This heart-wrenching book on widows in contemporary India delves into multiple forms of material and emotional deprivation including a most oppressive kind of renunciation forced on the widows living in Varanasi and Vrindavan. Seeing the things from the suffering women's perspective, it questions the exclusivity of their renunciatory life prescribed by the Hindu Dharmashastras. Among other things, this work argues powerfully that the widows need a measure of social security for their sheer material survival, as they have for long been subjected to humiliation, neglect and blatant exploitation.