‘Foul unhallow’d fires’1: Officiating Sati and the Colonial Hindu Widow in the United Provinces

Abstract

This article, in addition to the textual debates on sati, reviews the relevance of sensationalism around and governance of the sati cases by the nineteenth-century colonial state in the United Provinces (then known as the North-Western Provinces). While this article contains plenty of evidence to show the colonial engagement with shastras (more appropriately the vyavasthas), yet the question that has been posed is that the six volumes of Parliamentary Papers published on sati need to be read as a source material for writing women’s ethno-psychological history. Numerous cases of women burning themselves cannot be reduced to a question of mere shastric concern. As will become evident from the cases cited here—Hindu widows across caste had imbibed a deep sense of what a dutiful wife/widow should do. These notions of duty and faith accumulated over the ages, not only in a specific time and space. This article also argues that the historical process through which the colonial state and the Hindu reformers engaged with the position of the Hindu widow, produced two dominant ideas on the reform of the Hindu widows—one that the Hindu widows burnt themselves with their husband’s dead bodies by ‘volition’; the other that the colonial state (like its predecessors) possessed (or at least claimed to possess) a ‘moral–ethical’ status to scrutinize whether the custom of widow immolation was ‘involuntary’ or ‘voluntary’. These two processes complemented each other in a colonial context; the idea of a ‘voluntary’ widowhood germinated within official circles in the late nineteenth century and the idea of a living sati was extended to the public sphere by the Hindu reformist discourse. This nineteenth-century officio-reformist debate and discussion was marked by profound creativity for discourses and representations of the body and identity of a Hindu widow. It is this distinct ‘colonial’ Hindu widow whose image was later incorporated into nationalist and post-Independence discourses on nation and development.