Posted:
Many widows dress in red.
In Karnataka, Brahmin widows wear red saris for the last three four generations atleast. My neigbhours aunt is a widow who lives with them and she wears red sari everyday.
In addition, a few years ago I read an article on the tiger widows of sunderbans ... an entire village full of widows because the tigers come and attack and eat the men who work in the fields etc. All the widows in accompanying photographs were dressed in red saris. Bright red.
I asked a friend who is a Professor of textile design and she said she didn't know... and this was her speculation ...because to study this would be a big case study in anthropological history... but her speculation is that different communities in India began different colour coding symbols for their rituals based on natural plant dyes available to them in ancient times.
i.e. in Gujarat and Kutch particularly, the colour of widows is very dark blue... this is because of the abundance of the indigo plant that is found... it provides a natural dark blue dye. But these plants are the "good" indigo plants. But in other areas of India, even though Indigo plant grows, it is of a harmful variety, so people in those regions did not use dark blue in their colour schemes because the dye was poisonous. They adopted other colours which were natural dyes available from plants growing in their regions.
It is quite possible that the regions of jaitser might have been rich with some vegetation or berry plants that provided red/maroon plant dyes and were adapted into the colour schemes of those regions of Rajasthan. Other areas of India used to have lots of wooded areas where the bark of trees gave dark brown dyes, and those areas would have adopted dark brown into their colour schemes.
Over time, even though mass production mechanisms started coming into place and and chemical dyes also came into being... the old rituals did not change ...so inspite of there being a wide variety of colours available to all regions today, the symbolism of the colour codes from the past has not changed.
Also, only rich widows and elderly widows wear white.
Younger widows and poor widows all wear bright dark solid colours because white gets dirty easily and they did not have the werewithal to keep washing them again and again like rich people do or to have several white saris. Also younger widows were made to sleep on mud floors so saris etc. would get dirty ... so it only made sense to have deep dark saris. White saris for elderly widows because they would sleep on a bed.
This is of course speculation, but to me, it made sense as a potential explanation.
