Real and Imagined Women

Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134886517
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An essential addition to the postcolonial debate which offers a challenging mode of `reading resistance' which destroys the stereotyped and sensationalised humanist image of the `third world woman' as victim.

1

THE SUBJECT OF SATI

Pain and death in the contemporary discourse on sati

I

A woman burns to death in a village in the state of Rajasthan in India. The news makes it to the front page of the New York Times – as had some years earlier the news that a woman had been stoned to death for adultery in a Middle East country.¹ The ‘monolithic “Third World Woman’”² as subject instantaneously becomes an overdetermined symbol, victim not only of universal patriarchy but also of specific third world religious fundamentalism.

The stereotypical and merely sensational aspects of these ‘events’, isolated from their context, have tended to overwhelm not only the much greater complexity of the issues actually involved, but the equally significant protest mounted by local women's groups and other sections of the population; the continuing and persistent role of the ‘west’ in post-colonial gender issues; and the theoretical considerations that are of relevance to the issue of female subjectivity in general. It is some sense of these other aspects of sati in contemporary India that I attempt to communicate in the first section of this chapter. The next section explores, tentatively, how a western meditation on the subject of the body in pain may be appropriated for and contested by a specific historical and feminist project in the interests of the female subject as agent.³ A survey of the representations of sati created upon various discursive sites – the formulations of the anti-sati legislation of 1987, the journalistic media, visual (iconic and photographic) productions, documentary films, cinema and fiction – which follows in the last section, reveals how the politics of representation crucially intersects with the procedures of subjectification of the sati in India today.

If my reading of the ‘social text’ of sati highlights its discursive dimension, it is because this dimension has been so crucially interwoven with the material reality of the phenomenon. (I bear in mind here the caution issued by Benita Parry: ‘discourses of representation should not be confused with material realities.’)⁴ One index of the widespread recognition of its importance is that the new anti-sati legislation extends its scope to prohibit not only the ‘commission’ but also the ‘glorification’ of sati, a glorification achieved primarily through representations of women who commit sati. The opposition between the discursive and the ‘real’ has admittedly been a contentious one in feminist issues, corresponding as it does to the opposition between academic/theoretical projects on the one hand and activist interventions ‘in the field’ on the other; but it is not an opposition that has developed into an absolute one in the aftermath of the recent sati. A notable feature, therefore, of the recent debate on sati, a debate I recapitulate in the opening section, has been its public dimension. The fact that religious scholars, philosophers, jurists and writers have expounded their views at public meetings and conferences and interviews in the mass media and that academic historians, sociologists, psychologists and political scientists have published widely in newspapers and mass-circulation journals is indicative of the breakdown of the isolation of these spheres. In this discourse on sati one also notices the quick appropriation of academic research for interventionary purposes, and the corresponding theorizing that takes place from experiences ‘in the field’.

In the analysis that follows I attempt to promote such dialectical infusion methodologically by making Elaine Scarry's subtle academic dissertation on ‘the body in pain’, along with popular art forms and a variety of other representations of the burning woman, converge upon the subject of sati.

II

On 4 September 1987, 18-year-old Roop Kanwar, married only seven months, died on her husband's funeral pyre in Deorala village, about two hours from Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. The event was reportedly witnessed by hundreds of people. The state government did not react to the news although sati is an illegal practice. The massive media interest and the concerted action of women's groups eventually led to the issue of an ordinance banning not only the commission but the glorification of sati. Nevertheless, over 300,000 people attended the chunari mahotsav, the function marking the thirteenth day after the sati. Huge pro-sari rallies in Jaipur protested the government's interference in the Rajputs' practice of their religious rites. The village of Deorala has now developed into a prosperous pilgrim centre. Several of those arrested after the sati have been released under political pressure, and no one has yet been convicted. In January 1988 new legislation was enacted in Parliament (The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987) replicating the chief features of the Rajasthan State ordinance.

It was not for the first time that the government at the centre found itself under pressure both from fundamentalist forces, this time those of a large Hindu community (constituting a sizeable vote bank), and from the liberal press, women's rights groups, civil rights organizations, left political parties and world opinion to prevent the erosion of women's rights.⁵ The state's commitment to secularism, interpreted as the protection of the freedom of religious practice, conflicts with another constitutional guarantee, that of the right of life (in addition to all other equal rights) to women. Compromising between its legal and liberal commitment on the one hand and political expediency on the other, it therefore in this instance passed the required legislation without actively attempting to enforce it.

Sati was prohibited by law in Bengal in 1829 by a British governor, William Bentinck. It is assumed to have declined in frequency thereafter. In post-Independence India, stray cases of sati have been reported, about forty in all, chiefly in some northern states. In the past decade, the phenomenon has seen a significant increase; a number of sati attempts have been prevented by police intervention, but four or five have been successfully carried out.

