Introduction

Death is an inevitable event as every living organism is mortal, even after knowing this fact the pain and sufferings after the demise of anyone especially the husband is insurmountable for the widows, who are the “silent victims”. They are regarded as “invisible forgotten sufferers”. They are treated as if they have committed sin. This heart-rending pathetic situation of widows is prevalent all over the world. In India, their plight is worst because of patriarchal society, where their existence is known through their husband’s status only. No doubt from last few decades their status is being improved. Through multitudinous sufferings, they become iron women. Thus the traumatic event of the demise of the spouse may be considered as blessings in disguise when widows get an opportunity to capitalize on their potential, hence helpful in building resilience among them. Resilience is regarded as a psychological capacity that exhibits positive adaptation during adversity. As Arrington and Wilson (2000) defined resilience simply as “adaptation despite risk”. Masten and Powel (2003) also defined it in the terms of “positive adaptation”, towards contextually significant risk to adversity.

There are mainly two perspectives to explain resilience such as developmental (i.e. through struggles of life, one gets an opportunity to evaluate one’s own potentials to overcome these threatening challenges (Masten, 2001; Ryff and Singer, 2003), and clinical (i.e. resilience helps in coping with stressful events). This capability of “bounce back” helps in psychological growth after facing trauma which is termed as “posttraumatic growth” (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 1996).

It may be defined as a positive transformation after experiencing the utmost terrible events of life. In other words, it may be stated that after trauma when one experiences meaninglessness in life, triggers one to find the essence and aim of life through evaluating one’s own potential thereby turning tragedy into triumph. There are various models which have emphasized higher mental processes in the rebuilding of shattered cognitive schema Tedeschi and Calhoun’s model of PTG, 1996; “Janoff-Bulman’s theory of shattered assumptions, 1992” resulting in nurturing new schemas through transformational coping (Aldwin, 1994), where environmental determinants namely social networking, family aid also plays a primary role in nurturing PTG.

There is a wealth of literature which has highlighted the contribution of resilience in the growth aftermath of various types of trauma such as loss of spouse (Bonanno et al; 1995; O’Rourke, 2004; Coifman et al; 2007; Bonanno et al; 2010) siblings or friends (Johnsen and Afgun; 2020), child (Waugh et al., 2018).

On the conventionally a study by Levine et al., (2009) reported an inverse link of resilience with growth aftermath terror trauma. Based on the above findings, it may be inferred that pain and growth are experienced simultaneously. Some bereaved people showed resilience as being their innate tendency, so they are called “resilient grievers”. (Bonanno et al., 1995; O’Rourke, 2004; Coifman et al., 2007; Clements, 2014; McGurl et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2016; Jaaniste et al., 2017). After reviewing the literature related to “resilience and posttraumatic growth”, it was observed that there is scant literature related to exploring the growth after the trauma of the death of the husband, particularly with reference to widows living in rural areas. So the current research work is an attempt to assess the “level of resilience and posttraumatic growth” among rural widows and to explore the association between these two constructs. By choosing this research problem the following objectives were formulated.