by Mark Tully
Roop Kanwar had been married for only eight months. Her wedding photographs show her to have been a beautiful young woman with a finely chiselled nose, big almond eyes, high cheekbones and a long, slender neck. In one picture she is leaning towards her husband, smiling confidently, with her head touching his broad turban.
When the body of her husband was brought to the house, Roop Kanwar asked her relatives to take it to the small room where she had lived with him. The body was laid on a mattress on the floor. She then asked everyone to leave the room and started to prepare her husband's body for the funeral. She paid her last respects to him by pressing her forehead to his forehead, her nose to his nose, and her chin to his chin. Then the young widow bathed her husband's body. Relatives had offered to help, but she had insisted on performing this ceremony herself. When she had finished this, she covered the body with a white sheet, went to the door and asked for her father-in-law.
By this time a large crowd had gathered on the verandah outside the small room and the lane in front of it. Her father-in-law came to the door, but Roop Kanwar would not allow him into the room. She told him in a quiet but firm voice, ‘I am going to be a sati.’ He was appalled. He told her that the whole family would be in serious trouble with the police, pointed out that she was like a daughter to them and promised to look after her and care for her. But Roop Kanwar was adamant. Her father-in-law called a retired soldier who enjoyed respect and authority in the village. He explained the legal consequences for her family if she committed sati – they would, he said, be charged with murder. But Roop Kanwar still insisted that she would burn herself on her husband's pyre. Eventually some village elders and Brahmin priests were called. After questioning the young widow about her motives for wanting to be cremated with her husband, they pronounced that she was indeed a genuine sati. When the Brahmins left her room, Roop Kanwar had a bath herself and put on her wedding sari and jewellery.
The body of Roop Kanwar's husband was then carried out of the small room into the courtyard around which the house was built. Women were sobbing and beating their breasts, but Roop Kanwar said, ‘Don't cry, don't cry. I am going to become a sati.’ The women stopped weeping and stared at her. After a moment, the silence was broken by a cracked voice singing, ‘I have worn my rakhri [bridal hair ornament], I have put on my necklace, I have gold earrings hanging from my ears and anklets on my feet and I am wearing my wedding chunari [long scarf or veil]. I cannot leave the man I wed. I am going to be a sati.’ Other mourners took up the refrain, but their piercing voices mixed with angry shouts about Roop Kanwar's claim to be a sati – some mourners were arguing that she was too young, not married long enough or not sufficiently pious. They warned the enthusiasts who were still singing the praises of sati that they might all find themselves in a lot of trouble if they didn't stop the young widow burning herself. Their opponents proclaimed they would be cursed if they tried to prevent the sati.
A woman from the nai or barber caste grasped Roop Kanwar's wrists to break one of her bangles and place it on her husband's body. Traditionally, widows cannot wear bangles. Roop Kanwar pushed her away, saying, ‘What do you want to break my bangles for? I am going with my husband. You will be cursed if you stop me.’ Then a senior member of the family held up both her hands and said, ‘Stop, stop! I'll find out whether she is a sati. I have an illness. I will bathe and put on clean clothes. If the bleeding stops, I will know she is a sati. If it does not, she is not.’ The singing petered out, the arguments died down and everyone waited for the woman to return. Roop Kanwar sat by her husband's body muttering, ‘Om sati, om sati, om sati.’ When the relative returned, she walked over to Roop Kanwar, took her chin in her hands and said, ‘I accept that you are a sati.’
The mourners surged forward, surrounding the young widow and singing the song in praise of sati. Roop Kanwar said quietly, ‘Please do the parikrama.’ The women lined up and performed a ritual circumambulation around the body, still singing funeral songs. By this time, all opposition to the sati had collapsed. The men of the family came forward, picked up the bamboo bier and asked Roop Kanwar to lead the procession out of the courtyard.
