The Age of Kali (20 page)

Sati
began to die out elsewhere in India after the British banned it in 1829, but astonishingly, in Rajasthan it has lingered on to the present day in some of the more distant villages, with around forty cases thought to have taken place since Independence. The most recent – and much the most controversial – of these
satis
took place in the village of Deorala. There, on 4 September 1987, Roop Kanwar, an exceptionally beautiful eighteen-year-old Rajasthani girl, was burned to death on her husband’s pyre.

Roop was the youngest of six children in a middle-class Rajput
family, and had grown up in the Rajasthani state capital of Jaipur, where her father ran a trucking company. She was well educated, and had finished ten years of schooling by the time her parents arranged for her to marry Maal Singh, the son of a Rajput landowning family from Deorala, where many of Roop’s cousins lived.

In the photographs Roop has large, sensuous eyes and finely chiselled cheekbones. Some newspaper reports talked of her painting her nails – the mark of an outrageously modern girl in conservative Rajasthan – but her family say that she was always unusually religious. She had been married only eight months when her husband, Maal Singh, began to complain of stomach pains. On 2 September 1987 he was taken by Roop to the local hospital at Sikar, north of Jaipur. The doctors said his condition was not serious, so Roop returned home that evening. That night, however, Maal’s appendix burst, and he died in the early hours of the morning. The body was brought back to Deorala by Maal’s father. Roop had no children. Now she was faced with the prospect of spending the rest of her life as a childless widow. In a traditional Indian village this is regarded as the lowest form of life. High-caste widows like her would be expected to shave their heads, sleep on the floor, wear only simple white clothes and to perform menial tasks; for a woman of Roop Kanwar’s caste there would be no possibility of remarriage.

The following morning, the young widow appeared at the door of the family’s eighteenth-century
haveli
. She was dressed in her finest wedding sari, decked in jewellery, with her hands brightly painted with bridal henna. Word had already spread about what was going to happen, and the young widow soon found herself leading a procession of over six hundred villagers through the narrow lanes of Deorala, past a line of crumbling
havelis
and some abandoned camel carts, past the village shops and the village well.

On reaching the cremation ground the procession wound its way through a cluster of centuries-old cenotaphs erected to commemorate three
satis
which had taken place in the village in the Middle Ages. There Roop Kanwar split off from the crowd, and three times circled the funeral pyre that had been erected in the shade of a
wide, spreading peepul tree. As she did this her in-laws raised Maal Singh’s body – wrapped in a white shroud, but with his face showing – on to the logs. Then Roop climbed up on to the pyre, put her husband’s head on her lap and commanded her sixteen-year-old brother-in-law to light the kindling. Brahmin priests intoned Sanskrit prayers, drums began to beat and the crowd took up the chant
‘Sati Mata ki jai!’
Long live Sati Mata!
‘Jab tak suraj chand rahega, Roop Kanwar tera nam rahega!’
As long as there is a sun and a moon, Roop Kanwar’s name will live!

The pyre was apparently slow to catch alight, and when a police constable arrived some fifteen minutes later Roop Kanwar may still just have been alive. But the constable did not intervene, and eventually the flames did their work. Within half an hour Roop Kanwar and her husband had both been reduced to ashes.

On these events there is general agreement. But beyond the bare facts there is profound dissent about what happened in Deorala on the day of Roop Kanwar’s
sati
; indeed, the controversy soon grew in to a major national debate, splitting the country in two.

Roop’s own family, her in-laws and the whole of the village maintain that the young widow voluntarily gave herself up to the pyre. They say she firmly resisted all attempts, by both her in-laws and the village Brahmins, to dissuade her from becoming a
sati
. They say an almost supernatural calm came over her as she processed through the village, blessing passers-by who fell at her feet to touch her robes, and performing a miracle on the way by healing the bleeding of an elderly relative. They say she smiled beatifically from the pyre as the flames danced around her. This is the version that is uncritically accepted by the Hindu faithful of rural Rajasthan, who quickly turned Roop in to both a saint and a goddess: within
a fortnight of her burning, three quarters of a million people had turned up to worship at the site of her pyre.

But the police, the state government, Indian feminist organisations and most of the English-language Indian media will have none of this. There was deep embarrassment in both Jaipur and New Delhi when the news broke about the survival of such a primeval tradition, and within a few days the Jaipur police had started to leak stories to the papers which implied that what had happened in Deorala was not
sati
, but a barbaric public execution in which the entire village was implicated. Roop’s marriage was said to have been a failure, and it was hinted that she might even have been conducting an affair; it was also pointed out that she was well educated and not particularly religious. The chances of such a woman voluntarily jumping on her husband’s funeral pyre were – so the reports implied – next to zero. It was suggested that Roop had been pressurised in to the
sati
by her in-laws, then drugged with opium; and that her ‘beatific calm’ was not due to spiritual ecstasy, but to the mesmeric effects of the opium poppy.

In 1829 the British Governor General Lord William Bentinck had passed a law making it an offence to aid or abet a
sati
, and the offence remains on the Indian statute books. But in the case of Deorala the police chose not to invoke this law. Instead they charged no fewer than thirty-seven villagers – ranging in age from sixteen to seventy – with a more straightforward charge: murder.

