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Deromanticizing Hindu Heathens: SUTTEE

THE PRACTICE OF SATI (WIDOW BURNING)

In this age of ascending feminism and focus on equality and human rights, it is difficult to assimilate the Hindu practice of sati, the burning to death of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, into our modern world.  Indeed, the practice is outlawed and illegal in today’s India, yet it occurs up to the present day and is still regarded by some Hindus as the ultimate form of womanly devotion and sacrifice.

Sati (also called suttee) is the practice among some Hindu communities by which a recently widowed woman either voluntarily or by use of force or coercion commits suicide as a result of her husband’s death.  The best known form of sati is when a woman burns to death on her husband’s funeral pyre.  However other forms of sati exist, including being buried alive with the husband’s corpse and drowning.

The term sati is derived from the original name of the goddess Sati, also known as Dakshayani, who self-immolated because she was unable to bear her father Daksha’s humiliation of her (living) husband Shiva.  Sati as practice is first mentioned in 510 CCE, when a stele commemorating such an incident was erected at Eran, an ancient city in the modern state of Madhya Pradesh.  The custom began to grow in popularity as evidenced by the number of stones placed to commemorate satis, particularly in southern India and amongst the higher castes of Indian society, despite the fact that the Brahmins originally condemned the practice (Auboyer 2002).  Over the centuries the custom died out in the south only to become prevalent in the north, particularly in the states of Rajasthan and Bengal.  While comprehensive data are lacking across India and through the ages, the British East India Company recorded that the total figure of known occurrences for the period 1813 – 1828 was 8,135; another source gives the number of 7,941 from 1815 – 1828, an average of 618 documented incidents per year.  However, these numbers are likely to grossly underestimate the real number of satis as in 1823, 575 women performed sati in the state of Bengal alone (Hardgrave 1998).

Historically, the practice of sati was to be found among many castes and at every social level, chosen by or for both uneducated and the highest ranking women of the times.  The common deciding factor was often ownership of wealth or property since all possessions of the widow devolved to the husband’s family upon her death. In a country that shunned widows, sati was considered the highest expression of wifely devotion to a dead husband (Allen & Dwivedi 1998, Moore 2004).  It was deemed an act of peerless piety and was said to purge her of all her sins, release her from the cycle of birth and rebirth and ensure salvation for her dead husband and the seven generations that followed her (Moore 2004). Because its proponents lauded it as the required conduct of righteous women, it was not considered to be suicide, otherwise banned or discouraged by Hindu scripture. Sati also carried romantic associations which some were at apparent pains to amplify. Stein (1978) states “The widow on her way to the pyre was the object (for once) of all public attention…Endowed with the gift of prophecy and the power to cure and bless, she was immolated amid great fanfare, with great veneration”.  Only if she was virtuous and pious would she be worthy of being sacrificed; consequently being burned or being seen as a failed wife were often her only choices (Stein 1978).  Indeed, the very reference to the widow from the point at which she decided to become a “Sati” (Chaste One) removed any further personal reference to her as an individual and elevated her to a remote and untouchable context.  It is little wonder that women growing up in a culture in which they were so little valued as individuals considered it the only way for a good wife to behave.  The alternative, anyway, was not appealing.  After the death of a husband a Hindi widow was expected to live the life of an ascetic, renouncing all social activities, shaving her head, eating only boiled rice and sleeping on thin coarse matting (Moore 2004).  To many, death may have been preferable, especially for those who were still girls themselves when their husband’s died.

Over the centuries, many of India’s inhabitants have disagreed with the practice of sati.   Since its very foundation the Sikh religion has explicitly prohibited it.  Sati was regarded as a barbaric practice by the Islamic rulers of the Mogul period, and many tried to halt the custom with laws and edicts banning the practice.  Many Hindu scholars have argued against sati, calling it “as suicide, and…a pointless and futile act”; both abolitionists and promoters of sati use Hindu scripture as justification of their position.  At the end of the 18th Century, the influx of Europeans into India meant that the practice of sati was being scrutinised as never before; missionaries, travellers and civil servants alike condemned official Raj tolerance of the “dreadful practice” and called for its end (Hardgrave 1998).   In 1827 the Governor-General of India, Lord Bentinck, finally outlawed the custom in its entirety, claiming it had no sound theological basis (James 1998).  James also notes that the outlawing of sati practice was considered the first direct affront to Indian religious beliefs and therefore contributed to the end of the British Raj.  However the common people felt about it, many Indian rulers of the 19th century welcomed its abolition (Allen & Dwivedi 1998).

