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Sati: A question of religious freedom - By- Sunny Singh SUNNY SINGH was born in Varanasi. She received her education in various parts of India and the world. She has worked as a journalist, teacher, and as a management executive for multinationals in Mexico, Chile and South Africa. For the last four years, she has been writing full-time. She is also a playwright. Her first play, Birthing Athena, focussed on evolving relationships and the price of ambition in post-liberalisation India. The Times of India described the play as "an intensely cathartic experience." Her first novel, Nani's Book of Suicides, had been recently published by Harper Collins Publishers India. Described by the Hindustan Times as a "first novel of rare scope and power," the novel explores the cultural identity of an Indian woman through a fund of myths, family lore and contemporary reality. Her second book, Single in the City: The independent woman's handbook has just been released on Dec 22, 2000 by Penguin India.

Maharaja Arvind Singh Mewar and Maharaj Gaj Singh of Jodhpur leading a procession commemorating Sati.

I am glad that sati is an issue of discussion on the forum. At the risk of sounding a little out of sync with the debate on whether or not Charan Shah committed Sati or even why, I would like to draw some attention to the question of Sati itself in terms of a religious, political and personal choice.

In my own case, I am often seen as the model example of my generation: I wear Western clothes, studied at a foreign university, worked overseas for an MNC for ridiculous amounts of hard currency. I speak languages other than English that originated in Europe. But before you think I am boasting, let me be "reactionary": I honestly believe that as a Hindu woman, Sati is my birthright and I will not believe it wrong, evil or medievalist simply because some white people thought so a hundred years ago.

Let me further assure you that I am a feminist and I don't believe that Sati undermines my feminism in any way. I believe that women should have the fundamental right to education, work and equal pay. The professional glass ceiling stinks as does euphemistically terming sexual harassment "eve-teasing." Dowry is a dumb idea if it is demanded, worse if forcibly extracted and downright humiliating if it is paid.

However, Sati is a unique, resonant tradition for the Hindu woman. Let us not forget that Sati, in Hindu mythology, began as an act of defiance. She immolated herself because her father would not accept a filthy, ragged, serpent-adorned ascetic as her husband. Sati exercised her free choice in face of patriarchal oppression and preferred to die instead of accepting the decisions thrust upon her by apparently respectable, "we-know-better" adults. She speaks to my generation who have consistently pushed the limits and, at times, have brought home biker-dudes with pierced eyebrows to similarly violent parental reactions.

Even considered within the frame-work of feminist thought, Sati is an assertion of a woman's control over her own physicality when the patriarchy has effectively denied her power in other areas of her life. The Hindu woman has used Sati over the centuries in the same way as her Western sisters have depended on hysteria, madness, sickness and anorexia to exercise control over their own lives.

However, let us move beyond theory and mythology of Sati. Love that extends beyond death is a culturally transcendent, almost universal, ideal for humans. Even today, when romance has been replaced by practicality and love by pop psychology, the "one true love" is the ideal we grow up with. Imagine Juliet mourning Romeo for a few months and then marrying someone else. Or Laila moving on with her life since Majnu was obviously the "unstable" type. Not much of a love story, is it? So, let me - in all fairness - choose the glorious love story instead of a practical relationship.

If I have truly loved someone, then it is my right to choose death with them. If I were to don white for the rest of my days, kill off all aspirations of love and happiness, the world would hold me up as the role model of the faithful "Bhartiya nari." Better still, if I were to give up food, or more romantically, "lose my will to live," after my spouse's death, I would be lauded for my devotion and the women in the neighbourhood would recount my story on Karva Chauth. If I were to die of depression a few months or years after my spouse, I would be held up as the ideal woman for adolescent daughters. Well then, damn it, give me the religious and spiritual sanction to "lose my will to live" with Sati, under the self-professedly "secular" Constitution which guarantees religious freedom.

Yes, I know, every self-respecting intellectual out there will scream blue murder about how legalizing Sati will force every Hindu woman prematurely on her dead husband's pyre. However, let me point out that Sati performed under any kind of coercion goes against the very definition of the practise. According to our traditions, Sati must be voluntarily performed and that too under specific conditions.

There will also be mandatory protests that Sati shall be abused by greedy in-laws. Hailing from the notorious Bimaru belt, I realise that there is a great probability of this. But let us look for reasonable solutions: Legalize my right to commit Sati without coercion, of my own free will. Give me the right to request the presence of a police officer - a female one if you feel better about it. Grant me the right to ensure the presence of a judicial officer if that is any safer. Sati was never intended as an exercise in spontaneous combustion. So grant me the time to decide, to prepare. Send me a priest to provide spiritual and religious counsel. Assign me a psychologist to help me "make an informed decision." (There are enough NGOs to choose from). However, if my choice - after all the counselling and advice remains to be Sati, then grant me the fundamental constitutional freedom to profess and practise my religious belief.

My belief in Sati, and the miracles accompanying her, may be termed superstitious, primitive and obscurantist by my co-religionists. But let me ask you to consider the following: While I pray at a Sati shrine, a white patient in Europe claims that praying to a deceased little old lady in Calcutta has healed her of a terminal illness. Her white doctor supports her claim and the big white chief in Rome accepts it as a "miracle." And voila! The deceased little old lady of Calcutta is on her way to official canonization. Why is the European patient's claim accepted as a bona-fide miracle while mine is deemed superstition? Doesn't this count as neo-racist cultural imperialism?

My plea is a simple one: Let us move beyond the mindset of the colonized. Practices banned by the white people need not remain illegal for eternity. I was born in a free country - or so I have been told on every Independence Day. So give me the freedom to be an Indian, no matter how primitive, suppressed, obscurantist I may appear to the apparently "enlightened" Western mind. And for god's sake, don't call my supreme act of love and devotion a suicide.

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