by Mark Tully
Prehlad Sharma said, ‘All this talk of progress since independence the politicians are always on about – what changes can you expect in forty years? We are a very old nation and we have our own ways. They have changed before and they are changing now, but forty years is a very short time. Rajiv Gandhi is talking about the twenty-first century. What can we say about that? How can we know about Rajiv Gandhi's life? His is a city life but ours is a village life, and that's different.’
Some of the young men of Prehlah's joint family were standing listening, but they let the old Brahmin do all the talking. I asked him whether he felt it was right to prevent worship of the sati. He replied, ‘That's the government ruling, and who can go against the government ruling? No one. The trouble is that our representatives in the government never come to ask us what we want, or what our view is.’
‘But do you approve of sati?’
‘Approve or not approve, what is there to approve? Some people who have a religious mind approve of it. It's a religious matter, and people do want to worship at the sati sthal [site] when they come here. We can see that they are religious people. They behave very well. Cars still come almost every day, although they can't go up to the shrine.’
Tej Pal Saini, the journalist who had been the first to reach Deorala after the sati, had come to the village with me. He had warned me that the villagers were extremely sensitive about the allegations that Roop Kanwar had been forced to commit sati, so I approached the subject in a roundabout way by asking the Brahmin whether he was upset by what had been written in the press. ‘Anyone can say what they want. It is their right,’ he replied. ‘Because of the press, it's our good fortune that we have become famous throughout the world.’
‘But the press – or at least some journalists – said that Roop Kanwar was drugged with opium and then dragged to the funeral pyre.’
‘Now look here. I ask you – this is a big village, it's an open place – can anyone do zabardasti [cruelty] here and it not be known? I mean, when there are cases of dowry deaths in towns, inside houses, witnesses come forward. Can it happen that no one would have seen Roop Kanwar being taken to her funeral by force and no one says anything about it? You know, in a village, if a man beats his child once, other men will stop him before he can beat him again. To burn someone is a very big thing, and do you really think that no one is going to stop that? The press thinks that we are very crude and cruel people, that we burn women. We are in fact very decent people.’
Prehlad Sharma had not been in the village on the day of the sati, but he sent one of his sons to call a farmer who had. The farmer, Arjun Singh, turned out to be an uncle by marriage of Roop Kanwar. He wore a red and white spotted flat turban, loosely tied in the Rajasthani style, and a vest which indicated that he had been working in the fields. The Brahmin warned me that Arjun Singh might be unwilling to talk, because all members of the family had been ‘terrorized’ by the press, but he seemed very anxious to defend the family. I asked him about reports that Roop Kanwar had been forced back on to the pyre. He replied, ‘It was not really possible to tell what happened at the cremation. There were so many people there; there was such a crowd and so much pushing and noise that no one can tell exactly what happened, but I am in the family of Roop Kanwar and I am certain that I would have known if it had been wrongly done.’
Arjun Singh felt very strongly about the allegations that had been made in the press: ‘They have given very wrong news. I have seen photos and seen it on the television where they have written that Roop Kanwar was given opium and then they burnt her. We are not the sort of people who burn women. It could not happen in my family. Some people have defamed us.’
It was about a five-minute walk from the cremation ground to the house where Roop Kanwar and her husband had lived. It too was built of concrete around a courtyard, but the young couple's room was in the front of the house and its door opened on to a verandah facing one of the village lanes. The house was empty. A peacock strutted across the empty verandah where once eager sightseers had jostled to get a view through the barred window of the small room in which Roop Kanwar was reported to have decided to commit sati. There were some faded decorations above the locked door and blue paintings of elephants on the yellow walls of the verandah. One villager said that Roop Kanwar's father-in-law was returning in a day or two, but no one was willing to say which members of the family still lived in the village or how much time they spent there. The whole village knew that murder charges had been brought against the father and other members of the family, and so they didn't want to give any information about them.
