Spivak’s Rigveda and Dharmashastra

This question of representation, self-representation, representing others, is a problem. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Spivak’s Can the subaltern speaks? questions the legitirations of the western discourse over the colonized subject.
Here The validity of an authentic ‘self’ of the colonized ‘subject’ is the center of query.In her essay's fourth section,
Spivak undertakes a detailed analysis of the discourse on sanctioned suicide in the texts of Vedic and classical Hindu
antiquity, namely the RgVeda and the Dharmasastra, resonantly referred to several times throughout this essay as
"the archaic origin"-the "origin," that is, of "the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism.

The discourses on sanctioned suicide and on proper rites for the dead are the two relevant moments in the
Dharmasastra that Spivak turns to in order to frame her discussion of widow self-immolation as exception to the rule
of classical Hindu law. It is worth noting here that the legal narrative of the self-immolating widow "originates"
within discussions of sati as a solely male experience. As a rule, the scriptures (thinking only of the male) consider
the act of suicide or atmaghata as generally reprehensible, but the law accommodates certain forms of suicide
viewed as formulaic "performances." If the suicide arises out of tatvajnana ("knowledge of truth"), if, in other words,
the "knowing subject" or "enlightened self' commits suicide as an act of full comprehension of its tatva (its
"thatness" or "quiddity"), then such a selfannihilation, in Spivak's words, "lose[s] the phenomenal identity of being
suicide" . Using Kane's History of Dharmasastra as her source, Spivak turns to the commentary of Raghunandana
whose interpretations of the Rg-Veda provided the most authoritative legal validation of sati in those times and
places where the widow's self-immolation became the general rule for proper conduct for widows. Thus, it is
through this influential archon/interpreter that we gain access to the archival origin of the enigmatic and sacred Rg-
Veda. But what we discover is not the law as arkhe, the law as absolute "commandment," but rather the archival
violence of a primal misreading at the archaic origin.

So,Spivak tries to turn attention to this older history in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by returning to the ancient texts
of the Rig-Veda (a collection of roughly 3,000-year-old hymns, used during ceremonies and rites of passage) and the
Dharmasastra (an ancient book of religious and legal thought that early British colonial administrators mistakenly
took to be the book of law for Indian Hindus). Spivak analyses these texts since both were used as evidence during
the banning of sati. Spivak’s typically deconstructionist* approach—she points out how different translations of
these text can change their meaning—concludes with the observation that, while the British understood the word
sati to mean only “widow sacrifice,” it also has another, literal meaning: “good wife.”This incomplete meaning,
mistakenly using sati to refer only to “the rite of widow self immolation,” for Spivak “commemorates a grammatical
error on the part of the British, quite as the nomenclature [label] ‘American Indian’ commemorates a factual error
on the part of Columbus”. In Spivak’s understanding, by substituting “self-immolation on the husband’s pyre” for
“goodwifehood,” the “white men” of the colonial government imposed “a greater ideological constriction” on
“brown women.”That is, although seemingly acting in these women’s interests, the colonial government in fact
reinforced their subjugated position.