The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hindusim vol 2

Widows
Women carry water from the lake in a wedding procession in the town of Udaipur.
772
differing placement of explanatory
notes on the Vedic mantras and their significance.
The “White” Yajur Veda gathers
these notes into an appendix known as a
Brahmana—namely, the Shatapatha
Brahmana, which gives its name to
the second major stratum of Vedic texts.
In contrast, the four recensions of the
Black Yajur Veda include these notes in the
text itself.
Widows
Given the traditional assumption that a
Hindu woman’s central role is as a wife
and mother, becoming a widow is
deemed the worst fate that can befall a
woman and is seen as the karmic
fruition of some ghastly former deed.
Because the underlying assumption of
the marriage ceremony is that the
bride’s identity becomes assimilated to
the groom’s, a woman without a
husband was seen as having lost her
identity. Furthermore, because she had
already taken on her dead husband’s
identity, remarriage was not an option
for her. Immediately after her husband’s
death a woman was supposed to remove
all the symbols of a married woman—
rubbing the red vermilion from the part
in her hair, breaking her glass bangles,
and in southern India, cutting the
thread on her mangal sutra. For the rest
of her life, she was forbidden to wear
jewelry, colored clothing, or other bodily
adornments, was supposed to keep her
hair cropped short, and was supposed
to devote herself to religious acts for the
benefit of her dead husband. Because
she had been widowed, she was also
considered an unlucky and inauspicious
person, banned from any and all auspicious
events, living out her life doing the
drudge work in the household. In certain
parts of India, it was common practice
to burn a widow on her husband’s
funeral pyre, a rite known as sati,
although there were many other regions
in which this practice was unheard of.
In real life, there was considerable
variation on this grim picture. The most
significant factors were a woman’s age at
the time she was widowed, whether she
had children, and the social status of her
husband’s family. A woman widowed in
old age would likely continue as matriarch
of the family, a young widow with