The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  How can the same act, performed by two different women fifty years apart, elicit such contrasting descriptions and responses? Since the first European accounts, both Europeans and Indians have expressed widely differing opinions about the practice that Anglo-Indian English called suttee, the action of certain women in India who were burned alive on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands. (Sanskrit and Hindi texts call the woman who commits the act a sati, “good woman.”) Suttee had been around for quite a while before the Raj, as we have seen. Several queens commit suttee in the Mahabharata, and the first-century BCE Greek author Diodorus Siculus mentions suttee in his account of the Punjab. In the Buddhist Vessantara Jataka, based on a story shared by Hindus and Buddhists, when Vessantara is about to leave his queen and go into exile without her, she protests: “Burning on a fire, uniting in a single flame—such a death is better for me than life without you.”3 This imagery of wives so faithful that (to paraphrase St. Paul) they’d rather burn than unmarry (by being parted from their husbands in the next life) is part of the discourse of marital love even before it becomes a practice or is associated with funeral pyres. Such stories take to the extreme the sort of self-sacrifice normally expressed by relatively milder habits such as following husbands into exile, as both Sita and Draupadi do. On the other hand, a late chapter of the Padma Purana (perhaps c. 1000 CE) says that Kshatriya women are noble if they immolate themselves but that Brahmin women may not and that anyone who helps a Brahmin woman do it is committing Brahminicide.4

  In the Muslim period, the Rajputs practiced jauhar (a kind of prophylactic suttee, the wife immolating herself before the husband’s expected death in battle), most famously at Chitorgarh, to save women from a fate worse than death at the hands of conquering enemies. Numerous sati stones, memorials to the widows who died in this way, are found all over India; one of the earliest definitively dated records is a 510 CE inscription from Eran, in Madhya Pradesh. Most of the suttees seem to occur at first in royal Kshatriya families and later among Brahmins in Bengal, but women of all castes could do it. In 1823, for example, 234 Brahmin women, 25 Kshatriyas, 14 Vaishyas, and 292 Shudras were recorded as satis.5

  To a Euro-American, such women are widows, though from the Hindu standpoint, a sati is the opposite of a widow. A widow is a bad woman; since it is a wife’s duty to keep her husband alive, it is ultimately her fault if he dies and dishonorable for her to outlive him; to the degree to which she internalizes these traditional beliefs, she suffers both shame and guilt in her widowhood. A sati, by contrast, is a good woman, who remains a wife always and never a widow, since her husband is not regarded as dead until he is cremated (or, occasionally, buried), and she goes with him to heaven.6

  Different scholars confronting suttee, like the blind men who encountered the elephant in the middle of the room, see a different beast depending on what part they grasp.7 Onekk calls it a sacrifice and asks: What were the ancient and persistent traditions that drove some widows to do it voluntarily and other men and women to force other widows to do it involuntarily? Anotherkl calls it murder and asks: Can suttee be explained by the more general mistreatment of women by men in India, particularly female infanticide and dowry murders of daughters-in-law (killing one wife so that the man can marry another and get another dowry)? Anotherkm calls it widow burning and asks: Why did the British first loudly denounce suttee, then covertly sanction it, and then officially ban it? This chapter will be concerned primarily with this third question, though we cannot ignore the other two and will begin with them. We will then consider similar complexities that dog the Raj record on issues such as cow protection, (non)violence, addiction to opium and alcohol, and the treatment of the lowest castes.

  DID SHE JUMP OR WAS SHE PUSHED?

