Abstract
The crossings in this book occur on the site of sati, or the burning of Hindu widows with their dead husbands, as it was produced in European travel narratives of India from 1500 to 1723.1 By the 1500s, representations of sati, observed and recorded by Europeans, were conventional, almost de rigueur, in travelogues of India. This book is concerned with a range of meanings encoded within those representations. The circulation in Europe of such visual and verbal transmissions of sati, I will argue, not only informed responses to the ritualized violence of Hindu culture but also intersected in fascinating ways with specifically European forms of ritualized violence and European constructions of gender ideology.2 The spectacle of sati elicited responses that self-referentially returned to the cultural practices that fashioned European subjects: European accounts of women burning in India uncannily commented on the burnings of women as witches and criminal wives in Europe. The overlapping discourses of Hindu widowburning with European witchburning and ideologies of wifely conduct are compelling for several reasons. The convergences within these disparate, and some would say, isomorphic modes, allow us to understand, in hindsight, the complex and tangled nature of identity formation in the age of discovery. In highlighting the exchanges and synchronic ideological spaces between Hindu widows and European witches, widows, and wives, this book hopes to draw attention to the complex and “exotic” roots of the gendering of the early modern female subject.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
I use the term “European women” with a great deal of reservation. It suggests an undifferentiated grouping of different women from various regions—a homogenization of the kind I have said European travelers impose on Asian women. Although I will explore the shared cultural roots of many social constructs in Europe (a common Latin literature, similarities in Catholic and Puritan conduct books, or correspondences in religious practices, for example), there were significant regional differences in the cultural constructions of women from one European region to another. Obviously, Dutch, French, Scottish, or English women were not responding to exactly the same social mechanisms at exactly the same time. Some of these differences are borne out in the degree of ferocity of the witch-hunts. Other differences pertain not just to the particular regions the women came from but also whether they were rural or urban, educated or illiterate. Social class as well as marital status also marked such differences. Despite the differences, however, many shared cultural legacies suggested a “European” identity. See Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
Stephen Greenblatt’s work remains one of the most influential texts in this genre of criticism. See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Here I am referring to the East in more generic terms. As I have discussed elsewhere, in early modern discourses “India” was a vast, undefined space, frequently used as a handy synecdoche for all of Europe’s others; see “Milton’s India and Paradise Lost,” in Milton Studies 37, ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 142–65. There is a vast body of scholarship on Renaissance notions of race and its implications. Apart from anthologies of essays such as Women, “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), there are the special issues of The William and Mary Quarterly 54:1 (1997), ed. Michael McGiffert, and Shakespeare Studies 26, ed. Leeds Barroll (Madison, WI: Associated University Presses, 1998). See also, among others, Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, and Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Daniel J. Vitkus, “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997), 145–76.
On Irish “crossovers,” see Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, ed., Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Savage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Ania Loomba, “Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 147–66.
See Edward Thompson, Suttee: A Historical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Hindu Rite of Widow-Burning (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), 132. We will have occasion to return to this account later.
See Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 60.
E. William Monter notes the connection between heresy and sorcery and provides some semantic evidence from the dioceses of Geneva, Sion, and Lausanne to establish the connections in vernacular words for witch that were derived from heretics. See Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 22; see also Jeffrey B. Russell and Mark W. Wyndham, “Witchcraft and the Demonization of Heresy,” Mediaevalia 2 (1976), 1–21; John Tedeschi, “Inquisitorial Law and the Witch,” in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, ed. Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 83–118.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 7–8, 14.
Elizabeth Hallam, Jenny Hockey, and Glennys Howarth, Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 20.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), xiii.
Joan Kelly, “Did Women have a Renaissance?” in Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19–50; see also Hilda L. Smith, “Humanist Education and the Renaissance Concept of Woman,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9–29.
Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” 6 is cited from Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Modern Library, 1952).
Lata Mani, “Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widowburning,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 396.
I use the term “precolonial” with some caution and refer the reader to Shankar Raman’s recent formulation of the challenges inherent in the term and in the wish to “return” to an idealized space unmediated by colonial intervention. See Shankar Raman, Framing India: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 13.
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Vertue,” The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio. (New York: Modern Library, 1933), 633–39, esp. 633.
Francisco Pelsaert, Jahangir’s India: The Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert, trans. W. H. Moreland and P. Geyl (Delhi: Idarah-I-Ad-abiyat-I-Delli, 1972), 79–80.
Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1 of The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xi.
Regarding the scriptural sanction for sati, see Pandurang V. Kane, History of Dharmasastra (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1973); Lata Mani, “Production of an Official Discourse on Sati in Early Nineteenth Century Bengal,” in Review of Women’s Studies (1986), 32–40; Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Louis Grossberg, ed. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; Sakuntala Narasimhan, Sati: A Study of Widow Burning in India (Delhi: Viking, 1990), 11–20; Margery Sabin, “The Suttee Romance,” Raritan 11:2 (1991), 1–24; Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1993), 15–63. See also the useful collection of essays in John S. Hawley, ed., Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Women in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Ashes of Immortality: Widowburning in India, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and David G. White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
For an account of the early forms of this practice, see Henry Yule and Arthur C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, ed. William Crooke (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1903, rpt 1968), 879.
