Something like rights?

Faith,
law and widow immolation
debates in colonial Bengal

Tanika Sarkar
Jawaharlal Nehru University

The article straddles two separate but intertwined registers. One is the interface between
faith and law under early colonial rule. I explore this through the lens of colonial governance
of immolations of Hindu widows. The other is the gradual transmutation of an idea or a
word: consent, the widow’s consent to burning alive. The early colonial state formally institu-
tionalised the widow’s consent as the basis for all lawful immolations. That, I argue, eventu-
ated, over a long stretch of time, and through a strangely twisted dialectic, in a horizon of
female entitlements and immunities. Controversially but recognisably, she became the bearer
of something like rights rather than of sacred prescriptions and injunctions alone. This was a
development that neither the state nor its Brahman ritual specialists had actually intended.

Keywords: Consent, rights, ritual, colonial bureaucracy, reform, orthodoxy, scripture, custom, sati,
modernity, law

The article straddles two separate but intertwined registers. One is the interface
between faith and law under early colonial rule. I explore this through the lens of
colonial governance of immolations of Hindu widows. The other is the gradual
transmutation of an idea or a word: consent, the widow’s consent to burning
alive. A ritual condition—enjoined, no doubt, to prevent forced immolations—it
slowly morphed into an intimation of something like rights in the course of the
nineteenth century: not the finished and formal category which we find in liberal
political thought but an eclectic vocabulary made up of colonial legal usage, Hindu
scripture and custom and new vernacular ideas about natural justice.
The early colonial state formally institutionalised the widow’s consent as the
basis for all lawful immolations. That, I argue, eventuated, over a long stretch of

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC
DOI: 10.1177/0019464612455276
296 / TANIKA SARKAR

time, and through a strangely twisted dialectic, in a horizon of female entitle-

ments and immunities. Controversially but recognisably, she became the bearer
of something like rights rather than of sacred prescriptions and injunctions alone.
This was a development that neither the state nor its Brahman ritual specialists
actually intended to do—in fact, rather the reverse.
My arguments are, therefore, deeply revisionist on both counts. I will try to
show that British governance neither stigmatised the ritual nor did it abolish it in
the name of civilisational superiority. Nor was the idea of the woman’s rights
parasitic on western liberalism. This is, therefore, a story of conjunctural and
contingent developments. State administration of the ritual—not as abolition but
as proper maintenance—delineated a sphere of scriptural provisions to demar-
cate who were and who were not authorised to perform immolation. That, in turn,
carved out a sphere of legal activity, criminalising death for certain categories of
widows, or legally securing the right to life for them. Rights, therefore, were
conjugated largely from such messy histories and encounters between scriptural
and modern Hinduism and Anglo-Indian law rather than from systematic politi-
cal thinking. By placing the process within our histories rather than within west-
ern thought, I try to short-circuit that most tiresome conundrum of post colonial
studies: the dichotomy between deracinating modernity and authentic ancestral
tradition.

How can one think of the ritual of sati-making? According to sacred scripture the
would-be sati takes a ritual pledge (sankalp) before she ascends the pyre. In words
that are solemn and also rather beautiful, she calls upon the sun, the moon, the
stars, all the elements of the universe and all the gods, to stand forth as witnesses
to her momentous act. As she burns to death, she enters heaven with her husband
for as many years as there are hairs on her body—or for a minimum of three
million years—washing away the sins of seven generations of ancestors. ‘As the
snake charmer pulls out the snake from the hole, she pulls out the sins of her
kin’.1
In popular Bengali reference, the sati is agunkhaki or fire-eater: a woman who
devours fire; not a woman devoured by fire.2

1
In 1817, pandits of the Sadr Diwany Adawlutt were asked by the government to spell out the
correct ritual form. This is how they described the inauguration of the rite. They also provided an
account from the sixteenth century Dayabhaga lawgiver, Raghunandan, which is quite similar.
Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1821, p. 116. Rev. Ward added some local variations to
the form. Ward, The Hindoos, pp. 235–46.
2
A seventeenth century Bengali text, Raymangala, described Ulupi, Arjuna’s widow who wanted
to immolate herself as a fire-eater. Mandal, ed., Harideber Rachanabali, p. 85. In the early-twentieth
century, Kalyani Dutta heard her refer to immolated widows in the family as fire-eaters. Dutta, Pinjare
Bashiya, p. 40.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 297

In both kinds of religious understanding, then, classical and vernacular, she is

endowed with enormous ritual agency and activism. This is entirely different
from the rest of the Hindu normative universe where the good woman is a pre-
scribed person. In Manu’s famous dictum, na stree swatantram arhati: the woman
must never be autonomous.
Contrast this with the words of law that prohibited immolations—Regulation
17 of the Bengal Code of 1829: A Regulation Declaring the Practice of Suttee Or
the Burning/Burying Alive of Hindoo Widows Illegal and Punishable by Crimi-
nal Courts.3
How do we read this contrast: between sacred poetry and legal prose, the words
spoken by the widow and the command of the law? Anand Coomaraswamy puts
it as the oriental ‘denial of the ego for the sake of an absolute... the superiority of
the reckless sacrifice to the calculating assertion of rights’. What the sati says,
he thinks, ‘has been uttered by every woman in the world who has followed love
beyond the grave’.4 He thus transmutes the particular rite into universal female
love and conjugal commitment. The distinction between reckless and selfless
love and calculating rights is an important and influential perspective. It attributes
an individualistic spontaneity to an action that is scripturally prescribed as the
gateway to heaven. The slippage from ritual to love actually defaces the prescrip-
tive foundation of the ritual action and relocates it on the register of irresistible
emotion. In an earlier essay, I have pointed out how testimonials of nineteenth
century satis invoked a glorious ascent to heaven, which western beholders mis-
recognised as love and viraha.5 It is interesting that Coomaraswamy follows this
western perception even as he contrasts oriental love with western rights. Ashis
Nandy is more precise when he distinguishes between the rite as a mythic idea
which expressed love: and the rite as actual practice which becomes a ritual
example. While the latter cannot be condoned, he says, the former compels
empathy.6
The most influential recent readings have come from post-colonial feminist
scholars, most notably Lata Mani.7 She argues that the abolition of immolations
denied the widow the agency that her faith had bestowed on her. It did so by
infantilising her will. Reformers, moreover, really wanted to give Hindu trad-
itions an acceptable modern face and gender was merely the site for it. Gayatri
Chakrovarty-Spivak reads abolition as an imperial ruse for stigmatising the cul-
ture of the colonised: in her memorable words, white men saving brown women
from brown men.8 I will try to locate a critical gap between imperial rhetoric and
3
National Archives of India, The Bengal Code, 1829.
4
Coomaraswamy, ‘Status of Indian Women’, pp. 126–27.
5
Sarkar, ‘Holy Fire Eaters: Why Widow Immolations Became An Issue in Colonial Bengal’.
6
Nandy, ‘Sati in Kaliyuga’, pp. 32–52.
7
Mani, Contentious Traditions.
8
Chakrovarty-Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
298 / TANIKA SARKAR