The lane I was walking down eventually widened into the village bazaar, which consisted of a few small shops and two or three handcarts from which vegetables were being sold. The bazaar could certainly not be described as bustling – there was no sign of the hectic commercial activity that Roop Kanwar's sati had sparked off last year. The cloth shop, which had a very meagre selection, was owned by Ram Gopal Aggarwal, who had recently been elected as sarpanch or head of the village council. He was a small, youngish man dressed in shirt and trousers, not the comfortable loose-fitting dhoti that the older generation all wore. He told me that he had not been in Deorala at the time of the sati, but he insisted that it had been voluntary.
‘There could not have been any force. Our people are educated – they wouldn't have allowed someone to be burnt like that. I am not in favour of sati. It shouldn't have happened, but it couldn't have happened by force.’
One of the allegations made against the villagers is that they supported the sati because it would make Deorala into a shrine, and that would attract a lot of business. The sarpanch was a bania or member of the trading caste himself, but he denied this allegation.
‘Who in this village is going to be able to take advantage of that sort of thing? When huge crowds came to worship Roop Kanwar, I had five stalls. All the rest of the stalls selling photographs and other souvenirs came from outside. Take those photographs of Roop Kanwar showing her on the funeral pyre with her husband. That was trick photography, and there is nowhere in this village where you can do that. They came from Jaipur. Actually, this is a very backward village commercially. You can see the bazaar. When the villagers want to buy anything out of the usual they go to Ajitgarh, which is a smaller village but has a much better bazaar.’
I said to the sarpanch, ‘But the government maintains that the villagers wanted to build a temple so that devotees would flock into the village regularly. Then that would surely have benefited you all.’
‘Yes, the government thinks that we wanted to build a temple. No one is interested. Anyhow, do you think that we can build a temple in a day? The only people who might be interested would come from outside.’
Although the sarpanch was elected on the ticket of Rajiv Gandhi's Congress Party, he clearly did not support the government line that greed had led to Deorala supporting a brutal murder. But then the sarpanch's links with the village are much closer than his links with the party. He also had a personal grudge against the authorities: the police sent to prevent the worship of Roop Kanwar had forcibly occupied the village dharamshala or rest house. ‘We must have a place for people to stay,’ he complained. ‘When we have weddings in the village and other functions, it is essential that there should be somewhere for people from outside to sleep.’
All the villagers I met at Deorala insisted that Roop Kanwar's death had been ‘voluntary’.
Dr Sharada Jain, a leading sociologist and champion of women's rights who teaches in the state capital, Jaipur, said to me, ‘Roop Kanwar's death could not have been an act of free will. She was murdered.’ Dr Jain is a formidably intelligent academic who does not suffer fools gladly. Doubt is not one of her weaknesses. When I pointed out that Rajput leaders had accused the women's protest movement she spearheaded of being Westernized, she snapped back, ‘It is totally false to say that we are Westernized women. The Rajputs have taken to Western ways much more than any other community
. The sati was not a question of tradition against modernity.’
Sharada Jain claimed that the sati was a conspiracy by three of the most important castes in Rajasthan, who shared a vested interest in it. ‘Take the family which committed this murder,’ she said. ‘They are Rajputs. They pride themselves on their tradition of chivalry and valour. In villages throughout Rajasthan, the Rajputs were once the main landowners. Now there is little opportunity for deeds of chivalry, the government has taken away much of their land, and so the Rajputs are in search of an identity. A sati by a woman of the Rajput caste was a tremendous boost to their morale and their image.’
The Rajputs are the warrior caste from which the great ruling families of Rajasthan came – the maharajas of Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Bikaner and Jaisalmer. They still provide a very fertile recruiting ground for the Indian army.
Sharada Jain went on to explain the Brahmins' vested interest in sati. ‘As the priests, their approval was necessary before Roop Kanwar's sati could be accepted. Brahmin's prestige still depends on their priestly role. They only come into the limelight when something unusual happens – a birth, a death, a marriage. They would certainly want to dip into something so unusual as a so-called sati.’
