White Saris
and Sweet Mangoes
Aging, Gender, and Body in North India
sarah lamb

This book is about aging, gender, and the making and unmaking of persons.
Early on in my days in Mangaldihi (the village in West Bengal where I did
most of the research for this book), I came across a white-clothed widow in
her seventies called Mejo Ma (Middle Mother), sitting in the dusty lane in
front of her home. She could not stop complaining about clinging. Her attachments
to her family, to things, to good food, and to her own body were
so tight, she said, that she was afraid of lingering for years in a decrepit state,
unable to die. “How will I leave all these kids and things and go?” she
lamented. She feared that after her body died her soul would not ascend but
would remain emotionally shackled nearby as a ghost.
Ethnographic knowledge is always influenced by the life experiences of
the anthropologist.What anthropologists perceive in the field and what they
choose to write primarily about is whatever matters most to them.What
struck me, while living and doing research in Mangaldihi, was not so much
old age per se, but the ways people thought about and managed one of the
fundamental dilemmas of the life course—its compelling intensity, on the
one hand, and its irrevocable transience, on the other—a dilemma highlighted
for Bengalis (and for us all, perhaps, in some ways) in late life. As a
child living in northern California, I had observed a grandmother and greatgrandmother
each widowed and living alone in a big, separate house.These
older adults, like my divorced parents and adults in general, struck me as
very independent beings whose dwindling relations with others left them
too isolated for their own or anyone else’s comfort.