imperial statecraft. The state was in no great hurry to abolish the ritual even when
it was used to signify the difference between the West and the East. James Mill
found immolations and untouchability as the two irrefutable pieces of evidence
for Indian savagery but even he would not advocate abolition of either.9 When
abolition came, the rhetoric of difference was submerged and the law represented
itself as the will of brown men themselves.
The post-colonial reading has been convenient. It shifts our attention away
from the violence of burning bodies to the epistemic violence of the west. It trans-
mutes Hindu cultural shame into western colonial guilt. Significantly, the process
of burning alive finds no place at all in these readings.
There are more critical feminist readings. Sangari and Vaid described the
widow’s consent to burning as a product of ideological interpellation, as pro-
duced or made will, counterfeit and inauthentic.10 True enough, but there is a
problem. The reading takes the resistant woman’s will as something natural, in-
grained, always-already there. Not something which, too, needs to be made,
through another political mediation, as Butler pointed out in a different context.11
In a very important essay that re-inscribes burning into our readings, Rajeshwari
Sunder Rajan underlines the sheer viscerality of the pain of immolations. Since it
is fundamentally non-anticipable to living widows, their consent to it is unreal as
it is given before the actual experience of burning to death.12 A fine point, but this
makes the pain of the burning widow an existential and not a political problem, as
pain, in some measure, is a universal experience. It also ignores the theological
intertwining of religious ecstasy and self-inflicted holy pain: the former can only
result from the latter.13 Unless some kinds of pain are translated as injustice, the
recognition of pain, by itself, does not lead to social change or to a new politics.
We, therefore, need a normative transvaluation of this pain to bring forth a new
theory of justice.
In the early-nineteenth century, only men debated the issue and urged aboli-
tion. This constitutes an area of discomfort for feminists. That may be one of the
reasons why post-colonial feminists choose to question abolition and reform rather
than immolations and tradition. Abolitionists, moreover, were missionaries, colo-
nial officers and upper caste bourgeois reformers: and we all know that no good
comes out of such men!
I choose to accentuate the discomfort for we must acknowledge the sheer ana-
chronism of expecting an autonomous and deviant women’s politics, even as
latency, in all historical circumstances. Her agency has to be denaturalised. Like
9
Mill, The History of British India, p. 202.
10
Sangari and Vaid, ‘Institutions, Beliefs, Ideologies’.
11
On problems in feminist thinking in terms of a trans-ideological selfhood, see Butler, Gender
Trouble.
12
Rajan, ‘The Subject of Sati’.
13
On this, see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. Also, Peter Brown, The Body and Society.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 299

every other kind of subaltern politics, it, too, needs certain conditions for its pro-
duction. These may messily eventuate from contradictory developments: initially
made available not by the right sort of agency—widows, in our case—but by
‘wrong sorts’ of men. Equally, they derive from the new material resources of the
emergent public sphere.
This problematic split between the right kind of agency and the right kind of
change is a productive difficulty. The dislocation between the two suggests that
we need, perhaps, a more ironic stance towards the question of voice or agency.

II

Histories of modern sati begin and end with its abolition. Abolition is seen as the
telos for colonial rule, its self-justification and raison d’être. I would like to in-
vert the proposition. In stark contrast to every other European settlement in India
where immolations were strictly forbidden from the outset, British India took
more than 60 years to outlaw them. For well over a fourth of its total life span, the
colonial state allowed full legality to the rite.
In the interest of correctly administering the ritual, the colonial state expended
quite an incredible amount of time and work to figure out exactly which women
should burn and how. It patiently sought to track down the ‘true sati’: both the
widow who is scripturally authorised to burn, and the practice—Suttee, as they
called it—as it is described in sacred sources. The state did not invent the cat-
egory of satis. But it certainly made it a social object, a pivot of discussion and
investigation, the focus of a large number of administrative instruments.
At every step, it was advised by Brahman pandits appointed by the courts.
Pandits eventually pronounced that the widow’s own consent was a cardinal scrip-
tural requirement. That they took some time to excavate this ruling from texts
shows that her consent was not something that had always, or necessarily, played
a real role in actual practice. Moreover, even if scripture allowed willing widows
alone to immolate themselves, it provided no mechanism for the actual verifica-
tion of her consent.
The machinery of the modern bureaucratic state now made the scriptural con-
dition a matter of elaborate administrative procedure: carefully investigated and
systematically documented by state agencies. It gave her consent a public import-
ance that did not exist earlier. Classificatory categories developed to distinguish
true consent from coercion, licit sati from unauthorised ones. In the process,
the meaning of consent slowly began to change. Female consent had previously
been a ritual necessity for immolations. By the end of the century, it became a
political idea that was free standing, with value added: a desirable—if not an
actual—moral foundation for lawmaking as well as for ritual performance. In the
gap between the two uses of her consent, a conception of her rights was fitfully
elaborated.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
300 / TANIKA SARKAR

Something else happened in the process. In the belief that it was correctly
implementing scripture, state attention cohered around the figure of the widow,
isolating her from her guardians. It made sure that consent belonged to her and to
her alone, that it was not shaped by family influence or pressure. In front of vast
crowds of spectators, the police, the magistrates, or the Collectors asked her if
she wanted to die. The procedure set up an implicit division between the family’s
words and hers; it prised her out of her embedded status and made her stand forth
as a separate agent, speaking for herself. It also created a nebulous potential for an
oppositional female self for women who did not want to burn. The separation—
even as an unintended possibility—carved out a space for her legal subjecthood,
beyond her acknowledged status as a subject under community and scriptural
governance. The irony is that this happened when the state wanted to confirm
that she died under correct scriptural governance: not because it deliberately
wanted to wrench her away from her destined place. So, paradoxically, a notion
of female individualism began to accrue from willed ritual dying: an autonomy as
if seen through a glass darkly.
Immolations had always been a moment of liminal excess beyond the struc-
tures of the everyday.14 The sati acquired a brief, though spectacular, identity
since the ritual was always an open event, watched by large crowds. Astonish-
ingly, however, the widow was forgotten soon afterwards. Families commemo-
rated the memory of her action without a recollection of her name, and even as
she ascended the pyre, her entire name was rarely provided to the police who
documented the event. In Bengal, there were few monumental relics to celebrate
her memory as an actual individual: she merged into a collective of sacrificators
with her act.15 The colonial state began to record detailed descriptions of her last
moments, providing permanence to memory and lasting publicity to a fleetingly
public event. Encouraged by growing debates within state circles about what to
do with the ritual, and enabled by the developing public sphere of early print and
press, missionaries, reformers and orthodox newspapers also began to record, re-
port and comment on local immolations. A large category of eyewitness accounts
of these events provided the foundations of modern investigative journalism.16
It soon transpired, however, that consent was not an easy matter to define. Was
it a one-time decision, embodied in a ritual pledge (sankalp) after which it became
written in stone like the Brahmanical marriage sacrament—unconditionally in-
dissoluble? Or, was the widow, as sole possessor of consent, as free to retract it as

14
On this, see Turner, The Ritual Process.
15
Swapan Basu found only one instance of an old sati temple at Burdwan and at Agradwip. The
temples do not stand any longer but they survive in paintings. Basu, Sati, p. 15. On the use of broken,
distorted names supplied by families of the sati to the police, see Sarkar, ‘Holy Fire Eaters’, p. 46.
16
See Samachar Darpan, 1818–1819; also selections of writings from various newspapers in
Bandyopadhyay, ed., Sambadpatre Shekaler Katha, Vol. 1.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 301

she was to offer it? In other words, was her consent her absolute private property
or was it conditional and time-bound? If it was time-bound, at which point in the
ritual sequence would it become non-retractable?
All this meant that there were profound ambiguities about the identity of the
sati. When does the widow become the sati? After she has taken the pledge, or
after she had burnt to death? Is she ever a material, corporeal presence, or is she
a spectral being, actualised by death alone? Does the sati live only in death?
While describing congealed, invisible labour that is hidden inside each com-
modity, Marx had famously called it ‘a phantom like objectivity’. There can be
no better term for the sati, already a phantom in her last living moments. An
eighteenth century European eye witness, Mr Cruse, described the gaze of a young
widow ascending a pyre: it blazed with a strange intensity but it was already
focused on something beyond this world. She was in two places at once.17 An
early short story of Tagore has a widow who escapes the pyre and returns to her
lover. They live together, but she, a figure forever remote and ghostly, casts a
chill spell on his world, and makes it a shadowed half-life. The presence of the
sati—as person, as ritual, as idea—touches the world of the living with death.
With the swearing of an oath, the work of sati-making began and so did the
worship of the widow. Still, an unspoken and fearful gap divided the sati-to-be
from the truly forged sati. The widow, until she burnt to death, could turn either
divine or malevolent. If she went through the ritual with resolution, she would
become a holy figure, adored and worshipped. On the other hand, she could equally
change into the folk devil, who often tried to escape from the pyre and thereby
plunged her lineage into everlasting shame. In fact, she could do much worse. A
pandit told Rev. Ward about a Brahman widow who escaped from the pyre with
the help of an untouchable mat-maker. Now an outcaste herself, she married a
Muslim.18 Her mortal body was a theatre of contrary possibilities. And so was her
agency.
My real interest in consent is, thus, somewhat different from the way feminist
debates frame it: which is, whether she consents truly or if she is coerced or heg-
emonised: either by faith or by state. I am more interested in the ways in which
her consent came to acquire a legal and public life: and in the production of the
many contradictory meanings and implications of this increasingly loaded word.

