My personal journey with goddess Dhumavati happened very unexpectedly during a pivotal stage of my life. It was a transitional time for me in my immigration journey and in my life in the United States. I had just undergone an exhausting seventeen-year ordeal of completing an MA and Ph.D., going through the tenure track, and finally stood on the brink of achieving permanent residency. It had been a trial marked by trauma, anxiety, and coerced separation from my parents and my childhood in India. And yet, it was not mine alone. It was an experience that I knew many first-generation immigrants go through. What made it worse, however, was that during my time in the US, I had already lost my father and, four years after my father’s demise, I was slowly witnessing the mother I had known slip away from me, after suffering a stroke in the summer of 2018.
I was a new mother at the time, but I was also an only child. So, I picked myself up and flew to Kolkata, India to look after my mother. It was Kolkata monsoon at that time and the city was drowned in humidity. I was completely immersed making hospital, doctor and caregiving runs, away from my spouse and my three-year-old. And then my mother came back from the hospital with restricted movement and ability, as I shifted to a 24/7 caregiving schedule. During this process, the long corridor that separated my mother’s bedroom from our living room, marked a line of distinction between the imminent reality of her condition and my denial of it. I tried my best to balance my responsibilities with distractions, occupying myself in the world of Bengali televised soaps in the evening. In one such momentary escapade of watching a mythology, I was intrigued by the representation of the Hindu god Shiva and his relationship with his wife Parvati, who appears to him devoid of the splendor and grandeur typical of deities in Hinduism, bereft of the jeweled garb that the goddess as married woman is usually associated with. She was even different from the very warrior like depiction that we associate with Kali, appearing much older in her appearance and dressed in very modest attire.
She seemed more of an anti-protagonist from a fairy tale rather than a manifestation of a prominent goddess from Hindu mythology. That was my first encounter with goddess Dhumavati, and the beginning of an altered perspective.

The Mahavidyas

The goddess Dhumavati appeared to me as one of the manifestations within the Mahavidyas, which were popularized after the 10 century A.D. in India as a group of goddesses who are different from other mainstream Hindu deities—many are violent, dark skinned, obscure, and found in uncanny locations such as the cremation ground (Kinsley 1997). They are associated with both creation and power and are ten different appearances of the same original source of power also known as Sati. They are depicted both as the pleasant wife to lord Shiva as well as the fierce feminine manifestation associated with drinking liquor, blood, or meat (in contrast to the image of other deities in Hinduism). In a way they are regarded as the antimodels— in striking contrast with the ideals of femininity attributed to Indian women as models to aspire to, and through their divergent representations are associated with social marginality outside of the comfortable norms of existence (Kinsley 1997). As Kinsey puts it, connected with the spiritual realization of Hinduism, “The Mahavidyas, as antimodels, are awakeners, visions of the divine that challenge comfortable and comforting fantasies about the way things are in the world” (18).

The worship of the Mahavidyas is embodied in the Tantric tradition, which is an individualistic mode of worship, is somewhat secretive, and can be transmitted from a guru to a disciple (Kinsley 1997). In essence each of the goddesses is often matched with the disciple’s characteristics. The Mahavidyas, while dissimilar to other goddesses, are all protectors of the
cosmic order and manifestations of one goddess (Durga or Kali). They can be associated with the different stages of life and can represent the three qualities (gunas) of purity, energy, or ignorance or the three moods of amorousness (kama), anger (kroda), and benevolence (karuna) (Kinsley 1997). The ten Mahavidyas are Kali, Tara, Tripura-sundari (Sodasi), Bhuvanesvari, Chinnamasta, Bhairavi, Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi, Matarngi, and Kamala.

