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Business Standard
11-07-2025
- General
- Business Standard
Widows: Schipper's eight chapters offer deep insight into grieving, rights
Widows: A Global History by Mineke Schipper Published by Speaking Tiger 272 pages ₹499 The Padma Bhushan awardee and activist Dr V Mohini Giri once remarked that 'widowhood is a state of social death', an observation that succinctly summarises the realities facing widows, including my mother, the world over. Why oppressive measures against widows are followed so reverentially is something that the Emeritus Professor of Intercultural Literary Studies, University of Leiden, Mineke Schipper, dissects in Widows: A Global History. The eight chapters of Schipper's magisterial work offers a deep understanding into such issues as the kind of grieving is considered acceptable for a widow, what clothes are appropriate, to what extent she must desexualise herself, and if she can claim any right on the property of her deceased partner. The author's work in the domain of oral history also informs Widows. In fact, the idea came to her while working on a previous volume titled Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet: Women in Proverbs from Around the World. At the time, Schipper reflected, which she recollects in the Acknowledgments section: 'A widow was associated with death — and a widower was not. There must be more to widowhood, and I promised myself to get back to it later.' All thanks to her for keeping the promise. The sheer scale of the stories, the range of historical evidence, and the way Schipper articulates the injustices that widows endure make it a worthy successor to the seminal work on widows by Margaret Owen's A World of Widows (1996), chiefly covering 'poorer communities' in Africa and Asia. Schipper's work ties well the customary idioms of widowhood with the neopatriarchal othering they face. Sample this Chechen saying: 'Death of your wife, replacement in bed.' Or this one, which is popular in Europe: 'Grief for a dead wife lasts to the door.' Schipper notes the role language contributes towards creating the image of a widow. The word vidhua in Sanskrit 'means destitute, and the Latin viduata (made destitute, emptied) is the root of the word for [a] widow in many European languages,' she writes. The image is strongly adhered to by society if a widow happens to be in a patrilocal setup, which 'creates greater inequality between marital partners'. Schipper also highlights 'traditions [that] force widows to live in isolation for several months', underlining how compulsory isolation in some societies can 'take on more extreme forms' – such as in India because of the caste system. In the chapter titled 'Mourning,' Schipper weaves in famous reflections on grief such as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). Didion's memoir of her husband John Gregory Dunne's death is popular because of the radical way in which she processes grief. Juxtapose this with the complete lack of agency for traditional widows in expressing their loss. Examples include the 'Rudaali' tradition in many parts of India, and the title of 'head mourner' a widow earns in Trobriand Islands. A widow's grief was closely tied to what ornaments they'd wear. In the book, there's a picture of a Dayak widow in mourning, captured in 1900 in Indonesia. Schipper writes, 'The more rings worn, the heavier the burden, and as a result the greater your prestige.' Then, there was also a practice in the Andaman Islands of today's India to carry the remains of the deceased, say, a skull, as a photograph by SL Hamilton reveals. Suicide and sati practice are discussed in 'Accompanying Your Husband in Death'. In the chapter titled 'Sex', Schipper notes how South Asia leads in producing the number of child brides (and widows), and in 'Suspect of Witchcraft', she articulates the kind of accusations a widow must brave. 'The most problematic obstacle for the rights of widows in less-well-off regions is the unfortunate combination of illiteracy, fear of witchcraft and covetous in-laws,' she writes. Some revered texts make things worse: Manusmriti, for example. But the way a widow's sexual desire is kept in check is a deeply problematic practice that's most strictly observed to date even in many educated households. For example, in some societies, to maintain the 'bloodline', a widow may be married to her brother-in-law. In others, 'ritual sex' is mandatory. Shockingly, no one labels it for what it is: rape. Schipper observes that things are changing, but slowly. Some support systems are pushing back against traditions, for example, the Widows Alliance Network (WANE) in Ghana or the Barefoot College in Tilonia, Ajmer where widows from Africa come to upskill themselves. The iconic photograph of widows in Vrindavan celebrating Diwali is a case in point, too. But one must be cautious about rejoicing in these optics, as several detailed interviews from this book reveal. Coupled with accessible storytelling, academic findings and photographic evidence of how widows across centuries and geographies have lived — and continue to do so today — Widows makes for an important read as a reflection of the state of women's rights in 21st century India.
