older women I met were widows. In the Br...

This paper explores widowhood in rural West Bengal from the perspective of age. Although widowhood in India has grabbed the attention of scholars and social reformers for a good century now,1the focus of this attention has been (usually without explicitly acknowledg-ing it) on women widowed at a relatively young age. Debates over widow remarriage, the perceived dangers of a widow’s sexuality, a young widow’s anomalous childlessness etc., all—it turns out—have to do largely with the social and economic concerns surround-ing young widows. For the many women widowed in late life, the social expectations and dilemmas faced are significantly different. Scrutinising such differences not only helps us understand widowhood in India better, but sheds valuable light on local constructions of gender, sexuality and age. In 1989 and 1990, I went to the Birbhum District of West Bengal to study aging (Lamb 1993, n.d.), and I was struck by how many of the Acknowledgements: This article is based on fieldwork in West Bengal in 1989-90, funded by Fulbright-Hays, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Wenner-Gren Founda-tion for Anthropological Research. Special gratitude for assistance in West Bengal is due to Uma Das Gupta of USEFI. For their valuable comments on earlier drafts or versions of thi