Paper short abstract:

The long-held association between Brahmanical Hindu widowhood and the imagery and metaphor of death has shaped a prevailing sentiment that the experience of Hindu widowhood is a negation of subjectivity. I propose to study the forms of subjectivity that death might make possible.

Paper long abstract:

This talk comes from a dissertation proposal for fieldwork among Hindu widows in Vrindavan, a pilgrimage city in Uttar Pradesh, to be completed from August 2022 to August 2023. Hindu Widowhood in India has been portrayed as a simultaneous vulnerability and rigidity in one’s relationships with the matrices of religious obligations, state apparatuses, family, caste, and gender. It is often understood as a form of death. Because scholars have privileged marriage in South Asia as a site through which women gain social recognition as wives and mothers, the death of a husband—especially in the absence of children—has been understood as the undoing of a woman’s very existence. Taking inspiration from Saba Mahmood's (2012) treatment of norms as a lived experience, I have proposed to ask how Hindu widows live beyond the norm of conjugality, while always in relation to it in Vrindavan, the "city of widows."