**6. Ritual Criticism**

Why did Ronald Grimes (2002, pp. 299–302) choose *sat¯ı* as a topic of ritual criticism? Was it fair to put a more or less obsolete practice—that had been abolished and punishable by law for almost two centuries—up for ritual scrutiny and moral indignation?

It may be merely a detail, but Grimes did not present it as *sat¯ı*, *sahagamana, sahamaran. a*, nor as the more scandalous *suttee*, but as co-cremation, a designation he apologized for: '[ ... ] an act euphemistically called co-cremation.' (Grimes 2002, p. 299) Although scholarly sound, co-cremation is an ambiguous term, a container term. Co-cremation and co-burial, or even co-immersion, are terms with a claim to universal validity, whereas *sat¯ı* is stubbornly alien, strange, foreign, culture-specific. There seems to be a diachronic identity to the term co-cremation. It testifies to the human tendency to bring about a synthesis of time, place, and identity by grouping the particular, even the 'horrid', under a universal umbrella term that, at face value, looks innocent enough. The specifics are worked into the fabric of intellectual identification and acknowledgement of an overarching anthropological category (Kapferer 2004). Specific time thus begins to be represented as both global and universal, and so does location. Time specificity and space specificity become diffused, flatlined as it were, as on a hospital monitoring screen. Yet terms like co-cremation do help us forward in our conceptualizing of funerary practices. Just as there is a chronosynthesis, there is a semblance of spatiosynthesis when the neutral term co-cremation is applied, even to what the British had deemed pan-Indian 'horrid Hindu practices'. By using the term co-cremation for widow-burning, we seem to have safely distanced ourselves from it in both time and space.<sup>28</sup> By making it part of a universal, the sting is taken out of it. Grimes seems to have been right when he labeled the term a euphemism.

<sup>27</sup> Although our focus in this article has been on India, we could have mentioned neighboring country Nepal as a place where *sat¯ı* was banished as late as 1920. Nepal's Legal Code of 1854, the *Muluk¯ı Ain*, moreover, contains a detailed prescription-description of the procedure. In the previously mentioned first inscription (Nepal, 464 CE), we found an interesting conversation between a would-be *sat¯ı* and her son, who tried to dissuade her from entering the pyre by arguing that he as her son has equal or even more right to her presence. In a way, these are rare 'subaltern' voices. See (Michaels 1994).

<sup>28</sup> Exactly this is what happened when both Hindu priests and Hindu blood-and-soil nativists began to feel defensive in the years right before abolition. They countered the British civilizational zeal by pointing out parallels on the level of co-cremation, co-burial, and co-immersion in other cultures, including Europe. Even more poignantly (though less to the point topically) they indicated the evil of slavery, in which most of the so-called civilized nations were still deeply involved.

With the term ritual criticism, we indicate the current position of critical reflection on ritual within the academic framework of ritual studies. Roughly, three modes can be distinguished: (1) the predominantly internal perspective of criticizing a particular ritual performance or the ritual act in itself; (2) the predominantly external perspective with which a particular ritual performance or a ritual tradition is evaluated and assessed; and (3) ritual criticism as a step towards theorizing about 'doing ritual' or 'doing ritual studies'. Although this distinction (Post 2013, pp. 173–4; 2015, p. 8) can be helpful, in a case study such as this, types one and two are intertwined, since the criticism is presented both from within (inside Hindu culture itself) and from without (colonial British, as well as the open platform of ritual studies today).<sup>29</sup> The way Grimes presented the two examples of clitoridectomy and widow-burning was mainly within a normative framework mode (type two). It is not clear, however, whose normative framework. Presenting widow-burning as a topic for ritual criticism makes this a normative framework about a normative past and a normative 'elsewhere'. Under these conditions—the past and the distant—there is always the risk of an 'inversion of reality': othering. The British had presented India as a country where horrid rites like *sat¯ı* prevailed, whereas indigenous nineteenth-century public intellectuals had even condemned both present and past versions. They thus admitted to their own culture's horrid rites, both in their nineteenth-century form and in the form of a vaguely referred, possibly even more horrid rite of the pre-Vedic past: the 'ancient custom' (AV 18.3.1) of living wives accompanying dead husbands as funerary gifts30 into graves and onto pyres.

