1. The Event

On the 4^th of September 1987, Roop Kanwar (1969-1987), an Indian Rajput woman, was compelled to immolate herself in the village of Deorala in Rajasthan in India. The immolation, as was argued, was an act of sati; the Hindu practice where a widow, willfully or unwillingly, burnt herself alive in the funeral pyre of her deceased husband. Kanwar was 18 years old when this immolation took place, and her husband, 24 years old at the time, had died a day earlier. She was burnt alive on her husband’s pyre and was constituted as a sati after her death. Thousands of people came to visit Deorala as they identified it as a sacred site of pilgrimage. The death created a furor across India and led to the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act. Historian Radha Kumar (2014) points out how under the Draft Bill, sati was constituted as suicide and therefore the first person to be punished was the widowed woman herself. Further, during this time, the Hindu Right appropriated the language of (women’s) rights to offer their support for the heinous practice of sati (they used slogans like ‘Hum Bharat ke naari hai, phool nahin chingari hai’ which translates as ‘We are the women of India, we are not flowers but sparks’) (ibid.).

2. Ashis Nandy’s Intervention

The noted Indian psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural critic Ashish Nandy wrote an influential article in 1988 called ‘Sati in the Kali Yuga’, trying to understand the cultural politics and moral psychology associated with the event. He critiqued the urban middle class’s construction of the event as one bound exclusively by tradition. According to Nandy, the rite was within the ambit of tradition only to the extent that it was simultaneously very much a part of profit-based business cultures. Even under conditions when the widow decided to immolate herself independent of material aspirations, greed and hunger for status, he argued, often lead families to condone sati. Further, drawing from the art critic Ananda Coomaraswamy, Nandy challenged what he conceived as a misplaced hierarchy between self-immolation for modern and secular causes like revolution and nationalism and self-immolation informed by so-called outmoded cultural and religious causes.

Moreover, Nandy simultaneously broached a distinction between sati as system or pratha and sati as event or ghatana, i. e. between historical sati and mythical sati respectively. While he showed a significant amount of disdain towards sati as system/ pratha, he did want to retain the notion of sati as myth. A key example he offers here is the Indian poet-saint Kabir’s oft-used phrase ‘the impulse to sati’ as a metaphor for the devotees surrendering themselves to God. For him, as for a few other noted poststructuralist feminists, the desire to rest one’s honour in another person is not in itself an anti-feminist idea. It becomes anti-feminist only under patriarchal structures and formations. But the concept (of resting one’s own honour in the other) in itself need not be misogynist under all circumstances. Further, sati in the Indic tradition, for Nandy, was associated with the fear of women as it meant that men could not match the woman in the domains of will, authority and piousness. With capitalist modernity ushering in, the modes of non-economic powers that women wielded, declined, and gradually started getting devalued. Hence, as Nandy suggests, the implications of sati also became different. He notes that under conditions of rampant urbanization and consumer modernity, wherever women’s market value diminishes, her right to life also gets dwindled. Consequently, it is in those very places and historical contexts, that the practice of sati increased. He also shows how the practice of widow burning increases when women tend to hold economic powers within families and societies that are guided exclusively by contractual private property and self-interest-based relationships. For him, ‘the epidemic of sati’ (as system) was distinctly a consequence of the colonial encounter and the people who were impacted most by sati were the ‘uprooted westernized urban’ individuals. Nandy, in fact, adds that the ideology of sati (as system) does not produce sati, socio-economic conditions give rise to it. Further, as historians later noted about Nandy’s essay, he concludes by saying that since every culture produces its own pathologies, sometimes our choice will be to choose between pathologies. He wants to highlight the presence of 3,00,000 people in Deorala who visited the place as a site of pilgrimage with no palpable self-interest whatsoever. On the other end of the spectrum, Nandy notes, is the self-interested people who abetted Roop Kanwar’s suicide by making no attempt to bring her out of depression induced by the recent death of her husband. Nandy also expressed his severe discomfort with the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act of 1987; an Act that was put in place by the Parliament of India in 1988 in order to criminalize the aiding and/ or glorification of the practice of sati. According to him, this state-led gesture of criminalization did not differentiate between his aforementioned distinction between sati as a historical phenomenon and sati as a mythical event, collapsing the two, and thereby ended up criminalising both.

3. Sudhir Chandra’s Response: Female Victimhood and Sati

A series of criticisms, primarily launched by feminist scholars and activists, were levelled against Nandy for his positions on the incident in Deorala. However, in this blog, I will highlight one particular criticism that holds specific significance for the writing of histories of women’s welfare-related disparities (especially health and well being-related inequities) in India. This was historian Sudhir Chandra’s (1988) response in the prestigious Indian social sciences journal called the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW). A key point made by Chandra was that Nandy understates the gravity of the situation by repeatedly using the word ‘death’ to describe Roop Kanwar’s end. This understating, for Chandra, is irrespective of whether she is identified as a victim or as a martyr. Chandra expresses deep unease about the fact that Nandy, who is otherwise so conscious about the moral and social psychology of language, would use such a word to describe the event. Secondly, Chandra also argued that in our bereavement, we usually employ a language that is punctuated by ‘pain and anguish’, not one that is only ‘polemical and brazen’. However, Nandy here, according to Chandra, does the opposite. He says the following: ‘Nandy retains in a sombre situation like the one caused by Roop Kanwar’s “death” his characteristic panache for the polemical “kill”?’ (2078) Finally, Chandra expresses serious worry with Nandy’s tendencies to refer to the need to retain the idea of mythological sati (i. e. sati as a mythical event), within the context of Deorala.

4. Rammohan Roy, Sati and Female Murder

Finally, within this context, it is crucial to point out a key argument made by the Bengali social reformer Raja Rammohun Roy(1772–1833) in his arguments against widow immolation. Roy was the person who helmed the abolition of sati in colonial India in 1829. Insightful historians writing on the event (like Tanika Sarkar and Ranajit Guha) have highlighted how Roy, in order to uphold the prohibition of sati, was making a case for daya or compassion (directed at the widowed woman) that dwells at the limit of reason. However, a key yet lesser-known argument put forward by Roy was his relentless and sustained effort to persuade his opponent on the fact that a crucial way to identify sati is to recognize that it is essentially female murder (the attendant phrase mobilised by Roy is ‘the destruction of widows’). He, in fact, was repeatedly astonished at the sheer possibility of his opponent neglecting this simple fact of the matter. While formulating welfare-related laws and policies on women’s health and wellbeing (like the Sati Prevention Act itself), it is crucial to pay attention to this idea of female victimhood (even when the widow willingly immolates herself) that Rammohun Roy wanted to put forth, Chandra wanted to highlight, and Nandy, in a certain sense, ended up undermining. In the absence of this, there will be misdirected research inquiries where violence against women and women’s exploitation will be misidentified as ‘women’s choice’ induced by historical or cultural difference, and therefore remain grossly understated. Paying attention to this will help us gain deeper understanding of the role that female victimhood (induced by what Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex called ‘masculine bad faith’) often played, not just within the discourse of historical sati or sati as system, but even within the politico-discursive universe of (what Nandy’s sophisticated formulation identified as) mythical sati.

Key readings

Chandra, Sudhir (1988). ‘Sati in Kaliyuga’ in Economic and Political Weekly, 23(41), 2078.

Kumar, Radha (2014). The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800-1990. New Delhi: Zubaan.

Nandy, Ashis (1995). ‘Sati in Kaliyuga: The Public Debate on Roop Kanwar’s Death’ in The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 32-52.