Most recorded instances of sati during the 1800’s were described as “voluntary” acts of courage and devotion (Hardgrave 1998), a conviction that sati advocates continue to promote to this day. At the very least, women committing sati were encouraged by priests (who received the best item from the women’s possessions as payment), the relatives of both families (who received all the women’s remaining possessions and untold blessings) and by general peer pressure. However, it appears that at least in some recorded cases the women were drugged. In “An Account of a Woman Burning Herself, By an Officer,” which appeared in the Calcutta Gazette in 1785, the observer describes the woman as likely under the influence of bhang (marijuana) or opium but otherwise “unruffled.” After she was lifted upon the pyre, she “laid herself down by her deceased husband, with her arms about his neck. Two people immediately passed a rope twice across the bodies, and fastened it so tight to the stakes that it would have effectually prevented her from rising had she attempted”.

Once the reality of burning to death became obvious, many women tried to escape their fate.  Measures and implements were put into place to ensure that they could not. Edward Thompson wrote that a woman “was often bound to the corpse with cords, or both bodies were fastened down with long bamboo poles curving over them like a wooden coverlet, or weighted down by logs.”  These poles were continuously wetted down to prevent them from burning and the widow from escaping (Parkes, 1850).  If she did manage to escape, she and her relatives were ostracised by society, as is related by the redoubtable Fanny Parkes, wife of a minor British civil servant during the early 1800’s, who gives a frank eyewitness account in 1823 of a sati burning and the consequences:

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From Kashgar, here.

Why the WORD Anarchism Sounds Bad…

Are Libertarians “Anarchists”?

The libertarian who is happily engaged expounding his political philosophy in the full glory of his convictions is almost sure to be brought short by one unfailing gambit of the statist. As the libertarian is denouncing public education or the Post Office, or refers to taxation as legalized robbery, the statist invariably challenges. “Well, then are you an anarchist?” The libertarian is reduced to sputtering “No, no, of course I’m not an anarchist.” “Well, then, what governmental measures do you favor? What type of taxes do you wish to impose?” The statist has irretrievably gained the offensive, and, having no answer to the first question, the libertarian finds himself surrendering his case.

Thus, the libertarian will usually reply: “Well, I believe in a limited government, the government being limited to the defense of the person or property or the individual against invasion by force or fraud.” I have tried to show in my article, “The Real Aggressor” in the April 1954 Faith and Freedom that this leaves the conservative helpless before the argument “necessary for defense,” when it is used for gigantic measures of statism and bloodshed. There are other consequences equally or more grave. The statist can pursue the matter further: “If you grant that it is legitimate for people to band together and allow the State to coerce individuals to pay taxes for a certain service—”defense”—why is it not equally moral and legitimate for people to join in a similar way and allow the State the right to provide other services—such as post offices, “welfare,” steel, power, etc.? If a State supported by a majority can morally do one, why not morally do the others?” I confess that I see no answer to this question. If it is proper and legitimate to coerce an unwilling Henry Thoreau into paying taxes for his own “protection” to a coercive state monopoly, I see no reason why it should not be equally proper to force him to pay the State for any other services, whether they be groceries, charity, newspapers, or steel. We are left to conclude that the pure libertarian must advocate a society where an individual may voluntarily support none or any police or judicial agency that he deems to be efficient and worthy of his custom.

