A foiled sati attempt in Uttar Pradesh's Banda district suggests that even today, public pressure in rural India can compel a new widow to immolate herself on the pyre of her dead husband. Radha Bai's narrow escape was uncannily similar to two similar cases that surfaced in 1996. In one, a 54-year-old woman named Betola Bai in Jabalpur district of Madhya Pradesh went into such a stupor after her husband's death that word spread she wanted to commit sati. By next day such a frenzy of expectation built up that thousands of rural folk started streaming into her village. But before arrangements for the immolation could be made, four of Betola Bai's sons arrived and managed to save their mother. Yet another case of sati in UP was similarly foiled by an alert constable. The escape of these three widows shows that 171 years after Lord William Bentinck outlawed sati, one factor has remained constant in the few sati cases that have occurred in India. This factor is the eagerness of a crowd wishing to see a spectacle. In olden times, two other categories of people coerced new widows into immolating themselves. One group was the in-laws who wanted to save the expense of maintaining a widow and resented her legal right to the family estate. A second group consisted of greedy pundits who earned money for officiating at the immolations. Horrendously, the five known cases of sati in the last 21 years were witnessed by a huge crowd of villagers. The first sati case was in Banda district in July 1979 when a new widow, Javitri Tewari, died on her husband's funeral pyre. A second woman, Sona Kanwar, 62, committed sati in Rajasthan's Nagaur district and a picture of her burning appeared in the Illustrated Weekly of India. A third sati occurred in Rajasthan's Sikdar district and a fourth widow burning herself was Vaijayantri, just 20. The last well-known sati, of course, was 18-year-old Roop Kanwar's in Devrala village of Rajasthan. Her 1987 self-immolation grabbed world headlines. Interestingly, every sati case is followed by nonsensical stories of the widow's eyes glazing with ecstasy as flames envelop her. This contradicts all sati literature which says that the self-immolations were never voluntary. The new women were pressured into embracing death by in-laws who would crowd around her and tell her to join her dead husband. She would be made half-unconscious with narcotics. Invariably, she was tied to the husband's body and to heavy logs to prevent her from breaking free. And when the fire was lit, the spectators would set up a loud religious chant to drown out her cries. Yet in Devrala, witnesses swear that nobody put a match to Roop Kanwar and that she was set ablaze by a divine force which approved of her fiery self-sacrifice. Sati in India has been prevalent for at least a millennium because it was mentioned by travellers like Alberuni in the 10th century. But reliable figures on sati cases are scarce. They range from a few thousand a year to 25,000 a year when Bentinck outlawed sati in 1829. Even after that, however, widow self-immolations continued to occur in the princely states. When Maharaja Ranjit Singh died in 1839, eleven women burnt themselves on his pyre. But sati was most rampant in Bengal. In the Bengal Presidency, 8,134 women immolated themselves between 1815 and 1828, according to sati scholar V. N. Datta. Writers attribute the prevalence of sati in Bengal to the worship of goddess Kali and the need to satisfy her bloodthirstiness. Ram Mohun Roy's explanation was more logical, however. He ascribed sati in Bengal to the Dayabhaga system of inheritance which gave the widow a right over her husband's property. Sati in UP was rare because a Mitakshara law limited a widow's inheritance rights. So in-laws in UP had much less to gain from a widow's death.