III

As soon as the East India Company assumed administrative power in Bengal in

1770, the new colonial state promised Indians self-governance in their personal
beliefs and relationships. In all matters related to marriage, divorce, faith, ritual,

17
Parliamentary papers, House of Commons, 1821, p. 19.
18
Ward, The Hindoos, p. 13.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
302 / TANIKA SARKAR

caste, inheritance, succession, dower and adoption, Indian communities were left
free to follow their own religious texts and customs: the state intervening only
when present practice was shown to be inauthentic. The promise was cemented
by a royal edict, issued by George III in 1797:

‘...and in order that due regard may be had to the civil and religious usages of
the natives, be it enacted that fathers of families, accordingly as the same may
be exercised by the Gentoo or the Muhammedan law, shall be preserved to
them within the families respectively, nor shall the same be violated or inter-
rupted by any of the proceedings of the same courts, nor shall any act done in
consequence of the rule or law of the caste, so far as it respects of the members
of the same family only, be deemed a crime, although the same may not be
justifiable by the laws of England....19

So, laws of the fathers, Hindu and Muslim, were given sanctuary within colo-
nial ones. They were granted what was in effect a right to life intact—irrespective
of western sensibilities. This, then, is the first region of rights bestowal by colo-
nial law upon its Indian subjects: an absolute promise which could not be over-
turned. How could a separate area of human or gender rights develop against this
presence, even if it was something as basic as an entitlement to life?
We, therefore, have a split colonial discourse. Loud and harsh were British
denunciations of burning widows alive, and firm and inflexible were their stric-
tures that maintained them sacrosanct. The two halves were joined by a language
of helplessness. Lord Moira lamented that had he been a Brahman prince, he
could have abolished the rite. A strange regret; since when was the colonial
state dependent on the consent of the subjects? On the eve of the abolition in
1829, Sir Charles Edward Grey, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, pointed out
that abolition would not only overturn Hindu faith, it would also violate a pledge
made by the British Crown. After the abolition, when the Hindu orthodoxy took
the matter to the Privy Council, their counsel, Lushington, again referred to the
royal promise as the most significant point in favour of overturning the new law.20
Sati, which featured in many sacred texts from the Vedas through Puranas and in
the medieval and early modern regional schools of Hindu law, was, therefore,
part of a protected species: quite different from other customary suicides or
killings—koor, meriah, child sacrifice, meghpunniah—which lacked scriptural
sanction and which could, therefore, be outlawed as mere superstition, antithe-
tical to Hindu scripture or to authentic tribal norms.21

19
Cited in Marshman, The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward, p. 143.
20
Ibid., pp. 143–419.
21
President, Asiatic Society, Bengal, ‘On Some Extraordinary Facts, Practices and Customs of
Hindoos’.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 303

Hart has pointed out that a real though not an absolute gap exists between rules
of ‘merely convergent habitual behaviour in a social group’, or social morality
and rules which emanate from and are backed by the force of the state. The two
are not the same but they can, on occasion, go together.22 In British India, they
coincided in the field of personal laws, even though a vast cultural gulf separated
rulers from practitioners of protected custom. Indian cultural practices, reinforced
by state legality as well as by cultural legitimacy, became exceptionally diffi-
cult to breach. It was as if the state qualified its own judicial and legal sovereignty
and created a state within a state. In the domain of personal laws, therefore, colo-
nial modernity offered the modern-legal no transcendence from the sacred-
normative. It was, as Washbrook argued, a Janus-faced modernity, peculiarly
self-divided.23
Jorg Fisch points out that since the early-nineteenth century—widely regarded
as the time of vigorous Utilitarianism and aggressive cultural imperialism—
British rulers tried to achieve a balance between a historical relativism and a
natural law approach. He cites Thomas Munro on this: ‘No forms of law, how-
ever excellent...are good when they are not acceptable to the people for whose
use they are intended...’ .24It was in that spirit that in Benaras, Brahmans, guilty of
criminal offence, were exempted from capital punishment under Regulation 16,
1795. Colonial law repeatedly violated the dictum they proclaimed to be univer-
sally valid: equality before law.25 In their handling of disputed sati cases, they
flagrantly disobeyed their own regulations.
As a consequence, untouchability was not legally abolished before Indepen-
dence and the colonial state often allowed gross discrimination in private and
public realms. So, even under modernity, it was exceptionally difficult to imag-
ine or compose a language of rights. Caste protest, before Ambedkar, approxi-
mated the idea with the imaginary of a lost patrimony: pre-Hindu or pre-Brahman
egalitarian realms, stolen by Brahmans. For gender, reformers imagined or pre-
viewed rights as the reign of authentic scripture, which is kind and fair to both
sexes. Only then could they persuade the state that abolition was possible within
its own legal framework. When Bentinck finally abolished the rite in 1829,
neither colonial discourse nor the discourse of Indian reformers would suggest
that the rights already bestowed upon the laws of the fathers had been overturned
to grant the right to life to widows. Rather, the two were sutured together. The
widow, now legally protected from immolations, was represented as bearer of
true scriptural laws which modern law affirmed. Discursively, she remained a
culture bearing person, not a rights bearing one. The neat resolution, however,

22
Hart, The Concept of Law, p. 7.
23
Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Society in India’.
24
Fisch, Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs, p. 91.
25
Ibid.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
304 / TANIKA SARKAR

was put at risk by orthodox outrage and by things that reformers went on to say
about the widow and the woman, as we will see later. These two gave the lie to the
assertion of status quo and pointed out that a dangerous shift had actually taken
place with abolition.

IV
The long legal life of immolations in colonial India, I think, encompassed four
distinct phases. The first lasted until 1805 when they were unreservedly allowed.
From 1805, colonial bureaucrats began to consult pandits about their exact status
and form. Between 1812 and 1817, a slew of circulars appeared, cautioning
police, magistrates and judges about non-permissible satis. These did not have
the force of laws or Regulations as they were then called, but were, rather, advi-
sories. They were frequently violated, not least by European officials. A category
of licit immolations, nonetheless, took shape and sati finally entered the realm of
colonial governance.
The final phase commenced from 1818. An orthodox modern intelligentsia
petitioned the government to withdraw all restrictions on the ritual. Rammohun
Roy wrote two successive tracts, opposing them. To Bentinck, his arguments
proved the existence of an ‘enlightened Hindoo opinion’ without which no gover-
nor general could have taken the final step.26 What the countless hideous burnings
of widows—some of them mere children desperately trying to escape—had not
achieved, and what the Christian conscience of missionaries and some officials
had failed to reverse, was finally accomplished when a Brahman provided a per-
suasive scriptural justification. To the state, then, the value of Rammohun lay not
in his status as a liberal and a modern—which he certainly was—but in being a
Brahman whose scriptural knowledge was legendary.
How does sati enter bureaucratic attention? Twenty years after the East India
Company ‘stood forth as Diwan’ in Bengal, H. Brooke, Collector of Shahabad,
informed Cornwallis in 1789 that he had stopped an immolation on his own as it
was prohibited in the European precincts of Calcutta. He wanted to know if he
had done the right thing. Cornwallis’ reply was significant. ‘They (government)
did not deem it advisable to authorize him to prevent the observance by coercive
measures or by any exertion of his official powers...’27
An interesting case came up in 1797. The Acting Magistrate of Midnapore,
James Battray, wrote to Governor General Shore: ‘A child by name Kumly, in-
tended sacrificing herself with her husband... She being scarcely nine years of
age ...’ he felt himself duty-bound to prevent it. This was the first time that immo-
lations were questioned on grounds of age and consent. The letter skilfully juxta-
poses two motifs—her ‘intention’ and her being ‘scarcely nine’. Infancy seemed

