Saint or sinner? Suttee in the depiction of Flora Annie Steel and Cornelia Sorabji

Abstract

Suttee is a well-discussed and widely researched topic and yet the literary representations of it are not sufficiently probed into. Suttee, if merely understood as the rite of widow burning in India, is one of the cruelest practices of female subjugation. Hence, women’s attempts at articulating their views on such a practice are significant. This becomes more arresting when two women writers come from different (even opposing!) cultures and stand on different rungs of the colonial hierarchy. Moreover, given the flexibility of fiction as a mode of expression, it can arguably best be used as a powerful tool for one’s own propaganda. Several questions emerge. How does each writer see and show suttee? How does an awareness of their respective status in an imperialist world shape their creative imagination? What kind of politics of representation is involved in their writings in face of the charged politics surrounding the topic of suttee in a colonial world? In depicting this rite, how and why does each bring in the argument of sainthood that is inevitably related with any suttee-death? Endeavoring to find answers to these questions, I will examine one work of fiction each by two contemporaneous women writers, one British (Flora Annie Steel) and one Indian writer (Cornelia Sorabji), to see how the concept of ‘suttee’ has been used in each case.