Dhumavati, the Seventh Mahavidya

Figure One. Goddess Dhumavati (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Goddess Dhumavati further digresses from the other ten Mahavidyas—without the conventional attributes of beauty associated with many Hindu deities and clad in the outfit of the impoverished Indian woman, the goddess is represented as old and withered, denoting the inevitability of the life course rather than youthful vigor of other goddesses. The goddess rides a horseless chariot, is surrounded by crows, holds a winnowing basket, and confers boon with her other hand. Without the visual splendor associated with goddesses in Hinduism or even the other Mahavidyas, she symbolizes the inevitability of life and death. Also compared to Nirrti, Jyestha,
and Alaksmi (antagonistic from the “good” in the Hindu goddess in many ways), she is associated with danger and avoidance (Kinsley 1997). Some similarities she shares with these other out of norm deities are her dark complexion, donning accessories like brooms, her combative nature, and more mature age.
Dhumavati is often represented as a widow, although her origin myth details abandonment by her spouse Shiva, rather than widowhood. As described by Tiwari and Giri (1993) in relation to the malevolent and benevolent nature of goddesses: “Goddess Dhumavati, as one of the Mahavidyas, is worshipped as the goddess of poverty, frustration, and despair in Brahminical pantheon" 682). She is constantly hungry and thirsty, which denotes the unsatisfied desires in her mortal life rather than her literal appetite. She is often worshipped by those who are not married,
-- the single and widowed, for instance, signifying the independence that women experience outside of marriage (Kinsley 1997). She is said to have renounced the pleasures of the world for a state of higher realization—not very different from widows who follow a path of worship and spiritual salvation as a means of making sense of their lives after their husbands’ deaths. In a way she also personifies the acknowledging of aspects of life which are forbidden, including the false dichotomies of pure and impure, auspicious, and inauspicious (Kinsley 1997). Sometimes her worship is encouraged, with the idea that the widows might develop a special connection with her. In the tantric tradition, she can grant her devotees rewards and is similarly the rescuer of devotees who follow her from the various troubles they face—granting ultimate knowledge and liberation while triggering a spiritual understanding of the world (Kinsley 1997).

Contextualizing the Less Understood: Widowhood in India

Within the familiar pantheon of Hindu goddesses, Dhumavati is perhaps the only goddess that one is familiar with in connection to widowhood. The idiosyncrasy and uniqueness of her representation can relate to the predicament of those who survived their husbands in the traditional Hindu household and what this journey means for them.
Widows represent 4.6 percent of the Indian population (44 million), much of which is attributed to higher life expectancy for women. In India’s colonial past, several measures had been introduced to prevent some of the historical atrocities committed against widows, including banning the sati system in 1829, initiatives in emancipating women through education, as well as the Hindu Remarriage Act of 1856 (Dasgupta, 2017).
The lived experience of women divested of the honor of still having their husbands around and being blamed for their spouses’ death is a real problem that runs deep into the social past. As a form of mourning, widows abandon their colorful clothes and jewelry and, in some extreme cases (truer in yesteryears), were required to shave their heads. Even now, life after the
husband’s death is characterized by a restricted diet and other limitations, much of which are internalized as part of gendered socialization (for instance, widows do not traditionally participate in wedding rituals because their presence is believed to cause bad luck). Narratives of sexual violence and exploitation committed against them are abound (Corbacco and Barrera 2012). In the Brahminical tradition and among the higher castes, widowhood is a form of social death, divested both of sexuality and of the power of reproduction which marriage once brought. Reflecting on this, Giri (2002) comments that the Brahmanical patriarchy was faced with a problem: although the widow was socially dead, she continued to be a part of society and somehow had to be incorporated. One way was to ensure her physical death too through
practices like sati. Another way was to banish her to the margins of society and then to institutionalize this marginality. Among higher caste widows, remarriage was prohibited due to systems of patriarchy, patrilocal residence and patrilineage. While women in contemporary India do have statutory legal rights to property, many do not have the awareness and sometimes the means to implement them. In a nation widely divided in terms of resources and restrictions-- poverty, illiteracy and even homelessness compounded with sex work --can characterize the lives of widows. While the lived experience of widows differs in diverse regions of India, it is also true that common threads of social ostracization tie together the plight of war widows in Kashmir, the frequent practice of widow remarriage in Haryana, widow relocation to Vrindavan from parts of West Bengal, and the impoverished plight of Brahmin widows in Kerala. These experiences suggest that, like some other aspects of patriarchy, many facets of the lived experience of these women have endured through generations (Giri 2002).

Many elderly widowed women rely on children as caregivers, are victims of elder abuse, can be de-sexualized and be held responsible for the death of their husbands, thus intensifying their feelings of abandonment. Many Indian households exhibit a conflicting situation of having strong matriarchs who are accorded respect alongside lonely, elderly, and ostracized women who have survived their spouses. While widows in urban and rural areas have different experiences, both deal with a suboptimal existence built by traditions, expectations, and gender norms.