26
‘Lord William Bentinck’s Minute on Suttee, 8 November, 1829’, pp. 354–55.
27
Ibid., p. 22.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 305

to cancel out consent or, at least, put it under a question mark. Shore, even other-
wise known for his masterly inactivity, echoed Cornwallis: Battray must use all
his power of persuasion but he should do nothing more.28
In order to establish the status of the ritual, the Asiatic Society Journal pub-
lished a long article the same year on Hindu widowhood by the celebrated
Orientalist scholar, H.T. Colebrooke. He cited an impressive array of scripture to
prove that unlike other customary suicides or killings, immolations were scrip-
turally sanctioned and valued.29 In 1812, the Fifth Report of the Select Committee
on Indian Matters made the status of immolations clear: ‘The government has...
deemed it expedient to take measures for putting a stop to the barbarous practice
of certain Hindoos not sanctioned by their shaster... But in regard to immolation,
no further interference is permitted to take place...’30
Complications, nonetheless, ensued with the problem of coercion. In 1805,
J.R. Elphinstone, Acting Magistrate of Zillah Bihar, wrote a letter to George
Dowdeswell, Secretary, Judicial Department. The darogah of Gaya had reported
the imminent immolation of a 12 year old widow from a buniya caste. Remark-
ably, her friends secretly informed the darogah that her relatives were forcing
her. When the darogah went to the site, he found her ‘in a perfect state of stupe-
faction or intoxication’. The Magistrate disallowed it and reported, ‘the girl and
her friends are extremely grateful for my interposition’. He asked for further
instructions.31
If Kumly’s infancy had put her consent in a dubious category, this was a more
explicit case of non-consent. At least, it made it imperative to know more about
who could and who could not become a sati, rather than allow, without sufficient
information, full license to families to burn unwilling girls. The case occurred at
rather an unusual moment. Wellesley had ordered a count of occurrences along
the Ganges from ‘Tolly’s Nullah to Gurreah’ between April and October, 1804.
This was a fairly short stretch along the Ganges and the toll came to 116, a num-
ber he considered large enough to merit deliberations on possible abolition.32
Dowdeswell asked the Registrar of Sadr Nizamat Adawlutt, to enquire if, indeed,
immolations were founded on reliable religious opinion and if they could be
abolished.
Only pandits could decide this. They issued their very first bewastha or ver-
dict in 1805. They specified the four main varnas—‘Brahmans, Khetry, Bues and
Soodur’—who were entitled to immolation. Widows must not be pregnant, nor

28
Extract, Bengal Judicial Consultations, 19 May 1797; Parliamentary Papers, 1823; ibid., p. 23.
29
Colebrooke, ‘On the Duties of the Faithful Hindoo Widow’.
30
Firminger, Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of
the East India Company.
31
Extract, Bengal Judicial Consultations, 7 February 1805.
32
Notification of April 1802: Memoirs and Correspondences of the Most Noble Richard Marquis
Wellesley, pp. 202–03.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
306 / TANIKA SARKAR

with infant children, nor ‘in a state of uncleanness’—that is just after childbirth
or menstruating—nor ‘under the age of puberty’. No drugs or intoxicant must be
used and the woman must be willing.
The Court advised the Governor that the police should be informed of all im-
minent immolations and they should personally verify that all conditions were
met.33 Penalties for breaches of rules, however, were not mentioned. Given that
thanas were so few and far between—one for every 400 square miles when
Cornwallis set them up34—most cases would escape the notice of state officialdom.
Annual police reports, stating the circumstances of each case of immolation
were sent up to Parliament from 1815. Immolations, therefore, illuminate viv-
idly, the forging of colonial governmentality: police and magisterial monitoring,
capped by a Parliamentary one. Altogether, a growing involvement of the im-
perial and colonial state apparatus with the intimate sphere. Linda Colley has
discussed how, from the late-eighteenth century, parliamentary controls and in-
terventions began to acquire radically new proportions as Britain emerged as a
global empire.35 The trend becomes manifest as the Indian empire becomes an
established fact around this time.
Let us look at some critical questions that appeared when the state launched an
active administration of the ritual. The widow’s age was foremost among them.
Female age, however, was a notoriously slippery substance. As no mechanism for
registration of births would develop till the late 1880s, family memory was tapped
to ensure that she was, genuinely, of age. But how many families remembered the
birth of girls? The state at first wanted to know if she had reached puberty rather
than her actual age. But that could hardly be checked by the police. Family memory,
moreover, was strategic. The question of ascertaining her age came up only after
the family had already taken the decision to immolate her, expecting to harvest
enormous ritual benefits from her death. Also, if her infancy was at least notion-
ally a protected domain, old age was not. Police reports show up a very large
number of extremely old widows, some in their 90s or even 100s. Some of them
were too old to walk and had to be carried to the pyre.36 Their reported age would
be based on signs of extremely advanced senility, which made the notion of con-
sent meaningless. Actually, the highest age cluster came from the over-40s age
group, which makes me wonder if the decline of her labour power had something

33
Extract from Bengal Judicial Consultations, 7 February 1805, No 6 (Criminal); Parliamentary
Papers, House of Commons, 1821.
34
Majumdar, Justice and Police in Bengal, p. 294.
35
Colley, The Britons, p. 102.
36
One such instance comes from Lt. Wallace, cited in Nair, Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century,
p. 320.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 307

to do with immolations. All 51 of the immolated widows in Hooghly district in

1815, for instance, were between 80 and 50 years in age.37
Even childhood was not such a protected domain. The police sometimes
allowed nine-, eight- or even four-year olds to burn. The question of consent was
doubly compounded in one case that Rev. Ward cited. An 8-year old girl was
playing out far too late and her aunt scolded her. Offended, the little girl threat-
ened to become a sati. This was understood as a sankalp by her family and when
her husband died, her ‘wish’ was duly carried out. But Ward also cites a some-
what different case which is more difficult to read. Another 8-year old widow
pledged to immolate herself, holding a piece of burning coal in her hand to show
her resolve and her competence.38 This is an oft-repeated scenario—the resolute
widow who burns her hand or her finger unflinchingly to prove herself. Veena
Das points out that a ritual provides a script for how to be seen to suffer.39
Between 1815 and 1820, 62 child widows were immolated in Bengal. Their ages
ranged between 16 and 4.40
Let me take up the question of age on another register: that of the orphan that
the sati would leave behind. Earlier verdicts by court pandits said that she could
not burn if she left behind infants. But what was infancy, who was an infant? In
1813, the Nizamutt Adawlutt received a letter from the magistrate of Burdwan
about a sati who had a two-and-a-half-year old child. He suspected that Hindu
policemen had done nothing to stop the immolation and he arrested 10 of her
relatives. He appended his own pandit’s verdict which said that the widow should
not die if the child was less than three and if there was no one to care for him/her:
a strange ruling, as if a 3-year old can raise herself. The verdict cited important
sacred authorities and commentators to define the scriptural meaning of a bala or
a child. The magistrate, thus, took the matter of defining infancy upon himself.
The Adawlutt ruled that ‘it was not intended by instructions to authorise any
interference on the part of the darogahs or other officers of police to prevent the
ceremony ... on the ground of their having infant children... you are accordingly
desired to issue the strictest injunctions to your police officers, prohibiting their
interference...’. The magistrate was outraged. He wrote back that a total of 114
immolations had occurred within his jurisdiction between 1811 and 1812. In all
these cases, widows left behind infant orphans. Since the circular appeared, for-
bidding mothers of infants to perform immolations, he had been able to dissuade

37
Extract from Bengal Judicial Consultations, 4 July 1817, No 12, (Criminal); Parliamentary
Papers, House of Commons, 1821.
38
Ward, The Hindoos, p. 240.
39
Das, ‘Sufferings, Theodicies, Disciplinary Practices, Appropriations’.
40
Parliamentary papers, House of Commons, 1826–27.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
308 / TANIKA SARKAR

five widows from immolation. ‘I confess that I should feel deep regret if the court
were to annul an order which has already produced such beneficial effects...’. The
authorities asked pandits again at which age the child crossed infancy to enable
the mother to become ‘a legal subject for a Suttee’. Pandits consulted Raghunandan,
the sixteenth century lawgiver—who, incidentally had ‘liberalised’ immolation
rules and allowed all castes to possess this sacred right—and affirmed that three
was the threshold age.41
The question of infancy remained contentious till the end of the century, con-
troversies flaring up over the age of consent issue and in the first Factory Act in
1891. In both cases, nationalists opposed protective legislation for children. It
was as if age was a tackle that the state threw out to reel in children as subjects of
colonial law. When they crossed the legally prescribed stage of childhood, they
would be subject to the laws of their community or of their capitalist employers.
But before that, the state underwrote certain absolute entitlements and immuni-
ties. Within the frame of legal debates over age—of satis and their orphans, of
child wives and the child worker—a domain of childhood was delineated, carry-
ing with it a range of legal rights as well as considerable emotional force and
appeal. This was manifest in discussions of sati as well as in later debates over
widow remarriage.
However imperfect the immunity was, the little girl was, nonetheless, the first
recipient of legal personhood, of an absolute entitlement to life. If scripture en-
abled this—for without some citations from it, nothing could have been done—
then the new regulatory apparatus rewrote the scriptural condition as a legal right.
V