Grimes defined ritual criticism as 'the act of interpreting a ritual with a view to implicating its practice. [ ... ] Tendering interpretations is not only about finding or formulating meanings; it is also about identifying or taking positions regarding practices.' (Grimes 2013, p. 72). In an earlier work, *Deeply into the Bone*, Grimes had introduced the case of Hindu co-cremation in a chapter called Passages (ch. 5): 'A telling example in which a rite of passage comes under critical scrutiny from both inside and outside a tradition is sati. It is not widely practiced now, **so I will speak of it in the past tense**.' (Grimes 2002, p. 299; emphasis ours.)31 In a way, the case of co-cremation in India could be introduced by the same words he used on the case of female circumcision: '[ ... ] occurs at an intercultural frontier where indigenous practitioners and outside observers engage in considerable debate.' (Grimes 2002, p. 295). Likewise, we could pose the same questions to our case: 'Do observers have the right to criticize indigenous ritual practices? Do they have a right **not** to criticize them?' (Grimes 2002, p. 298). Indeed, the *sat¯ı* practice has been contested both by many Hindus themselves and by outsiders, even those back in Europe who had heard the most hair-raising missionary accounts of it. The practice, however, had never been widespread, and never had it been sanctioned unreservedly. In a way, there has always been indigenous Hindu criticism on the practice, not so much about one ritual component or another, or about its evaluation or interpretation. Rather, the moral and soteriological grounds have always been a matter of contention, for everyone involved, both proponents and opponents.32 Yet among the opinions and even outrage, one voice is sadly missing, that of the widow herself. Her perspective—becoming a *sat¯ı* or not, with which reasons, which emotions, and which expectations—is absent, as is often the case in the clitoridectomy debate—which Grimes explored as another case for ritual criticism—as well. In the real-life societal setting, the Hindu widow was often dramatically younger than her husband, and child widowhood had brought another

<sup>29</sup> The term 'ritual studies' emerged in the habitat of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in 1977. This does not, however, limit the phenomenon of systematic ritual criticism to this platform, nor to this timeframe. Examples can be found in various ancient cultures. For instance, scholars such as Catherine Bell (on ancient China) and Kathryn McClymond (on ancient India) are known to interweave classic culture-specific 'ritologies' with critical debates on the contemporary ritual studies platform.

<sup>30</sup> Although superficially the phenomenon may look the same, there is a crucial difference between wives as funerary gifts and wives as mediators of salvation.

<sup>31</sup> This crucial line tends to be overlooked. See for instance (Post 2013, p. 178), on 'co-cremation in Asia': '[ ... ] **is** the ritual tradition [ ... ]' instead of '**was**'.

<sup>32</sup> In an earlier article (Grimes 1988, p. 221) Grimes had distinguished emic (intrareligious), cross-cultural (inter-religious), and etic (mainly between scholarly and indigenous) contexts of ritual criticism. For seven principles of ritual criticism, see his pages 231–237.

sharp edge to the practice. It is telling that the Sati Regulation Act of 1829 has been followed closely by interrelated issues, such as the Widows' Remarriage Act (1856), the Female Infanticide Prevention Act (1870), and the Age of Consent Act (1891).

Many indigenous historical arguments for and against the practice, formulated by those privileged enough that their authoritative opinions had been transmitted in written form, are thus mainly circumstantial and contextual. As a result, the painful question remains whether a simple misreading in a Vedic text (*agne* (in the fire) for *agre* (at the front) had actually misguided countless generations of men and women about the scriptural authority of widow-burning. The same is valid for the failure to literally contextualize the Vedic statements. Had people—and especially women33—been able to read, would they have stopped reading after the first injunction about the widow lying down next to her deceased husband on the wood pyre? Or would they have continued reading and would they then have reasoned that the first injunction was merely a symbolical gesture, a ritual re-enactment of what might have been an actual practice in the hoary past? Would they have understood its 'purely performative' character34 and have played their part willingly, luckily escaping to a renewed chance at life? How could it happen that the invitation issued to the widow to join her husband in the fire had become completely disconnected from the following stanzas, in which she was invited back to the world of the living, and possibly even to remarriage, wealth, and offspring? If she had known, would she then have taken the proffered hand of her brother-in-law? Or do such things like philological and theological hairsplitting have relevance for only a few, and are the actual lifeworlds in which centuries of Hindu men and women used to live by far more crucial than a few dubious text passages?

