May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (12 page)

ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1987,
UNDER A BLAZING SUN IN THE VILLAGE OF
Deorala, Roop Kanwar, the eighteen-year-old widow of an unemployed college graduate, was burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre. That much, at least, is not disputed. Beyond that, the story has taken on the proportions of myth. The people of Deorala and Roop Kanwar’s family and in-laws said that the young girl, who had been married only seven months before, deliberately committed sati. Roop Kanwar sat calmly on the pyre with her husband’s head in her lap, they said, chanting Hindu prayers and showering blessings on the crowd as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of villagers watched. They tried to dissuade her, they said, but God had called her and she would not listen.

Urban women’s groups, stunned by the first successful sati in many years, countered that this was preposterous, and that no educated woman would choose such a gruesome way to die for a man she hardly knew. Roop Kanwar was forced, they said, or drugged with opium. Whatever the truth, the dusty little mound where she had died quickly became a place of religious pilgrimage. More than five hundred thousand people, including local political leaders and a state official of Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress party, came to worship there in the first two weeks after the event. Roop Kanwar became a goddess, revered for her courage, and funds were collected to build a temple in her honor on the site. Seven months later, Deorala was still attracting four hundred visitors a day, including those who believed that offering a prayer at the scene of her death would cure cancer or allow a childless woman to conceive.

I first heard of the young woman eight days after her death. On September 12, 1987, I opened up
The Times of India
and saw a front-page story that seemed incredible. Under the headline
THE SPIRIT OF SATI LIVES ON
, a
Times
reporter in the newspaper’s Jaipur bureau,
Shabnam Virmani, had written this lead: “Deorala is a village without remorse. Not a tear glistens in any eye—just the dull gleam of religious fanaticism.” The story recounted how a young Rajput girl, Roop Kanwar, had been inconsolable over her husband’s sudden death. After his body was brought to her, she had put on her wedding dress, walked to the cremation site with the funeral procession, arranged herself on the pyre with her dead husband’s head in her lap, then asked her brother-in-law to light the fire. The police did not turn up until five hours after the burning. The story stated that it was “unlikely” that Roop Kanwar had been coerced into sati by her in-laws because she was an educated girl who presumably had a mind of her own. The rest of the article centered on the excitement building in anticipation of September 16, when the chunri ceremony was to take place. The flames, kept going after the cremation, would be doused with milk, and one of Roop Kanwar’s chunris, or shawls, would be draped on the ashes. It was the final rite in honor of the sati, and more than one hundred thousand people were expected to attend.

Sati had once been common in India, particularly among the Rajput feudal warlords who built the palaces and forts that still rise from the rocky landscape of Rajasthan. Scholars are not sure of the origin of the practice, although there are early references to it in the historical accounts of the ancient Greeks and Scythians. In India, references to sati first appear in the Hindu epics, dating from about two thousand years ago. Five of the god Krishna’s wives were believed to have immolated themselves on his funeral pyre; four of Krishna’s father’s wives had done the same. The custom is named after Sati, the wife of the god Shiva. (She is no relation to Sita, the wife of Rama, who had to undergo the fire ordeal.) In the Hindu myths, Sati’s father refused to invite her husband to a sacrificial feast, which greatly mortified her and was apparently an acceptable reason for her to burn herself to death. Shiva pulled her corpse from the fire and carried it on his head as penance. But the god Vishnu, afraid that this act would somehow give Shiva great power, cut Sati’s body into bits. It fell to earth in either five, fifty-one, fifty-two, seventy-two or one hundred eight pieces, depending on the version of the myth. More than a thousand places in India claim to have received a bit of Sati, usually her ears, breasts or sexual organs. Although she did not actually burn herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, the term
sati
has come to be used for all widows who immolate themselves.

By the first century
A.D.
, sati began to gain the support of some of
the Hindu law codifiers, who described it as an act of great honor. It was generally practiced by the upper castes and reflected the belief that a man’s possessions—and his wife was his chief possession—could be sent with him into the next world if they were burned along with him. It was also considered a better alternative for a widow than facing a miserable life of abuse from her in-laws, who frequently blamed her for her husband’s death, made her sleep on the floor and kept her isolated from the rest of the family and all social functions. Many widows were beaten, denied food and forced to beg in the streets.

