No Full Stops in India

by Mark Tully

  Roop Kanwar did not become a sati because anyone threatened her, and neither was there any exceptional unhappiness clouding her own life which left her no option but to burn herself with her husband. Yet she purposely followed the tradition of sati which is found in the Rajput families of Rajasthan. Even among Rajasthan's Rajputs sati is no ordinary event. Out of hundreds of thousands of widows perhaps one would resolve on sati. It is quite natural that her self-sacrifice should become the centre of reverence and worship. This therefore cannot be called a question of women's civil rights or sexual discrimination. It is a matter of a society's religious and social beliefs.

  To protect the moral values of society from time to time various types of rules and restrictions are made. These may become corrupted, and they can also be changed. But change can only come by re-moulding the accepted ideas and beliefs of the common people. New beliefs cannot be forced on them.

  People who accept that this life is the beginning and the end, and see the greatest happiness in their own individual pleasure, will never understand the practice of sati. They are removed from the society which does not accept that death is the absolute end of the individual, but believes it to be the means of moving forward from one life to the next…

  The practice of sati should now be totally re-examined. But this is not the right of people who neither know nor understand the faith and beliefs of the masses of India. If such people make a decision it will be torn to shreds in the same way as the decision of the [Rajasthan] High Court and the police at Deorala [at the time of the chunari ceremony].

  The next day, about twenty-five members of the Janwadi Mahila Samiti or Popular Women's Committee filed into Prabash Joshi's office, surrounded his desk and started shouting slogans demanding that he apologize for the editorial. Joshi refused, insisting that he had not supported sati but had pointed out that laws should ‘emerge from the womb of our traditions’. After two hours the women gave up and settled for Joshi publishing their statement criticizing the editorial.

  Some Delhi academics did question the response of the liberal élite. Ashis Nandy, a sociologist and psychiatrist, wrote in the Indian Express:

  It is the practices of the poor, the powerless, and the unsophisticated – the ways of the strange creatures who populate the countryside of India and whom we the modern Indians have unfortunately to call Indians – which always look self destructive or superstitious and which invite censure… However satanic it may look to us, the urban, westernized Indians, sati reaffirms, even in a bizzarre [sic], violent and perverted fashion, respect for self-sacrifice in a culture in which increasingly there is no scope or legitimacy for self-sacrifice, in which even the idea of self-sacrifice sounds hypocritical.

  Nandy in no way approves of sati. He believes that Roop Kanwar was given, ‘no help to move out of her depression and no chance to retrace her steps’. He also admits that, although there might not have been ‘direct coercion’, there was ‘an atmosphere charged in favour of sati and the rite did become a spectacle for Deorala.’ At the same time, he insists that the incident must be viewed as part of the price India is paying for its pursuit of a Westernized, capitalist way of life:

  The traditional Rajasthani lifestyle is today facing major onslaughts on it – through the emergence of market morality as the only moral principle in social relations, through the emergence of modern political economy as the only organising principle of material life and the state as the only arbiter in inter-community relations, and through the large-scale destruction of traditional life-support systems which once provided the psycho-ecological basis of the Rajasthani culture.

  Nandy ended his article with an indirect attack on the women's protest movement: ‘Sloganeering cannot take away the fact that in a deeper sense the responsibility for the ritual suicide of Roop Kanwar will have to be borne by people like you and me.’

  Much more typical of the academic response was an article by Kumkum Sangari attacking Nandy. In the February 1988 issue of Seminar, she wrote:

  The notion of voluntary immolation in any of the cases that have taken place in Rajasthan, including Deorala, is not only absurd but contradicted by the evidence at hand… Nandy's pathetic belief in Roop's decision-making powers shows his distance from Deorala to be more comforting and self-serving than that of the modernists he deplores… Deorala is for him an apposite moment to criticise the modernists, and to make a sophisticated defense [sic] of Hindu orthodoxy and orthodox sociology.

  Rajput leaders saw the attack on the Deorala sati and the allegations about the way they treated widows as an insult to their community and a threat to its traditions. They formed a ‘Committee for the Protection of Religion’, and under its banner 100,000 Rajputs assembled in Jaipur to hear speeches calling on them to defend Hinduism against the Westernized élite and ‘independent’ women. Many of the young men in the crowd brandished swords so blunt and rusty that they could cause death only by tetanus – appropriate symbols of Rajput chivalry, now locked away in the cupboard of history. Speakers at the rally described sati as ‘a supreme example of a woman's duty to worship her husband’ – the very thing the ‘independent women’ who had organized the protest movement against the Deorala incident and the government's handling of it disapproved of. They too organized a rally, which was attended by 3,000 people. Their symbols were posters proclaiming that sati was an issue of women's dignity and identity and demanding that religion and caste should not be used to oppress women.

  A senior official of the Rajasthan government felt that those protests had burnished the Rajputs' rusty swords. He said, ‘The outcry against the Deorala sati put the Rajput community in the dock and that gave the fundamentalists among them a platform, which is surely not what the women protesters wanted.’