We now come to a rather strange series of immolations, which I will call inap-
propriate satis: immolations that violated scriptural–legal conditions flagrantly.
They illustrate the frequent violations of state restrictions by state agents. They
also occasionally disclose the logic that impelled the violations—the logic of her
consent.
The most elementary requirement for immolations was there should be a death,
a dead body of the husband. There was a case where a wife dreamt that she had
been visited by her husband’s ghost. Convinced that he was dead, she insisted on
immolation even though no news of death had actually come. Her family allowed
it without informing the police, so there was a double infringement of law. Pandits
admitted that this was entirely non-shastric. At the same time, since the wife had
shown ‘an excess of chastity’, her decision, they felt, should be honoured. Judge
C. Smith agreed and released the family members.42

41
Bengal Judicial Consultations, No. 6 ( Criminal ), 4 October, 1814; Parliamentary Papers, House
of Commons, 1821.
42
‘Illegal Suttees: Cases under Nizamutt Adawlutt, Fort William, between 1821–27’.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 309

In another case, news of death had arrived but the body was yet to come. The
widow arranged to burn without the body even though that was ritually imper-
missible. Post-cremation—anumarana—was allowed only where the body was
not brought home at all. The same judge exempted the abettors. In another case, a
12-year old, underage widow declared her intention to burn a year and a half after
the husband’s death, even though, according to scripture, she had to swear the
pledge as soon as she heard about the death. Again, Judge Smith considered it a
‘perfectly regular suttee...’.43
The ritual belonged to Hindus alone. In 1819, the Gorrukhpur court tried a
case where a Muslim fakir had successfully urged his nephew’s widow to burn
herself. It seemed a difficult matter to settle. Two Muslim Law Officers of the
Nizamutt Adawlutt, finally, issued a fatwa which decreed the fakir to six months
imprisonment.
Only the widow could burn herself. In 1822, the same court judged a case
where a sister burned with her dead brother. The father pleaded that she had in-
sisted on it. There were at least three cases where concubines—a doubly pro-
hibited category, being immoral and non-wife—were allowed to burn.44
The widow must be sensible, her mind and reason clear. We have the bizarre
case of a man who had three wives. One had never lived with him and another
was mentally unbalanced. When he died at a distant place, the third wife pledged
to become sati. Later, she retracted, and the mad wife offered to take her place.
This contravened the condition of real consent since she was not in her right
mind. When his body was brought home, she, too, changed her mind, insisting
that this was never her husband, this was a cow. The first wife was then brought
over and was forced to burn. Widows were, therefore, interchangeable; the one
who had taken the pledge could transfer her duty to another who had not done so,
all in a most un-shastric manner.45
Immolation meant death by burning. Jugis, as a caste, bury their dead and
several of their widows were buried alive, following a distinctive ritual sequence
of their own which is not found in any sacred text. This was questioned in 1813
and the pandit categorically stated that the custom contravened the scriptural form.
A sati must be forged through burning alone. Moreover, Jugis were considered a
most inferior and mixed caste, too polluted to be entitled to the rite. In 1817,
however, pandits of the Sadr Diwaney Adawlutt waived the objection even while
recognising its force. The intention to die with the husband, they said, proved
such exemplary chastity that they must be given the entitlement.46
The widows’ intention thus elevated their entire jati and there is an interesting
sequel. In the early twentieth century, Jugis demanded to be classified as a subset
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.
45
Ward, The Hindoos, pp. 235–46.
46
Proceedings of the Nizamutt Adawlutt, 25 June 1817, pp. 113–14.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
310 / TANIKA SARKAR

of Brahmans in the Census. There had been a similar disquiet about allowing
Chandala women to burn, since they were regarded as an impure, mixed caste,
outside the pale of the four varnas. That, too, was eventually allowed. Again, in
the late-nineteenth century, Chandalas began to claim a higher ritual classifica-
tion in the Census. In both cases, immolation was undoubtedly a route to socio-
ritual mobility. The widow, by courting death, did great service not only to her
several lineages—paternal, maternal and matrimonial—but also to the entire jati.
Conversely, not just her family, but the caste itself, would have stakes in her
death.
In all these dubious cases, the practice clearly spilled over beyond the sanc-
tioned community, condition, relationship and ritual form. Yet, these inappro-
priate satis were burnt in public view with the full support of local opinion. The
rite, therefore, would have traditionally signified a rather open and fuzzy domain.
Court cases did try to peel away layers of inappropriateness to pare down the
figure of the true sati to her essential prescribed characteristics, but, in effect,
public and priestly sanction overran shastric injunctions continuously. Astonish-
ingly, European judges often followed their lead.
In all cases of inappropriate immolations or burials, judges accepted depar-
tures from scripture on one ground: that the woman’s will to burn had been over-
powering. Cases where brutal force had clearly been applied constituted the most
problematic category.
In 1825, relatives of a widow were brought to trial at the Gorrukhpore Court.
The widow had struggled to escape from the pyre and implored the policeman,
standing by, for help. Her pleas were ignored; she was pushed into the flames.
She escaped again and, again was pushed back. This happened a third time after
which she died. The judges of the Circuit acquitted the accused, suspecting
‘malice from hostile witnesses’.47 There was no room for doubts of this sort in the
Houmulia case which was tried at the Gorrukhpore Sessions court and then came
up to the Sadr Nizamutt Adawlutt in 1822. Here the wife was about 14—still
definitely underage—and was living with her natal family when her husband died.
She supposedly agreed to swear the pledge though the police could not confirm it.
The Adawlutt later decided to ‘presume it was so’. We do not know why it was so
presumed. As flames began to blaze in earnest, she leapt out. She was caught by
her uncle and was thrown back into the pyre. ‘[M]uch burnt and her clothes quite
consumed... [s]he again sprang from the pile and running to a well hard by, laid
herself down in the watercourse, weeping bitterly. Sheolal (her uncle) now took
up a sheet, and spreading it on the ground, desired her to seat herself upon it. No,
she said, she would not do this: she would quit her family and live by beggary.
Her uncle swore that she would be taken back home. She came and sat, was

47
Letter from McNaughten, Nizamutt Adawlutt, to Bayley, Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal,
21 November 1823.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 311

bundled up and was thrown back into the fire. ‘The wretched victim once more
made an effort to save herself’. This time, a Muslim was urged by the crowd to
behead her with his sword, a mode of death totally incongruent with the rite. As
he struck, her head fell back, though it was not absolutely sure if it had been
beheaded or she had already died due to the burning.
The Sessions Judge decided to treat it as murder. At the Sadr Nizamutt Adawlutt,
our old friend, Judge Smith, disagreed violently. He exempted the uncle from all
blame since the girl had taken the pledge voluntarily. After that, he had no other
option. He was, therefore, ‘an object of pity rather than of punishment’. The Sadr
Nizamutt Adawlutt finally brought in a verdict of culpable homicide, not murder,
against the Muslim and the uncle: the uncle was sentenced to a month’s simple
imprisonment, the Muslim to five years of hard labour since it was his sword that
dealt the final blow.48
In this, as in so many of his other judgements, Smith chose to pronounce as
many doubtful immolations lawful as he could, always on the ground that the
widow had taken the pledge. This persisted even after 1817 when Mrityunjoy
Vidyalankar, the chief pandit of Sadr Nizamat Adawlutt, ruled that she could be
allowed to retract the pledge. At first I presumed that like several other European
contemporaries, Smith shared an admiration for the widow’s resolve. I was, there-
fore, considerably puzzled to find that just before the Houmulia case, the same
Judge Smith had written a very strong note to the Governor General, urging for
an ‘entire and immediate abolition’ of the ritual.49 What was going on here?
This mysterious ambivalence was, I speculate, anchored in a particular mode
of legal reasoning derived from English Common Law and long practiced by the
Court of Chancery in Britain. Later, this would be applied very stringently in tea
plantations against Indian coolies. This was the contractual law of specific per-
formances. If the labourer, hired to perform a specific act of labour, had signed
the contract voluntarily at the point of his entry to the labour regime, then under
no circumstances would he be let off from the contractual obligation until he had
completed the specific performance. The contract had absolute sanctity if the
entry point was based on ‘free consent’.50 The family resemblance between the
ritual oath and the capitalist contract law could have made the widow’s self pledged
obligation immutable in British eyes. Free consent provides the bridge between
these two widely different contexts. The freedom of the wage-worker in a free
market and of the woman consenting to a normative regime to the point of choos-
ing her own death can, therefore, provide overlapping codes of reading.

