Ram Mohan Roy Wrote the Case Against Sati in 1818. The 1829 Ban Was Bentinck's Law, Passed Against Roy's Advice on How to Do It

Ram Mohan Roy (spelled Rammohun in most nineteenth-century sources) did not pass the law that ended sati, the burning of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. Regulation XVII, which made the practice a crime in the East India Company’s Bengal territories, was passed by the governor-general in council on 4 December 1829. A long minute by Lord William Bentinck preceded it, and that minute records Roy advising a different method.

What Roy did do is also on the record. From 1818 he published the scriptural case against the rite in Bengali and in English. On 16 January 1830 he was among those who presented Bentinck with an address of thanks from 300 Calcutta residents. After he reached England in April 1831 he worked against the Hindu petition that asked the king’s council to overturn the ban.

463 widows in one year, 839 at the peak

Across the Company’s Bengal Presidency, officials reported 378 cases in 1815, 442 in 1816, 707 in 1817 and 839 in 1818, according to the table in Edward Thompson’s 1928 history of the practice. Of the 2,366 cases in those first four years, 1,485 fell in the Calcutta Division, the districts around the capital where Roy had lived since the mid-1810s. Between 1819 and 1826 the yearly count ran from 518 to 653, and Thompson’s table gives 463 for 1828.

Bentinck’s minute uses the same 463 for the whole Presidency of Fort William, with 420 in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and 287 in the Calcutta Division alone. Lord Hastings, the former governor-general, wrote on 21 November 1823, in a letter the minute quotes, that about 800 widows had burned in one year of his term and that he suspected many more went unreported to any magistrate.

The pamphlet that argued from Manu

Born into a Brahmin family at Radhanagar in Bengal, Roy says in his own sketch of his life that he studied Persian and Arabic at his father’s wish, because anyone attached to a Muslim ruler’s court needed them, and Sanskrit and its theological books following his mother’s family.

The English translation of the first Conference between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows Alive carries a preface dated 30 November 1818. It says the Bengali original had been in wide circulation for several weeks in the districts where the burning was most common. The text is a dialogue. Texts attributed to Angira and others, quoted by the Advocate, promise a widow who burns herself long years in heaven. Roy’s side, the Opponent, answers that Manu directs a widow to live as an ascetic, that a text contradicting Manu cannot stand, and that rites done for a reward rank below knowledge of God.

Nothing the Advocate cites, the Opponent says, tells anyone to do what is done: “you first bind down the widow along with the corpse of her husband” and press her down with bamboos while the pile burns. “This then is in fact deliberate female murder,” he concludes, and he adds that the tying down was a recent habit, “of late years” and only in Bengal. The Advocate’s reply is “This practice may be sinful or any thing else, but we will not refrain from observing it.”

A second Conference followed in 1820. There the Advocate says women are weak in understanding, untrustworthy and ruled by passion, and that this is why widows are tied down. The Opponent asks when men ever gave women “a fair opportunity of exhibiting their natural capacity”, and the tract closes with the charge that “you feel for them no compassion, that might exempt them from being tied down and burnt to death.”

Others had made the textual case before him. Kopf writes that the Sanskrit scholar Colebrooke, about twenty years before Roy’s first tract, showed from the sources that voluntary immolation of widows in Bengal departed from the authentic tradition. Sarkar adds that Mrityunjay Vidyalankar made the case for ascetic widowhood in 1817, yet still calls the closing section of the second Conference “deeply moving” and says only Roy in his generation could have written it.

Lata Mani’s reading of the debate is different. Rachel Dwyer, reviewing Mani’s Contentious Traditions in Times Higher Education on 10 September 1999, summarises the book’s argument that the quarrel was about the nature of Hindu tradition and that “the sati herself is not discussed nor does she speak”. She notes that Roy’s writings “invoked the scriptures in support of the ban”.

