The Hindus (106 page)

The national press in India nowadays marches “in lockstep with the colonial legislator who abolished the custom of widow-burning in 1829.”
¹⁸
Nationalist historians, despite their otherwise anticolonial bias, have accepted this part of the colonial viewpoint, thus aligning themselves with the Christian missionaries, whom they otherwise generally despise. On the left are the new, secular Indian elites, who engage in “internal colonialism” by protesting against the backlash of a Hinduism that they stigmatize as superstitious, socially retrograde, and obscurantist. On the right are the other sort of nationalist who use suttee as the banner of “Hindu-tva” (Hinduness) to oppress not only women but Muslims and dissidents.

Fast-forward: When it comes to suttee, we too are strange bedfellows, caught between two contemporary value systems. On the one hand, the increasingly popular concept of universal human rights challenges previous scholarly attempts to be value free and brings its adherents uncomfortably close to the camp of the British. On the other hand, such values as moral relativism or respect for other cultures condemn the British as white men saving brown women from brown men.
^kn
19
Allan Bloom, in his conservative book
The Closing of the American Mind
(1987), began his attack on moral relativism with the example of suttee: “If I pose the routine questions designed to confute [the students] and make them think, such as, ‘If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?,’ they either remain silent or reply that the British should not have been there in the first place.”
²⁰
I disagree. Some years ago, when I was invited to teach a class about India to a group of high school students on the South Side of Chicago, I told them about suttee and put Bloom’s question to them, and their unanimous reply was: “I would not interfere; I would not mess with someone else’s religion.” This answer, which shocked me at the time, came, I eventually realized, out of the Chicago students’ own experience of identity politics. But moving beyond the chauvinist British attitude (white men saving brown women from brown men) and then also beyond the relativist reaction (“I would not mess with someone else’s religion”), we might aspire to a more complex synthesis, balancing our respect for the Hindus as complex moral beings, many of whom protested against suttee, with our own sense of human rights. The best we can do is to question the deeper motives of the British, the Hindus, and ourselves.

Others before Rammohun Roy, including Akbar and Jahangir, had tried in vain to curtail suttee, and the British involvement in such reforms came from such mixed impulses that it was foredoomed to miscarry.

Every British schoolchild was once taught the story: “In 1829 the British government in India put an end to the Hindu practice of suttee, their moral outrage at this barbaric violation of human rights outweighing their characteristic liberal tolerance of the religious practices of people under their benign rule.” But almost every element in this credo is false. True, a law was passed in India in 1829 making it illegal for widows to be burned with their husbands, but moral outrage was not the predominant factor in the British decision to outlaw suttee, nor did they succeed in ending it. On the contrary, the fear of offending high-caste Hindus serving in the British army and civil service, and concern about the political costs of legal interdiction, had led the British for many years to sanction suttee under some circumstances (as long as the woman had no children
^ko
and persuaded the magistrate that she was acting of her own free will), thus effectively encouraging it by giving it a legal support it had never had before, making it a colonially enhanced atavism.

In 1680 the Governor of Madras prevented the burning of a Hindu widow, and ten years later an Englishman in Calcutta was said to have rescued a Brahmin widow from the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre and taken her as his common-law wife.
²¹
After that the British generally looked the other way where suttee was concerned. The same Orientalist spirit that led the British to mistake the idea for the reality, wrongly assuming that Hindus were following the
dharma-shastras
, led them to believe that they should not hinder but help the Hindus do as their scriptures dictated, and do it
right.
As usual they reached for
Manu,
but when for once he let them down—Manu is big on ascetic widowhood but does not mention suttee—they found some Bengali scholars who argued that the part of
Manu
advocating the burning of widows had somehow been left out of the Bengal manuscripts, so they helpfully put it back in.
²²
(Most of the dharma texts do not mention suttee, concentrating instead on ascetic widowhood; several condemn it in no uncertain terms; and a few late commentaries
^kp
argue for it.
²³
) And so, on April 20, 1813 (the same year the missionaries were allowed in), a British circular proclaimed that suttee was meant to be voluntary and that it would be permitted in cases in which it was countenanced by the Hindu religion and prevented when the religious authorities prohibited it, as when the woman was less than sixteen years old, pregnant, intoxicated (a point worth noting), or otherwise coerced. In fact, there was a dramatic increase in the number of suttees from 1815 to 1818, the first three years of data collection and the first five years after the circular was published; the toll went from 378 to 839 cases. After that, the numbers declined and then fluctuated between 500 and 600. The 1817-1818 cholera epidemic may have increased the numbers, with more men dead and more widows to die with them, or the clerks may have refined their methods of data collection. But there was also a suspicion that the numbers grew because of government intervention: They had authorized it (their work made it seem as if “a legal suttee was better than an illegal one”) and given it interest and celebrity (so that, as in the case of Rup Kanwar in 1987, there were copycat suttees).
²⁴

And when the British did intervene in suttee, the results were often counterproductive. For instance:

What Joseph Conrad called the reformer’s compassion here went horribly awry.

Finally, in 1829, the year after Robertston’s intervention, several years after prominent Brahmins had already spoken up against suttee, and at a time when there were many Indians in the legislature and William Bentinck, an evangelical sympathizer, was Governor-General (1828-1835), the desire to justify their continuing paternalistic rule over Indians whom they characterized as savage children led the British to ban suttee altogether, as well as child marriage, with much self-aggrandizing fanfare.