For this background, especially for the discussions of fifteenth-century European travelers to India—such as Athanasius Nikitin, a Russian citizen of Tver (in Golconda about 1470), Heironimo di Santo Stephano, a Genoese merchant, and Nicolo di-Conti—see R. H. Major, ed., India in the Fifteenth Century: Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India (London: Hakluyt Society, 1857).
See William Greenlee in The Voyage of Pedro Alvares Cabral to Brazil and India, trans. William B. Greenlee (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937), xxiii. The ancient city of Calicut is not to be confused with Calcutta, which was founded only at the end of the seventeenth century and later became the capital of the British Empire in India. Various Christian institutions established themselves in India early in the sixteenth century. Franciscan institutions in Goa date from 1518, Jesuit beginnings from the arrival of Francis Xavier in 1542, and Dominican establishments from 1548. By 1548, Goa was an archbishopric; the Inquisition began in Goa in 1557. One finds the dark threads of the Goa Inquisition in many contemporary texts on India. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten writes: “[H]e that is once christened, and is after found to use any heathenish superstitions, is subject to the Inquisition, what so ever he be.” See The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten to the East Indies, trans. William Phillip, in two vols., Vol. 1 ed. Arthur C. Burnell, Vol. 2 ed. P. A. Tiele (London: Hakluyt Society, 1885), 1:182. Jesuit priest Thomas Stephens, one of the first Englishmen in India (in Goa in 1579), may have played a role in saving the Englishmen Ralph Fitch and John Newberie from the Goa Inquisition in 1583. See William Foster, ed., Early Travels in India 1583–1619 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 2–3. For a vivid account of the practices of the Goa Inquisition, see Gabriel Dellon’s Relation de l’Inquisition de Goa (Paris: James Knapton, 1688). See also M. D-Sa, History of the Catholic Church in India (Bombay, 1910), and Francis M. Rogers, The Quest for Eastern Christians: Travels and Rumor in the Age of Discovery (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962).
Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol. 1, The Century of Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 314–15.
See Edward Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America [?1511]–1555 A.D. Being chiefly Translations, Compilations, &c. by Richard Eden (London, 1885; rpt New York: Kraus Reprint Co: 1971).
For the impact of these collections, see Donald F. Lach; see also George B. Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages (New York: American Geographical Society, 1928); and William Foster, England’s Quest of Eastern Trade (London: A & C Black, 1933). See also E. G. R. Taylor, ed., The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935); and Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print.
See Richard C. Temple, “Discourse on Varthema and his Travels,” in Ludovico di Varthema, The Itinerary of Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna from 1502 to 1508, trans. John W. Jones (London, 1863; rpt. Asian Educational Services, 1997), xviii.
The Voyage and Trauaile: Of M. Caesar Frederick, Merchant of Venice, into the East India, the Indies, and Beyond the Indies, trans. Thomas Hickock (London: Richard Jones and Edward White, 1588). There are several variations of this name: Cesare Fedrici, Caesar Fredricke, and Caesar Frederick, for instance. I will be using the name Caesar Frederick throughout.
See M. S. Commissariat, Mandelslo’s Travels in Western India (A.D. 1638–9) (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), x.
Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East-Indies Being the Observations and Remarks of Capt. Alexander Hamilton from the Year 1688–1723, ed. William Forster, two vols. 1st edition, Edinburgh 1727, 2nd ed. London, 1739; rpt. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1995), xv.
There is a colorful history behind Monserrate’s manuscript: After his return to Goa from the Mughal court in 1582, Father Monserrate was engaged in the writing of his experiences when he was ordered to Abyssinia in 1588. However, Arab seamen attacked Monserrate’s ship and Monserrate himself was imprisoned in Sanaa. Here, in 1590, he completed the manuscript. When he was ransomed in 1596, he brought the manuscript back to Goa. Although Monserrate died in India in 1600, his manuscript was not sent to Rome or Lisbon; it turned up, instead, in St. Paul’s Cathedral Library in Calcutta in 1906, and was published in 1914 by the Asiatic society of Bengal. See The Commentary of Father Monserrate, S.J. on his Journey to the Court of Akbar, trans. J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), xii–xviii.
Mansel L. Dames, trans. The Book of Duarte Barbosa: An Account of the Countries Bordering on the Indian Ocean and their Inhabitants written by Duarte Barbosa and Completed about the year 1518 A.D. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1918), liii.
See Fernão Nuniz, “Chronicle of Fernão Nuniz,” in Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijaya Nagar): A Contribution to the History of India (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1991), 291–395; see also Burton Stein, The New Cambridge History of India: Vijayanagara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 31–44.
