Please note that this article includes discussion of state violence against women, racism, and violent death.

Thousands of Hindu widows burned alive on pyres in colonised India, fanning the flames of British imperial rule. During much of the 19^th century, British colonial officials served as literal and figurative bystanders, watching women burn or be burned to death, on the spurious notion that colonial prohibition of the practice would lead to more widow immolations, not less (Mani 1986, p. WS-33). However, imperial narratives represent this history differently, focusing on the abolition of widow immolation in India by the British colonial state and framing it as a victory of European reason and civilization over barbaric Hindu custom.

The practice of widow immolation in India (referred to by the British as ‘sati’) was outlawed by the British Colonial state in 1829. One imperial historian hails this event “as one of the few real and untainted humanitarian achievements of British colonial rule” (Fisch 2000, p. 110). This narrative is false and misleading because it obscures the British colonial state’s institutionalisation of widow immolation in India in the first place. The institutionalisation of widow immolation must be understood a form of colonial gender-based violence enacted by British colonisers on the bodies of colonised Indian women. In my research, I focus on two aspects of this act of colonial gender-based violence; how it came to be, and how institutionalised widow immolation benefited the British colonial state.

The British colonial state institutionalised widow immolation in India on the grounds that the practice was supposedly inscribed in Hindu scripture. Through this act, the British colonial state enabled the deaths of thousands of Hindu widows. The institutionalisation of widow immolation was controversial in both India and Britain. The storm of opinion that it generated allowed the coloniser to play the role of sovereign, mediating between a diversity of religious opinion and between metropole and colony. When the British ultimately abolished widow immolation in India, they somehow forgot that they had themselves inscribed this defunct practice into law. This convenient forgetting allowed the British to represent themselves as European civilisers rescuing colonised women from their violent custom.

The British colonial state manufactured religious differences between Muslims and Hindus to exercise social control. In 1772, under Governor Warren Hastings, the Bengal government instituted “‘A Plan for the Administration of Justice in Bengal’” (Rocher 2010, p. 78). This Judicial Plan codified all indigenous laws along a religious binary of Hindu and Muslim, plastering over the diversity and eclecticism of Islamic and Hindu practices alike (Anderson 1993, p. 172). The Judicial Plan appointed pandits – Hindu scholars and learned men – to the civil courts to formulate colonial policy on “civil matters… [including] marriage, divorce, inheritance, succession” and widow immolation (Mani 1986, p. WS-33). In doing so, the Judicial Plan empowered upper-caste Brahmin pandits (Hindu scholars and learned men) by placing a high value on their ability to interpret Hindu scripture (Viswanathan 2022, p. 31).

The Judicial Plan effectively created a separate ‘civil’ or ‘private’ sphere that cemented patriarchal control of Indian women. The colonial state worked with pandits to search for scriptural authorisation of widow immolation and to formalise the ‘correct’ procedures of the process (Sarkar 2012, p. 299), all under the pretext of British ‘non-interference’ in Indian or Hindu custom.

In reality, colonial ‘non-interference’ in local customs allowed the British colonial state to justify their complicity in, even their enabling of, the murder of Indian women. In 1789, Governor General argued that widow immolation should be allowed to continue, because “‘public prohibition… would in all probability tend to increase rather than diminish [Hindu] veneration for it’” (Mani 1986, p. WS-33). Despite the fact that widow immolation was a defunct practice in many areas at the time, colonial officials nonetheless held the opinion that “in most provinces, ‘all castes of Hindoos [sic.] would be extremely tenacious of its continuance’” (Mani 1986, p. WS-36).

In the forty years from February 1789 to December 1829, the colonial state issued one singular regulation and only three policy circulars about widow immolation (Mani p. WS-33). In 1805, the provincial court’s pandit weighed in on the immolation of an intoxicated twelve-year-old widow, noting that immolations had to be voluntary, but otherwise the court did not act on this scriptural interpretation for years (p. WS-33). It was only between 1812 and 1815 that the provincial court issued any regulatory instructions about immolation, outlawing immolation for widows who were under sixteen, had young children, or were pregnant, intoxicated, or coerced in any way. For all other widow immolations, the court continued to support colonial ‘non-interference’ (Fisch 2000, p. 114).

