BOLLYWOOD star Preity Zinta said on Wednesday (January 13) that misinterpretations of Hinduism – often fuelled by greed – were partly responsible for the dire plight of India’s oppressed and neglected widows.
Speaking as she took up the role of ambassador for the Loomba Trust, a charity that campaigns for widows’ rights, Zinta railed against the Indian custom that widows are forced to stop wearing coloured clothes or jewellery.
“I am a Hindu and I’d like to say I think religion is always interpreted by various different people and the greatest reason for misinterpreting religion is always greed,” Zinta told a press conference in New Delhi.
Some Hindu widows in India are not supposed to remarry and often fall into lives of desperate poverty after being thrown out of the family home because they are seen as a drain on scarce resources.
Zinta recently completed a management course at Harvard Business School and is known as one of India’s most articulate actresses.
Cases of “sati” – the outlawed Hindu custom when a widow is cremated on the funeral pyre of her husband as an indication of her devotion – are now extremely rare, but widows are often left helpless.
Zinta, 34, said that many Indian widows struggled to avoid being pulled into prostitution or become victims of human trafficking.
The Loomba Trust educates 3,000 children of poor widows across India and has been supported by former British prime minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie since it was founded in 1998.
Cherie Blair told reporters in Delhi that “like every religion there are questions that are about the basic tenets of the religion and then there are the customs and practices that grow up around it.
“The Hindu religion is not the only religion that has a problem with that,” she said.
