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 First edition | |
| Author | Bapsi Sidhwa |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Milkweed Editions |
Publication date | 2006 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 237 pp (first edition, paperback) |
Water is a novel by author Bapsi Sidhwa that was published in 2006. [1]
Water is set in 1938, when India was still under the colonial rule of the British, and when the marriage of children to older men was commonplace. Following Hindu tradition, when a man died, his widow would be forced to spend the rest of her life in a widow's ashram, an institution for widows to make amends for the sins from her previous life that supposedly caused her husband's death.
Chuyia (Sarala) is an eight-year-old girl who has just lost her husband. She is deposited in the ashram for Hindu widows to spend the rest of her life in renunciation. She befriends Kalyani who is forced into prostitution to support the ashram, Shakuntala, one of the widows, and Narayan, a young and charming upper-class follower of Mahatma Gandhi and of Gandhism.
For a full length summary see: plot summary.
Sati or suttee was a historical practice in which a widow sacrifices herself by sitting atop her deceased husband's funeral pyre. Although it is debated whether it received scriptural mention in early Hinduism, it has been linked to related Hindu practices in the Indo-Aryan-speaking regions of India which diminished the rights of women, especially those to the inheritance of property. A cold form of sati, or the neglect and casting out of Hindu widows, has been prevalent from ancient times. Greek sources from around 300 BCE make isolated mention of sati, but it probably developed into a real fire sacrifice in the medieval era within the northwestern Rajput clans to which it initially remained limited, to become more widespread during the late medieval era.
Bapsi Sidhwa is a Pakistani novelist of Gujarati Parsi Zoroastrian descent who writes in English and is a resident in the United States.
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Cracking India is a novel by author Bapsi Sidhwa.
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