Sati: Abjecting to Sacred Violence

2015

Nitai Aleksiewicz

Feminism and Politics of the Sacred

29/5/2015

Sati: Abjecting to Sacred Violence

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Introduction

The rite of Sati, a witnessed religious ritual of widow-immolation originating in India, is

a source of horror and activism for feminists in India and the West. Beyond the social and

political controversies arise consistent argument over how to represent a woman who becomes a

Sati. At the outset of my research, I intended to write a paper on self-sacrifice. Beyond a bare

scratching of the surface, it became apparent that the concept of self, or individual autonomy, is

at the heart of this controversy. Scholars find themselves in a loop of language that serves to

subvert the voice and perpetuate the invisibility of Woman who Becomes Sati with every

definition as victim or individual agent. 1

In her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak sums up the debate

on scholarly determination of subaltern agency with two statements. It is either “white man saves

brown woman from the brown man;” or “The women wanted to die.”2 With deference to

Spivak’s warning at the dangers of arguing subjectivity of the subaltern Indian woman, I believe

Sati’s ‘choice’ lies in a complex margin we are still trying to understand. With the goal of

empathetic exploration, I will attempt to place theoretical filters on factual circumstances to

extricate another perspective. I do not believe that I can examine the sacrificial rite of Sati

without looking at the Woman who Becomes Sati. One does not exist without the other.

Using factual articles and feminist research on Sati as support, I will apply Rene Girard’s

structure of the violent sacred to reflect on the Physical aspects of the sacrificial act and Julia

Kristeva’s writings on psychoanalysis to examine the Psychic repercussions of the Sati social

order. My hope is that in the intersection of philosophies of Violence, Psychoanalysis, and

Feminism, we will find a way to approach this tragic sacrifice through relating to the complexity

that constitutes human experience.

Girard: The Sacred Violence of Sati

‘Religion shelters us from violence just as violence seeks shelter in religion. If we fail to understand certain

religious practices it is not because we are outside their sphere of influence but because we are still to a very real

extent closed within them.’(Girard, Violence of the Sacred, p.24)

1 I have created the term ‘Woman who Becomes Sati,’ as one that does not assign a socially weighted meaning,

such as ‘victim’ or ‘agent,’ but rather reflects physical fact. 2 Spivak, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ 297.

2

Picture from www.ancient-origins.net

Girard has articulated a theoretical set proclaiming violence as the “heart and secret soul

of the sacred.”3 In applying his framework to the founding murder myth of Sati as well as to

current historical and cultural examples of Sati sacrifice, certain aspects jump out in stark

alignment. Religion ably legitimizes sacrifice, the scapegoat mechanism is present, and the rites

of impure violence are neatly tamed with Purification Rituals creating the ambivalent Sacred.4

Girard, however, falls short by disregarding many of the gender driven power dynamics that

created, motivated, and perpetuate the Sati myth. He misses the intentional social positioning of

women as surrogate victim and scapegoat, exhibits a noted lack of inclusion (and reflexivity) of a

hegemonic patriarchal system, and underestimates the cunning complexity of a social order that

creates a self-less victim by offering a Divine Self as sacrificial reward. Numerous feminist

writings have focused on the importance of gender relations in sacrifice and it is stated quite

succinctly by Mary Condren, “The very words sacred, and its counterpart sacrifice, are now both

seen to instantiate and maintain particular hegemonic political and religious forms of power.” 5

1. The Founding Murder: Appropriating Myth

Incorporating knowledge of gender relations in sacrifice, Girard’s theories of Violence

and the Sacred apply to the physical facts of the Sati rite. We begin with the Founding Murder,

or myth of Sati, choosing interpretation religiously appropriated as validation for violent

sacrifice.6 Asserting that current Hinduism speaks a language that contains a hegemonic

3 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 31.

4 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World 2003.

5 Condren, ‘Suffering into Truth: Constructing the Patriarchal Sacred,’ 358.

6 In recent scholarly articles by feminist authors, alternate translations are presented in efforts to redefine Sati. In

this essay noted readings include Spivak’s analysis of the Dharmasastra and Rg-Veda in which she deftly points out an alternate translation of Sanskrit texts based on Sati which infer a widow is in fact remarried not immolated. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ 100.

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symbolic order, reading the myth through a feminist lens exposes the battle between further

establishing hegemonic patriarchal social order and the sacrifice of women.7

A re-telling of the Sati myth is paraphrased from translations of Srimad Bhagvatam and

popular versions of the story. Sati is the daughter of the powerful Daksa and is married to Lord

Siva. Siva is recognized as a God but he is infamous for his slovenly appearance and association

with the lower castes. Daksa resents Siva’s godhead but has reluctantly given him Sati’s hand in

marriage. Daksa holds a massive ritual sacrifice for the benefit of all, and does not invite Sati or

Siva. Infuriated at this deliberate slight, Sati insists on attending the sacrifice. When Siva tries to

dissuade her she bursts into angry tears and goes anyway.8 When she arrives at the event her

mother and sisters greet her but her father ignores her. Sati then realizes that offerings are present

for all the other Gods but her husband Siva. Angered by insults and ashamed of her relationship

with her father, Sati is unwilling to continue in a body from the lineage of her father. She decides

to destroy her body through a powerful yogic trance and is consumed from her powerful fire

within.9 When Siva learns of Sati’s death he goes into a wild rage and taking her body he begins

dancing a powerful destructive dance. Vishnu finally stops the dangerous dance by

dismembering Sati’s body. In an act of sympathy, the other Gods bring Sati back to life in a

divine reincarnation of Siva’s consort. 10

The first stage, or the Founding Murder of Girard’s cultural theories, is based on a triad

created by the mimetic nature of human desire. The desire of one subject appears as it is

triggered by another man’s desire for the same object. Tina Arppe restates Girard,

The subject’s desire for the object is thus always mediated by a ‘third,’ the model, the desire of whom the

subject is imitating. In the end, the subject’s desire is completely captured by the model that becomes the

real object of desire, whereas the original object is turned into a mere vehicle of desire. (2009, p.38)

Defining this triad and the object of desire in the Sati myth is crucial in developing the mimetic

conflict that inspired the Founding Murder of Sati.

