4 ideas
When she is found alone with him, the community orders a purification rite. During that rite she walks into the burning ritual hut and dies, so the ceremony meant to restore her purity becomes the means of her self-destruction.
The moth-eaten howdah is a ceremonial seat built for a tusker's back and a symbol of the sattra's grandeur, but it is rotting in storage. It names a specific condition in which the display objects and titles of rank survive after the material system that gave them meaning has decayed. People go on deferring to the symbol and living by its rules even though nothing stands behind it anymore.
The sattra's religious authority depended on tenant farmers paying rent in kind on its lands. When independence brought land reform and tenancy laws, tenants stopped paying, and the gosain family's sacred status could no longer secure food or obedience.
The high-caste widow's subordination is enforced less by open decree than by daily control over what she eats, wears and touches, and whom she may speak to. Once the constraint is lodged in ordinary appetites, any assertion of desire, whether hunger for meat or longing for companionship, reads as pollution and not as a human need. This lets the community punish the widow while describing the punishment as purification.