Hindu Widows in Britain: Continuity and Change

Abstract

Widowhood marks a most important change in gender relations in all human societies. The aim of this chapter is to examine how becoming a widow affects lives of Hindu women in the UK. This is based on anthropological fieldwork that I carried out in Westmouth (a pseudonym), over a period of many years in the late 1980s and early 1990s.¹ During this time I developed a close contact with the local Hindu community and eventually interviewed 12 widows in depth in their own homes. The lives of these widows show that traditional Hindu values continue to influence their self-consciousness as well as communal attitudes to them. The effects of change on widows as a result of Western influences and migration to Britain can best be understood against the background of the traditional Hindu views of marriage and widowhood, which is explored briefly. The experiences of individual women are then discussed, and the changes are analysed in the final section of this chapter. This analysis shows that traditional norms of widowhood among the Hindus are inextricably bound together with processes of social change.