The procession wound down narrow, sandy lanes to the small bazaar in the centre of the village. Roop Kanwar then turned back and, passing within a few yards of the family home, led the funeral procession on to the cremation ground at the other end of the village. Although Deorala is a large village, with a population of about 7,000, its old-fashioned houses are packed closely together on both sides of the lanes, which are barely wide enough for a tractor to drive through. There could not have been a single villager who did not know that a woman was going to commit sati by the time that Roop Kanwar ended her last walk through Deorala.
The pyre had been prepared in an open space surrounded by village houses. Maal Singh's body, wrapped in a white shroud but with his face uncovered, was laid on the pile of logs. Roop Kanwar started to walk slowly round and round the pyre. A few yards away, in the shade of a pipal tree, a sacred tree for Hindus, there stood three small shrines commemorating earlier women of the village who had committed sati. The air was thick with dust as thousands of villagers stamped and shoved to get a better view of the pyre. The prayers of the Brahmin priests were drowned by the beat of the drums, and by the frenzied crowd shouting ‘Sati mata ki jai’ – ‘Long live Sati, our mother’ – and ‘Jab tak suraj chand rahega, Roop Kanwar tera nam rahega’ - ‘As long as there are sun and moon, Roop Kanwar, your name will live!’
Some of the relatives of the dead man urged the young widow to climb on to the pyre quickly, in case the police came and stopped the sati, but she insisted on taking her own time. Eventually she sat on the logs laid out for her husband's cremation, lifted his head on to her lap and asked her youngest brother-in-law, Puspendra Singh, aged just fifteen, to light the pyre. He walked round the pyre lighting it in different places and poured ghi, or clarified butter, on the body of his brother to help it burn. But it was slow to catch fire, and Roop Kanwar called out, ‘It's a disgrace that you can't find enough wood and ghi to perform the sacrifice of a sati.’ Some villagers ran back to their homes to bring more ghi, which was poured on to the fire until the flames rose and burnt Roop Kanwar and her husband to ashes. Villagers maintain that Roop Kanwar continued to pray right up to the moment her body slumped forward and was consumed by the flames.
A police constable arrived during the cremation – apparently he had been informed about the sati by the village postmaster and the patwari or land-records official. Seeing the frenzied crowd, the lone constable realized that there was nothing he could do to stop the crime – which it certainly was under the Indian Penal Code – so he went back to the nearest police station to make a report.
That was the version of Roop Kanwar's sati given by members of her husband's family, her own relatives in the village and the villagers themselves.
Tej Pal Saini, the correspondent for the Rajasthan newspaper Rashtradoot who covers the district of Sikar, was the first journalist to arrive in Deorala. He visited the village every day for the next week. All the villagers he questioned insisted that Roop Kanwar had committed sati of her own volition. India Today, a sober and highly respected magazine, also reached that conclusion. It reported, ‘According to preliminary official reports and accounts given by friends and relatives, Roop Kanwar's sati was voluntary.’
The police have another version of the cremation. According to them, the sati was anything but voluntary. The police quote villagers as saying that Roop Kanwar was drugged with opium by a local doctor who was her husband's cousin. She was then dragged through the village leaning on the shoulders of two women. When they reached the cremation ground, members of her husband's family forced her to sit on the pyre and placed her dead husband's head in her lap. The flames shocked Roop Kanwar out of her drugged stupor and she struggled to get off the pyre, but she was forced back by young Rajput men wielding swords – the emblem of Rajput chivalry. Her screams were drowned by the slogans
of the crowd and the beating of the drums. So, according to the police, the death of Roop Kanwar was a brutal murder and the whole village of Deorala connived at it.
To strengthen their case, the police maintained that Roop Kanwar had been having an affair and therefore could not have committed sati out of love for her husband or grief at his death. A government lawyer dealing with the case told me that the police had evidence that there had been a relationship between Roop Kanwar and Dr Magan Singh, the man who they say drugged her before she was burnt alive. The doctor was married and was a cousin of Roop Kanwar's husband, but he had been a regular visitor to her parents’ house in the Rajasthan capital of Jaipur before she was married. The police also maintained that Roop Kanwar's marriage had been a disaster from the start. They said, ‘She had become used to city life. She even used to go to beauty parlours and did not in the least want to go to live in a remote village. Things got so bad that her father arranged a holiday in a hill-station, hoping that she would accept her husband after that. But it did not work.’
