The Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829

Regulation XVII of 1829 was promulgated on 4 December 1829 by the government of the Bengal Presidency under Lord William Bentinck. It declared the burning or burying alive of Hindu widows culpable homicide, punishable in the criminal courts, and it applied to those who abetted the act as well as to those who performed it. It was extended to the Madras and Bombay presidencies shortly afterwards.

The campaign behind it was not a single-sided colonial imposition. Rammohan Roy, the Bengali reformer, had argued against sati in print for a decade in Bengali, Persian and English, and had done so largely on scriptural grounds, contending that the texts did not require it. British evangelical opinion pushed from the other direction. Hindu orthodox petitioners opposed the Regulation and carried an appeal to the Privy Council in London, which was dismissed in 1832.

What is striking about the argument, and what has occupied historians since, is the ground it was fought on. Almost the whole debate turned on whether scripture enjoined the practice. Colonial officials, reformers and orthodox petitioners alike argued from texts, and the state positioned itself as the arbiter of what Hindu tradition properly required. The condition of the women concerned, and what they wanted, is very nearly absent from the record on every side.

Three bodies of scholarship read this Regulation in incompatible ways, and each of them is arguing in good faith from the same documents.

The reformist reading, which was the standard one for well over a century, treats 1829 as a milestone of emancipation: a cruel practice abolished, and Indian and British reformers rightly credited with abolishing it. It has the advantage of taking the deaths seriously as deaths.

A Hindu nationalist reading treats the affair as a case of colonial overreach, in which an aberrant and localised practice was magnified into a defining feature of Hinduism in order to establish that the tradition needed governing. This reading is right that the practice was not enjoined by any general scriptural requirement, and its critics answer that minimising the incidence has become a way of avoiding the question of the deaths.

A feminist and postcolonial reading, of which Lata Mani is the standard statement, points out what both of the others share. The colonial debate was conducted over the authority of scripture, the definition of tradition and the proper role of the state, and the women who burned appear in it mainly as the ground on which men argued. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak framed the same point as white men saving brown women from brown men, with the women themselves given no position from which to be heard.

The atlas does not adjudicate between these. What it can say is that they disagree about what the reform was, not about whether it happened.