Sati and its abolition in British social and political discourses c. 1832-1895

Blunn, Suzanne Amanda (2024) Sati and its abolition in British social and political discourses c. 1832-1895. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

The historiography of sati is almost entirely concerned with its practice from the late eighteenth century through to its abolition in India in 1829. Yet sati and its abolition had a significant, largely unexamined role in many important nineteenth-century British debates on a wide range of social and political issues. These included debates about the rule of India, religious freedom in the 1830s, the nature and settlement of the Indian Rebellion in the 1850s, and the plight of Hindu widows and child brides in the 1850s and 1880s. This thesis focuses on the function of references to sati and its abolition in these debates in the broader context of Victorian liberalism and its relationship, in particular, to empire and religion, of which the abolition was a product. It thus examines the role sati and its abolition played in constituting and sustaining liberal imperial discourses of British rule in India across time. This thesis further examines the more complex function of sati and its abolition as a moral and legislative benchmark in these debates, as a point of alignment and divergence in testing the limits of religious and social freedom and toleration, and the boundaries of the state in setting them. It demonstrates how these debates were often about determining these issues in Britain as much as in India at a time when these questions were not fully settled in Britain. By bringing together empire and metropole this thesis demonstrates in new ways how closely bound up liberal social and political discourses of home and empire were and how embedded sati and its abolition were within them.

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