I do not here intend to engage in a detailed exposition of this system, but only to answer the question, is this anarchism? This seemingly simple question is actually a very difficult one to answer in a sentence, or in a brief yes-or-no reply. In the first place, there is no accepted meaning to the word “anarchism” itself. The average person may think he knows what it means, especially that it is bad, but actually he does not. In that sense, the word has become something like the lamented word “liberal,” except that the latter has “good” connotations in the emotions of the average man. The almost insuperable distortions and confusions have come both from the opponents and the adherents of anarchism. The former have completely distorted anarchist tenets and made various fallacious charges, while the latter have been split into numerous warring camps with political philosophies that are literally as far apart as communism and individualism. The situation is further confused by the fact that, often, the various anarchist groups themselves did not recognize the enormous ideological conflict between them.

One very popular charge against anarchism is that it “means chaos.” Whether a specific type of anarchism would lead to “chaos” is a matter for analysis; no anarchist, however, ever deliberately wanted to bring about chaos. Whatever else he or she may have been, no anarchist has ever deliberately willed chaos or world destruction. Indeed, anarchists have always believed that the establishment of their system would eliminate the chaotic elements now troubling the world. One amusing incident, illuminating this misconception, occurred after the end of the war when a young enthusiast for world government wrote a book entitled One World or Anarchy, and Canada’s leading anarchist shot back with a work entitled Anarchy or Chaos.

The major difficulty in any analysis of anarchism is that the term covers extremely conflicting doctrines. The root of the word comes from the term anarche, meaning opposition to authority or commands. This is broad enough to cover a host of different political doctrines. Generally these doctrines have been lumped together as “anarchist” because of their common hostility to the existence of the State, the coercive monopolist of force and authority. Anarchism arose in the 19th century, and since then the most active and dominant anarchist doctrine has been that of “anarchist communism.” This is an apt tern for a doctrine which has also been called “collectivist anarchism,” “anarcho-syndicalism,” and “libertarian communism.” We may term this set of related doctrines “left-wing anarchism.” Anarchist communism is primarily of Russian origin, forged by Prince Peter Kropotkin and Michael Bakunin, and it is this form that has connoted “anarchism” throughout the continent of Europe.

The principal feature of anarchist communism is that it attacks private property just as vigorously as it attacks the State. Capitalism is considered as much of a tyranny, “in the economic realm,” as the State in the political realm. The left-wing anarchist hates capitalism and private property with perhaps even more fervor than does the socialist or Communist. Like the Marxists, the left-wing anarchist is convinced that the capitalists exploit and dominate the workers, and also that the landlords invariably are exploiting peasants. The economic views of the anarchists present them with a crucial dilemma, the pons asinorum of left-wing anarchy: how can capitalism and private property be abolished, while the State is abolished at the same time? The socialists proclaim the glory of the State, and the use of the State to abolish private property—for them the dilemma does not exist. The orthodox Marxist Communist, who pays lip service to the ideal of left-wing anarchy, resolves the dilemma by use of the Hegelian dialectic: that mysterious process by which something is converted into its opposite. The Marxists would enlarge the State to the maximum and abolish capitalism, and then sit back confidently to wait upon the State’s “withering away.”

The spurious logic of the dialectic is not open to the left-wing anarchists, who wish to abolish the State and capitalism simultaneously. The nearest those anarchists have come to resolving the problem has been to uphold syndicalism as the ideal. In syndicalism, each group of workers and peasants is supposed to own its means of production in common, and plan for itself, while cooperating with other collectives and communes. Logical analysis of these schemes would readily show that the whole program is nonsense. Either of two things would occur: one central agency would plan for and direct the various subgroups, or the collectives themselves would be really autonomous. But the crucial question is whether these agencies would be empowered to use force to put their decisions into effect. All of the left-wing anarchists have agreed that force is necessary against recalcitrants. But then the first possibility means nothing more nor less than Communism, while the second leads to a real chaos of diverse and clashing Communisms, that would probably lead finally to some central Communism after a period of social war. Thus, left-wing anarchism must in practice signify either regular Communism or a true chaos of communistic syndics. In both cases, the actual result must be that the State is reestablished under another name. It is the tragic irony of left-wing anarchism that, despite the hopes of its supporters, it is not really anarchism at all. It is either Communism or chaos.

