Sati: Widow Burning in India. by V. N. Datta Review by: Dorothy Stein Pacific Affairs, Vol. 62, No.

3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 415-416 Published by: Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2760652 . Accessed: 01/10/2013 04:56
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Book Reviews wants to deal bilaterally with Bangladesh and keep Nepal out of the negotiations on Farakka. The reason for this is simple: Nepal is the upper riparian in the case of the Brahmaputra River, and in negotiations with Nepal, India does not want Nepal to present the same arguments that India is presenting vis-a-vis Bangladesh. This would have been evident to Begum if she had looked into the literature on bargaining and international river disputes. Another serious weakness of the book is that no attempt is made to compare the Farakka Barrage dispute with other riverdisputes (such as the dispute between Canada and the United States over the Columbia River, India and Pakistan over the Indus, Mexico and the U.S. over the Rio Grande, etc.) with the result that the findings become justifications to point fingersat India instead of moving forward to prescribe a quid pro quo that Bangladesh could offerwhich could lead to a resolution of the problem. I think it is useless and, probably, counterproductive to ignore India's predominance in the region. The relative power position of the two countries must be incorporated into any durable solution. Aside from these problems, I would recommend the book to students of South Asian politics because of the richness of the empirical findings and the recognition of the multitudinous forcesat work in negotiations over a valuable resource in an essentially resource-poor region.

University of SouthernCalifornia,U.S.A.

KAZI ASADUL MAMUN

SATI: Widow Burning in India. By V.N. Datta. Riverdale (Mary-

land): The Riverdale Company. 1988. xvii, 279 pp. (Photographs, tables.) US$29.00, cloth. ISBN 0-913215-31-7.

ALTHOUGH sati, the custom of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, has been illegal foraround a centuryand a half, it never entirely died out. (A right-wing pro-sati group places the number since 1947 at "only" twenty-eight.) What is relatively new in recent years is the resurgence of self-conscious attempts to glorifythe practice in termsof caste or religious pride. Thus, the event that received worldwide publicity and reawakened a long-dead controversy in September of 1987, when an eighteen-year-old girl was burnt in a Rajasthan village, was not the first even in its area, but it was attended with elaborate ceremonies, belligerent marches, hyperbolic tributes and large crowds of pilgrims. This renewed consciousness clearly inspired the publication of the present book, which, surprisingly, is not a new study, but based on a 1950s Cambridge University doctoral dissertation. It has been provided with a preface and an epilogue that attempt to bring its relevance up to date by discussing more recent cases, but the bulk of the work, its scholarly approach and assumptions, and the focus on the nineteenth centuryabolition debate, remain untouched, caught in the peculiar time-warp of its provenance. The author and his work seem equally unaffectedby the trends and developments in scholarship and the real world that have shaped

415

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Pacific Affairs recent investigations of the subject, such as Marxism, feminism, nationalism, the fundamentalist revival, the rise of "subaltern studies," postmodernism and the currentlyfashionable anti-"Orientalism," although an occasional psychoanalytic interpretation is mentioned somewhat bemusedly. Where later writershave pointed to the possibly self-servingmotives of the British in accepting Brahman pronouncements as constituting the only valid form of Hinduism, regardless of caste and community custom, for Datta British policy on sati before 1829 is deplorable only in its timidity: "The Governors-General lacked not only the zeal and imagination, but also the necessary administrative flare for taking quick and smooth decisions" (p. 65). Likewise, the opposition to legal abolition raised by Rammohun Roy, the most prominent Indian critic of sati, is seen as a character defectrather than a political stance, while Lord William Bentinck, who, as governor-general of Bengal, by making sati illegal in 1829, "took the bold decision fearlesslyand confidently, which was enough to immortalize him for all time to come in the annals of history" (p. 111). Having thus followed the received (and British) version of the sati abolition controversy,afterexamining numerous cases, circulars, reports, and opinions Datta can answer the question of "Why Hindus Burn Women?" (pp. 207-19) only with "Suttee represents the degeneracy of religion into cruel superstition and prej udice and of priesthood and family members into wily agents of death.... But Religion was only a cloak that hid sordid material interest" (p. 219). These interests are construed as narrow personal benefit. The more interesting questions of why the more recent satis should center on an area and a community that had no particular historical association with the practice, of the complex social and economic factorsnow involved, of the relationship of sati to the position of women, to Hindu nationalism and Muslim fundamentalism, are not even posed. Nevertheless, although unfocused, the book contains a compendium of sati lore and speculation, as well as a good deal of material on the nineteenth century administrative history of this most administratively awkward of social customs, and may be useful as a referenceforthat period.

Instituteof Historical Research,London, U.K.

THE ARTISANS OF BANARAS:

DOROTHY

STEIN

1986. By Nita Kumar. Princeton (New Jersey):Princeton University Press. 1988. xix, 279 pp. US$29.50, cloth. ISBN 0-691-05531-9.
BOOK BREAKS NEW GROUND IN TWO DISTINCT AREAS.

Popular Culture and Identity,1880-

study of urban artisans, a category of people that has virtually been ignored in writings on South Asian society to date, even as historians have taken an increasing interest in other "subaltern" (i.e., subordinate) groups such as tenants, agricultural laborers, and "tribals." Second, it is the firstmajor anthropological or historical work about popular leisure practices on the subcontinent. Kumar's focus here is on the recreational activities of the 416

THIS

it is a First,

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