To those on a new civilising mission

By Madhu Kishwar

(The following is the writer's response to articles by Ms. Jayanthi Natarajan titled ``Sati vs murder'' (TheHindu, December 3, 1999), and Ms. Subhashini Ali titled ``Outlawing inhuman practices'' (TheHindu, December 27 & 28, 1999).

Ms. Jayanthi Natarajan takes objections to the fact certain women's organisations publicised their findings which indicated that Charan Shah of Satpura village in U.P. had immolated herself without any planning or even informing her family. She thinks it ``vitiated a proper probe by local authorities.'' What would Ms. Natarajan rather have them do? Stay silent about the facts as they found them and keep demanding the death sentence under the Sati Prevention Act for the inhabitants of Satpura, even after their investigations led them to conclude that there was no coercion involved in Charan Shah's immolation?

As a self-professed ``believer in liberal discourse,'' Ms. Natarajan finds it condemnable that different women's organisations have spoken in discordant voices, providing conflicting versions of Charan Shah's immolation. However, an essential prerequisite of liberalism in respect for and receptivity to differences in opinions as well as interpretations. Those who claim to have the clear cut truth as their sole prerogative are not liberals, but practitioners of authoritarian politics.

Ms. Natarajan believes there are numerous people, including at the ``highest levels of government, business and society who consider that sati is an act worthy of reverence and a perfectly acceptable fate for a widow.'' If that we true, there would have been hundreds of millions of satis in India in the last few decades. Instead, by her own account, there were no more than three reported attempts between the much-hyped Roop Kanwar sati in 1987 and Charan Shah's self-immolation in 1999. How many people are willing to let their daughters become a sati? Not many, if in a country of one billion people, no more than a small handful have committed or attempted sati in the last 52 years.

There is a world of a difference between revering a dramatic act of self-sacrifice and sanctioning it as an acceptable fate for normal people. I am surprised that despite her legislative experience, Ms. Natarajan asserts that ``it is totally unacceptable to distinguish between forced sati as being criminal and voluntary sati as being cultural tradition.'' This is as absurd as saying that no distinction should be made between murder and suicide - or that the punishment for murder should be the same as for being a witness to a suicide. In fact, the main point of my article was that it is absurd to describe a forced immolation as a sati. Such an act of coercion can only be called murder.

My argument is simple: in cases, where there is evidence of direct or indirect coercion, such acts should be treated as murder and punished according to the regular provisions of the IPC. The supporters of sati cults should also make common cause with others in preventing such acts since in the logic of their own value system, they cannot possibly apotheosise a murdered woman as a sati. An additional concern voiced by Ms. Natarajan is that the villagers of Satpura have started propagating a mystique about Charan Shah ``in order to translate the alleged sati into a money spinning enterprise.'' It has also been said that the villagers are keen on converting that immolation site into a pilgrimage spot, since they expect many visitors after the interest generated by the event, hoping that this flow might lead to some outside income coming into the economy of this poverty stricken village.

First, all this is in the realm of speculation. Even if true, I find it an all-too-human consideration not much different from other more modern and socially approved forms of commercialisation. What if Satpura villagers were to demand the enactment of a law which stipulates that anyone making money by writing about or filming a sati case should be declared a criminal, or those making films on the real or imagined miseries of Indian women be subjected to punitive fines if they make any money from it?

Ms. Natarajan does not seem to care that not one family in Satpura village is likely to have the money to secure bail or hire lawyers to defend themselves should they be prosecuted in the manner she suggests. They would simply rot and die in jail without defence.

The issue boils down to simply this: if people commit crimes in the name of tradition, the state is well within its rights to prevent such acts and punish such people. I would never recommend that we tolerate human sacrifice or any form of violence committed on others in the name of cultural tradition. However, when someone shows extraordinary commitment or devotion and sacrifices his or her life for the sake of another, or even an idea, it may invoke awe and reverence. Some like Ms. Natarajan might choose to revere those who sacrifice their lives in the name of the nation, even though people like me believe glorification of national wars has caused much greater misery than the glorification of sati. Is it fair that those who have acquired power and privilege, arrogate the right to declare that all those who do not conform to their values are ``uncivilised'' and ``barbaric''? Only a misanthrope could demand that the ruthless, venal and indiscriminate danda of the police be unleashed upon these ordinary villagers without having shown they have engaged in any acts that led Charan Shah to immolate herself.