But what worries women's groups is not an epidemic of sati – sati defenders mock the triviality of the issue in terms of its numbers – but the disturbing implications of the recent phenomenon of the glorification of sati through temples and annual fairs. Rich businessmen, for the most part belonging to the Marwari community, have deified centuries-old satis by building temples to them all over Rajasthan and nearby Delhi; these centres attract thousands of devotees and rake in huge donations. Annual fairs bring prosperity to villages that have been sites of past and recent sati. As is clear, religious sanction, political complicity and economic benefits have combined to encourage a cult of sati in a climate of overall oppression of women.

The issue of sati in India today is not a simple one, but in essence it has resolved itself into a series of binary oppositions subsumed into the larger categories, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’.⁶ Defenders of or sympathizers with sati are purportedly on the side of ‘tradition’: for them sati is a venerated ritual which gains its sanction from the Vedic scriptures;⁷ it is also a practice written into the history of the Rajputs and hence serves as an index of a glorious martial civilization. Belief in sati is in this view expressive of the simple and idealistic faith of India's rural masses⁸ – so that the ban on sati and its celebration pits the state against the community, the colonial or westernized rulers and elites against the ‘native’ Indian subject.⁹ The negative identity of ‘modernity’ – as an elite, high bourgeois and alienated ‘westernization’ – can be and is, by the same token, thrust upon those who take the stand of opposing sati.¹⁰ To repudiate ancient scripture as a basis for modern practice is to invite the charge of alienation; to designate sati as crime rather than ritual, and by such designation seek to intervene through legislative prohibition, is to merely replicate the move of the colonial ruler;¹¹ to highlight the plight of the woman is not only to be insensitive to the identity of the Rajput community (which is defined by her act),¹² but also to be selective and hypocritical in the women's issues that one champions – and have one's bona fides questioned.¹³ It is within the problematic of ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’ that the opponents of sati have had to negotiate their position even as they seek to call the very terms into question. By historicizing the practice of sati, and by plotting the social, economic and political configurations of the scenario of its contemporary version, the notion of a timeless and virtually platonic sati is combated.¹⁴ Historians conclude on the basis of regional variations in the number of satis in Bengal in the nineteenth century that the practice of sati was legitimized by local custom rather than by authoritative and invariable religious prescription.¹⁵ The vocal and organized proponents of sati today, other investigations reveal, are not the simple rural masses, but the landed gentry and the urban business classes; the ‘State’ is not a nameless adversary but is made up of politicians, policemen and other functionaries deeply entrenched in regional politics; the glorification of sati through temples and fairs is a commercial reality and an entirely ‘modern’ phenomenon; the enactment of modern sati derives its features from popular cinema and political meetings rather than hallowed ritual.¹⁶ When they choose to, supporters of sati may themselves claim that the issue is not the opposition between tradition and modernity, but rather ‘the ironing out of the contradictions between the two’¹⁷ – such as is displayed in the case of Roop Kanwar, a ‘modern’ girl in many respects, ‘choosing’ to commit sati in spite of her affluent background, her school education, etc. Thus the categories ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are invoked and contested in a significant way in the struggle for self- and other definition between the two sides.

Nevertheless, the problematic remains insidiously coercive in framing the issue of female subjectivity. In the representations of sati in contemporary India that I shall be discussing shortly the subjectivity of the woman who commits sati remains a crucial issue; female subjectivity has in its turn hinged on the questions: Was the sati voluntary? Or was the woman forced upon the pyre? These stark alternatives were posed as an aspect of British intervention in the issue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries¹⁸ and still retain their force when played into the series of oppositions that categorize the problematic of tradition versus modernity. For defenders of sati today all satis are voluntary, and for its opponents all of them are coerced. But when the individual woman's subjectivity is read in terms of intention, intentionality can only be a matter of conjecture and, finally, ideological conviction.

It is revealing, nevertheless, to see how transparent such intention can appear to be when read back from the initial premise that sati is suicide. In the first place there is the assertion that ‘sati was never a system, it is not one now, it will not be one in the future. It is a case of an individual decision* (emphasis added).¹⁹ The establishment of sati as individual decision permits the investment of the woman with the fullest integrity of fre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION: Subjectivity, representation and the politics of postcoloniality
• 1 THE SUBJECT OF SATI: Pain and death in the contemporary
• 2 REPRESENTING SATI: Continuities and discontinuities
• 3 LIFE AFTER RAPE: Narrative, rape and feminism
• 4 THE NAME OF THE HUSBAND: Testimony and taboo in the wife’s discourse
• 5 GENDER, LEADERSHIP AND REPRESENTATION: the ‘case’ of Indira Gandhi
• 6 REAL AND IMAGINED WOMEN: Politics and/of representation
• Index