Delhi University professor, Meenakshi Jain in her book Sati: Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse. The book in its back cover explains,
Its (The book’s) primary focus is on the colonial debate on sati, particularly the role of Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries. It argues that sati was an "exceptional act," performed by a miniscule number of Hindu widows over the centuries. Its occurrence was, however, exaggerated in the nineteenth century by Evangelicals and Baptist missionaries eager to Anglicize and Christianize India.
The book explains how,
THere are no description of Sati in Ancient Sanskrit texts notably dharmashastra (or rule books), including Manusmriti, Yagyavalkasmriti etc.
The Mahabharata has only scattered references to sati, but none of the wives of soldiers who died in the great war did Sati nor the wives of Dasharatha in Ramayana.The incidence of sati seems to have been the highest in Rajasthan as a defiance to the Islamic invaders. In Bengal, on the other hand, no “sati inscriptions from that period have so far been discovered.”
As far as cases of unwilling satis are concerned, including that of two queens of Kashmir, and some accounts by foreign travellers who wrote of both unwilling immolations as well as cases where the women displayed a marked “aversion to intervention.” But many foreign narratives and accounts however have been dismissed as “highly exaggerated“, “formulaic“, and “replete with generalizations.”
Till 1813, the East India Company “did not permit missionaries to operate in its territories in India.” as they considered that natives should be left alone in their customs, religion and traditions for their business to function without any problem.
The leader of the missionary enterprise in the Indian empire was Charles Grant. It was he, who, in collaboration with Rev. David Brown, William Chambers, and George Udny, drafted the plan for a “Mission to Bengal” that “envisioned the division of the province [of Bengal] into eight missionary circles, each with a clergyman of the Church of England.” This was in 1786-87. But churches were only the second step. The first was the “idea of native schools as prepatory to the main business of giving Christian light to this land sitting in heathen darkness.”.
Soon two clergymen were sent to Benares to study “Hindoos” where “they will spend about three years in study, and furnish themselves with languages. After which they may begin their glorious work of giving light to the heathen with every probability of success.”
In 1790, after 20 years of stay in India, Grant published Observations, in which he summarized, “the moral character and condition of the native … is extremely depraved, and that the state of society among that people is, in consequence, wretched. These evils … have been traced to their civil and religious institutions; … in the false, corrupt, impure, extravagant, and ridiculous principles and tenets of their religion…”.
East India Company’s charter came up for renewal in 1813 where Hindu atrocities and their “evil practices” were manufactured, reached a frenzied pace. Even the rath yatra at the Temple of Jagannath was not spared. William Carey estimated that every year 120,000 pilgrims perished at the rath yatra. Even today, a massively crushing force is called Jaggernaut which originates from Jagannath. Wilberforce estimated that every year there were an estimated 10,000 “annual sacrifices of women” (sati) in the Bengal province alone.William Ward calculated, with a breakup, the total number of people sacrificed annually to the Hindu gods as 10,500! “However, on the very next page, he doubled the number of satis from five to ten thousand”. Rev. David Brown cited William Chambers in estimating the number of sati incidents to be “about 50,000.” Charles Grant hypothesized a number of 33,000.
The British government started maintaining a registry of sati cases between 1815 and 1828 in the three Presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay. In Bengal, a region not associated with sati, these government figures recorded 5,997 of 6,632 cases of sati – i.e., 90% of all sati cases from the three Presidencies were recorded in Bengal – which “raises uncertainties about the reliability of the data.” It is pertinent to note that it was Bengal where the missionaries were focusing on, and therefore unsurprisingly, from other places, sati was almost non-existent.
“The Judge of Malabar notified that the practice was entirely absent in his area. ,,, The Judge of Trichinopoly informed around the same time that he could trace no instance of widow immolation for the previous ten years in the district.” But not one to let facts deter propaganda, Baptists kept up their campaign of calumny with frenzied vigour. “In 1819, Friend of India cited the figure of 100,000 satis per year. In 1829, the journal claimed that the custom had claimed over one million lives in Bengal alone!”
Sati was abolished in December 1829.
Interestingly, Meenakshi writes,
Once the ban was announced, Company officials stopped their surveillance of sati, and the allegedly rampant practice seemed to have abruptly ceased. It was a truly unique case of prompt universal compliance of a government diktat.
TLDR: How Sati, a relatively scare phenomenon, with no scriptural reference and voluntary in most cases and even more so in Bengal, was pumped up by missionaries to discredit the native religion as a bunch of superstitious bullshit. They used Ram Mohan Roy, who was heavily influenced by Unitary Church. Sati, had now become a moral black chapter in the history of Hinduism even though it was scarcer than philandering Christian Priests or the witch burning ceremony of Europe.
Further reads:
The Sati strategy. Review of Meenakshi Jain’s book SatiBook Review: Sati by Meenakshi Jain | IndiaFacts
EDIT1:
Readers might be interested in this recent conversation Meenakshi Jain had with Rajiv Malhotra on his YouTube Channel.
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