48
Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1830.
49
Minute of C. Smith, Second Judge, 25 May 1821: Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons,
1823.
50
Stokes, Sir Henry Maine, pp. 171–78.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
312 / TANIKA SARKAR

The verdict had ironical implications. While Smith insists on the total sanctity
of her consent at the moment of sankalp, other judges allow her the right to de-
velop a belated, second-order will after the pledge. So, a possible congruence
with contract laws of the market could be played off against a notion of bourgeois
property law which allows an absolute and non negotiable right over property.
The widow’s consent could also be seen as her absolute possession and its de-
ployment could depend on her will. Her decision, however, remains the corner-
stone of all judgements. Out of such paradoxical stresses on her consent, a new
status eventuates for the woman’s will, voice, decision. The bureaucratised con-
text of consent, moreover, endows the Sati with a new kind of agential initiative.
So far, by consenting to immolation, she gathered enormous ritual agency to save
her husband, ancestors and lineages from sins in past births. In the new colonial
regime, the fate of the ritual would also hang on her words.
Consent to immolations reappeared in official debates even after the ritual had
been outlawed. Article 298 of the draft Penal Code of 1837 had reiterated that
if the immolated widow was below 12, ‘however ripe in body and mind’, then
abettors who helped her burn would be held guilty of murder. In 1848, this clause
was reviewed by the Law Commissioners, indicating their continuing discomfort
with ascribing infancy and lack of agency to the consenting widow. Some of
them argued that this was unfair as most Indian women reached puberty before
they were 12. The clause, therefore, ‘confounds a person under 12 years with in-
capacitated infancy’. Early puberty made her capable of ‘intelligent consent’ even
before she was 12.51 Consent is now identified with puberty, a purely physical
state, not with acquired intellectual capabilities or with mental maturity. In fact,
even though some government officials violently opposed the rite and the state’s
sanction to licit immolations—Walter Ewer explained her will as ‘reluctant con-
sent’—many others deeply admired her act. Descriptions of the ritual in the
Calcutta Government Gazette are replete with admiration and they use a lan-
guage which is identical with that used by an orthodox Hindu. It reported with
some triumph how a widow ‘notwithstanding the strenuous opposition of the
public authorities, burnt...with a swelling heart and a smiling countenance’. An-
other widow, a girl of 16, ‘abandoned with cheerfulness and of her own free will,
this perishable frame’.52
The sati, moreover, acquired fresh functions with time. As some widows pub-
licly asserted their will to burn, overruling the pleas of magistrates, they appeared
as saviours of their faith. In the late-nineteenth century nationalist imagining,
she was described as the saviour of the Hindu nation itself. In her courage and

51
Report on the Indian Penal Code, from Law Commissioners to the President of the Council of
India, Calcutta, p. 6.
52
Extract from the Calcutta Government Gazette, 15 January 1827, Cited in Parliamentary Papers,
House of Commons, 1828.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 313

commitment lay the sign of past greatness and the seeds of future nationhood,
wrote Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in the 1870s. A very young Rabindranath
composed a song about the blazing beauty of widows in the same decade.53 At the
time of the Swadeshi upsurge, Abanindranath painted a sati in flames: but melt-
ing into them gracefully, as under some soothing showers, her radiance un-
dimmed.54 The transition from liberal reformism to Hindu revivalism and cultural
nationalism in late-nineteenth century Bengal began with this revalorisation of
the memory of burning widows.
The orthodoxy began to defend the ritual; interestingly, not just as a holy and
ancient rite but more as an expression of ‘her own will and pleasure’.55 Reformers,
on the other hand, strained hard to prove that consent was meaningless, based on
misinformation and vulnerability. So female consent became a word that every-
body needed to claim and possess. As Ricouer makes the point, the very word
denotes a degree of helplessness: I consent to something that is not of my own
making.56 But when the consent of the subaltern needs to be solicited and dis-
played conspicuously by dominant groups and can no longer be assumed, taken
for granted, a new historical situation is born and a crucial shift in the practice of
hegemony has taken place.

VI

How, then, is a notion of the woman’s rights born at all, if the rights of faith and
the right of the consenting widow had an established, anterior presence within the
legal discourse? Nancy Fraser had made famous a fundamental criticism of mod-
ern liberal rights which were restricted to the public domain and which masked
the absence of rights in the private realm.57 However, she accepts that there can
be, beyond the concept of Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere, many other ‘sub-
altern counter publics’ which may not lead to a real egalitarianism but which,
nonetheless, open up a space of contestation.58
I argue that change begins to accrue when a condition—so far discursively
unreflected and unproblematised, and, hence, naturalised despite private misgiv-
ings and doubts—is articulated as unfair and therefore deserving of a strong as-
surance of entitlements. The new public sphere in Bengal—vernacular, though
still restricted to the privileged leisured and literate classes—did not so much
articulate a discourse of rights, as of injustice.

53
See Sarkar, ‘Holy Fire Eaters’, pp. 51–52.
54
For an excellent analysis of the painting, see Guha-Thakurta, The Making of A New Indian Art.
55
Letter 168, ‘The Petition of the Hindoos against the Abolition of Suttee, from the Hindoo
Inhabitants of Calcutta’, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1825, 367–69.
56
Ricouer, Freedom and Nature, p. 7.
57
Fraser, ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory?’, p. 87.
58
Fraser, Justice Interruptus, p. 71.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
314 / TANIKA SARKAR

Sati discussions were the very first public debates in our history as they coin-
cided with the emergence of the new public sphere of print, prose and press.
Sacred texts were compiled, translated and published on a large scale just at this
time, scores of newspapers were started to discuss sati, a pamphlet war began
among reformers and orthodoxy, and several public associations—the first of
their kind—were formed.59 Indians learnt the art of petitions and mass signature
campaigns. Rammohun perfected the punctuation system for Bengali prose as he
wrote his second tract on immolations. It made his arguments accessible to a
large circle of interested participants.60
The leadership of the orthodoxy came from Kayastha urban landlords and a
fairly multi caste commercial elite: men like Radhakanta Deb, Tarinicharan Mitra
and many others who employed Brahman pandits to argue their case. The status
of Kayasthas was under a question mark for most of the century. They were more
literate, educated and better entrenched in pre-colonial and colonial bureaucra-
cies than Bengali Brahmans were. Yet, Raghunandan had situated them in the
Shudra category and till the end of the nineteenth century, court cases were fought
to dispute this status.61 Their championship of the pro-immolation cause was,
I think, a step in ritual self-improvement, an important way of becoming bhadralok.
Radhakanta Deb—leader of the anti-abolition lobby—was, in many ways, a
modern, cosmopolitan reformer. But immolations constituted a different case.
His household, the Shobhabazar Raj estate, was renowned for holding ekajayis or
periodic great conferences of genealogists who would meet to decide the respec-
tive status of the great regional families from time to time. He hosted one of these
important conferences himself, thus claiming the mantle of the leadership of the
Dakshin Rarhi Kayastha Samaj. But it was not easy as another family contested
the claim. By leading the orthodox campaign, Radhakanta established himself as
the undisputed leader of Dakshin Rarhi Kayasthas.62
But Rammohun was a Brahman himself and was a great scholar, moreover, of
Sanskrit scripture. He was even awarded a prize for his mastery by his arch rival
Radhakanta himself.63 All this gave him an edge in the controversy, which was
augmented by his deftness in handling the resources of the public sphere. He
quickly wrote a tract in 1818 to reply to the orthodox petition. Within weeks he
had translated it in English and then came out with a second tract in 1820 to reply

