Yamuna’s Journey is the English translation of Baba Padmanji’s 1857 Marathi novel Yamunaparyatan. “Yamuna” is both the name of the female protagonist of this novel as well as a reference to the river Yamuna in India; “paryatan” means journey or travel. “Yamunaparyatan” (“Journey to the Yamuna”) can be interpreted as travel to Vrindaban, a holy city on the banks of the river Yamuna, where Hindu widows were sent to live a life of spirituality and—widowhood being considered a curse—penance in homes set aside for them. Most of them were however in fact abandoned by their relatives and forced to live in abject poverty and isolation. The title, thereby, is suggestive of the trials and tribulations of widowhood in 19th century Hindu society.
Yamuna’s Journey can make a claim to be the first Indian novel. While the Bengali-language Phulmoni-o-Karunar Bibaran was published five years earlier in 1852, its author—Hannah Catherine Mullens—was a European missionary. Baba Padmanji (1831-1906) was a Christian convert and feminist reformer who campaigned in Maharashtra for widows to be allowed to remarry. Yamuna’s Journey is a fictionalized narrative of his experiences and struggles during the campaign.
Padmanji’s novel throws light on the impact of colonial modernity on the social life and literature of 19th century India. Western-inspired Indian social reformers of this period criticized the tyrannical practices of Brahmin society, protested against what they considered superstition, advocated for English education and fought against polygamy and various forms of injustice towards widows. This English translation makes this pioneering work—one written with the specific purpose to educate native Christians—available to readers and scholars who do not have access to the original version. Although it reads like a parable, it was written at a time when the novel was still nascent in Indian literature.
At the outset of the book, Yamuna, a young bride, sets off for a business trip across several towns in the Bombay Presidency with her well-educated husband Vinayak Rao. They are a perfect match. Vinayak treats Yamuna as a friend and an equal, unusual in the patriarchal 19th century. Despite hailing from Hindu Brahmin families, they considered the teachings of Christianity enlightened and often refer to biblical passages at times of crisis. They are both pained by the sufferings of Hindu widows, something they feel can only be alleviated through legal reform.
The narrative changes its course when Yamuna herself is widowed. She is beaten up and driven out of the house by her former mother-in-law. Yamuna however purges the curse of widowhood by converting to Christianity and marrying an Indian Christian.
Yamuna’s Journey offers a microscopic view of the miseries of widowhood through the eyes of Vinayak and Yamuna. During their travels, in every Maharashtrian town they encountered widows whose miseries stemmed from the orthodox traditions of the Brahmin society. One such tradition was the ritual of tonsuring the wives of the deceased Brahmins. It was believed that the soul of the husband would wander in Hell if the widow grew her hair. The custom seemed to have been designed to make the widows look sexually unattractive and to prevent them from remarrying. Scared of being tonsured, Godavari Bai, Yamuna’s neighbour, committed suicide. Venu, a young widow of twenty, whom Yamuna met in Nagpur, was overburdened with household chores by her in-laws. She revealed to Yamuna that she ate stale food, had only a few old sarees and a coarse woollen covering to wear and was not allowed to sleep on a bed.
Distressed widows might opt for prostitution as the only means for earning a livelihood, as had Yamuna and Vinayak’s landlady during a sojourn in Pandharpur. Affairs and consequent pregnancies led to abortion, abandonment, suicide, and even murder.
Through the story-within-the-story framework of his novel and the insightful observations of his protagonists whose story features as the frame narrative, Padmanji highlights the plight of various widows and their impact on contemporary society. He emphasises that widowhood increased immorality and crime.
The novel also needs to be read in the context of debates and disagreement that lead up to and accompanied the passage, with the intervention of the British East India Company, of the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act in 1856. Padmanji represents this conflict in the chapters titled “The Conference” and “The Moment of Decision” in which Vinayak and other intellectuals argue about widow-remarriage. They also discuss the scholarly interpretations of Hindu epistemology: one character’s reinterpretation of the shastras to prove that the Hindu scriptures do not prohibit women from remarrying reflect those of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a contemporary social reformer of Bengal. Although the debate of the Hindu scholars ends with a positive reinterpretation of the shastras, Yamuna’s emancipation and remarriage nevertheless only materialize after her conversion to Christianity.
This novel’s journey motif—highlighted in the title—was quite common in the Christian novels produced by the period’s Indian missionaries and the converts, due in no small part to the widespread translation of John Bunyan’s allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) into several Indian languages in the 19th century and the wide circulation of translated texts through Serampore Missionary Press (established in 1800). Hari Keshav’s Yatrik Kraman (1841), the Marathi version of Bunyan’s allegory, in particular is thought to have inspired Yamuna’s Journey. Padmanji’s novel focuses on the experiences of a woman traveller, whose spiritual travel from ignorance and confusion to salvation represents a “pilgrim’s progress” in the journey of life, educating her in social reality and enhancing her spiritual maturity.
In an age when Indian women did not enjoy the freedom to travel, study and marry according to their choices, Yamuna’s Journey is important as a woman’s travelogue. Unlike most Marathi girls of her time, Yamuna was educated and had independent thoughts. Prior to her marriage, she studied in a missionary school. The schooling sharpened her intelligence and introduced her to Christianity. During her travel across the different towns, she witnessed the deplorable condition of the Hindu widows in Maharashtra and observed the opinions of the learned men in this matter. Towards the end of the journey, she lost her husband in an accident. Unlike other Hindu widows of her time, she refused to suffer in silence and proceeded to walk the path of enlightenment and modernity.
Although translator Deepra Dandekar notes that she has avoided verbatim translation of the quoted passages in Sanskrit and old Marathi, this loss in translation hardly matters to a modern-day reader. The English translation of Yamuna’s Journey after hundred and sixty-five years of its original publication is not just a retrieval and revival of the work of fiction from a neglected history, but an opportunity to revisit contemporary debates leading to legal reforms. The severity of the injunctions associated with widowhood in Hindu society have over time indeed slackened. Tonsuring of widows is now thankfully viewed as relegated to the past. However, some rituals such as wiping of the vermilion from the parting of the wife’s hair, breaking of her conch and coral bangles and wearing of white saree are still practised in some parts of the country while performing the last rites of the deceased husband. Even today, charity homes set apart for castaway widows exist in Vrindavan, though the number of residents in these homes has declined over the decades.