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When the lights go down in the Steeple Playhouse Saturday afternoon, April 12, the audience at the New Bedford Film Festival will be transported to Tamil Nadu, India, where widows and their children endure a harsh existence.
“Women of Truth and Courage: The Widows of Kalangarai,” a documentary short produced by Karen Kayser, Ph.D., of Dartmouth, nevertheless delivers a message of hope.
The film is nominated for best documentary short, and Kayser for best New Bedford filmmaker of the year.
Kalangarai (“beacon of light”) is a non-governmental organization formed by a group of Jesuits to provide aid in the aftermath of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004. One of the largest natural disasters in recorded history, the tsunami killed an estimated 228,000 people across 15 countries, with India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, and Thailand suffering massive damage.
About 25 years ago, as a professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at Boston College, Kayser led students on learning and service trips to Nepal, and then to Kolkata, India. In 2005, she decided to work with Kalangarai in the tsunami-stricken southeastern coastal state of Tamil Nadu, where social work students could learn about disaster relief, trauma, and social justice.
Kalangarai’s mission is to help low-caste widows and abandoned women overcome the cultural and social stigma that for hundreds of years has kept them living in extreme poverty, without adequate housing, steady employment, or even sufficient food for their families.
It was only 200 years ago that the custom of sati (or suttee), in which a widow would immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, was outlawed. The neglect and ostracism of Hindu widows, practiced since ancient times, is considered by some to be a “cold” form of sati.
To combat the dehumanizing treatment of widows and abandoned women, Kalangarai offers empowering self-help programs; provides micro-credit loans to fund a business or collective farming; assists women in petitioning for improved housing; supports education of their children; and informs them about benefits owed them by the government.
“Women of Truth and Courage: The Widows of Kalangarai” illustrates the impact of this work by focusing on Mrs. Manjula, one of the more than 2,500 widows who have been uplifted by the program.
In 2011, Kayser left BC for the University of Louisville, where she held the Dr. Renato LaRocca Endowed Chair of Oncology Social Work. Her research focuses on the study of interpersonal and cultural factors that influence and promote optimal adjustment to cancer. In 2018, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to conduct research at the Cancer Institute (WIA) in Chennai, India, to teach, and to lecture at cancer centers and universities across the country.
Upon retiring from the university in 2020, she was awarded the title professor emerita.
Having continued to work with Kalangarai since 2005 on research projects, student trips, and fundraising, Kayser founded the nonprofit Friends of Kalangarai in 2016 and serves as its president.
The film is dedicated to Kayser’s late husband, Fred Groskind, who passed away in February 2024, weeks after she returned from a trip to Tamil Nadu to film “Women of Truth and Courage.” Kayser said the caring support she received in her grief dramatically contrasts with the dire neglect and ostracism low-caste widows in India suffer.
In a conversation with The Light, Kayser talked about the work of Kalangarai, her changing role through the years, and her experiences as a filmmaker.
New Bedford Light: Please describe the mission of Friends of Kalangarai.
Karen Kayser: The mission is to support the community-based programs in India that are being implemented by Kalangarai, which was formed after the Indian Ocean tsunami. Within days of the tsunami, this group of Jesuits went in and did a needs assessment and looked at what groups weren’t getting disaster relief.
And they found one of the groups were widowed women, who were not necessarily widowed during the tsunami. They have a lot of needs in terms of just basic human rights, around housing, food, and livelihoods. They are ostracized by the society and oppressed, which goes back for centuries, because of Hindu law saying that widows are bad luck or impure or shouldn’t get remarried.
What (the Jesuits) observed, after the tsunami, was that the government was giving relief to heads of households, heads of families. But women can’t be heads of families, so they did not qualify for the relief. And so that’s kind of how Kalangarai got started. …
For me, the rewarding part of this work is seeing how these women have been empowered and how they have just now shunned some of these (discriminatory) traditions … So the first thing the NGO had to do with the widows was help them get a sense of self-esteem and dignity … First of all, they had these self-help groups that did a lot of the empowerment on kind of a more psychological individual level, but also gave them micro-credit loans to start businesses … (or to) pay off a debt, pay for their kids’ education, or just fix their house.
NBL: How did your role evolve from educational collaborator to advocate, founding the Friends of Kalangarai?
