My aunt’s funeral showed me that even in death, a woman is not her own

My aunt passed away almost six months ago. She had cancer, and we knew the day was coming. What I did not know, having never witnessed the death of a woman whose husband was still alive, was how the spectre of patriarchy continues to haunt women even in death. I learned that death is not an equaliser for women.

It began before she had even gone. Her brothers wanted to perform a small ritual, take her blessings, and donate some money to the pandit. A question arose that was taken with complete seriousness: She had grown up practising Sanatan Dharma in her natal home, but her husband practised Arya Samaj. Same religion, different sects. Since she was married, everything had to be done according to her husband’s house and his beliefs. She was, therefore, “Arya Samaji” now. Her own faith, held across a lifetime, became secondary the moment she married. A woman, it turns out, does not even get to keep her God.

She passed away in the morning. Her body was brought home from the hospital. It had to be cleaned and clothed. Rituals dictate that she should be dressed like a bride. Red saree, bangles, bindi, the whole set. Of all the things that remained of her, this was the identity that society reached for first. Not the woman she had been for almost seven decades, but as the bride. As if the most defining moment of her life was not the life itself, but the day she was handed from one family to another. As if the biggest achievement in her life had been that she was married.

The most interesting ritual of applying sindoor came, where her husband was supposed to apply it to her forehead one last time. The many women who were around talked about getting sindoor from my aunt’s dressing table. “She is so lucky she died before her husband. We should all apply sindoor from her box so that we also die before our husbands.” This is the most twisted, misogynistic statement I have heard in a while. This essentially means that dutiful wives die before their husbands, and dying as a married woman is seen as an achievement. The aspiration encoded in that sentence is not long life or a life well lived on one’s own terms. It is a correctly timed death. So many of women’s achievements and successes, such as beauty, sacrifice, devotion, even the manner of dying, are evaluated in relation to men.

At the cremation ground, as her body was being loaded into the vehicle, a voice from the background said, “Girls don’t go to the cremation grounds.” Nobody listened. Many of us women went. My cousin lit the pyre. The pandit objected and then, when she went ahead anyway, told her she had condemned her mother. The message was precise: Your love is impure, your presence is contaminating, your grief should be controlled. A daughter who insists on her right to grieve, to participate, to perform the final rites for her own mother is positioned as a threat to her mother’s salvation. If this is not an exact map of how gender operates, nothing is.

On the third day, there was a puja at home. The pandit again said it was inauspicious for the daughter to sit at the havan and partake in the ritual. The same anger, the same exclusion. Then why is a daughter born at all, if sons alone are allowed to honour the dead, if sons alone are trusted with the rituals of love and farewell?

What becomes clear across these rituals is not only that women are excluded. It is that the exclusion has been given a theological backing. It is embedded in the sacred, made into the will of God, so that to question it is to question the divine rather than simply to question men who benefit from the arrangement. The pandit is not a neutral messenger. He is a gatekeeper, and he is guarding the social order dressed in the language of religion while engaging in fearmongering.

The detail that undid me most quietly was this. My cousin’s in-laws had come for the last rites. After the havan, when there was food, they refused to eat or even drink a glass of water. Their own daughter’s home was not a place where they were permitted to accept hospitality. Their daughter’s natal home, where she grew up, is not considered her “real” home after marriage. Her married home is not fully hers either, since her own parents must sit hungry within it. She belongs, formally, to nowhere. She is passed between homes without being truly held by either. She is her husband’s family’s daughter-in-law, her own family’s former daughter, and in neither place is she simply herself.

The question that really came up was the worthlessness of a woman as an individual, and just how much of her identity is linked to her relationships with men. My aunt’s sisters said, again and again, that she had been a good wife, a good mother, a nice person. Perhaps this is simply what people say when someone dies. But the monolithic structure of these descriptors made it clear how patriarchy assigns value to a woman’s legacy. A woman’s legacy, when it is assembled in public, is made entirely of her relationships with others. Wife. Mother. The individual beneath those roles, her faith, her preferences, her particular way of being in the world, her opinions, her history, her self, is not part of what gets said out loud. It is not considered the relevant part.

She was clothed as a bride. She was mourned as a wife and mother. She was denied her own religion, her own rituals, her own name for God. And the women around her, the ones who loved her most, had so thoroughly internalised this structure that they reached for her sindoor box and wished for themselves the same ending. That is perhaps the most precise measure of how embedded in everyday rituals and systems this is. Patriarchy does not only need men to enforce it. It recruits women into its own perpetuation, makes them its most faithful custodians, gives them just enough investment in the system that they will defend it, sometimes in the same breath as they grieve. The most dangerous thing about a cage is not the lock. It is when those inside begin to decorate the bars.

The writer is national gender lead with Pratham Education Foundation. Views are personal and not representative of the organisation