THE RAJ RIDES TO THE RESCUE
Others before Rammohun Roy, including Akbar and Jahangir, had tried in vain to curtail suttee, and the British involvement in such reforms came from such mixed impulses that it was foredoomed to miscarry.
Every British schoolchild was once taught the story: “In 1829 the British government in India put an end to the Hindu practice of suttee, their moral outrage at this barbaric violation of human rights outweighing their characteristic liberal tolerance of the religious practices of people under their benign rule.” But almost every element in this credo is false. True, a law was passed in India in 1829 making it illegal for widows to be burned with their husbands, but moral outrage was not the predominant factor in the British decision to outlaw suttee, nor did they succeed in ending it. On the contrary, the fear of offending high-caste Hindus serving in the British army and civil service, and concern about the political costs of legal interdiction, had led the British for many years to sanction suttee under some circumstances (as long as the woman had no childrenko and persuaded the magistrate that she was acting of her own free will), thus effectively encouraging it by giving it a legal support it had never had before, making it a colonially enhanced atavism.
In 1680 the Governor of Madras prevented the burning of a Hindu widow, and ten years later an Englishman in Calcutta was said to have rescued a Brahmin widow from the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre and taken her as his common-law wife.21 After that the British generally looked the other way where suttee was concerned. The same Orientalist spirit that led the British to mistake the idea for the reality, wrongly assuming that Hindus were following the dharma-shastras, led them to believe that they should not hinder but help the Hindus do as their scriptures dictated, and do it right. As usual they reached for Manu, but when for once he let them down—Manu is big on ascetic widowhood but does not mention suttee—they found some Bengali scholars who argued that the part of Manu advocating the burning of widows had somehow been left out of the Bengal manuscripts, so they helpfully put it back in.22 (Most of the dharma texts do not mention suttee, concentrating instead on ascetic widowhood; several condemn it in no uncertain terms; and a few late commentaries kp argue for it.23) And so, on April 20, 1813 (the same year the missionaries were allowed in), a British circular proclaimed that suttee was meant to be voluntary and that it would be permitted in cases in which it was countenanced by the Hindu religion and prevented when the religious authorities prohibited it, as when the woman was less than sixteen years old, pregnant, intoxicated (a point worth noting), or otherwise coerced. In fact, there was a dramatic increase in the number of suttees from 1815 to 1818, the first three years of data collection and the first five years after the circular was published; the toll went from 378 to 839 cases. After that, the numbers declined and then fluctuated between 500 and 600. The 1817-1818 cholera epidemic may have increased the numbers, with more men dead and more widows to die with them, or the clerks may have refined their methods of data collection. But there was also a suspicion that the numbers grew because of government intervention: They had authorized it (their work made it seem as if “a legal suttee was better than an illegal one”) and given it interest and celebrity (so that, as in the case of Rup Kanwar in 1987, there were copycat suttees).24
And when the British did intervene in suttee, the results were often counterproductive. For instance:
THE SLOW-BURNING FIRE
A certain Captain H. D. Robertson, Collector of Poona in 1828, learned that a botched suttee had allowed the pyre to burn too slowly, causing the would-be sati to escape in agony. She requested that they try again; again it was botched; British officers finally intervened, and she died twenty hours later. Robertson investigated and determined that “Hindu scriptures” did stipulate that such slow-burning grass should be used, though it seldom was. He decided that if the British were to insist that this text be obeyed to the letter, the realization that suttee would now invariably produce a slow burn, increasing the agony, would discourage women from undertaking it. But one woman did still commit suttee, despite attempts to dissuade her, and Robertson was zealous in carrying out what he saw as his duty.25
What Joseph Conrad called the reformer’s compassion here went horribly awry.
Finally, in 1829, the year after Robertston’s intervention, several years after prominent Brahmins had already spoken up against suttee, and at a time when there were many Indians in the legislature and William Bentinck, an evangelical sympathizer, was Governor-General (1828-1835), the desire to justify their continuing paternalistic rule over Indians whom they characterized as savage children led the British to ban suttee altogether, as well as child marriage, with much self-aggrandizing fanfare.
The British law probably facilitated more women’s deaths than it saved, and its main effect was to stigmatize Hinduism as an abomination in Christian eyes.26 Suttee is a pornographic image, the torture of a woman by fire, hot in every sense of the word. Relatively few women died that way, in contrast with the hundreds, even thousands who died every day of starvation and malnutrition, but suttee had PR value. Thus the Raj had it both ways, boasting both that it did not interfere with other people’s religions and that it defended human rights. The debate, in both India and Britain, turned what had been an exceptional practice into a symbol of the oppression of all Indian women and the moral bankruptcy of Hinduism. Nor did the 1829 law, or, for that matter, the new legislation enacted by India after its Independence put an end to it; at least forty widows have burned since 1947, most of them largely ignored until the suttee of Rup Kanwar in 1987 became a cause célèbre, and some even now attested only in obscure local archives.