Biographers tell that Roy watched his brother’s widow forced down onto the pyre with bamboo poles and vowed to end the rite. Sophia Dobson Collet’s Life and Letters carries the story, and an editor’s footnote in the 1914 edition finds “evidently some confusion” in it, because Roy was at Rangpur when his brother died.

What Bentinck wrote down about Roy’s advice

Bentinck became governor-general in July 1828. The minute of 8 November 1829 spends more space on risk than on morality. As governor of Madras he had seen the Vellore mutiny, which he ascribed to a supposed violation of religious custom, and he wrote that the memory made him cautious. Of forty-nine army officers he polled, twenty-four wanted an immediate public ban, eight wanted abolition through indirect pressure by magistrates, twelve wanted abolition but not by direct prohibition, and five wanted no interference at all. The judges of the Nizamat Adalat, the Company’s highest criminal court, had urged abolition, four of five in their 1828 report and all of them in 1829.

Roy appears in the middle of this. Bentinck writes that Roy, “a warm advocate for the abolition of sati and of all other superstitions”, had told him in conversation that the practice could be stopped “by increasing the difficulties and by the indirect agency of the police”. A public law, Roy feared, would make Hindus suspect the British meant to force their own religion on them next. Bentinck’s answer was that he saw truth in this but did not accept the conclusion, that a government “bound by Parliament to rule by law” could not rely on a tacit sanction, and that he wanted “an open, avowed, and general prohibition”.

Local examples in the minute showed that indirect pressure worked. Sir Charles Metcalfe never permitted a sati in the Delhi territory, and in the Jessore district the yearly count fell from 30 in 1824 to none in 1827 and 1828 under one magistrate’s pressure. A Maratha widow had been stopped from the pyre much earlier, in 1754, as told in The Queen Who Refused the Pyre.

Regulation XVII declared sati “illegal, and punishable by the criminal courts”. Anyone who helped, whether or not the widow consented, was guilty of culpable homicide, and the Nizamat Adalat could impose death where violence or compulsion, or the widow’s intoxication or stupefaction, was proved. The preamble says the practice “is nowhere enjoined by the religion of the Hindus as an imperative duty” and that a life of “purity and retirement” is preferred for a widow, which matches the line of Roy’s pamphlets. The minute does not say where the drafters took it from. Elsewhere the minute agrees with Horace Wilson, secretary of the Hindu College, that trying to prove sati was no part of Hindu religion was a dangerous evasion, since what mattered was what Hindus believed.

Thompson wrote in 1928 that Roy “was a valiant fighter against suttee, but he thought the prohibition an inexpedient measure”. Of the ban itself he wrote: “The credit is almost entirely personal, and it is Bentinck’s.” Against that he set Ananda Coomaraswamy’s remark that sati “was prohibited by law in 1829 on the initiative of Raja Rammohun Roy.”

Thanks on 16 January, a rival society on the 17th

The address of 16 January 1830 thanked Bentinck for rescuing the signatories “from the gross stigma hitherto attached to our character as wilful murderers of females”. Editors of Roy’s works treat it as his composition. Collet dates the formation of the Dharma Sabha, a society of orthodox Hindus, to the next day, 17 January. Banglapedia says only January 1830, and Kopf puts the formation in 1831, with informal meetings probably from February 1830.

The Sabha’s leader was Radhakanta Deb (1784 to 1867), compiler of an eight-volume Sanskrit dictionary, a director of the Hindu College for more than thirty years, and an advocate of female education. Thompson says its appeal to the king in council gathered more than 800 signatures and rested on the Company’s pledge not to interfere in religion.

Roy sailed for England in November 1830, and the Centenary Edition of his works says a counter-petition, “presumably written by himself”, was presented in the House of Lords on 13 June 1832 by the Marquess of Lansdowne. The Privy Council committee reported that “the said petition should be dismissed”, and Ghose dates the rejection to 11 July 1832.

