I have seen the amazing scenes of Benares when everybody goes there to cleanse themselves in the Ganges...alas, only in films. Amazing stuff. I have been thinking of the Raj while working on the book. Given that the East India Company was just that, methinks that their taking over of Bengal could be seen as the biggest corporate takeovers of all time? "The narrative of an Empire’s rise and progress usually tells how the brook became a river and the river became a sea. But the history of British India is peculiar and incongruous. It began without a strip of territory. A warehouse was expanded into a province; a province into an Empire" Philip Anderson

And slowly in the 21st century the Corporate replaced the State !

Definitely, Sunny!! :)) Love the irony in the fact that an Indian has bought the EIC...karma...what goes around, comes around. :))

This time around the colonialists have no face , they are behind layers of shell-companies , the fronts are just puppets . They are much smarter this time around -rainbow class so no race feels left out ! And they will have us believe we are the freest society on earth ever . Freedom is the new burden.

looks like Devki nandan haveli in Ramapura ,Varanasi.

Oh, we have them here too, Sunny!! One of my relatives would only buy a particular product because it was branded to look as though it were a local product. It was actually produced by the Brits. :-/

Oh dear, those poor girls. :-/

@ Amita what I have seen in my years of working in rural North India that lower castes - Artisans and Dalits have much less stigma of widowhood . They need as many working hands as possible , and there always has been widow remarriage . It is among Brahmins, Banias and Rajputs , that widowhood is very stringently managed.

Sunny : That was a reassuring perspective.

@Sunny :I agree stigmatising women for widowhood is an upper caste scourge absolutely.Lower caste women could always re-marry and were free from observing the strict tenets of widow-hood.They were free from 'bondages' of sexual morality too. There was a reason why we have evolved like that.Although that has now outlived it's relevance.Among Rajputs most often the husbands died in their youth in battle-grounds and there exists no provision of a widow remarriage in Hinduism traditionally. As the joint family system was prevalent brothers-in-law and uncles-in-law sometimes of the same age and sometimes even younger were always hovering around with a roving eye. So the widows were relegated to the corners and made to look ugly with their hair shorn.In almost every culture long hair for women are associated with beauty.Islam frowns upon the display of long hair in public and nuns cover them under their habits.Widows were forbidden from wearing make-up ,provocative colours (red, yellow, pink and orange) and from partaking in any auspicious work.Rendering them virtually un-touchables.All this just so they could be made to look ugly and in-accessible for lusting menfolk. @Ameeta: Sadly even today Vrindavan is full of Bengali widows,hair very closely cropped with just a sari to cover them without a petticoat or a blouse. Only when they engage in singing bhajans for five hours in the glory of Bhagwan Krishna are they given two hand-fulls of rice.The really old ones who doze off are poked out of their reverie with a walking stick by burly guards. Their conditions are deplorable and heart-wrenchingly squalid.Just as nuns are" brides of Jesus" these abandoned women live a life of penury in the lanes and by-lanes of Vrindavan awaiting their deaths in the land of Lord Krishna as" HIS gopis in the modern times."

I may add an interesting historical episode here. Niccolo Manucci (~1660) and an Armenian friend had gone for ride into the country around Agra when they noticed a crowd of people. Being curious, they went there riding their horses and saw a big fire burning in the middle, and a young woman slowly walking around it in a circle with the crowd cheering her to jump into the fire. The young woman looked at these two foreigners wistfully as if she did'nt really want to jump into the fire. In an instant, these two guys decided to push into the crowd, pulled the woman onto the Armenian's horse, and fled the scene at great speed. The life of the woman was thus spared. After a few weeks, her relatives appeared in Agra and lodged a complaint against these 'farangis' for running away with that woman. Interestingly, Aurangzeb himself investigated the case. He dismissed the charges against these two foreigners and proclaimed that there would no burning of widows anywhere in the Mughal empire. The woman eventually married the Armenian and lived happily afterwards!