ROMANCING SUTTEE
Some of the British, sympathetic to one Hindu view, compared the satis with Christian martyrs or the heroic suicides at Masada—death rather than dishonor, better dead than red, and so forth. Other Europeans romanticized suttee in other ways. Abraham Roger, in 1670, recorded a local story:
INDRA TESTS A SATI
Indra, the Vedic king of the gods, came to earth as a man and visited a whore, to test her faith. He paid her well and they made love all night. In the morning, he pretended to be dead, and she wished to be burned with him, despite the protests of her parents, who pointed out that she was not even the man’s legitimate wife. When the pyre was ready, Indra woke up, announced that it was just a trick, and took her to his heavenly world.27
We have seen Indra’s tricks before, but this Dutch author apparently has not. He mistakes suttee for the practice of a woman of the night, rather than the act of a chaste wife. Voltaire (who had gotten India wrong before) also seems to have missed the point: In Zadig (1747), he imagined a heroine about to commit suttee and suggested the enactment of a law forcing widows to spend an hour with a young man before deciding to sacrifice themselves. And an eighteenth-century French comic opera presented a Frenchman in India whose wife, an Indian woman who was unfaithful to him, feigned drowning in the hope that her husband would throw himself on her pyre.28
Richard Wagner staged suttee in his opera Götterdämmerung by having his heroine, Brünnhilde, ride her horse onto the flaming pyre of her beloved Siegfried. kq In an early draft of the opera (summer of 1856), Brünnhilde spouts a kind of garbled Vedanta (via the philosopher Schopenhauer, who had read Indian philosophy in German): “I leave the Land of Desire, I flee the Land of Illusion forever; I close behind me the open door of eternal Becoming. . . . Freed from rebirth, everything eternal . . . I saw the world end.”29 Thus some Europeans glorified the custom of suttee.
ANIMALS: DAYANAND SARASVATI, THE ARYA SAMAJ, AND COW PROTECTION
Since women and cows are closely linked in the Hindu imaginary, through the trope of purity, let us turn now to the issue of cow protection, which was the banner of the Arya Samaj even as suttee was for the Brahmo Samaj.
Dayanand Sarasvati (1824-1883) was trained as a yogi but steadily lost faith in yoga. He claimed to base his doctrines on the four Vedas as the eternal
word of god and judged later Hindu scriptures critically, denouncing image worship, sacrifice, and polytheism. After traveling widely as an itinerant preacher, in 1875 he founded the Arya Samaj, which rapidly gained ground in western India. Dayananda insisted that “those who read or listen to the Bible, Quran, Purana, false accounts, and poetic theory—books of ideas opposed to the Veda—they become sensuous and depraved.”30 The Arya Samaj further developed the ceremony for “reconversion”kr (called purification [shuddhi]) to bring “back” to the Vedic fold some Muslims who had never been Hindus at all, as well as to reconvert some recent Hindu converts to Islam.31 They used the same ceremony to “purify” Pariah castes.32 And they sought to distinguish themselves, as Aryans, from Hindus, who in their view (as in the British view) practiced a degraded form of Vedic religion.33
In 1893 internal disputes caused the Arya Samaj to split into two parties, sometimes called the Flesh-eating and Vegetarian parties. But the issue of vegetarianism arose before that in 1881, when Dayanand published a treatise called Ocean of Mercy for the Cow ( go-karuna-nidhi), and in 1882, when he founded a committee for the protection of cows from slaughter. For the next decade the Arya Samaj established cow protection societies all over British India. The first agitation over cow slaughter in the Raj took place in a Sikh state of the Punjab where cow slaughter had been a capital offense right up to the moment when the British took over.34 From then on, the issue challenged the legitimacy of British rule, though the immediate violence was directed against Muslims who killed cows, as they did during the Bakr-Id festival and after pilgrimages (though goats could also be sacrificed). The same debate that hedged British interference in suttee (if it was religious, they should not interfere, but if it was secular, they should) also hedged cow protection.35 In 1888 a British court in Allahabad ruled that a cow was not a sacred object, that Muslims who slaughtered cows could not be held to have insulted the religion of the Hindus, and that police were to protect Muslims who wanted to slaughter cows.
Cow protection societies continued to form the major plank of the Arya Samaj movement in North India, and cow slaughter was specifically used to justify violence against Pariahs and Muslims. Popular ballads and stories highlighted Kshatriya virtues embodied in acts of saving cows from the assaults of Muslim butchers, to whom Pariahs such as Chamars allegedly supplied cows. At the Bakr-Id festival of 1893, riots broke out involving the entire Hindu population of villages, and thousands of people attacked Muslims. In the 1920s, communal riots occurred around symbols of the cow. Cows continued to provide a lightning rod for communal violence from then until the present day.
VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE
VIOLENCE: DYER AT AMRITSAR
After World War I, India was a different world, but still the iconic massacres, like those surrounding the 1857 Rebellion, continued. It was 1919. There had been fierce protests against British rule, an orgy of arson and violence that left five Europeans dead. The British forbade all meetings and demonstrations. A peaceful group assembled in Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, an open space hemmed in by houses, to celebrate the feast day of Baisakhi. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched his troops in and, without any warning, gave the order to fire on the crowd; they ceased firing only when they ran out of ammunition. Because the British were blocking the only gate to the enclosure, the crowd was trapped. More than twelve hundred men, women, and children were seriously wounded, and three to five hundred were killed.
