Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India

The much publicized burning of a young Rajput widow from the state of Rajasthan in 1987 renewed intense debate on the subject of Sati. Long a topic of horrified fascination—how can a woman commit herself to death on her husband’s funeral pyre, then actually carry through with it—Sati is at once both a powerful symbol of Otherness for the west and an act proving a woman’s sacredness and spiritual power in the Hindu world. Ashes of Immortality attempts to see the Satis through Hindu eyes, provding a wide-ranging experiential and psychoanalytic account of ritual self-sacrifice and self-mutilation in South Asia. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in northern India, where the state-banned practice of Sati reemerged in the 1970s, as well as extensive textual analysis, Catherine Weinberger-Thomas Constructs a radically new interpretation of Satis. She invites readers to set aside their personal prejudices and worldviews and enter the Hindu universe, in which humans and deities freely cross the borderline between heaven and earth, people are born and die again and again according to the laws of Karma, and violent self-sacrifice is perceived as a path to immortality.