Saint or sinner? Suttee in the depiction of Flora Annie Steel and Cornelia Sorabji

Abstract

Suttee is a well-discussed and widely researched topic and yet the literary representations of it are not sufficiently probed into. Suttee, if merely understood as the rite of widow burning in India, is one of the cruelest practices of female subjugation. Hence, women’s attempts at articulating their views on such a practice are significant. This becomes more arresting when two women writers come from different (even opposing!) cultures and stand on different rungs of the colonial hierarchy. Moreover, given the flexibility of fiction as a mode of expression, it can arguably best be used as a powerful tool for one’s own propaganda. Several questions emerge. How does each writer see and show suttee? How does an awareness of their respective status in an imperialist world shape their creative imagination? What kind of politics of representation is involved in their writings in face of the charged politics surrounding the topic of suttee in a colonial world? In depicting this rite, how and why does each bring in the argument of sainthood that is inevitably related with any suttee-death? Endeavoring to find answers to these questions, I will examine one work of fiction each by two contemporaneous women writers, one British (Flora Annie Steel) and one Indian writer (Cornelia Sorabji), to see how the concept of ‘suttee’ has been used in each case.

This article focuses on two women writers’ depiction of “suttee,” ¹ a term that simultaneously refers to the Hindu rite of widow-burning as well as the self-immolating widow herself. This rite has held captive the imagination of the West for hundreds of years. ² Lata Mani (1998) and Thomas Metcalf (1994), among others, speak of how many of the foreign male eyewitnesses are said to have been rooted to the ground, unable to take their eyes off that terrifying scene which at once demanded admiration and evoked repulsion. It is to be noted that white women were no less attracted to or amazed by this strange rite. However, their writings reveal how they were often outspoken on this issue that many of them considered an injury to women’s dignity. ³

An endeavor to know how Indian women themselves portray suttee in their writings is of unfailing interest. Caught between the loud crossfire of the two warring camps of the pro-suttee Hindu orthodoxy supported by a cautious British government and the anti-suttee alliance of a handful of Hindu reformers and innumerable brave self-articulating East India Company officials, the Indian woman — both the subject and the object of the entire suttee discourse — hardly gets a chance to claim for herself the attention of a perceptive audience. The victims of the practice, of course, do not speak to us directly, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1994) would argue that social subalterns like them cannot speak at all. ⁴ However, Benita Parry points out that “Lata Mani does find evidence, albeit mediated [through eyewitness accounts], of woman’s voice” (2007: 37) and thus resents “Spivak’s deliberated deafness to the native voice where it is to be heard” (2007: 40). But the entire concern becomes especially problematic when Mani herself, depending on whose arguments Parry so confidently demands a modification of “Spivak’s model of the silent subaltern” (2007: 37), arguing as follows:

The issue, returning to Spivak’s question, may not be whether the subaltern can speak so much as whether she can be heard to be speaking in a given set of materials and what, indeed, has been made of her voice by colonial and postcolonial historiography. Rephrasing Spivak [i.e. can the (female) subaltern be heard?] thus enables us to remain vigilant about the positioning of woman in colonial discourse without conceding to colonial discourse what it did not, in fact, achieve — the erasure of women. (Mani, 1998: 190)

The “erasure of women” not having been achieved by the male-dominated colonial discourse, we thus still see a few women’s attempts (albeit enfeebled and ignored) to make their opinions known even within that restricted discursive space.

Defying restrictions and prejudices, by the second half of the nineteenth century, women like Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–1922), Krupabai Satthianadhan (1862–1894) and Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954) start writing about their grievances in English to reach out to a larger readership. In fiction or non-fiction, whichever genre they choose, their anger at female suppression and their commitment to making audible that suppressed female voice are evident. Hence, women’s attempt at articulating their views on one of the cruelest practices of female subjugation is significant. This article aims to examine the literary representations of suttee, which are largely overlooked and, consequently, still remain insufficiently probed into. Moreover, given the high flexibility of fiction as a mode of expression, it can be used as a powerful tool for one’s own propaganda. Thus, I here juxtapose two contemporaneous women writers — Flora Annie Steel and Cornelia Sorabji — coming from the opposite sides of the colonial divide in British India.

Steel and Sorabji

Anybody who has delved into the scholarly field of memsahibs’ ⁵ writings of British India has come across the works by a famous “unconventional memsahib” (Coppin, 2011: 1), Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929). Steel is today best known as a memsahib writer who has left behind her a rich treasure trove of writings about the British Raj. She was the wife of an ICS officer who lived in India for 22 years at the end of the nineteenth century. During her stay in India, she proved her exceptional mettle in trying to befriend the “natives,” learn their languages, accompany her husband on his important tours, establish girls’ schools, serve as an inspector of schools, and leave her mark on India in numerous other ways. What comprises a more lasting legacy is her writing about British India. Her works range from novels (like On the Face of the Waters), short fiction (like “In the Permanent Way”), collection of Indian folk-tales (Tales of the Punjab), to guides for other memsahibs in colonial India (The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook). She is honored as the “Novelist of India” (Powell, 1981) or a “Star of India” (Patwardhan, 1963), and is also often hailed as the “female Rudyard Kipling” ⁶ of British India.