In assigning this triad we must apply a feminist lens to analyze patriarchal mythic

appropriation. The dominance of men in this myth is apparent in the dynamics between father

and daughter, and husband and wife. Sati, though situated in the beginnings of a male dominated

myth, still has agency and decides against the wishes of her husband to attend the sacrifice as a

7 Assisted from a lecture by Dr. Mary Condren on reading myth with feminist perspective to view patriarchal

sublimation of matri-centered values, Trinity College Dublin, March 23, 2015. 8 Paraphrased partly from the translation in Aishwarya Laksmi’s ‘The Liminal body: the language of Pain and

Symbolism around Sati,’ 85. Reference is made in original cited text to Sati’s emotional reactions, “her judgment being clouded by her womanish nature.” 9 In the Srimad Bhagvatam Sati is destroyed through yogic trance but it has been interpreted as being consumed

by her own inner fire. 10

It is to be noted that Sati is sometimes reincarnated and sometimes resurrected. The ending of the myth is highly varied. This version of resurrection is taken from various online versions of the Sati myth including http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Sa-Sp/Sati.html.

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patriarchal mediator.11

When her father refuses to acknowledge her and she sacrifices herself

through great yogic power, there are two potential readings. One is as a cautionary tale;

disobedient wives who transgress their husband’s desire meet unfortunate endings and cause

destruction.12

Condren writes “In many mythological or theological systems, women are

responsible for bringing death into the world through disobedience, chaos, or uncontrolled

sensuality.”13

The other interpretation is an existential sublimation of women’s subjectivity. Sati

with her remaining agency desires to be recognized and seen by her father/kin regardless of her

relationship to Siva, whom her father does not approve of. Her desire to be recognized as

autonomous when denied, results in rebellious self-destruction. Aishwarya Lakshmi argues “Sati

is a moment/story caught in the act of resisting appropriation and consolidation, and the narrative

itself carries the surest ‘proof’ of the struggle.”14

The very violence inherent in this myth

revolves around appropriating female agency.

In a feminist reading of transitory myth the formation of a powerful woman as first

discredited and then killed/destroyed, fits the fate of many goddesses in myths reflecting growing

hegemonic patriarchy. When Sati desires her autonomous being, so too does her father. In

denying her recognition, he symbolically claims her visibility and subjecthood. The wrath of her

husband, who now also desires his wife in classic repetition of mimetic conflict, creates a dance

of destruction. This places Sati as Girard’s original victim, whom he labels the

originator/resolver of the Founding Murder crisis.15

The resolution of the conflict is her divine

rebirth at the benevolence of powerful male Gods for the benefit of Siva, another male God.

Because she is no longer born of a woman she is seen as more pure, godlier. Reincarnated by

men for a man, she also no longer has any ties to a mother or the laws of kinship. She is

presented as an improved version, one conceived by patriarchal acquiescence. Sati has in mythic

flagrance now become the foundation for religious interpretation of woman existing solely for

her husband. So began a social order invented through appropriation of the Founding Murder

changing Sati’s act of rebellion into one of sacrifice in service of her husband. Progressively

crafting religious rules to enforce this role of women in the social order spawned the dichotomy

of living Woman as Object and dead woman as Subject/Divinity.

Establishing the base of Mimetic conflict, as woman desiring her autonomy and man

desiring woman’s autonomy conceives an interesting mutation to traditional patterns of

sacrificial violence in the evolution of the Sati. According to Girard, the surrogate victim, the

first substitution in the violent sacred, represents an individual who “dies so that the entire

community, threatened by the same fate, can be reborn in a new or renewed cultural order.”16

Here we must stop and analyze the threat to the entire community. In the myth of Sati, the initial

11

Lakshmi, ‘The Liminal body: the language of Pain and Symbolism around Sati,’ 86. 12

Ibid. 13

Condren, ‘Suffering into Truth: Constructing the Patriarchal Sacred,’363. 14

Lakshmi, ‘The Liminal body: the language of Pain and Symbolism around Sati,’ 83. 15

Girard, Violence and the Sacred 16

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 255.

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threat was levelled at Sati’s subjecthood, in both her father’s lack of recognition, and the

appropriation of the myth to reflect dependency of her subjecthood on Siva’s reputation. The

threat to the community and the world at large is present in Siva’s destructive dance after Sati’s

yogic self-immolation. Perhaps the translated threat to communities practicing the Sati religion is

derived from a gendered mimetic conflict.

In the actualized rite of modern Sati, the only victims targeted are women. The object of

desire in the Founding Murder we have defined to be the subjectivity of woman, but can also be

simplified to physical woman. From the moment men have sought to control women as objects

of value and desire, mimetic conflicts have violently ensued to possess this object of desire.

Girard states “By channeling its energies into ritual forms and activities sanctioned by ritual, the

cultural order prevents multiple desires from converging on the same object.”17

Men desire to

possess woman as object, and woman desires to possess herself. Sati evolved through religion

and subsequently social and cultural order as a system that teaches woman her sole value and

only option is to be a good, chaste, wife to her husband. This order simultaneously denies

woman her subjectivity and places her solidly in the private sphere hidden from the desire of

other men, therefore reducing conflict. In short,

The social necessity or existence of such gender splitting is culturally specific rather than comprising a

necessary outcome of any civilizing process. Furthermore, the elaboration of such splitting through rites

such as that of sacrifice, often serves to establish and maintain hegemonic male domination in that it

reflects, and legitimates specific gender relationships. (Condren, 2009 p.363)

Tracing the patterns of Sati we see the way in which the social order has shifted to keep

women sublimated. There are references to women committing Sati in the second half of the first

millennium AD but it was confined to the ksatriya or warrior caste.18

The strict hierarchical caste

system and the prevalence of varying sacrificial rites in the communities of various castes would

support complicity in the sacrificial rite of Sati. However, there are external factors that perhaps

contributed to a solidification and prolonged continuation of the Sati rite in India.

2. External Factors: Historical Perpetuation

The entrance of British rule and external pressure had multiple effects on the social and

political standing of Sati. There was a notable increase of Sati cases in the early 1800’s when

British rule began trying to define a ‘voluntary’ Sati as basis for legally inhibiting the rite. Ania

Loomba writes “When the British prior to the colonial debate questioned the pundits about the

practice they actually succeeded in creating a scriptural sanction and a religious tradition for a

practice which had been diverse, variable, and uneven.”19

From 1818-1820 an internal movement

against Sati led by Indian scholars and political leaders handed out pamphlets written against Sati

17

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 149. 18

Loomba, ‘Dead Women Tell No Tales,’ 210. 19

Loomba ‘Dead Women Tell No Tales,’ 212.

