Imperialism Solved One Of India's Most Horrific Problems
The Anniversary of England's Best Comment
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Much ink is now spilled about the supposed evils of colonialism, by which those spilling it normally mean the primarily Western European imperialism in Africa and Asia of the 19th Century.
Nationalists claim it was bad for the national economies of the nations because of the money directed into, say, hospitals and railroads in hellholes like West Africa rather than at home, and because it put people groups under the government’s aegis who shared nothing in common with the home country.
Leftists of the Howard Zinn stripe claim it was awful because it was some variation of “mean.” Ignoring the cruelties of the prior rulers, whether the Mughals of India, African-ruling Arabs of Zanzibar, or cruel, Zulu-style African chieftains themselves, these types claim that the occasional massacres perpetrated by this or that overzealous commander mean the whole project was rotten. They also make this same claim of battles, ignoring that the natives were just as willing to fight as the Europeans and often outnumbered them dozens to one. Related to this, of course, are claims of economic exploitation: textile exports to India, various dry good imports to Africa, and all the rest is treated as exploitation of the natives rather than the provision of better goods to those who need them in a way that profits the home country and makes the whole project sustainable.
Regardless, it’s tiresome framing. Cruelties were, of course, occasionally perpetrated, and in some cases, the expense of empire was in no way commensurate with value added to the home countries. This is probably most true of Germany, which both behaved poorly in its African colonies and built an immense navy to defend them and raise the flag nearby, which led to World War I and the Second Reich’s total demolition, and got nothing of value out of its small African colonies.
But, generally, both sides got something out of it. An export market for domestic industry, raw materials like otherwise unobtainable hardwoods and vast mineral reserves, and outlets for surplus domestic populations all benefitted the Europeans. Better governance, modern medicine, modern rail and steamship infrastructure, better business practices in everything from mines to markets, and all the rest that came with having well-developed European nations turn former jungle and veldt into immensely successful colonies like Rhodesia benefitted the natives within those colonies immensely.
While Rhodesia serves as a sterling example of what was1 and could have been2 had the projects lasted longer, the clearest example of the benefit brought to everyone by unapologetic European governance is that of sati and its end at the hands of the English.
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Barbarism and Its End
Sati is the Indian term for immolating widows on their husband’s funeral pyre. As could be expected, it has long drawn criticism as a barbaric practice little different than the twisted Canaanites rolling children into the red-hot furnace of Ba’al.3 But, though long present in India, sati didn’t become relatively widespread in India as a custom until the 17th century, around the time the Europeans showed up in force.
An Old Practice
It might have originated with the Indo-European conquest of India during the Bronze Age,4 but remained relatively rare as a practice for centuries. The Greek historians, including those who traveled with Alexander and saw it firsthand, mention it only rarely, and by most accounts, it remained a lurking but rarely conducted practice from Alexander until the 10th century AD.
At that point, priestly caste knowledge of and interest in the practice appears to have been restored, but it remained a still rare practice only conducted amongst some elite Hindu groups until it got more popular as a practice in the 12th century AD.5 At that point, it once again mostly paused as a cultural tradition, one that was still known of but rarely practiced, until India’s colonial period started taking shape in the 17th century.
A Colonial Resurgence
Two main factors appear to have led to sati’s 17th resurgence and resumption amongst the Indian population, particularly the Hindu elite.
Mughal Ambivalence
One is that the then-ruling Mughal Empire, a Muslim one, for centuries didn’t much care if the locals were burning their wives alive. In fact, though some Mughal emperors outlawed compulsion in sati, they saw wives voluntarily immolating themselves as an honorable end worthy of praise rather than outlawry.6 That opinion shifted by the end of the 17th century, but by then the practice was relatively more common than it had been centuries prior, and bans on it could be avoided with a bribe. François Bernier, describing the compulsory part of the practice in the 17th century, when it was supposedly banned by the Mughals, said:7
At Lahor I saw a most beautiful young widow sacrificed, who could not, I think, have been more than twelve years of age. The poor little creature appeared more dead than alive when she approached the dreadful pit: the agony of her mind cannot be described; she trembled and wept bitterly; but three or four of the Brahmens, assisted by an old woman who held her under the arm, forced the unwilling victim toward the fatal spot, seated her on the wood, tied her hands and feet, lest she should run away, and in that situation the innocent creature was burnt alive.