Cornelia Sorabji is no less interesting a personality who is increasingly coming under the lens of scholars, historians, and literary critics ⁷ for her large insightful oeuvre during a crucial period in Indian history, nation-building, and identity-formation. Hailing from a Parsee background in western India, she was raised as a Christian in her family that had converted to Christianity from Zoroastrianism and was strongly committed to social service. Eventually, she carved out her own niche in history as “the first woman barrister to practise in India” (Vadgama, 2011: 25). She served the British government in India as the first and only Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards, being the female legal representative for women in purdah. As early as in 1899, she was described in The Queen as “one of those pioneers who make the paths which others of her sex may follow” (Vadgama, 2011: 58).

Both Steel and Sorabji were often in the limelight due to their activities that violated the boundaries prescribed for the feminine domain. Steel was a famously “unconventional memsahib” who did not limit herself to the traditional lifestyle of a white civil servant’s wife, doing the tours of parties, clubs, tennis matches, and sojourns at hill stations. As Margaret Macmillan explains, “she never allowed herself to be turned into the standard memsahib” (1988: 205). Similarly, it is difficult to pigeonhole Sorabji as the stereotypical “Indian” woman, given her unusual background as a non-Hindu — Parsee-Christians being a negligible minority in the demographic map of British India — and as a highly capable, ambitious, scholarly, independent woman, who does not conform to the image of prostrate purdah–confined woman in need of the West’s intervention for liberation. As Sonita Sarker puts it, “her life is anomalous to Western European and Anglo-American projections of underprivileged and submissive South Asian womanhood” (2002: 277). In fact, both women, due to their exertions that many considered to be over-zealous and uninvited, were deemed meddlers. For instance, Antoinette Burton notes, “Sorabji had a reputation as a busybody and an excessively verbose correspondent” (2003: 75, emphasis in text). Steel too gained notoriety as a “busybody” with “bossy, insistent energy and her confident assertion of her own powers” (Barr, 1976: 160), and almost became a menace to government officials because of her nagging interference, as in the case when she crusaded against a corruption case in Lahore University.

Steel and Sorabji are also known for their embattled allegiance to the cause of women. Sorabji, despite setting records as the first woman lawyer, the first female lecturer in Allahabad University, the first and only female legal representative fighting for purdah women’s rights, was an “anti-feminist by her own definition” and “was extremely dismissive of the Indian feminist movement” (Burton, 2003: 67, 86). However, Steel was a self-declared suffragist and yet her feminism — the kind that is “keen, not so much on the rights, as the wrongs of women” (1929: 265) — was often ambivalent, she being often critical of the women’s movement. ⁸

Both were strongly against the nationalist movement in India, considering Indians not yet capable of taking up independent governance. ⁹ Their relation with the empire machinery too was fraught with complexities and contradictions. Although Steel was a staunch “maternal imperialist,” she did not agree with all policies of the imperialist government in India and the manner in which the British Empire often worked. She was often a vocal critic of particular policies or actions of the British government in India in spite of the fact that she sincerely believed in the beneficial civilizing effects of the British rule there. “Flora decided,” Pat Barr notes, “that inefficiency and bungling was rife in all branches of the Indian administration” (1976: 150). Sorabji too, despite being a publicly avowed Raj loyalist, did not hesitate to criticize the government’s misdeeds; for instance, in many Court of Ward cases. And, one should not overlook the fact that “For Sorabji, imperial citizenship is realized — or claimed — only through an indirect rhetoric of ‘maternal imperialism’” (Banerjee, 2010: 125), her version of that imperialism being in getting actively involved in the imperial endeavor and social reforms. It is therefore interesting to see how these two contemporaneous women writers with similar dynamism represent the suttee figure in their literary works. Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (orig. pub. 1896) has been widely discussed and intensively scrutinized, ¹⁰ whereas Sorabji’s memoirs, essays and autobiographies are more discussed than her fiction. ¹¹ In this article, the focus will be on a short story of hers, “A Living Sacrifice.” ¹²

Steel’s Tara

Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters is a “Mutiny” novel. Jim Douglas, the hero, saves a Rajput widow, Tara Devi, from being sacrificed as a suttee on her dead husband’s funeral pyre. Now that even the “Sacred Fire” has forsaken her and she has furthermore been polluted by the touch of a firanghee (foreigner), Tara is rejected by her own society. Douglas keeps this helpless woman in his service until his oriental mistress Zora bibi dies. Tara then goes away to lead the austere life of a widow, whereas Douglas joins the Company’s espionage. Then Kate Erlton, the heroine of the novel, comes into the picture. Wife to an unfaithful man, Major Erlton, who runs after one Alice Gissing, Kate is leading a miserable life in exile, away from her beloved England. When the Mutiny breaks out (and our focus is on Delhi, the seat of the Great Moguls), Major Erlton tries to rescue his mistress rather than his wife but the resourceful Kate manages to escape and is later rescued by Douglas, although they cannot get away from Delhi to reach the greater safety of English camps. Consequently, they disguise themselves as an Afghan couple and, with the help of Tara, they start living on a secluded rooftop. Several times, in the absence of the “Huzoor,” Tara saves Kate, realizing that if any harm befalls the memsahib, Douglas, the master for whom she nurtures a dumb worshipping love, will be deeply hurt. Greatly hurt, Tara sees how Douglas gradually falls in love with this white woman. Delhi is finally recaptured and Major Erlton dies in the battle. Now the widowed Kate is morally free to go and marry the man she loves (for, during those three long months of a shared struggle for survival, she too has learnt to love Douglas). Douglas and Kate come together, and Tara, with a heavy heart, realizes she is needed no more. Her frustrated love for an Englishman drives her to her death. At the novel’s end, she goes back to her temple, which is on fire, and there, ascending to the burning rooftop, she burns herself alive, crying out that she is a suttee.