Kopf offers a different reading of the Sabha, arguing that most of its members were not Brahmins, that they had worked for years with the Company’s Orientalist scholars, and that it was the earliest “protonationalist” movement in modern India. His verdict on Roy is that he “was far more traditional than he was generally acknowledged to be”. Sarkar answers that even at the height of the agitation the Sabha’s paper, the Samachar Chandrika, said “it is only the abolition of Suttees which has given us disquietude”.

A hall for one God on Chitpore Road

The first meeting of the Brahmo Sabha, a society for the worship of one God, was held on 20 August 1828. The hall on Chitpore Road opened on 23 January 1830, six days after the Dharma Sabha was formed. The trust deed, dated 8 January 1830, dedicates the hall to “the Eternal, Unsearchable, and Immutable Being”, bars images, sacrifices and the killing of animals there, and opens it to people of all descriptions “without distinction”.

His monotheism was older than the hall: the Persian Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin, A Gift to Monotheists, his earliest surviving work, was published at Murshidabad in 1803 or 1804, and from 1815 he rested his case on the Upanishads. Sarkar questions whether the Brahmoism that followed was ever more than “a rather unsatisfactory halfway house” and notes that caste was not attacked with the same zeal until the 1860s.

The letter Amherst’s government would not answer

In 1823 the Calcutta government planned a Sanskrit College. Lord Amherst, the governor-general, received a letter from Roy dated 11 December 1823 saying the funds should pay Europeans to teach “Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, and other useful sciences”, and calling Sanskrit “a lamentable check to the diffusion of knowledge”. The General Committee of Public Instruction resolved on 14 January 1824 that the letter needed no reply, since in its view it claimed to speak for the natives of India yet “bears the signature of one individual alone”.

Roy was not hostile to Sanskrit itself. By July 1826 he had built a Vedanta College where a pandit taught Sanskrit literature, according to a letter by William Adam that Collet quotes. Sarkar cautions that English education was not progressive in itself, since Roy’s conservative opponents also wanted it, and finds the striking thing in Roy’s stress on the sciences, which he says was “totally and significantly lost” in the literary schooling introduced in 1835. That policy is covered in Macaulay’s Children.

Mirat-ul-Akhbar, a Persian weekly that Roy published from 1822, did not last. After the acting governor-general John Adam curtailed the press on 14 March 1823, Roy’s memorial to the Supreme Court was rejected, he appealed to the king in council, and he stopped the paper as a protest after about sixteen months, Collet says.

An emperor’s envoy

Akbar II, the titular Mughal emperor in Delhi, thought the allowance the Company paid him fell short of what a treaty guaranteed, and he appointed Roy his envoy to the king in England. According to Collet, he apparently gave Roy the title of Raja around August 1829. Roy wrote to Bentinck on 8 January 1830 asking leave to use it. The government replied on 15 January that it could not sanction the title or recognise him as the emperor’s envoy. The next day Roy was at the governor-general’s house with the address of thanks for the sati ban.

By his own account he embarked in November 1830 and arrived in England in April 1831. What the mission won is disputed. Sandford Arnot wrote in the Asiatic Journal in 1833 that Roy had secured an extra £30,000 a year for the emperor. An anonymous reply in January 1834 said the Directors raised the allowance on the governor-general’s recommendation and never negotiated with Roy. Collet reads the reply as showing the mission had succeeded. What the Company later planned for the Mughal household is told in Lord Dalhousie and the Doctrine of Lapse.

Bristol, 27 September 1833

In September 1833 Roy went to Bristol to stay with Unitarian friends, and he died at Stapleton on the 27th. Historic England’s listing says the exact cause is not known and that an inflammation of the brain was blamed at the time. Arnos Vale Cemetery’s page says meningitis. Burial followed at Stapleton Grove on 18 October; in 1843 the remains moved to Arnos Vale, and in 1844 a Bengali-style chhatri, a domed pavilion designed by William Prinsep and paid for by Dwarkanath Tagore, went up over the tomb. Historic England lists it at Grade II*.

The tablet gives his birth year as 1774, and Banglapedia gives 1772 or 1774. It ends: “AND DIED AT BRISTOL SEPTEMBER 27TH 1833.”