  Eyewitnesses, both English and Indian, speak with different voices, sometimes of coercion—of women who tried to run away at the last minute and were dragged back, held down with bamboo poles, and weighted down with heavy logs designed to keep them from escaping—and sometimes of willing, joyous submission. But the one voice that we most want to hear in this story seems to be missing: the voice of the woman in the fire. To Gayatri Spivak’s ovular question, “Can the subaltern speak?” (the subaltern being in this case the disenfranchised woman), my answer is yes. But that does not mean that we can hear her speak. The satis who are said to have wanted to die and succeeded did not live to tell the tale; the balance of extant testimony is therefore intrinsically slanted in favor of those who successfully escaped. Their voices tell us that the widow was forced to do it (by relatives who wanted her jewelry or feared that she would dishonor them by becoming promiscuous) or that she preferred an early, violent death (often very early indeed, as many were widowed in their early teens) to the hardships of the life of a widow in India. Thus, in dramatic contrast with the multivocality of all the other players in this grim drama, almost every widow whose speech is noted by the colonial records is said to have given the same explanation: material suffering. Economic hardships may indeed have contributed to the spread of suttee. But this argument, that suttee occurred because widows had nothing, is contradicted by the argument that it occurred precisely because they had too much; the larger incidence of suttee among the Brahmins of Bengal, particularly from 1680 to 1830, was due indirectly to the Dayabhaga system of law that prevailed in Bengal, where, unlike in most of the rest of India, widows were entitled to their husbands’ share of family lands and wealth8—wealth that would revert to the sati’s husband’s family after her death.

  There were also religious reasons for a woman, or her relatives, to choose suttee. Many observers, both English and Indian, testified that women insisted on performing suttee, despite serious attempts, by both British officials and Indian relatives, to dissuade them. What was the religious ideology that might have motivated either the woman herself or the people forcing her to do it, or both? A woman might perform such an action for her own, personal, religious reasons (rebirth in heaven, or Release) or nonreligious reasons (depression, guilt, hardship, the desire to honor her husband and her family or to ensure a better life for her children) or involuntarily for someone else’s nonreligious reasons (the reasons of her family, forcing her to do it so that they could get her money) or for their religious reasons (to satisfy their own ideas about the afterlife). Some women, as we shall see, even used suttee as a weapon of moral coercion to reform their husbands.

  The crass Materialist hypothesis hardly does credit either to these women or to their religion; to argue that all of the satis were coerced, either driven to suicide or simply murdered, makes them victims rather than free agents, victims of male ventriloquism or false consciousness, an uncomfortable position for either a feminist or a relativist to assume. Taking the religious claims seriously gives the satis a marginally greater measure of what feminists call agency and I would call subjective dignity. It views them as individuals who made choices, who believed in what they were doing. The religious goal of some of these women may have been what they said it was: rebirth with their husband in heaven or again on earth or ultimate Release from rebirth. Some of them probably meant it when they said they wanted to die with their husbands (death for a Hindu is a very different prospect than it is for Christians and Jews), and feminists have taught us that it is sexist to disregard women’s words.

  Every ritual needs its myth, and the image of the suttee as sacrifice is supported by two myths, neither of which in fact describes an act of suttee. The first is the ancient Sanskrit tale of the goddess Sati, who entered a fire that was, significantly, not the pyre of her husband, Shiva, who never dies: She spontaneously ignited herself in protest when her father, Daksha, failed to invite Shiva to his sacrifice. A second myth, often used to justify the claim that a true sati does not suffer, is the tale of Sita, who entered a fire (again, not her husband’s pyre) to prove her chastity and felt its flames as cool as sandalwood. The mythology of the ordeal by fire implied that, like Sita, a truly “good woman” would feel no pain (and many
of the reports, including British reports, insisted that the women did not feel any pain), proving that she was not guilty of infidelity or any other failure as a wife, and if she did suffer, she was assured, her pain would destroy the bad karma of her evident guilt. But a suttee differs significantly from an ordeal; guilty or innocent, the sati cannot survive. And these myths were twisted into support for the idea of widows’ immolation only at a fairly late date, while other mythological women were sometimes taken as paradigmatic satis instead.9

  Any explanation of suttee must address the essential question of gender. True, there are many instances, in both myth and history, of Hindu men who sacrificed themselves in fire, but not on the pyres of their wives. Why not? The answer to this question must contextualize suttee as an aspect of the more general male desire to control women’s sexuality, in which light suttee emerges not merely as a religious tradition but as a crime against women who are the scapegoats of a sexist society. Since Hindu texts blamed women for the sexual weakness of men, one danger posed by a widow was that she was a loose cannon, a hazard both to men and to her family, which she would dishonor were she unfaithful to her dead husband.

  The traits of sexism are, however, recognizably cross-cultural; women have been beaten to death by their husbands and even burned alive (sometimes as witches) in countries where there is no suttee mythology of women and fire. To explain why the abuse of women takes the particular form that suttee assumes in India, we must therefore invoke, after all, the powers of a religious mythology of marriage, death, and rebirth. Once again we need a Zen diagram, allowing for the intersection of Materialist, feminist, and religious concerns.

