Sovereignty and Social Reform in India: British Colonialism and the Campaign Against sati, 1830–1860 by Andrea Major (review)

It is common knowledge that the practice of sati, or the self-immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands, did not just end in 1829 by administrative decree in British India. Not much has been written, however, about the campaign to eradicate the ritual in other parts of India during the ensuing decades when the East India Company became an undisputed, paramount power, and exercised considerable sway over subordinate princely states. Andrea Major’s short but lively study of sati as the object of colonial social reform and its civilizing mission raises new and suggestive questions about the crusade against this much-reviled Hindu practice, notjust to alleviate the abject suffering of the Hindu widow, but also to root out retrograde and obdurate sanguinary customs among the so-called marital races, such as the Rajput warrior clans and other ruling houses of the far west. Major also provides a glimpse into the liberal ambitions of the East India Company’s state and the limits of its powers of suasion over the princely states bound to them by political treaties, where widows continued to burn now and again alongside deceased notables in lavish displays of piety and circumstance.

Over the years a number of scholars have attempted to trace the true disposition of the Company state toward Hindu ceremonial practices that were repugnant to Christian values, beginning with the controversy over the proscription of sati in British-ruled territories under Governor General William Bentinck. Major delves behind the superficies of colonial policymaking, noting the ambiguities and inconsistencies in the official stance against the practice. Abolition, she suggests, was not simply a matter of Western enlightenment dispelling the gloom of an outmoded, barbaric practice once and for all, but a drawn-out saga of legal and administrative wrangling over the political price of interference into native practice. The colonial discourse of Suttee, in other words, was not monolithic. Nor was it impervious to the political engagements that accompanied everyday experiences of colonial governance. Those engagements, messy to start with, only became messier as native regimes attempted to cling to older forms of family honor and to the obligations of kin and clan by attaching further weight to the domestic rituals of marriage and widowhood.

Major draws a stark distinction between official attempts to curb the incidence of sati in Bengal and Rajasthan. She argues that while women and the general population in Bengal were seen as passive victims of a practice partly imposed on them by corrupt Brahmins, in the princely states of western India it was considered rather as a time-honored custom befitting the valiant and chivalrous Rajputs. Such attitudes were fostered to a large extent by Colonel James Tod’s widely popular Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829–32)—published ironically enough in the same year that sati was declared illegal in Bengal. Nonetheless, not all Company stalwarts were persuaded by the idea of voluntary sacrifice of women as a genuine expression of traditional valor. Major argues that we should not be misguided by the overarching moral rhetoric of abolition. The British often decided not to intervene when public immolations took place in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota, or Udaipur in the later nineteenth century, their decisions “guided by hard headed political pragmatism” and the principles of sovereignty stipulated in the treaties signed with subsidiary powers. The Court of Directors of the East India Company wished to communicate the unequivocal abhorrence of the government without “exciting the dread of authoritative interference” (62). Here the author seems to agree largely with one of Lata Mani’s contentions in her landmark book, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (1998): ultimately the rhetoric of abolition was about the exercise of power rather than the venting of moral outrage.

This study is an important addition to the literature on the British-Indian...