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in the Bengal area focusing first on religious sanctions that devaluated Sati.20

In 1829 the British

government released the first law declaring Sati illegal. In the Bengal area of India Sati all but

died out, but to the Rajasthan people of India who claim caste/lineage authority over the Sati

culture, the prohibition seemed to reinforce and strengthen their cultural order.

This opposing Rajput resurgence of the Sati proves Girard’s theory “Where violence is

concerned, intolerance can prove as fatal an attitude as tolerance, for when it breaks out it can

happen that those who oppose its progress do more to assure its triumph than those who endorse

it.”21 The longevity of the Sati religion in Rajasthan extends to the present, and though

occurrences are increasingly rare, all cases researched from recent history took place in this area.

To shed light on the continuity of a rite with gender specific violence still existing internally

within a community, we must analyze religious traditions, and dominant social discourse

affecting Woman who Becomes Sati.

3. Social Order: Preparing the Scapegoat

To comprehend the journey from the initial interpretation of the Sati myth to the more

recent reality of religious regulations, a community that accepts the sacrifice, and women who

‘volunteer’ for the act, we must take into account the circumstances that form women’s place in

the social order. An article written in 1980 on the Rajasthan area dominantly known for cases

of Sati lists possible factors that might contribute to a woman ‘choosing’ to become Sati. These

include a huge female illiteracy rate, upper-class women (most often the Women who Become

Sati) completely dependent on men and living in seclusion, and frequent female suicides. This

does not create a largely appealing picture of the life created through social order for Rajput

women, and in searching for applicable theory we find Girard offers typical characteristics for

scapegoats while simultaneously declaring, if chosen, anyone can be prepped for sacrificial

victim.

Ritualistic thought does not limit itself to seeking out those categories that are the least unsuited for

supplying ritual victims. Once the victims have been obtained, it strives in various ways to make them

conform to its own image of the original victim and simultaneously increase their quotient of cathartic

potential. We consider that anything involving this kind of intervention is sacrificial preparation; that is, our

use of the term goes beyond the usual definition of sacrificial preparation that immediately precede a

sacrificial killing. (Girard 1979, p.272)

Leslie Harlan’s work details the societal and religious rules that influence the life of a

modern Rajput woman living in the area of Rajasthan, India. In direct correlation with the

resurrected kinless Sati of myth, when a woman from the social order of Sati marries, she leaves

her family and friends, and becomes physically dependent on her husband’s relations.22

It is

indeed a social replay of mythic Sati who is interpreted to put her husband above her family, and

20

Sangari and Vaid, ‘Sati in Modern India: A Report,’ 1285. 21


Hawley and Harlan, Sati: A Blessing and a Curse, 79.

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herself. In characterizing scapegoats, Girard initially paints an outer lying target; the weak

animal easily separated from the herd and describes the vulnerable character of the victims as

one that inspires negative feelings from the community that are expressed and purged in the

sacrifice. “The victim must be neither too familiar to the community nor too foreign to it.”23

Woman who Becomes Sati is both familiar and foreign; she enters the community a foreigner,

now familiar only by extension of her husband who is part of the community.

In studying the belief structure it is clear that ideologically a woman’s life is entirely

reliant on that of her husband’s. The word Sati is derived from the female participle of sat ‘to

be.’24

A play on the verb translates to ‘what ought to be’ which is interpreted through Hindu

formulations to ‘good woman.’25

It is understood that a good woman is a good wife, but social

rules show that association is more than a simple title for one of many roles a woman can assume

in life. For the Woman who Becomes Sati her only way of Being exists as a good wife to her

husband.

The rules for being a good wife are stringent. A woman is believed to become Sati

through acquiring goodness or sat which comes with three stages of preparation pativrata,

sativrata, and satimata. 26

A pativrata, or married woman, is believed responsible for her

husband’s health and his life itself. If she is a good wife and attends to all his needs, encouraging

him, and performs ritual vows (most of which are fasting), she protects him. If her husband

somehow dies before her, she is held responsible for his death and may be suspected of

insufficient devotion.27

4. Religion’s Role

Religion as it dictates social order solidified women as the members of the community

designated for sacrificial victim. Here aspects of woman as associated with impurity begin to

crop up in rules prohibiting a woman from becoming a Sati if she is on her menstrual cycle or

pregnant. (These associations of women as impure will be fleshed out, pun intended, in relation

to the abject in the next section focusing on abjection). In addition, though it is far from every

woman who Becomes Sati, the spectre of possible of death remains. As death is associated with

the impure, there is stigma attached to women kept at bay only by a living husband.28

However,

if her husband dies and she chooses to take the vow of Immolation (sativrata), she is cleared of

all suspicion.29

If she stays alive she suffers a miserable fate as an impure dishonored widow,

forbidden from remarrying, and a burden on her in-laws. Once she claims sativrata, declaring

she will be the victim in what Girard terms Purification Ritual, she is instantly catapulted from

23


Hawley, Sati: A Blessing and a Curse, 13. 25

Ibid. 26

Hawley and Harlan, Sati: A Blessing and a Curse, 80. 27

Ibid. 28


Hawley and Harlan, Sati: A Blessing and a Curse, 80-84.

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association with the shamed and impure into the territory of the Sacred.30

Girard determines that

the impure lies on a dichotomous line to sacred. When the impure enters a ritual, the ambivalent

sacred comes into play. “Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him--but the victim is

sacred only because he is to be killed.”31

A sliver of the indoctrination and circumstances these women experience has been laid

out, yet barring potential psychological factors which we will discuss in the following segment,

what else drives these women towards death by fire? Wrapping our head around this exploration

of ‘choice’ shows the status of women and religious ideologies combine for dangerous cultural

conditioning. A pativrata, who has no autonomous status of her own, is raised to the prestige of a

sacred being with agency, sativrata, when she commits to her death. In the days in which she

prepares to mount the funeral pyre, every demand she makes is fulfilled and every word she

speaks is treated with prophetical importance.32

Girard writes of victims imbued with Divine status,

The victim is considered divine because it appears responsible for the disorder culminating in a unanimous

gathering against it and for the return to order assured by that unanimity itself. The community is unable to

see in the victim only an occasional and passive instrument of its own metamorphosis, a catalyst for its

instant transition from collective hysteria to tranquility. (2003, p.108)

Beyond the heady experience it may be for the Sati to be not only in full command of self, but to

be elevated to status of Divine, there are significant external pressures. Her husband’s family and

the village have much to gain from her death as it significantly adds to their good fortune. Her

in-laws are now entitled to her share of her husband’s property as well as all the donations made

for her sacrifice; huge financial gains with one less mouth to feed. The villages often receive

large donations for the building of new temples which draw Sati devotees and visitors. In one

instance, a village in Jhadli gathered resources to publicize and capitalize on the Sati far before

the act had transpired (documents proved a plot for new temple was chosen pre-Sati ritual, and a

camera purchased to publicize the Sati).33 Girard’s sacrificial scapegoat dies for the overall good

of the village, and materially and financially the Sati’s death is a benefit to others at her expense.