  Are we forced, after all, to choose between crass materialism and religious self-justification? I think not. Here we must consider the question of women’s subjectivity, the subaltern’s voice. These women were not a homogeneous group of mindless victims or soulless fanatics, but individuals who made various choices for various reasons and had many voices and cannot be sorted into two tidy groups of those who jumped and those who were pushed. Some were murdered for land or money or family honor; some sacrificed themselves for religious reasons; some committed suicide out of guilt, despair, or terror. Some resisted, and ran away, and lived to tell the tale; some tried to resist and failed; some tried to die and failed; some were unable to resist; some did not want to resist. What they all had in common is what they reacted to, the culture, the ideal of what a woman should be and do, a story that they all knew, though some believed it and some did not. That culture too was hardly monolithic; the woman who so impressed the Dutch admiral in 1770 was up against forces very different from those faced by the women who grew up singing ballads praising the immolation of entire royal households in Rajasthan or by those who learned on television about the much publicized, and protested, suttee of a woman named Rup Kanwar on September 4, 1987, at Deorala, in Rajasthan.

  RAMMOHUN ROY AND THE BRAHMO SAMAJ

  With these issues in mind, we can go back and consider what some people in nineteenth-century India tried to do about suttee.

  Raja Rammohun Roy (1774-1833), a Bengali Brahmin who knew Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, in addition to his native Bangla (Bengali), was a major voice raised in opposition to suttee. Roy read the scriptures of many religions, only to find, he said, that there was not much difference between them. In 1814 he settled in Calcutta, where he was prominent in the movement that advocated education of a Western type, urging Hindus to learn mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and “other useful sciences.”10

  Roy always wore the sacred thread that marked him as a Brahmin, and he kept most of the customs of a Brahmin, but his theology was surprisingly eclectic. (He may also have been the first Hindu to use the word “Hinduism,” in 1816.11) His intense belief in strict monotheism and his aversion to the sort of image worship that characterized Puranic Hinduism (puja, temple worship, pilgrimage) began early and may have been derived from a combination of monistic elements of Upanishadic Hinduism, then Islam and, later, eighteenth-century deism (belief in a transcendent Creator God reached through reason), Unitarianism (belief in God’s essential oneness), and the ideas of the Freemasons (a secret fraternity that espoused some deistic concepts). He was one of the first upper-class Hindus to visit Europe, where he made a great hit with the intelligentsia of Britain and France. In 1828 he founded the Brahmo Samaj (“Society of God”), based on the doctrines of the Upanishads, several of which he had translated into Bangla in 1825.12

  Roy wrote two tracts against suttee, publishing each first in Bangla and then in his own English translation. The first was A Conference between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows Alive, which he published in two parts, in 1818 and 1820.13 It was written in the form of a dialogue between an advocate and his opponent—the classical Hindu bow to diverse arguments. Roy denounced suttee from the standpoint of scripture and Hindu law,14 arguing against it even when it was voluntary and, as such, faithful to “the scriptures”; he advocated ascetic widowhood instead.15 Though he was unwilling to endorse government interference in matters of religion, his writings may have been a major factor prompting the British to take action against suttee in 1829. In 1830 Roy published a tract entitled Abstract of the Arguments Regarding the Burning of Widows Considered as a Religious Rite and, later, Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females, a tract on women’s rights to property (a right that married women did not have in England until 1882), based on a reading of both the main commentary on Manu (by Mitakshara) and Dayabhaga law (the Bengal marriage code).

  After Roy’s death in 1833, Debendranath Tagore became leader of the Brahmo Samaj and, like Roy, vigorously opposed the practice of suttee, as did his son Rabindranath (though Rabindranath “treated the ideas behind it respectfully”). 16 The third leader of the Brahmo Samaj, Keshab Chunder Sen, abolished caste in the society and admitted women as members.

  STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

  As for the British, on the issue of reform in general and suttee in particular, they were divided in several ways. Edmund Burke, a conservative, insisted that India was fine as it was, admired its religion and customs, and advised a hands-off policy; he sided with Sir William Jones and the Orientalists, who wanted to educate Indians in their own tongues and their own literatures, and he led the move to impeach Warren Hastings. On the other side, James Mill, a liberal, insisted that India suffered from arrested development and that the British had a duty to intervene and interfere; the Utilitarians sided as usual with Anglicists such as Macaulay, who wanted to teach the Indians about European literatures, in European languages, but on this issue of interference, they also sided with the evangelicals. The colonial bureaucrats were divided on the political costs of intervening in suttee, the Baptist missionaries took very different stances in addressing British and Indian audiences, and European eyewitness accounts of widow burning ricocheted between horror and fascination. One can hardly speak of a European consensus.

  The two basic factions among the British also aligned themselves along the divide between, on the one hand, the basic terms of Cornwallis’s pact in 1793, the promise not to interfere in religion in India (an early antecedent of Star Trek’s prime directive), sympathetic to the Orientalist/Conservative position, and, on the other hand, ideas of universal human rights, which often amounted to their desire to bring Enlightenment rationality to India, the Anglicist position (or even to bring Christianity to them, the evangelical position). The debate over whether suttee was religious (which also argued that it was painless; version B, above: She felt no pain, she really believed it, went willingly) or secular political/economic (and therefore painful; version A: They murdered her, presumably for the money, and she fought and screamed) meant that the British were driving with one foot on the brake and one on the accelerator: If suttee was religious, the prime directive would keep the British out; if it was secular, murder was being committed, and it was the duty
of the British to prevent the Hindus from burning their women.

  The Hindus were also divided in complex ways, and the grounds shifted in the arguments that they made for and against suttee in response to colonial discourse. The British thought that the various Hindu reform movements canceled one another out,17 but they misunderstood the nature of Hinduism; each side raged on against the other(s), gaining rather than losing strength from the opposition. On one side were those who supported a strict enforcement of the caste system, held on to their old ways, and opposed any change in caste customs, including antisuttee legislation. On another side were the radicals, who included in their ranks both militant Hindus, who advocated violence, and college-educated students who renounced Hinduism, aped the British, became Anglophile Christians, ate beef and drank beer. Somewhere in between the extremes of both Indians and Europeans, Rammohun Roy and the Indian Liberal movement opposed child marriages and suttee, preached nonviolence, and tried to build a new world that would combine the best of Hindu and Christian/British values.

  The national press in India nowadays marches “in lockstep with the colonial legislator who abolished the custom of widow-burning in 1829.”18 Nationalist historians, despite their otherwise anticolonial bias, have accepted this part of the colonial viewpoint, thus aligning themselves with the Christian missionaries, whom they otherwise generally despise. On the left are the new, secular Indian elites, who engage in “internal colonialism” by protesting against the backlash of a Hinduism that they stigmatize as superstitious, socially retrograde, and obscurantist. On the right are the other sort of nationalist who use suttee as the banner of “Hindu-tva” (Hinduness) to oppress not only women but Muslims and dissidents.

  Fast-forward: When it comes to suttee, we too are strange bedfellows, caught between two contemporary value systems. On the one hand, the increasingly popular concept of universal human rights challenges previous scholarly attempts to be value free and brings its adherents uncomfortably close to the camp of the British. On the other hand, such values as moral relativism or respect for other cultures condemn the British as white men saving brown women from brown men.kn19 Allan Bloom, in his conservative book The Closing of the American Mind (1987), began his attack on moral relativism with the example of suttee: “If I pose the routine questions designed to confute [the students] and make them think, such as, ‘If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?,’ they either remain silent or reply that the British should not have been there in the first place.”20 I disagree. Some years ago, when I was invited to teach a class about India to a group of high school students on the South Side of Chicago, I told them about suttee and put Bloom’s question to them, and their unanimous reply was: “I would not interfere; I would not mess with someone else’s religion.” This answer, which shocked me at the time, came, I eventually realized, out of the Chicago students’ own experience of identity politics. But moving beyond the chauvinist British attitude (white men saving brown women from brown men) and then also beyond the relativist reaction (“I would not mess with someone else’s religion”), we might aspire to a more complex synthesis, balancing our respect for the Hindus as complex moral beings, many of whom protested against suttee, with our own sense of human rights. The best we can do is to question the deeper motives of the British, the Hindus, and ourselves.