  There were important Rajput leaders who did not condone sati. Bhairon Singh Shekhavat, the leader of the opposition in the Rajasthan state assembly and a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is a Hindu party, told the assembly that he did not believe that sati was a ‘religious act’. He blamed the Deorala sati on ‘anti-social elements’, and pointed out that the Rajputs were not the only caste in which incidents of sati had occurred. But he went on to criticize the protest movement, saying, ‘When, on account of such behaviour by anti-social elements, the entire Rajput community has been made to stand in the dock; and when, after making it stand in the dock, abuse is showered on it – then, forgive me, I am a Rajput and I too feel anguished.’

  When I went to see Bhairon Singh Shekhavat a year after the incident, he was still smarting under the insults he felt his community had suffered. He showed me letters he had written to the editor of the Hindustan Times about the columnist who had suggested that Rajput men sexually abused widows, and the report that Roop Kanwar had been having an affair with a boy from a Harijan caste. The proprietor of the paper, K. K. Birla, had written back an apologetic letter K. K. Birla is an industrialist with major interests in Rajasthan. Bhairon Singh Shekhavat, a tall, grey-haired man with a commanding personality, is in his mid-sixties, so Mr Birla may well have to reckon with his presence on the Rajasthan political scene for several years to come.

  The Rajput opposition leader was particularly incensed by an allegation reported to have been made by Rajiv Gandhi's minister for women and children's development, Margaret Alwa. He said, ‘Margaret Alwa has made a statement that when Rajputs come to console widows they pull the hair out of the widows' heads. Can anyone really believe that any community would have such a barbaric custom? What people don't understand is that we have a deep respect for our women, and that the relationship between a man and his wife is considered something very sacred. Because we don't treat our women in a modern way, does that mean that we treat them badly? My own father died when I was sixteen, but I always had the deepest respect for my mother. Would I have seen her badly treated?’

  The Deorala sati was a grave embarrassment to Rajiv Gandhi. He was due to attend the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference in Canada the
next month, and to go on from there to visit the United States. Roop Kanwar's sati had by this time attracted considerable attention in the international press, and the young prime minister who had promised to bring India into the twenty-first century did not much relish the idea of going abroad as the leader of a country where the burning of widows was celebrated as a joyous occasion. The government had to be seen to be acting, but in India that all too often means legislative, not executive, action. Under the existing law, those who in any way took part in an incident of sati could be charged with abetment to murder or suicide, but, instead of taking measures to see that this more general law was enforced, Rajiv Gandhi ordered the Rajasthan chief minister to pass a new law specifically against sati.

  The same politician who had originally described sati as a ‘matter of religion’ now took the highly questionable step of proroguing the state assembly for one day so that he could issue an ordinance without any delay. But the liberals were not satisfied. They pointed out – with justification – that, if a law against sati was necessary, it ought to be effective throughout India, not just in Rajasthan. So the central government extended the winter session of parliament to rush through its own bill. Ignoring the sensitivity of the issue, the government gave itself no time to consult experts or interest groups. An act made it a crime to commit sati or to abet anyone to commit sati, and banned the ‘glorification of sati’.

  Even lawyers working with women's groups condemned the act. For one thing, it did not distinguish between voluntary and involuntary sati, so even a woman forced to be cremated with her husband would be guilty of a crime if she were rescued in time. Also, the act classified the organizers of a sati as abettors, for which the maximum sentence was to be just one year's imprisonment, whereas under the law which already existed they could be prosecuted for murder. Since not even the most extreme Rajputs contended that a woman should ever be forced to commit sati, the act was a retrograde step from everyone's point of view.

  A year later, the fragility of the provisions of the new act prohibiting the glorification of sati were shown up. In the town of Jhunjhunu, about an hour's drive from Deorala, there is a shrine dedicated to Narayani Devi, a woman who is said to have committed sati centuries ago – exactly when, nobody knows. She was reputed to have been a member of the Aggarwal caste of banias or traders. Her shrine is now known as the Rani Sati, or Queen Sati, temple and has become a very important centre of the rich Rajasthani bania community known as Marwaris. During the last century, the Marwaris moved into the new cities of British India and many of them laid the foundations of great fortunes. Some of today's biggest names in Indian industry are Marwaris. After independence, Marwari money started to pour into Jhunjhunu. The small shrine of Narayani Devi was converted into a vast white marble temple, surmounted by a curved tower in the north-Indian style. Smaller towers were raised over shrines of twelve other satis. A rest house with some 200 rooms was added, as an outer court of the complex. Every year there is a large fair in honour of Rani Sati.

  The year after Deorala, some of the women activists decided to test the new act by challenging the holding of this fair, saying that it amounted to glorifying sati. The Marwari temple trustees argued that sati was just an epithet describing a woman who was pious and faithful to her husband. They maintained that the trust was entirely opposed to the burning of widows and said that the goddess worshipped was in fact Shakti, the Hindu goddess of power. Lawyers moved in and eventually the Supreme Court issued a temporary order banning the fair but allowing the regular daily worship in the temple to continue. Some 40,000 people turned up to worship the goddess on the day when the fair should have been held. Had the law been broken or not? Nobody seemed to know.

