The Case for Reason: Volume Two: A Scientific Enquiry into Belief

by Narendra Dabholkar

Several centuries ago, a just-widowed woman would be burnt alive in her deceased husband’s pyre. Her half-charred body would then be thrown into the river. In one such instance, a woman survived the atrocity and floated to the shore. Governor General Lord William Bentinck’s police pulled her out and tried to revive her. But the so-called faithful groups demanded her body, arguing that saving her life this way was unacceptable, and that sati was an issue of religious faith. When Lord Bentinck promulgated a law banning sati in 1829, it led to several demonstrations in Allahabad and other places. The protestors asserted that the East India Company had no right to interfere in religious faith, which the custom of sati was part of. The law kicked in nevertheless. Despite the enforcement, a woman in Deorala, Rajasthan, committed sati in 1987. This time, it was women-welfare bodies and other social organisations helming demonstrations, to demand that the ban on sati be made stricter. Thus, the custom of sati, which had constituted religious faith until the nineteenth century, had become a clear case of superstition by the twentieth. This is the temporal nature of superstition.