After making history with her book on the Ayodhya
controversy, Rama and Ayodhya (2013),
Prof. Meenakshi Jain adds to her reputation with the present hefty volume Sati. Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries,
and the Changing Colonial Discourse (Aryan Books International, Delhi 2016).
In it, as a meticulous professional historian, she quotes all the relevant
sources, with descriptions of Sati from the ancient through the medieval to the
modern period. She adds the full text of the relevant British and Republican
laws and of Lord Wiliam Bentinck’s Minute
on Sati (1829), that led to the prohibition on Sati. This book makes the
whole array of primary sources readily accessible, so from now on, it will be an
indispensible reference for all debates on Sati.
But in the design of the book, all this material is
instrumental in studying the uses
made of Sati in the colonial period. In particular, the missionary campaign to
rally support for the project of mass conversion of the Indian Heathens to the
saving light of Christianity made good use of Sati. This practice had a strong
in-your-face shock value and could perfectly illustrate the barbarity of
Hinduism.
Indignation
In the preface, Prof. Jain surveys the existing literature
and expresses her assent to some recent theories. Thus, Rahul Sapra found that Gayatri
Spivak’s observations, e.g. that the 19th-century British tried to remake
Indian society in their own image and used Sati as the most vivid proof of the
need for this radical remaking, don’t take into account the changing political
equation during the centuries of gradual European penetration. In the 17th
century, European traders and travellers mostly joined the natives in glorifying
the women committing Sati, whereas by the 19th century, they posed as chivalrous
saviours of the victimized native women from the cruel native men. This was
because they were no longer travellers in an exotic country and at the mercy of
the native people, but had become masters of the land and gotten imbued with a
sense of superiority.
Indians in large numbers, and especially the many
indefatigable but amateurish “history-rewriters”, tend to be defective in their
sense of history, starting with their seeming ignorance about the otherwise
very common phenomenon of change. When I hear these history-rewriters fulminate
against the West with its supposed evil designs of somehow dominating India
again, it seems that in their minds, time has frozen in the Victorian age.
Similarly here, there is not one monolithic Western view of Sati but, apart
even from individual differences of opinion, there are distinct stages, partly
because of the changing power equation and partly because internal changes in
the Western outlook have influenced the Western perception of things Indian. So
it takes a genuine historian to map out precisely what has changed and what
not, and which factors have effected those particular changes.
Then again, It is of course interesting to realize the
continuity between the present-day interference in Indian culture by Leftist
scholars like Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock and that of the British
colonialists: “We know best what is wrong with your traditions and we come to
save you from yourselves.”
In this respect, the changes in the Western attitude to Sati
run parallel to that regarding caste. Until the early 20th century, caste was
seen as a specifically Indian form of a universal phenomenon, viz. social
inequality. Nobody was particularly scandalized when in 1622, the Pope gave
permission to practise caste discrimination between converts inside the Church.
Around the time of the French Revolution, the idea of equality started catching
on, but only gradually became the accepted norm. At that point, it became
problematic that people’s status was said to be determined by birth. In this
case, determination by the inborn circumstance of being a woman, unequal in
rights compared to men, and never more radically unequal than in committing
Sati. After World War 2, the norm (henceforth called Human Right) of absolute
equality and increasingly of absolute individual self-determination made the
tradition of caste and of Sati too horrible to tolerate. Therefore, the
indignation about Sati is far greater today than when Marco Polo visited India.
Today, Sati is already a memory, but the commotion around the exceptional Sati
of 1987 gave an idea of the indignation it would provoke today.
Evangelization
In this case, an extra factor came into play to effect a
change in British attitudes to Sati. In Parliamentary debates about the East
India Company charter in 1793, there was no mention yet of Sati though it had
been described many times, including by Company eyewitnesses. But by 1829, Sati
was forbidden in all Company domains. This turn-around was the result of a
campaign by the missionary lobby.
Ever since the missionaries set out to convert the Pagans of
India, they made it their business to contrast the benignity of Christianity
with the demeaning atrocities of Heathenism. This was an old tradition starting
with the Biblical vilification of child sacrifice to the god Moloch by the
Canaanites. The practice was also attested by the Romans when they besieged the
Canaanite (Phoenician) colony of Carthage. The Bible writers and their
missionary acolytes present child sacrifice as a necessary component of
polytheism, from which monotheism came to save humanity. And indeed, we read
here how Rev. William Carey tried to muster evidence of child sacrifice too
(but settled for Sati as convincing enough, p.178)
In reality, the abolition of human sacrifice was a universal
evolution equally affecting Pagan cultures such as the Romans. In the case of
Brahmanism, it is speculated that the Vastu-Purusha concept (a human frame
deemed to underlie a house) is a memory of a pre-Vedic human sacrifice. Even if
true, fact is that in really existing Brahmanism, human sacrifice has not been
part of it for thousands of years; if it had, we would be reminded of it every
day. In this respect, Brahmanism was definitely ahead of the rest of humanity.