It is no wonder therefore that the term “anarchism” has received a bad press. The leading anarchists, particularly in Europe, have always been of the left-wing variety, and today the anarchists are exclusively in the left-wing camp. Add to that the tradition of revolutionary violence stemming from European conditions, and it is little wonder that anarchism is discredited. Anarchism was politically very powerful in Spain, and during the Spanish Civil War, anarchists established communes and collectives wielding coercive authority. One of their first steps was to abolish the use of money on the pain of a death penalty. It is obvious that the supposed anarchist hatred of coercion had gone very much awry. The reason was the insoluble contradiction between the antistate and the antiproperty tenets of left-wing anarchy.

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From Mises.org, here.

Adding a ‘True Partner’ to the Asch Conformity Experiment

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Has the American Oligarchy Gone Too Far?

Scholar Behind Viral ‘Oligarchy’ Study Tells You What It Means

By Sahil Kapur | April 22, 2014 1:00 p.m.
A new political science study that’s gone viral finds that majority-rule democracy exists only in theory in the United States — not so much in practice. The government caters to the affluent few and organized interest groups, the researchers find, while the average citizen’s influence on policy is “near zero.”

“[T]he preferences of economic elites,” conclude Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin I. Page, who work with the nonprofit Scholars Strategy Network, “have far more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens do.”

TPM spoke to Gilens about the study, its main findings and its lessons.

You published an advance copy of your study on April 9th, and in just the last few days there’s been an explosion of coverage and interest. Are you pleased, shocked, overwhelmed, all of the above?

I’m delighted to be able to contribute to a terribly important public discussion. And I’m thrilled that there’s so much interest and concern about the issues. It takes on a life of its own. I’m sure you’ve noticed, this notion of America being an oligarchy seems to be a dominant meme in the discussion of our work. It’s not a term that we used in the paper. It’s just a dramatic sort of overstatement of our findings. So it’s been interesting for me. Typically my work is read by a few dozen political scientists and I don’t get this kind of response.

Let’s talk about the study. If you had 30 seconds to sum up the main conclusion of your study for the average person, how would you do so?

I’d say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups — of economic elites and of organized interests.

You say the United States is more like a system of “Economic Elite Domination” and “Biased Pluralism” as opposed to a majoritarian democracy. What do those terms mean? Is that not just a scholarly way of saying it’s closer to oligarchy than democracy if not literally an oligarchy?

People mean different things by the term oligarchy. One reason why I shy away from it is it brings to mind this image of a very small number of very wealthy people who are pulling strings behind the scenes to determine what government does. And I think it’s more complicated than that. It’s not only Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers or Bill Gates or George Soros who are shaping government policy-making. So that’s my concern with what at least many people would understand oligarchy to mean. What “Economic Elite Domination” and “Biased Pluralism” mean is that rather than average citizens of moderate means having an important role in determining policy, ability to shape outcomes is restricted to people at the top of the income distribution and to organized groups that represent primarily — although not exclusively — business.

Would you say the government is most responsive to income earners at the top 10 percent, the top 1 percent or the top 0.1 percent?

This is a great question and it’s not one we can answer with the data that we used in the study. Because we really don’t have good info about what the top 1 percent or 10 percent want or what issues they’re engaged with. As you can imagine, this is not really a group that’s eager to talk with researchers.

How exactly do you measure the preferences of average citizens in an academic way? Polls show that many American voters feel on a gut level that the government isn’t looking out for them. But what kind of data do you use to test this theory and how confident are you in the conclusions?

What we did was to collect survey questions that asked whether respondents would favor or oppose some particular change in federal government policy. These were questions asked across the decades from 1981 to 2002. And so from each of those questions we know what citizens of average income level prefer and we know what people at the top of the income distribution say they want. For each of the 2,000 possible policy changes we determined whether in fact they’ve been adopted or not. I had a large number of research assistants who spent years putting that data together.

There are criticisms of your study within the academic community. Some say public opinion surveys are a poor measure because people don’t understand policy or that their stated preferences are self-contradictory. Tyler Cowen says citizens vote retrospectively so it’s better to judge on outputs rather than whether voters get their preferred inputs. How do you respond?