Still, these textual details and their implications are serious grounds for ritual criticism, and have been so in the academic study of Hinduism (Oldenburg 1994a; 1994b, p. 159). They show the Janus face of lived religion: popular emotion-charged religious practices can arise and continue more or less independently of scriptural injunctions that might have been interjected into the discussion at a much later stage by commentators who advocated the practice. Were they indeed late justifications, introduced when literate Brahman priests began to advocate and glorify the practice in a certain way? They may have incorporated the Vedic verses into the commentarial tradition as late as the sixteenth century, with a view to lend Brahmanic legitimacy to a practice that to all probabilities had been limited to communities that had long followed their own logic and argumentation.

But what really remains unanswered so far are other grounds for framing *sat¯ı* as a topic for ritual criticism, especially the cross-cultural framework: do outside observers have a right to criticize indigenous ritual practices, and even more pointedly: do they have a right not to criticize them? To these poignant moral questions we need to add: do outside observers have a right to criticize indigenous ritual practices of the **past**? Do they have a right/duty not to?

Sidestepping the moral and intercultural issues mentioned above, we can merely remark that what is presented as type-2 ritual criticism tends to be not about ritual itself, but rather about its moral environment. Moreover, the moral indignation we are expected to express in this case is misplaced and lagging behind the facts: it is predominantly a thing of the past, and others have already done all the arguing, documentation, and legislation of abolishing it. In the last fifty years, a considerable number of scholars have written detailed analyses (Sharma et al. 1988; Datta 1990; Hawley 1994; Mani 1998; Weinberger-Thomas 1999). In another tone of voice and with other tools, novelists and filmmakers have brought the practice to life in all its heart-wrenching drama (such as the Bengali film Sati by Sen 1989). But what is still lacking is its (critical) evaluation as a rite. I therefore present, in retrospect, merely a few remarks of a more ritual nature than is usual in discussions of *sat¯ı*.

(1) It is crucial to point out that in a patrilinear society, man and woman, through the wedding ritual, had become a ritual unit. This implies that a wife lost her own lineage (*gotra*) and started to live with

<sup>33</sup> Even leaving general analphabetism and illiteracy aside, it had long been strictly prohibited for women to read the *Vedas*.

<sup>34</sup> See Richard Schechner on performance theories as related to ritual (chapter 3) and play-acting (chapter 4) in his *Performance Studies* (Schechner 2006).

her agnatic family, whose ritual structures she had to follow from that moment onwards.<sup>35</sup> As a result, when her husband died before her, a widow was doubly destitute, not only socioeconomically but also ritually. Ritually, a widow was an anomaly. A new widow stood at a dead end, in the most literal and ritual sense of the word. Her own identity had died when she married. As a consequence, a newly widowed woman was bereft in all dramatic senses of the ancient term. Being in this void, this limbo, she was forced to take a ritual step and cross a threshold, in whichever direction. This transition was to be marked either way: by becoming a *sat¯ı* or by accepting her inauspicious state as a widow and act accordingly. If she did not choose *sat¯ı*, all she could do was invest as much energy and dignity as was left in her into the numerous commemorative rituals that filled the ritual calendar from that moment onwards. Her only raison d'être was to become totally dedicated to her deceased husband's own well-being, and that of his ancestors, by scrupulously and meticulously performing ancestor rituals, including fasts, wakes, and pilgrimages. Both options—whichever of the two new life stages she would choose—had to be preceded by a solemn declaration of intent (*sam. kalpa*). If she declared to become a *sat¯ı*, she was dressed and decorated as a bride and led triumphantly to the pyre; whereas if she declared to accept her state as a widow she had to relinquish her marital paraphernalia, such as jewelry and the auspicious red powder in the parting of her hair. Her hair was shaven off, her bangles were broken, and from now on she would wear only coarse white cotton. She would live celibately and frugally at the family's periphery, despised or at best ignored, and would take no part at all in whatever auspicious occasion (including life rites) of this household. It would require research of its own to come to a proper evaluation of the previously mentioned subalternative for widowhood: marrying her eldest brother-in-law. Somehow, this option of remarriage seems to have petered out in recent centuries, or at least it failed to draw much attention in studies on *sat¯ı*. It may also indicate a gap between cultural ideals—the customary Hindu law to provide the widow a safe and secure place within the joint family—and actual social realities. We know from other sources that remarriage was widely practiced, except among those who aspired upper-class status. It must have been after 1000 CE that remarriage gradually began to give way to the two other options, at least among some communities. Taking ritual criticism seriously36 in a specifically and exclusively ritual sense might thus produce a slightly changed perspective on *sat¯ı* as one of those 'horrid Hindu rites'. Weighing both starkly contrasted widow rituals against one another would at least create some idea of what went on in such a widow's mind when she was forced to make her choice in a matter of just a few hours.