Not to idealize matters, we have to admit that, like the
Biblical writers, who used the vilification of the child-sacrificing Canaanites
as a justification to seize their land (and even to kill them all), Pagans who
had left the practice behind equally used the reference to it to score
political points. The Romans had practised human sacrifice within living memory
and then abolished it, so they were acutely aware of it and tried to exorcize
it from their own historical identity by rooting it out in conquered lands as
well. (This is the same psychology as among modern Westerners who remember
their grandfathers’ abolition of slavery and therefore feel spurred to support
or engineer the “abolition of caste” in India.) Using that mentality, Roman war
leaders would emphasize this phenomenon of child sacrifice among the
Carthaginias to portray them as barbarians in urgent need of Rome’s civilizing
intervention. Later Caesar would also demonize ashuman-sacrificers the Druids
of Gaul, another “barbarian” country the Romans “liberated” from its own
traditions after conquering it. Likewise, the Chinese Zhou dynasty justified
its coup d’état (11th century BCE)
against the Shang dynasty by demonizing the Shang as practising human
sacrifice.
This way, Sati came in very handy to justify an offensive in
India. Mind you, in a military sense India had partly been conquered already,
and British self-confidence at the time was such that the complete subjugation
of the Subcontinent seemed assured. The offensive in this case was not
military, its target was the Christianization of the East India Company, to be
followed by the conversion of its subject population. Around 1800, the Company
was still purely commercial and even banned missionaries: their religious zeal
might create riots, and these would be bad for business. So, the Christian
lobby had to convince the British Parliamentarians that the Christianization of
India was good and necessary, and therefore worthy of the Company’sactive or
passive support, namely to free the natives from barbarism. To that end, there
was no better eye-catcher than Sati.
Here I will skip a large part of Prof. Jain’s research,
namely into the details of the specific intrigues and events that ultimately
led to the success of the missionary effort. While these chapters are important
for understanding the Christian presence in India, and while I recommend you
read them, I have decided for myself to limit my attention for colonial history
as it is presently eating up too much energy, especially of the Hindus. The
study of colonial history is instructive and someone should do it, but for the
many, it is far more useful to study Dharma itself, to immerse yourself in
Hindu civilization as it took shape, rather than in the oppression of and then
the resistance by the Hindus. India is free now and could reinvigorate Dharmic
civilization, which is a much worthier goal than to re-live the comparatively
few centuries of oppression.
Let us only note that the missionaries are responsible for
associating Hinduism with Sati much more prominently than would be fair. The
missionary assault on Hinduism dramatized the practice of Sati, which had been
“an ‘exceptional act’ performed by a minuscule number of Hindu widows over the
centuries”, of which the occurrence had been “exaggerated in the nineteenth
century by Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries eager to Christianize and
Anglicize India”. (p.xix)
Krishna
Many Hindus believe that Sati is an external contribution,
probably triggered by the Muslim conquests. In reality, Sati is as old as
scriptural Hinduism. Already the Rg-Veda (10:18:7-8, quoted and discussed on
p.4--5) describes a funeral where the widow is lying down beside her husband on
the pyre, but is led away from it, back to the world of the living. So it
already provides a description of a Sati about to take place, as well as of the
Brahmanical rejection of Sati.
Likewise, the Mahabharata, the best guide to living
Hinduism, features several cases of Sati. Most prominent is the self-immolation
by Pandu’s most beloved wife Madri. Less well-known perhaps is that Krishna’s
father Vasudeva is followed on the pyre by four wives, and that Krishna’s death
triggers the self-immolation (in his absence) of five of his many wives. But
unlike Mohammed, Krishna need not be emulated by his followers. By contrast,
Rama’s influence on the women in his life is not such that they commit Sati (on
the contrary, his wife Sita comes unscathed out of the flames of her “trial by
fire”),-- and he counts as the perfect man, the model whose behaviour should
serve us as examplary.
The oldest foreign (viz. Greek) testimony on Indian Sati
reports on the death of an Indian general in the Persian army. His two wives
fought over the honour of climbing his funeral pyre. Both had a case: one was
the eldest, the other was not pregnant (whereas the eldest was, and should not
deprive the deceased man of his progeny). So the authorities had to intervene,
and they ruled in favour of the younger wife. It should be repeated, for the
sake of clarity, that “favour” here really means the honour of committing
self-immolation, as emphatically desired by the young widow.
