ABSTRACT
Sati has been a focal point not only for the colonial gaze on India, but also for recent work on post-coloniality and the female subject, for nineteenth-and twentieth-century Indian discourses about tradition, Indian culture and feminin ity, and, most crucially, for the women’s movement in India.1 Reading these various discourses against each other and in the context of the specific cultural moments and inter-cultural tensions in which they are produced is often a frus trating task because of the astounding circularity of language, arguments and even images that marks discussions on sati from the late eighteenth century till today. This circularity has sometimes been used to indicate the enormous shaping power of a colonial past on contemporary India society, or ‘to question’, as Lata Mani puts it, ‘the “post” in “post-colonial” ’.2 While such an emphasis has been useful in indicating the continued economic, cultural and epistemological hegemony of the West, and salutary in questioning Eurocentric intellectual paradigms, it has also contributed to a lack of focus on the crucial shifts from colonial to post-colonial governance and culture. To isolate the study of coloni alism from that of its later evolution is to deflect attention from the narratives of nationalism, communalism and religious fundamentalism which are the cru cibles within which gender, class, caste or even neo-colonialism function today.3
