May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (13 page)

In January 1987, an auspicious time when the streets of Jaipur were already bursting with hundreds of wedding processions, Roop Kanwar married Maal Singh, a fellow Rajput and high school graduate who was then looking for a clerical job. She had met him only once before. In his wedding pictures, he looks worried and ill at ease with the celebrations around him. But the couple settled into an apparently peaceful marriage, at the home of the groom’s parents in Deorala, about a two-hour drive from Jaipur. By Indian standards it was a prosperous, developed village.
Manushi
, India’s leading feminist magazine, reported that in most families a husband, brother or son worked in the towns nearby, usually in government offices. About 70 percent of the village was literate. Almost all of the houses, like that of Roop Kanwar’s in-laws, were made of brick and cement. There was electricity and tap water. Many families owned television sets and motorcycles.

Seven months after her marriage, Roop Kanwar had just returned to Deorala after a visit with her family in Jaipur when her husband became ill. The next day, after a night of vomiting and stomach pains, the family took Maal Singh to a hospital in a nearby town, where he seemed to improve. Roop Kanwar and her mother-in-law returned from the hospital to Deorala that night, but at eight the next morning, September 4, 1987, Maal Singh suddenly died, apparently of a burst appendix. The doctor did not tell the family the cause of death, and the family said they did not ask. The body was brought back by jeep to Deorala at ten in the morning and was placed before Roop Kanwar.

At this point, Roop’s father-in-law claimed, he fell unconscious, conveniently remaining that way until the sati was over. (Numerous villagers, however, said they saw him at the burning pyre.) Roop, who was praying, announced to the family that her soul should be united with her husband’s and that she planned to commit sati. When people in the family tried to dissuade her, she replied that a curse would befall anyone who tried to stop her. As the word of her decision spread through the village, holy men came to see her to make sure the true
sati spirit was within her. Once they determined that it was, her in-laws gave their blessings. She changed into her wedding dress, led the funeral procession through the streets of the village, circumambulated the pyre for fifteen minutes, then climbed onto it. Her husband’s head was laid in her lap. Maal Singh’s fifteen-year-old brother lit the pyre, but it didn’t catch; at this point, according to an anonymous eyewitness quoted by the newsmagazine
India Today
, Roop Kanwar fell off the pyre with her feet scorched and had to be helped back on. By this time nearly every Rajput household in the village had brought pails of ghee, or clarified butter, which they threw onto the wood until it burst into flames.
India Today
described the crowd, which various accounts estimated at five thousand, as “cheering,” “applauding” and “frenzied.”

At the time, as unthinkable as it seems now, Steve and I did not completely discount this version of events. We felt this way partly because we had spent an entire day talking to villagers who assured us, one after another, that Roop Kanwar had been willing to die. An entire village seemed to have its story straight. We also could not imagine that anyone was capable of an act of such enormous cruelty as pushing a young girl onto a funeral pyre. Our theory was that Roop Kanwar, an impressionable young girl, had been so shocked by her husband’s sudden death that in the confusion and delirium of the moment she had succumbed to the pressures of others to observe a tradition that had been instilled in her since birth.

This view was enforced for us that evening back in Jaipur, when we met Sushil Kumari, an elegant fifty-four-year-old Rajput woman, a relative of one of Rajasthan’s royal families, who had come to the city that day to join the women’s organizations in a demonstration against the sati. Protesting in the open was a giant step for her. She had only recently begun to leave her house after thirty-two years of purdah, and the demonstration would be the first time she had publicly denounced such a central part of her heritage. Ever since childhood, she had been told there was no higher achievement for a woman than sati. “It is very, very ingrained in the Rajput psyche,” she said, sitting before dinner in a dimly lit living room in one of the big houses on the Civil Lines road. “It is glamorized, it is eulogized. It is drilled into us, whether we are educated or not, that the husband is a god figure. It is the ultimate achievement for a girl. We heard about it all the time. In fact, in 1955, a few months before I got married, a cousin became a sati. We were always told that no matter what your husband was like, you should never, ever think of leaving him.” Only 150 years
earlier, in her in-laws’ family, one or two of the six wives of every husband routinely committed sati. Many of the women left their handprints along the walls of the house before leaving for the pyre, and these could still be seen. Committing sati, Sushil Kumari said, guaranteed that a woman, her husband and seven generations of the family after her had a “direct passport” to heaven and would be released from the painful cycle of birth and rebirth.