  Once again, both sides had right on their side. Since independence, the Marwaris have built a large number of shrines to satis they have rediscovered in the area surrounding Jhunjhunu. This is also the area in which most of the satis have taken place since independence. There could well be a connection. But the Marwaris can justifiably claim that Jhunjhunu is simply a very important temple of their community, where they come to celebrate all the important events in their family lives.

  The new law has had some effect on worship at Jhunjhunu. When I visited the temple, the image of Sati or Shakti – whoever she was – was a simple silver trident standing in an ornate miniature pavilion also made of silver. A picture I bought outside the temple showed that the trident used to have two eyes between its forks and a red and gold embroidered cloth and a necklace underneath it, giving the impression of a human face and shoulders. I had also read that there used to be a macabre model of Narayani Devi's sati: she sat surrounded by red crêpe paper with her husband's head on her lap. The impression of flames licking around her was heightened by a mechanical device which bobbed her up and down and by electric fans which rustled the paper. When I asked the temple's security officer whether I could see this model, he denied all knowledge of it.

  The victories of the women who had challenged the Jhunjhunu fair had been won at the cost of the revival of the memory of the Deorala sati, just one year after the event, and the likelihood of legal cases lasting for years which will be continual reminders of sati. These reminders could well increase interest in the worship at sati shrines in villages all over Rajasthan – the law will never be able to prevent worship at all of them. The Marwaris of the Jhunjhunu trust have offered to make it absolutely clear that they are worshipping Shakti, not Sati, in all the temples they control, but the liberals have rejected this as a ‘dishonest compromise’. The liberals have certainly not stamped out the worship of Sati. In the temple at Jhunjhunu I watched a well-to-do Marwari couple with their two children walk down the line of smaller shrines celebrating the lesser satis. They stopped to pray at every shrine, and the father gave his daughter a 100 rupee note to put in the collection box outside each one.

  Dr Sharada Jain told me that when she and her colleagues started their protest movement they were determined that Roop Kanwar's sati should be seen not as a religious or caste issue but as a criminal act linked to the problem of women's identity in India. ‘We didn't want to attack Rajputs,’ she told me, ‘because we were afraid it would just provoke another clash of the castes.’ But the debate did turn the sati into a battle between the feminists ‘modernity’ and the Rajput fundamentalists' religious and caste traditions. There is no doubt which side the village of Deorala backed, and the reaction is likely to have been exactly the same in hundreds of other Rajasthani villages. The fundamentalists were, as the Rajasthan government official said, given a platform. At the same time, the law was brought into disrepute by legislation which was impossible to implement, and another myth about the barbarity and backwardness of India was spread throughout the world.

  Dr Jain gave me a very frank assessment of the protests which she had played a prominent role in organizing. She said, ‘In the end we just wanted the whole commotion to stop. There was so much tension. The controversy became a very happy hunting-ground for journalists and film-makers. They were amused and excited. I didn't see a face which was not smiling. Nobody was interested in solving the problem: they were just here to do their own thing. Caste leaders and fundamentalists came into the limelight and made good use of it. Politicians said, “If we can have another sati we can bring down the government.”’ But Dr Jain did not believe that the protests had all been in vain. She said, ‘What was not counter-productive was that the vested interests were clearly identified.’

  The cause of all that amusement and excitement was the government's failure to enforce the law. The protest movement in Jaipur was launched only when it became clear that the Rajasthan government was not going to prevent worship at the shrine of Roop Kanwar. If the chief minister had ordered the police and the administration to stick to the rule book, those responsible for the sati would have been charged with abetment to murder, or at least abetment to suicide, and the villagers would have been prevented from putting up any sort of shrine to commemora
te Roop Kanwar. An example would have been set which would deter others from encouraging sati, and Roop Kanwar's death would have been seen for what it was – a crime, but a rare one. Three years earlier Dr Jain had told a student that sati was a ‘non-issue’. But a non-issue would not have pleased those feminists who jumped at the opportunity the tragedy in Deorala gave to promote their views on women's rights. They turned that crime into an issue without thinking about the damage their campaign could do to the very women whose lives they were trying to improve and without giving thought to the prejudices against India it could create in other countries. The villagers of Deorala said the feminists used the sati to publicize themselves. That is a harsh judgement, but then the villagers felt they had been harshly treated.

  8

  TYPHOON IN AHMEDABAD

  On 3 April 1990 the body of a Muslim, Yasin Arab, was found near his home in the congested area of Ahmedabad known as the Old City. He had been stabbed to death. Within an hour of that murder, four Hindus were stabbed in separate incidents. Police were baffled by two aspects of these murders. The young Muslim appeared to have been killed elsewhere, because there were no blood stains near his body. That seemed to indicate that the body had deliberately been brought back to anger Muslims who live cheek by jowl with Hindus in the narrow crowded alleys of the Old City. It was also very strange that revenge should have been taken so quickly, with the four Hindus being stabbed so soon after the Muslim's body had been discovered. Both these unusual aspects led the police to suspect that this was a planned attempt to start riots.