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Sati: How the fight to ban burning of

widows in India was won
14 hours ago

KEAN COLLECTION

Lord William Bentinck outlawed sati in 1829, but the law was later diluted

By Soutik Biswas
 India correspondent

In December 1829, Lord William Bentinck, the first governor general of

British-ruled India, banned sati, the ancient Hindu practice of a widow
immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre.

Bentinck, then the governor general of Bengal, sought the views of 49 senior
army officers and five judges, and was convinced that the time had come to
"wash out a foul stain upon British rule". His regulation said sati was "revolting
to the feelings of human nature" and that it shocked many Hindus as well as
"unlawful and wicked".

The regulation said that those convicted of "aiding and abetting" in the
burning of a Hindu widow, "whether the sacrifice be voluntary on her part or
not" would be found guilty of culpable homicide. It empowered the courts to
impose the death penalty for persons convicted of using force or assisting in
burning alive a widow "who had been intoxicated and could not have exercised
her free will".

Forced to undergo genital exams in colonial India

Bentinck's law was even more stringent than a more gradualist way of rooting
out the practice recommended by leading Indian reformers who campaigned
against sati. After the legislation, 300 eminent Hindus, led by Raja Rammohun
Roy, thanked him for "rescuing us forever from the gross stigma hitherto
attached to our character as wilful murderers of females".

Orthodox Hindus pushed backed and petitioned Bentinck. Quoting scholars

and scriptures, they challenged his case that sati was not an "imperative duty
under the religion". Bentinck didn't budge. The petitioners went to the Privy
Council, the court of last resort in British colonies. In 1832, the Council upheld
the regulation, saying sati was a "flagrant offence against society".
 A painting by French explorer Pierre Sonnerat showing the custom of sati in India

"The unapologetic combativeness of the 1829 regulation was perhaps the only
instance throughout 190 years of colonial rule where a social legislation was
SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES
enacted without offering any concession to orthodox sentiments," notes
Manoj Mitta, author of Caste Pride, a new book examining the legal history of
caste in India.

Also, Mr Mitta writes, "long before Gandhi famously deployed moral pressure
against the British empire, Bentinck had pitted the same force against the
caste and gender prejudices intrinsic to sati".

"By criminalising this one native custom that had so corroded the colonised,
the coloniser had scored a moral point."

How Britain tried to 'erase' India's third gender

But, in 1837, Bentinck's law was diluted by another Briton, Thomas Macaulay,
author of the Indian Penal Code. In Macaulay's reading if someone could claim
with evidence to have lit the pyre at the instigation of the widow, he could be
let off lightly. He said in a draft note that women burning themselves could be
motivated by a "strong sense of religious duty, sometimes of a strong sense of
honour".

Mr Mitta found that Macaulay's "sympathetic position" on sati had resonance

with British rulers decades later.

He writes his draft was dusted off after the 1857 mutiny when native Hindu
and Muslim soldiers, also known as sepoys, rebelled against the British East
India Company over fears that gun cartridges were greased with animal fat
forbidden by their religions. Now, the diluted regulation made it to the statute
book "fitting the colonial strategy of appeasing high-caste Hindus who had
played a leading role" in the rebellion.
 Hands commemorating women who had committed sati on the walls of a fort in Rajasthan

The 1862 regulation repealed both the penal provisions which said that sati
would be punishable as culpable homicide and the other imposing that the
GETTY IMAGES
death penalty in aggravated cases. It also meant that it allowed the accused to
claim that the victim had consented to her life being terminated at her
husband's funeral, so it was a case of suicide rather than a murder.

Mr Mitta writes that the dilution of the sati rule was a "response to the
simmering grievances against social legislation" - outlawing of sati, a 1850 law
empowering outcaste and apostate Hindus to inherit family property and a
1856 law allowing remarriage of all widows.

But the immediate trigger for pushing through a diluted law was the "outrage
among upper-caste Hindu soldiers" who were incensed over reports that
cartridges had been greased with cow fat.

How Britain's opium trade impoverished Indians

Between 1829 and 1862, the crime of sati had been diminished from murder
to abetment of suicide. "Though less commonly practised since 1829, sati
continued to be valorised and revered in certain parts of India, especially
among higher castes," says Mr Mitta.

In a curious twist, Motilal Nehru, a lawyer-politician who joined the Indian

National Congress and played a key role in the campaign for independence
from British rule, appeared in court defending six upper-caste men in a case of
sati in 1913 in Uttar Pradesh.

GETTY IMAGES
 In 1913, Motilal Nehru, a lawyer and politician, defended a group of men accused of sati

The men said the pyre had "ignited miraculously through the sheer piety of the
widow". Judges rejected the theory of divine intervention, deplored the cover-
up and held the men guilty of abetting suicide - two of them were sentenced
to prison for four years.

More than 70 years later, there was a final twist in the story of sati. In 1987, a
government led by Motilal Nehru's great-grandson Rajiv Gandhi, enacted a
law which criminalised for the first time, "glorification of the practice". People
who supported, justified or propagated sati could be punished for seven years.
The law also elevated the practice to murder and reintroduced the death
penalty for those who abetted it.

This move had followed widespread outrage over the last reported sati in India
involving a teenage bride called Roop Kanwar in a small village in the northern
state of Rajasthan. It was, Mr Mitta notes, the 41st case of sati officially
recorded after Independence in 1947.

The preamble to Rajiv Gandhi's law borrowed from Bentinck's regulation. "It
was a tribute paid, even if unwittingly, by a decolonised country to its erstwhile
coloniser," says Mr Mitta.

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