------------------------------------------------------------------------ * G * O * A * N * E * T *** C * L * A * S * S * I * F * I * E * D * S * ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sangath, www.sangath.com, is looking to build a centre for services, training and research and seeks to buy approx 1500 to 2000 sq mtrs land betweeen Mapusa and Bambolim and surrounding rural areas. Please contact: [email protected] or [email protected] or ph+91-9881499458 http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2009-July/180028.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The debate on sati is probably as fictionalised, stereotyped and turned into Black Legend as the debate over the Inquisition in Goa. It's hard to take the colonial discourse on sati at face value. It's interesting though, specially now that it has been disected by a number of scholars. (I recall reading in the past that figures about the number of sati victims were grossly exaggerated. It's anyone guess as to whose interest it would lie in, to inflate the problem out of proportion and then show this as part of the White man's civilising mission.) For instance, see: Sati, the blessing and the curse by John Stratton Hawley, Columbia University. Southern Asian Institute: Modern research confirms what traditional brahmanical treatises imply -- that sati has always been very much the exception rather than the rule in Hindu life. Yet from the time of Marco Polo until well into the nineteenth century (sati was officially abolished in Bengal in 1829), Westerners publishing diaries of their travels in India almost always included a chapter on a sati they had witnessed. These men watched their satis in horror but with admiration, too, for the courage and dignity of the women involved. If their books were even sparsely illustrated, a drawing of the sati was sure to appear.... What were Western readers being asked to see in these verbal and visual portraits? An icon in reverse -- something from which the eye should be averted -- or in some clandestine way an icon in fact? A condemnation of sati the practice, or a secret adulation of sati the heroine victim? http://books.google.com/books?id=w_VbHItKQjYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=sati+exaggeration&source=gbs_similarbooks_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q=&f=false Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Paperback) by Lata Mani http://www.amazon.com/Contentious-Traditions-Debate-Colonial-India/dp/0520214072 "Examines the documents of the colonial bureaucracy, the writings of the nineteenth-century indigenous male elite, the journals and publications of missionaries, and numerous European eyewitness accounts. She asks why the British first loudly denounced it, then covertly sanctioned it, and then officially banned it. . . . Contentious Traditions shows how divided the colonial bureaucrats were on the political costs of intervening in sati, how the grounds shifted in the arguments that the nineteenth-century Bengali reformer Rammonhun Roy made against sati in response to colonial pronouncements. how the Baptist missionaries took very different stances in addressing British and Indian audiences, and burning ricocheted between horror and fascination. . . . In citing the gruesome evidence that many satis were neither "voluntary" nor painless, and by assuming that the material causes for many satis make them by definition non-religious, Lata Mani discounts the religious ideology that might have motivated either the woman herself or the people forcing her to do it, or both."--Times Literary Supplement Sati by Arvind Sharma http://books.google.co.in/books?id=UJmWgz2mv5oC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=sati+missionary&source=bl&ots=LkP-ZJ0n5u&sig=iGtOIgECygJU6jiG2CIqPfE6yiE&hl=en&ei=kRh3SoXMBcODkAWs1fH_Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=sati missionary&f=false QUOTE: The Christian missionary involvement for the abolition of the sati rite was only an offshoot of their grand design in India, which was conversion of the country to Christianity. Rev. Claudius Buchanan of the Church of England, who landed in Bengal in 1790, had no illusions about such success. ...There were those practices or rituals which inflicted immediate death or tended to produce death. One of these practices was the rite of sati. Buchanan advocated abolition of the rite by law and argued that when the practice of sacrificing children -- another "bloody superstition" of the Hindus -- had been abolished by Wellesley by the Regulation VI of 1802, "not a murmur followed", and that there would neither be any if the Government abolished the sati rite by a regulation.... ENDQUOTE 2009/8/3 J. Colaco < jc> <[email protected]> > > Thanks for the link, FN. > > I am in no position to state whether the author verified the details > before publishing them. > > Even so, pages 9 and 10 were very difficult to read; What went on in > the name of Sati (and still apparently goes on in certain places) was > just as inhumane to life as the Inquisition. The description on pages > 9 and 10 are truly awful.... -- FN +91-9822122436 P +91-832-2409490 Konkani adages http://konkani-adages.notlong.com/ Medieval Goa http://medieval-goa.notlong.com/
