Calcutta, December 1829: Law or Persuasion on Sati?
A boys' school in Calcutta, December 1829, is debating the motion 'Sati must be abolished by law, not by persuasion'. Bentinck's Regulation XVII has just made the burning of widows punishable as culpable homicide. Four documents are on the table. Rammohan Roy's pamphlet argues that no Hindu scripture sanctions the practice and that it is custom wrongly called religion. A petition from Calcutta's orthodox citizens, drafted in 1830, calls the Regulation an interference with religion and warns of unrest. Bentinck's own minute says he weighed the attachment of the army to custom, decided the practice was horrible, and satisfied himself it was not required by the shastras. A Baptist missionary's journal claims that above four hundred widows were burned in Bengal in a single year, without explaining how the figure was compiled. The school's debating society has four speakers and twenty minutes.
1. How would you combine Rammohan Roy's argument with Bentinck's worry about the army, and what conclusion follows?
Read the worked answer
Combine them as argument and constraint. Rammohan's move is the strongest available, because it shifts the ground from 'religion versus reform' to 'true religion versus corrupt custom'. That gives the Governor-General a defensible position: he is protecting Hinduism as he understands it, not attacking it. Bentinck's minute shows the constraint - a large part of the Company's army was drawn from exactly the communities whose customs were being legislated against, and the fear of religious interference was a standing anxiety. The conclusion is not that the law should wait, but that the law must be argued in the language Rammohan supplied, and enforced with restraint. A widow cannot meaningfully consent to being burned; where an act kills a person who cannot refuse, a legal prohibition is justified even against a custom sincerely held.
2. What are the limits of these four documents as evidence about sati in Bengal?
Read the worked answer
Each has an interest and a blind spot. The missionary's count is the weakest: 'above four hundred' in a year, with no method given, produced by a body with an interest in showing how much work remained. The orthodox petition speaks for propertied Calcutta men, not for all Hindus, and its warning about unrest may be pressure tactics as much as prediction. Rammohan's pamphlet is a work of persuasion by a cosmopolitan reformer who argued from texts most villagers never read. Bentinck's minute records a decision, not the practice. Most telling is the absence: the widows themselves left no testimony, so the sources tell us what was argued about them, not what they wanted. The practice was also never uniform - it was concentrated among certain groups and regions, and a single Bengal-wide figure hides that.
3. Judging from the evidence in the setup, was legislation or persuasion the better route?
Read the worked answer
Both, and the sequence matters. Legislation set a legal norm and made the practice publicly criminal, which no amount of pamphleteering could do; the school's motion is right that persuasion alone would have left the decision to families with an interest in it. But the 1830 petition shows belief was real and organised, and the missionaries' own figures show how uneven enforcement would be. So the law needed the argument Rammohan supplied and the local pressure that bodies like the Brahmo Sabha and later reformers could apply. The longer consequence is worth stating: the fear that the Company was attacking religion, raised by this Regulation among others, was still being cited in 1857. A law that changes behaviour without changing belief buys compliance in the towns and evasion elsewhere.