The diversity of opinion around the institutionalisation of widow immolation benefited British colonial rule by allowing the coloniser to play the role of sovereign mediator. Support for institutionalisation primarily came from British officials afraid of local resistance and the orthodox Brahmin pandits, neither of which could have been particularly surprising to the British colonial officials. The colonial state was put in the position of arbitrating between religious values on two fronts. First, the colonial state separated ‘Muslim law’ from ‘Hindu law’, and then it leveraged British Christian evangelism against the ‘Hindu’ rite of widow immolation, obscuring the fact that the British had breathed new life into the practice by codifying it into law. This role of arbiter between distinct indigenous and metropolitan religions helped to justify continued British occupation of India.

Nonetheless, groups on both sides of the British empire resisted the institutionalisation of widow immolation into state law. Indian widows and reformists resisted through direct action and campaigning. While somewhat obscured, the resistance of widows who were forcibly immolated is defiantly present in colonial records (Mani 1986, p. WS-36). Reformists such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a prominent Bengali religious and political reformer, advocated for the abolition of widow immolation through campaigns directed to the public and to the colonial state (Siddhart 2018, p. 7176).

British state officials and imperial feminists also resisted widow immolation, challenging the colonial state’s justification that it was central to Hindu religious practice and that prohibiting it would lead to unrest and threaten colonial rule. In districts in Bengal where widow immolation was high, colonial officials (including judges, district state officials, and members of police) asked for a prohibition of immolation from 1816 through 1818, arguing that it would not lead to local dissent (Fisch 2000, p. 117). By 1821, a member of the provincial court declared widow immolation “‘a reproach to our [colonial] government, and that the entire and immediate abolition of it would be attended with no danger’” (117). Fourteen groups of English women evangelicals petitioned the British Parliament to abolish widow immolation from 1829 to 1830 (Midgley 2000, p. 95).

The British colonial state’s institutionalisation of widow immolation in India led to a significant increase in the practice. Following the legalisation of widow immolation, the annual number of widow immolations in the state of Bengal nearly tripled from 378 (1815) to 839 (1818). During the fourteen-year period from 1815 to 1828, a total of 8,134 widow immolations took place in Bengal, an average of 581 immolations annually (Figure 1).

The institutionalisation of widow immolation was a form of gender-based violence enacted by the colonial state against its Hindu women subjects. Thousands of Indian Hindu women died violent, burning deaths with the passive encouragement of the British colonial state. Colonial regulation of widow immolation required women’s consent and thus imbued Hindu widows with a supposedly scripturally ordained desire for suicide (Sarkar 2012, p. 300). The ‘consent’ of some widows to their immolation must be understood in the context of patriarchal ideologies (Vaid and Sangari 1991).

The simultaneous encouragement of widow immolation and the regulation of the conditions under which it could transpire allowed the British colonial state to simultaneously play the roles of judge, jury, and executioner of Hindu widows. The legal regulation of an extremely violent practice created the necessity to abolish the practice through law. After years of abolitionist campaigns in India and Britain, widow immolation was eventually abolished in Bengal by Governor General of India, Lord William Bentinck on December 4, 1829 (Fisch 2000, p. 109).

References

Anderson, M. (1993). Islamic law and the colonial encounter in British India. In D. Arnold and P. G. Robb (Eds.), Institutions and Ideologies: A SOAS South Asia Reader. Routledge Curzon.

Fisch, J. (2000). Humanitarian achievement or administrative necessity? Lord William Bentinck and the abolition of sati in 1829. Journal of Asian History, 34(2), 109-134.

Mani, L. (1986). Production of an Official Discourse on” Sati” in Early Nineteenth Century Bengal. Economic and Political Weekly, WS32-WS40.

Rocher, R.  (2010). The creation of Anglo-Hindu law. In T. Lubin, D.R. Davis Jr., and J.K. Krishnan (Eds.), Hinduism and Law: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.

Siddharth, M. (2018). A study on Raja Ram Mohan Roy and abolition of sati system in India. International journal of social science and economic research, 3(12).

Vaid, S., & Sangari, K. (1991). Institutions, beliefs, ideologies: widow immolation in contemporary Rajasthan. Economic and Political Weekly, WS2-WS18.

Viswanathan, G. (2022). Colonialism and the Construction of Hinduism. Wiley Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, 1-20.

Ghazah Abbasi is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. She received her Doctorate in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.