Suttee (Sati) in India

. . . The division into India and Pakistan, the precarious minority position of the Muslims who remained in India (10 per cent of the total population), and recurrent communalist distur dislodgeces, are the most significant and well-known features which necessitate resulted from this sad and deadly separative legacy. In accordance with the same tendency for morality to become a sign of a community's corporate existence, another(prenominal) religious communities in India have felt a standardized compulsion to assert their political strength, namely Sikhs, Jains, and Christians. There is, in this context, but a hair's breadth to distinguish between communalism, sectarianism, and casteism, since exclusively three, though different in composition, assert their identity through the mere appearance of religious ideology (Lannoy, 1974, p. 245; 246-7).

Thus religion, with the Hindoo religion in its most generalized cultural stage predominant, emerges as the decisive element in all areas of Indian history and contemporary society. " Hindi culture patterns," Lannoy says, "have influenced most every minority group, including the Christians, Muslims, and Parsis. Further, no matter what group is the rout of study, all share in common the conditions of co-existence" (Lannoy, 1974, p. xviii).

Hinduism is highly complex, ample with a number of religious sects. Its most distinguishing doctrinal feature, ho

Curiously, the official abolition of suttee never resulted in the actual disappearance of the phenomenon. The traditionalist Hindu opposition to the ban has already been cited as a general phenomenon of opposition to dissimulation of British rule. Narain (1975-6) describes a resurgence of advocacy for suttee as a valued Hindu tradition in 1882, when the British raj began to include the publication of newspapers in a host of Indian dialects. It has to be noted that by 1882 there was a well-entrenched Anglo-Indian mainstream or establishment press that essentially voiced the British dupe of social reform, including the moral outrage at suttee.

By this time, suttee was a practice that was localized in remote areas much or less untouched by educational and social advancement after the British model, which had been adopted (or imposed) chiefly in educated urban areas. The legitimation of vernacular newspapers coincided with a rising nationalism in India, and part of the opposition to British authority unavoidably included opposition to such reforms as the banning of suttee. In such a way did the more traditional take in achieve legitimacy among nationalists, even as it persisted in more primitive areas, a legacy of low-caste connection to ancient royal stag prerogative.

It would appear that the Hindu approach to life, ahistorical yet conservative in its repressive caste system, is suited to the practice of suttee, which is an supreme expression of absorption in uncanny matters and heedless of the friendship of the phenomenal world. thus far from the modern perspective, the practice of suttee calls into question both blanket assertion that the culture was or is exclusively life-fulfilling. Yet Hinduism smothers Indian culture. Lannoy asserts that most political or religious movements against Hindu orthodoxy in one form or another "have all been subjected to the same [Hindu] embrace until their edges have begun to blur" (Lannoy, 1974, p. 336). The dreamlike, otherworldly preo
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