Domingo Navarrete, The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, in two vols., ed. J. S. Cummins (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1962).
Niccolao Manucci, A Pepys of Mogul India 1653–1709, trans. William Irvine, introduction by Margaret L. Irvine (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1913), viii.
This account was published anonymously in a Dutch collection of voyages in 1644–46. The author probably served in a Dutch factory in Nizampatam from 1608 to 1614. It is attributed to Pieter Gielisz van Ravesteyn, the “Anonymous Relation” in W. H. Moreland, ed., Relations of Golconda in the Early Seventeenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1931), 67–86.
See Jon Olafsson, The Life of the Icelander John Olafsson Traveller to India written by Himself and Completed about 1661 A.D. with a Continuation, by another Hand, up to his Death in 1679, in two vols., trans. Bertha Phillpotts, ed., Richard C. Temple and Lavinia M. Anstey (London: Hakluyt Society, 1932), xv, xxvii.
Early French travelers Paulmier de Gonville rounded the Cape as early as 1503 and reached Madagascar; another historic French voyage, that of Jean and Raoul Parmentier of Dieppe went to Sumatra. See François Pyrard de Laval, The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, trans. Albert Gray and H. C. P. Bell, in two vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1887; rpt. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2000), x–xi.
Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, trans. V. Ball, ed. William Crooke, in two vols. (London, 1924; rpt. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1995), 2: 100, n.1.
John Burnell, Bombay in the Days of Queen Anne Being an Account of the Settlement, introduction, Samuel T. Sheppard (London: Hakluyt Society, 1933), xiii.
English merchants such as Edward Osborne and Richard Staper, who had been granted the monopoly of the English trade in the Turkish dominions by a royal charter in September 1581, had already tapped the rich commercial potential of this route. See William Foster, ed., Early Travels in India, 2. Newberie is variously spelled as Newberry, Newbery, and Newberie. I use the spelling “Newberie,” following J. Horton Ryley, Ralph Fitch: England’s Pioneer to India and Burma (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899).
See Pietro della Valle, The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in India, trans. G. Havers, ed. Edward Grey (London: Hakluyt Society, 1892), 1: iv.
See Abbé D., Barthélemy Carré, The Travels of Abbé Carré in India and the Near East 1672–1674, trans. Lady Fawcett, ed. Charles Fawcett, two vols. (London, 1946; rpt. New Delhi: Asian Education Services, 1990), xiii–xv.
Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589), xviii.
Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 2–3.
The printer’s note was appended to Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London, J. Martin, 1655), n.p., original emphasis. Other references from Terry appear in the same text, A2, 361. The reason for Terry’s augmentation of his original material may have been rooted in the demands of the book trade itself. Revised, emended, and updated works frequently sold very well. See Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996), 154.
Philip Baldaeus, A True and Exact Description of the Most Celebrated East-India Coasts, Vol. 3. Anon trans. of 1672 Dutch edition (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1703), 563–64.
See Rudolph Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes V (1942), 159–97; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 22; John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, 1–39.
See Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–18.
Francois F Catrou, “Preface,” in The General History of the Mogol Empire, from it’s [sic] foundation by Tamerlaine, to the late Emperor Orangzeb: Extracted from the memoirs of M. Manouchi, a Venetian, and chief physitian to Orangzeb for above forty years (London: printed for Jonah Bowyer, 1709), n.p.
Henri de Feynes Montfort, An Exact and Cvriovs Svrvey of all the East Indies (London: Printed by Thomas Dawson for William Arondell, 1615), B, B2.
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 69, 75.
Barbara Johnson, “Taking Fidelity Philosophically,” in Joseph F. Graham, ed., Difference in Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 142–48, esp. 146.
Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, Difference in Translation, 165–208, esp. 166. In fact, Derrida’s notion of the point of origin as ungraspable seriously complicates the notion of history and representation by calling attention to the inadequate and unstable nature of representation. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 36.
Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2.
Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 1, 63, 81. The reference to Vicente Rafael’s “Gods and Grammar: The Politics of Translation in the Spanish Colonization of the Tagalogs of the Philippines,” in Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, ed. Norman F. Cantor and Nathalia King (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), appears in Niranjana 63, n. 55.
Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 297, 298, 308; see also Lata Mani, “Production,” in Europe and its Others, 107–27; Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and Writing about India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 63.
Manu, Mānāva-Dharma-Çāstra, in The Ordinances of Manu, trans. A. C. Burnell, ed. E. W. Hopkins (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1995), 130.
See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in B. G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 260; see also Trinh T. Minha-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and Framer Framed (New York: Routledge, 1991); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17 (2), 251–74; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 5, 109.
Copyright information
© 2003 Pompa Banerjee
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Banerjee, P. (2003). Introduction. In: Burning Women. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05204-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05204-9_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73046-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-05204-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)