Author: Krishna Rajvir
Publisher: Harman Publishing House
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 263
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8186622365
Description
This book weaves together the story of several generations. The women speak of passion, intrigues, neglect and the naked birth-the revelation of what it means to be a woman in India from 1857 to 1965.
The Zamindar’s Bahu is the story of women who were neither famous nor exemplary in any field or endeavour. They were, by modern standards, perfectly ordinary women, housewives as they would be called today. At a time when the Imperial Sun was at its zenith, they were the wives of feudal lords. Historical decline in the status of women is popularly believed to have started in the sixteenth century coinciding with the consolidation of Mughal rule in India. The Mughals brought Islam to India and with it certain regressive attitudes towards women, that helped spread the already existing practices of female infanticide, child marriage, purdah and sati.
It was small wonder, then, that women, especially of the upper castes in the feudal system, suffered from the excesses of seclusion, male domination and superiority and the attendant male vices of drinking, gambling and womanizing. The women of rich feudal houses were unseen, uneducated, isolated often trapped in polygamous marriages who died woefully young without getting proper sanitary and medical treatment.
This merciless oppression of woman developed with the idea of preserving rigid caste distinctions. Thus, Manu’s code of law, which first set down the rules of caste in India in effect also cast the death knell for an independent existence for women in stating. From the cradle to the grave woman is dependent on a male: in childhood on her father, in youth on her husband, in old age on her son. This law naturally enough suited men, though resulted in the steady decline in this status of women in India.
Contents
Preface
Beginning -The untold Story
Childhood at Bharawati
Grand Parents - Rajas of Roopdhani
Visit to Roopdhani
Marriage
Gauna- Zamindar’s Bahu
The Other Woman
Abolition of Zamindari
My Son -Yadvir
The Last Wait