These are all good questions. They’re questions I address in some length in my book, “Affluence and Influence.” There is some truth to some of these perspectives. But in a nutshell I think citizens overall have fairly sensible policy preferences which appear not to change much if citizens have an opportunity to learn more and debate the policy and view pros and cons.

Talk about some examples of policy preferences that the majority holds that the government is not responsive to.

Financial reform — the deregulatory agenda has been pursued, somewhat more fervently among Republicans but certainly by Democrats as well in recent decades. Higher minimum wage. More support for the unemployed. More support for education spending. We’d see, perhaps ironically, less liberal policies in some domains like religious or moral issues. Affluent people tend to be more socially liberal on things like abortion or gay rights.

Which party, Democrat or Republican, caters to the interests of the rich more? Does your research find them to be equal or is one more responsive than the other?

We didn’t look at that in this paper. Other work I’ve done suggest it depends. There are a set of economic issues on which the Democratic party is more consistently supportive of the needs of the poor and middle class. But it’s by no means a strong relationship. Both parties have to a large degree embraced a set of policies that reflect the needs, preferences and interests of the well to do.

Relatedly, does divided government like we have now make politicians more or less likely to cater to the affluent than one-party control?

It does seem, absolutely, that divided government has the effect of reducing the amount of policy that gets adopted, restricting the policies that get adopted that are more broadly popular.

When did things start to become this way?

It’s possible that in earlier eras, that we don’t have data for, that things were better. But in the time period that we do have data for, there’s certainly no such evidence. Over time responsiveness to elites has grown.

It seems to me the paradox here is that sometimes non-rich people favor an agenda that supports the rich. For instance, middle class tea partiers want low taxes on the highest earners, just as Steve Forbes does. Isn’t that still democracy at work, albeit in an arguably perverse way?

Yes, absolutely. I think people are entitled to preferences that conflict with their immediate interests — narrowly conceived interests. That may be an example of that. Opposition to the estate tax among low-income individuals is another. But what we see in this study is that’s not what this is happening. We don’t look at whether preferences expressed by these different groups are consistent or inconsistent with their interests, narrowly conceived. We just look at whether they’re responded to by government policy-makers, and we find that in the case of ordinary Americans, they’re not.

How does a system like this perpetuate itself when after all it’s ordinary voters who cast their ballots and elect their leaders. Theoretically they can change it in a heartbeat. Why don’t they?

That’s a very good question. I don’t have a complete answer for you. Part of it clearly is that while politicians need votes while in office, they need money to obtain and retain office. So they need to balance the activities that will benefit them in terms of money with the activities that’ll benefit them in terms of votes. Voters are not particularly effective at holding politicians accountable for the policies they adopt. Voters also have a limited choice set when going into an election. We find that policies adopted during presidential election years in particular are more consistent with public preferences than policies adopted in other years of the electoral cycle.

What are the three or four most crucial factors that have made the United States this way?

Very good question. I’d say two crucial factors. One central factor is the role of money in our political system, and the overwhelming role that affluent individuals and organized interests play, in campaign finance and in lobbying. And the second thing is the lack of mass organizations that represent and facilitate the voice of ordinary citizens. Part of that would be the decline of unions in the country which has been quite dramatic over the last 30 or 40 years. And part of it is the lack of a socialist or a worker’s party.

What does the broader social science literature say about societies that go into this non-democracy state? Do you see this as a pendulum that swings back and forth, or is it a sort of tipping point from which there’s no way back?

That’s kind of a gloomy question!

It’s my job to ask those.

I don’t know. There have been periods — the ages of Robber Barons and Trusts, the progressive era where there was too much concern about concentration of power. I’m not a historian, so I don’t know — maybe it takes a Great Depression.

Your study calls to mind something that Dennis Kucinich, the former congressman, said years ago during the recession. He essentially said the class war is over and the working class lost. Was he right?

I mean, for now, it certainly seems like it. The middle class has not done well over the last three and a half decades, and certainly has not done well during the Great Recession. The political system responded to the crisis in a way that led to a pretty nice recovery for economic elites and corporations.

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From Talking Points Memo, here.