It was the Rajputs of the old princely states that made up the region of Rajputana who glamorized sati in the legends that mothers told their little girls. It became customary for not only wives but also concubines, sisters, sisters-in-law and even mothers to hurl themselves on the pyres of their dead men. Many historians claim—and the Rajputs believe—that the practice became widespread during the Muslim invasions of five hundred years ago, when an entire clan of men could be lost in a single battle. Rather than submit to the conquerors, the women killed themselves in mass immolations. Whether it is fair to blame the Muslims is a matter of emotional debate in India today; recent historians say sati was prevalent long before the Moghul invasions. In any event, today there are stones and temples that stand in honor of the dead women across Rajasthan, romantic memorials seriously at variance with historical accounts by European travelers who wrote of widows who were drugged, tied down to stakes or pushed back on the pyre with poles. In 1829, the British outlawed sati, and in recent years the few widows who attempted it were stopped by the police. At the time of Roop Kanwar’s death, the belief among the elite in India was that sati had all but died out.

How, then, could an educated woman have committed sati in the India of the late 1980s? Even if the sati had occurred—and I was still not certain of that—I could not imagine a celebration such as the one the
Times
was describing. The villagers seemed to be living in another century. Was the newspaper story true? Who was Roop Kanwar, really?

Three days later, Steve and I were heading toward Deorala, a village of ten thousand people about a five-hour drive southwest from Delhi. Our plan was to see the chunri ceremony and to talk to the villagers and Roop Kanwar’s parents and in-laws. Steve thought the immolation might make a story for
The New York Times
, and I thought that the incident, however atypical, might be included in this book. We
had with us a young Indian couple from the nearby city of Jaipur to help us with the local dialect.

What happened during those next forty-eight hours was almost surreal. Deorala was in the grip of a sati fever that defied the notion of India as a modern, secular state. It was the first time I had so directly felt the power of religious fundamentalism. I never would have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes.

We parked the car on the grounds of Deorala’s secondary school, a run-down brick building on the dirt road leading into the village. As long as we were there, we thought we should drop in on a teacher to find out what the educated people of the village were saying. The excitement in the village had emptied the school’s classrooms, and we found Madan Lal Gupta, an English teacher, sitting in a little office with nothing to do. We asked him about the sati. Yes, he said, it had occurred on September 4 at one-thirty in the afternoon. He and the rest of the school first heard about it a half hour later. Did Roop Kanwar die voluntarily? “She herself was willing,” he said with authority. “Nobody forced her to die.” We asked him what he thought of this. “No doubt it is not a good thing in this modern age,” he began sensibly enough. “But now there may be some miracles, and many big, good things may come to us.” It turned out that Madan Lal Gupta, an educated man who was imparting wisdom to the next generation of Indians, perfectly reflected the feelings of the rest of the village.

That became apparent as we left the school and began the walk toward the center of Deorala. Along the road dozens of little souvenir shops had sprung up, offering grotesque color photo montages of Roop Kanwar supposedly burning on her husband’s pyre. The most popular one used pictures of Roop Kanwar and her husband, apparently cut out from snapshots taken on their wedding day, superimposed on a picture of fire so it seemed that Roop Kanwar was smiling serenely as she went up in flames with her husband. The boy peddling the picture wanted thirty-five cents. By the day of the chunri ceremony, the pictures were selling briskly at four dollars each, nearly a week’s wages for a farm laborer.

By the time we arrived in the center of Deorala, we were part of a festive wave of revelers pouring in by truck, bus, tractor, camel cart and foot. The men wore the scarlet-and-yellow turbans of Rajasthan, and the women came in bright red full-length skirts, short overblouses, glittering veils, large nose rings and thick silver ankle bracelets. Hindi film music and popular religious songs blared from loudspeakers.
Nobody seemed to notice the demonlike sun and the dust that swirled in hot, thick clouds. Roop Kanwar’s death had occasioned a carnival, and it appeared that no one within a hundred miles intended to miss it.

