In 1829 the British Governor General Lord William Bentinck had passed a law making it an offence to aid or abet a sati, and the offence remains on the Indian statute books. But in the case of Deorala the police chose not to invoke this law. Instead they charged no fewer than thirty-seven villagers – ranging in age from sixteen to seventy – with a more straightforward charge: murder.
Taking their lead from the police, the Indian papers began to send teams of reporters to the village, with the intention of proving that Roop Kanwar’s sati was involuntary. Soon stories began to appear offering increasingly grisly versions of the event to the Indian public. The Bombay Sunday Observer quoted an unnamed farmer who said that Roop Kanwar had attempted three times to get off the funeral pyre, and was each time forced back on to it by irate villagers. The Calcutta Telegraph reported that Roop had tried to avoid being burned by hiding in the home of her aunt; the source for this story was given as ‘some Deorala women’. The Women and Media Committee of the Bombay Union of Journalists sent a task force to the village who came up with an even more lurid version of the incident. According to an unnamed ‘Congress Party worker’, Roop had in fact been dragged screaming through the streets by six hundred fanatical villagers, a version of events that has gone down in the feminist literature on the subject as gospel truth, endlessly requoted, though the anonymous Congress worker has never been named, and certainly never surfaced at the subsequent trial. Finally, the Hindustan Times published a story which announced that Roop’s husband was both impotent and a manic depressive, that the marriage was a sham and that Roop had spent little time with him after the wedding.
If the ‘village sources’ on which these stories were based ever existed, none of them came forward during the trial to give evidence, and despite the police applying considerable pressure on the accused and allegedly attempting to extract confessions by torture, the prosecution failed to produce a single witness who would testify to having seen Roop Kanwar compelled to become a sati.
The trial ground on for nearly a decade before the judge finally reached his verdict at the end of October 1996. To the astonishment of middle-class India, which had long assumed that Roop Kanwar was brutally executed, the judge decided that the villagers were innocent of murder, and characterised the police case as a tangle of inconsistencies and fabrications.
But this has not closed the case. For three months following the trial the Indian papers were full of articles expressing outrage at the acquittal, until at the beginning of January 1997 the state government of Rajasthan announced that it was appealing against the verdict. A new prosecution is now soon due to begin in the Jaipur High Court.
When I went to see the Chief Secretary of Rajasthan, who took the decision to appeal, I asked him why he thought the session judge’s verdict was unsatisfactory. He replied quite frankly that he believed a voluntary sati was impossible in modern India: ‘It is a preposterous idea,’ he said. ‘We live in 1997, not 2000 BC. All our villages have televisions. Newspapers reach there. You think a literate woman would choose to go from her house in a procession to have herself burned to death? It is so unlikely it is next to impossible to believe. The balance of probability is definitely against it.’
The same conviction drove M.M. Mehrishi, who at the time was the Superintendent of Police charged with investigating the sati. Now retired from the police, he told me he had never believed for a minute that there was any chance that Roop Kanwar could have freely chosen to go to her death; he always assumed the burning was forced: ‘I thought it was extremely improbable that today, in modern India, a woman could commit sati. This led me to investigate the situation very closely.’ Mehrishi also hinted that after the story hit the headlines, he came under extreme pressure to get quick results. When I asked him if his men had used torture to extract confessions from the accused he replied: ‘I will not pretend the police are saints. You have to make these people feel the law has force.’
Yet what both the Chief Secretary and the Superintendent of Police found impossible to conceive is quite unsurprising to the ordinary villagers of Rajasthan. For them sati is not only possible, but actually a cause for celebration. While most urban Indians regard sati with horror, seeing it as a primeval custom unthinkable in contemporary India, in rural Rajasthan the villagers are quite unrepentant, and continue piously to revere past satis. The women in particular remain visibly proud of the courage and loyalty of their ancestors who, as they see it, abandoned life to join their husbands in the afterworld. In daily usage the word sati simply means ‘a good woman’, and Rajasthani women, particularly those from the Rajput caste, are brought up to see satis as the paradigm of the ideal woman and the perfect wife. In most Rajasthani villages the goddess Sati Mata is actively venerated, and the sati stones which litter the Rajasthani countryside are annually adorned with vermilion and silver foil, and are visited by every family after a birth or before a marriage.