Beyond (or maybe because of?) material gains, once a woman chooses Sati it is nearly

impossible to go back. There are religious rules in place dictating that attempts to dissuade a Sati

from her conviction may result in curses known as srap, for the dissuader. Harlan explains, “A

sativrata pronounces a curse (srap or shrap) if she becomes angry while preparing to die.”34

Consider that a woman who is sativrata may angrily or emotionally try to extricate herself from

the death sentence, and it is construed as a curse from a woman who is insistent in her

30


Ibid., 1. 32

Hawley and Harlan, Sati: A Blessing and a Curse, 85. 33


Hawley and Harlan, Sati: A Blessing and a Curse, 84.

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conviction. Even the small acts that may be interpreted as the sativrata changing her mind are

twisted to be acts of compliance.

Sangari and Vaid describe these final days with examples of small acts appropriated as

religiously holy and an unstoppable group energy that makes a change of heart for Women who

Becomes Sati, nearly impossible. Harlan speaks of the fear of the srap which serves to ensure the

support of family and community in encouraging the sativrata to maintain her course towards

death.35

What began as a ‘voluntary’ act becomes involuntary due to the various internal and

external forces resisting a sativrata’s refusal to become a satimata. Community/collective force

ensures the sati rite is carried out—religious euphoria elevates mundane acts to miracles and

condones the ritualized murder as a means of “concealing and denying individual and

community responsibility.”36

Once the rite is complete and the woman immolated, she is

satimata, a divine figure who is worshipped and whose words are faithfully remembered for

decades. Sangari and Vaid claim, in the social and religious ideology of Sati, it is “the ‘pinnacle’

of achievement for a woman.”37

To Girard, religion is crucial in misdirecting society and the victim herself from the true

motivation of violent sacrifice.

The function of ritual is to ‘purify’ violence; that is, to ‘trick’ violence into spending itself on victims

whose death will provoke no reprisals. Because the secret of this mechanism is unknown to the participants

in the rites, religion tries to account for its own operation metaphorically, using for that purpose the objects

and materials involved in that operation. (1979, p.36)

The Sati rite is elevated to the making of a Goddess, the ultimate spiritual act of self-sacrifice

that assures a woman her place in heaven with her husband, and her fame on earth.

Despite the deeply entrenched and elaborate social and religious rules that condone Sati,

for the last thirty years there has been increased disavowal of the rite even from within the

community. This is not unforeseen in the theories of sacred violence. Girard warns “The sheer

repetition of the sacrificial act—the repeated slaughter of the same type of victim—inevitably

brings about such change. But the inability to adapt to new conditions is a trait characteristic of

religion in general.”38

5. Sacrificial Crisis

The last recorded case of Sati took place in Rajpur, India, October, 2008. The following

is an excerpt from an online blog by local Indian man, Shishir Srivastava.

35

Ibid., 84. “The curse, which hangs over a family for a number of generations, usually seven, serves to encourage within it proper attitudes and activities….The sativrata makes it clear that intervention is unacceptable, and in fact dangerous.” 36


Ibid., 1287 38


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The Indian society might have progressed and moved forward, but the social evil of Sati continues to haunt

us. The shocking incident of a seventy one year old woman performing Sati in Chattisgarh a few days back

is an eye opener for all of us…. Lalmati had come to the funeral dressed in a new sari. When her husband’s

body had been almost burnt and the villagers were about to leave, Lalmati jumped into the pyre and was

reduced to ashes in moments… It is a shame for our society that this heinous practice continues to go on.39

The above writing is indicative of the beginning of what Girard labels Sacrificial Crisis. “The

sacrificial crisis can be defined therefore, as a crisis of distinctions—that is, a crisis affecting the

cultural order. This cultural order is nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions in

which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual

relationships.”40

I would argue that the cultural order of Sati has been in this crisis since the

highly publicized death of eighteen year old Roop Anwar in 1987. It garnered national and

international attention and inspired the revision of Britain’s 1829 act prohibiting Sati. This new

law criminalized both the act of Sati and those who were in compliance with the act from

relatives to worshippers. According to the letter of the law, the woman who commits Sati is now

a criminal but if successful she is dead and punishment can only be meted out to those proven

accomplices.

In a 2006 case of Sati reported by BBC, the investigating detective Ms. Chauhan, who is

visiting Tulsipur to ‘do an on-the-spot inquiry into the whole affair,’ says: “It has to be verified if

someone encouraged or coerced her to take this extreme step.” The same article reports the

outright admiration from the villagers for the Woman who Became Sati; they are captivated by

Janakrani's “extraordinary devotion to her long-ailing husband.”41

A similar sentiment is echoed

by a man visiting to ‘check it out’ from a nearby village. The controversy between traditional

religious admiration and the modern intolerance at the horror of widow immolation is in full

effect. Girard explains,

Whether the slippage in the mechanism is due to ‘too little’ or ‘too much’ contact between the victim and

those whom the victim represents, the results are the same. The elimination of violence is no longer

effected; on the contrary, conflicts within the community multiply, and the menace of chain reactions

looms ever larger. (1979, p.39)

This lack of unifying support of sacrifice is to Girard is the natural result from religion’s

“inability to change,” integration of the victims into the community, and the loss of consistent

violence due to reduction of sacrifice.

In the 2008 case of Lalmati mentioned above, the police arrested her three sons, their

wives, and her daughter. If convicted they face life in prison. This reflects a growing judicial

39

Srivastava, “Practice of Sati still prevalent in India,” http://www.merinews.com/article/practice-of-sati-still-prevalent-in-india/144412.shtml “Lalmati Verma ,aged seventy one and a resident of Chechar village in the Raipur district in Chattisgarh.” 40


Ali, “Visitors Flock to 'Sati' Village,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5278898.stm

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system which Girard claims is the modern version of acceptable sacrificial violence.42

There is

hope that with continued legal accountability and the dominant presence of a judicial system, the

Sati rites will end.