Widowhood in Perspective: My Mother’s Transition:

Moments of loss can be personally painful and transitory in many ways. For me, that personal pain led to me being drawn to the goddess Dhumavati, even as I wondered why I was so intrigued by my knowledge of her. While partly my connection to her could be explained by the
fact that she was unlike any other goddesses I had come across, I realized that I was also drawn to her because as a widow goddess, she brought into perspective the journey through widowhood that I had observed my own mother undergo after she lost my father.
My mother lost her spouse in 2015 and in many ways, while she was still the literate urban spouse who outlived her husband, I saw in her many of the nuances and inhibitions that we associate with widowhood in conventional literature. I have always struggled to find a sense of why this is the case given her participation in urban life and given that she was a relatively emancipated woman.
My parents tied their knots in the late 60s as an inter-caste couple, which meant that many from my father’s side of the family did not take to this arrangement happily. My mother was only nineteen at that point in time. They lived through a turbulent era, marked by the important social changes that were moving the world-from Civil Rights, second wave of feminism to flower-power. Although my father’s job often took him out of town, I am not certain how much of this touched their lives. My mother spent the initial years of her married life trying to adjust to her new household, not having the opportunity to complete her education. She kept her musical talent and inclinations alive, even when they moved to a smaller town. Thus, my mother’s journey as a married woman started from a conventional home in north Kolkata, West Bengal, to a small cosmopolitan town that had a postcolonial history as a railway colony. This place was home to different communities, typical of many industrial settlements during that time. I was born there and after my formative years moved back to Kolkata to live with the rest of my
father’s extended family. This move back to Kolkata, to her in-laws, had a permanent impact on my mother's mind. It was very different from the free-flowing space of the small town, and coming back to our extended family arrangements required some readjustment.

When I was in my high school, my mother's health problems started. She had acute rheumatic arthritis, which eventually restricted her mobility. From the initial days of their marriage, my parents had shared a very tight relationship and so, my father became her main caregiver. My mother was a bizarre embodiment of corporate India’s emancipated proclamations of autonomy and the patriarchal expectations that came with a conventional Hindu household. As her health deteriorated, this blend manifested itself in the hours spent in prayers at the altar in the bedroom every day. When we had company, and once her evening religious rituals had been completed, she would start her evening socializing, drinking alcohol and even sometimes lighting a cigarette to add to a spirit of adventure. These escapades of entertaining beyond the restricted realms of being a homemaker were sometimes her only emotional outlet. In that sense, I realized, her prayers throughout the day were not very different from her partying. Religion was also a coping mechanism to deal with her unrealized dreams, the pains of her failing health, and the claustrophobia of her circumscribed life.
As she was aging and more reliant on my father, her one constant hope against hope was that he would outlive her, which was not just connected to her desire for his wellbeing but also with a recognition of the stigma of widowhood. Yet the inevitable happened and my father passed away suddenly in 2015. For the first time in her life my mother was now responsible for her own household, finances, self-care management as well as the emotional trauma associated with being left alone. Many years prior to that I had already left the country and could only visit my family intermittently.
As I gazed at Dhumavati, I realized that I had seen the same intriguing mix of tradition, modernity, change, and uncertainty that she embodied in my mother. After my father died, my mother did not abandon her non-vegetarian diet or her alcohol consumption, as widows were
expected to do. In moments of her travel to the United States or when I went back home, she tried to optimize her life to the fullest whenever she had an opportunity. And when she wasn’t making the most of things, she continued to spend her hours in religious meditation at the altar. These two modes of being became her way of dealing with a paradox that marked her life - she was fiercely independent in her thought and yet physically dependent on others for her needs. This paradox consumed her emotionally as much as did the idea of ever having to live beyond my father.

In hindsight, I wonder: what is it about the social construction of widowhood in India that can divest even those who have been relatively empowered and entitled to not be able to come to terms with their widowhood? My mother had always educated me about the importance of being self-reliant and yet when she was forced to do so herself, she was unable to come to terms with it. I also wondered: how does one make sense of the experience of widowhood? As a method of classifying marital status in census reports, and as a label, my mother’s experiences cannot be understood without also grappling with the social ramifications of embodying this category. The patriarchal internalization of an ostracized femininity is perhaps why Dhumavati, as an independent, mature widow who thinks about salvation outside the realm of marriage, has been less mainstream.

