<b>Sati and other suicide</b>
by Dr. Koenraad Elst
Original: "Sati en andere zelfdoding"
(In the September 2000 issue of <i>Hinduism Today</i> the meritorious journalist and leading feminist Madhu Kishwar criticizes the law that prohibits the religious glorification of widow self-immolation or <i>Sati</i>. According to her, this is an encroachment on freedom of religion that prepares the way for other forms of limiting freedom. On account of her opinion-piece I have unearthed the text below from my work, which appeared in <i>India</i>, the paper of the Belgian-Indian friendship-society <i>Shanti Darshan</i>, in 1994. The article in the version presented has been completed on Makar Sankranti day 14 January 1995, the 25th anniversary of Jan Pallach's suicide in Prague. A few new additions are italicised. Apologies for the messy transcription.)
Today there is much talk of multi-cultural co-existence. It remains to be seen whether people are ready for that. Because another culture, that is not so much another way of eating or dressing, but another system of fundamental values, another stance on the fundamental parameters of life, e.g. on individual liberty, of the womanâs status, of death. When we are confronted with another stance on death, then the xenophobic reflexes of non-understanding and judgement immediately rear their heads.
An excellent example is what has already recently been written about Sati, the self-immolation of widows on the pyres of their husbands. Now here is a custom that is really alien to our culture. Whoever wants multi-culturalism shall therefore welcome this and wave away all foolish prejudices against it. Isnât it so?
The central prejudice in this case is that only a few in the Western culture-sphere are prepared to believe that this deed is voluntary. On the contrary, people want to desperately reduce this practice to something that is better-known in our cultural pattern: murder.
Do note, âWestern culture-sphereâ does not so much refer to the geographical West. The English-speaking elite in India is far more fanatical in her hostility toward and determined incomprehension for the traditional Indian culture than the British ever were. The student is after all more fanatical than the master. Nowadays one can defend all possible colonial prejudices in a very learned manner using modern Indian sources as authority for argument.
<b>The case of Rup Kanwar</b>
A good example are the reports about the last sensational Sati, the self-immolation of Rup Kanwar in Deorala, Rajasthan, in 1987. The English-language paper <i>India Today</i> stated that hundreds of bystanders had seen how Rup Kanwar worthily fulfilled her rituals, climbed the pyre and, singing, underwent the death-by-fire. This hundred-fold testimony was unfortunate for a newspaper that crusades against the âobscurantismâ of âhuman dishonouringâ practices like Sati which, after all, cannot possibly be anything other than a disguised form of murder. What does the paper of the modern Indian, that chooses empirical observance over blind belief, do with an unwelcome hundredfold empirical testimony? This: âThey probably saw what they wanted to see.â Okay, there was a unanimous testimony from hundreds of eyewitnesses, but that doesnât count, because those backward villagers âprobably saw what they wanted to seeâ.
Not only does this clincher show the boundless contempt of the urban westernised Indian for the turbanned villagers of Deorala. It especially proves the prejudiced character of the âSati is murderâ message that the English-language press would like to give its readers in connection with Rup Kanwarâs self-immolation.
The newspapers, to their own dissatisfaction, had to report that the surroundings of Rup Kanwar confirmed that she had acted of her own accord, against the village elders' attempts at dissuading. However, the papers continued undiminished with inventing alternate scenarios. That the in-laws would have been bothered by the fact that the dowry had been chased away by it, whereas the dowry to Rup Kanwarâs family had to be paid back because Rup and her husband didnât have any children yet: thatâs why they would have forced her to the Sati. That [scenario] would then be a variant on the dowry murders which rather occur quite often in precisely the westernised environments.
<b>Dowry Murders</b>
At this point, let us make a clear distinction between the self-immolation of widows, and the kitchen fires that are often orchestrated (thousands a year, in India as well as in Pakistan) to murder brides if the dowry (<i>dahej</i>) that they bring along is less than expected or demanded. Traditionally, a dowry was a gift of personal items, especially jewels, given to the bride: while her brothers remained in the parental home and took over the family business or family lands, the bride got to take her share in the inheritance with her in the form of shiny movable goods. In any case, it was not a gift of the brideâs family to the bridegroom and his family, whereas such is indeed the case in less traditional circles today.
This practice only originated in the 13th century, and then only among the martial Rajput caste (coincidentally the same where, since ages prior to it, Sati also occurs the most). Among other castes it never involved more than a nominal gift, and it is only in the 19th century that the <i>dahej</i> has taken on scandalous proportions and become a real social problem, starting with the most anglicised environments, such as the Parsees and the Sindhi Banias (merchants). The first dowry victims that made it into the newspapers were young girls who committed suicide to safeguard their fathers from the impending dowry-bankruptcy.
Nowadays, the giving of enormous presents to the groomâs family is a rather common custom, which finds entry even in the lowest classes and which reduces families with many daughters to beggary. Particularly in modern households, marriage is the golden occasion for a young man is the golden occasion to reel in all kinds of luxurious goods in one go. Which is why it is there [in such households] that the dowry has started becoming a reason for bride-murder. To suppose that bride-murder is an evil of the traditional society that "still continues" to occur often, is completely wrong. On the contrary, it is a typical example of how an innocent custom of the native people has become a poison through contact with our consumer-culture.
<b>Rup Kanwar: what we donât know</b>
The allegation that Rup Kanwar would supposedly have been forced into Sati has remained unproven. The journalists who with fanfare had asserted that they had seen through the conspiracy and had found witnesses for the murder-scenario, were absent at the trial or appeared emptyhanded.
This, in spite of the fact that (as Mark Tully observes in the Sati chapter of his impressive book <i>No Full Stops in India</i>) the police could most definitely have put pressure on the villagers to testify for the (Sati-demonising) sentence that the government wished for. Which is why the in-laws, who were summoned to the judge by the government, were acquittedâa sentence against which the government has given a notice of appeal of which nothing further has been heard.
Still, those that had maintained their belief in the murder-scenario might have been right. Firstly, there were witnesses that declared that Rup Kanwar changed her mind once the flames soaked her body and wanted to jump off the pyre, but was pushed back onto it. But perhaps they too saw âonly what they wanted to seeâ? Besides, the occurrence of panic while carrying out a difficult decision would still not alter the voluntary nature of that decision. Secondly, it was asserted that Rup Kanwar was visibly drugged when she climbed onto the pyre. This claim was unverifiable due to the nature of the case. But the fact that the cremation, according to some, had taken place uncommonly soon (however: a cremation <i>always</i> takes place before the first following sunset), and that Rup Kanwarâs parents were not timely informed, threw even more suspicion on the in-laws. On the other hand, Rup Kanwarâs father has declared to be certain that his daughter acted entirely voluntarily. He has even appeared with Rupâs father-in-law in several public forums in India to testify about this. That does not prevent the English-speaking press from systematically referring to the case as âthe murder of Rup Kanwarâ.
From this distance we do not want to judge the true facts of the Rup Kanwar case. Most people in Deorala, and most Rajputs, have steadily remained believing in the authenticity of this Sati and in the innocence of Rup Kanwarâs in-laws. The anti-Sati expressions due to the press, the government and some judges are discarded by them as a smear-campaign by prejudiced city-dwellers who do not wish to understand anything of the heroic Rajput-code.
Irrespective of the true facts of Rup Kanwarâs Sati, it must be said that the suspicion of prejudice among the westernised circles is completely correct. Because in both cases, murder or voluntary suicide, the English-speaking elite in India will nevertheless maintain that it could only have been murder. With this it sinks its own credibility. Its potentially correct diagnosis that Rup Kanwar was murdered, was sincerely rejected by many (among others in the Hindi and Marathi press) because the action-committees, politicians and members of the press involved declared with that same absolute certainty that Sati is always and by definition involuntaryâand that is manifestly untrue. If they had restricted themselves to the facts of this case, then they might have been able to convince; now that they wanted to couple this with a general (and as we shall see, untenable) dogma, their judgement of this one case was seen in the light of their general position, and thus rejected.
<b>The anti-Sati law</b>
The self-immolation of Rup Kanwar was the cause of the new anti-Sati measures on the part of politics. Even in 1987, the Parliament adopted the âCommission of Sati (Prevention) Billâ. This draconian law deals out the death penalty or life imprisonment to whoever aids a Sati in one way or another. This includes: talking a woman into believing that Sati is of any merit or has any heavenly reward, preventing her from withdrawing from the Sati or hindering her rescue, taking part in the procession that brings the woman to the pyre or to even be present in any capacity at the Sati or its related ceremony. In case an action is brought out against this, the burden of proof lies with the accused. The woman who attempts Sati can herself get a prison sentence for up to one year, depending on the degree to which it was voluntary, and taking into consideration all the social and psychological factors.