Sushil Kumari seemed to us a traditional but sophisticated woman. After all, when her father had refused to let her go to college, she had gone on a one-week hunger strike and had won the right for herself. Yet I had learned in India how deceiving a cosmopolitan exterior could be. So I asked her if there was a part of her that still felt sati was an honorable thing. To my surprise, she came at my question from the opposite direction; it turned out that she was in fact ambivalent about her public protest. “I will be very frank and say that a part of me, when I heard about the sati, felt very, very sad,” she said. “I will be very frank and say: I don’t believe in it. But it is a very hard thing for me to say.”

Afterward, at a dinner with some friends, we met an American woman visiting India who scolded us for taking such an isolated, unrepresentative event as a sati and sensationalizing it for American readers. Why didn’t we write about the good things in India, she asked, such as all the marvelous textile exports? I was irritated, but not as much as I might have been. In this case I was afraid she might have a point. Maybe we were making too much of a weird little incident.

The events of the next day erased my doubts. Roop Kanwar’s death may have been an aberration, but the mob of two hundred thousand that swarmed into Deorala the next morning for the chunri ceremony was a shocking statement on the status of women in rural India. The chunri ceremony had been scheduled for noon, but the villagers, fearing interference from the police, held it at seven in the morning. By the time Steve and I arrived, the crowd seemed right on the edge of hysteria and was hostile to outsiders like us. Tens of thousands were still straining to see Roop Kanwar’s silver-and-scarlet shawl draped over the ashes. I tried to fight my way through the crowd to get closer to the immolation site but was stopped by overwrought teenage boys belonging to the Rajput youth groups.

The day before, the Rajasthan state authorities had banned any attempt to “glorify” the immolation, a vague ruling that was not enforced. I saw no police at the immolation site on the day of the
chunri ceremony, although police did stop buses several miles away from going into Deorala. This had the effect of easing traffic and probably ensured that more people, not less, got to see the final rites. By the time of the ceremony, a half million people had already visited Deorala, and donated twenty-five thousand dollars to a newly formed sati committee for the temple construction.
India Today
reported that among those who came to receive the sati mother’s blessings were a joint secretary of the Rajasthan state committee of the ruling Congress party, an opposition party leader and two opposition members of the state assembly.

In the weeks that followed, the odd little event came to be seen among India’s urban and educated elite as a national disgrace. It plunged the country into months of debate over the condition of women, the failures of education and the rise of religious fundamentalism. The story of what “really” happened to Roop Kanwar changed every day. Numerous English-language newspapers, citing anonymous “eyewitnesses,” began reporting that Roop Kanwar had been coerced.
The Sunday Observer
in Bombay quoted an unnamed farmer who said that Roop Kanwar had tried three times to get off the pyre but was pushed back on by the crowd.
The Telegraph
in Calcutta quoted “some Deorala women” who “hesitantly and reticently” admitted that Roop had tried to escape by hiding at the Deorala home of her aunt. The Women and Media Committee of the Bombay Union of Journalists sent a fact-finding team to the village and then published a report citing an unnamed Congress party worker who said Roop Kanwar had to be dragged out of a barn and forcibly placed on the pyre. When she screamed and tried to escape, the report said, she was surrounded by Rajput youths with swords.
The Hindustan Times
, under the frontpage headline
IT WAS “NOT” VOLUNTARY
, quoted village “sources” who said the husband, Maal Singh, was under treatment for impotency, shock and depression at the time he was married to Roop Kanwar, and that since her marriage she had spent less than three weeks at her husband’s house. She lived there for ten days after the marriage, the sources said, and then returned to Jaipur, where she became involved with another man. Based on such a piece of evidence,
The Hindustan Times
concluded: “The sources said this truly knocked the bottom out of the theory of her voluntary ‘sati’ since there was clearly no great attachment between the young girl and her husband.”

