them for a special event. Patil asked the official to celebrate the widows for their heroism in battling the oppressive widowhood rituals. The official agreed. It was a bold move. News spread in the villages and beyond, and the event was covered by the regional media.
Mudshinge printed the photos and kept them in her wallet. “From then on, whenever someone abused me, I showed them these photos, and it helped me,” she said. She would never have guessed that a photo could change her life. The event expanded into a series, hosted by several villages in Maharashtra. At each event, widows were celebrated and encouraged to break with the rituals and practices that had brought so much suffering into their lives.
Around the same time, social activist Pramod Zinjade started a movement asking village heads in Maharashtra to pass a resolution to ban the widowhood rituals outright. In May last year, Herwad became the first village to do so. The state government asked all villages to follow suit, and reportedly 7,500 villages have passed resolutions seeking to curb the practices. However, there are no legal ramifications if these resolutions are not followed through, so it’s difficult to say how effective they will be.
Just the beginning
Changing local and state policy is important. But the work doesn’t end there. As lawyer and activist Amol Naik says, “Implementation is the key.” Naik has spent over a decade fighting to protect and uphold the rights of women farmers and agricultural labourers, many of whom suffer greatly if they are faced with widowhood. He points out that widows do have legal rights under Indian law – such as the right to inherit their husband’s property – but often feel unable to assert these rights. “Younger widows are ostracised and made to feel that their relatives are doing them a favour by letting them stay [in their own homes]. Eventually, they stop asking.”
Akkatai Teli is an activist who has spent four decades working with widows and bringing the perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence to justice. She says that many widows aren’t aware of their legal rights and there can often be a vested interest in not telling them. “Most of them are denied a share in the property and kicked out of the house because the in-laws fear they will ascertain their rights,” she says. Many of these women end up in shelter homes. The problem is so severe that in 2018, the government built a shelter home in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, that can accommodate 1,000 widows.
Patil, meanwhile, has continued to work on the root cause of widows’ problems. Between 2017 and 2022 she trained a team of 20 women, most of whom are widows themselves, to help combat regressive customs. So far, the network has helped hundreds of widows from over 20 villages in Maharashtra. Her attempts are now being formalised into a full-time support system at the village, district and state levels.
Patil’s goal is not just to help these women heal, but to ensure they can live a life of dignity. This involves practical support; ensuring the widows have the correct paperwork to access government welfare, training them to become self-reliant and helping them start their own businesses. She also helps them access mental health treatment. “Telling their stories can be triggering for the women,” she says, so they have learned to be careful in their work.
But there is another challenge. As an ASHA, Patil isn’t paid for her work with the widows, nor is she trained to provide counselling. “The health department doesn’t even acknowledge our work,” she says. The work with widows is classed as voluntary. She says that ASHAs aren’t paid enough in any case, and could achieve much more with adequate compensation.
While the exact figures vary across states, they are uniformly low. In Maharashtra, ASHAs earn an average of 3,500-5,000 Indian Rupees (£34-50) per month. They are paid per task – for example, for providing antenatal or postnatal care and overseeing a pregnancy in a public hospital, they earn £4.90. “ASHAs are a support system for millions of people,” Patil points out. “If the government starts paying us adequately and on time, many [more] ASHAs can help women recover from their trauma.”
A turning point
Ongoing support is important, as even if the lives of widows improve, they still have to recover from the abuse and ostracisation. When Anjali Pehelwan, 39, lost her husband to Covid, her relatives weren’t concerned about her grief. “All they wanted was to forcefully take away my jewellery and toe rings,” she remembers. Although Pehelwan resisted, a few women pulled off her jewellery, bruising and cutting her. The cuts healed in a week, she says, but it took a year before she recovered from the mental trauma.
Luckily, Pehelwan was able to access support. She was put in touch with Maya Patil, the ASHA worker who had helped Netradipa organise the very first awareness sessions for widows. (Netradipa and Maya share a last name but are not related.) Maya Patil started counselling Pehelwan on the phone and in person. Gradually, Pehelwan started wearing her jewellery again, began to leave the house, and started asking people to treat her as an equal to other women. It wasn’t easy. “The community members were so aghast that they started calling me ill-omened and a witch,” she said.
Then, in April 2022, Maya Patil came up with the idea of celebrating Gudi Padwa (Maharashtra’s new year), considered to be the most auspicious occasion in the Hindu calendar. “Traditionally, while a widow is allowed to celebrate this occasion, they are barred from performing any rituals,” Pehelwan explains. Maya Patil was determined to change this. She called a group of 20 women together, including Pehelwan and another widow. “I started talking about the discriminatory practices and why we should raise our voice,” she says. At first, the other women stepped away from the widows, but Patil wouldn’t give up. She convinced them to celebrate the new year festival together, with Pehelwan taking the lead.
There was a backlash from certain members of the community. People spread a rumour that Pehelwan was celebrating the festival because she had remarried. (Widows in India are allowed to remarry, but in reality they are often ostracised if they do.) A scandal was brewing, but fortunately the local journalists reported the event accurately, confirming that Pehelwan was still single. “That was the best time to shut down all such conspiracy theories,” she recalls, laughing at the memory.
Later, Pehelwan discovered that there were 450 widows and separated women in her village of Arjunwad alone. “We need to stop using the word ‘widow’ and come up with better words,” she says. “‘Widow’ is never a woman’s identity. It’s no fault of hers that her husband has died.” She found that many women wanted to oppose the rituals, but didn’t speak up because of the patriarchal system. “My goal is to help them voice their concerns.”
Pehelwan works long hours as a data entry operator. But although her work is tiring, she spends her evenings taking phone calls from other widows, encouraging them to leave the house and assert their rights. “People think it’s a burden, but it’s not,” she says. “Whenever I see a woman healing, I feel I have given someone a new life. While this can never make up for my loss, I am proud to help bring an end to the trauma of other women.”
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2023 edition. Subscribe here.