The third caste which benefited from the sati, according to Dr Jain, are the banias. ‘The banias’, she explained, ‘are a very rich and successful caste. You could say they are commercially very daring, but they are also basically superstitious. They are religious-minded, but their religion is based on luck. They would want to touch the ground where a sati was committed because they would believe it would bring them luck.’
Sharada Jain believes that these three castes combined to promote Roop Kanwar's death as sati. ‘The banias have the economic power, the Rajputs the political power and the Brahmins the power of religious knowledge. Is it right that a woman's identity should be controlled by these vested interests?’
That mention of a woman's identity is the crux of Sharada Jain's argument. She insists that, whatever actually happened in Deorala, it was the unjust social and pseudo-religious pressures on women in Rajasthan which led to the death of Roop Kanwar. For that reason, she argues that journalists and academics who have tried to find out whether the sati was voluntary or not have got it all dangerously wrong. She wrote in the Bombay-based Economic and Political Weekly:
The climax of the horror story in fact lies not in Deorala, or even in other parts of Rajasthan. It lies in the élitist ‘distanced’ quarters. It is from the urban educated élite that the oft repeated question came: ‘Did Roop Kanwar commit sati of her own will or was she forced?’ If, even at this level, the utter irrelevance of the question is not clear and if, even here, the condemnation or approval of the event depends on an answer to this question, then the focus of action has to be deliberated on with great care.
In one sense Sharada Jain is clearly right: it is not possible to justify anyone standing by and watching a woman burn herself, no matter how inspired by religious fervour she might be, no matter how ‘voluntary’ the act may be. But there is another aspect to this question. The villagers of Deorala could be described as misguided or superstitious if they stood by and witnessed what appeared to be a voluntary sati by a woman overcome by grief immediately after her husband's death and by religious fervour. On the other hand, if the villagers stood by and watched a young woman being dragged to the funeral pyre of her husband and then forcibly held down while she burnt, they can then only be described as condoning a public execution without any legal or religious sanction. There seems to me to be an important distinction between the two. The villagers of Deorala certainly feel there is, and they object to being seen as ‘people who burn women’.
The Rajasthan government already had adequate powers and experience to deal with a case of sati: there have been twenty-eight such incidents in Sikar and its two neighbouring districts since 1947. A senior official in Jaipur told me there was a standard practice. ‘Book the offenders under the Indian Penal Code, prevent puja or worship of the sati, and prevent the collection of donations.’
It was two days after the sati that the representatives of three women's organizations, including Sharada Jain, called on Mr Harideo Joshi, the chief minister of Rajasthan. They demanded that stern action be taken against those who abetted the sati, which they told the chief minister was a crime. He replied, ‘It is a matter of religion. I will do the needful.’ When they asked what that would be, the chief minister rang his bell and called for the next supplicant. Investigations were formally launched the next day, but the case was registered as one of abetment to suicide. This certainly did not satisfy the women's organizations: it was their contention that sati had to be murder, that Roop Kanwar could not possibly have chosen of her own free will to die on her husband's pyre. But what really angered them was that no attempt was being made to prevent the public celebration of the twelfth day after the sati: the date of the chunari ceremony, when the father and brothers of a woman who has been burnt with her husband place a coloured headcloth on a trident marking the spot where the cremation took place, which is considered a shrine of the goddess Sati.