In addition, this law forbids and punishes all practices that could be considered as âglorification of Satiâ. Ceremonies for remembrance of a Sati and the building of Sati temples are forbidden, and the government is even authorised to break down existing Sati temples. The tens of existing Sati temples in Rajasthan quickly converted themselves into â<i>Shakti</i> templesâ (<i>shakti</i> is the female force, and is a relatively applicable term, because Sati is seen as a great display of this specific female force). Still, their popularity and the income from them have been heavily curtailed.
This law has not provoked a storm of protest: few will want to put out their necks for something as controversial as the right to commit or commemorate Sati. Still, the law could be annulled, because it has been challenged at the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
An oft-heard objection concerns the prohibition of religious ceremonies and temple construction and the threat of breaking temples down: this would be an apparent desecration of religious freedom. The constitution does say that the practice of religious freedom can be limited by considerations of morality, hygiene and public order. But it is an apparent absurdity that mausoleums of massmurderers like Aurangzeb and traitors like Muinuddin Chishti (who functioned as a spy for Mohammed Ghori) can still operate as places of pilgrimage, whereas temples for the âloyal suicidesâ of Sati women should be forbidden. If people fear that the glorification of these women shall lead to unwanted imitation, then what about for example the glorification of monsters like Stalin and Mao in countless publications of the communist party?
We can find other objections in the most important challenge (without outcome) to this law at the Supreme Court, the one by Jivan Kulkarni, a historian from Bombay <i>[and a veteran of the war against China in 1962; in the meantime deceased, from cancer]</i>. He says that he too is against the self-immolation of widows, but that the law implies a whole lot more than the discouraging of Sati. His position is that, firstly, the law in its terminology assumes that Sati is âthe burning of a widowâ, not a self-immolation but a burning carried out by others, i.e. a murder. Well, neither the written mentions of Sati, nor the eyewitness accounts drawn up by unbiased witnesses <i>in tempore non suspecto</i> ['in times above suspicion'] (especially British colonials), leave any doubt that in principle and usually also in practice itâs about voluntary self-immolation.
Secondly, seen as how the ban on Sati by the British was established in 1829 not as a ban on a particular form of murder (superfluous, because of its inclusion in the general ban on murder), but as a ban on suicide, namely from the christian taboo on suicide, itâs a violation of religious freedom, in the sense that suicide counts as an accepted and frequently as a particularly honourable practice in Indian traditions.
<b>Origin</b>
People sometimes say that widow-burning was brought into India in a later migration from Central Asia, that of the Shakas or Scythians, in the middle or end of the first millenium B.C.E. These Scythian tribes are then supposed to have been the ancestors of the martial Rajput caste in Rajasthan, the caste to which Rup Kanwar and the most famous Satis belonged. This to me seems to be an attempt to push away from oneself a difficult to defend custom. Of the Scythians, it is indeed known that they sent widows to their death with their husband, as well as servants and horses with their master â whether burnt with them or buried with them. From archaeological excavations in Southern Russia it appears that widows were already climbing the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands in the fourth millennium before our chronology, in the so-called Kurgan-culture, an apparantly proto-Scythian and definitely Indo-European culture.
<i>[The connection with India should however not be sought in the Scythian invasion of the 1st century B.C.E., but in the much older common Indo-European roots, because the custom also occurred among the Celtic and Germanic people. So we hear in the Edda, in the book Sigurdarkvida, that Brunhilde stabs herself after the death of Siegfried in order to be buried with him; in addition she first has her slaves killed and she also invites free servants to voluntarily die with her. So she doesnât climb the funeral pyre, but nevertheless follows her husband into death. Also among the Celts did this custom occur in large scale. Great power and wisdom are ascribed to a woman about to commit Sati, which is why for e.g. Brunhilde predicts the future at the last moment for next of kin.
Bernard Sergent (Les Indo-Européens, Payot, 1995, p.223), observes a connection between Sati and the status of a woman. In spite of feminist claims that this custom once again proves the male contempt for woman, it in fact occurred the least in those Indo-European societies where the woman was most disparaged in both practice as well as mythology, like the Greek [society]. A woman who does not have much honour to maintain, wonât accompany one to the pyre; itâs precisely the proud and relatively emancipated Celtic and Germanic women who did this.]</i>
<b>See quoteblock at end concerning the above</b>
In India, besides the Rajputs, the martial Marathas and Sikhs also knew this custom, though to a lesser extent. Other castes did not know this practice at all or specifically disapproved of it, in particular the Brahmanas (although they too practised Sati in British Bengal, in particular after the modernisation of the law of succession). In most duty-prescribing books (400 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.?), Manu and Yajnavalkya among others, there is no mention of widow-burning at all. Only the Vishnu Dharmashastra gives the widow the choice between celibacy and self-immolation.
<b>Suicide, not murder</b>
That in principle itâs about self-immolation and not murder is apparent from many British testimonies. For that matter, these are in agreement that this practice only occurred among a few higher castes. They keep stressing that those present continually tried to make the woman give up on her resolve, and that there wasnât a single stigma associated with forsaking this resolution, unless it only happened after the ceremony had started (which might perhaps have been the case with Rup Kanwar).
In Bengal at the start of the 19th century, several cases have been mentioned where the Sati was under pressure by the in-laws. A part of the cause was the British reforms of the law of succession, which suddenly made it worthwhile for the in-laws to not be left with a surviving daughter-in-law. This was therefore an aberration, partly induced by colonisation, of the general practice where Sati was completely voluntary. For that matter, itâs significant that such women did not become the object of worship, as opposed to the many non-suspect Sati women in Rajasthan.
The mentions of Sati in mythological, judicial and historical texts of the Hindus are without exception concerned with voluntary self-immolation. The name actually cames from Sati, the beloved of Shiva, who sets herself on fire in protest against the unjust treatment of her lover by her father; this story therefore has noting to do with widow-burning. It is quite possible that this might be a later-constructed myth to explain the name, and that the practice of Sati is much older. Sati actually means âgoodâ or âloyal [woman]â, from <i>sat/sant</i>, âtrue, goodâ. The most famous mention is that of Madri, the favourite wife of Pandu, the father of the five Pandavas from the Mahabharata epic: she climbed Panduâs pyre, while the other wife, Kunti, declined the honour. The Greek author Diodorus Siculus tells of how in 316 B.C.E. the Indian commander of a hired army is killed in action in Iran, upon which his two spouses argue about the privilege of becoming the Sati.
Countless examples are known from the Middle Ages. The Arabian writer Albiruni writes that widows were treated badly and thatâs why they <i>chose</i> self-immolation. Marco Polo, on the other hand, states that they did this âout of love for their husbandâ. A special case is the <i>jauhar</i>, the collective Sati of Rajput women when a city besieged by Muslims no longer had a chance to be saved: the men did a desperate sally in order to die heroically, and the women were kept out of the hands of the enemy by the firedeath. Much more recent examples are the voluntary immolation of Shivajiâs wife Putalabai (1680), of Madhavarao Peshwaâs wife Ramabai, and of the wives of Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of the Sikh realm, in 1839.
Of more import for the biased westerner is rather, that also the unsuspectable British shared the opinion that the widows involved carried out their Sati voluntarily. Before the British rule banned this practice in 1829 on Lord Bentinckâs initiative, it had a report drawn up with the significant title: âThe Report on Hindu Widows and <i>Voluntary</i> Immolationsâ. H.T. Colebrooke, H.H. Wilson, Jonathan Duncan and other British authorities advised against a legal ban on Sati, because this ritual does not occur under duress/coercion. A few citations from the assessments collected in this report, and also from other British testimonies, deserve to be heard.
Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone wrote in his <i>History of India</i>: âOn occasion it has been said that the relatives encourage the widow to immolate herself to obtain her possessions⦠People can however be sure that the relatives usually beg the widow not go through with it, and to this end also call in the intervention of friends and figures of authority. If she is of high rank, even the monarch will come to console her and to advise her against it.â
Lieutenant-colonel John Briggs in a letter stated: âWhoever has witnessed the self-immolation of Hindu widows, and of their attitude/bearing towards this as I have seen them, will find it hard to free themselves of the idea that these devoted women have reached the highest grade of faith. The justness of the law that robs them of their only religious solace⦠is therefore at the very least doubtful.â When Lord Bentinck in 1829 issued the ban on Sati, it was under rather general opposition from his (British) subordinates.
