Abro

  I want you to imagine something before we begin. Not a battlefield, not a palace — just a riverbank, at dusk, somewhere in northern India. Perhaps it is the year 1820. Perhaps earlier. A woman — she may be thirty years old, or she may be seventeen — sits near a pyre that is already burning. Her husband died yesterday. She is dressed in the finest clothes her family owns. Her hands are steady. Around her, a crowd of hundreds has gathered: relatives, priests, neighbors, strangers. There is music. There are chants. There is, in some accounts, the smell of camphor and clarified butter rising with the smoke. And then — she enters the fire.   That image — its horror and its strange, terrible dignity — has haunted two centuries of historians, anthropologists, colonial administrators, feminist theorists, and ordinary readers. It is the image we are here to examine today. Not to sensationalize it. Not to pass easy judgment on an ancient society from the comfortable distance...