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Sati: a review article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Werner Menskt
Werner Menskt
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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Extract

The last recorded case of sati in India, the murder (for such it undoubtedly was) of Roop Kanwar, which took place in the large Rajasthani village of Deorala in 1987, has had many reverberations. In particular, it has served as a focus for international and Indian women activists' opposition to continuing gender violence and to male domination in general. Not surprisingly, the responses have been wide-ranging, from individual and collective acts of feminist solidarity to various attempts at local level, mainly by men and political agencies, to discredit this particular women's movement.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , February 1998 , pp. 74 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1998

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References

1 Hawley, John Stratton (ed): Sati, the blessing and the curse: the burning of wives in India, xiii, 214 pp. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar

2 See Hakim, Catherine, ‘Five feminist myths about women's employment’, British Journal of Sociology, 46/3, 1995, 429–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

3 Firth, Shirley, ‘Death, dying and bereavement in a Hindu community in Britain’, London: SOAS 1994, to be published as Dying, death and bereavement in a British Hindu community, Leuven: Peeters (forthcoming).Google Scholar

4 As Julia Leslie lightly but appositely puts it, the husband would not wait for her in some distant heaven. (Suttee or sati: victim or victor', in Leslie, I.J. (ed.) Roles and rituals for Hindu women, London: Pinter, 1991, 175–91, at p. 188.).Google Scholar

5 Fisch's book takes sati as its central concern. Like Firth's thesis, mentioned earlier, Fisch's work incorporates key concepts from the distant past relating to Hindu perceptions of death and the afterlife which the current sati debates have not considered. My own doctoral work on ancient and modern Hindu marriage laws provided access to layers of Indian tradition which have also not been taken into account in these discussions (see Menski, W.F.: ‘Role and ritual in the Hindu marriage’, Ph.D., SOAS, 1984).Google Scholar

6 So clearly Derrett, J. D. M., ‘The discussion of marriage by Gadadhara’, in Derrett, J. D. M., Essays in classical and modern Hindu law. vol. I (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 303–32.Google Scholar