The Sarna: a case study in natural religion

(ca. 1999)

Whatever one might have against the Christian missionaries, one cannot deny their enormous energy in mapping the world's religious landscape, not just by processing secondhand data in their armchairs, but by collecting facts first-hand at the price of great discomfort and sometimes at the risk of their lives. At a later stage, during the implementation of their plans for conversion, the data are sometimes twisted for propaganda purposes (e.g. by labelling the Indian tribals as "monotheist" to distance them from the Hindus and bring them closer to Christianity), but by and large, Christian fact-finding literature about tribal religions is a treasure-trove of authentic information.

Let us consider, for example, the excellent introduction to the religion of the Munda tribals in Chotanagpur by Y. Philip Barjo: "The religious life of the Sarna tribes", Indian Missiological Review, June 1997. The Mundas, along with the Santals, are what is left of an originally much larger and more widely spread Austro-Asiatic population in the Ganga basin. In the plains, they got assimilated into the Indo-Aryan speech community, but in the isolation of the hills of Chotanagpur (southern Bihar, western Orissa, northeastern Madhya Pradesh) they retained their linguistic and cultural identities. The visible mark of their religious identity is the Sarna, the sacred grove where rituals for the gods are performed.

Ethnocentrism and endogamy

Like most tribes worldwide, the Mundas are quite ethnocentric: "The Mundas call themselves Horoko, which means 'men'." (p.43) Just as Ba-ntu means "men", and likewise many other ethnonyms.

The Mundas maintain their tribal identity by prohibiting intermarriage with other tribes: "The tribals of Chotanagpur are an endogamous tribe. They usually do not marry outside the tribal community, because to them the tribe is sacred. The way to salvation is the tribe." (p.43)

Among literate religions, there is one clear parallel, viz. Judaism, which frowns upon intermarriage and has no notion of salvation outside the prospering of the Chosen People. In fact, far from being a unique case, Judaic ethnocentrism, like Munda ethnocentrism, is but the preservation of an attitude which was near-universal at the tribal stage of human development. That is why Christians with their universalism tend to see Jewish ethnocentrism as a "Pagan" element in Judaism (along with Jewish ritualism as opposed to the Christian emphasis on the "spirit"). Conversely, it is also why ethnicist neo-Pagans, of whom some are avowedly racist, tend to show no inclination to anti-Semitism, for they see Judaism as a fellow ethnic religion.

Tribal endogamy explains the Hindu caste system. As Vedic society, an advanced and differentiated society characterized by class (varna) hierarchy, expanded from the Northwest into India's interior, it absorbed ever more tribes but allowed them their distinctive traditions and first of all their defining tradition, viz. their endogamy. This way, endogamous self-contained units or tribes became endogamous segments of Hindu society, or castes.

The supreme God

Christian apologists in India have invested heavily in the proposition that tribals, unlike Hindus, are monotheists, almost-Christians who only need to learn of Jesus: "Sarna spirituality is marked by a strong belief in one God. A careful study of their religious beliefs and ceremonies shows that they believe in a Supreme Being whom they call Singbonga which literally means Sun God." (p.46)

To be sure, "sun god" hardly exonerates the Mundas from the suspicion of Paganism and idolatry. The Inca Athahualpa was killed precisely because he refused to trade in his Sun God for the Christian God and Saviour. The Roman Empire's dominant religion which was replaced and annihilated by Christianity was devoted to the Sun God, Sol Invictus. But modern Christians can explain the anomaly: they will say (like the iconodoulic party in Byzantine said of their icons) that the sun is merely a symbol, an icon which should not be confused with the immaterial divine reality which it represents. And so, Munda Sun worship gets incorporated into the monotheist tradition.

