The Cauliflower Read Online Free Page B

considered—even briefly—the tradition of sati , and what the implications might have been for her if this practice had not been summarily outlawed by India’s British colonial rulers in 1829 (seven years before). Research tells us that sati was considered to be the ultimate act of honor and devotion by a pious wife (a sign of both insurmountable grief and spiritual renunciation). The Goddess Sati, also known as Dakshayani, was the first incarnation of the Goddess Parvati (who is also called Durga and, ah, Kali). She burned herself alive after her father, Daksha, publicly humiliated her beloved husband, Shiva.
    In sati (first celebrated among the Kshatriya , or warrior, caste, and later cautiously embraced throughout Indian society—although notably disapproved of by the Brahmin s) we see a fascinating crossover (a meeting of minds) between the spiritual and the pugnaciously pragmatic. Many Indian faith traditions venerate acts of voluntary self-negation and renunciation above all others (especially for women; these impulses—to negate the self and sacrifice for family—are the natural duties of a good wife and mother, after all). But we also see the widow as a social inconvenience. The widow inherits property, but may only ever be perceived as a temporary custodian of it, since all money and goods are passed on to the husband’s family upon her death. And good widows were—and still are—expected to live only half a life (an excuse for a life, a groveling apology), the life of an ascetic, wearing only white, eating plain food, rejecting all social activities, and sleeping on the ground on a thin grass mat.
    Sati , on the other hand, was a helpful foreshortening of this social and emotional purgatory. It was a key to salvation. Its power was vested in the belief that when a widow submits her living body as a burned offering on her husband’s funeral pyre (although many were drowned or buried alive) she gets not only to purge herself of all her sins, but to save her husband’s soul, her own, and those of the following seven generations from the tortuous cycle of rebirth and death. Suicide is forbidden among Hindus, but sati is not suicide, it is a cruel and clever semantic sidestepping of the rules; it is an act of exquisite piety. And when a widow kills herself, her husband’s family—the main players in a story in which the widow is merely a bump in the road, a narrative impediment—may inherit sooner.
    What is the Rani thinking as she stands and watches the priests take a lighted tinder to her much-adored Rajchandra’s funeral pyre? She is a modest woman, and pious, and loving, but she is fiercely intelligent. Is there a measure of social pressure? Statistics tell us that the practice of sati was much favored in Bengal during the early part of the Rani’s lifetime. The practice was especially keenly followed in the areas surrounding Calcutta—Kali-cutta; Kali who was Sati who was Dakshayani had immolated herself voluntarily. But the Rani (not a Rani, but our Rani) does not offer herself. Imagine the eyes of the crowd upon her. What are they thinking? Do they judge her?
    The writer Lata Mani (in her book Contentious Traditions ) calls that 1829 law “a founding moment in the history of women in modern India.” And the necessary consequences of this “founding moment”? “Women became the site on which tradition was debated.”
    This is a debate still raging today.
    So our Rani, who is not a queen but of low caste, must now negotiate (in 1836, for heaven’s sake) a complex path between conformity and independence, piety and survival, tradition and modernity, happiness and disapproval. This is a tortuous route. But the Rani will walk it. And she will walk it bravely and lightly. And as she walks it she will throw out sparks of hope to women everywhere. Women then and women now. She will become emblematic of something intangible. Of