Something like rights? Faith, law and widow immolation debates in colonial Bengal

In: The Indian economic and social history review: IESHR, Band 49, Heft 3, S. 295-320

Abstract

The article straddles two separate but intertwined registers. One is the interface between faith and law under early colonial rule. I explore this through the lens of colonial governance of immolations of Hindu widows. The other is the gradual transmutation of an idea or a word: consent, the widow's consent to burning alive. The early colonial state formally institutionalised the widow's consent as the basis for all lawful immolations. That, I argue, eventuated, over a long stretch of time, and through a strangely twisted dialectic, in a horizon of female entitlements and immunities. Controversially but recognisably, she became the bearer of something like rights rather than of sacred prescriptions and injunctions alone. This was a development that neither the state nor its Brahman ritual specialists had actually intended.