Lord Holwel, lieutenant-governor of Bengal, wrote: âIf we viewed these women in the correct light, then we would think more openly about them, and admit that they act out of heroic as well as rational and pious principlesâ.
As evidence for the involuntary nature of Sati, people constantly refer to the mention of a forced immolation in F. Bernierâs <i>Travels in the Moghul Empire</i>, a travel report from the pre-colonial time. Pointing to this, professor Prabha Dixit said, short after the self-immolation of Rup Kanwar, that âSati is never a voluntary deedâ and âalways took place under brazen pressureâ. Well, the same Bernier, who stayed in India from 1656 to 1668, writes in the same book: âMostly it was the practice that Sati was carried out voluntarily.â
He mentions several voluntary self-immolations, and gives among others this description: âwhen I left Surat for Persia, I witnessed the devotion and firedeath of another widow. Several English and Dutch [people] were present. The woman was middle-aged and not at all ugly. With my limited ability for expression, I do not expect to convey a complete idea of the brash courage or fear-inducing liveliness on the womanâs countenance, of her sure tread, of her freedom from all disturbance, with which she spoke and let herself be washed, of the look of confidence or rather indifference that she gave us; of her easy air, free of doubt, of her distinguished bearing, without any embarrassment, when she searched her seating place, which consisted of thick dry milletstraw mixed with small wood, and when she went to sit on the pyre, placed the head of her deceased husband on her lap, took a torch, and with her own hands set it on fire from the insideâ¦â
Contemporaries of Bernier, like Nicholas Withington, William Hawkins, Edward Terry and others, have left behind a few more eyewitness accounts, and they confirm that it practically always concerned voluntary self-immolation.
General Sleeman described in his <i>Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official</i> (1844) the self-immolation of the widow of a rich landlord: âI must do the family the justice to say that they all exerted themselves to dissuade the widow from her purpose, and had she lived she would assuredly have been cherished and honoured as the first female member of the whole house. There is no people in the world among whom parents are more loved, honoured, and obeyed than among the Hindoos; and the grandmother is always more honoured than the mother.â
A more recent example: in september 1991 in Adig (western U.P.) a certain Lakshmi, about 35 years old and mother of five, announced that she wanted to follow her lately deceased husband Mangatu Singh on the pyre. Her in-laws prevented this, made the police guard her, and cremated the body of her husband. But a few days after, two policemen who carried out the watch in front of her door, noticed that there was fire in her room. Apparently she had succeeded in smuggling in some inflammatory materials, and had set fire to herself. Her daughter poured water over her and she was brought to the clinical hospital with 70% burn wounds, where she passed away hours later. At her formal cremation days later, the police was required to prevent a revering crowd.
We may conclude that Sati in the great majority of the cases was a voluntary deed. One can only understand Sati if they give up the prejudice that people can only be coerced into self-immolation, and if one comes to see the completely different views on loyalty to marriage and death. Sati is the extreme consequence of the idea that the woman is gifted with a magical power, and of the belief in reincarnation. Hindu women undergo all kinds of ascetisms for the welfare of their husband, or to be together again in another life, e.g. fasting on the eleventh day of both halves of the moon cycle; Sati is the ultimate ascetism. The belief in reincarnation makes of death just a step on a much longer path, and of suicide something much less dramatic than a selfdestruction, [itâs] sooner the discarding of a not-as-yet worn out dress.
In christianism, there existed for a long time the reverence of martyrs. They too were people who voluntarily chose death, e.g. as an alternative to giving up their faith. They too were people who were convinced that with death all was not over, that their self-chosen death was not a complete selfdestruction. The modern abhorrence for practices like Sati comes from the materialistic idea that death is the absolute end, an idea that also explains the modern taboo on death. For any who believes that he is in reality eternal, the view of death changes completely, and there is not that fear and loathing for the end.
<b>Right to suicide</b>
That the British forbade the practice of Sati, was not a measure against murder, but against suicide. As was and is known, suicide is forbidden in christianism; in some countries there was even the death penalty for attempts at suicide. In India however, people have always judged it differently.
In this way, it is well-known that old Jain monks, once they felt their time had come, just refused to feed themselves still, and thus fasted themselves to death. From this tradition Mahatma Gandhi derived his tactic of âfasting unto deathâ to force others to yield. As a matter of fact, heâs never used this tactic against people of whom it was known that they would not yield anyway, like M.A. Jinnah. His political opponent Swatantryavir Savarkar (1883-1966) had nothing but aversion for Gandhiâs âaffectationâ with his dramatic plays of a fast-unto-death that always ended with a glass of fruit juice and acquiescence to Gandhiâs wishes anyway. He thought that such ascetic stunts didnât have a place in politics. But he did recognise the value of the self-chosen death: when he himself was old and ill, he carried out a <i>real</i> fast-unto-death.
After Mahatma Gandhi, the âfast-unto-deathâ as a political pressure device has become greatly trivialised. The most common everyday report in an Indian newspaper is that yet again someone has started a fast-unto-death to force the authorities to do this or that. The inevitable end to such actions within a few days is often not even mentioned: after all, everyone knows that it ends this way. It was out of frustration, due to the slight attention given to their initial âfast-unto-deathâ, that students in 1990 set themselves on fire to add power to their protest against prime minister V.P. Singhâs caste-reservation plan.
A fast-unto-death with a political goal that was actually carried out was that of Potti Sri Ramulu for the formation of a state corresponding to the Telugu language region in 1952. Before Independence, the Congress party had promised to redraw the map of India according to language boundaries, and to give the large language-communities their own linguistically homogeneous state. Prime Minister Nehru however was against this, and the promise remained unfulfilled. Potti Sri Ramulu went on a hunger strike against this. The government ignored him, but he kept going and died. The government could no longer cope against the wave of sympathy with the cause of the <i>hutatma</i> (self-sacrificer), and the state boundaries were redrawn. The Telugu language-group got its own state, Andhra Pradesh (1953). This suicider is still honoured at official occasions and with portraits in official buildings of the Andhra state.
At the death of M.G. Ramachandran, filmstar and Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, about thirty of his fans attempted suicide in a showy and dramatic manner. The ones that did not succeed with their intention received 5000 rupees as support from the state government, the next of kin of those that did succeed received 10,000 rupees: so whoever commits Sati without calling it as such, is rewarded. Such a suicide of followers is in itself not a new occurrence either: at the death of the Sikh Guru Hargovind (17th century) a number of (male) students followed him into death. Jaya Lalitha, the lover of M.G. Ramachandran and now [=1994] Chief Minister herself, declared later that she had been close to committing Sati in order to have died with her great love. Immediately, anti-Sati activists (like Swami Agnivesh, the Hindu equivalent of our âleftist pastorsâ) demanded her arrest on the grounds of a brandnew legislation against the committing or glorification of Sati. Whoever commits Sati informally is rewarded, but whoever does so formally or speaks about it even, would be punished for it.
Another legitimate ground for suicide in the Hindu tradition is quite universal: just like a minister resigns as a consequence of his political responsibility in some scandal or another, in the same way people can take their lives to thus clean up their own guilt in a catastrophic development. In this way, king Jayapala of Kabul took his own life in 1001 when he had not been capable of protecting his people against the muslim invaders. He made a pyre, climbed it and set fire to it himself.
A few recent cases of elderly ascetics who went to meet death by refusing food, are Vinoba Bhave and Badri Prasad Maharaj. Vinoba, the famous follower of Mahatma Gandhi, began a fast-unto-death in 1982. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi went to visit him to get him to give up on his resolve, but she could only establish that the old man was not to be convinced.
When people asked Indira whether his fasting could not be stopped against his will, she said: âThis is after all what he wants.â <i>Indian Express</i>-columnist Arvind Kala, spokesperson for the westernised elite, pleads for the prevention of all suicide, and writes about Vinoba, pointing to article 390 of the Penal Code: âIn actual fact, he was transgressing the law of the land in full view of the public.â
In reality, Vinoba followed in the footsteps of many of the thousands of ascetics who since times immemorial have gone the same way, and about whom the Indian population has never pronounced a negative judgement; if the law forbids him this, then this law is in conflict with the views of the population. This law illustrates how the Indian legal system is not philosophically neutral (âsecularâ), but is, on the contrary, a powerful instrument of westernisation, just as it was meant to be by the constitution-legislators Ambedkar and Nehru.