Cases of Sati are rare, but still occur exceptionally in poverty-ridden rural areas where

communities worship the practice as the epitome of female honor and devotion. In honor of

Lalmati villagers gathered at the pyre and read verses from sacred texts all night before she

burnt.43

Girard further defines sacrificial crisis as loss of transcendence that abolishes the terms

of legitimate and illegitimate sacrifice. Then it “becomes a matter of mere opinion, with each

man free to reach his own decision.”44

In applying Girard’s theories to the Sati rite, there

undoubtedly are patterns of Girard’s Sacred Violence. Yet, he never makes a specific connection

to gender relations as a motivating factor behind violence. Condren writes,

The social necessity or existence of such gender splitting is culturally specific rather than comprising a

necessary outcome of any civilizing process. Furthermore, the elaboration of such splitting through rites

such as that of sacrifice often serve to establish and maintain hegemonic male domination in that it reflects,

and legitimates specific gender relationships. (2009, p.363)

In interrogating the gender relationships that manifest in the tragic sacrificial Sati ritual, we can

dive deeper into external factors introduced above, but it is equally important to study the

internalized psychic consequences of cultural order. In exploring the psychic life of a Woman

who Becomes Sati, we can perhaps begin to tackle in more detail the debate of agency and

subjectivity. With primary assistance from Nancy Jay and Condren’s works on abjection and

sacrifice, I will apply Kristeva’s theory of the Abject in an endeavor toward understanding

Woman who Becomes Sati.

Kristeva: Abjection and the Supersubject

‘I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an

insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling;

it is thus that they see that ‘I’ am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death.’ (Kristeva,

Powers of Horror, p. 3)

42


Ramesh, “Relatives Arrested After Widow Burns to Death on Funeral Pyre,” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/oct/14/india 44


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In the previous section, the focus was confined to discussion of Girard’s theories on

sacred violence. What Girard does not attend to—and what will be investigated in more depth

here—is the impact of gender relations in creating sacrificial rituals that either wholly exclude

women from sacrifice, or include women only as scapegoats.

Many historical sacrificial rites had a primary objective of cementing a patrilineal order

and in doing so found ways to undermine women in order to control their wombs.45

The

impure/unclean/abject was born as a way to dismiss women from sacrifice and therefore lineage.

Religion, as Girard points out, creates rules and reasons to support sacrifice. The

symbiotic relationship of the two in patrilineal/patriarchal societies has, over time, indoctrinated

what Freud defined as Superego to internalize abjection in women.46

This segment of the essay

will begin with examining ‘Why’ the Sati ritual exists, move forward to ‘How’ abjection became

internalized through the cultural order defining Sati, and end with exploring hypothetically

‘What’ effects internalized abjection may have for Women who Become Sati.

In discussing the origin of abjection it is important to note a contradiction or perhaps a

misunderstanding of Kristeva’s read on India’s hierarchic order and the resulting disregarding of

abjection. She notes earlier in Powers and Horror,

But whether it be within the highly hierarchical society of India or the Lele in Africa it is always to be

noticed that the attempt to establish a male, phallic power is vigorously threatened by the no less virulent

45

Jay, ‘Sacrifice for Remedy of Having Been Born of Woman,’ 288. 46

Theories based on Freud but brushed up from Saul McLoed, 2008, http://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html

subject/object

'Self'/'Other'

sacrifice abject

self/SuperSubject

Woman is abject….I am woman…..I am abject…..Abject is death…..when I am not Self but Object I live…..

living with Abject/Self is intolerable…..abject must be expiated through rituals of defilement.....In

destroying the abject I destroy Self…..In death Self is elevated to ‘Purity’ and Divine Woman ……When I

decide to die I am free to be myself…..I am free to be more then myself…….. I become a SuperSubject.

13

power of the other sex, which is oppressed. That other sex, the feminine, becomes synonymous with a

radical evil that is to be suppressed. (1982, p.70)

Later in Powers of Horror she argues that in India abjection as it relates to gender differences is

displaced by an endogamy marriage system.47

Her logic is that the symbolic order as it defines

pure/impure is exorcised in differentiating hierarchy of castes, and the practice of marriage

within caste provides a non-violent balance of power between sexes.48

I argue that the Sati ritual

is violent proof of gender associated power imbalances operating in spite of the caste system.

1. ‘Why’ does the Sati Ritual Exist?

The cultural order of Sati demonstrates that in some societies in India, sacrificial violence

is still pivotal in oppressing the female sex. As Kristeva points out, the caste system in India

provides an alternative outlet to gender for expelling the impure. ‘Why’ then does this Sati rite

exist? Though the caste system is a social symbolic order also perpetuated by religion, it does not

in the case of Sati nullify the destructive factors accompanying gender roles. The sacrificial rite

of Sati is an extreme example of human sacrifice used to perpetuate a patrilineal order. The caste

system may in fact, have exacerbated the violence of the sacrifice. Though vague, I believe

Nancy Jay alludes to Sati as “the case of human sacrifice before the British conquest, the

patrilineally organized royal bureaucracy.”49

The religion and culture of Sati both exist in an

undeniably patrilineal and patriarchal order in what was considered India’s hegemonic caste of

ksatriya or ruling class. It is a natural leap to associate a heightened need to establish lineage

where extreme power and wealth can be contested. Jay writes,

When the crucial intergenerational link is between father and son, for which birth itself cannot provide sure

evidence, sacrificing may be considered essential for the continuity of the social order. What is needed to

provide clear evidence of jural paternity is an act as powerful, definite, and available to the senses as birth.

(1992, p.288)

In the Sati ritual we are seeing two separate yet interrelated objectives for widow-

immolation. One is maintaining a patriarchal order through one lineage. There is no chance of

contention over a throne if not one, but both parents die simultaneously. In the Rg-veda,

considered an authoritative source on Sati (which predates the Dharmasasthra a religious text

with distinctly misogynistic societal rules), it is noted that there was a religiously condoned

practice of niyoga or remarriage of a widow to her brother-in-law. This ensures lineage continues

through the man’s line but allows the widow to live. Spivak illuminates a possible mistranslation

of this text based on a single letter in a single word which shifts the meaning from “Let these

wives first step into the house,” to “let these wives step into fire.”50

She notes that though the rest

of the text deals with a widow’s choice of a celibate but much respected spiritual life, or the

47

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 82. 48

Ibid., 83. 49

Jay, ‘Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman,’ 288. 50

Spivak, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ 304.