So, by that point, sati was a Hindu practice that the Mughals generally allowed, even if it was technically against the law.
Greed and Immolation
The other reason for sati’s revival, particularly in Bengal, a region in the northwest of the Raj that is now its own country and borders Bangladesh, were changes to inheritance law. Particularly, when widows of the Brahmins in Bengal gained inheritance rights in the late 17th century, sati increased dramatically.
Thus, as sati became to be seen as supported by Hindu religious belief, it became notably more prevalent; greedy and unscrupulous family members and neighbors would use sati as a way of taking property from widows who otherwise would inherit the property of their dead husbands. Relatedly, the era was particularly poor, so many women chose sati as a way out of a life of penury.
British Intolerance
Such was the situation the British found when they began to administer the enlarged Raj that Arthur Wellesley, later the first Duke of Wellington, conquered in the late 1790s and early 1800s. Those wars, meant to expand British territory in India and nibble around the edges of the French Empire, brought with them not just glory and riches but also an immense amount of new territory with tens upon tens of millions of Indians within it to administer.
That conquest also coincided with, as mentioned above, the increasing prevalence of sati as widows were forced into it out of penury or their neighbors’ greed for their inherited possessions. So, the British suddenly found themselves with an immense amount of, for the time, densely populated territory in which greedy neighbors were pushing widows to light themselves on fire, particularly if they were notably rich or poor.
Naturally, such behavior was something the British found themselves increasingly unwilling to tolerate as it became an increasingly frequent occurrence. Amongst those who drew attention to the issue and demanded an end to it was evangelist William Carey. He, based in Bengal’s main city, Calcutta, found over 400 incidents of sati in just a thirty-mile radius around Calcutta in 1803 alone. Further research into the issue found that from 1815 to 1818, sati incidents doubled. This was despite a formal ban on sati in the Calcutta area, showing the intractable nature of the problem.
Such an increase in incidents forced the British to begin taking it more seriously. While individual British officers had attempted to prohibit sati in their individual spheres of control beginning in 1680, when Agent of Madras Streynsham Master did so, the British East India Company (John Company) was unwilling to formally end the practice. Its hesitance came from its profit-focused nature, as it found unrest was lessened and profits increased when the natives were allowed to continue with their own practices, leading it to generally follow a policy of non-interference in their affairs.
But, despite its hesitance, the issue was such a frequent occurrence and reason for public uproar in England that John Company and England had to shift policy and ban the practice. That came in 1829 at the insistence of Christian and Hindu reformers, namely the aforementioned evangelist William Carey and Hindu reformer Ram Mohan Roy. Using their calls for reform and gathered data as reasoning, along with his personal abhorrence of the practice, Lord William Bentinck, Governor-General of India, banned sati on the 4th of December, 1829 (hence why this article was published on the 6th, shortly after the anniversary). That ban from Lord Bentinck came in the form of Regulation XVII, which declared sati to be illegal and punishable in criminal courts without exception.
However, the regulation was initially limited in geographic scope. As Governor-General of India in 1829, Lord Bentinck didn’t have direct control over all of India. Rather, his somewhat misleading title meant that he was both governor-general of the Presidency of Fort William, meaning he controlled Bengal for the East India Company, and oversaw all of its other officials in India, though without direct control over their provinces. So, as Governor-General of India for the East India Company and England, his regulation marked a massive change in British and East India Company policy away from the traditional stance of non-interference in Hindu religious matters and toward one of paternalistic control. However, it was limited to his area of direct control, Bengal.
