Archiving Femicide: The Company State and Ritual Burnings of Hindu Widows in Early Colonial India

The article argues that the immolation of hundreds of widows in colonial Bengal (eastern India) every year on the funeral pyres of their husbands constituted a distinct form of femicide: one valorized by faith even though the early colonial state was complicit with the practice for more than half a century. It tracks the formation of a colonial archive on the ritual of sati or immolation—this being one of the earliest instances of colonial record keeping. It explores the religious underpinnings of the performances and explains how and why the archive came to be formed around them at a time when the new state was not thinking in terms of abolishing the ritual. It focusses specifically on the caste and age of the widows and on the complex question of their consent as well as their resistance to burning alive.