On 4 September 1987 Roop Kanwar burned on the funeral pyre of her husband at Deorala, a village in Sikar district, Rajasthan. She was eighteen. Mal Singh Shekhawat, whom she had married seven months earlier, had fallen ill and died. Thousands of people came to the village in the days that followed, a shrine was established at the site, and money was collected there.
Whether she went to the pyre of her own will is the central factual question and it was never settled. Accounts given at the time contradict one another completely, from a serene voluntary act to a young woman who was drugged and held. No finding was ever made, because the prosecutions failed.
The event is not history in the sense that the 1829 Regulation is history. It happened inside living memory, in a state with a constitution, a police force and a free press, and it produced a modern legislative response within months. That is precisely why it is recorded here. Arguments about sati are usually conducted as arguments about the distant past, where the evidence is thin and everyone can hold their position comfortably. Deorala took place under conditions of full documentation and the central question still could not be answered.