14

practice of remarrying a brother or close kinsman of her deceased husband, it is the text most

often used to validate the sacrificial rite of Sati.51

These choices are non-existent in more current

religious texts. Was it the need to isolate and protect the lineage of the ruling class combined

with the growing hegemony of patriarchy that instituted widow-immolation through blatant

appropriation of text?

Jay argues that “Sacrifice can both expiate descent from women (along with other

dangers) and integrate the ‘pure and eternal’ patrilineage.”52

The practice of Sati sacrifice does

both though in a somewhat different fashion than patrilineal rites solidified through blood

sacrifice that revolve around the exclusion of women to unify men through lineage by sacrifice

not birth.53

This practice of widow-immolation rather hits a double solution by creating a Girardian

scapegoat of women to unify community, and by erasing possibility of a (royal) widow having

future children. The high stakes necessity of controlling a woman’s reproduction in the ruling

caste society practicing Sati, seem to line up with a common patriarchal religious practice of

associating impurity with women.54

Condren clarifies, “In the patriarchal world, while religions

take very different expressions, they usually agree on one thing: that the abject, the female, and

death are integrally connected.”55

Two things are at play, maintaining the external dominant

patrilineal social order, and forming individual identity separate from that of mothers.56

These

goals combined to form (sometimes violent) purity rituals of defilement that dealt with the

impure/abject aligned with women.

In establishing woman as abject, all things associated solely with natural body functions

of women were designated impure. Childbirth and menstrual blood are the most notable, making

women impure not by action but by merely by Being. According to Kristeva the abject comes

into play when the individual forms subjectivity and separates from Mother. In developing

subjectivity the individual also realizes mortality. In a patriarchal society, that horror and fear is

projected onto the maternal.57

All individuals are indeed born of women, and in a patriarchal

symbolic order, experience the need to abject the mother to establish self-identity. Kristeva

writes,

Abjection is coextensive with social and symbolic order, on the individual as well as on the collective level.

By virtue of this, abjection, just like prohibition of incest, is a universal phenomenon; one encounters it as

51

Ibid. 52


Jay, ‘Sacrifice for Remedy of Having Been Born of Woman,’ 292. ‘For patrilineage members, it is sacrificing, not giving birth, that maintains lineage continuity as patrilineage.’ 54

Kristeva, Powers of Horror 55

Condren, ‘Women, shame, and Abjection,’ 5. 56

Kristeva, Powers of Horror 57

Ettinger and Sanday both argue that “abjection” only arises in a patriarchal symbolic order and critique Kristeva accordingly. In this essay the use of abjection is applied to an argued patriarchal order.

15

soon as the symbolic and/or social dimension of man is constituted and this throughout the course of

civilization. (1982, p. 68)

The blood sacrifice of Sati manifested as a pinnacle of patrilineage, patriarchy, and abjection of

women. In the cult of Sati, the symbiotic nature of religion, culture, and sacrifice conceived a

belief system in which woman was only recognized communally solely through her association

with her husband, but when that circumstance no longer applied, she was seen as abject-an

impure subject that required purification through destruction.58

A ritual born of social order that perpetuated patriarchal control over women’s

reproduction, mutated into annihilation of woman as impure/abject. Jay writes “Unlike

childbirth, sacrificial killing is deliberate, purposeful, ‘rational’ action, under perfect control.

Both birth and killings is acts of power, but sacrificial ideology commonly construes childbirth

as the quintessence of vulnerability, passivity, and powerless suffering.” 59

As abjection and

purification rites take on many forms but always accompany religion in an attempt towards

psychic resolution, it becomes apparent that the ritual of Sati is not merely Jay’s ‘Sacrifice for

Remedy of Having Been Born of Woman,’ but also Sacrifice for Remedy of Having Been Born

Woman.60

Moving from hypothesizing the foundation of Sati sacrifice and social manifestation

of the abject, it is crucial to outline the aspects of the Sati social order that internalized abjection

so Woman who Becomes Sati is held responsible not only for childbirth but also for her own

sacrificial killing.

2. ‘How’ is Abjection Internalized?

In discovering ‘How’ abjection came to be internalized in Woman who Becomes Sati,

we will look at the following: additional subconscious motivations for men to subvert the female

subject, the rites in which this subversion is cemented, and the internalized abjection that creates

a ‘willing’ sacrificial scapegoat. Karen McCarthy Brown, in response to Harlan’s research on the

culture of Sati, created a hypothesis based on the ‘Good Mother, Bad Mother’ dichotomy

recognizable in psychoanalysis.61

She combines the extended role of Indian mothers (sometimes

breast-feeding children as old as five or six, having a hands off approach to child-rearing

milestones like potty-training, etc.), and links the loss of the mother with the feeling of

powerlessness that may have overwhelmed ksatriya men of the former ruling class. The British

occupation of India ending only to invite in Western culture, she argues, evokes a feeling

reminiscent of the infant’s loss of maternal support. “When the immediate circumstances that

cause those feelings cannot be controlled, there are always women around that can be.”62

Brown

marks this as the basis for women as scapegoats.

58


Ibid. 60

Condren, ‘Women, shame, and Abjection,’5. 61

Hawley and Brown, Sati, the Blessing and the Curse, 94. 62

Ibid., 95.

16

In his abjection of woman/the Mother, man harbors a subconscious hate for women born

of his infantile splitting of the object. If the male infant has never reached the depressive stage to

work through his suffering, it can manifest in sadism and aggressive anxiety.63

Brown drives

home her point invoking the contradictory goddesses in Hinduism she associates with ‘Good

Mother, Bad Mother.’

In India, the expectations placed on women to offer selfless nurturance are great. The Hindu ideal of the

pativrata, the self-sacrificial wife, mythologically represented through such characters as Sita and Parvati,

is an especially potent expression of this expectation. And as might be expected the fear that the mothering

one will not give food but, instead, turn others into food for herself (think of the rapacious Kali) is equally

great. (1994, p.95)

Parvati is Sati reborn and renamed after her self-sacrifice. Kali is considered the dark aspect of

Parvati and is a truly fierce avatar often shown with a necklace of skulls, holding men’s

decapitated heads. If a male dominated society wanted to exercise revenge against ‘Bad Mother,’

creating religious rules where women are stripped of all identity save that which nurtures the

man seems a fitting punishment. In the Sati order the role of mother is lower in status than the

all-consuming role of ‘Good Wife.’