Indeed, however much urban India would prefer it otherwise, the awful truth is that in the countryside satis are actually popular with both men and women. Not only did 750,000 people turn up to worship at the site of Roop Kanwar’s pyre within a fortnight of the sati, but seven months later, long after the event had faded from the headlines, four hundred visitors were still visiting it every day to offer prayers. When Rajiv Gandhi’s government passed a law in November 1987 making the ‘glorification of sati’ a criminal offence, a hundred thousand villagers took to the streets of Jaipur to protest. By contrast, the feminist rallies calling for the conviction of the menfolk of Deorala attracted only three thousand middle-class Indians, many of them bussed in from Delhi. The issue highlights a national divide in India, showing the growing mental gulf that now separates the towns from the villages of the subcontinent, a gulf in to which all discussion of the Deorala sati has become lost. Most secular urban Indians, and especially the feminist lobby, have started from the assumption that in the late twentieth century no educated woman could possibly commit sati, and that Roop Kanwar’s sati could only have been forced. The villagers of Rajasthan, male and female, have a very different perspective.
It seems unlikely now that it will ever be firmly established what actually did happen that day in Deorala. Either the sati was forced, in which case there has been a terrible miscarriage of justice and a barbarous crime has – so far – gone unpunished. Or else, if you accept the session judge’s verdict – which on the face of it seems an eminently informed and impartial one, based not on political sensitivities but on the weakness and internal contradictions of the prosecution case – we are dealing with a Salem witch-hunt where, to satisfy the secular incredulity of India’s middle-class urban élite, the menfolk of an entire peasant village have been rounded up, forced confessions have been extracted, and thirty-seven men have been unjustly hounded for a decade for a crime they did not commit.
To get to Deorala, you drive north from Jaipur in to ever more arid territory. Except for the occasional herdsman leading his goats across the flat, desert planispheres, the landscape is harsh and empty and primitive.
You become aware of both the reverence for sati and the deep defensiveness of the villagers on the subject immediately you enter the village. Mention it casually, and the answer will be evasive: we were not here the day of the sati, it was long ago, who knows what happened? But talk a little longer, scratch the surface, and the answer you receive will be very different.
Kripal Singh Shekhawat is one of the best-educated men in the village, a middle-class engineer now living and working in Madras. He was on holiday when I visited the village, and I found him sitting unshaven in his pyjamas, reading the paper on his doorstep. Like everyone else in Deorala, he claims to have been away on the day of the sati, but admits he was proud of what Roop Kanwar had done: ‘Our Rajput women are very valorous,’ he said. ‘What she did has made the whole village respect her, and the whole of Rajasthan respect this village. It’s complete nonsense that she was forced. Can a murder be committed in front of five hun
dred people? My wife saw the whole thing from the roof of our house. She says that Roop came through the village with a smiling face, blessing the people as she went. Even today my wife worships her as a goddess.’
Kripal’s next-door neighbour is the retired village schoolteacher, Narayan Singh. Like his neighbour I found him sitting outside his brightly painted haveli enjoying the pale winter sun; from the top of the arched gateway of his house a peacock was calling to its mate. When I asked him why everyone was pretending they were away on the day of the sati he laughed.
‘Of course people are hiding things,’ he said. ‘Who wants to get in to this confusion? I’m seventy-five, and I was arrested by those thugs in the police. They picked up everyone: the shopkeepers, the old men, even the boys playing in the street. The bastards booked the entire village. For three weeks there was hardly a man left in Deorala. Sixty-six of us were bundled off to jail and interrogated.’
‘Violently?’
‘Of course. The police here know no other way. Even at the best of times they treat villagers like animals. Many of us were beaten. Bodu Ram the carpenter had his arms broken. Several old men were put in to iced baths and had their heads held underwater. They used electric shocks on others. It is you journalists that caused the problem. The journalists and the women’s organisations.’