Badri Prasad Maharaj was an aged monk of the extremely ascetic Jaina tradition. In 1987 he fasted to death. Among those present at this fasting was Girilal Jain, who passed away in 1993, who as head editor of the <i>Times of India</i> on account of Rup Kanwars self-immolation had become fiercely opposed to Sati.
In short, in the Indian culture there is no stigma attached to certain types of suicide, not today either. However it is there in the Indian law, as became apparent in a grotesque way in June 1991. After the murder of Rajiv Gandhi (the suicide action of a female christian Lanka Tamil militant) the heavies of the Congress party wanted to take revenge, like they had done after the murder on the Mahatma in 1948 against the Brahmanas, and after the death of Indira in 1984 against the Sikhs. This time it was not such a clearcut group that could be attacked, so the aggression of the Congress in the state Andhra Pradesh just focussed itself on the rival parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the regional Telugu Desam Party. The actions were much less serious than what had been done against the Sikhs in 1984, however it was still serious enough for the leader of the TDP, the filmstar/director and ex-Chief Minister N.T. Rama Rao, to react. He began a âfast-unto-deathâ at a public place, to demand from the Congress state government an official investigation into these allegations. The demand was conceded, after which Rama Rao ended his six-day-long fasting. Because the state government wanted at all costs to prevent that the popular Rama Rao would die during an anti-Congress fast, the police had meanwhile taken him and brought him to a hospital, where he could, if necessary, be fed through a tube. What's noteworthy about this is however that the police filed a complaint at the court against Rama Rao on grounds of article 390, which declares attempts of suicide as a punishable fact.
This law was put in question before the Bombay High Court, that in 1986 decided that an Indian citizen did constitutionally have the right to suicide (a decision against which an appeal was made once again, exactly because it undermines the anti-Sati policy). But apparently people still hold that man is not allowed to have a say about his own life, a christian viewpoint that has already been abandoned in the legislation of many Western countries. Another court of justice, that of Andhra Pradesh, decided in April 1987 that the law which makes suicide punishable, is consitutional: âThe right to life does not imply the right to die.â
Judge Hon. K. Amareshwari accounted for this pronouncement by pointing to the following implication: âIf the attempt to suicide is not punishable, then anyone who helps or incites others to suicide, could go free.â This line of argument is not entirely sound, because the legislator could very well pronounce different judgements for attempt at suicide and inciting to suicide. The Canadian law does not punish suicide, but incitement to it is 14 years imprisonment. The Indian law at least differentiates quantitatively: thereâs a 1 year prison sentence for attempted suicide, 10 years for inciting to it.
Another argument for the ban on suicide is that an honoured suicide or one that is surrounded by publicity might incite imitation. Suicide is therefore implicitly always âincitement to suicideâ. Arvind Kala sums it up: âThe death of Vinoba formed the incitement to a copycat-suicide when a year later an old Gandhian, named Patwardhan, starved himself to death in the house of his daughter. When Badri Prasad Maharaj passed away after 50 days of fasting, his example was immediately followed by a female Jain ascetic. At the self-immolation of students in protest against the caste-reservation plan of V.P. Singh, every self-immolation created the atmosphere for the next one. The government therefore was very much in the right to interfere in N.T. Rama Raoâs fast. God forbid, if heâd died, his emotional fans might have followed his example in a moment of shock.â
It is nevertheless misplaced to put the emotional deed of the students (not unknown in Europe either, see Jan Pallach in Prague 1968) on the same line with old ascetics who deem their time to have come. The Hindu morality gives no uniform rules, but distinguishes on a case by case basis. From the Hindu perspective, ascetics (a status that people can take on at any moment) have the fullest right to opt for death, and they inevitably do this in imitation of others: not just of Vinoba and Beni Prasad, but also of the many thousands before them. Emotional suicide on the other hand, on own initiative or in imitation, is plainly comdemnable, on grounds of the Vedic text: âPeople should not leave this world before they have completed the time measured out.â Point of discussion is whether this text is also directed at Sati.
<b>Judgement of Sati</b>
Around 1800, about thirty years before the British administrator Lord Bentinck issued a ban on Sati in Bengal, the Hindu governments in some princely states had already issued orders to discourage Sati, in particular the Maratha government in Sawantwadi and the Brahmana government in Pune. With this, they concretised the anti-Sati policy of the Maratha queen Ahalyabai who passed away in 1795. Even within the Hindu tradition there has been, at least since Medhatithiâs commentary on the Manu Smriti (900 C.E.?), always a stream that rejected Sati. The Shakta or Tantra stream was very explicit in this. The Mahanirvana Tantra says: âThe woman who in her delusion climbs the pyre of her husband, shall go to hell.â (This sentence itself has however made the philologists suspect that this text was written or was completed around 1800, when Sati had become a hot point of discussion.)
The reason for rejecting the Sati is mainly that a woman, in the middle of the crisis which her husbandâs passing after all represents, hardly has a dayâs time to think over such a grave decision. A monk who, in his old day, decides to refuse food has had a whole life of developing a stance of equanimity and non-attachment. His decision does not happen hastily or under emotional pressure.
Besides, there is an element of inevitability in his going to meet death: his candle is already going out, so he is only going along with the stream, even though in facing death he keeps his dignity. The decision of an aged monk is actually just a choice between dying of illness, disability and helplessness, and dying via self-inflicted starvation. A Sati woman on the other hand does have a real choice between life and death: that is why her suicide is more violent, going against the stream of the natural will to life. But that is also exactly whatâs heroic about it.
It is completely logical that Sati was not general practice on one hand, and yet on the other was still completely accepted in the case of the martial castes, especially the Rajputs. With the lower castes, a widow could in every respect remarry, among the Brahmanas continuing to live on alone as a female ascetic conformed with the ascetic caste-ethos, but with the martial castes it was passion and heroism that counted as pre-eminently honourable. That Sati was considered as the appointed way for some and not for others, conformed with the Hindu pluralism, that posits that everyone has their own duty or code of honour (swadharma), corresponding to the their own natural capacity (swabhava).
In the modern West, that same respect for everyoneâs âown wayâ grows more and more, including the freedom to command oneâs own life. People speak openly about âthe right to die worthilyâ. There is no longer a moral consensus that sentences suicide, only a rejection of the scenarios where complete voluntariness (which implies that people have considered it well and realise what theyâre doing) is not guaranteed. Even without blowing new life into Sati as a practice, people can from within the modern culture bring up a more honest recognition of the historic truth about Sati, and even a level of appreciation for what must indeed have been a heroic deed.
<i><b>End of Elst's article</b></i>
1. <b>About the bit in the above that's succeeded by purple text:</b>
Practices similar to Sati are rather more universal than uniquely "Indo-European". China is not considered "Indo-European" and yet its royalty knew a practice that is actually more similar (than Indian Sati is) to the Germanic suicide ritual which Bernard Sergent and Elst mention above. Therefore, Sati in India can well be independent from any "Indo-European" practices pertaining to ritualised collective suicide of household members:
<i>Extracts from "Who was the 'First Emperor'?", taken out of 'The Giant Book of Facts', Octopus Books, 1987, London, p.248:</i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>"Who was the 'First Emperor'?</b>
He was Cheng Ying, who adopted the title of Shih Huang-ti (meaning the 'First Emperor') when he became ruler of the whole of China in 221 BC.
...
<b>Earlier rulers of China went to their graves accompanied by a large entourage of courtiers, wives and servants (who either voluntarily committed suicide or were put to death)."</b>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
2. About the sentence: "It is quite possible that this (Shiva-Sati narrative) might be a later-constructed myth to explain the name".
And it might just as well be that whichever Hindu first thought of referring thus to the practise of Hindu widows immolating themselves might have considered that they were doing this out of a devotional loyalty to their husbands, and was reminded of how Sati is devoted to Shiva and hence referred to it with the Amman's name.
2. About the paragraph starting with: "In christianism, there existed for a long time the reverence of martyrs. They too were people who voluntarily chose death, e.g. as an alternative to giving up their faith.... "
Many a christian martyr did not exist. In particular, the stories of them choosing death as opposed to giving up their faith tend to be fable. Consider pope Marcellinus, venerated as saint and martyr: history knows he never died for his faith - so he's not a martyr, AND history knows he apostasised - so he can't be a *christian saint*. Other examples abound, see Joseph McCabe. See http://freetruth.50webs.org/Appendix5.htm and http://freetruth.50webs.org/B3b.htm
by Dr. Koenraad Elst
Original: "Sati en andere zelfdoding"
(In the September 2000 issue of <i>Hinduism Today</i> the meritorious journalist and leading feminist Madhu Kishwar criticizes the law that prohibits the religious glorification of widow self-immolation or <i>Sati</i>. According to her, this is an encroachment on freedom of religion that prepares the way for other forms of limiting freedom. On account of her opinion-piece I have unearthed the text below from my work, which appeared in <i>India</i>, the paper of the Belgian-Indian friendship-society <i>Shanti Darshan</i>, in 1994. The article in the version presented has been completed on Makar Sankranti day 14 January 1995, the 25th anniversary of Jan Pallach's suicide in Prague. A few new additions are italicised. Apologies for the messy transcription.)
Today there is much talk of multi-cultural co-existence. It remains to be seen whether people are ready for that. Because another culture, that is not so much another way of eating or dressing, but another system of fundamental values, another stance on the fundamental parameters of life, e.g. on individual liberty, of the womanâs status, of death. When we are confronted with another stance on death, then the xenophobic reflexes of non-understanding and judgement immediately rear their heads.
An excellent example is what has already recently been written about Sati, the self-immolation of widows on the pyres of their husbands. Now here is a custom that is really alien to our culture. Whoever wants multi-culturalism shall therefore welcome this and wave away all foolish prejudices against it. Isnât it so?
The central prejudice in this case is that only a few in the Western culture-sphere are prepared to believe that this deed is voluntary. On the contrary, people want to desperately reduce this practice to something that is better-known in our cultural pattern: murder.
Do note, âWestern culture-sphereâ does not so much refer to the geographical West. The English-speaking elite in India is far more fanatical in her hostility toward and determined incomprehension for the traditional Indian culture than the British ever were. The student is after all more fanatical than the master. Nowadays one can defend all possible colonial prejudices in a very learned manner using modern Indian sources as authority for argument.
<b>The case of Rup Kanwar</b>
A good example are the reports about the last sensational Sati, the self-immolation of Rup Kanwar in Deorala, Rajasthan, in 1987. The English-language paper <i>India Today</i> stated that hundreds of bystanders had seen how Rup Kanwar worthily fulfilled her rituals, climbed the pyre and, singing, underwent the death-by-fire. This hundred-fold testimony was unfortunate for a newspaper that crusades against the âobscurantismâ of âhuman dishonouringâ practices like Sati which, after all, cannot possibly be anything other than a disguised form of murder. What does the paper of the modern Indian, that chooses empirical observance over blind belief, do with an unwelcome hundredfold empirical testimony? This: âThey probably saw what they wanted to see.â Okay, there was a unanimous testimony from hundreds of eyewitnesses, but that doesnât count, because those backward villagers âprobably saw what they wanted to seeâ.
Not only does this clincher show the boundless contempt of the urban westernised Indian for the turbanned villagers of Deorala. It especially proves the prejudiced character of the âSati is murderâ message that the English-language press would like to give its readers in connection with Rup Kanwarâs self-immolation.
The newspapers, to their own dissatisfaction, had to report that the surroundings of Rup Kanwar confirmed that she had acted of her own accord, against the village elders' attempts at dissuading. However, the papers continued undiminished with inventing alternate scenarios. That the in-laws would have been bothered by the fact that the dowry had been chased away by it, whereas the dowry to Rup Kanwarâs family had to be paid back because Rup and her husband didnât have any children yet: thatâs why they would have forced her to the Sati. That [scenario] would then be a variant on the dowry murders which rather occur quite often in precisely the westernised environments.
<b>Dowry Murders</b>
At this point, let us make a clear distinction between the self-immolation of widows, and the kitchen fires that are often orchestrated (thousands a year, in India as well as in Pakistan) to murder brides if the dowry (<i>dahej</i>) that they bring along is less than expected or demanded. Traditionally, a dowry was a gift of personal items, especially jewels, given to the bride: while her brothers remained in the parental home and took over the family business or family lands, the bride got to take her share in the inheritance with her in the form of shiny movable goods. In any case, it was not a gift of the brideâs family to the bridegroom and his family, whereas such is indeed the case in less traditional circles today.
This practice only originated in the 13th century, and then only among the martial Rajput caste (coincidentally the same where, since ages prior to it, Sati also occurs the most). Among other castes it never involved more than a nominal gift, and it is only in the 19th century that the <i>dahej</i> has taken on scandalous proportions and become a real social problem, starting with the most anglicised environments, such as the Parsees and the Sindhi Banias (merchants). The first dowry victims that made it into the newspapers were young girls who committed suicide to safeguard their fathers from the impending dowry-bankruptcy.
Nowadays, the giving of enormous presents to the groomâs family is a rather common custom, which finds entry even in the lowest classes and which reduces families with many daughters to beggary. Particularly in modern households, marriage is the golden occasion for a young man is the golden occasion to reel in all kinds of luxurious goods in one go. Which is why it is there [in such households] that the dowry has started becoming a reason for bride-murder. To suppose that bride-murder is an evil of the traditional society that "still continues" to occur often, is completely wrong. On the contrary, it is a typical example of how an innocent custom of the native people has become a poison through contact with our consumer-culture.
<b>Rup Kanwar: what we donât know</b>
The allegation that Rup Kanwar would supposedly have been forced into Sati has remained unproven. The journalists who with fanfare had asserted that they had seen through the conspiracy and had found witnesses for the murder-scenario, were absent at the trial or appeared emptyhanded.
This, in spite of the fact that (as Mark Tully observes in the Sati chapter of his impressive book <i>No Full Stops in India</i>) the police could most definitely have put pressure on the villagers to testify for the (Sati-demonising) sentence that the government wished for. Which is why the in-laws, who were summoned to the judge by the government, were acquittedâa sentence against which the government has given a notice of appeal of which nothing further has been heard.
Still, those that had maintained their belief in the murder-scenario might have been right. Firstly, there were witnesses that declared that Rup Kanwar changed her mind once the flames soaked her body and wanted to jump off the pyre, but was pushed back onto it. But perhaps they too saw âonly what they wanted to seeâ? Besides, the occurrence of panic while carrying out a difficult decision would still not alter the voluntary nature of that decision. Secondly, it was asserted that Rup Kanwar was visibly drugged when she climbed onto the pyre. This claim was unverifiable due to the nature of the case. But the fact that the cremation, according to some, had taken place uncommonly soon (however: a cremation <i>always</i> takes place before the first following sunset), and that Rup Kanwarâs parents were not timely informed, threw even more suspicion on the in-laws. On the other hand, Rup Kanwarâs father has declared to be certain that his daughter acted entirely voluntarily. He has even appeared with Rupâs father-in-law in several public forums in India to testify about this. That does not prevent the English-speaking press from systematically referring to the case as âthe murder of Rup Kanwarâ.
From this distance we do not want to judge the true facts of the Rup Kanwar case. Most people in Deorala, and most Rajputs, have steadily remained believing in the authenticity of this Sati and in the innocence of Rup Kanwarâs in-laws. The anti-Sati expressions due to the press, the government and some judges are discarded by them as a smear-campaign by prejudiced city-dwellers who do not wish to understand anything of the heroic Rajput-code.
Irrespective of the true facts of Rup Kanwarâs Sati, it must be said that the suspicion of prejudice among the westernised circles is completely correct. Because in both cases, murder or voluntary suicide, the English-speaking elite in India will nevertheless maintain that it could only have been murder. With this it sinks its own credibility. Its potentially correct diagnosis that Rup Kanwar was murdered, was sincerely rejected by many (among others in the Hindi and Marathi press) because the action-committees, politicians and members of the press involved declared with that same absolute certainty that Sati is always and by definition involuntaryâand that is manifestly untrue. If they had restricted themselves to the facts of this case, then they might have been able to convince; now that they wanted to couple this with a general (and as we shall see, untenable) dogma, their judgement of this one case was seen in the light of their general position, and thus rejected.
<b>The anti-Sati law</b>
The self-immolation of Rup Kanwar was the cause of the new anti-Sati measures on the part of politics. Even in 1987, the Parliament adopted the âCommission of Sati (Prevention) Billâ. This draconian law deals out the death penalty or life imprisonment to whoever aids a Sati in one way or another. This includes: talking a woman into believing that Sati is of any merit or has any heavenly reward, preventing her from withdrawing from the Sati or hindering her rescue, taking part in the procession that brings the woman to the pyre or to even be present in any capacity at the Sati or its related ceremony. In case an action is brought out against this, the burden of proof lies with the accused. The woman who attempts Sati can herself get a prison sentence for up to one year, depending on the degree to which it was voluntary, and taking into consideration all the social and psychological factors.
In addition, this law forbids and punishes all practices that could be considered as âglorification of Satiâ. Ceremonies for remembrance of a Sati and the building of Sati temples are forbidden, and the government is even authorised to break down existing Sati temples. The tens of existing Sati temples in Rajasthan quickly converted themselves into â<i>Shakti</i> templesâ (<i>shakti</i> is the female force, and is a relatively applicable term, because Sati is seen as a great display of this specific female force). Still, their popularity and the income from them have been heavily curtailed.
This law has not provoked a storm of protest: few will want to put out their necks for something as controversial as the right to commit or commemorate Sati. Still, the law could be annulled, because it has been challenged at the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
An oft-heard objection concerns the prohibition of religious ceremonies and temple construction and the threat of breaking temples down: this would be an apparent desecration of religious freedom. The constitution does say that the practice of religious freedom can be limited by considerations of morality, hygiene and public order. But it is an apparent absurdity that mausoleums of massmurderers like Aurangzeb and traitors like Muinuddin Chishti (who functioned as a spy for Mohammed Ghori) can still operate as places of pilgrimage, whereas temples for the âloyal suicidesâ of Sati women should be forbidden. If people fear that the glorification of these women shall lead to unwanted imitation, then what about for example the glorification of monsters like Stalin and Mao in countless publications of the communist party?
We can find other objections in the most important challenge (without outcome) to this law at the Supreme Court, the one by Jivan Kulkarni, a historian from Bombay <i>[and a veteran of the war against China in 1962; in the meantime deceased, from cancer]</i>. He says that he too is against the self-immolation of widows, but that the law implies a whole lot more than the discouraging of Sati. His position is that, firstly, the law in its terminology assumes that Sati is âthe burning of a widowâ, not a self-immolation but a burning carried out by others, i.e. a murder. Well, neither the written mentions of Sati, nor the eyewitness accounts drawn up by unbiased witnesses <i>in tempore non suspecto</i> ['in times above suspicion'] (especially British colonials), leave any doubt that in principle and usually also in practice itâs about voluntary self-immolation.
Secondly, seen as how the ban on Sati by the British was established in 1829 not as a ban on a particular form of murder (superfluous, because of its inclusion in the general ban on murder), but as a ban on suicide, namely from the christian taboo on suicide, itâs a violation of religious freedom, in the sense that suicide counts as an accepted and frequently as a particularly honourable practice in Indian traditions.
<b>Origin</b>
People sometimes say that widow-burning was brought into India in a later migration from Central Asia, that of the Shakas or Scythians, in the middle or end of the first millenium B.C.E. These Scythian tribes are then supposed to have been the ancestors of the martial Rajput caste in Rajasthan, the caste to which Rup Kanwar and the most famous Satis belonged. This to me seems to be an attempt to push away from oneself a difficult to defend custom. Of the Scythians, it is indeed known that they sent widows to their death with their husband, as well as servants and horses with their master â whether burnt with them or buried with them. From archaeological excavations in Southern Russia it appears that widows were already climbing the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands in the fourth millennium before our chronology, in the so-called Kurgan-culture, an apparantly proto-Scythian and definitely Indo-European culture.
<i>[The connection with India should however not be sought in the Scythian invasion of the 1st century B.C.E., but in the much older common Indo-European roots, because the custom also occurred among the Celtic and Germanic people. So we hear in the Edda, in the book Sigurdarkvida, that Brunhilde stabs herself after the death of Siegfried in order to be buried with him; in addition she first has her slaves killed and she also invites free servants to voluntarily die with her. So she doesnât climb the funeral pyre, but nevertheless follows her husband into death. Also among the Celts did this custom occur in large scale. Great power and wisdom are ascribed to a woman about to commit Sati, which is why for e.g. Brunhilde predicts the future at the last moment for next of kin.
Bernard Sergent (Les Indo-Européens, Payot, 1995, p.223), observes a connection between Sati and the status of a woman. In spite of feminist claims that this custom once again proves the male contempt for woman, it in fact occurred the least in those Indo-European societies where the woman was most disparaged in both practice as well as mythology, like the Greek [society]. A woman who does not have much honour to maintain, wonât accompany one to the pyre; itâs precisely the proud and relatively emancipated Celtic and Germanic women who did this.]</i>
<b>See quoteblock at end concerning the above</b>
In India, besides the Rajputs, the martial Marathas and Sikhs also knew this custom, though to a lesser extent. Other castes did not know this practice at all or specifically disapproved of it, in particular the Brahmanas (although they too practised Sati in British Bengal, in particular after the modernisation of the law of succession). In most duty-prescribing books (400 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.?), Manu and Yajnavalkya among others, there is no mention of widow-burning at all. Only the Vishnu Dharmashastra gives the widow the choice between celibacy and self-immolation.
<b>Suicide, not murder</b>
That in principle itâs about self-immolation and not murder is apparent from many British testimonies. For that matter, these are in agreement that this practice only occurred among a few higher castes. They keep stressing that those present continually tried to make the woman give up on her resolve, and that there wasnât a single stigma associated with forsaking this resolution, unless it only happened after the ceremony had started (which might perhaps have been the case with Rup Kanwar).
In Bengal at the start of the 19th century, several cases have been mentioned where the Sati was under pressure by the in-laws. A part of the cause was the British reforms of the law of succession, which suddenly made it worthwhile for the in-laws to not be left with a surviving daughter-in-law. This was therefore an aberration, partly induced by colonisation, of the general practice where Sati was completely voluntary. For that matter, itâs significant that such women did not become the object of worship, as opposed to the many non-suspect Sati women in Rajasthan.
The mentions of Sati in mythological, judicial and historical texts of the Hindus are without exception concerned with voluntary self-immolation. The name actually cames from Sati, the beloved of Shiva, who sets herself on fire in protest against the unjust treatment of her lover by her father; this story therefore has noting to do with widow-burning. It is quite possible that this might be a later-constructed myth to explain the name, and that the practice of Sati is much older. Sati actually means âgoodâ or âloyal [woman]â, from <i>sat/sant</i>, âtrue, goodâ. The most famous mention is that of Madri, the favourite wife of Pandu, the father of the five Pandavas from the Mahabharata epic: she climbed Panduâs pyre, while the other wife, Kunti, declined the honour. The Greek author Diodorus Siculus tells of how in 316 B.C.E. the Indian commander of a hired army is killed in action in Iran, upon which his two spouses argue about the privilege of becoming the Sati.
Countless examples are known from the Middle Ages. The Arabian writer Albiruni writes that widows were treated badly and thatâs why they <i>chose</i> self-immolation. Marco Polo, on the other hand, states that they did this âout of love for their husbandâ. A special case is the <i>jauhar</i>, the collective Sati of Rajput women when a city besieged by Muslims no longer had a chance to be saved: the men did a desperate sally in order to die heroically, and the women were kept out of the hands of the enemy by the firedeath. Much more recent examples are the voluntary immolation of Shivajiâs wife Putalabai (1680), of Madhavarao Peshwaâs wife Ramabai, and of the wives of Ranjit Singh, Maharaja of the Sikh realm, in 1839.
Of more import for the biased westerner is rather, that also the unsuspectable British shared the opinion that the widows involved carried out their Sati voluntarily. Before the British rule banned this practice in 1829 on Lord Bentinckâs initiative, it had a report drawn up with the significant title: âThe Report on Hindu Widows and <i>Voluntary</i> Immolationsâ. H.T. Colebrooke, H.H. Wilson, Jonathan Duncan and other British authorities advised against a legal ban on Sati, because this ritual does not occur under duress/coercion. A few citations from the assessments collected in this report, and also from other British testimonies, deserve to be heard.
Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone wrote in his <i>History of India</i>: âOn occasion it has been said that the relatives encourage the widow to immolate herself to obtain her possessions⦠People can however be sure that the relatives usually beg the widow not go through with it, and to this end also call in the intervention of friends and figures of authority. If she is of high rank, even the monarch will come to console her and to advise her against it.â
Lieutenant-colonel John Briggs in a letter stated: âWhoever has witnessed the self-immolation of Hindu widows, and of their attitude/bearing towards this as I have seen them, will find it hard to free themselves of the idea that these devoted women have reached the highest grade of faith. The justness of the law that robs them of their only religious solace⦠is therefore at the very least doubtful.â When Lord Bentinck in 1829 issued the ban on Sati, it was under rather general opposition from his (British) subordinates.
Lord Holwel, lieutenant-governor of Bengal, wrote: âIf we viewed these women in the correct light, then we would think more openly about them, and admit that they act out of heroic as well as rational and pious principlesâ.
As evidence for the involuntary nature of Sati, people constantly refer to the mention of a forced immolation in F. Bernierâs <i>Travels in the Moghul Empire</i>, a travel report from the pre-colonial time. Pointing to this, professor Prabha Dixit said, short after the self-immolation of Rup Kanwar, that âSati is never a voluntary deedâ and âalways took place under brazen pressureâ. Well, the same Bernier, who stayed in India from 1656 to 1668, writes in the same book: âMostly it was the practice that Sati was carried out voluntarily.â
He mentions several voluntary self-immolations, and gives among others this description: âwhen I left Surat for Persia, I witnessed the devotion and firedeath of another widow. Several English and Dutch [people] were present. The woman was middle-aged and not at all ugly. With my limited ability for expression, I do not expect to convey a complete idea of the brash courage or fear-inducing liveliness on the womanâs countenance, of her sure tread, of her freedom from all disturbance, with which she spoke and let herself be washed, of the look of confidence or rather indifference that she gave us; of her easy air, free of doubt, of her distinguished bearing, without any embarrassment, when she searched her seating place, which consisted of thick dry milletstraw mixed with small wood, and when she went to sit on the pyre, placed the head of her deceased husband on her lap, took a torch, and with her own hands set it on fire from the insideâ¦â
Contemporaries of Bernier, like Nicholas Withington, William Hawkins, Edward Terry and others, have left behind a few more eyewitness accounts, and they confirm that it practically always concerned voluntary self-immolation.
General Sleeman described in his <i>Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official</i> (1844) the self-immolation of the widow of a rich landlord: âI must do the family the justice to say that they all exerted themselves to dissuade the widow from her purpose, and had she lived she would assuredly have been cherished and honoured as the first female member of the whole house. There is no people in the world among whom parents are more loved, honoured, and obeyed than among the Hindoos; and the grandmother is always more honoured than the mother.â
A more recent example: in september 1991 in Adig (western U.P.) a certain Lakshmi, about 35 years old and mother of five, announced that she wanted to follow her lately deceased husband Mangatu Singh on the pyre. Her in-laws prevented this, made the police guard her, and cremated the body of her husband. But a few days after, two policemen who carried out the watch in front of her door, noticed that there was fire in her room. Apparently she had succeeded in smuggling in some inflammatory materials, and had set fire to herself. Her daughter poured water over her and she was brought to the clinical hospital with 70% burn wounds, where she passed away hours later. At her formal cremation days later, the police was required to prevent a revering crowd.
We may conclude that Sati in the great majority of the cases was a voluntary deed. One can only understand Sati if they give up the prejudice that people can only be coerced into self-immolation, and if one comes to see the completely different views on loyalty to marriage and death. Sati is the extreme consequence of the idea that the woman is gifted with a magical power, and of the belief in reincarnation. Hindu women undergo all kinds of ascetisms for the welfare of their husband, or to be together again in another life, e.g. fasting on the eleventh day of both halves of the moon cycle; Sati is the ultimate ascetism. The belief in reincarnation makes of death just a step on a much longer path, and of suicide something much less dramatic than a selfdestruction, [itâs] sooner the discarding of a not-as-yet worn out dress.
In christianism, there existed for a long time the reverence of martyrs. They too were people who voluntarily chose death, e.g. as an alternative to giving up their faith. They too were people who were convinced that with death all was not over, that their self-chosen death was not a complete selfdestruction. The modern abhorrence for practices like Sati comes from the materialistic idea that death is the absolute end, an idea that also explains the modern taboo on death. For any who believes that he is in reality eternal, the view of death changes completely, and there is not that fear and loathing for the end.
<b>Right to suicide</b>
That the British forbade the practice of Sati, was not a measure against murder, but against suicide. As was and is known, suicide is forbidden in christianism; in some countries there was even the death penalty for attempts at suicide. In India however, people have always judged it differently.
In this way, it is well-known that old Jain monks, once they felt their time had come, just refused to feed themselves still, and thus fasted themselves to death. From this tradition Mahatma Gandhi derived his tactic of âfasting unto deathâ to force others to yield. As a matter of fact, heâs never used this tactic against people of whom it was known that they would not yield anyway, like M.A. Jinnah. His political opponent Swatantryavir Savarkar (1883-1966) had nothing but aversion for Gandhiâs âaffectationâ with his dramatic plays of a fast-unto-death that always ended with a glass of fruit juice and acquiescence to Gandhiâs wishes anyway. He thought that such ascetic stunts didnât have a place in politics. But he did recognise the value of the self-chosen death: when he himself was old and ill, he carried out a <i>real</i> fast-unto-death.
After Mahatma Gandhi, the âfast-unto-deathâ as a political pressure device has become greatly trivialised. The most common everyday report in an Indian newspaper is that yet again someone has started a fast-unto-death to force the authorities to do this or that. The inevitable end to such actions within a few days is often not even mentioned: after all, everyone knows that it ends this way. It was out of frustration, due to the slight attention given to their initial âfast-unto-deathâ, that students in 1990 set themselves on fire to add power to their protest against prime minister V.P. Singhâs caste-reservation plan.
A fast-unto-death with a political goal that was actually carried out was that of Potti Sri Ramulu for the formation of a state corresponding to the Telugu language region in 1952. Before Independence, the Congress party had promised to redraw the map of India according to language boundaries, and to give the large language-communities their own linguistically homogeneous state. Prime Minister Nehru however was against this, and the promise remained unfulfilled. Potti Sri Ramulu went on a hunger strike against this. The government ignored him, but he kept going and died. The government could no longer cope against the wave of sympathy with the cause of the <i>hutatma</i> (self-sacrificer), and the state boundaries were redrawn. The Telugu language-group got its own state, Andhra Pradesh (1953). This suicider is still honoured at official occasions and with portraits in official buildings of the Andhra state.
At the death of M.G. Ramachandran, filmstar and Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, about thirty of his fans attempted suicide in a showy and dramatic manner. The ones that did not succeed with their intention received 5000 rupees as support from the state government, the next of kin of those that did succeed received 10,000 rupees: so whoever commits Sati without calling it as such, is rewarded. Such a suicide of followers is in itself not a new occurrence either: at the death of the Sikh Guru Hargovind (17th century) a number of (male) students followed him into death. Jaya Lalitha, the lover of M.G. Ramachandran and now [=1994] Chief Minister herself, declared later that she had been close to committing Sati in order to have died with her great love. Immediately, anti-Sati activists (like Swami Agnivesh, the Hindu equivalent of our âleftist pastorsâ) demanded her arrest on the grounds of a brandnew legislation against the committing or glorification of Sati. Whoever commits Sati informally is rewarded, but whoever does so formally or speaks about it even, would be punished for it.
Another legitimate ground for suicide in the Hindu tradition is quite universal: just like a minister resigns as a consequence of his political responsibility in some scandal or another, in the same way people can take their lives to thus clean up their own guilt in a catastrophic development. In this way, king Jayapala of Kabul took his own life in 1001 when he had not been capable of protecting his people against the muslim invaders. He made a pyre, climbed it and set fire to it himself.
A few recent cases of elderly ascetics who went to meet death by refusing food, are Vinoba Bhave and Badri Prasad Maharaj. Vinoba, the famous follower of Mahatma Gandhi, began a fast-unto-death in 1982. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi went to visit him to get him to give up on his resolve, but she could only establish that the old man was not to be convinced.
When people asked Indira whether his fasting could not be stopped against his will, she said: âThis is after all what he wants.â <i>Indian Express</i>-columnist Arvind Kala, spokesperson for the westernised elite, pleads for the prevention of all suicide, and writes about Vinoba, pointing to article 390 of the Penal Code: âIn actual fact, he was transgressing the law of the land in full view of the public.â
In reality, Vinoba followed in the footsteps of many of the thousands of ascetics who since times immemorial have gone the same way, and about whom the Indian population has never pronounced a negative judgement; if the law forbids him this, then this law is in conflict with the views of the population. This law illustrates how the Indian legal system is not philosophically neutral (âsecularâ), but is, on the contrary, a powerful instrument of westernisation, just as it was meant to be by the constitution-legislators Ambedkar and Nehru.
Badri Prasad Maharaj was an aged monk of the extremely ascetic Jaina tradition. In 1987 he fasted to death. Among those present at this fasting was Girilal Jain, who passed away in 1993, who as head editor of the <i>Times of India</i> on account of Rup Kanwars self-immolation had become fiercely opposed to Sati.
In short, in the Indian culture there is no stigma attached to certain types of suicide, not today either. However it is there in the Indian law, as became apparent in a grotesque way in June 1991. After the murder of Rajiv Gandhi (the suicide action of a female christian Lanka Tamil militant) the heavies of the Congress party wanted to take revenge, like they had done after the murder on the Mahatma in 1948 against the Brahmanas, and after the death of Indira in 1984 against the Sikhs. This time it was not such a clearcut group that could be attacked, so the aggression of the Congress in the state Andhra Pradesh just focussed itself on the rival parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the regional Telugu Desam Party. The actions were much less serious than what had been done against the Sikhs in 1984, however it was still serious enough for the leader of the TDP, the filmstar/director and ex-Chief Minister N.T. Rama Rao, to react. He began a âfast-unto-deathâ at a public place, to demand from the Congress state government an official investigation into these allegations. The demand was conceded, after which Rama Rao ended his six-day-long fasting. Because the state government wanted at all costs to prevent that the popular Rama Rao would die during an anti-Congress fast, the police had meanwhile taken him and brought him to a hospital, where he could, if necessary, be fed through a tube. What's noteworthy about this is however that the police filed a complaint at the court against Rama Rao on grounds of article 390, which declares attempts of suicide as a punishable fact.
This law was put in question before the Bombay High Court, that in 1986 decided that an Indian citizen did constitutionally have the right to suicide (a decision against which an appeal was made once again, exactly because it undermines the anti-Sati policy). But apparently people still hold that man is not allowed to have a say about his own life, a christian viewpoint that has already been abandoned in the legislation of many Western countries. Another court of justice, that of Andhra Pradesh, decided in April 1987 that the law which makes suicide punishable, is consitutional: âThe right to life does not imply the right to die.â
Judge Hon. K. Amareshwari accounted for this pronouncement by pointing to the following implication: âIf the attempt to suicide is not punishable, then anyone who helps or incites others to suicide, could go free.â This line of argument is not entirely sound, because the legislator could very well pronounce different judgements for attempt at suicide and inciting to suicide. The Canadian law does not punish suicide, but incitement to it is 14 years imprisonment. The Indian law at least differentiates quantitatively: thereâs a 1 year prison sentence for attempted suicide, 10 years for inciting to it.
Another argument for the ban on suicide is that an honoured suicide or one that is surrounded by publicity might incite imitation. Suicide is therefore implicitly always âincitement to suicideâ. Arvind Kala sums it up: âThe death of Vinoba formed the incitement to a copycat-suicide when a year later an old Gandhian, named Patwardhan, starved himself to death in the house of his daughter. When Badri Prasad Maharaj passed away after 50 days of fasting, his example was immediately followed by a female Jain ascetic. At the self-immolation of students in protest against the caste-reservation plan of V.P. Singh, every self-immolation created the atmosphere for the next one. The government therefore was very much in the right to interfere in N.T. Rama Raoâs fast. God forbid, if heâd died, his emotional fans might have followed his example in a moment of shock.â
It is nevertheless misplaced to put the emotional deed of the students (not unknown in Europe either, see Jan Pallach in Prague 1968) on the same line with old ascetics who deem their time to have come. The Hindu morality gives no uniform rules, but distinguishes on a case by case basis. From the Hindu perspective, ascetics (a status that people can take on at any moment) have the fullest right to opt for death, and they inevitably do this in imitation of others: not just of Vinoba and Beni Prasad, but also of the many thousands before them. Emotional suicide on the other hand, on own initiative or in imitation, is plainly comdemnable, on grounds of the Vedic text: âPeople should not leave this world before they have completed the time measured out.â Point of discussion is whether this text is also directed at Sati.
<b>Judgement of Sati</b>
Around 1800, about thirty years before the British administrator Lord Bentinck issued a ban on Sati in Bengal, the Hindu governments in some princely states had already issued orders to discourage Sati, in particular the Maratha government in Sawantwadi and the Brahmana government in Pune. With this, they concretised the anti-Sati policy of the Maratha queen Ahalyabai who passed away in 1795. Even within the Hindu tradition there has been, at least since Medhatithiâs commentary on the Manu Smriti (900 C.E.?), always a stream that rejected Sati. The Shakta or Tantra stream was very explicit in this. The Mahanirvana Tantra says: âThe woman who in her delusion climbs the pyre of her husband, shall go to hell.â (This sentence itself has however made the philologists suspect that this text was written or was completed around 1800, when Sati had become a hot point of discussion.)
The reason for rejecting the Sati is mainly that a woman, in the middle of the crisis which her husbandâs passing after all represents, hardly has a dayâs time to think over such a grave decision. A monk who, in his old day, decides to refuse food has had a whole life of developing a stance of equanimity and non-attachment. His decision does not happen hastily or under emotional pressure.
Besides, there is an element of inevitability in his going to meet death: his candle is already going out, so he is only going along with the stream, even though in facing death he keeps his dignity. The decision of an aged monk is actually just a choice between dying of illness, disability and helplessness, and dying via self-inflicted starvation. A Sati woman on the other hand does have a real choice between life and death: that is why her suicide is more violent, going against the stream of the natural will to life. But that is also exactly whatâs heroic about it.
It is completely logical that Sati was not general practice on one hand, and yet on the other was still completely accepted in the case of the martial castes, especially the Rajputs. With the lower castes, a widow could in every respect remarry, among the Brahmanas continuing to live on alone as a female ascetic conformed with the ascetic caste-ethos, but with the martial castes it was passion and heroism that counted as pre-eminently honourable. That Sati was considered as the appointed way for some and not for others, conformed with the Hindu pluralism, that posits that everyone has their own duty or code of honour (swadharma), corresponding to the their own natural capacity (swabhava).
In the modern West, that same respect for everyoneâs âown wayâ grows more and more, including the freedom to command oneâs own life. People speak openly about âthe right to die worthilyâ. There is no longer a moral consensus that sentences suicide, only a rejection of the scenarios where complete voluntariness (which implies that people have considered it well and realise what theyâre doing) is not guaranteed. Even without blowing new life into Sati as a practice, people can from within the modern culture bring up a more honest recognition of the historic truth about Sati, and even a level of appreciation for what must indeed have been a heroic deed.
<i><b>End of Elst's article</b></i>
1. <b>About the bit in the above that's succeeded by purple text:</b>
Practices similar to Sati are rather more universal than uniquely "Indo-European". China is not considered "Indo-European" and yet its royalty knew a practice that is actually more similar (than Indian Sati is) to the Germanic suicide ritual which Bernard Sergent and Elst mention above. Therefore, Sati in India can well be independent from any "Indo-European" practices pertaining to ritualised collective suicide of household members:
<i>Extracts from "Who was the 'First Emperor'?", taken out of 'The Giant Book of Facts', Octopus Books, 1987, London, p.248:</i>
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>"Who was the 'First Emperor'?</b>
He was Cheng Ying, who adopted the title of Shih Huang-ti (meaning the 'First Emperor') when he became ruler of the whole of China in 221 BC.
...
<b>Earlier rulers of China went to their graves accompanied by a large entourage of courtiers, wives and servants (who either voluntarily committed suicide or were put to death)."</b>
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
2. About the sentence: "It is quite possible that this (Shiva-Sati narrative) might be a later-constructed myth to explain the name".
And it might just as well be that whichever Hindu first thought of referring thus to the practise of Hindu widows immolating themselves might have considered that they were doing this out of a devotional loyalty to their husbands, and was reminded of how Sati is devoted to Shiva and hence referred to it with the Amman's name.
2. About the paragraph starting with: "In christianism, there existed for a long time the reverence of martyrs. They too were people who voluntarily chose death, e.g. as an alternative to giving up their faith.... "
Many a christian martyr did not exist. In particular, the stories of them choosing death as opposed to giving up their faith tend to be fable. Consider pope Marcellinus, venerated as saint and martyr: history knows he never died for his faith - so he's not a martyr, AND history knows he apostasised - so he can't be a *christian saint*. Other examples abound, see Joseph McCabe. See http://freetruth.50webs.org/Appendix5.htm and http://freetruth.50webs.org/B3b.htm