SOCIAL PARIAHS AND DOMESTIC DRUDGES 131 graphically how labour is virtually extracted from them in return for the grudging maintenance they received. The widows also suggest a close connection between their economic precariousness, the drudge labour they perform, the lack of dignity they experience, and the absence of control they have over the quality of their own lives. In this situation most widows had little option but to submit, without a murmur, to their fate. Very occasionally there are indications of attempts at resistance. There was also the possibility of manipulating elements within the structure of relationships of the household the widows were placed in, which was grasped by some women, as the last part of this essay will show. II The set of essays written by young widows studying in the fifth and sixth form in the Widows' Home in Poona is a significant collection for the insight it gives us into the feelings of widows in contrast to knowledge about them. In writing about themselves the dominant emotion described is that o3F being trapped, a situation that no one else cared about. 'But who cares' is a continuous refrain in their writing. Believing that no one cared convinced the widows that only those who had experienced widowhood could know how miserable it was.6 This refrain of 'who cares' even became the title of H.N. Apte's social novel on widowhood written in the late 19th century.7 Despite this display of sympathy the widows felt that their dependence upon others, who then had the power to humiliate them, was so unique and the pain caused by it so unimaginable that it was only 'we widows who could understand it'.8 What is ironical is that while the widows experienced in their own eyes an 'excess' of pain others regarded them as if they were not human at all but 'like a stone without feeling and without emotion'.9 In this context Harper's account of Havik brahmins who regarded a widow as a lifeless thing, using the neuter 'it' or the term prani or animal to describe her is significant.1^ Widows were routinely spoken of as if they did not exist and derogatory references to them would be made in their presence as if they were objects that had no feeling.11 The abject and powerless situation of the high caste widow was continually reiterated through everyday expressions of power such as routine subjection to verbal 'lashings1, denial of adequate food, surveillance, performance of drudge labour and even physical assaults.12 What made the upper caste widow's condition so precarious and put her in the power and control of others was her dependence on these very people, particularly if she had no son. In western India, unlike Bengal where the Dayabhaga law had given the widow certain rights in the husband's property during her lifetime, the widow under the Mitakshara system had no control over coparcenary •