(2) A second aspect of ritual criticism, again in a purely ritual sense, is her ritual reward, the soteriological merit to be gained from either of these options. Cynically, one could say that *sat¯ı* would merely bring a short moment of glory—the festive procession, in bridal attire, to the pyre—followed by the unimaginable fear of the flames and the excruciating torture of being burned alive. But traditions were generous and quite explicit in promising what came later: endless marital bliss in the beyond and either an auspicious rebirth or the attainment of heaven for the couple. If we would be equally cynical about a widow's inauspicious existence at the periphery of her family-in-law, reconciliatory tradition would counter this picture of dreary survival as only of short duration, provided the widow was determined in her ritual service to her deceased husband and his ancestors (cf. Embree 1994). This came with equally promising compensations in the beyond: a prosperous and safe path to the gods for both, gratefulness and honor accorded by the ancestors, and finally an auspicious rebirth or the attainment of heaven for both of them. In the end, if women would make a well-informed calculation, the ritual reward of devoted ascetic widowhood would amount to more or

<sup>35</sup> This is why it is often said that wedding rites for Hindu women double as initiation rites: whereas boys undergo *upanayana* rites around puberty, girls are initiated into a proper ritual identity only by marriage, namely into the ritual identity of her husband and in-laws.

<sup>36</sup> It is striking that Grimes, who made a career of writing about rituals, ignored (2002, p. 301) this aspect of a traditional Hindu widow's existence: she may be deprived in various material and social ways, but her ritual value is unique and priceless, as she is the only one to safeguard her husband in the afterlife through constant ritual action.

less the same as *sat¯ı* would. In other words, when weighing the ritual rewards of one option against the ritual rewards of the other option, it would seem that overall there was not much difference.37

Undoubtedly, a much more exhaustive ritual criticism could be given, even if we would indeed focus on the ritual alone. It must suffice in this article that we have tried not to sensationalize the ritual practice and instead consider it a ritual in its own right, deserving well-balanced description and analysis. But there is another pitfall: the scholarly language of understanding could easily take the edge off it, reducing the 'horrid rite' to a mere custom, thus trivializing it. By ascribing mature deliberation to the woman finding herself at such crossroads we may forget about the terrific power a ritual may hold for those who have internalized a certain ideology, especially the oppressive ideologies about women, wives, and widows. For the larger part of *sat¯ı*'s history, the woman had to choose between becoming a widow or a *sat¯ı*. It was not the death of her husband that had made her a widow, but her choice between two rituals would make her either a widow (containing everything the life and status of a widow implied) or a *sat¯ı*. For her, this was not simply a choice between life and death, but a choice between two religious paths, either of which would define her as a good woman, and would define both rituals as demonstrating her womanly power for the salvation of her husband. Whatever choice she would make, this soteriological power changed her, momentarily, from a victim to a victor.38 By demonstrating this as a crucial ritual choice, we might again contribute something to type-1 ritual criticism, but not without admitting that in many cases this would overrate the choice women actually had in such moments. For most Hindu women, choice itself must have been a fiction.

## **7. Some Tentative Conclusions**

One of the slogans of post-independence feminism in India was: 'Widows39 are not for burning.'40 Long after *sat¯ı* had been abolished, it remained a 'burning' issue, although the focus had gradually shifted to the position of Indian women in general, and more particularly the perception of widowhood in society (Chen 1998, 2011).