Ill-informed crusaders

Ms. Subhashini Ali's attack was published days before my article appeared in Manushi's issue No. 115. The normal practice is to send one's critique to the publication in which the article has appeared so that the readers are familiar with the views and facts presented in the original piece. For reasons best known to her, Ms. Ali chose to send her critique to TheHindu.

Ms. Ali condemns as ``a travesty of truth'' my statement that the ``British invented a creature called the Indian woman,'' and that they fixed her into a stereotyped image of oppression. Anyone who has a cursory familiarity with the complex history of this subcontinent, as opposed to the colonial invention of our past and present, would know that if 300 years ago somebody had called out for the darshan of an ``Indian woman,'' there would have been no such candidate. Men and women at that time used different identity markers - based on village, region, language, jati, sect and so on. Pan-Indian gender identity is a recent creation.

Similarly, anyone rooted in this society would also know that even today this sub-continent presents vast divergences among different regions, castes and communities. This diversity was much greater in pre- colonial India. It is absurd to suggest that the position of women among Nairs, Meitis and other matrilineal communities of the south and the northeast would have been the same as that of Rajput women in the Rajasthan or Yadavs of Bihar. Even within the same region, the customs, values, role and status of women were far more varied than they are even today. It is only in colonial discourse beginning in the 19th century that all of this sub-continent's diverse women were homogenised into a monolithic group under the all-inclusive category ``Indian Women,'' and primarily associated with a repertoire of negative images. Several respected historians have analysed how this was part of a systematic campaign for the defamation of India to justify colonial domination. For example, according to the 1901 census, no more than 10 per cent of communities considered widow remarriage a taboo. Among the rest, divorce and remarriage of women carried no stigma. On the one hand, the Victorian-minded British found the prevalence of easy divorce among many groups on the Indian subcontinent very objectionable and considered this a reason to feel superior to them. On the other hand, other colonial critiques of India presented compulsory and oppressive widowhood as the inevitable fate of all of Indian's women, and found that a source of criticism of Indian civilisation.

In the case of sati, the lies they popularised were even more pernicious. It is unfortunate that Ram Mohan Roy's genuine concern for all those women were forcibly burnt was manipulated by the British to project those murders as sati. Today, Ms. Ali is making the same mistake of mixing up Charan Shah's suicide with the coerced burning to death of women. In fact, she goes a step further and blurs the difference between jauhar and sati. In the former case, women immolated themselves in order to escape what they felt was dishonour at the hands of victorious enemies who had defeated their kin in battle. Jauhar thus amounts to women preferring suicide over humiliation and rape, rather than choosing death over widowhood. Ms. Ali's failure to distinguish sati from jauhar is not surprising, because she seems to belong to that intellectual coterie which believes that the British were here on a civilising mission - and that before they arrived here, Indian society was backward and stagnant.

Ms. Ali quotes some random 19th century advocate from an unnamed source, who in turn quotes some unspecified document she identifies as a shastra to assert that ``There is no other way known for a virtuous woman except ascending the pile of her husband... there is no other duty whatever after death of her husband.'' Thus Ms. Ali believes that burning on her hushand's pyre was a mandatory requirement according to the shastras, and that forcing an unwilling widow to do so received popular sanction in India. I challenge her to show me one accepted shastric text which would condone the forced immolation of women and uphold it as an example of sati.

Even though my article makes it amply clear that I personally do not support sati of any kind and would do all in my power to dissuade women from following that path, Ms. Ali distorts my views to mean that I am pro- sati. Nor did I assert that Charan Shah acted ``out of love'' for her husband. I only said, let us not assume she acted out of an obscurantist belief that her life as a widow was useless simply because she was a poor illiterate, rural Indian women who is only permitted to live up to stereotypes the so-called culturally advanced people have of her.Certainly, there is an urgent need to actively combat all those received notions which condition women to act in self- destructive ways. Moreover, if honest and judicious investigations reveal that Charan Shah was goaded or forced into killing herself, then such an act can be legitimately classified as murder. But if her family failed to prevent her death because they did not know of her intention to immolate herself, then demanding their conviction under the Anti-Sati Act shows real contempt for the lives of poor and disadvantaged.

It is in that spirit that I called for the repeal of the draconian anti-sati law. To begin with, the law does not differentiate between a voluntary act of self-immolation, and murder, where the family or community has either forced or pressured a woman to burn on her husband's pyre, as happened in the case of Roop Kanwar.

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