The Description of Sati In Ibn Battuta's Travelogue: From a Structuralist's Viewpoint

2011

The immolation of a widow on her late husband’s funeral pyre, which became known as sati, is considered to be the strongest expression of marital velour that a woman could demonstrate. It was declared illegal in 1829 by the British. Due to the low status of women in India, it is often the only way a widow will be revered following the passing of her husband and therefore often considered the only option appropriate. A prominent case of sati that has occurred within recent years has been the immolation of Roop Kanwar in the village of Rajasthan during September of 1987. With this case in view, Sati has become a modern phenomenon, and the reactions towards Roop Kanwar suggest that Sati is not wholly embodied within Hindu culture. Supporters of Sati are from the Rajput community and even then there is a definite line between the worship of Sati and the actual practice of it.

Parisheelan an International Research Journal (ISSN: 0964-7222), 2014

History Workshop Journal, 1993

History Workshop Journal arguments, the differences in what is at stake in the three most substantial bodies of writings on sati: the first being the colonial debate on widow immolation, the second the work of feminists working in the Western academy (both diasporic Indians and non-Indians), and the third is the spate of writings produced in India following the burning of a young woman, Roop Kanwar, in the village of Deorala, Rajasthan, in October 1987. These historical and conceptual differences, I shall suggest, are crucial to our reconceptualising the burning widow as neither an archetypal victim nor a free agent, and to analysing the inter-connections between colonialism and its aftermath. In order to trace the roots and trajectories of the different ideologies and representations of widow immolation, I shall move freely between these three sets of writings. Despite widespread references to sati, there were surprisingly few extended studies of it between Edward Thompson's well-known colonial commentary on the subject published in 1928 and the Deorala episode in 1987.4 Even now, apart from Lata Mani's work, the most thought-provoking accounts have been shorter essays, although several book-length studies are now available.5 Curiously too, the most prestigious historians of colonial India (either British or Indian) have not written at any length on the subject, and nor does the influential revisionist series Subaltern Studies deal with it.6 There is no conclusive evidence for dating the origins of sati, although Romilla Thapar points out that there are growing textual references to it in the second half of the first millenium A.D.7 It began as a ritual confined to the Kshatriya caste (composed of rulers and warriors) and was discouraged among the highest caste of Brahmins. She suggests that it provided a heroic female counterpart to the warrior's death in battle: the argument was that the warrior's widow would then join him in heaven. The comparison between the widow who burns herself and heroic male deaths has been a recurrent feature of the discourse on sati from the earliest comments till the present day and has been used to distinguish sati from mere suicide: the argument is that the sati, like the warrior, dies positively for something, instead of negatively to escape a miserable life.8 Such a comparison obviously deflects attention from the miserable fate that awaited, and still threatens most Indian widows; it also led to the contention that the heroic sati feels no pain in death. Thapar suggests a correlation between the rise of sati and the decline of niyoga or the practice of a widow being married to her dead husband's brother; widow immolation reduced the possibilities of women marrying others within the family, or outsiders, and thus creating complications regarding inheritance. In a useful commentary on sati, Dorothy Stein points out that it was not unique to India: 'there are accounts of widow sacrifice among the Scandinavians, Slavs, Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, Finns, Maories and some American Indians'.9 This was Edward Thompson's view too: 'the rite' he says, 'belongs to a barbaric substratum which once overlay the world, including India'.%0 Like several others of his time (notably, for example, Rider Haggard), Thompson subscribes to the idea of a globally shared and primitive past from which Europe had emerged and from which England could liberate India too. This notion of sati being a sort of global practice is also an idea that recent'writers like Ashis Nandy return to, in their attempt to read widow immolation as the result of [a universal] male anxiety about female sexuality.'1 The earliest historical record of widow burning is a Greek commentary on the death of a Hindu general in a battle with the Greeks in 316 B.C. The elder of his two wives was not allowed to burn because of 'her condition' (which could mean she was either pregnant or menstruating). The death of the younger one is described in some Dead Women Tell No Tales 211 detail, especially her clothing and her ornaments, and the commentator concludes that she 'ended her life in heroic fashion.... The spectators were moved, some to

International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2020

Revista Científica Arbitrada de la Fundación MenteClara, 2016

Este artículo analiza el tantra hindú y la adoración de la diosa en el noreste de la India. Para esto se vale de varias de las ideas de Bataille sobre el erotismo, el sacrificio y la transgresión, al tiempo que las repiensa de manera crítica. Específicamente, analiza la adoración de la diosa Kamakhya y su templo en Assam, que es venerado como uno de los más antiguos «centros de poder» o asientos de la diosa en el sur de Asia y como el centro del órgano sexual de la diosa. En muchos sentidos, el trabajo de Bataille es extremadamente útil para comprender la lógica de la transgresión y el uso de la impureza en esta tradición. Al mismo tiempo, sin embargo, este ejemplo también pone de manifiesto algunas tensiones en el trabajo de Bataille, especialmente, la cuestión de la sexualidad femenina y la representación de las mujeres. En el caso del tantra asamés, la sexualidad femenina juega un papel central e integral en los fenómenos más amplios de la transgresión, los gastos y el éxtasis en la experiencia religiosa. Como tal, se puede poner fructíferamente en diálogo con el trabajo de Bataille para una «teoría de la religión» crítica en la actualidad. Abstract This article examines Hindu Tantra and goddess worship in northeastern India, by using but also critically rethinking several of Bataille’s insights into eroticism, sacrifice, and transgression. Specifically, the article examines the worship of the goddess Kamakhya and her temple in Assam, which is revered as one of the oldest “power centers” or seats of the goddess in South Asia and as the locus of the goddess’s sexual organ. In many ways, Bataille’s work is extremely useful for understanding the logic of transgression and the use of impurity in this tradition. At the same time, however, this example also highlights some tensions in Bataille’s work, particularly the question of female sexuality and women’s agency. In the case of Assamese Tantra, female sexuality plays a central and integral role in the larger phenomena of transgression, expenditure, and ecstatic religious experience. As such, it can be fruitfully put into dialogue with Bataille’s work for a critical “theory of religion” today.

Victorian Literature and Culture, 1997

My title brings together two cultures — Indian and British — and three phases of womanhood — the bride, the widow, and — through suttee — the dead widow. Suttee, or sati, is the obsolete Hindu practice in which a widow burns herself upon her husband's funeral pyre. In this essay I wish to explore how sati was used as a metaphor in British novels and periodicals in the nineteenth century — used both as a metaphor for the British widow's mourning rituals and for the plight of the British bride in an unhappy marriage. I shall argue that sati forms a nexus connecting the seemingly disparate situations of the bride and widow, and that it also in this metaphorical sense forms a nexus or point of comparison between British and Indian culture.

he abolition of sati by the British in 1829 has become a founding moment in the history of women in moder India.' The legislative prohibition of sati was the culmination of a debate during which 8,134 instances of sati had been recorded mainly, though not exclusively, among upper caste Hindus, with a high concentration-63 percent-in the area around Calcutta City.2 The debate, initiated primarily by colonial officials, is regarded as signifying the concern for the status of women that emerges in the nineteenth century. Colonial rule, with its moral civilizing claims, is said to have provided the contexts for a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of Indian "tradition" along lines.