Tara keeps asserting throughout the novel that she is a suttee but Steel takes pains to show how befuddling that concept is to Tara herself. She misses her chance of becoming a saint by committing self-immolation because Douglas rescues her from that ritual fire. Ever since, we are told:

she ha[s] been bound to him by the strangest of ties. He ha[s] been the means of saving her from her husband’s funeral pyre; in other words of preventing her from being a saint, of making her outcaste utterly. […] It was confusing, even to Tara herself; and the mingling of conscious dignity and conscious degradation, gratitude, resentment, attraction, repulsion, made her a puzzle even to herself at times. (Steel, 2005: 35)

Such a woman — “a puzzle even to herself” — nevertheless, after the conclusion of her services to Douglas at Zora’s death, chooses of her own accord her next course of action, namely, to go and sacrifice herself as a suttee. She says that she has remained suttee these long years even after her husband’s death and this is merely an allusion to her having remained virtuous all along. However, though she explains confidently to Douglas that she has been his servant for “gratitude’s sake” and is now going to be the servant of God for “righteousness’ sake” (Steel, 2005: 70), all her arguments crumble in front of Douglas’s volley of angry questions, for she realizes that it would be too much to admit that “the only method for a woman to preserve constancy to the dead was to seek death itself” (Steel, 2005: 73). Thus, she is inwardly relieved when Douglas, in order to prevent her intended suicide in the name of rightful conduct, picks up a lock of her hair and threatens to keep it in his locket as a love token, knowing that such a deed defiles her “suttee-virtue.” In fact, Tara is pleased by this symbolic outrage about her virtue because, unknown to her own conscious efforts to the contrary, she longs for her master’s love, thereby bringing under suspicion her supposed loyalty to her dead husband. Later, when the two again meet to save an Englishwoman from the bloodthirsty “rabble and refuse” of a mutinous city, Tara pitifully keeps convincing herself that there is no harm in helping her master in his plan, for, after all, her sutteehood is not adversely affected by it. Yet Steel instructs us that it is with her “cry of suttee” (2005: 287) that she struggles in vain to crush her earlier vague resentment against Zora or her present agonizing jealousy of Kate.

And it is in her sutteehood that Tara pathetically thinks lies her superiority to Kate Erlton. No matter how “white,” better or adored by Douglas she may be, the memsahib can never be a suttee. Ferociously conscious of her own suttee-virtue, Tara wonders whether Kate would ever be willing to be a suttee, and when she does find Kate happily cutting her hair prior to shaving her head and adopting the disguise of a suttee, she is understandably alarmed, remembering how reluctant she herself was to do that when it was demanded of her. According to Sangeeta Ray:

Tara’s anguished recollection of her first ceremonial initiation into the role of sati could suggest the beginning of a bond between the two at the recognition of women’s fate in a patriarchal society. (2000: 463)

Rebutting this argument, a very different picture emerges in my reading. The novel revolves less around recognition of women’s common predicament in a patriarchal society than exploration of Tara’s utter failure in retaining her final vestige of superiority. For all her sense of self-importance owing to her suttee-virtue, she has resisted performing the unpleasant task for her own husband while Kate is willing to do it for another man. Kate has surpassed her even in that one thing she took pride in (and thus, has demolished the Indian woman’s boastfulness about her spiritual superiority over the Western woman). Henceforth Tara is always worried how deep an impact it may leave on her master’s heart when Kate tells him of her unflinching eagerness to take on the guise of a suttee for him. Toward the end of the novel, as Douglas lies sick and Tara realizes that he will die without Kate, she goes to fetch the memsahib. When Kate hesitates just for a moment at this surprising turn of events, Tara immediately taunts her with the exultant words, “I will tell [master] the mem is not suttee” (Steel, 2005: 376), as if that were a feeble consolation to the latter’s injured conceit. In Tara’s ultimate act of suttee is manifest her bitterness at defeat rather than any jubilance of triumph. Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan, quoting Nancy Paxton’s views, argues that:

Ultimately, “Kate concedes the contest of purity to Tara, accepting her assertion of the absolute cultural differences that separate the English and the Indian woman”. After her husband dies, Kate marries again; it is Tara who ‘triumphs’ by dying a sati-like death in the fires of war while helping Kate to escape. (1993: 47, emphasis added)

Conversely, I suggest, Tara does not triumph but instead loses the race of common sense and rational action. Steel makes it clear that Tara commits suicide in a state of manic exultation (which evidently stands in contrast to Kate’s levelheadedness throughout her crisis). Moreover, Tara, with her death, does not help Kate to escape. On the contrary, Kate’s escape from danger and her subsequent union with Douglas drive Tara to her death. ¹³ Most importantly, the “contest of purity” cannot be associated with Tara, let alone Kate conceding it to her. Tara claims to die as a suttee for her dead husband whereas she is actually committing suicide out of her frustrated love for another man. If such a question of a “purity-contest” does come in, then it is to scathingly criticize Tara’s impurity, and thus, her incapability of ever becoming a true suttee. This last issue shall be elaborated upon later in this section.