Indeed, a woman wanting to commit Sati needed some
will-power, for Hindu society did not take this as a matter of course. A per
the many testimonies, she usually had to overcome the dissuasion from her
family and from worldly or priestly authorities. (But rather than leading her
away in chains for her own good, as modern psychiatrists would do, they give
her the decisive last word.) That is why the first British report on the
practice spoke of “self-immolation of widows”. Contrary to allegations of
“murderous patriarchy” by modern feminists (who hold the same ignorant
prejudices about Hindu culture as the average foreign tourist), women themselves
chose this spectacular fate.
Contrary to a common assumption, the practice was not confined
to the Rajputs or to the martial castes in general, where passion and bravery
were prized. Prominent Hindu rulers like Shivaji Bhonsle and Ranjit Singh were
followed on their pyres by a big handful of wives and concubines. Among the
lower castes, like among the Muslims, life usually resumed and a widow soon
remarried, not to let any womb go to waste. But nevertheless, a British survey
in Bengal found that no less than 51% of Sati women belonged to Shudra
families. Among the other upper castes, and among the majority of women even in
the martial castes, widows would be confined to a life of service and asceticism.
But no matter how rare the actual practice of Sati, it remained a glamorous
affair, honoured among the Hindu masses with commerorative stones (sati-kal)
and temples (sati-sthal).
Hindu Sati?
Sati was not confined the Hindu civilization. It existed elsewhere,
both in Indo-European and in other cultures. Rulers in ancient China or Egypt
are sometimes found buried with a number of wives, concubines and servants. In
pre-Christian Europe, the practice was related (directly, not inversely) to the
status of women in society: not at all in Greece, where women were very subordinate,
but quite frequently among the more autonomous Celtic women. Among the Germanic
people, a famous case is that of Brunhilde and her maidservants following
Siegfried into death. Yet Indian secularists preferentially depict Sati as one
of the unique “evils of Hindu society”.
The only shortcoming is this wonderful book is not a mistake
but a hiatus, less than a page long. One important point I would have liked to
see discussed more thoroughly, is the question raised by Alaka Hejib and
Katherine Young in their paper: “Sati, widowhood and yoga”. (p.xv-xvi) They see
a ”hidden religious dimension: yoga; though neither the widow nor the sati was
conscious of the yogic dimension of her life”. Indeed, “the psychology of yoga
was instilled, albeit inadvertently, in the traditional Hindu woman”. Well
well, yoga as the most consciousness-oriented discipline in the world is
imparted unconsciously: “instilled, albeit inadvertently”. Prof. Jain reports
this hypothesis but does not comment on it. So I will.
Naïve readers may not have noticed it yet, but here we are
dealing with as instance of a widespread phenomenon: the crass manipulation of
the term “Hindu”. Every missionary and every secularist does it all the time:
calling a thing “Hindu” when it is considered bad, but something (really
anything) else as soon as it is deemed good. Many Hindus even lap it up: it is
“instilled, albeit inadvertently”.
Thus, whenever Westerners show an interest in yoga, the
secularists and their Western allies hurry to assure us: “Yoga has nothing to
do with Hinduism.” (It is like with Islam, but inversely, for whenever Muslims
make negative-sounding headlines, we are immediately reassured that these
crimes “have nothing to do with Islam”.) There may be books on “Jain
mathematics”, but never about “Hindu mathematics”, for a good thing cannot be
Hindu. If the topic cannot be avoided, you call it, say, “Keralite mathematics”
or fashionably opine that it “must have been borrowed from Buddhism”. So, yoga
cannot be Hindu when its merits are at issue. However, when it is presented as
something funny, with asceticism and
other nasty things, then it can be Hindu, and even used as middle term to
equate something else (something nasty, of course, like Sati) with Hinduism. So:
Sati is Hindu!
In this case, the poor hapless secularists are even right. Sometimes
even a deplorable motive, like their single-minded hatred for Hinduism, makes
men speak the truth: Sati is Hindu. Sati
is not Brahmanical: the Rg-Veda enjoins continuing life rather than committing
Sati, and the Shastras either don’t mention it or prefer widowhood, for which
they lay down demanding rules. Many of the testimonies cited here mention
Brahmanical priests trying to dissuade the woman from Sati. Not Brahmanical,
then, but nonetheless Hindu, a far broader concept. A Hindu means an “Indian
Pagan”, as per the Muslim invaders who first introduced the term in India. And
indeed, Sati has existed in many countries but certainly in India, and it is
not of Christian or Islamic origin, so it may be called Pagan. And so can the
rejection of Sati. See?
This, then, makes for half a page that I would have done
differently. The rest of this book, 500-something pages, is designed to stand
the test of time. It will survive the flames that tend to engulf its topic: the
brave Sati.
Read more!