Taking their lead from the police, the Indian papers began to send teams of reporters to the village, with the intention of proving that Roop Kanwar’s
sati
was involuntary. Soon stories began to appear offering increasingly grisly versions of the event to the Indian public. The Bombay
Sunday Observer
quoted an unnamed farmer who said that Roop Kanwar had attempted three times to get off the funeral pyre, and was each time forced back on to it by irate villagers. The Calcutta
Telegraph
reported that Roop had tried to avoid being burned by hiding in the home of her aunt; the source for this story was given as ‘some Deorala women’. The Women and Media Committee of the Bombay Union of Journalists sent a
task force to the village who came up with an even more lurid version of the incident. According to an unnamed ‘Congress Party worker’, Roop had in fact been dragged screaming through the streets by six hundred fanatical villagers, a version of events that has gone down in the feminist literature on the subject as gospel truth, endlessly requoted, though the anonymous Congress worker has never been named, and certainly never surfaced at the subsequent trial. Finally, the
Hindustan Times
published a story which announced that Roop’s husband was both impotent and a manic depressive, that the marriage was a sham and that Roop had spent little time with him after the wedding.

If the ‘village sources’ on which these stories were based ever existed, none of them came forward during the trial to give evidence, and despite the police applying considerable pressure on the accused and allegedly attempting to extract confessions by torture, the prosecution failed to produce a single witness who would testify to having seen Roop Kanwar compelled to become a
sati
.

The trial ground on for nearly a decade before the judge finally reached his verdict at the end of October 1996. To the astonishment of middle-class India, which had long assumed that Roop Kanwar was brutally executed, the judge decided that the villagers were innocent of murder, and characterised the police case as a tangle of inconsistencies and fabrications.

But this has not closed the case. For three months following the trial the Indian papers were full of articles expressing outrage at the acquittal, until at the beginning of January 1997 the state government of Rajasthan announced that it was appealing against the verdict. A new prosecution is now soon due to begin in the Jaipur High Court.

When I went to see the Chief Secretary of Rajasthan, who took the decision to appeal, I asked him why he thought the session judge’s verdict was unsatisfactory. He replied quite frankly that he believed a voluntary
sati
was impossible in modern India: ‘It is a preposterous idea,’ he said. ‘We live in 1997, not 2000
BC
. All our villages have televisions. Newspapers reach there. You think a
literate woman would choose to go from her house in a procession to have herself burned to death? It is so unlikely it is next to impossible to believe. The balance of probability is definitely against it.’

The same conviction drove M.M. Mehrishi, who at the time was the Superintendent of Police charged with investigating the
sati
. Now retired from the police, he told me he had never believed for a minute that there was any chance that Roop Kanwar could have freely chosen to go to her death; he always assumed the burning was forced: ‘I thought it was extremely improbable that today, in modern India, a woman could commit
sati
. This led me to investigate the situation very closely.’ Mehrishi also hinted that after the story hit the headlines, he came under extreme pressure to get quick results. When I asked him if his men had used torture to extract confessions from the accused he replied: ‘I will not pretend the police are saints. You have to make these people feel the law has force.’

Yet what both the Chief Secretary and the Superintendent of Police found impossible to conceive is quite unsurprising to the ordinary villagers of Rajasthan. For them
sati
is not only possible, but actually a cause for celebration. While most urban Indians regard
sati
with horror, seeing it as a primeval custom unthinkable in contemporary India, in rural Rajasthan the villagers are quite unrepentant, and continue piously to revere past
satis
. The women in particular remain visibly proud of the courage and loyalty of their ancestors who, as they see it, abandoned life to join their husbands in the afterworld. In daily usage the word
sati
simply means ‘a good woman’, and Rajasthani women, particularly those from the Rajput caste, are brought up to see
satis
as the paradigm of the ideal woman and the perfect wife. In most Rajasthani villages the goddess Sati Mata is actively venerated, and the
sati
stones which litter the Rajasthani countryside are annually adorned with vermilion and silver foil, and are visited by every family after a birth or before a marriage.

Indeed, however much urban India would prefer it otherwise,
the awful truth is that in the countryside
satis
are actually popular with both men and women. Not only did 750,000 people turn up to worship at the site of Roop Kanwar’s pyre within a fortnight of the
sati
, but seven months later, long after the event had faded from the headlines, four hundred visitors were still visiting it every day to offer prayers. When Rajiv Gandhi’s government passed a law in November 1987 making the ‘glorification of
sati
’ a criminal offence, a hundred thousand villagers took to the streets of Jaipur to protest. By contrast, the feminist rallies calling for the conviction of the menfolk of Deorala attracted only three thousand middle-class Indians, many of them bussed in from Delhi. The issue highlights a national divide in India, showing the growing mental gulf that now separates the towns from the villages of the subcontinent, a gulf in to which all discussion of the Deorala
sati
has become lost. Most secular urban Indians, and especially the feminist lobby, have started from the assumption that in the late twentieth century no educated woman could possibly commit
sati
, and that Roop Kanwar’s
sati
could only have been forced. The villagers of Rajasthan, male and female, have a very different perspective.

It seems unlikely now that it will ever be firmly established what actually did happen that day in Deorala. Either the
sati
was forced, in which case there has been a terrible miscarriage of justice and a barbarous crime has – so far – gone unpunished. Or else, if you accept the session judge’s verdict – which on the face of it seems an eminently informed and impartial one, based not on political sensitivities but on the weakness and internal contradictions of the prosecution case – we are dealing with a Salem witch-hunt where, to satisfy the secular incredulity of India’s middle-class urban élite, the menfolk of an entire peasant village have been rounded up, forced confessions have been extracted, and thirty-seven men have been unjustly hounded for a decade for a crime they did not commit.