By virtue of a miraculous descent of fire on her that occurs in Benares and leaves some “sacred scars” on her limbs (and which the infuriated Douglas attributes solely to the deceit of the cunning priests), Tara, the former outcast and sinner, is suddenly raised to the pedestal of a saint by those who know nothing of her polluted past. In addition to a formal procession to honor the saint, many people flock to the temple precincts where she lives to simply kiss the hem of her coarse dress in dizzy reverence. Her sainthood is a powerful triumph over her own superstition-held people; conversely, it is this very sham sainthood of hers that Douglas sees as her biggest weakness and plans to exploit to his advantage, for “from saint to sinner would be too great a fall” (Steel, 2005: 125). At a later stage in the story, when Tara is wracked by her envy of Kate, she takes refuge in her sainthood, no matter how hollow it is:

It was balm indeed! It was peace. […] She would be suttee. After all the strain, and the pain, and the wondering ache at her heart, she had come back to her own life. This she understood. Let the Huzoors keep to their own. This was hers. (Steel, 2005: 328)

Her suttee–sainthood entrenches the racial demarcation more prominently. Between the world that she knows is “hers” and the world of the “Huzoors” to which she evidently aspires, her hysterical oscillation is most acute. Realizing soon, however, that “it [is] hopeless trying to be a saint” (Steel, 2005: 328) unless she fulfills her promise of helping her master whom she literally worships, she knows that she must go back to that “Other” world that vexingly evades her comprehension. Before long, she perceives the decisive rejection of her fragile claim on the domestic space of her Huzoor (since Douglas would rather accept from the hands of Kate the same chicken broth that Tara has made). As such, a greater compulsion drives her back to her “own” world to seek in its mad violence her final peace. After the “strain and pain” of her pariah life, she receives the “balm” of death (Steel, 2005: 328).

Tara’s death is more impulsive than premeditated, borne more out of frustration than devotion, more at the sight of flames than insight of faith. Jenny Sharpe brings to our notice that “The image of Tara on a burning Delhi rooftop calls to mind that of Bertha above the flaming battlements of Thornfield” (1993: 103). ¹⁴ Here, an Indian suttee is compared to Bertha; in other words, just the opposite of what Spivak proposes. Spivak equates a Caribbean woman with an Indian suttee when she highlights “the self-immolation of Bertha Mason as ‘good wife’” (1997: 163). Now, reversing the order of comparison, I (and Sharpe) compare an Indian suttee to a Caribbean woman. This is to pinpoint the novelist’s strategy of removing the “unwanted” element from the racial equation to re-establish the British order.

Both Tara and Bertha are the “Other woman” in the text — a signifier of yawning cultural differences; a foil to the good “feminine” English heroines. Besides being colonized women, both are fierce, jealous, suicidal, and rather “masculine” females, thus a deviation from the norm. As Sharpe astutely notes, “Each novel presents us with the image of a deranged woman with arms outstretched against the burning sky in a spectacle of death” (1993: 104). More importantly, in both cases, a good Englishman undertakes grave risks to save another from fire — Rochester fails; Douglas succeeds initially but ultimately fails. So, in more than one way, the “madwoman on the rooftop” (Tara) resembles the “madwoman in the attic” (Bertha).

However, the similarities end here. Bertha is only a shadowy figure in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847); in comparison, Tara is a well sketched-out character. Bertha dies, setting Thornfield on fire. Perhaps Brontë shows that as no more than the just punishment needed for the salvation of the erring hero. However, in Tara’s case, the insinuation goes farther. She burns herself alive on the rooftop of a Hindu ashram, though the shrine of the temple remains unharmed because “already, in the dawn, English officers were at work giving orders, limiting the danger as much as possible” (Steel, 2005: 381). Thus, Steel carefully draws attention to the assiduousness and righteousness of English officers, fighting the “wanton” fires to save natives and their property, despite the harm done to their own people and property during the riots not so many hours ago. The tolerant British Raj is accordingly shown not to dishonor indigenous places of worship, which catapults to significance especially when one remembers that a grudge against British “disrespect” toward Indian religious beliefs and practices was a major reason that triggered the Revolt of 1857. The abolition of suttee, as Steel herself carefully highlights, was one of the biggest grievances against an interfering foreign rule.

Coming back to the two women in the novel, we find that both Kate and Tara are widows in the end. Tara immolates herself and Kate marries Jim Douglas. The implications of this striking contrast may go beyond the mere idea of a convenient sacrifice of the colonial “Other”. This might be Steel’s conscious or unconscious step to show the difference between the two cultures in their treatment of women (specifically widows). As a widow, Tara is to be burnt alive or forced to live an austere life, which denotes the supposed barbarity and backwardness of her culture. Kate is not only allowed to exist but also lives happily with her second husband, showing the apparent magnanimity and humanitarianism of her culture. This differing treatment of women, which is taken to reveal the standard of maturity of a people’s culture, is the justification of a superior culture dominating and teaching an inferior culture — in short, the justification of the British Raj in India.