If the abject is formed when a girl separates from her mother to create the autonomous

individual, she immediately falls into societal preachings of Sati. In the social order of Sati ideals

of self-sacrifice are taught as the highest honor a woman can attain, and everything that is

channeled into SuperEgo teaches a woman to be consumed by duty to her husband. Aiswharya

Lakshmi writes “Within the patriarchal narrative a woman is 1) A good pativrata woman whose

identity and selfhood are contingent on being non-autonomous 2) The transcendent symbol of

suffering and sacrifice.”64

Her individual autonomy therefore means little before it is linked to a

husband. Autonomous Self/Subject is categorically assigned with Mother and Woman, to the

abject. The only way, sat, ‘to be,’ is a good wife. In her rite of joining with her husband she

gives up all she knows as autonomous individual and becomes a part of him.

Woman who Becomes Sati’s marriage is one half of rituals Jay labels communion and

expiation.

Communion sacrifice unites worshipers in relation to the good, whereas expiatory sacrifice separates them

from evil. These two forms have often been discussed as if they were wholly separate or separable kinds of

action. But like the gender-related features of sacrifice, the interconnection of communion and expiation is

a regular feature of sacrificial religions recognizable across unrelated traditions. (1992, p.294)

Jay goes on to link communion with ‘oneness’ as it is defined in opposition to differentiation.

The inverse is differentiation at the recognition of integration.65 When a woman becomes

pativrata and participates in the sacrificial rite of Marriage/Communion (in India the marriage

63

Kristeva, Melanie Klein, 88. 64

Lakshmi, ‘The Liminal Body,’ 92. 65

Jay, ‘Sacrifice for Remedy of Having Been Born of Woman,’ 294.

17

rite functionally parallels the rite of Sati as man and wife are joined by sanction of a priest with

hands joined over a sacrificial fire), she renounces that same Self to become one with her

husband. In this function ‘self,’ or autonomous subjecthood, experiences a psychic splitting and

Self is assigned to the abject while consciousness takes on the primary role of ‘object’ digressing

to Other. In poetic fashion Kristeva articulates, “I experience abjection only if an Other has

settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me.’ Not at all an other with whom I identify and

incorporate, but an Other who precedes and possesses me, and through such possession causes

me to be.”66

Woman who Becomes Sati cannot simultaneously be her Self and fully embody Being as

a good wife. To abject Self, the once Abject Other now becomes external.

The unconscious contents remain here excluded but in strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a

secure of differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be

established—one that implies a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration. As if the fundamental opposition

were between I and Other or, in more archaic fashion, between Inside and Outside. (Kristeva 1982, p.7)

Abjection is fully internalized. Instead of the ‘other’ being a source of abject, the woman has no

identity no subjectivity and therefore exists as an extension of her husband. She is pure, as

Ego/Object/Other. Yet abject/Self is always lurking beneath her that is now Other outside. The

desire to experience Self is terrifying because Self is Abject and Abject means death. Condren

argues: ‘The abject is, therefore, both the condition of subjectivity insofar as subjectivity

constitutes the amalgam of drives, corporeality, and desires. But the abject is also intolerable to

the subject. The abject reminds us both of our origins, and also of our ultimate end: from dust

thou came and into dust thou will return.’67

The desire for woman to experience herself as Subject, to release the impure Abject,

would disrupt the social order that cunningly created this paradox. In an effort to protect itself,

Other/Ego seizes on obsessive adherence to Prohibition and Law as created by Religion,

Morality, and Law to erect psychic barriers and hem in the anxious desire to experience

Abject/Self.68 Kristeva defines, ‘Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part,

from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real

threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.’69

Abjection is ambiguous and also ambivalent

when sacred. It does not fully separate from Self, rather it reminds her Other/Ego of its

continuing danger. In the Case of Woman who Becomes Sati, the danger inherent in Abject/Self

does not fully erase her desire to reunite with her original individuality. 70

Inevitably her husband

dies and she and society share the mutual horror/hope of her existing as autonomous subject.

Brown defines this horror in practical terms.

66


Condren, ‘Women, shame, and Abjection, 3. 68

Combined from Kristeva, Power of Horror, 16., and Melanie Klein, 85. 69


Ibid., 10.

18

Whereas before whatever she consumed, literally and figuratively, could be understood as fuel for further

acts of self-sacrifice, as a widow she threatens to become a consumer of family resources, literally and

figuratively, in her own right and for her own purposes. Whereas before her will (another form of hunger)

was contained by being subject to that of her husband, there is now a danger that it may break loose,

untempered by larger family agendas. (Brown 1994, p.96

Harkening back to Girard’s sacred violence, we see how this social order has created another

internal failsafe to avoid mimetic conflict for woman’s subjectivity.

The dangerous Abject that is Autonomous woman is interpreted as a threat to the social

system. The patriarchal (definitely misogynistic and possibly sadistic) order has declared for

Woman who Becomes Sati to experience Abject/Impure/Self, she must suffer a purification

ritual of violent sacrifice. Kristeva perfectly describes reality as it exists for Woman who

Becomes Sati.

The system of abominations sets in motion the persecuting machine in which I assume the place of the

victim in order to justify the purification that will separate me from that place as it will from any other,

from all others. Mother and death, both abominated, abjected, slyly build a victimizing and persecuting

machine at the cost of which I become subject of the Symbolic as well as Other of the Abject. (1982, p.112)

As Woman who Becomes Sati is presented with the option of Life as

Impure/Dishonored/Widow- a societally acknowledged Abject, or as a realized but rather Dead

Self, SuperEgo presents a tantalizing trump card that has been building in potentiality over a

lifetime of self-sacrifice. If Woman who Becomes Sati takes her vow of sativrata, she is not

merely Self/Subject, but something more. She is a Woman who’s every word is valued. A

woman who’s every demand is seen to. A woman who will be surrounded by an adoring crowd

celebrating her as Divine Goddess reincarnated. Temples will be built in her honor, her name

will remembered and spoken in reverence. She will be a SuperSubject.

3. ‘What’ Problematic Dichotomies Emerge?

In determining ‘What’ dichotomies internalized Abjection forms for the Woman who

Becomes Sati, my intention is not to wander into flippant or hyper-heady psychoanalytic

assumptions, but rather to create an understanding of human complexity that aluminates the push

and pull of ‘choice/not-choice.’ Lakshmi presents numerous paradoxes in this stage of Woman

who Becomes Sati. “The choice to claim self but only as she destroys her ‘self’ into her husband

by becoming Sati; the symbolic language of choice and choosing is the language of possibility,

yet the ‘choice’ changes possibility to non-possibility.”71

Is it fair to judge these ‘choices’ of

Social Death/Bodily Life vs. Social Eternal Life/Bodily Death?

