Widows for sale

Originally published in Himal Southasian, July '09

What is traditionally the country’s most suppressed and passive community has become a loud member of Nepal’s dissenting chorus. Hundreds of widows rallied in Pokhara on July 16 to protest a cash incentive – announced in the government’s annual budget earlier that week – of 50,000 rupees for men who chose to marry widows. Widows, quite literally, are being put up for sale.

But Pokhara is merely the epicenter of an anger felt throughout Nepal. Widows in 52 out of Nepal's 75 districts have sent petitions to their local administrations. Lily Thapa, who founded the Women for Human Rights (WHR) group 15 years ago after her husband died in the Gulf War, spelt out the objection in moral terms: ‘The offer turns widows into commodities and paves the way for their further exploitation [most notably, domestic violence].’ WHR has documented dozens of cases of women, widowed during the 10-year Maoist insurgency, being duped into second marriages for their compensation money – a trend that can only increase with the new scheme.

Ten years of civil war has widowed hundreds of women across the county – not to mention the many more children who now depend on them alone. The announcement in the budget is a corner stone of the nascent government’s postwar reconstruction program; in this light, it looks all too much like deliberate avoidance of a comprehensive compensation scheme for families in need. Crude match-making is a penny-pinching ‘solution’ to the liability of the fatherless family. Dama Sharma, a Maoist MP whose husband was a victim of the insurgency – and whose party opposes the offer – called for the state to provide vocational training and jobs, to allow widows some measure of independence.

If the reward-scheme stays in place, a new breed of bounty hunter is set to emerge among the Nepali manhood – the widow catcher, scanning the streets for white saris. But said bounty hunter would have to remain aloof from the stigma attached to widows in Hindu communities throughout Southasia. Sati is only a freak phenomenon these days, but widows are often quite literally outcastes in their own villages – in some cases their own families. Achieving widowhood means an immediate loss of status; they are no longer allowed to take part in religious ceremonies, and are forbidden from wearing auspicious red clothing or jewelry – instead, they must wear only white. A widow in your home is bad omen – hence the maltreatment they often receive by their own families.

Ostracism is considered worse in India than in Nepal, although – perhaps as a consequence – it is entrenched in the Nepali Tarai that borders India. Yet Nepal has much to learn from India in the rehabilitation of widows into mainstream society. Indian state governments have special schemes for assisting widows, such as free rations of rice and free use of public transport. But the boundaries they face are largely found within the communities themselves; and this flashpoint is merely a chapter of a protracted story of emancipation among Southasia’s Hindu widows.