Book Review
Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India
Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. By LATA MANI. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xiv + 246. $15.00 (paper).
Reverend W. Bampton's eyewitness account of sati performed by an "infatuated woman" recorded in 1824, some five years before the British colonial regime outlawed this "dreadful rite" in 1829, represents a common missionary discourse found in most accounts:
A scene, the most perfectly hellish that we ever saw, was presented as way was made for the woman to the pit, and its margin was left clear; she advanced to the edge facing her husband, and two or three times waved her right hand; she then hastily walked round the pit, and in one place I thought the flames caught her legs; having completed the circle, she again waved her hand as before, and then jumped into the fire.
Sati, or "suttee" as it was spelled by Westerners, refers most commonly to a widow who immolates herself on her husband's funeral pyre, as well as to the practice itself. The debate on sati circulating in Bengal and Britain between 1780 and 1833, included East India Company (EIC) officials, Hindu pundits (scholars), Bengali bhadralok ("respectable" class, urban-based and upper-caste), munshis (teachers), [End Page 505] Christian missionaries, and members of Parliament, among others, but excluded entirely the voices of Indian women. This exclusion of woman as subject framed the patriarchal discourse both of British colonial officials and indigenous interlocutors.
Lata Mani's Contentious Traditions is an examination of this debate. For Mani, 1780 marks a distinct shift in the structure and mission of the EIC from a trading company to that of a colonial, a revenue collecting state, the result of a "complex mediation structured by relations of domination and subordination" (p. 13). The ability of the colonial state to extract revenue and material resources, to codify and enact laws, was mediated by differentiated and uneven relations among metropolitan Britain, indigenous middle classes, and the indigenous masses. These three "publics" represent the discursive elements in the formation of colonial discourse on sati. The debate, at least in relation to Mani's historical analysis, appears to dissolve by 1833, the year that Rammohun Roy, the "father of modern India," died in England. This was also the period of the Bengal "Renaissance," associated with Roy's social reform movement, depicted in Indian nationalist historiography as a modern bhadralok social force that eventually influenced the composition of later anti-colonial nationalist discourse.
Between the first recorded colonial discussion of sati in 1789 and its abolition in 1829, the EIC promulgated four circulars on the practice. The most prominent of the four, the Circular of 1813, distinguished "legal" from "illegal" sati based on specific and contradictory interpretations of Hindu scripture. Chapter 1 examines the production of colonial knowledge on the subject. EIC officials sought to discover Hindu scriptures, as opposed to customs, that they assumed were the basis for Hindu laws. The Company saw customary practices as "degraded," "superstitious," and ensuring the "corrupt" power of Brahmin priests. The EIC employed indigenous interpreters, at least until EIC officials learned Sanskrit and Persian, to locate and provide analysis of Hindu texts in the codification of colonial law. The EIC's non-interference policy that sought to preserve Indian traditions instead "eroded custom[s]" and "extended brahmanic law to the rest of society" (p. 40).
Chapter 2 explores the discursive specificities--"competing versions of modernity"--that framed indigenous male discourse on sati. Here, Mani focuses on four "sites" of bhadralok discourse: vyawasthas (legal opinion), pamphlets, petitions to the EIC, and newspapers. Contending discourses of pro- and anti-sati forces were forged in relation to official discourse. Mani presents the multiple forces, the discursive strategies implemented by both reformers and conservatives, in indigenous male discourse on sati. In this debate between and among EIC [End Page 506] officials and indigenous male elite, "women are neither subjects nor objects but rather the ground of the discourse on sati" (p. 79).
Chapter 3 examines Christian missionary discourse and its role in the "civilizing" mission of the colonial state. Until 1813, Christian missionaries were banned from EIC territory. This did not stop missionary activity in India: witness the Christian mission based at Serampore. Proselytizing activity in the form of street preaching, in contrast to the EIC's legal-administrative functions, characterized the early period of missionary work in India, from the 1790s until 1813. Although generally unsuccessful at attracting converts, missionaries attended festivals and places of worship to witness, confront, and denounce indigenous religious practices. Indigenous customs were seen by the Christian missionaries as illegitimate, corrupt, and degraded. The inability of indigenes to produce scriptural support for local customs, according to the missionaries, exemplified the ignorance of the Indian masses and their domination by Hindu and Muslim priests. Missionary and EIC official discourse on sati and Indian society basically overlapped.
Chapter 4 analyzes the travel of missionary texts between Britain and India after 1813 when the renewed EIC Charter legalized missionary activity. Mani compares two editions of William Ward's Account of the Writings, Religions, and Manners of the Hindoos (Serampore, 1811), revised and re-titled A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos (London, 1822), exploring the differences reflected in their spatial and temporal production. The 1811 text, published in India, is a descriptive account of Indian society, whereas the 1822 London edition is "argumentative" and "authoritative" and attempts to reform Indian religious beliefs and practices. This "ethnographic shift" reflects the increasingly important position missionary activity secured in India after 1813. Moreover, the 1822 edition addressed a metropolitan London audience and like other evangelical publications, such as the Missionary Register, depicted an Indian society in need of British humanity.
Chapter 5 treats eyewitness accounts of sati such as Reverend Bampton's, introduced above. English-language papers published these accounts recorded predominantly by European males in India and Britain. A "binary view of agency" represents the woman as victim of force or as heroic superstitious Hindu (p. 162). The woman as victim, the eyewitness is "horrified"; as heroine, the eyewitness is "fascinated." Many such accounts describe women who escaped. Here Mani reads "against the grain" in an effort to re-situate the female as the subject rather than the object of the narrative. In this way Mani highlights the material and social bases of sati, in place of the religious ritual depicted by colonial officials, Christian missionaries, and indigenous male elite. [End Page 507] Thus sati, confined to upper-caste women, must be viewed in relation to socioeconomic conditions rather than to religious customs.
Mani's Contentious Traditions will interest those concerned with the historical production of colonial discourse. What makes this book worthwhile is Mani's analysis of the constituent elements of colonial discourse on sati: EIC officials, evangelical Christians in India and Britain, indigenous male elite, both reformists and conservatives. Mani represents colonial discourse as a multi-vocal, multi-relational, and multi-directional means to legitimate the colonial state. Indigenous male elite, though subordinate to British colonial officials, actively participated in representations of sati and in constituting "woman as the site for the contestation of tradition" (p. 2). On the other hand, Mani's recovery of a female subject-position reads more as a projection of her own feminist perspective. Mani discusses this criticism, rendered often since the appearance of the "Contentious Traditions" essay in 1986, in an "Afterword." Here Mani defends--unsuccessfully in my opinion--her reading of female subject-position in the sati debate during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, Mani depicts the colonial state as a disjuncture in the history of India. She offers little discussion of sati in pre-colonial India, which seems somewhat odd given Mani's otherwise detailed analysis of overlapping discourses, indigenous and British. Some discussion of the imbrication of Mughal and other pre-colonial discourses in relation to sati would strengthen this otherwise excellent book.
JOHN R. PINCINCE
University of Hawai'i
