186 Part III: South Asia
fall in love after the wedding, not before. The wedding rites initiate her suhag,
the auspicious state of a woman with a living husband, no longer a virgin, not
yet a widow. It connotes full adult sexuality, all the beauty and glamour of a
woman whose arms and ankles jingle with bangles, whose forehead is red with
auspicious sindur in the part of her hair, whose body is clothed in colorful saris,
whose womb is productive with life (Raheja and Gold 1994).
As a young bride in her husband’s household, her delight in suhag is tem-
pered by the necessity of submitting to the authority of all women senior to her,
which includes first, her husband’s mother, and then all the wives of her hus-
band’s elder brothers. These large extended households are built around a core
of fathers and sons; daughters marry out to other villages, and wives marry in
from outside. These can be warm and happy family communities with lots
going on all the time and never a shortage of companionship, but they also
have their built-in tensions, which are best handled by careful lines of authority
and codes of conduct to protect the vulnerable. The young bride is vulnerable
to possible sexual predation by older men of the family, and so avoidance pat-
terns require her to keep her head completely veiled in their presence and to
stay away from them if at all possible. The men will cough politely as they enter
a room to give her an opportunity to slip out; they will convey messages to her
through a child.
A woman is considered blessed if she dies before her husband. But if she
becomes a widow, parts of the funeral rites of her husband will include the
beginning of her widowhood. Such rites frequently include breaking her ban-
gles, washing the red powder out of the part in her hair, and robing her in a
white sari. The more extreme forms of ascetic widowhood have been modified
in recent years, but in many parts of India one still meets young widows wear-
ing the white sari and avoiding all auspicious occasions such as weddings.Two Social Problems
Out of these patterns of marriage and the woman’s life cycle have emerged
extremes that are a challenge to Indian society today.
Dowry Deaths. In the last few decades as consumerism has grown,
Indian society has had to struggle with a new form of greed made possible by
the old tradition of dowry. A young bride comes into her new family as a “Lak-
shmi,” a goddess of wealth, bringing money and consumer goods. The groom’s
family may continue to make demands on her father long after the marriage, a
new form of extortion with the bride held hostage. When his resources run out,
a “kitchen accident” may occur in which she burns to death in a kerosene fire.
Most major Indian cities have several such “accidents” every week, referred to
as “dowry deaths,” which are rarely successfully prosecuted. The husband then
is free to marry again and gets a new dowry (see box 5.8).
Sati (Suttee). Widows have sometimes chosen to follow their husbands
in death rather than to live for many years as a widow, an act that has Hindu