Dyer, who already had a reputation for brutality (he had had prisoners beaten, sometimes in public, and made Indians crawl on the street), was proud of what he had done. The House of Lords passed a measure commending him, and he was designated a “defender of the Empire.” Nor was he ever punished.ks But Winston Churchill referred to the massacre as “a monstrous event,” the British press expressed shocked outrage, and Dyer’s action was condemned worldwide. The House of Commons officially censured him, and he resigned in 1920. Tagore returned his Nobel Prize, and Nehru’s father abandoned his Savile Row suits and took to wearing Gandhian homespun.36
And the rest, as they say, is history: Indian nationalists, under the banner of the Congress Party, succeeded, after decades of often violent Indian protests and equally violent British reprisals (both imprisonments and executions), in winning independence from the British in 1947.
NONVIOLENCE: GANDHI
One of the key figures in the independence movement was Mahatma Gandhi, who reacted to Amritsar with one of his fasts against the British. Pleading for an honorable and equal partnership between Britain and India, held not by force but “by the silken cord of love,” he argued: “Fasting can only be resorted to against a lover, not to extort rights but to reform him, as when a son fasts for a father who drinks. My fast at Bombay and then at Bardoli was of that character. I fasted to reform, say, General Dyer, who not only does not love me, but who regards himself as my enemy.”37
Gandhi frequently used fasting as a weapon to reform (or coerce) others; on one occasion, he fasted to get Congress to agree to regard the Pariahs (whom he called Harijans [People of God]) as a Hindu community, and he succeeded; separate Harijan electorates were abolished, and more seats were reserved exclusively for Harijan members.38 Fasting, in the dharma texts, was usually a restoration for sins and errors, and Gandhi always had a strong sense of his own shortcomings; the fasting dealt with that too. Thus his fasting was intended first to control himself, then to control his own people, getting them to unite in protest but to pull back from violence; and then to control the British, getting them to let him out of jail on several occasions and, eventually, to quit India. He had more success with the British than with his own people.
Drawing on the nonviolent Jaina and Vaishnava traditions of his native Gujarat, Gandhi, who came from a merchant (Baniya) caste, developed the idea of what he called satya-graha—“holding firmly on to truth” (satya, like sati, derived from the verb “to be” in Sanskrit)—first in South Africa, on behalf of the Indian community there, and then in India, on behalf of the Harijans, elevating suffering and denial into a quasireligious discipline, like yoga or meditation. 39 He used fasting as a weapon of the weak40 against the British, as Indian women had used it against their husbands for centuries (often simultaneously withholding sexual access, locking themselves into the “anger room,” as Kaikeyi did in the Ramayana). Gandhi said that you cannot fast against a tyrant, that he fasted to “reform those who loved me.” Refuting the binary sexual attributes as the British generally applied them to male colonizers and feminized colonized subjects (the Rape of India syndrome), he made female fortitude, self-sacrifice, and self-control the model of national character for both men and women. Thus he invented a gendered nationalism that expressed an androgynous model of virtue,41 which he regarded as the essence of both bravery—indeed virility—and the female qualities of endurance and nonviolence.
Gandhi was a one-man strange bedfellow. His insistence on celibacy for his disciples caused difficulty among some of them, as did his habit of sleeping beside girls young enough to be called jailbait in the United States, to test and/or prove his celibate control or to stiffen his resolve. But this practice drew not so much upon the Upanishadic and Vaishnava ascetic traditions, which were the source of many of Gandhi’s practices, as upon the ancient Tantric techniques of internalizing power, indeed creating magical powers, by first stirring up the sexual energies and then withholding semen.
On the question of eating beef, Gandhi was also ambivalent. As a child he had heard popular poems recited by schoolboys: “Behold the mighty Englishman /He rules the Indian small,/Because being a meat-eater/He is five cubits tall.”42 Thus, in contradiction of the reasons to eat meat outlined in many Hindu texts, Gandhi felt as if the natural order—the laws of violence and power—required him to eat meat in order to defeat the British. But eating meat was not natural for Gandhi, who was raised in a Vaishnava family that practiced strict vegetarianism,43 in Gujarat, where Jainism was strong.
In the end Gandhi
used the image of calf love (vatsalya), the love of and for a mother cow, particularly the Earth Cow, Mother Earth, as a key symbol for his imagined Indian nation, and though he also tried to include Muslims in the family, cow protection was a factor in the failure of his movement to attract large-scale Muslim support. His attitude to cows was, however, an essential component of his version of nonviolence (ahimsa), which, in Gandhi’s hands, came to mean not just opposition to blood sacrifice but what others called passive kt nonresistance44 and I would call passive-aggressive nonresistance, against the British, without spilling their blood any more than an adherent of traditional ahimsa would spill the blood of a sacrificial animal.
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