Singbonga looks a bit like the Biblical Creator-God: "Tribal religions generally believe in one God, in a Supreme Being who goes by such names as the Great Spirit, the Great One, the Creator, the Mighty Spirit (...), etc. Although at times God is identified with the rain, light, dawn, fire, water, hills, the Supreme Being of the tribal people is usually independent of the material or astral world. (...) He has dominion over the entire universe." (p.44)

In character, Singbonga seems to have more in common with the charitable God of the New Testament than with the vindictive one of the Old: "Singbonga is eternal. (...) He is also omniscient and omnipresent. (...) Singbonga of Sarna religion is a gentle god, not a malignant deity. He is an all-pervading benevolent power, ever intent on doing good to humanity." (p.46)

An ethnocentric God

Though all-pervading and benevolent, Singbonga is also an ethnocentric God, like Jahweh: "However, Singbonga's relation with the tribe is not one of individual love, but of an all-embracing tribal love. The tribe is the apple of his eye and yet he keeps himself a little aloof from it. He has no favorites; the pahan [= priest] is no more privileged in his eye than the ordinary villager. The Sarna peoples' allegiance to Singbonga is therefore also tribal, an allegiance to the visible and invisible tribe." (p.47)

The apple of His eye, that is how He sees his favourite people, and this justifies the law of endogamy: "The tribe is the temple of Singbonga and he wants it undefiled. The basic belief that Singbonga created the tribe and that therefore it must be preserved in its integrity justifies in the eyes of the Mundas all the regulations and taboos that bind them in this regard. (...) These include exogamy [between families], endogamy [within the tribe], and monogamy in marriage and conjugal fidelity. Not only the offenders themselves but the entire community is appropriately punished by Singbonga for the non-observance of these great ethical values. This almost exclusively tribe-oriented moral code with little personal conscience to enlighten and guide puts the Munda tribe in a world of its own, self-contained, self-sufficient and turned in upon itself, whose whole existence was tied to traditions with little change in the course of time."

(p.47) "The Sarna people do not have a written code of moral law. Their idea of right and wrong comes from their tradition. Tradition is their measure of truth. Their way to salvation is the tribe.

Hence they must see that they remain in the tribe. For them evil is essentially any offense that would break up their tribal status. There are two kinds of offenses: ethical and tribal. Ethical offenses include all aberrations committed consciously and which harm not so much the individual but others. Singbonga may punish such offenses by causing illness or misfortune to the tribe. (...) The offense against the tribe is the most tragic offense for the Sarna people, because their way to salvation is the tribe and this offense usually excludes them from the tribe." (p.52-53)

So, Singbonga punishes His people if they lapse into disloyalty by breaking the taboo of tribal endogamy, just as Jahweh punished His people for mixing with the Midianites, Amorites and other Pagan nations. It is possible that the depiction of Munda religion by our Christian informer is distorted by his Christian upbringing and Biblical schooling; but it is equally possible that we are faced with a genuine parallel between tribal and Biblical (Old-Testamentic) religion, again concerning their ethnocentrism.

As for the nature of the punishment, it must be entirely this-worldly. This is closer to Old-Testamentic beliefs in God's punishing intervention than to Christian claims of an unverifiable punishment in an unseen afterlife,-- or to Puranic-Hindu beliefs in a punishment in future incarnations: "The punishment is not carried over to the life beyond the grave. The idea of repeated rebirth is borrowed from the Hindu religion." (p.53) When a Christian tries to create distance between Hinduism and Indian tribal religions, we must be on our guard, as this is just what his apologetic and strategic interests require, but it may be true nonetheless. My guess is that the idea of reincarnation is entirely native to the Sarna tribes (as it is to numerous tribal cultures around the world), but that it doesn't have the moralistic dimension so typical of the most popular Hindu variant of the reincarnation doctrine, so that the content of the next life is not seen as determined by a tally of merit and guilt.

Monotheism?