KK: It was the people around me that were so interested in what I was doing, who wanted to get involved. … In terms of being more advocacy, I felt like first of all, we might need more funding to do the stuff that we wanted to do, and to help them. When you go over there, that’s what you want to do. You just want to help.
Every year, I’ve seen these women growing and developing. It was just amazing, the changes that you could see, that I felt “This is really rewarding,” and I wanted to keep on doing that. And really for two reasons: Not only because I’d like to help people and you feel you have something to offer, but also you’re so grateful for them letting you into their lives.
NBL: How did Boston College Film Studies get involved with the project?
KK: When I was thinking about doing (a documentary based on her first visit, in 2005) the chair of the film studies program at BC (John J. Michalczyk) told me that they had scholarships for students to do social justice documentaries. You could get $3,000 for doing one, so he found a student to go with me.
(Editor’s note: The result was her first film, “In the Wake of the Tsunami: Loss, Hope, and Resilience,” followed by “Empowered Voices: Widows of South India Unite for Change.” Another grant helped fund “Women of Truth and Courage.” All are co-produced with Michalczyk.)
NBL: What is the purpose of “Women of Truth and Courage: The Widows of Kalangarai”? Raising awareness, raising money?
KK: Both. I like to refer to it as more than just raising awareness but educating people and helping them to examine their own lives. The title that I came up with was from a book of meditations, and the author was asking an old woman, “What’s the best way to live?” And she said, “It’s to live with truth and courage.”
I reflected on that in my own life and thought, well, what have I done that’s courageous, or is promoting truth? And the first people that I could think of were these women, how they had to face the truth of their oppression, that people were denying them basic human rights for no reason at all. They did nothing wrong. So, facing that truth and then saying, I’m going to do something about it. That’s probably the hardest part, is the courage (to do something). …
Once these women felt more a sense of dignity and that they had a voice, they joined the widows’ livelihood movement, and … it took them 10 years, but they finally (spurred creation of the) State Welfare Office for Widowed and Disabled Women. Tamil Nadu is the first state to have that office. A number of widowed women are on the board that manages it, and they were given a million rupees or so (to support the welfare needs of the women). So that’s the part that I get most excited about. OK, we have this change (for the better) for individuals or small groups, but now to move to society and see the change on a social level is really where you want to be. …
I’m hoping the film will inspire women to do the same. I mean, if these women can do it, we can do it. I think it’s timely in terms of what is going on around us right now. And I just keep that in my mind — truth and courage — to feel like I can make a difference.
NBL: Obviously you have a deep passion for this work. What else are you passionate about?
KK: When I retired, I wanted to do something different than what I’ve been doing in oncology, and one area that I never really had spent a lot of time pursuing is nature. Moving here, I was so inspired by the DNRT (Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust) and the Lloyd Center for the Environment. Part of it comes from my area of cancer (research), because I think environmental health is a better concept to think of what’s happening with our environment than saying “climate change” or “global warming.” My area of concern is environmental health, and just how unhealthy the environment has become for us and (nature generally). …
I have a number of birding friends, so I really want to get back to that. I just signed up to help with a project, kind of advocacy around rodenticides (that kill birds when they consume poisoned prey animals). We’ve lost some bald eagles. So that’s one project that I said, “OK, I’ll see what I can do.”
The last three years I’ve done water testing for the Buzzards Bay Coalition. So that’s the other piece that I really want to work on.
NBL: What do you hope viewers take away from seeing your film?
KK: I hope that the viewers will be inspired by the women, the widows of Kalangarai, and how they faced the reality of the challenges in society and how they were being oppressed. And then not only how they transformed themselves in terms of feeling better in self-efficacy, in their sense of dignity, but that they took it to the next level, and with their courage, went out and built a movement so that other women would not have to deal with the challenges that they had when they became widows.
Joanna McQuillan Weeks is a freelance writer and frequent correspondent for The New Bedford Light.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
View the trailer for “Women of Truth and Courage: The Widows of Kalangarai”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtquw0cfjuc
Schools, churches, and other organizations may arrange for a screening by contacting Kayser at kalangarai.friends@gmail.com. For more information about the film festival, visit newbedfordfilmfestival.com/
I commend this woman for her work highlighting the disparities suffered these by these widows. As the son of an American widow, I can also say I witnessed the second class treatment my mother received from patriarchal governmental agents and agencies that would attempt to super impose their pseudo morality upon her.