The ‘Dying’ and the ‘Living’ Sati: Chastity and
Widowhood in India
Jyoti Atwal
In terms of numbers, the widows in India comprise 34 million souls and the overall
share of widows to total population of women in India is 6.9%.1 In general, widows form a
significant proportion of all adult women in the world. The world over it varies from 7 to 16
percent. Indian scenario is interesting as the widows form about 1 percent of all younger
women between the age of 15 and 35. Widows account for 12 percent of all middle aged
women between the age of 35 to 59; and 55 percent of women above sixty years of age.
Nearly thirty thousand widows are below the age of fifteen. On the other hand, the
widowers in India are less than three percent of the adult male population. In the rural areas
factors such as illiteracy, caste loyalties and ideas of honour, preference for male child,
arbitrariness of property claims and maintenance rights of the women as daughters, wives
and widows, place women in a relatively more vulnerable situation than their urban
counterpart. The entire context of widowhood in the rural areas is dominated by the notion
that a widow is inauspicious and this is used to justify her exclusion from society and to deny
her access to resources, cultural as well as economic.
My paper will look into the historical continuity of two dominant ideas on widowhood and
chastity since the colonial period in India: the idea of the dying sati (ancient Hindu custom of
widow immolation) and the idea of the ‘living’ sati. The production of colonial knowledge
about the Hindu widow in early 19th century through the category of sati led to an enquiry
into the Hindu religious – socio – cultural realm. The extent to which the issue of Hindu self
immolating widow or the ‘performing’ sati caught the colonial attention is testified by the
fact that by the year 1830, House of Commons had ordered printing of six volumes of
Parliamentary Papers on burning of the Hindu widows. Apart from the weak 19th century social
reform, a variety of nationalisms emerged by the early decades of the 20th century that had
1
Census of India, 2001,Marital Status by Religion, Community and Sex, Table C3..
crucial implications for the public debate on widowhood. All forms of nationalism like
Gandhian one, were faced with the crisis of loss of the material domain. They were left with
only the spiritual one. Gandhi seems to have borrowed his discourse on inner domain from
the widow’s spiritual domain. He introduced the ideas of celibacy and renunciation into the
active sphere of politics. Gandhi’s articulation of sexual self discipline and the inner feminine
strength of a widow to preserve her chastity and honour had a precedent in Hindu widow’s
own perception of her honour. The enduring popularity of the idea of Mother India was
shaped by the Indian experience of suffering and belief in God’s will, remaining stoic and
steadfast in the face of misfortune. These were the elements which constructed the image of
the heroic mother. It is noticeable that the film is much about a widow’s struggle but not
with ‘widowhood’ alone. This struggle responded to a complex matrix of economic
pressures of a ‘feudal/landlord’ rural peasant society where colonial ‘modernity’ was not a
feasible alternative or option.
Dr Jyoti Atwal teaches gender history at the Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social
Sciences Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is at present a guest scholar at University of
Sydney and is collaborating on a joint project with Dr. Tim Allender on ‘Education and Dalits in
Colonial Punjab’.
Her area of specialization is Indian women in the reformist, nationalist and contemporary
perspectives; dalit women’s history; entangled histories of Indian/English/and Irish women.
She has also published in the field of comparative cultural studies on Korean, Afghani, African and
Swiss women.
Her latest publication includes ‘Foul unhallow’d fires’: Officiating Sati and the Colonial Hindu
Widow in the United Provinces’, in Studies in History, 29.2 (2013): 229-272.