Though Singbonga is the Great God of His Munda people, He is not a jealous God but freely allows the worship of other celestial beings: "The domain of tribal belief also extends to the other supernatural beings which are above mankind but are less than the Supreme Being. They are usually called spirits but at times they are also invoked as 'deities' or 'gods'. Belief in spirits is one of the most important characteristics of tribal religions. In fact the tribal world is a world of spirits." (p.44)

There is a whole hierarchy between the supreme God and ordinary spirits: "Besides the Singbonga the Mundas generally worship a host of other spirits including their own ancestors. But Singbonga occupies the highest position in the hierarchical order of spirits." (p.46) This reminds us of the heavenly hosts filling the heaven between the supreme God and the atmosphere in many religions, such as Catholic theology's hierarchy of angels (archangels, powers, principalities etc.) and the choir of angels and saints forever singing God's praise; or, earlier, of Ahura Mazda's six Immortal Spirits and the numerous Helper-Spirits in Zoroastrianism.

Like in the actual practice of popular Roman Catholicism, where people pray to the Virgin Mary or to a particular saint, Munda worship is less directed to the supreme God than to the host of intermediate beings: "Cult or worship is mostly directed to the spirits and the ancestors." (p.44-45) This was the done thing in many polytheistic religions, e.g. the Pagan Arabs made idols of lesser deities for purposes of worship, but never depicted the supreme God, Allah. The existence of a "supreme God" is not proof of monotheism, but is on the contrary entirely typical of most polytheistic pantheons, just as the existence of one Pole Star does not nullify the concomitant existence of a heavenly host of numerous other stars.

Munda polytheism

For a first introduction to the Munda pantheon: "The spirits of the Mundas are hierarchically ordered. The first in order of dignity comes the Burubonga, Marang Buru or Pat Sarna. This spirit is a mountain-god or the highest hill or rock in the neighbourhood. He is represented by no visible object." (p.48) Like the sun, the mountain is an immediately visible presence and needs no representation. So-called idolatry is a relatively recent development in religious history, e.g. most ancient Indo-European peoples did not use idols or icons in their religious practice.

After the mountain god, "Next in order come the Hatu Bongako or the Village spirits. (...) They are worshipped by the Pahan on behalf of the whole village at specific times in the sacred grove or the Sarna of each village." (p.48)

Then, like in most premodern cultures, comes ancestor-worship: "The third group of spirits in the Munda pantheon are the Ora Bongako or the House-spirits. These are the spirits of the deceased ancestors of each family. They are worshipped in the house-sanctuary called Ading, by the head of every family. Sometimes they are referred to as Haparomko (the ancestral spirits). Ancestor worship finds an important place in the religious belief of the Mundas. They believe that after the death of a person his spirit/shade (roa/umbul) has no house to live in. As an outcast it roams about in the neighborhood of the grave. After an odd number of days, the Umbul-ader (homebringing of the shade) ceremony is performed by which the 'shade' of the deceased is brought into the ading of the house and enshrined there. Henceforth the man's spirit is called no longer umbul but Ora Bonga (House Spirit). This important ceremony is a way of re-introducing the deceased member into the tribe. It is believed that they in turn are the real benefactors of the family or the tribe to which they belong." (p.48; the Umbul-ader ceremony is held on the 7th or 9th day for adults, on the 3rd or 5th for children, p.56)

The Christian reporter will be satisfied at noticing that the ancestors are not strictly worshipped but rather (like the Catholic saints) venerated and asked for their intercession with higher celestial authorities: "They keep in touch with other bongas and pray to Singbonga for the welfare of their household and the tribe. They are remembered and offered their due worship and sacrifice at all important occasions of life." (p.48) More explicitly: "The sacrifice they offer is mostly intercessory" (p.49), and their feasts "all refer to Singbonga as provider and creator of the tribe". (p.49)

Worship of lesser gods is not always devotion, it may be apotropeic rituals to appease malevolent beings: "Besides Singbonga, the Munda pantheon includes a number of other deities and spirits whom they call Bongas. (...) There are both benevolent spirits (Manitabongas) and malevolent spirits (Banitabongas). (...) Accordingly the benevolent spirits are worshipped and the malevolent spirits are only appeased or propitiated." (p.47-48)

