Overview

Contentious Traditions analyzes the debate on sati, or widow burning, in colonial India. Though the prohibition of widow burning in 1829 was heralded as a key step forward for women's emancipation in modern India, Lata Mani argues that the women who were burned were marginal to the debate and that the controversy was over definitions of Hindu tradition, the place of ritual in religious worship, the civilizing missions of colonialism and evangelism, and the proper role of the colonial state. Mani radically revises colonialist as well as nationalist historiography on the social reform of women's status in the colonial period and clarifies the complex and contradictory character of missionary writings on India. The history of widow burning is one of paradox. While the chief players in the debate argued over the religious basis of sati and the fine points of scriptural interpretation, the testimonials of women at the funeral pyres consistently addressed the material hardships and societal expectations attached to widowhood. And although historiography has traditionally emphasized the colonial horror of sati, a fascinated ambivalence toward the practice suffused official discussions. The debate normalized the violence of sati and supported the misconception that it was a voluntary act of wifely devotion. Mani brilliantly illustrates how situated feminism and discourse analysis compel a rewriting of history, thus destabilizing the ways we are accustomed to look at women and men, at ""tradition,"" custom, and modernity.

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9780520214071

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Examines the documents of the colonial bureaucracy, the writings of the nineteenth-century indigenous male elite, the journals and publications of missionaries, and numerous European eyewitness accounts. She asks why the British first loudly denounced it, then covertly sanctioned it, and then officially banned it. . . . Contentious Traditions shows how divided the colonial bureaucrats were on the political costs of intervening in sati, how the grounds shifted in the arguments that the nineteenth-century Bengali reformer Rammonhun Roy made against sati in response to colonial pronouncements. how the Baptist missionaries took very different stances in addressing British and Indian audiences, and burning ricocheted between horror and fascination. . . . In citing the gruesome evidence that many satis were neither voluntary nor painless, and by assuming that the material causes for many satis make them by definition non-religious, Lata Mani discounts the religious ideology that might have motivated either the woman herself or the people forcing her to do it, or both. --Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Lata Mani is an Indian feminist and historian who currently lives in California.

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