Reconstruction 6.4 (2006)
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The Question is not, "Can the Subaltern speak?" The Question is, "Can She be heard?"
A Review of:
Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Laxman D. Satya
<1> In this powerful book Lata Mani argues that the sati debate in the early nineteenth century marginalized its very subject, i.e., the widow. The book systematically dissects the ideas of colonialists, nationalists, traditionalists and Christian missionaries and attempts to draw a simile between them. Taking a clearly subaltern feminist approach, it provides a post-colonial critique of all forms of knowledge to date. The most vehement critique is reserved for the very idea of modernity itself. "Nationalist ideology secularized and domesticates the rationality of colonial modernity" (p. 6) contends the author. Through the medium of post-nationalist, post-orientalist, and post-colonialist feminist approach, Mani challenges the notion that sati was a voluntary and religious act of wifely devotion. The book makes a serious attempt to bring to the forefront the subaltern agency of the widow and the materiality of her suffering.
<2> Mani argues that in these debates, the interpretation of scriptures was more important then the suffering of the widow. Apparently, the reason for the reluctance of the colonial state to abolish sati was political. The "colonial state’s own security concerns overrode its commitment to reformist project" (p. 20). Similarly, free traders in Britain used sati to attack the East India Company monopoly. While the colonialists and Christian missionaries used sati to either defend or oppose the state, Indian traditionalists coerced widows to immolate for material gain. The widow’s right over her husband’s property combined with the coercion of corrupt pundits, relatives and the crowd, sealed the fate of sati victims. The central motive behind sati according to Mani was economic and political.
<3> In a substantial opening chapter, Mani exposes the official debate on widow burning. Accordingly, sati emerged from the scriptural evidence, which pundits provided to the colonial courts. This evidence was then selectively used to propagate and enforce the official non-interference policy under the pretext that sati had scriptural sanction. Therefore, the British claimed to safeguard the tradition by non-interference. The basic assumption of the colonial state was that the Indian society was deeply grounded in religion and that sati was a religious act, therefore government should not interfere in colonialized people’s religious affairs. The fact that sati was guided by material gain was ignored until Ram Mohun Roy provided enough evidence to show that the scriptural basis of stai was dubious and that it was principally motivated by economic factors. Here again Mani argues, the debate was not focused on the subject as a human being but on the scriptural interpretation of the act of sati.
<4> As a result, even Ram Mohun Roy advocated ascetic widowhood as an alternative to sati. Though Roy’s failure to recommend widow remarriage stemmed from his own upper caste bhadralok background, yet the reasons for the limitations of his reformism lay in his ultimate dependence on the scriptural interpretation of sati. This was a position not very different from the Manu Dharmashastra. Nevertheless, Roy boldly established the case that widow burning was an involuntary act forced by corrupt brahmans who were ignorant of scriptures. We are informed that Roy was really not so much of a reformer but a restorer of a tradition, which had been supposedly misinterpreted. Therefore, there was a profound need in Roy’s line of thinking to revive and restore India’s glorious tradition. This was not very different from the communal interpretation of the Arya Samaj in the late nineteenth century. This was also similar to the colonialist and orientalist interpretation, whereby the British rescue India’s glorious past as a justification for colonial conquest. Similarly, the Indian nationalists altered the tone of this debate very little, while calling for the revival of the great Hindu tradition of ancient India. The scriptural interpretation of sati led to shared ideas between the Bengali bhadralok and official discourse from which the subaltern subject (the widow) disappeared. Mani’s contention is that these debates completely failed to acknowledge the rights of women as a person and human being.
<5> However, Ram Mohun Roy’s major contribution to this debate lay in the establishment of the material basis of sati. He was perhaps the very first to clearly visualize a close link between sati and widow’s right over her dead husband’s property. The introduction of private property rights by the Permanent Revenue Settlement in Bengal in the late eighteenth century and the subsequent development of a land market further intensified sati. Roy’s anti-sati position projected immolation as an act of courage and heroism while calling for the revival of an uncontaminated original tradition from India’s ancient past. Mani contends that the imperialist/colonialist paradigm and Roy’s ideas combined to form the sati abolition act of 1829. Both these arguments were presented within the orientalist framework that ‘the truth of people’s tradition should be given back to the ignorant people.’
