Sati Evangelicals Baptist Missionaries And The Changing Colonial Discourse Meenakshi Jain by Meenakshi Jain 9788173055522, 8173055521 instant download after payment.

This is not a work on sati per se. It does not address, in any depth, issues of the possible origins of the rite; its voluntary or mandatory nature; the role, if any, of priests, or family members; or any other aspect associated with the actual practice of widow immolation. An introductory chapter briefly surveys the literature on these dimensions of the rite.
The primary focus of this work is the colonial debate on sati, particularly the role of Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries. It argues that sati was an “exceptional act,” performed by a miniscule number of Hindu widows over the centuries. Its occurrence was, however, exaggerated in the nineteenth century by Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries eager to Christianize and Anglicize India. The “missionary assault on Hinduism” dramatized the practice of sati (Bayly L991: 222),
Evangelical-missionaries wanted, firstly, to secure the consent of the British Parliament to operate in the East India Company’s territories in India (which was denied to them till the Charter Act of 1813). Thereafter, to validate British presence in the country, they presented graphic accounts of the raging “ills” of Hindu society, among them female infanticide, ghat murders, and widow immolations. The “catalogue of horrors” was intended to shock and motivate the British public and also garner funds at home for missionary work in India (Major 2006: 124). Significantly, several contemporary non-missionary observers insisted that these “evil practices” were nowhere as rampant as alleged. It is pertinent that in missionary accounts the epicentre of these practices was the vicinity of Calcutta, the very area in which the Baptists operated and the seat of British power in India.
The Baptist presentation of sati marked a radical departure from earlier foreign accounts of the rite, beginning with that of Diodorus as far back as the first century Bc. These accounts mostly resonated with awe and incredulity and speculated on the possible reasons for the custom. They also revealed how limited the practice actually was. It was only in the opening decades of the nineteenth century that Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries presented appalling figures of thousands of widows being burnt on the pyres of their husbands. Also, in contrast to earlier accounts which typically described sati as an act of voluntary martyrdom, missionary writings presented sati as murder or suicide (a mortal sin). This version of sati became dominant in the early nineteenth century. Most studies have attributed the British drive for social reform in the nineteenth century to an ascendant liberal sentiment. The extent to which the reform agenda was invented by Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries eager to authenticate British presence in India has not been adequately emphasized.