The British law probably facilitated more women’s deaths than it saved, and its main effect was to stigmatize Hinduism as an abomination in Christian eyes.
²⁶
Suttee is a pornographic image, the torture of a woman by fire, hot in every sense of the word. Relatively few women died that way, in contrast with the hundreds, even thousands who died every day of starvation and malnutrition, but suttee had PR value. Thus the Raj had it both ways, boasting both that it did not interfere with other people’s religions and that it defended human rights. The debate, in both India and Britain, turned what had been an exceptional practice into a symbol of the oppression of all Indian women and the moral bankruptcy of Hinduism. Nor did the 1829 law, or, for that matter, the new legislation enacted by India after its Independence put an end to it; at least forty widows have burned since 1947, most of them largely ignored until the suttee of Rup Kanwar in 1987 became a cause célèbre, and some even now attested only in obscure local archives.

Some of the British, sympathetic to one Hindu view, compared the satis with Christian martyrs or the heroic suicides at Masada—death rather than dishonor, better dead than red, and so forth. Other Europeans romanticized suttee in other ways. Abraham Roger, in 1670, recorded a local story:

We have seen Indra’s tricks before, but this Dutch author apparently has not. He mistakes suttee for the practice of a woman of the night, rather than the act of a chaste wife. Voltaire (who had gotten India wrong before) also seems to have missed the point: In
Zadig
(1747), he imagined a heroine about to commit suttee and suggested the enactment of a law forcing widows to spend an hour with a young man before deciding to sacrifice themselves. And an eighteenth-century French comic opera presented a Frenchman in India whose wife, an Indian woman who was unfaithful to him, feigned drowning in the hope that her husband would throw
himself
on
her
pyre.
²⁸

Richard Wagner staged suttee in his opera
Götterdämmerung
by having his heroine, Brünnhilde, ride her horse onto the flaming pyre of her beloved Siegfried.
^kq
In an early draft of the opera (summer of 1856), Brünnhilde spouts a kind of garbled Vedanta (via the philosopher Schopenhauer, who had read Indian philosophy in German): “I leave the Land of Desire, I flee the Land of Illusion forever; I close behind me the open door of eternal Becoming. . . . Freed from rebirth, everything eternal . . . I saw the world end.”
²⁹
Thus some Europeans glorified the custom of suttee.

Since women and cows are closely linked in the Hindu imaginary, through the trope of purity, let us turn now to the issue of cow protection, which was the banner of the Arya Samaj even as suttee was for the Brahmo Samaj.

Dayanand Sarasvati (1824-1883) was trained as a yogi but steadily lost faith in yoga. He claimed to base his doctrines on the four Vedas as the eternal word of god and judged later Hindu scriptures critically, denouncing image worship, sacrifice, and polytheism. After traveling widely as an itinerant preacher, in 1875 he founded the Arya Samaj, which rapidly gained ground in western India. Dayananda insisted that “those who read or listen to the Bible, Quran, Purana, false accounts, and poetic theory—books of ideas opposed to the Veda—they become sensuous and depraved.”
³⁰
The Arya Samaj further developed the ceremony for “reconversion”
^kr
(called purification [
shuddhi
]) to bring “back” to the Vedic fold some Muslims who had never been Hindus at all, as well as to reconvert some recent Hindu converts to Islam.
³¹
They used the same ceremony to “purify” Pariah castes.
³²
And they sought to distinguish themselves, as Aryans, from Hindus, who in their view (as in the British view) practiced a degraded form of Vedic religion.
³³

In 1893 internal disputes caused the Arya Samaj to split into two parties, sometimes called the Flesh-eating and Vegetarian parties. But the issue of vegetarianism arose before that in 1881, when Dayanand published a treatise called
Ocean of Mercy for the Cow
(
go-karuna-nidhi
), and in 1882, when he founded a committee for the protection of cows from slaughter. For the next decade the Arya Samaj established cow protection societies all over British India. The first agitation over cow slaughter in the Raj took place in a Sikh state of the Punjab where cow slaughter had been a capital offense right up to the moment when the British took over.
³⁴
From then on, the issue challenged the legitimacy of British rule, though the immediate violence was directed against Muslims who killed cows, as they did during the Bakr-Id festival and after pilgrimages (though goats could also be sacrificed). The same debate that hedged British interference in suttee (if it was religious, they should not interfere, but if it was secular, they should) also hedged cow protection.
³⁵
In 1888 a British court in Allahabad ruled that a cow was not a sacred object, that Muslims who slaughtered cows could not be held to have insulted the religion of the Hindus, and that police were to protect Muslims who wanted to slaughter cows.

Cow protection societies continued to form the major plank of the Arya Samaj movement in North India, and cow slaughter was specifically used to justify violence against Pariahs and Muslims. Popular ballads and stories highlighted Kshatriya virtues embodied in acts of saving cows from the assaults of Muslim butchers, to whom Pariahs such as Chamars allegedly supplied cows. At the Bakr-Id festival of 1893, riots broke out involving the entire Hindu population of villages, and thousands of people attacked Muslims. In the 1920s, communal riots occurred around symbols of the cow. Cows continued to provide a lightning rod for communal violence from then until the present day.