Empowering this State of Being

It is needless to mention that I did not discover the goddess Dhumavati until my mother's ailment and then her death. In 2018, I started a new chapter in my life. This experience is particularly difficult for first generation immigrants, who are attached to their roots and the communities they grew up in. For me, my parent’s demise meant that I had to painfully acknowledge that I could never return to the most important people I had left behind. While some grapple with such loss through therapy, counselling, or other adaptive mechanisms— I engaged in filmmaking. This was not an entirely new vocation for me. I already had a master’s and some practical experience in media. Yet through the years, academics, employment needs, and immigration protocols had taken precedence over pursuing filmmaking. It was then that I acted upon my mother’s advice of not letting the mundane occupy the best of my senses, and instead attending to the creative zeal I had always assumed was my calling. I acted upon that advice and enrolled in a class on screenplay, with the idea that if I wrote now, perhaps someday I would be able to write a film.
Over the course of the semester, I developed a screenplay. While I wrote, I continued to process the loss of mother. And I also experienced a different kind of empowerment. Life had prevented me from being an optimal source of support to my mother during the last four years of her life. There was a relative sense of helplessness associated with that. And yet in the creative space that I now had after she was gone, I had more influence and freedom. I could create a protagonist with the strength, power, and entitlement to make a difference in the world, just as the religious text described Dhumavati to be, or what I thought my mother was in her embodiment of certain characteristics of Dhumavati. To me this iconic protagonist I was writing about in my first ever screenplay, would integrate both the corporeal limitations of the Indian widow and the ethereal powers of the widow goddess. I was making amends for the things that my mother had been capable of accomplishing, and yet never had the opportunity to. I thought my narrator would be a seeker like me, displaced in the immigrant diaspora, who would return to India based on an illusion or a childhood dream. She would eventually meet the other central protagonist who is much designed in this ethereal and corporeal characteristic of goddess Dhumavati and the modern urban widow. The setting of the films was in Doars in North Bengal—a hilly region of the state which I visited with my family and my mother, the winter before her death.

Figure Two. My illustrations of the central protagonist for my screenplay

After completing the screenplay at the end of fall 2018, I was co- hosting a film festival in Providence, Rhode Island. A producer who was showing one of her works was traveling from India and I developed a certain camaraderie with her. I shared my screenplay with her and was thrilled when she immediately liked the concept. In January of 2019, I travelled once again to Doars, North Bengal, for what I was hoping would be a preproduction visit. The trip became nostalgic for me at different levels, as it was a reminder of the places that I had traveled to with my mother, little more than a year back. It also helped me understand the nuances of my own script in the landscape where it was set. Here I present some of the visuals from the trip, which includes a preview of the life of the communities around the tea gardens. The tea gardens revealed themselves to be a vastly contrastive economic space: from the posh bungalows of the tea gardens which are now tourist spots to the living arrangements of the locals not far away. In addition to that, there was also the neutral landscape where I imagined that the characters from
my screenplay, would also dwell. This land was more magical than the place I grew up in because to me it evoked memories of me and my mother one last time. And this is also where serendipitously and unknowingly, my cinematic journey started.

Figure Three. The Tea Gardens of Doars.Figure Four. Bengal Bhutan border- Phuentsholing

(Social milieu for my screenplay)

Figure Five A and B. The Modest Dwelling of Communities Attached to Tea Gardens (and the social space for grassroot activity in my screenplay)

Figure Six. The Typical Colonial Tea Garden Manager’s Bungalow

Afterword
Notwithstanding what I thought was the sincerest intent of the producer –my screenplay did not mature to an actual film right away. Part of this was due to a lack of funding, and partly due to the effects of the pandemic. In the meantime, I had two academic presentations on the visual implications of virtual depictions of the goddess. More importantly, Dhumavati is the reason why my parallel penchant for filmmaking was taken to a higher level. Despite the fact that the screenplay did not materialize into an actual film right away, the producer friend who had first expressed an interest in the idea, asked me to write a short screenplay on domestic abuse. This process ignited a different kind of leap of faith. Working on a shoestring budget and being a creative consultant of a first project in the United States, I shot my first short film in Kolkata, India in the fall of 2019 during my sabbatical. Thereafter I moved on to other larger documentaries, long shorts, and between 2019- and 2024 completed five successful projects. A feature length production is thus the next logical step for me.
My screenplay also titled Dhumavati still remains with me. I hope that it will someday be filmed. A few projects later, while working on the social context of haunted narratives in New England, and critically examining the gendered implications associated with the history of witch trials, and their connection to modern Wicca, I realized that the cultural universal of celebrating marginal yet powerful femininities drives my creative vision. I am hopeful that life will come to a full circle at some point and bring me back to the original screenplay that shaped my goal of empowering the traditional Hindu widow. I hope to still film and promote this different and less understood narrative on gender empowerment for a global audience someday not far away.

Works Cited
Dasgupta, P. “Women alone: The problems and challenges of widows in
India.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (IJHSS), 6(6), 35-40. 2017.
Kinsey, D. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas. University of California Press.1998

Tiwari, M. N., & Giri, K. ICONOGRAPHY OF SITALA. In Proceedings of the Indian History Congress (Vol. 44, pp. 679-688). 1983.
Giri, V. M. (Ed.). Living death: Trauma of widowhood in India. Gyan Books. 2002.