‘In what sense?’
‘You people come here and write what you want. You all assume that Roop Kanwar was forced. But sixty of her relatives are here in this village. Would they allow it to happen? You are from a big city. I don’t know you. But if someone here tried to beat you up, I and everyone else would run to help. So much more so with our own relatives. How would we allow one of our own to be murdered? The family tried to dissuade the girl, but she was obstinate.’
‘Has the sati brought any benefits to the village?’ I asked.
‘On the contrary,’ said Narayan Singh. ‘It has been a terrible thing for us. People are now so afraid none of them dare to go to funerals any more. Even the priests are careful. If a Rajput dies, first the priest will ask, “Is the widow intending to become a sati?” Only then will they agree to attend the cremation.’
It was only after many hours of interviews in and around Deorala that I found one eyewitness who was prepared to come on the record and admit that he had been present at the sati. Inder Singh said that he was the oldest man in the village, although he was unsure exactly what his age was: well over ninety, he thought. In his youth he had fought for the British, first in the thirties at Kandahar and Kabul (where he lost his thumb), then, during the Second World War, in North Africa and Italy. He had seen action at Tobruk and had been decorated for being among the first ashore at the Salerno landings. He had leathery skin and a grey walrus moustache. On his head he wore a bright orange turban.
‘Of course I was here,’ he said. ‘And not just me: the whole village. Everyone was here, no matter what they say now. Yes, I saw the whole sati with my own eyes. She was not forced. Absolutely not. So many people saw her. Can you force somebody to sit on a funeral pyre in front of five hundred people?’
‘But didn’t you feel you should have stopped her?’ I asked.
‘No one can stop a sati,’ replied Inder Singh. ‘We believe that if anyone stops a sati they will be cursed. Something will definitely happen to them.’
‘And she didn’t try to get off the pyre?’
‘No,’ said Inder. ‘It was her own choice. Sati is something from inside. It is no sati if it is forced. When the fire was lit she just sat there with her husband’s head on her lap. She seemed to feel no pain. You see, satis have a special power. When the gods want something they can do anything. In the past, when the gods willed it the great warriors of India fought on even when their heads had been cut off. Compared to that, what is a sati?’
‘What do you think of the law banning the glorification of sati?’ I asked.
‘These are ungodly times,’ said Inder Singh. ‘These ladies from the women’s organisations come here unveiled, without their husbands, wearing trousers. They tell us we burn our daughters by force. Do they think we are animals? When Lord Ram was the ruler he allowed sati. So who are these people in Delhi to ban it?’
Inder Singh moved closer to me and whispered in his cracked voice: ‘This is the Kali Yug, the Age of Kali, the epoch of disintegration. Ungodly things are happening all around us. Publicly these people from the towns have stopped us worshipping the goddess Sati Mata. But in our hearts we still do. Who can stop us?’
Two Bombay Portraits
BOMBAY, 1993
Last summer, when Baba Sehgal, the world’s first Hindi rap megastar, pulled up his hood, bounced through a thick cloud of dry ice and ran out on to the floodlit stage of a Bombay stadium, to be greeted by an ear-piercing scream from some forty thousand overexcited Bombay babes, he broke all conceivable bounds of probability.
It was not just that India has never before had a home-grown rap artist: for that matter it has never really had any kind of home-grown star playing any sort of rock music to any sort of respectable-sized audience. Nor was it just the inherent improbability that the person who pulled off this coup – creating a vast market for rap music in India from nothing – should be a plump Sikh electrical engineer from the Indian boondocks. It was even more unlikely than that: it was against the odds that the stage was standing at all.
The promoter’s cheque had bounced at around two o’clock the previous afternoon. By five o’clock, when the final rehearsal was due to begin, a very Indian chaos had descended upon the stadium. One group of workmen, assigned to build the left flank of the stage, was working at double speed, apparently in the hope of suing the promoter for unpaid labour. The other group, assigned to the right flank, had taken umbrage and begun tearing down their side of the superstructure with a speed and violence that any warband of English football hooligans would have been proud to match. By the time Baba Sehgal had arrived on the scene, thirty minutes later, only half of his stage was still standing.
