The Man Who Challenged Indian Society's Treatment of Widows and Fought for Their Remarriage

In the early 19th and 20th centuries widows were treated as bad omens who did not deserve a place in society. They were ostracised from society, lived in deprivation, and were treated as an abomination. They were not allowed to remarry after the death of their husbands and were forced into a life of poverty, bound by rituals that kept them in pitiable conditions. As social reform movements for women took off across the Indian subcontinent, one important effort was to challenge the taboo surrounding widow remarriage.Dhondo Keshav Karve (18 April 1858 – 9 November 1962) was a leading force in advocating widow remarriage. Popularly known as Maharshi Karve, he established the Widow Marriage Association in 1893 to challenge the orthodox social norms

that stigmatised widows who wished to remarry. He also founded an educational institution for women, the Hindu Widows' Home in Poona, to help widows become financially independent if they were unable to remarry.Karve became increasingly concerned with illiteracy among women, and after retiring from Fergusson College, he founded Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey Women’s University in 1916. He later expanded his social reform efforts to include the establishment of societies for village primary education and the abolition of caste.He became involved in the upliftment of widows while working as an instructor in mathematics at Fergusson College in Poona (present-day Pune).Read: R. Sivabhogam: India's First Woman Chartered Accountant Who Wore Only KhadiHe was married at a very young age, which was a common practice in Indian society at the time. In his autobiography Looking Back, published in 1936, he reflected on his early marital life:"I was married at the age of fourteen and my wife was then eight. Her family lived very near to ours and we knew each other very well and had often played together. However, after marriage, we had to forget our old relationship as playmates and behave as strangers, often looking towards each other but never standing together to exchange words. We had to communicate with each other through my sister. My marital life began under the parental roof at Murud when I was twenty."Excerpts from his autobiography were later published on a blog by his great-grandson, Vikram Waman Karve, as he reviewed the book.However, his wife died young, leaving Karve with his son. A young widow named Godubai later became his second wife. He had said, "I am a widower. If I marry again, it shall be a widow only."She had been widowed at the age of eight. At 23, she was studying as the first widow student at Pandita Ramabai’s Sharada Sadan. Marrying a widow was not easy, as orthodox society strongly opposed such unions.In 1929, he travelled to Europe, America, and Japan to raise funds for the university. It was during this time that he met Albert Einstein.Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1955 and India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1958 on his 100th birthday. In his autobiography, he had said, "If there is any truth in the theory of rebirth, I would wish to be born again in this country and dedicate myself once more to the achievement of the cause of women's regeneration."