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Dying for the Dead: Sati in Universal Context
JÖRG FISCH
Universität Zürich
| On 4 September 1987, in the Indian village of Deorala (Rajasthan), eighteen-year-old Roop Kanwar died with the body of her husband in the flames of his funeral pyre. The news spread around the world, and everyone was or pretended to be shocked.1Sati is the Indian custom of burning widows, or of widows burning themselves (the expression, originally denoting a faithful wife, says in its modern use nothing about the agent and thus nothing about the voluntary or involuntary character of the act) on the funeral pyres of their husbands' bodies. It is probably the best-known among those customs the Europeans found overseas that they thought shocking to the utmost and therefore suppressed or tried to suppress in due course. The British prohibited sati in their own possessions in 1829 and had it prohibited by the Indian princes by 1862, but it lingered on. India tightened the law immediately after the death of Roop Kanwar. Nevertheless, there have been occasional new instances since then,2 and there probably still are a certain number of undetected cases every year. Accordingly, there has been a great deal of research,3 a huge number of accounts by eyewitnesses and others, and a considerable production of fiction and even poetry on sati, from Goethe and Southey to Jules Verne and M. M. Kaye, to mention but a few names.4 |
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In scholarly works it is frequently said that sati was not an isolated custom but that similar rituals were to be found all over the world in the course of history. Yet this assertion is never supported by references to serious research or to primary sources but only to similarly vague passages in the literature, or it remains completely uncorroborated. It is the purpose of this article to check these claims. To what extent can or could sati be found outside India? What similar customs have there been in the course of history? This necessitates a definition of the subject in broader terms. Then a short comparative survey of the incidence of the defined custom is given. On this basis, more systematic questions can be asked and, to some extent, answered: What were the origins and the functions of such customs? Were they sanctioned by religion? What were the social structures underlying them, and did they in turn influence those structures? The main thesis is that such customs link in a unique manner religious beliefs in a hereafter with power struggles in a society, either between classes or other social groups or between the sexes. Each aspect is irreducible to the other. Both idealized otherworldly and crudely materialist and political aspects are indissolubly bound to each other. Any attempt to suppress such customs was bound to have religious as well as social and political consequences—and this remains true even in a postcolonial world. |
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A cautionary word about the sources is necessary. A modern state bureaucracy usually does not administer customs of the kind investigated here, but it prohibits and suppresses them. Therefore, the bulk of the sources are not administrative but ethnographical and often of questionable authenticity.5 Nevertheless, they frequently give a fairly detailed and reliable picture. There is only one important exception. While all other colonial powers and the British themselves in all other places suppressed such customs as soon as they had the power to do so, the British in India at first tried to administratively regulate sati by distinguishing between legal and illegal cases according to Hindu law. For obvious reasons (mainly because British officials were not prepared to accept the notion of a widow lawfully burning herself to death in public in what was defined as a voluntary act), this attempt misfired, and eventually even the British in India tried to suppress the custom. But the aborted attempt at regulation produced an enormous account of sources. There is nothing comparable for other parts of the world. Moreover, of all the areas in which such customs could be found, India was the most easily accessible for Europeans who, up to the late eighteenth century, had no power to interfere. Therefore, we have more eyewitness accounts for India than for any other part of the world because such accounts are usually written only by outsiders. There seems to be, for example, not a single precolonial description of a widow burning in India by an Indian or in Bali by a Balinese. |
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