Something like rights? Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal

Tanika Sarkar

The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 2012, vol. 49, issue 3, 295-320

Abstract: The article straddles two separate but intertwined registers. One is the interface between faith and law under early colonial rule. I explore this through the lens of colonial governance of immolations of Hindu widows. The other is the gradual transmutation of an idea or a word: consent, the widow’s consent to burning alive. The early colonial state formally institutionalised the widow’s consent as the basis for all lawful immolations. That, I argue, eventuated, over a long stretch of time, and through a strangely twisted dialectic, in a horizon of female entitlements and immunities. Controversially but recognisably, she became the bearer of something like rights rather than of sacred prescriptions and injunctions alone. This was a development that neither the state nor its Brahman ritual specialists had actually intended.

Keywords: Consent; rights; ritual; colonial bureaucracy; reform; orthodoxy; scripture; custom; sati; modernity; law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:indeco:v:49:y:2012:i:3:p:295-320

DOI: 10.1177/0019464612455276

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