Murderous Ritual versus Devotional Custom: The Rhetoric and Ritual of Sati and Women’s Subjectivity in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

Abstract

Abstract:The representation of the practice of sati, the immolation of widows on their husbands' funeral pyre, has garnered interest for long from postcolonial and feminist discourses among others. While advocates of Western modernity perceive sati as a murderous ritual, the proponents of orthodox Hinduism, on the contrary, claim sati to be a courageous cult of "wifely devotion". In both bigoted beliefs, as poststructuralists observe, women largely appear as "mute objects". Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2008) brilliantly sidelines the conundrum of polarizing representation of sati along the East-West axis and reflects instead the subjective experience of women as sati. The article examines how the rhetoric and ritual of sati in the novel enable marginalized women to acquire consciousness of their subjectivity in a colonized society. To this end, the paper analyzes deconstructive readings of sati, such as by Gayatri Spivak, and explores the way the novel uses religion as a ploy, which, instead of perpetrating violence, confers a subjective entity on the sati that can even subvert the constrictive norms of a colonized society.

Sati tradition its origin and change as reflected in Around the World in 80 Days: A sociological approach

“…It uses other's accounts as data and focuses in identifying incorporeal factors, such as social norms, socioeconomic status, gender roles, ethnicity, and religion. Then, the researcher gets the data from several sources which are Around the World in 80 Days, Murderous Ritual versus Devotional Custom: The Ritual of Sati and Women's Subjectivity, and Conformity, Obedience, Disobedience: The Power of the Situation (Barnali, 2014).…”