Steve and I followed the crowd to the sati site, a hard little mound of dirt with a low circle of bricks surrounding the place where the burning had taken place. In the center of the brick circle was a small fire, left over from the sati and fed continuously with dried coconuts; around it were piles of incense sticks, and over it was a crooked wooden scaffolding. On the day of the ceremony it would hold a gold-and-fuchsia canopy decorated with strands of marigolds. Young men from Rajput youth groups marched in a clockwise circle around the fire, wielding swords as they chanted “Sati Mata ki jai”—“Glory to the Sati Mother”—in order to guard the place from magic that might have taken away the power created by Roop Kanwar’s immolation. Pinned to the young men’s breast pockets were little cloth tags embroidered in neat Hindi letters that said
MAHASATI ROOP KANWAR
—the Great Sati Roop Kanwar—and beneath,
DEORALA
. In an outside circle, the crowd pressed forward to get a look, although they were hindered by camel carts lumbering through with leaking barrels of drinking water. In the middle of the confusion, an old, skinny woman knelt in the dust, flailing her arms wildly. People told us she had been possessed some time back, and that she had been brought to Deorala in hopes that the evil spirit would leave her.

Steve and I fanned out into the crowd, looking for people who could tell us about Roop Kanwar. The few women I found who were willing to say they had seen the event—and they were growing fewer by the hour as the police pressed their investigation—assured me that Roop Kanwar had acted willingly. The sati had made her a saint in their eyes. “If we had known she was going to do this, we would have touched her feet,” said Kamal Kunwar, a housewife. “Now I will give her a place in my house and worship her every day.” Yet most women said that they themselves were not courageous enough to commit sati. “Sati is not possible for all women, but only those who are very blessed,” said Ratan Kunwar, a fifty-eight-year-old mother of two from a nearby village. “Now I have come here for the blessings from this holy place.” Other women had made their way over to the home of Roop Kanwar’s in-laws, where her room had become a shrine overnight. I pushed my way forward, then peeked in through a window with the rest of the crowd to see the bed she had shared with her
husband. The brick house was clearly that of a well-to-do village family. In one corner of Roop’s room was a television set, a symbol of their affluence.

I was finally able to find Roop’s parents and in-laws in a nearby tent, where they were participating with Hindu priests in a religious ceremony in honor of the sati. When it was over, I approached them. Roop Kanwar’s mother, who seemed dazed but not stricken, told me that her daughter used to read the
Bhagavadgita
during her childhood; her father, Bal Singh Rathore, a big man in a disheveled turban who lived in Jaipur, told me that Roop was “very religious” but admitted that “no one could have imagined this.” Amazingly, he had not found out about his daughter’s death until he read about it in a newspaper the day after it happened. Like his wife, he seemed more stunned than anything else. “The sati lives,” he assured me. “She is not dead, she is alive. Just as we bathe in water, she bathed in fire.” I kept pressing him, and finally he cut me off. “Just as you know English and have your own traditions,” he said, “we have our own traditions. The loss has made me sad, but there is grandeur associated with sati. My family’s name will be famous all over.”

Roop’s father-in-law, a Hindi teacher at a secondary school, was more talkative, even though the police had arrested his younger son, Pushpendra Singh, on a charge of abetment to suicide for lighting the funeral pyre. The rumors were that Roop’s father-in-law would be next. Steve and I sat down with him for almost an hour. What follows is his version—and Deorala’s version—of what happened.

Roop Kanwar grew up as the youngest of six children in a working-class family that had recently settled in Jaipur, the modern capital of Rajasthan and once one of India’s most glittering princely states. Gayatri Devi, the jet-setting former maharani, still lives there in a chintz-filled house on the grounds of her onetime home, the Rambagh Palace. Roop Kanwar had no contact with Jaipur’s old nobility, but the city she lived in was hardly a backwater. Her father, who ran a trucking company, had seen to it that his daughter had finished ten years of school before her marriage was arranged. Roop Kanwar did not appear, at least from her pictures, to be a traditional Rajput girl. In her wedding photos, she did not veil her face and stare at the floor like a proper bride; instead, the camera caught the unashamed smile of an exceptionally pretty young woman with large, sensuous eyes. Newspaper reports, quoting villagers, described her painted nails and the colorful polyester salwar kameezes she wore—all marks of a
modern girl. Roop’s family insisted, however, that she was devoutly religious. One village woman claimed that she prayed for four hours a day. For part of her life, Roop had lived in the eastern state of Bihar, next door to a temple honoring Sati, the goddess who had committed suicide. She continued to worship Sati when she came to Rajasthan. She read the Hindu religious epics every day and fasted on Tuesdays, also in accordance with Hindu traditions.