59
Derrett, Religion, Law and the State in India, p. 245.
60
Sarkar, Unishshataker Samajsanskar Andolon O Bangla Bitarka Rachana, p. 8.
61
Bandyopadhyay, Smritishastre Bangali, pp. 36–201.
62
Editors of the Rajah’s Shabdakalpadrum.
63
Robertson, Raja Rammohun Roy; Shastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj; Biswas, Rammohun
Sammeksha.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 315

to the orthodox pandit Kashinath Tarkabagish. He soon prepared an English ab-

stract of his arguments specifically for the benefit of a readership in England.64
I can only refer to a few of their arguments here. Rammohun, a master polemi-
cist, certainly presented somewhat strained and overstretched shastric readings
with immense persuasiveness. He was playing with very poor cards. His initial
arguments hinged on who could count as the most venerable sacred authorities. If
some of them, like Manu, had been silent about immolation, he took it to mean
that they disapproved of the practice. He interpreted Manu’s praise for ascetic
widowhood as implicit criticism of sati since these texts meant widows should
live.
More important is what Rammohun inserts insidiously into arguments that are
only ostensibly about the ritual: a notion of a superior female morality and reso-
lution and also an argument for educating them. He said, in a land where men are
terrified of dying, women court death bravely. He said that all fears of immorality
could be controlled by imparting knowledge to women. His orthodox opponent
Kashinath objected that women were biologically handicapped and could not
receive knowledge.65 Rammohun asked, when did you test their intelligence that
you call them foolish?
In the second half of the second tract, Rammohun suddenly transits to a dif-
ferent discursive terrain altogether. He gives up textual arguments, and, with great
compassion, passion, anger and shame, he starts to describe what Hindu men
have done to Hindu women, developing, in the process, an altogether new male
gaze and a new male literary genre to describe the woman. Not as the nubile,
glorious body but as the wracked, caged, and, finally, burnt body.

At marriage, the wife is recognised as half of her husband, but in after con-
duct, they are treated worse than animals. For the woman is employed to do
the work of a slave in the house... to clear the place very early in the morning,
whether cold or wet, to scour the dishes, to wash the floor, to cook night and
day, to prepare and serve food for her husband, father and mother in law,
brothers in law, ... friends and connections... If they commit the smallest fault,
what insults do they have to receive... After the male part of the family have
satisfied themselves, the women content themselves with what may be left,
whether sufficient in quantity or not... Should the husband acquire wealth, he
indulges in criminal amours... almost under her eyes... As long as the husband

64
Roy, Conference between An Advocate for and An Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows
Alive; Roy, A Second Conference between An Advocate for and An Opponent of the Practice of
Burning Widows Alive; Roy, Abstract of Arguments Regarding the Burning of Widows Considered
as Religious Life.
65
Tarkabagish, Bidhayak-Nishedhak Sambad.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
316 / TANIKA SARKAR

is poor, she suffers every kind of trouble and when he becomes rich, she is
altogether heartbroken...where a husband takes two or three wives, ... they are
subjected to mental miseries...lower class women are branded falsely as
thieves... If unable to bear such a cruel usage, a wife leaves her husband’s
home to live separately from him, the magisterial authority is generally suffi-
cient to place her again in his hands: when in revenge for quitting him, he...
sometimes even put her privately to death. These are facts occurring every day
and not to be denied... What I lament is that seeing the woman thus dependent
and exposed to every misery, you feel for her no compassion that might ex-
empt them from being tied down and burnt to death...

Utterly new words, the stuff of almost all critical feminist writings about Hindu
women which began to appear from the 1860s. A radical re-description of the
woman, bringing in a new ethnographic gaze to bear upon her every day and her
concrete, intimate, material and mental experiences. A representative genre that
transfigures the lived world of the good woman as a site of perpetual injustice.
The abandonment of the field of sati is significant. It seems immolations were
a preface to the more serious purpose: to talk about the life of Hindu women and
about its future redefinition. The woman—not just the widow or the sati—springs
from his writings, fully fashioned, as victim of male tyranny. But she is not an
abject creature for she also has moral strength, intelligence and skills. In a later
tract, he argued eloquently for the widow’s absolute property rights.
These moral and emotional compulsions, however, would cut no ice with the
legal-judicial framework of the state. What, eventually, made his argument fool-
proof to colonial minds was his reclassification of the ritual as an entirely cus-
tomary one. The Bengal school of colonial officials, unlike the western Indian
counterpart, privileged scriptural texts over custom if there was a conflict be-
tween the two. In all sacred texts that valorise immolations, he says—and here he
is, indeed, on firm ground—the woman walks free into the fire. But as it is prac-
ticed, the widow is first tied to the husband’s body, then secured to the pyre with
stout ropes. Loads of jute bales and logs are then heaped on her; she is then held
down with massive bamboo poles and set on fire, still pressed down with the
poles. This is not the shastric ritual of sati, he says, this is woman murder’, sinful,
according to scripture and criminal in the eyes of law. He dwelt, again and again,
on the graphic details of the funeral. He never used words like anumarana or
sahamarana: he always referred to the rite as burning alive of the Hindoo widow
or, plain and simple, ‘woman murder’. His rhetorical devices were as carefully
fashioned as were his scriptural and moral arguments.
Kashinath did not rise to the challenge by saying that the mode of burning
would now be altered and made shastric. He feebly said that custom was as sanc-
tified as texts and he gave a reason why the widow needed to be so secured. She
would go to heaven for many ages, and, unless she was well trussed up, her limbs

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 317

would fall off during the burning. Such urgent reason notwithstanding, he had to
admit that the existing ritual form was, indeed, customary and non- or anti-shastric.
This hopelessly undermined the rationale for immolations in colonial eyes, re-
ducing them to the status of a non protected species of ‘mere superstition’. And,
so, the colonial state decided at last to abolish the rite.
I have argued that the symbiosis between cultural and sacred norms and state
laws persisted in the domain of personal laws. Yet, modern laws are also made
within a public sphere, in the middle of raucous arguments about both state and
scripture. What is enduring is not so much the letter of the law or its actual remit
or effectivity. Far more significant are the disturbances and dissonances that the
discussions set up within a cognitive and a moral universe, hitherto ruled by
social and sacred injunctions. In the small slits and folds of these dislocations,
slippages occur, and slivers of counter norms appear. At the very least, doubts are
articulated about both law and scripture.
Historically, rights have been demanded and received in the name of other
things: for very specific and concrete exemptions, entitlements or immunities.
On behalf of immolated widows, reformers asked for a scripturally ensured form
of burning in place of the customary form. But they elaborated other, collateral
arguments in the process. Hidden behind scriptural conditionality, consent to death
gradually evolved into an entitlement for life whose positive meanings and pos-
sibilities required socio-legal guarantees: education, property, mobility, recogni-
tion, esteem. Rammohun would soon write another tract, trying to ensure the
widow’s rights to her husband’s property. These enframing capabilities exceeded
the specific demand. They continued to expand over other claims. The word
consent could henceforward draw upon all these additions in order to appear
meaningful.
This had, as always, its antithesis, its tragic cost. Brahmanical scripture gained
unshakeable authority in the age of Indian liberalism. If Roy used Manu strate-
gically, the next generation, which tried to legalise widow remarriage, would find
this a great burden as Manu was explicitly opposed to remarriage. If Parashar was
used by Vidyasagar to recommend remarriage, then reformers during the Age of
Consent controversies had to admit that Parashar did endorse cohabitation with
child wives. Yet, under the legal framework of colonial governance, there could
be no other way of saving widows from immolations, from enforced celibate
widowhood, from infantile and dangerous cohabitation, without referring to these
Brahman sages. Nor was there any other way of soliciting Brahmanical endorse-
ment for minimal reform and Brahmans decided social norms—even for low castes,
as we saw. We have to recognise the nature of the discursive spiral as it comes
back to its starting point and curls upon itself.
But, once again, collateral arguments proved critical. Iris Marion Young thinks
that ‘an overlapping moral consensus’ exists in all situations where divergent

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
318 / TANIKA SARKAR

moral norms always find a minimum common ground. But, in the matter of im-
molations, orthodox and liberals had no moral world in common. Rammohun,
therefore, adopted rhetorical strategies to arouse emotions of shock, shame and
repugnance, hoping to create out of emotions an overlapping consensus of feel-
ings. He appealed to those submerged, silent, yet real sentiments of affect that
had made most Hindus reluctant to burn widows even when they glorified the
ritual which promised them so much. Once gathered together, they would move
from a theory of injustice to one of justice.
Words, once spoken, acquired a life that forced the spiral back into the active
mode: from a discourse of her consent to death to, eventually, her right to script
her own life. Iris Marion Young points out a critical anterior stage before rights
are encoded: the phase when the need for rights is first recognised.66
This was precisely what was happening in the process of sati debates. Import-
ant new words had been uttered which expressed what E.P Thompson, in another
context, has called ‘a new vocabulary of desire’. These, like a spectre, would
haunt the normative world of Hindus for the rest of the century. And, beyond the
century.