According to the police, Roop Kanwar returned to Deorala only a week or so before her husband fell ill. There she conspired with the doctor to poison him. The police said the doctor accompanied Maal Singh to Sikar hospital, because he had contacts there and could prevent the correct treatment being given. When the young man died, his father, Sumer Singh, accused the doctor of poisoning him and threatened that he would expose the crime unless the doctor administered morphine to Roop Kanwar so that she could be forced to burn herself on the funeral pyre. According to the police, the morphine was not entirely effective, because Roop Kanwar did escape and run to a neighbour's house, but she was dragged back by her in-laws. The police maintain that the villagers thought they would ‘benefit spiritually’ from the sati, and so none of them intervened.
A different version of this story was published in the Delhi daily the Hindustan Times, attributed to ‘senior citizens of this once obscure hamlet beginning to speak up albeit in hushed terms’. According to the young woman journalist who wrote the report, Roop Kanwar's husband was being treated for impotency and she was having an affair with a boy from the mali or gardeners' caste – a caste classified as Harijans. This report appeared twenty-four days after the death of Roop Kanwar and her husband and was one of a number of similar reports written well after the sati, but it particularly incensed the villagers of Deorala – perhaps because it had been written by a woman. A reporter from a Jaipur paper quoted villagers as saying, ‘These girls come from Delhi in their trousers and write whatever they like about us. If they wanted to commit sati they wouldn't know which man to do it for.’ An old farmer told a senior official, ‘Our honour has been insulted. Women who travel all the time and spend only two nights a month with their husbands have come and said these dirty things about our women.’
The family of Roop Kanwar point out that young girls in Rajput homes are watched strictly and are not allowed out unaccompanied, so, they maintain, it would have been impossible for Roop Kanwar to have had any relationship with a man they didn't know about. They also say that she and her husband were friendly before they got married. He used to come to Jaipur and was allowed to take her to the cinema or to a restaurant, with an escort. At the same time, they deny that Roop Kanwar did not live with her husband in Deorala. This is also the view of two judges of the Rajasthan High Court, who heard a series of petitions against the government. In their judgement, they said it was ‘an undisputed fact’ that Roop Kanwar had lived with her husband in her father-in-law's house ‘for some months’.
It was three weeks after the sati when the police made their first arrests in the case. They maintain that the delay was because all the offenders were ‘absconding’. Unfortunately for the police, none of the witnesses who gave statements against Roop Kanwar's in-laws was willing to testify in court. This, the police maintained, was because they had come under pressure from the higher-caste villagers – the Rajputs, the Brahmins, and the banias – who were likely to benefit either politically or commercially from the reports that a voluntary act of sati had been committed and the consequent shrine. Now it is perfectly possible that the higher castes did get together and agree on a conspiracy of silence, and if that were so they would certainly have been able to put very effective pressure on the police witnesses, who were mainly ‘servants and subordinates’. But, at the same time, ‘servants and subordinates’ are just the sort of people the police would find it easiest to persuade to make statements supporting their case – Indian police methods of persuasion are not of the gentlest.
There are two serious discrepancies in the story as told by Maal Singh's family: there is no record of the young man's admission to Sikar hospital and there is no adequate explanation of his family's failure to inform Roop Kanwar's parents of their son-in-law's death. It's quite possible that they feared that the parents would prevent Roop Kanwar committing sati – it's significant that failure to inform the wife's parents has been a feature of all the cases of sati in Rajasthan in recent years.