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Business Standard
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Standard
Learning about the Other: The Cave of Echoes swims with own pair of fins
The book operates much like a magic mirror where the glass reflects, not the object, but the viewer's gaze on the object Arundhuti Dasgupta Listen to This Article The Cave of Echoes: Stories about Gods, Animals and Other Strangers Published by Speaking Tiger 225 pages ₹599 The impulse to tell a good story is universal and eternal. Nomadic hordes, early settlers, kings, and commoners — everyone has always loved a good yarn. Myths and folktales that survive to this day were the elixir the ancient world sipped. These stories that the ancients once told still burn bright, holding large crowds in thrall, churning up new ideas, and driving new discoveries about early human existence. How does one explain their timeless power? Several writers have written eloquently on the
The Wire
12-06-2025
- Politics
- The Wire
M.C. Davar's Behind-the-Scenes Role in Trying to Stop Partition
Excerpted with permission from He Almost Prevented Partition: The Life and Times of M.C. Davar (Speaking Tiger). Why the Shimla Conference failed is recorded by [then Viceroy Lord] Wavell: 'He (Jinnah ) refused even to discuss names unless he could be given the absolute right to select all Muslims and some guarantee that any decisions which the Muslims opposed in Council could only be passed by a two-thirds majority – in fact a communal veto. I said these conditions were entirely unacceptable.' Praveen Davar He Almost Prevented Partition: The Life and Times of M.C. Davar Speaking Tiger, 2025 Dr [M.C.] Davar, who was so passionately devoted to the prevention of Partition, made sure that he was present in Shimla for the entire duration of the Conference which lasted for almost 15 days in June-July 1945. While he was there, staying at the house of Sanjiva Roy, Chairman of the Federal Public Service Commission, one day at 11 PM, he got a telephone call from Mrs Rajen Nehru asking him to reach the Grand Hotel. When Dr Davar reached within less than twenty minutes, he found her hotel room packed: it was full of a dozen frontline leaders of the Muslim League – all members of the League Working Committee. They included Khaliq-ur-Rahman, Mohd. Ismail and Abdul Majid Sindhi. Rajen Nehru wanted Davar to convey to Pt Nehru that these Muslim League members were prepared to resign from the working committee of their party if Jinnah remains adamant on his condition of having only Muslims from the League. On being asked by Davar why she couldn't speak to Jawaharlal herself being a close relative, Rajen replied that 'your work in this field is well known and you will be able to convince Panditji.' So under tremendous pressure from Rajen Nehru, Davar after speaking to the League leaders left for Armsdale, where Nehru was staying. When he reached there at almost twenty minutes past midnight, he found Dharam Yash Dev, a local personal assistant of Nehru's, waiting for Panditji to return from dinner at Mashobra from where he was, as per his habit, walking back. It was thirty minutes past midnight when Panditji reached, he asked Dharam the purpose of being awake so late. Dharam replied pointing towards Davar that 'Doctor Sahib's business seems to be more important.' Panditji then said: 'Davar, come in' while entering the house. But he could not find the switch to put on the light. Then Dharam Yash Dev came to his rescue and found the switch at the bottom of a wall while Nehru and Davar were trying to locate the switch on the middle of the wall. Davar narrates: 'Now Panditji said, 'sit down Davar.' We sat down on the sofa, and he asked what brought me here to which I replied 12 League members are at Grand Hotel and want to meet you… 'What for do they want to meet me? ' asked Panditji. I said: 'Jinnah is pressing for 5 seats as Liaqat Ali got in writing from Bhulabhai Desai that League will get 5, Congress 5 and others 3. Now Maulana Azad is demanding one seat for Nationalist Muslims as also the Unionist Party of Khizar Hayat Khan. So Jinnah is adamant…he wants all five Muslim seats…that is why this Conference seems to fail and that is why they want to meet you.' Then Panditji asked why should they not meet Maulana? (Davar narrated to Panditji details of his meeting with Azad five years ago at Kolkata wherein Maulana after great persuasion had agreed to bless his