International Widows Day

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for initiating this debate. I thought I would raise two issues with the Minister and make some other points. We have been talking about widows for a long time in this House. Those of us who come from the Indian subcontinent vividly recollect what it means to be a widow and the kind of suffering women have to go through, so this is not a new subject. It is a very painful subject, and we have raised it again and again. I want to ask two questions which have not been asked before.

First, who is a widow? I am told that a widow is somebody whose husband has died. What is a husband? The manner of thinking and talking about marriage and social relations is undergoing fast changes, partly because of the impact of feminism and partly because of radical ideas, so that the old categories of married/not married/widowed/divorced make less and less sense. For example, if two people have been cohabiting and one of them dies, is the cohabitee a widow? In same-sex marriages, if two men are married to each other and one of them dies, is the other man a widow? If he walked into my office and said “Professor, I am a widow”, I would be horrified to hear that. So the first question that this House, with its distinguished concentration of intelligence and wisdom, will want to address is who is a widow and whose future and whose past are we talking about.

My second question is far more important. A widow is a cultural construction. To be a widow in India is a very different experience from being a widow in the United States. As the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, said, what does being a widow in India mean? I speak from experience, because I saw what happened with my grandmother and other widows. You will not wear fancy dress. You will not eat fancy food. You will slowly withdraw from public occasions. You will not allow your shadow to be cast on newly born children or newly married couples. In other words, you lose all your human rights. What do you do? To be a widow means to be not just depersonalised but depersoned. You no longer count as a person. What do we need to do to improve their condition? The suggestion that they should somehow be economically better off or economically empowered simply does not do. The problem is not economic. My grandmother suffered those handicaps, and having a lot of money would not have helped her.

The problem requires a revolutionary change in the culture. It is a cultural problem, not an economic one. It is a cultural problem in the sense that people in the community hardly ever recognise that widowhood is a social condition, not an identity. That is an important difference. Old age is a social condition but if you turn it into a matter of identity, that entails rights and obligations and all sorts of things, as is increasingly happening in the modern world. So when widowhood is turned into a matter of identity, it has to be counted as such. That can be done only at the cultural level, not the economic level.

I end by suggesting that the revolutionary cultural change required to deal with the problems of widows is enormous. In India, which I observe regularly, the problem has been with us for at least 300 years. In the 19th century, one of the greatest reform movements was the remarriage of widows, because widows were not allowed to remarry. Not only that, but a widow was seen a threat because she would seduce your husband or entice him or other members of your family away. What do you do? The widow was not only an ill omen but a threat.

In those kinds of situation, how do social reformers fight those ugly practices and beliefs? That is precisely the point—cultural change requires fighting the beliefs and practices through which people define themselves. I suggest that economic power is useful but not enough.