However, justification is not the only factor at play here. The entire affair becomes problematized when one tries to judge the validity of the women’s actions. The authenticity of the motives these two widows have for their respective decisions — one marrying another man and the other committing suttee — is also divergent. Kate loves and finally marries Jim Douglas. Her love for “another man” is justified not just because Douglas has been her savior but also because her first husband was unworthy and disloyal. Tara, however, has been given no such supporting props to validate her action. She cannot possibly be a true suttee as she is not “pure at heart.” She has desecrated the memories of her dead husband by harboring love for another man (and, it does not matter much that Douglas has also once been her savior). Moreover, we do not know whether or not she was happy with her husband. Therefore, her “fiery” death is, by no means, her self-sacrifice for her dead husband. Beneath the veneer of sacred rituals of sutteehood, hers is positioned as a crazy suicide, and one that is unacceptable to Christianity. ¹⁵

There is no doubt that Steel intends to expose the foolishness and hypocrisy of the blindly superstitious Indians. The self-assured matronly voice of the author, resonating throughout the novel, makes confident statements about the role of British complacency in bringing about the Mutiny, women’s contribution toward re-establishing the British stronghold in India, and the arousal of a superior courage and racial spirit during the crisis even among such renegades as Jim Douglas, Herbert Erlton, and Alice Gissing. Also explored are the admirable resourcefulness of single, needy Englishwomen like Kate Erlton, the plight of natives with confused faith and contemptible dreams like Tara Devi and Zeenut Maihl respectively, and the irrefutable demand for the civilizing British Raj in India. Among all these assertions, Steel’s sardonic portrayal of Tara’s confused faith and insane suicide are perhaps the most problematic aspects of the text.

Let us pause to judge the import that Tara’s voluntary act may hold for the postcolonial critic. When considered carefully, the signification of Tara’s self-immolation goes beyond Steel’s conscious intentions. Jim Douglas saved her from being sacrificed as a suttee many years back, and then keeps the helpless woman in his service. Out of gratitude, she serves him very faithfully; her love for her master is apparent but remains unreturned. He can keep an oriental mistress — a prostitute at that — but cannot consider a widow as a sexual partner. A widow, it seems, is lower down the social rung than a prostitute, greater social apathy being hurled at her even by a member of the so-called superior enlightened race. Both her kinsmen and this Englishman reject her. Later, her self-willed death in the self-same way from which Douglas saved her is perhaps her most potent protest against him — and, in a way, against the racist empire. Her suttee is a protest against the shallow, insensitive sympathy condescendingly shown to the browbeaten colonized by the self-righteous colonial masters; it is a rejection of the master’s moral teachings by returning to the established native pattern (cruel or otherwise). This trope, then, that Steel uses to parody Indian rituals ¹⁶ may turn against that desired effect when re-read from a different angle. It does not simply show the enraged reaction of a single disappointed woman against an Englishman’s hollow show of sympathy and her going back to nativism with a vengeance. Tara’s protest comes when the larger Rebellion has been suppressed. It indicates to a careful reader the hollowness of British triumph when their own ardent supporters turn rebellious, even though the mutineers have already been defeated. Though Steel focuses on the unharmed shrine saved by English officers to prove the moral strength and uprightness of the empire-builders and justify their rule over India, I would rather concentrate on the burning female body to remind over-confident imperialists of the “burning” issue of heated anger against empire.

Sorabji’s Dwarki

Suttee, already legally banned by the time Anglophone Indian women writers pick up their pens in the late nineteenth century, is still a major topic of debate and discussion in their writings, rousing their feminine consciousness in resistance to the harsh demands made on women. The silence of the suttee–victim is nearly insurmountable and only a voice, filtered through another’s agency, reaches us. In my reading of Sorabji’s text in this section, this voice is doubly removed, since it is neither the real suffering suttee herself who speaks to us, nor is the author whose voice finally reaches us a Hindu woman herself. This tradition of widow-burning existed among the high-caste Hindus but the short story I have chosen here has been written by a Parsee–Christian woman. Written in an age of growing awareness of and increasing confidence in female position and rights, her representation of suttee carries the insignia of the changing times. Cornelia Sorabji’s short story “A Living Sacrifice” treats the term “suttee” in an intriguingly outrageous way.

Sorabji’s story is a biting satire on the custom of suttee and the society that breeds and encourages it. It is the sad tale of two sisters, Dwarki and Tani, who are identical twins. Dwarki, whose husband has been sent away to serve a prison sentence, lives with and slaves for Tani’s “exacting” mother-in-law. Suddenly Tani’s husband dies, and she is now to be burned alive with him. She dreads it and pitifully begs Dwarki to save her from it. Dwarki volunteers to perform the sacrifice, drugging her sister and hiding her away, while she masquerades as the widow Tani and sacrifices her own life instead as a suttee.

“Little” Tani does not want to die not just because she cannot bear the scorching heat of the cruel flames but also because, as she says:

I love this present life. I love everything — to watch the gambols of the children, and bathe my little Urmi; to sew her small garments, when I am not cooking the dinner or scouring the pans. I love to see the water bubble into the brass vessel as I draw it from the well near the bamboo trees. And it is a joy beyond words when I have dyed my nails the right colour, and donned my brightest garments, and painted the shadows ‘neath my eyes […] And must all this come to an end? No more gambols or gay jewels, or even household duties; no more victories over the less fortunates! No! No! I cannot! (Sorabji, 2003: 84)

Interestingly enough, Tani cries for mundane things, but hardly shows any grief at her greater bereavement. She is not especially concerned at having lost her husband forever. (Perhaps we can read this as an oblique comment on the depth of love in the marital relationship of this couple.) Instead, she thinks that she has done enough for him by having given him a son and that he will be looked after by others even in death. It is herself that she wants to save to continue enjoying earthly pleasures instead of eagerly seeking heavenly bliss. So she is far from conforming to the orthodox ideas of what a true suttee must be feeling like at the demise of her “husband–lord.” She is not ready to rise to the occasion and conform to the dogmatic expectations of her people.

Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), the legendary reformer of her times, gives us reasons why many widows accepted the horrifying death easily:

The act was supposed to be altogether a voluntary one […] Some died for the love stronger than death which they cherished for their husbands. Some died not because they had been happy in this world, but because they believed with all the heart that they should be made happy hereafter. Some to obtain great renown, for tombstones and monuments were erected to those who thus died, and afterwards the names were inscribed on the long list of family gods; others again, to escape the thousand temptations, and sins and miseries which they knew would fall to their lot as widows. Those who from pure ambition or from momentary impulse, declared their intentions thus to die, very often shrank from the fearful altar. (1887: 76)

Not a stronger-than-death love or the other-worldly union or a posthumous apotheosis can tempt Tani to let the flames claim her alive. Such an unwilling act would hardly be worthy of divine grace.

From the legal perspective too, the suttee is unacceptable. The mention of the place and the year in the story’s subtitle is indeed important here, ¹⁷ especially keeping in mind that the author herself is a lawyer and is thus not unaware of the laws of the land. The Ganges Valley is where this practice was most frequent, and 1828 is just one year before Lord William Bentick, Governor-General of India from 1828 to 1835, took decisive steps to legally ban suttee in totality. Scholars like Mani (1998) and Arvind Sharma (1988) mention “a dramatic increase in the incidence of sati” (Mani, 1998: 21) after the British government tried to control it with its strategic Act of 1813. Sakuntala Narasimhan too notes: “From the time the regulation [of 1813] came into force, the annual records maintained by the administration on sati showed an increase in widow burnings” (1990: 63). The numbers nearly tripled from 1815 to 1818, as if women were burning in defiance of the orders, and thus, in a way, were protesting against British interference. However, the anti-suttee campaign of the simultaneously pro-abolition reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and his friends had also begun to take “root in the younger generation of women” (Lokugé, 2003: xxxv), and Tani seems to belong to that radical group. Had Tani been forcefully sacrificed, it would not have been a “voluntary” one at all. According to the English law of the times, an “involuntary”/“forced” suttee was illegal and punishable. It also prohibited any child-wife younger than a certain age and having children below three, from performing this rite. ¹⁸ Tani has small children, though their ages are not specified. As well as being described as “little” (Sorabji, 2003: 85), Tani is interpellated as a “[p]oor child!” (Sorabji, 2003: 86), perhaps alluding to her very young age, and her son and daughter (the aforementioned Urmi) too are “little” (Sorabji, 2003: 84). So from all angles, this suttee must not be performed.

However, when Dwarki ¹⁹ embraces this death, her reason is shockingly different from any stated by Ramabai in the passage quoted earlier. She dies to save her widowed sister and to liberate herself from her own life of misery as a vulnerable unprotected wife. She is shown to be a “voluntary” suttee, since she does have a chance for escape from the fires when an Englishman offers to help her. He, in fact, tries to deter her by asking her to reconsider her decision but she chooses not to.

Dwarki is a willing suttee, and thus, her death is permissible under the law, but the readers know where the loophole lies. It is, after all, a parody of suttee-sacrifice, all the religious tenets disregarded and discarded, since the woman dying with the dead body is not the real widow. She is instead desecrating the holy altar by cheating the mortal spectators and lying to the immortal gods. “To buy immortality for a husband, is not this the crown of life, the bliss of death!” (Sorabji, 2003: 85) — that is not so in her case because she is not doing it for her own husband. Instead, by enacting this false widowhood, she is, ideologically, endangering his life. For a Hindu woman to even remotely think of any man other than her husband is considered a sin. And here, her lying down beside and dying with “another” man, that too in an act of daring dishonesty, is beyond human imagination and divine forgiveness. No doubt, after her death, even a sacred suttee-stone might be erected in her name to mark her sainthood amongst the many other similar stones that Sorabji slyly mentions are found scattered around the cremation ground. Yet, her sacrifice is far from “the crown of life, the bliss of death” (Sorabji, 2003: 85); the truth of her fraudulent death, if known to her superstition-ridden people, is condemnable, thereby, making her “living sacrifice” the curse of her life, the blister of her death!

This blister of her death becomes all the more poignant when her own sister gladly, without the slightest objection, accepts her sacrifice. Sorabji provides this strikingly sardonic twist at the very end of her story. Dwarki quietly decides to die on behalf of her sister and spare her the ordeal but, thinking that Tani might not allow this out of sisterly love, drugs her. Tani, after waking up from an opium-induced slumber, comes running to her dying sister, and at that moment:

“Almost was that drug a waste!” [Dwarki] reflected.

For Tani had accepted the sacrifice! (Sorabji, 2003: 89)

One irony is that the drug which is usually given to a widow to help her perform her sacrifice in a daze has been used to save Tani.