As was mentioned earlier, Bengal was the locus of sati issues given the inheritance issue, though there were occurrences of it across the country. Thus, though Lord Bentinck banned sati for Bengal in 1829, it was still legal in much of the Raj until 1830, when the same law was extended to Madras and Bombay. It took, however, many years for the ban to take effect across the rest of the Raj. Particularly, the states still controlled by princes rather than directly by the East India Company took about a decade longer to ban it. For example, the Kathiawar Agency states banned sati in 1840, Kolhapur followed in 1841, Satara, Nagpur and Mysore banned it in 1842, and some like Kashmir didn’t do so until 1847.
It was with the extension of the law across the Raj and a coherent attempt to enforce it over the ensuing decade that the greatest of all Victorian moments happened. That came when Balochi priests in the Sindh region of the Raj, now part of Pakistan, complained to the Sindh region’s British Governor, General Sir Charles Napier, about what they saw as an unconscionable degree of meddling in their sacred customs. Sir Napier, who conquered Sindh in 1843, was undeterred by their reluctance to follow his orders. Exhibiting a great degree of self-confidence of the sort that characterized Britain’s Empire at the time, he told the priests:
Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs!
Sati essentially ended at that point, with the final princely state holdout banning it in 1861. The last legal case of it comes from that year as well: Mewar, the last princely state holdout, saw a final case that year in the capital of Udaipur. Though public opinion had shifted firmly against it by that time, a concubine of Maharanna Sarup Singh self-immolated on his funeral pyre. A few incidents of illegal sati occurred in the years following the outlawing of it, with the final one coming well after independence, in 1987. Then, Roop Kanwar, an 18-year-old married for only a few months, was forced to self-immolate by 45 people in her village.
India now, following in Lord Bentnick’s footsteps, has banned the practice completely with the Sati Prevention Act of 1987, which prohibits the burning or burying alive of a widow or woman with the body of one of her relatives or thing associated with a relative, voluntary or not.
Thank You, Colonialism
The story of sati is one that could be told many times over in the 19th century. The English of that period, led by such a man as Sir Charles Napier or Sir James Brooke,8 set out in search of fortune and found instead a pit of horrors. Instead of just packing up and moving on to greener, less horror-ridden pastures, they set down roots and aimed to fix it.9 This is not only true of sati, but was particularly true of the slave trade and its associated horrors. Sir Brooke ended particularly horrific, pirate-related versions of it in Borneo. Dr. Livingstone spent years away from his family, tromping through the dense, tropical bush of the Congo to map the area so that the source of the Nile might be found and the slavery of the area stomped out. And, of course, ships of the Royal Navy patrolled the West coast of Africa so that the horrors of Dahomey could be stomped out.
No one is perfect, of course, and even the English of the 19th Century had their faults in the running of their empire. The pre-Lord Bentnick policy of non-intervention toward sati is one such fault, and the Opium Wars are a horrific tale of greed backed by guns. But, generally, they brought civilization to the darkest corners of the world. Who else but the English would have chased pirate kings through the jungles of Sarawak as Sir Brooke did? Who but the English would have erected gibbets and risked a sub-continent-wide revolt to end widow immolation?
Such is their legacy, much as the legacy of Cortes is ending the most horrific human sacrifice regime in history,10 and that of Perseus is freeing Greece from similar, Neolithic regimes in the Bronze Age.11
And that is what “colonialism,” as most now call it, but really 19th-century imperialism, wrought. Not only were there material benefits that came with railroads and global, imperial markets. Not only were there standard of living benefits that came with modern medicine, sanitation, and technology. But there were also, much as those like Howard Zinn and his acolytes would have you believe otherwise, improvements in justice that came with European rule: great injustices, from the slave markets of Zanzibar to the widow pyres of India, were permanently stamped out by men who had no real reason for doing so other than that it was right. That is what English imperialism brought the world.
François Bernier's Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656–1668.
This is something Stormy Waters and I discussed here:
