Sati: The Virtuous Woman, the Chaste Wife, and the Immolated Widow in Colonial and Postcolonial India

Women's History, Episode #1 of 4. In 1987, the last reported instance of sati threw India into a maelstrom of furious debate and conflict following the ritual suicide of Roop Kanwar after her young husband’s death. Nearly 150 years earlier, British colonial officer Lord William Bentinck passed a prohibition on sati in British India. As Roop Kanwar’s death suggests, British colonial rule did not end the practice of sati in India - not at the time of that prohibition, not in the 30 years that followed as the British East India Company tried to expand their influence into the subcontinent Rajputs that were nominally autonomous, and not before, during, or after Indian independence. Widowed girls and women (and yes, we’ll come back to the specificity of girls and women later) continued to climb onto their dead husband’s funeral pyres and burn alive, whether because they believed it was their duty, because they felt they had no other choice, because they couldn’t face a future where their widowhood would be socially and culturally enforced until they died anyway, or because their religious fervor and/or grief moved them to suicide by fire. The history - and experience - of sati in India is complicated, made more so by the ham-fisted intervention of British colonialism, the rise of Hindu nationalism in the late nineteenth century, and the growth of a feminist movement - involving both European and Indian women - in the twentieth century.

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