<6> Another agency, which was closely associated with this issue, was the Seerampore Baptist Mission in Bengal. Its purpose was to convert people to Christianity. The Christians however failed in their objective because the Indian society was too heterodox and Christianity did not offer anything new. The ideas of a savior, monotheism, and scriptures were already prevalent in the Indian tradition. Even the Christian attack on caste and idol worship failed because the well-established Buddhist, Bhakti and Sufi movements has successfully dealt with this problem at the popular level. Mani argues that the colonial missionary notion of Indian society as being deeply rooted in religion was also flawed. In fact the subaltern culture had always been quite egalitarian and secular throughout Indian history. The Christians failed to convert people because the missionaries could not understand the simple fact that the spiritual and material were deeply intertwined in popular culture and imagination. The Christian effort to distinguish between the two led to failure. The missionary belief in the hegemony of brahmanical scripture over Indian society was also misleading. Their reliance on pundits and kazis to interpret scriptures formed the basis of colonial civil law. It created the problem of dubious credibility of scriptures and laws. The production of knowledge by the priestly class on colonial payroll serviced the interest of the colonizers and the imperial state. This misguided approach failed to register popular culture based on subaltern customs and consciousness outside the indigenous priestly elite and colonial legal definitions. This contributed to the rise and growth of casteism and communalism in the nineteenth century, contends the author.
<7> As already mentioned, a major preoccupation of the book is with colonialism and nationalism and how these two ideologies approached the question of widow burning while the colonialists depicted the widow as a victim, the nationalists portrayed her as a heroine. But both looked at women as an object to be saved and not a subject with feelings or an individual with personality. The representation of women in such simple terms precludes the possibility of a ‘complex female subject’ according to Mani. It tried to save women by intervening on her behalf without giving her a voice in this matter. Thus the sati debate pushed the very subject to the margin and made her into an object of contest between the colonizers and the indigenous male elites. Woman as a keeper of the nation’s honor was really not very different from the colonial ‘civilizing mission’ of rescuing her from the barbarism of the Hindu tradition. Control over woman’s sexuality was central to the sati debate. Again, it should be noted that ‘this woman’ was primarily upper caste and upper class bhadralok subject. The vast majority of peasant women were forsaken and therefore beyond the rescue of colonialist and bhadralok/nationalist project.
<8> This book attempts to destroy the myth that sati was a voluntary religious act. Instead, it argues that sati was rooted in the material, social, and cultural context rather then religion. Women were not a passive, willing, or a silent participant in this act. Women were in fact forced into it and never did any women submit to immolation voluntarily. Mani provides solid documentary evidence of actual eyewitness accounts and narratives of widows themselves to show that sati was nothing but murder, plain and simple. A reporter of the BengalHurkaru recorded this frightening eyewitness account on January 4, 1826 under the title "Horrible Suttee" in the following manner:
I returned to the scene beheld a sight that made me shudder and the recollection of which sends a thrill of horror yet thro’ my body, the unfortunate woman had only succeeded in extricating herself from the wood and rolling down the pile; for the struggle and heat had nearly deprived her of life. She lay gasping for breathe [sic], her face and body exhibiting the most revolting spectacle imaginable (p. 177).
<9> An eyewitness recorded another equally explicit and gruesome account in November 1823:
I arrived at the grounds as they were bringing her...from the river [to which the widow had escaped from the pyre]....I cannot describe to you the horror I felt on seeing the mangled condition she was in almost every inch of skin on her body had been burnt off, her legs and thighs, her arms and back were completely raw, her breasts were dreadfully torn and the skin hanging from them in shreds, the skins and nails of her fingers had peeled wholly off and were hanging. The widow was taken to the hospital where she lingered in the most excruciating pain for about 20 hours and then died (p. 177).
<10> With such eyewitness accounts backed by women’s testimonials, Mani demolishes the colonial insistence that sati was religion based. The concerns of woman were explicitly material and social. It was not derived from scriptures. It is strongly suggested that delay in the prohibition of sati was mainly due to this stubborn colonial insistence till the end. The crucial point for Mani is not Gayatri Spivak’s question, "Can the subaltern speak?" But "Can she be heard?" By reposing this question, Mani criticizes Spivak’s approach of this thematic subject. And this departure takes the book to a different level where it is, "...attempted to reconstruct woman as subject, to restore to the center the traces of [her] active suffering, resistance, and coercion" (p. 190). Mani claims to provide concrete evidence to hear the voices and feelings of suffering widows, the very voices that colonialists and bhadralok nationalists had failed to listen.
<11> This book has multiple dimensions and makes a major contribution to South Asian historiography. It is not only well grounded in theory but also in social, cultural, and gender history of the nineteenth century colonial India. At its core, this scholarship is a stringent Subaltern critique of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. In the end it even becomes critical of elitism in the Subaltern School itself. The book is well documented with thorough research but replete with subaltern and feminist jargons. Once the reader moves past this murkiness, the book begins to unravel with enormous force of language and interpretation.