Inevitably, scholars do not agree on the origins of sati or on whether there is any scriptural authority for it. However, memorials to women who committed sati make it clear that by the tenth century some of these women were being worshipped because it was believed that Shiva's consort had entered into them. ‘Sati’ is one of the names given to that powerful goddess. Criticism of sati had also started by the tenth century. In Rajasthan, sati was clearly associated with a woman's duty to love and be faithful to her husband. The Mughal emperor Akbar did his best to discourage the practice. Commenting on the belief that a woman who committed sati assured her husband's salvation, he said, ‘It is a strange commentary on the magnanimity of men that they should seek their deliverance through the self-sacrifice of their wives’ – a sentiment that Indian feminists today strongly applaud. In the nineteenth century, the great Hindu reformer Ram Mohan Roy campaigned against sati. At the same time, the British rulers overcame their reluctance to interfere with Hindu religious customs and outlawed the practice. Ironically, the maharaja of Jaipur, whose kingdom included the village of Deorala, had banned sati before the British did. Nevertheless, stray cases continued in his kingdom and in parts of British India.
Rajput women in Rajasthan who survive their husbands are condemned by tradition to live highly restricted lives and cannot remarry. So there could have been three motives for Roop Kanwar to sacrifice herself on her husband's pyre: grief, fear of the life of a widow or religious fervour prompted by the belief that she would be worshipped thereafter. All three motives could, of course, have combined in the mind of the young widow, deeply disturbed by the loss of her husband and carried away by the intense emotion of Rajput mourning.
Many Indians refuse to believe that it is possible for a woman living at the end of the twentieth century to decide to burn herself on her husband's pyre, but I have come across one case where a highly educated Rajput woman certainly did commit sati of her own free will. On 18 October 1954, Brigadier Thakur Jabar Singh, a wealthy Rajput landowner who was the comptroller of the maharaja of Jodhpur's household, died after a long illness. His widow, Shugan Kanwar, asked for her husband's younger brother to be called from Jaipur. When he arrived, she told him that she intended to commit sati. He protested that it would do grave damage to the rest of the family, and particularly to his career as a government employee. Shugan Kanwar insisted that no harm would come to him or to any other members of the family. To demonstrate that she had the courage to commit sati, she held her hand over a diya or small oil-lamp. The flame appeared to cause her no pain, nor did it mark her hand. The next day a vast crowd assembled to watch her lead her husband's funeral procession, climb on the pyre and burn herself to death. Shugan Kanwar's sati is attested by many members of this well-to-do and thoroughly modern family.
I visited Deorala a year after Roop Kanwar had burnt to death and found the villagers angry and embittered. The Rajasthan Armed Constabulary had set up a checkpoint on the sandy tr
ack leading to the village. No cameras were allowed beyond that checkpoint. The cremation ground had been fenced off and was guarded by the police, to prevent anyone worshipping the sati. The site of the cremation was marked by a trident, the symbol of Sati, covered by a chunari, the long cloth which Rajasthani women wear over their heads. The chunari had been placed over the trident in a religious ceremony twelve days after the death of Roop Kanwar. Once bright red, it had since faded in the sun. Over the trident there stood the remains of what had been a pavilion. The cloth which had been draped round the bamboo structure to decorate it was begrimed by dust and hung in tatters. Traditionally, a sati shrine should be tended daily, but the police saw to it that Roop Kanwar's shrine was neglected – the government had ordered that no ‘glorification’ of the sati should be allowed.
I found Prehlad Sharma, a Brahmin who had just retired as a government inspector of cooperative societies, sitting outside one of the houses overlooking the open space where Roop Kanwar had burnt alive. He came from a prosperous family with a large house. It was built of concrete but in the traditional style, around a courtyard. The Brahmin sat on a platform outside the doors leading to the courtyard. Next door was one of the many crumbling brick-built havelis or mansions of Deorala. Many of them have fallen into disrepair because of family disputes over their ownership. Other families can no longer afford to maintain them properly, because they have lost a lot of their land in the government land reforms. Although it is set in the Rajasthan desert, Deorala has been a prosperous village for many years because it has plenty of underground water. Until recently, bullocks used to amble slowly round and round the wells, turning Persian wheels. Now there are electric pumps. Tractors have come to Deorala too, but the most common vehicles are still carts pulled by camels, their noses turned up disdainfully as their flat feet pad slowly but surely through the dust and sand. Deorala is a village where change is taking place, but most of its elders want that change to take place similarly slowly but surely.