And yet, the question is: can Tani, spared of this painful death, ultimately be considered saved? Will the truth never come to light, and will Tani always be secure in her present borrowed identity as Dwarki? Will not her own children recognize her? In the story, the mother-in-law is conveniently away when her son dies and someone else disguises as the rightful daughter-in-law to ascend the pyre. But when she comes back, will she not be able to detect the falsehood and identify the surviving Tani for who she really is? Sorabji focuses more on the irony of Dwarki’s sacrifice but the story’s end is far from a satisfying closure. The text’s untold disturbing afterlife looms large and torments the reader, who knows and thus can imagine the punishment that lies ahead for the immature, impulsive Tani for her grave wrongdoing in knowingly allowing this lie. Indeed, it becomes apparent that to have borne the pain of burning for minutes would have brought Tani release from what subsequently awaits her. Both Pandita Ramabai and Tarabai Shinde speak of suttee as the only choice left to the bereaved woman to escape from the miserable fate of accursed widowhood:

the poor, helpless high-caste widow with the one chance of ending her miseries in the Suttee rite. (Pandita, 1887: 93)

In the old days, a woman used to go as sati — that was good. She could turn herself to ashes along with him, and it was all over with. (Shinde, 1882: 103)

Mani, in her critical scrutiny of a few eyewitness accounts, concludes:

The accounts of sati incidents available to us suggest many of the external pressures [other than religious dictum] on the widow. These included fear of future economic hardship and the absence of protection by family. (1998: 170)

Tani’s potential misery is even worse; it will not only be a penance for her widowhood but a purging of the sin she has committed in trying to flee from her duties and in tarnishing the sacredness of a religious rite. Dwarki is beyond sufferings now, but a most alarming future is in store for poor Tani.

Tani’s and Dwarki’s joint act, therefore, is a grievous sin but, when considered with sympathy, it can be seen as their powerful protest against the society which oppresses them so severely. Both have used their agency to make a serious choice. Dwarki chooses to sacrifice herself; Tani chooses to let her sister sacrifice herself on her behalf. She does have a choice to stop it when she comes to the cremation ground at the story’s end but she keeps up the pretense and accepts Dwarki’s sacrifice. Each, in her own way, defiles the sanctity of sutteehood. Tani is openly defiant from the very beginning and wants instead to run away and disobey all social dictates. Her selfishness in letting Dwarki die so easily is discomfiting. Nevertheless, it reflects more badly on her society than herself. What can be expected from “little” Tani than her trying to save herself from pain at any cost? By contrast, Dwarki is thoroughly submissive and religiously conditioned. She is self-abnegating in life, rendering uncomplaining service to others, and self-effacing in death, killing herself through another’s identity. As such, the bold deception and defiance on her part is even more surprising.

Tara vs Dwarki

Evidently, Dwarki’s sacrifice is a travesty of suttee, and this reminds the reader of Tara’s suttee-death in Steel’s novel, which is also nothing if not a charade. Both Tara and Dwarki die, claiming themselves to be suttees when they cannot be so in the true sense of the term. Both helpless and “husband-less,” they seek shelter and are therefore at others’ mercy. Both choose death as a way of release from their present lives of destitution. In this, the respective writers evidently share their alarm at the oppression of women that a rite like suttee signifies.

Now let us trace the divergence in their treatment. To the colonizing woman writer, Tara — an adult — is child-like in her senseless obstinacy, mindless jealousy, and limited understanding, while, to the colonized female writer, Dwarki — a child-wife — acts like a mature adult in taking this quick decision in the face of a crisis. Another interesting observation is that both Tara and Dwarki have twin siblings who look very much like them: Tara has a brother, Soma, and Dwarki has a sister, Tani. At one point in time, both Tara and Dwarki masquerade as their respective twin siblings, and that, too, with the sole purpose of saving somebody. Tara dresses up as the soldier Soma (symbolically being elevated to the active masculinity of soldiery, which, however, is a serious folly inherent to Steel’s Victorian sense of gender propriety) in order to pass Kate out of the city gates of unruly Delhi. Dwarki dresses up as the widow Tani (succumbing to the passive femininity of widowhood, which is Sorabji’s indirect indictment of indigenous patriarchy) to save the latter from a fiery death. Tara rescues Kate, being anxious not for her safety but because she does not want the memsahib to meet Douglas and tell him that, in spite of being a white lady, she was ready to shave her head and become a suttee for him. The memsahib may die outside Delhi for all she cares. However, Dwarki rescues Tani, being afraid that the recalcitrant, childish Tani will be forcibly burnt to death as a suttee. Tani eagerly accepts her sacrifice. An acerbic irony plays a role in both these rescues: the irony of the former case lies in the distorted motive of the rescuer; that of the latter, in the unanticipated response of the rescued.

In their suttee-deaths also lies the sardonic bend. Tara dies in her “mad exaltation,” whereby Steel takes away from her action the force of a rational will, whereas Dwarki carefully plans it all out in full sanity, whereby Sorabji accredits her admirable strength of character. Steel, of course, mocks Tara’s suttee-sainthood and although Tara is heralded as a saint by the native crowd in the novel, the author exposes the imposter within. In contradistinction, Sorabji upholds Dwarki’s unimaginably selfless sacrifice (admittedly as a false suttee), and in doing so, highlights the undemanding fortitude of the Indian woman.

