Burning Women
eBook - PDF

Burning Women

Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Burning Women

Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India

About this book

In early modern Europe, the circulation of visual and verbal transmissions of sati, or Hindu widow burning, not only informed responses to the ritualized violence of Hindu culture, but also intersected in fascinating ways with specifically European forms of ritualized violence and European constructions of gender ideology. European accounts of women being burned in India uncannily commented on the burnings of women as witches and criminal wives in Europe. When Europeans narrated their accounts of sati, perhaps the most striking illustration of Hindu patriarchal violence, they did not specifically connect the act of widow burning to a corresponding European signifier: the gruesome ceremonial burnings of women as witches. In examining early modern representations of sati, the book focuses specifically on those strategies that enabled European travellers to protect their own identity as uniquely civilized amidst spectacular displays of 'Eastern barbarity'.

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Yes, you can access Burning Women by P. Banerjee in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-Title
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Series Editor’s Foreword
  9. List of Illustrations
  10. Introduction
  11. 1. Overlapping Discourses:Widows,Witches, and Forms of Literary Haunting
  12. 2. Under Western Eyes: Sati and Witches in European Representations
  13. 3. Instructions for Christian Women:The Sati and European Widows
  14. 4. Disorderly Wives, Poison, and the Iconography of Female Murderers
  15. 5. Civility and “Dying” to Speak: Sati, the Fetish, and History
  16. Chronological Chart of Indian Voyages of Early Modern European Travelers (cited in this book) who wrote about Sati
  17. Notes
  18. Bibliography of Indian Travel Narratives cited in this book
  19. Bibliography
  20. Index