The Indian Express
seemed to speak for most of the English-language newspapers when it attacked the immolation in an editorial as
“barbarous and primitive,” but at least one newspaper in the more widely circulated and traditional vernacular press defended the sati and redefined the debate as a class war of the irreligious minority against the religious
majority. Jansatta
, a leading Hindi-language daily, berated Westernized, secular India, which it presumed did not believe in reincarnation, in an editorial that stated that “the people who consider this life to be a beginning and an end in itself will never understand the custom of sati.” Sati ought to be reconsidered, the editorial said, “but the people who do not know or understand the customs and convictions of the common people of India have no right to do it.” The editorial concluded that “Roop Kanwar did not commit sati under threat from anyone. She had such a terrible disappointment in her own life that she had no alternative but to be burned with her husband … and if this self-denial of hers should become a center of reverence and worship, it is but natural.” The next day, the editor
of Jansatta
was besieged in his office by fifty outraged feminists.

Under increasing pressure, the police finally arrested Roop Kanwar’s father-in-law and five other members of his family soon after the chunri ceremony. But the charge was abetment to suicide, not murder. The police also began rounding up other villagers from Deorala on the new charge of “glorification” of sati. But it was not until September 27, eleven days after the chunri ceremony and more than three weeks after the immolation, that the prime minister himself publicly reacted. In a letter to Rajasthan’s chief minister that was released to the press, Rajiv Gandhi termed the immolation “utterly reprehensible and barbaric,” adding that “all right-thinking people should speak out against this and those who are glorifying the murder of a young woman.” When I asked the prime minister a year later why he had taken so long to react, he put the blame on Rajasthan’s chief minister, Harideo Joshi. “I had talked to the chief minister a day after it happened,” he said. “I told him he must take some strong measures, and I didn’t want to interfere in what’s really a state government area. When we found out that he was not doing something, then I thought we just had to step in.” But it was hard to see why a condemnation of the immolation could not have been more swiftly issued from the prime minister’s office even if the chief minister had handled the situation well.

Whatever the case, Harideo Joshi’s difficulties in managing the aftershocks of the burning led in part to his ouster by the central government four months later. Steve and I had gone to see Joshi the evening before the chunri ceremony, when he seemed at a loss to
handle the crisis he had on his hands. He was under enormous pressure, from women’s groups, the press and especially New Delhi, to stop people from attending the chunri ceremony, but he seemed confused about whether the government could ban people from assembling for a religious purpose. The Rajputs claimed that the chunri celebration was a religious rite and a vital part of their traditions. Rajputs, as it happened, were a crucial part of Joshi’s constituency. “I had advised them they should not permit people to go there,” Joshi said. “But the difficulty is that they take it as a religion, not backwardness.”

This also became a significant point of debate. Writing in an issue of the journal
Seminar
that was devoted entirely to sati, the historian Romila Thapar suggested that religious traditions such as those the Rajputs were claiming “often arise out of contemporary needs but seek legitimation from the past.” The editors of the feminist magazine
Manushi
came to the same conclusion. In a revealing article that examined the influence of the Rajputs in the chunri ceremony and the pro-sati campaign that had simultaneously sprung up in Jaipur, Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita reported that the leaders of the pro-sati cult were urban, educated men in their twenties and thirties, newly prosperous, with property and family connections. The secretary of a new pro-sati group in Jaipur, for example, ran a thriving leather export business; his wife was the graduate of one of Delhi’s most elite colleges. Kishwar and Vanita found that the phrases shouted at the sati site by Rajput schoolboys were modeled on election slogans rather than religious chants and that the song sung at the daily evening worship there was similar to a popular Hindi film tune—which was not of Rajasthani origin, and had nothing to do with sati. Kishwar and Vanita concluded that “the sati cult in its present-day form is primarily the product of a phony religiosity that is the accompaniment of newfound prosperity, harnessed by political leaders for their own vested interests.” The Rajputs appeared to be using the sati issue to shore up their sagging political power. (The Rajputs had once been the dominant caste in Rajasthan, but outsiders had moved in and were now running the state government.) As Romila Thapar asserted in
Seminar:
“The Rajputs therefore seek to demonstrate their solidarity and status through other kinds of actions. One mechanism is to choose a ritual which is controversial and insist on supporting it.”