Widowhood revisited: Nature of landholding and women’s work in colonial agrarian Bengal

Abstract

Despite major economic and political changes in the last two centuries, the incidence of underage marriage of girls as well as their widowhood is much higher in West Bengal than in any other parts of India. The incidence of widowhood was very high in Bengal among the major colonial provinces in the first half of the twentieth century. Many historians argue that marriage practices of the higher castes gradually percolated downwards, and many intermediary cultivating castes as well as lower castes started following the norms of child marriage and ban on widow remarriage as a means of attaining social respectability during the closing decades of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century. This article tries to explore whether the very high incidence of widowhood in colonial Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century could also have been linked to the very nature of women’s labour force participation which in turn was largely determined by the nature of the agrarian economy.