With startling novelty and stirringly dark irony, Sorabji briefly deals with the much-disputed suttee stereotype. The rich complexity of her presentation lies in making her suttee both the norm (in appearance) and an aberration (in reality), both the acting subject (in her taking a decision) and the object acted upon (in her submitting to social pressures). Steel’s depiction, however, is rooted in and further roots the clichéd colonial idea of Indian womanhood. In Parry’s words, Steel’s supposedly impartial and sympathetic representations “refract images through a prism of cultural convictions, distorting the subjects in view” (1998: 108). ²⁰

Discussing the stereotyping of suttee, Mani avers:

The widow nowhere appears as a subject-in-action, negotiating, capitulating, accommodating, resisting. Instead, she is cast as eternal victim: either a pathetically beaten down and coerced creature or a heroic person, selflessly entering the raging flames unmindful of pain. (1998: 31, emphasis added)

Steel’s Tara is neither a victim nor a heroic figure. She is saved by an Englishman once and is never again really pressurized to perform self-immolation. Even when she decides to die, it is shown more as a meaningless suicide than a courageous sacrifice. However, Sorabji’s Dwarki is both a victim and a heroic figure. Dwarki is a victim of a cruel, superstition-ridden patriarchal society, and yet, she is undeniably heroic in the kind of sacrifice she chooses to make. Steel’s Tara is a sinner in the guise of a saint; Sorabji’s Dwarki is a saint despite her sinful act.

Tara and Dwarki are two fascinating female characters who challenge and eventually go on to subvert the general concept/image of the suttee. And they come from the pens of two women writers whose portrayal of the Indian woman would have been considered “authentic” by their readership. Both Steel and Sorabji claim special first-hand knowledge of the elusive Indian women due to their close contact with and philanthropic work for them. In fact, as Banerjee asserts, Sorabji uses her unique position to claim “a professional citizenship” (2010: 129) of the empire; her service, she thinks, gives her a right to recognition. Likewise, Steel’s distinctive role as an inspector of girls’ schools gives her the right to claim a special place in the imperial machinery, given her indispensable role and invaluable service in upholding the benevolent nature of the Raj. They both strive to consolidate the British Empire in India. While Karyn Huenemman observes that Steel tried to become the “voice for Indian women” (2000: 234), Sorabji felt that she was the only trustworthy representative of the old-fashioned purdah woman and, giving ballast to her assertion, Ranjana Sidhanta Ash notes, “Sorabji’s books about traditional women who lived in purdah […] were reviewed enthusiastically by British and Indian newspapers and journals” (2009: 142).

Yet it has to be noted that despite being recognized as some kind of an authority in representing native women, the suttee figure would have been beyond these women writers’ ken not just because they are culturally removed (both are of non-Hindu roots), but also because they are temporally distant (the rite was legally banned and nearly non-existent by the turn of the twentieth century). So, in critically reading the characters of Tara and Dwarki, it is not so much the factual evidence that is significant but the literary imagination — and the politics of representing female agency — that they use. As already seen, each writer employs an element of parody in how these female characters use their agency: in Tara’s needless suicidal act and in Tani’s heedless acceptance of her sister’s sacrifice. The imperialist in Steel comes to the forefront when she emphasizes the subsiding of anarchy after the mutiny and English officers’ endeavors at restoring order. The English magistrate in Sorabji’s story upholds the munificent face of the Raj, revealing Sorabji’s version of maternal imperialism.

Such tales highlighting the consolidation of the empire come at a very crucial political moment because by the end of nineteenth century, the Indian National Congress has been established and Indian nationalism is on the rise. At that time, when Raj loyalists, social reformers and nationalists were making political clamor out of women’s rights, with recently passed Acts (like the Native Marriage Act of 1872 and the Age of Consent Act of 1891) focusing on wives’ marital rights and raising the age of consent for sexual intercourse, harping back on the “dead” suttee issue — that had been the focus of social reform efforts just half a century back — seems politically strategic. Many critics, including Revathi Krishnaswamy, Paxton, and Sharpe, have pointed out that there was a “resurgence of novels about the mutiny in the 1890s [as] a response to the racially charged discourses surrounding the introduction of the Ilbert Bill, also known as the ‘white mutiny’” (Ray, 2000: 77). Steel’s Mutiny novel, especially with its attention on the warped image of a suttee, is particularly significant to add strength to the “white mutiny” rhetoric, underscoring how it is not safe to hand over judicial power over the whites to a people that once practiced this rite. After all, “sati became an important ideological element in the vindication of English imperialism” (Krishnaswamy, 1998: 85).

Sorabji’s suttee tale is the only one of its kind in an anthology in which other short stories concentrate on purdah, child marriage, polygamy, zenana intrigues, blind orthodoxy, and other such crippling factors that make Indian women’s lives miserable. Yet the inclusion of Dwarki’s false suttee-sacrifice is tactical because, after all, this rite had been as obvious a social attempt at controlling female sexuality as the practices of purdah or child marriage, the only difference being that the widow-burning rite was a more direct, brutal, and quick method. For Sorabji, a supporter of British rule in India who was considerably jarred by the growing claim for Swaraj (self-rule), this dark tale is yet another tool to remind overzealous supporters of the Swaraj movement about women’s mistreatment that unequivocally declares the lack of maturity in a people and that should pre-empt the right to self-rule too soon. ²¹

At a time when India was confronted with a huge social upheaval and political awakening, each woman writer used the literary depiction of suttee — a social reform issue from the past — to make a political statement about the subcontinent’s future. Critical readings of literary depictions of suttee — especially those that contain an element of parody to challenge and offset major trends of political ventures and social thoughts of those times — can offer a substantive addition to the textual corpus of and on suttee, widening our historical understanding of the diversity of responses that it evoked.