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Sati and the Task of the Historian
JÖRG FISCH
University of Zurich
| Sarah Schneewind's comment on my article on sati is a valuable reminder of the difficulties connected even with very limited approaches to phenomena of global history. I am grateful for her additions, clarifications, and improvements, especially concerning East Asia. I fully subscribe to her demand for "a more complete analysis [which] would consider following in death as part of a spectrum, or repertoire, of practices of faithfulness to the dead." Some of her observations, however, touch fundamental conceptual and methodological questions, on which I would like to make a few remarks. |
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The Historian's Task: Prescription or Description? | |
| Schneewind begins her thought-provoking general reflections with an unambiguous statement: "Every text on sati argues that it is bad." This is certainly not a summary of my article, nor does it seem to be Schneewind's own opinion, as she speaks of "written celebrations, some expressing regret as well as admiration, of Chinese widow and fiancée suicides." In India, most authors recommended and glorified sati. Today, glorification of sati is still so well known that the Indian Penal Code declares it a crime for which punishment has been tightened as late as 1988 to a mandatory life sentence. |
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Why, then, this assertion that everybody considers sati everywhere a bad custom? The next sentence contains a possible explanation: "Since the practice is bad, one agenda of the writer must be to work toward ending it." The most salient feature of this sentence is its normative character. Prescription has led to a wrong description of texts on sati. In my view, it is not the task of the historian to contribute to abolish even what is universally condemned. Whoever studies such topics is free to hold their value judgments, and their findings should be considered independently of their assessments of and attitudes toward the relevant customs. The task is not to abolish but to describe and to analyze. |
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Such a detached attitude is as important as it is difficult in the case of sati and related customs. To say they are bad is begging the question. The most solid ideological foundation of following into death is the conviction of those who organize it that it is not (morally) bad, but a meritorious act. Underlying the demand to end such "bad practices" is the modern teleological-progressive view of history. It is based on the idea of universal human rights, which are supposed to be eternally valid and to have been accepted by all states, thus being valid for each individual. Both individuals and states can be ranked according to the degree to which they have realized these rights by suppressing bad practices. |
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Such a view imposes values and standards that are not necessarily accepted by all societies, although their states may have ratified the relevant pacts and declarations. These discrepancies between the official view of the state and the actual view of society (or parts thereof) can be found not only under foreign but also under native rulers. The stronger the tendency to universalize and homogenize moral values, the more likely it is that these values become fictitious from the point of view of substantial parts of a society. |
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What is true for moral views in general is even more true for following into death. It is, in the eyes of the societies in which it is practiced, by definition a meritorious act and not a crime. I do not say that "all members of a given society are stuck with its hegemonic beliefs." It can be a minority, even a small one. But it must be the dominant, the hegemonic belief, the belief of those who in the end decide what is good and evil, meritorious and sinful. If we restrict the question to how a bad custom was abolished, we miss the much more fundamental question why and in what context such a custom could develop. |
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