Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency and Tradition in Colonial and Post-Colonial Writings on Window Immolation in India

Abstract

Sati has been a focal point not only for the colonial gaze on India, but also for recent work on post-coloniality and the female subject, for nineteenthand twentiethcentury Indian discourses about tradition, Indian culture and femininity, and, most crucially, for the women's movement in India.1 Reading these various discourses against each other and in the context of the specific cultural moments and inter-cultural tensions in which they are produced is often a frustrating task because of the astounding circularity of language, arguments and even images that marks discussions on sati from the late eighteenth century till today. This circularity has sometimes been used to indicate the enormous shaping power of a colonial past on contemporary Indian society, or 'to question', as Lata Mani puts it, 'the post in post-colonial'.2 While such an emphasis has been useful in indicating the continued economic, cultural and epistemological hegemony of the West, and salutary in questioning Eurocentric intellectual paradigms, it has also contributed to a lack of focus on the crucial shifts from colonial to post-colonial governance and culture. To isolate the study of colonialism from that of its later evolution is to deflect attention from the narratives of nationalism, communalism and religious fundamentalism which are the crucibles within which gender, class, caste, or even neo-colonialism function today.3 Widow immolation is one of the most spectacular forms of patriarchal violence; each burning was and is highly variable, and is both produced by and helps to validate and circulate other ideologies that strengthen the oppression of women. But for the most part, representations of sati have tended to homogenize the burnings and to isolate them from the specific social, economic and ideological fabric in which they are embedded. Thus the spectacularity of widow immolation lends itself to a double violence: we are invited to view sati as a unique, transhistorical, transgeographic category and to see the burnt widow as a woman with special powers to curse or bless, as one who feels no pain, and one who will be rewarded with everlasting extra-terrestrial marital bliss. She is marked off from all other women by her will; thus her desire, her 'decisions' are to be revered by the community even as theirs are consistently erased. Paradoxically but necessarily, this process also casts the burning widow as a sign of normative femininity: in a diverse body of work, she becomes the privileged signifier of either the devoted and chaste, or the oppressed and victimized Indian (or sometimes even 'third world') woman. In this essay, I will attempt to locate, within the apparent repetitions of