Photo 1 Caption: Anjali Kumari Khang, a 12-year-old girl living in the Saptari district of Nepal. “I am not happy. I do not want to get married. I hope my husband gets a job in a foreign city. Then, I can come back to my mother’s home and stay for as long as I want to.”
By Swathi Vadlamudi – HYDERABAD – June 24, 2017
Alcohol, Accidents Claim Lives of Many Young Men
The link between child marriage and early widowhood could never be starker. Almost all the women who attended a meeting at the International Widows Day on Friday at L.B. Stadium, were victims of child marriage and eventually loss of partner.
Dubarla Yadamma, who was from Katryal village of Wardhannapet mandal in Warangal district, lost her husband to an accident 11 years ago, at the age of 18. She had already been married for six years and was pregnant with a boy after birth of two girls.
“My in-laws brought pressure on me to leave home without my girls and get the foetus aborted. They even offered Rs. 2 lakh, but I refused and stay put in the house. Even now, my children and I have to face a lot of harassment and discrimination,” Yadamma said.
From her village with over 200 families, there are 50 women who lost their husbands at very young age. Most of the men in their productive years succumbed to alcoholism and accidents.
Komuramma alias Lusamma, also from Wardhannapet mandal, lost her husband 10 years ago to liver cirrhosis. She was married at 15 and had five children before her husband died.
“He was employed by the village panchayat for sewer cleaning. After each day’s work, he would drink or he couldn’t sleep,” she recalled. She works as farmhand now.
An alcoholic husband was the reason for early widowhood of Chaganti Sammakka too from Thimmapur village of Warangal. Her husband, who was a farmhand was heavily into drinking and left her with two sons, one mentally unsound.
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Though cheap liquor has been controlled after the Telangana Government cracked the whip against it, that has resulted only in increased sales of ‘brand’ liquor, the women say. |
The meeting had widows mostly from Warangal and Mahbubabad districts, as the organisation ‘Bala Vikasa’ which organised the event is active there.
The women are also subjected to severe discrimination and abuse, which is so internalised by them that they are unmoved by it.
“Nobody invites us to any auspicious occasion. I cannot attend the functions of my own children,” says Yadamma, with a tinge of sadness, while B. Somakka from Brahmanakothapalli village of Mahbubabad district does not see why the custom should be opposed. She even calls herself a ‘munda’ which is an abusive word in Telugu for widow.
“Why would people invite us to weddings? We are widows!” she exclaims.
“We have to face abuse often in our daily lives. We have learnt to ignore, or else we cannot live,” says Sumalatha, another young widow.
The meeting has demanded a corporation for widows, reservations in education and jobs for children of single mothers and a law against discrimination and abuse.
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“A child widow’s job is to repent and atone. They live a life virtually devoid of pleasure and must wear no other color but white. They must eschew jewelry, meat, fish, and social gatherings, even with family. Temples are off limits and they are not allowed to remarry. They must not leave the house or look men in the eye, as it is said that a widows gaze will bring bad luck,” Basu added.
Kaelyn Forde – October 2, 2015
When photographer Poulomi Basu turned 18, she said her mother begged her to run away from home and make a life for herself in a faraway city, so that she would not face “the same fate.”
Both Basu’s mother and grandmother had been married and widowed young; in her native India, that meant they could wear only white and were forced to atone for the rest of their lives.
“Widows are regarded as bad omens — as witches, as ‘man-eaters.’ They bring bad luck. They are paying for sins committed in a past life. The Hindu scripture, the Vedas, is clear on this point,” Basu told Refinery29.
“As long as I can remember, my grandmother only wore white saris, even until her deathbed. My grandmother became a widow when she was in her late 20s and there was not single day since my grandfather’s death that she wore colorful clothes…she also followed several rituals in penance,” Basu said.
“When I was 17, I lost my father. It was my mother’s turn to follow the rituals and wear white. I resisted the rules, for I did not want my mother to wear white and pay for sins that she never committed in the first place! I was enraged. I made sure she never followed them to the core. However, she never wears red, another forbidden color for widows,” she added.
It was only after becoming a photojournalist and traveling to Nepal that Basu would meet other widows resigned to the same fate. But these widows were children.
“They are children who have been stripped of their childhood and choices,” Basu said. “The women are so young when they are married, they have no idea what lies in store. One woman we spoke to was looking forward to the music and dancing of her wedding, but had no idea what would come after, no idea what it meant to be a ‘wife,’ let alone a ‘wife’ in such a patriarchal setup.”
Worldwide, more than 700 million women alive today were married before the age of 18; of those, one in three were married before the age of 15, according to UNICEF. Often, girls are forced to marry men much older than they are and must leave school. You can read more about the plight of child brides here, as well as the story of one girl who fought to get divorced at age 14 so she could continue to pursue her education.
“[Child widows] are the legacy of child marriage, something we know less about. That is a particularly severe injustice. In this case, someone is being robbed of their childhood and their life thereafter. It is a vicious cycle with the children married to older men that leads to a life of stigma when that husband dies,” Basu said.
“A child widow’s job is to repent and atone. They live a life virtually devoid of pleasure and must wear no other color but white. They must eschew jewelry, meat, fish, and social gatherings, even with family. Temples are off limits and they are not allowed to remarry. They must not leave the house or look men in the eye, as it is said that a widows gaze will bring bad luck,” Basu added.
Since 2013, Basu has captured and conveyed the lives of these child widows as part of her project, A Ritual of Exile. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times and NPR, among many others, and she has also worked for human rights groups, such as UNESCO, Save the Children, WaterAid, and Crisis Action. She spoke to Refinery29 while on assignment in China.
Child marriage is rampant in many partst of Nepal. Girls are seen as a burden and an additional mouth to feed. Villagers often marry off their girls before their menstruation starts — it is believed that if they do so, the immediate family will go to heaven.
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