This book explores the politico-cultural imagination that formed the subtext of the reformist, nationalist and women?s discourses on widowhood from the colonial period to the 1950s. It examines legislative debates on the relationship between sexuality, morality, property rights and widowhood, and explores the world of literate widows of the early twentieth century. It also traces the manner in which the complex connection between the nineteenth-century idea of widowhood and the concept of the anti-colonial Mother India of the 1920s transformed the notion of the ideal Hindu widow into a metaphor for a struggling/recovering nation in post-colonial India. This metaphor further evolved in independent India under Nehruvian socialism, where, uniquely combined with Gandhian moral reformism, it produced renewed and reformed cultural codes for widows in particular and for Indian women in general.