Policing Sati: Law, Order, and Spectacle in Postcolonial India
Keywords:
sati, widow immolation, postcolonial state, Hindu law reform, 1950s India, rule of law, tradition, religious custom, independent nation-state, police recordsAbstract
This article explores the response of the postcolonial state to the question of widow immolation – sati. It demonstrates that the conversation on the practice of sati at the high point of Hindu law reform in the 1950s reflected the simultaneous pressures on the new democracy to establish rule of law while also accommodating the renewed reverence for tradition and religious custom in an independent nation state. Distinct from the colonial response to sati that treated women as either “helpless and pathetic” or “brave and valiant,” post-independence police records describe women committing sati mostly as “insane” or “not in their senses,” and yet chiefly responsible for their actions. The article contrasts administrative and parliamentary narratives of the crime. Local belief in miracles surrounding the performance of sati not only obscured the experience of the woman's suffering but also made collection of evidence in such a case particularly difficult. This rendered convictions of the abettors of such “painless suicide by insane women” weaker. Legal interventions in sati eventually prompted administrative responses to shift from emphasizing the “uncontrollability” of the spectacle to deeming the spectacle a necessary precondition in distinguishing a sati from suicide.
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Equivalent to ~ £48,000 today.
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The woman was a 16-year-old widow of a schoolteacher. The police learned that she had received permission from her family to commit sati at her husband's funeral pyre. Upon hearing this, SP Mr. Tripathi rushed to village with a small police force and succeeded in prevention.
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The Times of India, January 18, 1960. In Selwara Village in Madhya Pradesh, another 25-year-old woman accompanied her dead husband to the funeral pyre. The police only learned about the incident 2 days after it had taken place.
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Ibid.
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Sati, Goddess and the wife of Lord Shiva, who had died for the honor of her husband, reincarnated as Parvati, also wife of Shiva.
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A Hindu Nationalism political party based in Maharashtra.
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In 2018, a film on the mythological tale of queen Padmavati's sati to escape her capture by the Mughal Emperor Allauddin Khilji brought the practice back into public debate. The film-maker and actors received death threats from a Rajput organization called Karni Sena, which objected to the representation of Rajput women and in particular Queen Padmavati on the silver screen as a Muslim ruler's muse. This sparked a debate across the country about vigilantism as well as about freedom of creative expression that, ironically, glorified sati.
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