‘What’s going on?’ shouted Baba.
‘Hanky panky,’ replied a lackey from the record company. ‘Promoter’s money is not forthcoming. Cheque is bouncing.’
‘Either we get the rehearsal done tonight,’ said Baba, removing his shades. ‘Or I’m not appearing tomorrow.’
‘But we are already selling forty thousand tickets!’
The lackey from the record company ran off to try to mollify the labourers. Baba stalked off to his car. A group of Baba’s dancers flapped about, unsure of what they were meant to be doing. Zubin, the camp choreographer, wrung his hands in disappointment.
‘Oh, what a shame,’ he said. ‘I was so looking forward to wearing my new tights.’
As rock gigs are brand new innovations in India, teething troubles are hardly surprising. India’s first recorded rock act surfaced only in the early eighties, when one Gary Lawyer appeared on a flush of Bombay magazine covers showing off his gold chest medallions and his massive motorbike. Lawyer’s music – an unhappy cross between Julio Iglesias and AC/DC – was even less remarkable than his taste in personal adornment, and to India’s great credit it went down as badly there as it would have done anywhere else.
Since then various other acts have surfaced, notably Remo, an ageing Goan hippy with a ponytail whose latest offering, entitled Politicians Don’t Know How to Rock’n’Roll, boasted a cover picture of an Indian MP in a homespun cotton dhoti jamming with an electric guitar. The album attacked the readiness of most Indian politicians to jump from party to party on the receipt of a suitable bribe, and included the memorable verse:
They keep party-hopping left and right,
But they never get to party on a Saturday night.
They beg and they lie and they suck for your vote,
But once they’re in power they treat you like a goat.
Yet for all this, no Indian rock band had really grasped the imagination of the public or had any significant commercial success. The truth was t
hat in the 1970s and eighties India was not yet ready. Even in the thoroughly Westernised commercial capital of Bombay there were no clubs and no pubs; no (open) sex, no drugs and hence no rock’n’roll. The middle class which had been emerging in increasing numbers ever since the fifties had yet to find its feet.
But around 1989, in the last few months of Rajiv Gandhi’s government, a subtle change took place. Quite suddenly there seemed to be a lot of money around. Economic deregulation and free-market reforms in the years that followed led to a massive boom on the Bombay stock market; inflation fell to single figures; Western investment began flowing in. The typical middle-class family, which in the seventies had been working hard to buy its first fridge, and in the eighties its first car, suddenly found itself comfortable enough to relax and spend its cash on consumer fripperies like televisions, books, art and clothes. Money began to filter down to middle-class teenagers, some of whom began to spend their pocket money in the new wave of bars and discothèques which mushroomed in Bombay.
Then, in 1991, the Hong Kong-based satellite network Star TV began to beam in to India. Overnight the skyline of Indian cities was transformed, as satellite dishes began to outnumber the spires of the Hindu temples and the domes of the mosques. The network brought with it BBC World Service Television, a clutch of the first international soaps ever seen by an Indian audience, and, crucially, MTV Asia, the Oriental cousin of the American-owned Music Television Channel.
Up to this time, Doordashan, India’s antiquated state-run television network, had always broadcast a regular weekly music show, but Chitrahar (‘Garland of Pictures’) was entirely devoted to songs lifted from the stream of musicals produced by the prolific Bombay film industry; before 1991 home-grown Indian rock music had never been broadcast on the Indian mass media. Star TV changed all this; suddenly videos from Indian bands were being shown on an international channel alongside acts like U2, Bon Jovi and Whitney Houston. Baba Sehgal appeared on the scene in 1992, and was immediately taken up by Star. Within a matter of months he had become India’s first serious rock star, transmitted daily in to the homes of forty-five million people across Asia, from Turkey to Japan, from the Gulf to Indonesia.
The Age of Kali Page 14