My imagined interaction of Freud’s triad—Id (Primitive Instincts), Ego (Realistic

Mediator), and SuperEgo (Ego Ideal)—as they may exist in the unconscious of Woman who

Becomes Sati, unfolds something like this. Superego has informed Id that Woman as Subject will

71

Lakshmi, ‘The Liminal Body’ 89.

19

not survive if she lives on the Outside. Ego internalizes Self in response to Id’s survival instinct

and becomes less than autonomous Subject, Being/Living only as Object/Other/Good Wife.

Subject/Self is Abject. Living with the Abject/Self Inside is intolerable to Id but Ego keeps them

in check. Crisis has occurred; the primary Gatekeeper of the Ego/Other, Autonomous husband is

now gone. Self wants to go Outside. Id agrees but Ego wants to live. Superego informs Ego that

destruction of the Self leads to attainment of SuperSubject. Self only has to die to live forever.

By staying mindful of the confusion, contradictions, and various ‘choices/not-choices,’ the

endeavor is to comprehend the psychic and sacrificial implications of Woman who Becomes

Sati’s last days.

The moment sativrata is announced—and it is possible this is forced or deliberately

misinterpreted on a case by case basis—the Woman who Becomes Sati experiences an

exponential amount of autonomous power not previously experienced. Kristeva writes, “The

abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes the ego back to its source on the

abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away--it assigns it a source in

the non-ego, drive, and death. Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the

ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance.” Her

Abject/Self has made a full appearance and it is this Abject as Autonomous Woman that now

forms the Sacred/Evil dichotomy to be expiated from society through Purification Ritual. As she

was brought into Being through the abjection of Self to attain Oneness sanctioned by

Communion ritual with her husband, now her husbandless Self is Abject/Impure and must be

expiated in a ritual designed to once again integrate her Self wholly into her husband. In the act

of sacrifice where the abject/ impure becomes sacred through violence so Woman who Becomes

Sati also attains the elusive Divine in the form of satimata. In death she achieves freedom from

her fears of the abjected Self and simultaneously achieves a SuperSubject catapulted from

dependent object to goddess incarnate with her words holding the power of prophecy and

retaining power over society long after she has passed.

Condren writes “The realm of abjection is also the realm of what is culturally designated

as sacred. The sacred is ambivalent: powerful and dangerous, bearer of life and/ or death.”72

In

recognition of that power in the minimal time period that she is sativrata, Woman who Becomes

Sati is not only allowed but expected to lay down curses and mandates that will influence her

family for generations. She is given whatever she demands and in these last days she defines the

relationship and level of protection she will provide the family as a divine satimata. As this

SuperSubject, she is punisher, teacher, and Goddess. She lays down the inarguable law that the

sati’s “will must be respected and her desire remembered.”73

It is crucial at this point to remember that Men are given the same rights to officiate at

sacrificial rites without dying themselves. Condren lists the dichotomies of Rites of Abjection

72


Hawley and Brown, Sati, the Blessing and the Curse, citing Harlan, 96.

20

and while many apply, one drives home the drastic gender based inequality. While Men can dive

into abjection, experience the sacred and rejuvenate themselves or the social order while

maintaining life, Women immersed in abjection, result to inverted autonomy, and/or death.74

The ability to live as a respected autonomous subject, even a powerful almost goddess,

does not shift the end result. The Woman who Becomes Sati approaches death in a bridal sari to

ritually commune/unite with her husband, while simultaneously, the impure Abject/Subject is

expiated from society through a purifying blood sacrifice. Through the psychic complexities that

may or may not compel a Woman to Become Sati, the facts remain the same. A woman is told

her salvation; her chance at accomplishing a great honor lies in burning herself alive. The

religious social order has defined a lifetime of ‘choice/not-choice’ by creating options dependent

on sublimation of Self. Even if as she approaches the fire she changes her mind (assuming she

was not already coerced beyond the internalization of the social order), and she is forced into the

fire, those responsible may not be prosecuted.

It is important to note that the exceptional sacrificial Sati rite is now nearly extinct.

Societal changes in present day India are reflected in an increase of arrests made for those shown

to be accomplices to a completed Sati rite, and in the unfavorable reactions from a younger

generation of locals. The conflict inherent to a shifting social order is shown in the 2008 case of

Lalmati. In opposition to the earlier quoted young villager obviously distressed at Lalmati’s

becoming Sati, Lalmati’s son declared “No one forced her to do it” when he was arrested due to

his complicity in her ritual murder.75

Though Sati occurrences are few and far between, when

they happen, a challenged yet still influential social order is exposed that allows a woman no

higher honor or way of Being than a Good Wife, or a Dead Divinity.

Conclusion

The sacrificial rite of Sati, widow immolation, is exceptionally violent. The greater

violence is a social order that creates the only source of women’s spirituality as synonymous

with ceasing to exist. Spivak argues that within the circumstances of the Sati social order, the

subaltern woman cannot speak.76

Loomba answers Spivak’s declaration of feminist intellectuals’

responsibility to the subaltern woman, ‘If women are and have always been at stake, we must

look for them, both within discourses which seek to erase their self-representation and

elsewhere.’77

I have endeavored towards this goal by examining the Physical aspects of the Sati

rite through a Girardian lens of the Violent Sacred, and by exploring the Psychic aspects of

Woman who Becomes Sati through a feminist lens of Kristeva’s Abject. I do not subscribe to

Girard’s theory that violence is at the heart of all sacred. However, I do agree violence supported

74


Ramesh, Randeep. “Relatives Arrested After Widow Burns to Death on Funeral Pyre,” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/oct/14/india 76

Paraphrased from a Spivak quote cited by Loomba, ‘Dead Women Tell No Tales,’218. 77

Loomba, ‘Dead Women Tell No Tales,’ 222.

21

by religion can create a self-perpetuating cycle. To change the outcomes, we must change both

belief system and supporting social order. To change the social order we must be aware of where

and how it is internalized by women. In the case of Sati, I believe there is space for ancient texts

on the Sati myth to be translated from a feminist perspective. In reinterpreting myths through a

feminist lens, lies opportunity to transform a Divine Woman that exists outside the language and

social order of hegemonic patriarchy.78

78

Irigaray, ‘Divine Women,’ Sexes and Genealogies.

22

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Sati: Abjecting to Sacred Violence

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