Type-1 and type-2 ritual criticism have quite a history here. Whereas the British had tended to sensationalize the practice of widow-burning, the Indian response may have been to trivialize the institution (Sharma et al. 1988, p. 10). In a parallel opposition and rivalry, British historians still tend to monopolize the credit for having abolished it, whereas contemporary Indian historians mainly point at their own nineteenth-century Bengali intellectuals, thus appropriating and nationalizing the abolishment. Moreover, Indian post-independence feminism took up the challenge to psychologize the issue: now that *sat¯ı* is abolished and widows can no longer burn themselves, they still suffer 'cold' *sat¯ı*, therefore their minds need to be decolonized as well as dewidowed. Such processes show us the variety of perspectives. It has never been a general practice and there is a long indigenous tradition of internal dissent and debate.

One of the forms of criticism that have been expressed in legal texts had to do with the overall prohibition of ritual suicide<sup>41</sup> and ritual homicide. More elaborate commentarial traditions merely mentioned it as an alternative to widowhood, but gradually commentators began to take positions.

<sup>37</sup> Various commentators have put more weight on the unimaginable merit of her choice for *sat¯ı*, and others more weight on her slow, difficult, but indispensable path of ritual dedication to her husband's salvation, as a widow. At some point, the curious argument was made that, considering a woman's fickle and sensuous disposition, the path of celibate ascetic widowhood would be more difficult, and thus unreliable, than the 'more easy, safe and secure path' of *sat¯ı*. This, again, requires quite a stretching of monocultural minds. See also Leslie (1989, p. 189).

<sup>38</sup> This double attribute was elaborated by Leslie (1992).

<sup>39</sup> In fact, ritually speaking, a wife only became a widow once she had fully undergone the ritual transition from the state of a married woman to being a widow. Should she choose *sat¯ı*, she would enter the fire auspiciously and victoriously as a wife, not a widow. This also explains why in most *sat¯ı* memorials the woman still wears her bangles.

<sup>40</sup> The issue of burning, in those years, was not only inflamed by a renewed case of *sat¯ı* (see Roop Kanwar, in Section 5), but also by dowry burnings, mostly known as dowry murders: various tragic cases when young women were intentionally set afire in the kitchen in order to settle dowry issues, although such acts were made to look like cooking accidents.

<sup>41</sup> There are nuances regarding religious forms of suicide. See, for instance, (Michaels 2004), Chapter 4.

In legal texts from the fifteenth centuries onwards, we found both supporters and opponents. An intricate debate about the limiting conditions under which *sat¯ı* would be permissible ensued. So did a theological–soteriological discourse: on the one hand about the ritual merit ascribed to ascetic widowhood and on the other hand, the ritual merit ascribed to *sat¯ı*. While such soteriological merits hung in an uneasy balance, the everyday realities of rights to inherit (or not), the age of brides, and the level of socioeconomic constraints for women often determined conjugal life, including the prevalence of remarriage, widowhood, or *sat¯ı*-hood.

Whereas the topic has long elicited internal as well as external moral judgements and even outrage, explicit ritual criticism, in the sense of evaluating *sat¯ı* as a ritual, on its own terms, and in its own right, is rare. In that setting, four further critical ritual considerations need to be made:

First, imagine a wife's choice for one of the two rituals as not merely determined by the pressures and limitations of patrilinear family life, but as one determining her husband's salvation, and indirectly her own. Second, imagine the newly widowed woman at a dead end, in the most literal and ritual sense of the word. Understanding the ritual void she was in—a dramatic form of in-betweenness—the newly widowed woman had to solemnly declare her decision. In Hinduism, a ritual decision reinforced by fire and water is irreversible. This illustrates once more the literal hold ritual can have on people. Third, whereas one of the key messages of the *Bhagavadg¯ıta¯* might be that one should act without attachment to the results of one's actions, Hindu ritualism requires an elaborate and intricate bookkeeping of ritual merits. How can a newly widowed woman make a well-balanced computation on which she bases her choice? Both her life and her death are in service of her husband's eternal well-being anyway. Fourth, considering the brief time span allowed between death and cremation, often no more than a mere few hours, who could expect the newly widowed woman to be led by mature deliberation? Crucial ritual choices were to be made within a matter of hours, how could she be expected to make the required well-informed choice? From the perspective of the woman42, the terms indecent haste and socioeconomic pressure do seem to fit here, even if we take into account the 'normality' of the extremely short time generally allowed between the moment of death and the lighting of the pyre.43