efforts for Congress-League unity but now seemed to be backing out.) But Panditji, though partially convinced, kept insisting that they must Maulana and that 'I will not interfere in Maulana's work.' (Despite Davar telling Nehru that Muslims of India had more faith in him than any leader, and these 12 League leaders were ready to ditch Jinnah provided he 'holds their hand ', Nehru refused to listen). [Davar says,] 'When I told him that I was the original author of the Liaqat-Desai formula, which actually is Davar -Sultan formula, Panditji remarked: 'Oh, then you are the person who has put us in trouble.' After I left I rang up Dharam Yash as I had left my umbrella there. Dharam told me Panditji had guessed it was your umbrella which is lying safely, but your discussion with him created a deep impression on him, and he kept asking me about you, though he appeared to know about your homoeopathic and revolutionary background.' Deeply disappointed, Davar left Simla in the morning, but before doing so dropped a line at Wavell's house telling the Viceroy about his meeting with Pt Nehru who did not agree to his suggestion of meeting the Muslim League members. He therefore concluded that the Simla Conference would fail. That it failed was not only due to Jinnah's intransigence, equally it was because of Wavell's lack of firmness. HV Hodson, who was the Reforms Commissioner in 1941-42, wrote in his memoirs, The Great Divide : 'Lord Wavell had in effect capitulated to Jinnah… Mr Jinnah's control of the Muslim League was at that time far from complete. The Unionist Party was still strong, and Mr Liaqat Ali Khan favoured a settlement. There were still many uncommitted Muslims in the country. It is arguable that if the Viceroy had been as adamant as Mr Jinnah, the latter would have been obliged to give in; that the destruction of the Unionist Party, which paved the way for partition of Punjab,would have averted.' But probably Wavell also could not forget so soon that it was the Congress which had challenged the Empire with the Quit India Movement during the period when he, as the Commander-in-Chief himself, had to bear the brunt, and hence he let Jinnah sabotage the Conference which would also please Churchill who was, naturally, in sympathy towards the 'enemy's enemy'. But within two weeks, Churchill's Conservative Party lost elections, displaying the maturity of the British electorate that victory in war was no passport to better governance in peace times. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Hindustan Times
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Review: The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap by Adil Jussawalla
Given its geohistory, Mumbai has attracted the attention of an outrageously large number of chroniclers. Even someone who has never been to the much-mythologised city can experience it through the art it has inspired. Though Mumbaikars may judge this as an inauthentic way of experiencing their metropolis, I too have learnt a lot about the place through its poetry — those ambivalent delights that one turns to, usually in the event of adversity. 85-year-old Adil Jussawalla is one of Mumbai's, or Bombay's, if you will, best-known poets. Wicked, witty, and wondrous, he writes with an ease that signals an internalisation of the city and its people in all their complexity. Much has been written about his journey, which is therefore no longer intriguing. What is definitely intriguing is this Speaking Tiger volume featuring 35 of the poet's prose pieces written between 1980 and 2002. The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap: Writings from Bombay convinces the reader that when poets turn to prose, each word illuminates as nothing is rendered uncalibrated. In his introduction, An Enduring Unease: Adil Jussawalla in the City, poet, novelist and translator Jerry Pinto writes, 'I remember the exhilaration of seeing a Devnagari letter in an English book and thinking, 'Is this allowed?' But then Adil wasn't very interested in what was allowed and what wasn't. He was interested in words, he was interested in where he was, he was interested because that was another habit of mind: the belief that everyone mattered, and hierarchies were there only to be challenged.' This is evident in the first piece, The Bombay Within, which begins with a bitter truth: 'The waiters of the Bombay Gymkhana remain invisible.' Jussawalla follows this up with: 'So, when you think of it, does