Let us not appropriate the grief of the women of Pahalgam

Indian Express

a day ago

Is there a drone that takes top-angle shots of the emotional pathways of the crowd below? If so, it would have mapped the thick relationships of love and belongingness in the family groups clustered at the Baisaran meadow in Pahalgam at 1.45 pm on April 22. It would have generated digital evidence of the baffling paradox of the Indian middle class: Its soaring optimism among almost daily setbacks.
Honeymooners, mid-life couples on a family holiday, teenagers, pilgrims who took a detour to mini-Switzerland after the religious trek to the Vaishno Devi shrine and elderly people came face to face with the slaughter of 26 men by four or five Pakistan-radicalised terrorists. The 26 who fell to the barbarians' bullets were deeply embedded in their families. The honeymooners, some married for only six days, were just beginning to hum the music that would hold their lives together, but the automatic weapons of the terrorists silenced the song in their heart forever.
Today, 26 families are living with the power of the memory of somebody who is not here and never will be. There's no set time for grieving an unexpected and violent death. Grief swamps you in tidal waves, and then it recedes a bit, loitering like an enemy helicopter, waiting to scoop you into its inky darkness in your loneliest moments. Experts say that an unexpected, violent death sends the mourner into shock, and that it might take weeks, even months, before a mourner can 'feel' again, when the brain begins to function at an intellectual level.
Six weeks into their terrible loss, the 26 families are most likely processing the searing reality of their altered life and beginning to redefine their identity in the absence of their family members. An event of this magnitude is like finding yourself alive after an epic landslide. It is precisely at this time, when the women, brutalised by the Baisaran tragedy, might be returning to 'life', that the country's leaders, politicians, civil society activists and journalists are referring to them as the 'widows of Pahalgam'. By identifying them by this collective label, as the inheritors of loss — to rephrase Kiran Desai — we are sending a coarse message that these women have lost social status, acquired a lifelong stigma, assumed a cloak of vulnerability, and invited public scrutiny, judgement and discrimination for the rest of their lives — the young and old women alike.
BJP MP Ram Chander Jangra has already accused the wives of 'not having the passion, zeal, heart to fight the terrorists to save their husbands. That's why they folded their hands instead of fighting, and letting their husbands become victims of the terrorists' bullets'. He wants to reignite the spirit of bravery of Rani Ahilyabai Holkar. Ironically, this warrior queen as well as the intrepid Rani Jhansi Bai had helmed their armies and attacked their enemies after the deaths of their husbands had wiped off their sindoor.
In our society, where marital status is a significant social marker, labelling the women victims of Pahalgam 'widows' defines them by their loss rather than their potential resilience and ability to rebuild their families. Several of the women survivors who were 'homemakers', invested in familial relationships, traditionally dependent on their husbands for the family's authority, will now face loss of purpose and social role, unmoored from the tight social embrace that held them together as members of a community. They will face a lack of economic buoyancy, and challenges of inheritance rights. Their children will look up to their mother to navigate the trauma of their father's sudden absence, even as their mother's 'widow' status diminishes her agency. The women are still being pressed into a role of mourning and dependency, as befits their sindoor-less status.
As an angry nation, we are being exhorted to focus on the Pahalgam women victim's loss of vermilion in the parting of their hair, the fading of the sindoor that marks the end of their conjugal status. But why have we chosen the loss of sindoor as the symbol of the women's life ahead? Have we questioned the appropriation of the sindoor — the most tender and intimate moment when a groom adorns his bride's hair with a sprinkling of the sindoor, as a mystical covenant between two persons to live together — to be used as a symbol of muscular martial outrage, where patriotism will be inscribed in a hair-parting? 'Operation Veer Bharat' repulsed the enemy, not the vermilion.
Have our societal norms advanced or retreated? Bapsi Sidhwa's Water, set in colonial India, followed an eight-year old 'child widow', Chuyiya, who is banished to an ascetic life of isolation and shaved heads in a widows' ashram, to atone for her sins that brought about her husband's death, but she rebels against this life of guilt and forced deprivation. Mahashweta Devi, Amrita Pritam and several other writers understood the sub-humanness of 'widowhood' and the readers of that time greeted their inspiring stories with thoughtful acceptance.
So why are we promoting regressive thinking by referring to these 26 women, who lost their husbands so cruelly at the hands of Pakistan-trained terrorists, using a vocabulary that reminds them constantly of their sindoor-less status? These women are now gathering the strength to live courageous lives, their bonds of love with their absent husbands tethering them strongly to the tough terrain of the life ahead. These are the precious women of Pahalgam.
The writer is a senior journalist