Introduction

The normally quiet village of Deorala in the Indian state of Rajasthan witnessed, in September 1987, a controversy that revealed deep social conflicts, when an eighteen-year-old named Roop Kanwar was burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre. News of her death provoked widespread debate about women's status in India and, in particular, about sati or widow immolation (Sen 2002: 2). The practice had been outlawed by the British administration in 1829 and was widely thought to be obsolete in the modern day. While most Indians oppose it, a number of Hindus affiliated to the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party supported its legalisation in 1996 (Hardgrove 1999: 723). Two years before the Deorala sati, moreover, in her novel Rich Like Us (1985), Nayantara Sahgal had portrayed the relationship of this practice to the colonial project and to the independence movement. Her account of the modernity of this tradition is echoed in one feminist's insistence that the Deorala incident ‘should not be viewed as a remnant of a feudal past but as an expression of … the contemporary denigration of women’ (Loomba 1993: 247).

Other feminists are worried, however, about the political risks involved in focusing on rare practices in non-liberal cultures. Uma Narayan (2000: 88), for instance, draws attention to Mary Daly's (1978) reproduction of an ‘essentialist packaged picture of “Indian culture” ’, which effaces the challenges posed to sati in history. To emphasise cultural or religious justifications for this practice, Narayan argues, plays into the hands of fundamentalists who invoke it as a central component of ‘Indian culture’, even though it has all but disappeared (2000: 89; Oldenburg 1994).