Burning Women
Subtitle: Widows, Witches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: December 31, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781403960184
Subjects: Death & Dying; Literary studies: general; Women's studies; Women's Studies - General; Regional, Ethnic, Genre, Specific Subject; India; Literature - Classics / Criticism; English; Literary Criticism; Widow suicide; Sati; Feminist; Literary Criticism & Collections / Feminist Criticism; History; Social conditions; Women
First sentence: The crossings in this book occur on the site of sati, or the burning of Hindu windows with their dead husbands, as it was produced in European travel narratives of India from 1500 to 1723.
Description: "In early modern Europe, the circulation of visual and verbal transmissions of sati, or Hindu widowburning, not only informed responses to the ritualized violence of Hindu culture but also intersected in fascinating ways with specifically European forms of ritualized violence and European constructions of gender ideology. European accounts of women being burned in India uncannily commented on the burnings of women as witches and criminal wives in Europe.

When Europeans narrated their accounts of sati, perhaps the most striking illustration of Hindu patriarchal violence, they did not specifically connect the act of widowburning to a corresponding European signifier: the gruesome ceremonial burnings of women as witches.

In examining early modern representations of sati, the book focuses specifically on those strategies that enabled European travelers to protect their own identity as uniquely civilized amid spectacular displays of "Eastern barbarity.""--BOOK JACKET.