Ashes of Immortality : Widow-Burning in India

Contents: Funereal Prelude: 1. A burning in bali. 2. A question of words. 3. Immortality: time reckoned. 4. The truth about women. 5. Speech as instrument. 6. Sexual colorings. 7. Living Satis. 8. Blue as blood. 9. Trial by fire. 10. Fire and the fault of Karma. Handprint, Dagger, and Lemon: 1. Mutilation and Voluntary Death. 2. The rhetoric of protest suicide. 3. Dizzying heights of vengeance. 4. The trammels of resentment. 5. A rite of exorcism. 6. The offering of the self. 7. The fruits of one’s acts. 8. The corporality of the dead. Death in the Telling: 1. Rite and belief . 2. A Sati on the shore of the Ganges (Stavorinus). 3. A Sati in Surat (Durlabh Ram). 4. The dream as proof. 5. The transmission of the deadly vow. 6. Love in the extreme. Under the Spell of Sacrifice: 1. The Goddess’s body. 2. Sati divine, earthly Satis. 3. Cult and apotheosis. Shekhavati, an Endangered Region: 1. Belief and mystification. 2. True and false traditions. 3. Cross examination of a district. The Rite, The Law, and the Custom: 1. Ritual and how to use it. 2. A Sati in Poona. 3. Shared passions. 4. Menstruation and the final oblation. 5. The seasonal fault. A Foreword in Retrospect: Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

"The much publicized burning of a young Rajput widow from the state of Rajasthan in 1987 renewed intense debate on the subject of Sati. Long a topic of horrified fascination—how can a woman commit herself to death on her husband’s funeral pyre, then actually carry through with it—Sati is at once both a powerful symbol of Otherness for the west and an act proving a woman’s sacredness and spiritual power in the Hindu world.

Ashes of Immortality attempts to see the Satis through Hindu eyes, providing a wide-ranging experiential and psychoanalytic account of ritual self-sacrifice and self-mutilation in South Asia. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in northern India, where the state-banned practice of Sati reemerged in the 1970s, as well as extensive textual analysis, Catherine Weinberger-Thomas Constructs a radically new interpretation of Satis. She invites readers to set aside their personal prejudices and worldviews and enter the Hindu universe, in which humans and deities freely cross the borderline between heaven and earth, people are born and die again and again according to the laws of Karma, and violent self-sacrifice is perceived as a path to immortality." (jacket)

[Catherine Weinberger-Thomas is Professor of Hindi, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, a member of the Centre d’Etudes de I’Inde et de I’Asie di Sud, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and winner of the 1996 Alexandra David-Neel Prize for the French edition of Ashes of Immortality.]