References

Bandyopadhyay, Brajendranath. ed., Sambadpatre Shekaler Katha (Newspaper Reports During Those
Days) Vol. 1, Calcutta, 1932.
Bandyopadhyay, Sureshchandra. Smritishastre Bangali, Calcutta, 1961.
Basu, Swapan. Sati, Calcutta, 1978.
Bengal Judicial Consultations, Extract, 19 May 1797.
Bengal judicial Consultations, Extract, 4 July 1817, No. 12 (Criminal).
Bengal Judicial Consultations, Extract, 4 October 1814, No. 6 (Criminal).
Bengal Judicial Consultations, Extract, 7 February 1805, No. 6 (Criminal).
Biswas, Dilip Kumar. Rammohun Sammeksha, Calcutta, 1994.
Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity,
New York, 1988.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York and
London, 1990.
Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval
Women, California, 1987.
Chakrovarty-Spivak, Gayatri. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grosberg,
eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana, 1988, pp. 271–313.
Colebrooke, H.T. ‘On the Duties of the Faithful Hindoo Widow’, Asiatic Society Journal, 4 (l795),
1797, pp. 205–l5.
Colley, Linda. The Britons: Forging the Nation, New Haven, 2005.
Coomaraswamy, Anand. ‘Status of Indian Women ‘, in The Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian Essays,
Bombay, 1952, pp. 82–102.

66
Young, ‘Introduction’, in Justice and the Politics of Difference.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
 Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal / 319

Das, Veena. ‘Sufferings, Theodicies, Disciplinary Practices, Appropriations’, International Social

Science Journal, Vol. 49(154), 1997, pp. 563–72.
Derrett, J.D. M. Religion, Law and the State in India, London, 1968.
Dutta, Kalyani. Pinjare Bashiya (Inside the Cage), Stree, Calcutta, 1966.
Editors of Rajah’s Shabdakalpadrum, A Rapid Sketch of the Life of Rajah Radhakanta Deva
Bahadur with Some Notices of His Ancestors and Testimonials of His Character and Learning,
Calcutta, 1859.
Firminger, Walter, ed. Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the
Affairs of the East India Company, 28 July, 1812, Calcutta reprint, 1917, Vol. 1.
Fisch, Jorg. Cheap Lives and Dear Limbs: The British Transformation of the Bengal Criminal Law,
1769–1817, Wiesbaden, 1983.
Fraser, Nancy. ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender’, in Susan
Moler Okin and Jane Manbridge, eds, Feminism, Aldershott, 1994, Vol. 1.
———. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Post Socialist’ Condition, New York, 1997.
Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. The Making of A New Indian Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalists in
Bengal, 1850–1920, Cambridge, 1992.
Hart, H.L. A. The Concept of Law, Oxford, 1994.
Majumdar, N. Justice and Police in Bengal, 1765–1793: A Study of The Nizamat in Decline, Calcutta,
1960.
Mandal, Panchanan, ed., Harideber Rachanabali: Rayamangala O Shitalamangala (The Complete
Works of Harideb: Rayamangala and Shitalamanagala), Shantiniketan, 1960.
Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, California, 1998.
Marshman, John Clark. The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman and Ward : Embracing the History
of Serampore Missions, London, 1859.
Mill, James. The History of British India, Vol. 1, London, 1817, Delhi reprint, Associated Press,
1990.
‘Minute of C. Smith, Second Judge, 25 May 1821’, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons,
1823.
Nair, Thankappan, ed. Calcutta in the Nineteenth Century, Calcutta, 1989.
Nandy, Ashis. ‘Sati in Kaliyuga: The Public Debate on Roop Kanwar’s Death’, in, Return from
Exile, Delhi, 1998, pp. 32–52.
National Archives of India. The Bengal Code, 1829.
‘Notification of April 1802’ in Memoirs and Correspondences of the Most Noble Richard Marquis
Wellesley, Vol. 2, New Delhi reprint, 1989.
Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1821, ‘Proceedings of the Nizamutt Adawlutt, 25 June
1817’.
Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1823.
———. 1825.
———. 1826–27.
———. 1828.
———. House of Commons, 1830.
Philps, C. ed., The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, 1828–1831, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1977.
President, Asiatic Society, Bengal. ‘On Some Extraordinary Facts, Practices and Customs of Hindoos’,
Asiatic Society Journal, 1797.
Rajan, Rajeshwari Sunder. ‘The Subject of Sati: Pain and Death in the Contemporary Discourse of
Sati’, in the Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Post Modernism, New York and
London, 1993.
Report on the Indian Penal Code, from Law Commissioners to the President of the Council of India,
Calcutta, Military Orphan Press, 1846.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320
320 / TANIKA SARKAR

Ricouer, Paul. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, E.V. Kohak, trans., Chicago,
1966.
Robertson, Bruce Carlile. Raja Rammohun Roy: The Father of Modern India, Delhi, 1995.
Roy, Rammohun. Conference between an Advocate for and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning
Widows Alive, Calcutta, 1818.
———. ‘Second Conference between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning
Widows Alive’ in Kalidas Nag and Debajyoti Burman eds., The English Works of Rammohun
Roy, (Calcutta, 1947), part 3, pp. 99–128.
———. A Second Conference between An Advocate for and An Opponent of the Practice of Burning
Widows Alive, Calcutta, 1820.
———. Abstract of Arguments Regarding the Burning of Widows Considered as Religious Life,
Calcutta, 1830, in Kalidas Nag and Debajyoti Burman, eds, The English Works of Raja
Rammohun Roy, Calcutta, 1945, pp. 129–37.
Samachar Darpan, 1818–1819.
Sangari, Kumkum and Sudesh Vaid. ‘Institutions, Beliefs, Ideologies: Widow Immolation in
Contemporary Rajasthan’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26: 27, WS-2-18.
Sarkar, Ajayendranath. Unishshataker Samajsanskar Andolon O Bangla Bitarka Rachana (Nineteenth
Century Social Reformation and the Formation of Bengali Debate), Calcutta, 1982.
Sarkar, Tanika. ‘Holy Fire Eaters: Why Widow Immolations Became An Issue in Colonial Bengal’,
in Rebels, Wives and Saints : Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times, Delhi, 2009,
pp. 13–68.
Shastri, Shibnath. History of the Brahmo Samaj, Vol. 1, Calcutta, 1911.
Shore, John. ‘On Some Extraordinary facts, Practices and Customs of Hindoos’ Asiatic Society Journal,
4(1795), pp. 331–50.
Stokes, Whitley, ed. Sir Henry Maine: A Brief Memoir of His Life by Sir M.E. Grant with Some of
His Indian Speeches and Minutes, London, 1892.
Tarkabagish, Kashinath. Bidhayak-Nishedhak Sambad, Calcutta, 1819, in Ajit Kumar Ghosh, ed.,
Rammohun Rachanabali, Calcutta, 1973.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti Structure, London, 1969.
Ward, Rev. William. The Hindoos: History, Literature and Religion, London, 1815, Delhi reprint,
1981.
Washbrook, David. A. ‘Law, State and Society in India’, in Christopher Baker, Gordon Johnson and
Anil Seal, eds, Power, Profit and Empire, Cambridge, 1981.
Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, 1990.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49, 3 (2012): 295–320