The ‘Sati’ ‘Sita’ Syndrome
Prem Chowdhry
REAL AND IMAGINED WIDOWS: GENDER RELATIONS IN COLONIAL NORTH INDIA by Jyoti Atwal Primus Books, 2019, 282 pp., 1495
February 2019, volume 43, No 2

A very well researched book, the basic premise of Jyoti Atwal’s Real and Imagined Widows is located in the ‘absence’ of a single dominant cultural practice that could shape and determine the question of widow remarriage in the vast and diverse region of the United Provinces. The author closely maps the castes/tribes in different geo-economic regions of this province to define the variations existing among widows ranging from Sati, to prohibition of remarriage, the remarriage and the sale of widows, etc. For this, she gives weightage to changes in economy, landholding and caste structure in different regions of UP, and the resultant increasing labour demand for women in certain caste-groups both in agriculture and the household. The author fruitfully broadens the discourse of the reformists, conservatives and the nationalists based upon community identity regarding widow remarriage by contextualizing this problem within the differing contours of agrarian economy. Considering the fact that the plight and fate of widows in different regions and among different caste groups in India have received not inconsiderable scholarly attention from the academics, the author has been able to analytically imbibe all this and has also successfully carved out a space for her study of widows in a particular region. This assumes importance as UP emerges as a sort of chromosome for India, as it combined various cultural practices followed by different caste groups in relation to the widows. What has also been brought out well is the raging debate in the thirties between the two contending and unequal ideologies: the ‘rights of women’ and the accent on ‘male succession’ to property. Significantly, this debate resurfaced in Independent India around 1955-1956 when the Hindu Succession Act and the Hindu Marriage Act were under discussion in the Parliament and was influential in shaping the laws that were eventually framed. The customary laws regarding marriage, re-marriage, terms of succession, inheritance and maintenance of widows are also brought in by the author and seen especially through court cases.

Interestingly, the one dominant binding material that emerges in this study in the otherwise heterogeneous scene of UP is the reigning concept of ‘fidelity, purity and chastity’ of widows. This has been rightly termed—the ‘Sati’ or the ‘Sita’ syndrome—a syndrome based upon the notion of a Hindu woman’s image as ‘pativrata’, a consuming concern with her chastity which can be seen to run as a thread across most caste, class and regional differences.

In handling the Sati or the widow problematic the British officials show varied reactions based upon the nineteenth century colonial knowledge of the practice. It is noticeable that the British officialdom was severely divided over how India was to be governed and what laws were to be framed or adopted. Their reactions to Sati and different practices being followed in the same district by different castes and communities, to what was considered ‘legal’ and what was not, building up of the pressure against it as well as the court cases eventually led to the enactment of the 1829 Act against it. In fact, the subsequent Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act, 1856 can be read as a complementary Act to the anti-Sati Legislation as it removed all legal obstacles to the remarriage of Hindu widows.

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