most of the city, most of the time. Do we ever look at its details?' Notorious for noticing things, the fine print interests him the most. How the protagonists of this piece — the historian Sharada Dwivedi, poet Rahul Mehrotra, and Jussawalla himself — exit the club is quite telling. The reader is compelled to also appreciate the writer's sense of foreseeability. The titular piece exemplifies this, though many may claim that it developed solely out of a mix of journalistic and poetic impulses. In 1962, at an auction of a 'collection of jewellery and antiques', his friend, Sunil, gifted the poet a late 19th-century article, a 'diamond-encrusted rat trap' which contained a 'tightly-rolled scroll'. Jussawalla wondered if this was Sunil's way of jokingly 'calling [him] a rat'. But when he opened the scroll, there was a 'repetition of certain forms, the gaps between each set of designs clearly indicated'; it was some sort of encryption. He sent it to 'Father Schiller of Ootacamund, an expert on Hindu family codes' and received the decoded text 20 years later, which is reproduced in full in this 1984 piece. The story reveals much: the cyclical nature of karma, an obsession with the foreign and the forbidden, a personal account of the Bombay plague of the 1890s, and the tangential story of Waldemar Haffkine, who was brought to India by the Governor of Bombay to create a vaccine for the epidemic. Interestingly, it was the same institute where 'the plague used to kill [Amarendra Chandra Pandey] had come from'. The concluding paragraph signals that Jussawalla reads the city better than most: 'It's a hot month and my wife and daughter have left the city. Looking at its lights from my balcony, I think a lot of the diamond-encrusted rat trap.' In O City, City from 1993, he writes that Bombay, like every megalopolis, is cruel. But cruelties and tragedies play out differently in life and in the arts. Of the latter he states sombrely, 'We may or may not be moved by what we see.' There are moments of hilarity too. In Want to Get Away? Let Others Do It for You (1997), he writes, 'I've come to believe that the best way of taking a holiday is to stay put; let others do the getting away for you. It can be wonderfully relaxing.' Heeling Process, another example of a succinct piece with a clickbaity title, ruminates on how the individual falls apart when their shoes fall apart. 'That's why I've written several poems on shoes,' Jussawalla concludes. In A Change of Light, he writes that he seems 'to attract a lot of attention through no fault of [his]', leaving readers wondering if there's a subtext, something more to the piece than meets the eye. The collection also includes Baby Talk, in which Mulk Raj Anand visits Jussawalla. Mostly, though, these articles are about the poet himself, the lapsed architect, who imagines the city by the sea one word at a time. The period in which these were written witnessed the renaming of Bombay to Mumbai (1995). Somehow, the difference in what Jussawalla noted about the city and its people is telling of the transformation of the place and of himself too. The Diamond-Encrusted Rat Trap: Writings from Bombay is a pleasant read and, as Pinto notes, these pieces are 'a way of giving witness to the bigness and the strangeness of the city.' Adil Jussawalla, he writes, 'does not provide any potted histories; those are for others to write and to believe in. His city is built of chance encounters, of laughing liftmen, of departed friends and other ghosts.' Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
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Business Standard
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Standard
A Stranger in Three Worlds: Tracing Aubrey Menen's search for identity
With biting wit, Menen maps the universality of exclusion Amritesh Mukherjee Listen to This Article A Stranger in Three Worlds: The Memoirs of Aubrey Menen Published by Speaking Tiger 280 pages ₹499 The soul of humanity lies in contradictions. We are as charged with kindness as beset with cruelty, as quick to judge as yearning to be heard, and as mindless in existence as reflective in every moment. Aubrey Menen, the British writer whose satirical retelling of the Ramayana, Rama Retold was banned in India in 1955, was a man who knew how to capture those contradictions. It feels fitting, then, that his two autobiographies, republished recently, have polar perspectives on identity and nationality. Or