The government was well aware of the mounting fervour in the village and the commercialization of the sati. Five days before the chunari ceremony was due to take place, the Times of India reporter wrote:
And now the ‘devotees’ come in teeming hordes, squatting atop jeeps and buses and spilling out of camel carts. They come from as far as Delhi and Jaipur to this remote village, to propitiate the goddess of Sati… Meanwhile, the village economy has got a shot in the arm… with an average of 10,000 pilgrims streaming in every day. Jeeps, buses and tractors ply twenty-four hours between Deorala and Ajitgarh, a village four kilometres away. The villagers, recognizing the opportunity to make a quick buck, have set up makeshift shops selling everything from coconuts, sugar canes and sweetmeats to photographs of the couple. A not-so-cleverly engineered photographic card displays Roop Kanwar holding the superimposed face of her husband, smiling resplendent, on the pyre. These crude reproductions are selling like hotcakes… The fervour will reach its climax at the ‘chunari mahotsav’ [festival]… the villagers expect more than one lakh [100,000] devotees on that day.
Still the government did nothing. The women organized a protest march, but it attracted only some 400 people, many of them well-known activists. That was no political threat to the government, and so it continued to regard the celebrations as a matter of religion. It was not until the day before the chunari ceremony, when the women's organizations got an injunction from the High Court ordering the Rajasthan government to prevent the ceremony taking place, that action was taken. Orders were sent to the local administration to control the situation, and senior officials of the police and the civil administration were dispatched to Deorala to enforce those orders. But a senior police officer told me they had been faced with an impossible situation. ‘We kept on getting messages from the government: only allow 400 to worship, then only allow forty, then only allow the immediate relatives. But what could we do? Thousands and thousands of people had already arrived and buses were pouring in from Delhi, from other states and from Rajasthan itself. There would have been a riot.’
In the end a deal was struck with the organizers of the ceremony. They agreed to bring it forward by a few hours, so that the authorities on the spot could claim they had been taken by surprise and could not prevent it. But it is quite clear that at no stage did the Rajasthan government actually attempt to prevent the worship of sati, as it should have done according to its own procedures. If it had done, it would not have told the officials on the spot to try to limit the number of worshippers: it would have ordered them to surround the sati sthal and prevent anyone putting that red chunari over the trident.
Why did an experienced politician like the chief minister of Rajasthan not forestall the chunari ceremony? Like most chief ministers belonging to the prime minister's Congress Party, Hari Deo Joshi was little more than a cipher, takin
g orders from party headquarters in Delhi, which in effect meant the prime minister's secretariat. Those orders didn't arrive until too late. Joshi was already facing a serious threat from disgruntled Congressmen in Rajasthan who appeared to enjoy the support of Rajiv Gandhi, and he was not going to risk offending a politically powerful community like the Rajputs on his own initiative.
The chunari celebrations were widely reported in the press and sparked off a series of predictable responses. The urban liberal intellectuals and journalists jumped into the fray on the one side; on the other side, Rajput leaders leapt to the defence of their community and its traditions.
Journalists – as fundamentalist in their blind faith in modernity as the young Rajputs were in their beliefs – fanned the flames. Promila Kalhan, a syndicated columnist, attempted to make the case that sati was caused by the life that Rajput widows were condemned by tradition to live. She quoted the most senior civil servant in the Rajasthan government as saying, ‘Men in their [Rajput] families consider it their prerogative to sexually abuse widows.’ The official later denied ever saying this. No one I talked to confirmed that this was part of Rajput custom. The veteran communist columnist Nikhil Chakravarty described the death of Roop Kanwar as ‘the murder of a young woman in the name of the outlawed superstitious practice of sati’. He went on to say, ‘Reports available now indicate that the hapless victim was repeatedly pushed into the raging funeral pyre by the thugs masquerading as the standard bearers of Rajput chivalry.’ He did not mention the reports which indicated that Roop Kanwar had committed sati voluntarily.
Praful Bidwai, writing in the Times of India, called sati ‘one of the more opprobrious rituals and inhuman customs of Indian society’. He then went on to accuse the Rajputs of attempting to use sati as a powerful symbol to promote their identity in Rajasthan. Very few journalists made any attempt to understand the point of view of the villagers of Deorala. One who did was Prabash Joshi, the editor of the Hindi daily Jansatta, which is widely distributed throughout northern India. In an editorial, he suggested that Roop Kanwar did commit sati of her own free will: