Sovereignty and Social Reform in India

British Colonialism and the Campaign against Sati, 1830-1860

Andrea Major

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136901140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The British prohibition of sati (the funeral practice of widow immolation) in 1829 has been considered an archetypal example of colonial social reform. It was not the end of the story, however, as between 1830 and 1860, British East India Company officials engaged in a debate with the Indian rulers of the Rajput and Maratha princely states of North West India about the prohibition and suppression of sati in their territories. This book examines the debates that brought about legislation in these areas, arguing that they were instrumental in setting the terms of post-colonial debates about sati, and more generally, in defining the parameters of British involvement in Indian social and religious issues.

This book provides a reinterpretation of the major themes of sovereignty, authority and social reform in colonial South Asian history by examining the shifting pragmatic, political, moral and ideological forces which underpinned British policies on and attitudes to sati. The author illuminates the complex ways in which East India Company officials negotiated the limits of their own authority in India, their conceptions of nature and the extent of Indian princely sovereignty, and argues that and the so-called 'civilising mission' was often dependent on local circumstances and political expediencies rather than overarching imperial principles; the book also evaluates Indian responses to the supposed modernising Enlightenment discourse.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of South Asian history as well as British colonial studies.

1
Chivalry, sacrifice and devotion

Imagining sati in Rajput society

On 4 December 1829 the British Government of India, under Governor General Lord William Bentinck, passed Regulation XVII, which formally prohibited sati in the Presidency of Bengal. This regulation was the culmination of nearly thirty years prevarication and debate in official circles between those who advocated the abolition of the custom on humanitarian grounds and those who saw this as an unwarranted interference with Indian religion. By the end of 1830, similar legislation had also been passed by the governments of Madras and Bombay and these acts, taken together, are often cited as representing the abolition of sati in India.¹ In reality, of course, sati continued to occur across the subcontinent. As the judicial records of the colonial state make abundantly clear, the legal prohibition of the custom did not automatically effect its eradication.² Illicit satis were performed in all three Presidencies throughout the period of British rule, raising questions about how best to enforce the legislation. In addition to these illegal satis, the rite also survived, quite lawfully, in the large areas of the subcontinent that remained, nominally at least, under Indian rule. Formally outside the ambit of British control and responsible for their own internal affairs, the princely states were not subject to the British regulation on sati and ostensibly had the freedom to choose if and when to legislate on the matter. As a result, in many of these states sati continued to be not only tolerated, but also often positively revered long after 1830.

Prior to 1829, the British debate on sati had concentrated primarily on the rite as it existed within British India. This is not to suggest that its existence in other states was not acknowledged, of course – some British observers even considered it more prevalent in princely India than in Bengal³ – but little was really known about the nature or extent of the rite outside the three Presidencies. It was only after sati had been successfully prohibited in their own territories that East India Company (EIC) officials turned their gaze outwards to consider its prevalence in the princely states. After 1829, newspapers and journals such as The Times (London) and the Asiatic Journal, which had previously carried reports on sati in British India and followed the debate over its abolition, reported, albeit infrequently, on incidents in the Indian states, drawing both public and government attention to the rite’s continued existence in these areas. Although these reports covered satis in a range of Indian states, from Hyderabad in central India to Kashmir in the north, certain areas dominated popular, and official, perceptions of sati in non-British India: the Punjab, the Maratha states and, above all, Rajputana. Of the thirteen satis, or attempted satis, in non-British India reported in The Times between 1830 and the end of the nineteenth century, nine occurred in Rajput states. Moreover, the newsworthiness of a mass immolation on the death of a Rajput ruler, such as that which occurred at Idar in 1833, when fourteen women were forcibly burnt, meant that such events received significant coverage, reinforcing the image of Rajputana as the last bastion of sati in the British public imagination.

There are several reasons for the prominence of the Rajputs in British discourses on sati in the princely states. On a purely practical level, the sheer number of states under Rajput rule made them a significant group in any British policy relating to princely India. Moreover, as British interest in abolishing the rite grew, and as several non-Rajput states fell quickly into line, the apparent recalcitrance of the Rajputs with regard to this custom helped to consolidate a previously vague conception that they were particularly devoted to it. British attempts to suppress sati in the princely states quickly led them to locate the Rajputs as the rite’s greatest proponents and defenders. The princely states of Rajputana were cast as the great stronghold of sati, and the rite itself conflated with a ‘martial’ warrior tradition that the British thought epitomised Rajput culture.

Rajputana comprised a large area of India that was outside British control and is therefore sometimes seen as marginal in terms of European constructions of India – a wild and dangerous land on the peripheries of the known, pacified and controlled British India. This idea was reinforced in the nineteenth century by tribal insurrections and general ‘lawlessness’ in some of the more remote areas of Rajputana (as among the Bhils in the hilly tracts of Mewar, for example). Historically speaking, Rajputana was not as remote as later constructions of ‘British India’ would suggest, however; in the pre-colonial period the Rajput states were far from isolated, as routes through this region formed a major commercial link between Delhi and Agra in the interior and the western seaports of Cambay, Surat and Bombay. Early modern European travellers in India would often pass through this region and the ‘territories of the Rajas’ were far from peripheral in their narratives, even though it became ideologically marginalised in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British accounts – a trend that has continued to inform the historiography even to this day.

The British assumption that Rajputs were inherently predisposed to sati had a long pedigree; indeed, it played a significant role in the orientalist construction of Rajput identity as a ‘martial race’. Several early modern European observers commented that the Rajput princes were particularly rigorous in their observation of the rite, and though they were by no means represented as the only group to practise it, some early European writers do seem to have equated sati, if not specifically with Rajputs, then at least with warrior castes and princely houses. The famous seventeenth-century traveller Francois Bernier, for example, reported that ‘the number of self immolations is still very considerable, particularly in the territories of the Rajas, where no Mahometan governors are appointed’.⁴ For early modern observers, as for their nineteenth-century counterparts, this kind of sati was closely bound up with issues of rank and status. The Italian humanist and traveller Pietro Della Valle reported in 1665

‘Tis most usual among great persons, who prize Reputation at a higher rate than others do; and in the death of Personages of great quality, to whom their Wives desire to do Honour by burning themselves quick. I heard related at my first coming that a Raja, that is an Indian Prince, (one of the many that are subject to the Moghol) being slain in battle, seventeen of his Wives were burnt alive, together with his body; which in India was held for great Honour and Magnificence.⁵

Similarly Niccolao Manucci saw sati as indispensable to the honour of the ruling elite, noting that

Among the caste of Rajahs it is imperative that on the husband’s death the wife be burnt alive with the body, for should regard for her own honour even not force her to this act, the relations will force her to it, it being an inviolate custom of their caste. It is so whether the husband die at home of disease, or of wounds upon the battlefield.⁶

Henry John Grose, writing in 1757, noted that ‘the higher rank the husband is, the greater is the incumbence on the wife to follow him in this manner; and the Rajas specifically have several of their wives burned with them’.⁷

The idea of sati as a Rajput issue is one that has become commonplace in post-colonial India. A number of high-profile sati cases in Rajasthan in the late twentieth century have led to a contemporary conception that sati, as it has re-emerged in modern India, is closely bound up with that community’s identity and politics. Many, though by no means all, of roughly forty immolations that took place between Independence and the burning of Roop Kanwar in 1987 occurred in Rajasthan, especially in the Shekhawati region of that state, which lies between Jaipur and Bikaner. Those who supported the immolations in this region often cast the rite as part of the area’s glorious Rajput heritage, closely connected to the ideals of this caste. Hinduism Today, for example, which took a positive view of the Roop Kanwar immolation, commented ‘Roop’s people, the martial Rajputs (who have inspired fear in every invader of India from the Muslims to the British), claim sati as their custom and religious right – the free choice of the widow.’⁸ Such associations were not limited to pro-sati perspectives; it was also widely depicted as a Rajput issue by feminist observers such as Kumkum Sangari, Sudesh Vaid, Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita, among others. For these observers sati was inextricably bound up, this time in a negative way, with Rajput identity politics; a site on which wider concerns about the changing position of Rajputs within the unitary state could be played out and images of patriarchal virility reasserted.⁹

The close identification between sati and Rajput politics in recent years, combined with the assumption that the colonial debate on sati was limited to events in Bengal, has led to a dichotomy between ideas about sati as a phenomena in colonial and contemporary India. Although many scholars have pointed to the continuities between the debate on sati as it took place in British India and the terms of the contemporary discourse, the two ‘events’ are often represented very differently.¹⁰ Discussions of contemporary sati, while acknowledging some terms of reference rooted in the colonial past, tend to delineate between the colonial experience with sati in Bengal and the modern Rajput phenomena. Because the British experience with sati in the Rajput states after 1829 has largely been ignored by historians, ‘colonial sati’ is usually depicted as a Bengali issue and is often portrayed as qualitatively different to Rajput sati. Though few would now endorse Ashis Nandy’s famous, though contentious, view that sati in Bengal was a colonial pathology, the direct result of an attempt by an embattled Indian elite to negotiate the impact of colonialism,¹¹ there does appear to be a general consensus that the two forms of sati sprung from different causes. Sati in Bengal is widely regarded as something of an anomaly, arising from a certain set of social and economic circumstances that prevailed in Bengal at the time. The vagaries of the marriage market at the elite level produced a disproportionate number of high caste widows in Bengal,¹² while the Dayabhaga inheritance system, which gave the widow rights over both joint family property and her husband’s self-acquired assets in the absence of a son, grandson or great grandson, provided an economic incentive for families to remove a rival claimant to their property and so avoid the alienation of family resources.¹³ Sati in Rajasthan, on the other hand, is often depicted as somehow more ‘authentic’, bound up with martial traditions that date back to at least the Middle Ages and inextricably linked to local tradition and culture.¹⁴

The predominance of Bengal in the historiography of colonial sati debates, especially in the extremely influential work of Lata Mani, has led to the assumption that the ‘colonial’ view of sati was based almost exclusively on this regionally specific manifestation of the custom. As a result it is considered to be unrepresentative of the experience of sati in India as a whole, which, it is argued, took radically different trajectories in different parts of the subcontinent. The dominance of Bengal in our understanding of ‘colonial’ sati is, however, as much the product of the literature as it is of British preoccupations in the early nineteenth century. Although never eliciting the level of popular engagement that the debate on sati in British India provoked, the colonial debate on sati in Rajasthan demonstrates that the British officials were not only aware of other contexts for sati, but also in many cases shifted their own understanding of the nature and meaning of the rite in subtle but important ways in response to these alternate experiences of it.

British encounters with and debates on sati in the Rajput (and to a lesser extent Maratha) states between 1830 and 1860 resulted in a refor mulation of ideas about the rite within an expanded colonial discourse that helps to span the divide between limited colonial experiences of sati in the Bengali context and contemporary understandings of it as a predominantly Rajput issue. Although I am certainly not suggesting that the emphasis on sati as a Rajput issue was a colonial invention, the idea of sati as a specifically Rajput practice was deeply embedded in the colonial discourse, suggesting connections between an orientalist construction of the rite that essentialised the Rajput ‘race’ and their supposedly characteristic devotion to sati¹⁵ and the contemporary debate about sati as a Rajput political issue. This provides an important new perspective on the historical context of the modern sati debate, as up to now the pro-sati lobby has represented itself as drawing on longstanding and ‘authentic’ cultural tradition and has denigrated those who oppose the rite as westernised liberals who draw their morality from the ‘inauthentic’ colonial encounter with sati in Bengal.¹⁶ A reassessment of the level of colonial engagement with Rajput sati places this sort of assertion in a new historical context, suggesting that pro-sati attitudes have also been influenced by colonial discourses on and assumptions about sati.

If colonial constructions of the Rajput sati have influenced the shape of contemporary debates, these were themselves influenced by experiences ‘on the ground’ in the Rajput states and by exposure to Rajput discourses on sati. Far from simply imposing orientalist constructions of India’s ‘essence’ on a passive colonised society, as Said, and to some extent Inden, would suggest, British images of Indian society emerged out of a dialectic process in which orientalist imperatives and the encounter with Indian ideas and attitudes combined in the construction of colonial discourses. The encounter with sati in the different socio-cultural context of the Rajput princely states had a profound influence on the way in which British political agents understood the custom. The conflation of sati with martial warrior traditions underpinned an image of Rajput sati that was very different to that which prevailed in Bengal, where the rite was seen as the despicable imposition of a corrupt, but powerful, Brahmin elite on a credulous, but devout, society. Thus the British repositioning of sati as a Rajput issue, where before it had been viewed primarily as a Bengali one, affected the way in which the nature and meanings of the rite itself were represented.

Before we go on to look at the impact that placing sati in its Rajput context had on colonial interpretations of the rite, however, it might be helpful to provide a brief overview both of British attitudes to sati in Bengal and of some of the main features of sati in Rajasthan as discussed by recent historians and anthropologists. We will then go on to look at how British experiences with sati in the Rajput context altered their perceptions both of the provenance of the rite and of the role of the widow within the processes of sati, and reopened space for debate about the nature and extent of her agency.

It is not the intention of what follows to deter mine whether Rajput satis were in fact any more or less ‘voluntary’ than those of Bengal. There is insufficient evidence from the widows’ perspective to venture any such assessments and what little material there is has been distorted by the colonial archives. This, combined with the ideological problems surrounding the idea of female ‘volition’ within sati, would make any such attempt both hazardous and unhelpful. Nor is it my intention to ascribe to a qualitative ideological distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘coerced’ sati. Rather, the intention here is to explore the shifts and changes in Br...

Table of contents

• Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Chivalry, sacrifice and devotion
• 2 Princes, politics and pragmatism
• 3 Victims, perpetrators and self-determined sacrifices
• Afterword
• Glossary of Indian words
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index