The worship of Singbonga is of a different order from that of ancestral and other spirits: "Singbonga, unlike spirits, is worshipped for his own sake. His purity demands that he be offered sacrifices only of things that are white. Hence he is given sacrifices of white goats, white fowls, white gulainchi flowers, white cloth, sugar, milk, etc." (p.47) White is the sacred colour of most Indian tribals, not only of the Mundas but also of the Bhils in the western provinces, and of many others.

Tribal environmentalism

In this account, the Munda tribals are presented as confirming the impression that tribals are ecologists by nature: "The world of any tribal group is stamped with sacredness, religiosity and reverence for nature. (...) This is the view of the Sarna tribal people as well. They are totally involved in the world, they communicate with the spirituality that surrounds them. They love nature, they communicate with it and are attached to it. Nature is their way to the supernatural."

(p.51)

Recently the notion of the environmentalist "noble savage" has taken a battering. It is now known that both the North-American Indians and the Australian Aboriginals have exterminated most large mammalian species in their continent. They had no consciousness of the limitations of nature, so they hunted the mammoth or the two-toed American horse or the giant wombat until the seemingly unlimited supply suddenly dried up. Some Western ecologists glorify the life of hunter-gatherers, but in fact, the hunting-gathering lifestyle is by definition plunder. It is because people in India shifted from hunting-gathering to agriculture early on, thus becoming self-reliant instead of dependent on plunder, that India has preserved most of its large species. Only some of the so-called tribals have not taken this step, but most have; the Mundas practise agriculture.

Otherwise, it is obvious that natural religions not based on books and exclusive revelations are much more immersed in nature. Some Christians have developed this religious feeling for nature as well, e.g. the 19th-century Flemish priest-poet Guido Gezelle, required reading in the schools attended by the Flemish Jesuits active in Chotanagpur. But it will again be obvious that this eco-spirituality came from their hearts rather than from their Biblical studies.

Conclusion

This brief little exercise in comparative religion has necessarily been limited by our choice of source material, viz. a fairly sympathizing account marked by a Christian perspective. Therefore, we have tried to avoid basing our impressions on observations which really provoke questions of whether the observer has been projecting his Christian notions onto his topic, or whether the tribals described may not have recently interiorized notions imparted to them by Christians or by Sanskritic Hindus.

Thus, this story about the punishment of the Asuras (Indo-Iranian term for "lords" or "gods", but from late-Vedic onwards a term for "demons") resembles both the Christian theme of the revolting angels and the Old-Testamentic theme of God punishing his people, and perhaps also the Hindu account of Parashuram killing all the male members of the warrior caste: "The Asurs were like the bad angels who revolted against God. They were greedy iron smelters, who even after repeated warning from Singbonga kept on smelting day and night. Because of their disobedience Singbonga destroyed all the male members of the tribe." (p.55) Has this been borrowed, or does it show that all religions address common themes and consequently develop parallel stories? One hesitates to make the choice.

No such hesitation need stop us from appreciating certain deep and undeniably hoary traits of Sarna religion as discussed in this account: its hierarchically conceived polytheistic pantheon centred around an apex god, Singbonga, so typical of Pagan religions in general though possibly usable as a "preparation" for the Christian variety of monotheism, with its Triune God surrounded by a hierarchy of angels; its cult of the ancestors who get associated with the gods, again following a widespread Pagan pattern, though comparable with how the saints are included in the heavenly sphere by Christian theology; and its ethnic dimension, rather different from Christianity but reminiscent of Judaism along with many Pagan tribal religions.

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The Sati strategy. Review of Meenakshi Jain’s book Sati

 

(Bharat-Bharati, 24 March 2016; Swarajya, 27 March 2016)

 

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.

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