As at Deorala, so at Satpurwan in Mahoba district in UP, what is on display is the eagerness of some people to cash in on the tragic incident, put the unfortunate woman on a pedestal and accord her veneration and eventually build a shrine for her. As the district administration finds itself in aspot controlling the people visiting Satpurwan to worship the latest sati, it is the silence of the Hindu organisations that is disconcerting. If their silence amounts to acquiescence, it is a sad trend. After all, in the past leaders like Rajmata Vijaye Raje Scindia and Kalyan Singh Kalvi had made bold to lend the practice a semblance of social respectability.

It is when such incidents occur that the relevance of a social reformer like Raja Rammohun Roy is felt. He did not see sati as a religious problem that should be left to the Hindus themselves to sort out. When it came to fighting social evils, he believed that all well-intentioned people, irrespective of caste or creed, should join hands. In fact, the manner in which he fought sati showed how the zeal of the Christian missionary and the idealism of the Hindu reformer could be combined to strike at the roots of a social malaise. It is a pity that in the jaundiced history taught in schools and colleges, this aspect of the fight against sati is notmentioned.

When all other contributions of William Carey, the pioneering Baptist and botanist who gave Bengali its first dictionary, and his Serampore mission are forgotten, it is his dogged fight against sati that will still be remembered. Ever since he came to India and set up his post at Serampore, then under Danish control (missionaries were banned in the British areas), it was the abolition of the horrendous practice of sati into which he put his heart and soul. In this he was influenced by an incident of sati his life-long colleague Joshua Marshman had witnessed once at Serampore: "It was a horrible sight. The most shocking indifference and levity appeared among those who were present. I never saw anything mo-re brutal than their behaviour. The dreadful scene had not the least appearance of religious ceremony. It resembled an abandoned rabble of boys in England, collected for the purpose of worrying to death a cat or a dog."

Carey knew that however hard he tried to build public opinion against sati,it would not succeed unless he had the backing of Hindu notables. He found that on this question, there was congruence between his views and that of Raja Rammohun Roy, the prophet of Indian nationalism.

Carey made available the columns of Samachar Darpan, the first Indian language newspaper, which he launched, to Roy to expound his views. Roy argued forcefully that sati had no religious sanction whatsoever. It was not in vogue in the Vedic period and in the only legend in which it figures, it bears little resemblance to its modern-day version. As the legend goes, Lord Siva and his father-in-law, Prajapati, attend a yagna. Prajapati feels insulted when Siva does not pay him due respect. In retaliation, he org-anises his own yagna to which he invites all the gods and goddesses save Siva. Yet, Siva's wife decides to attend it. So does Siva. However, the uninvited guests are insulted. Enraged, she opts for samadhi. Her body goes up in flames, mingling with the fire of the havan.

Note that she did not commitsati to join her husband. What's more, she had to do penance for thousands of years before Siva accepted her as his consort after her rebirth as Parvati. While Roy used Hindu scriptures to debunk the theory of religious sanctity, Carey used his influence on the government to force it to ban sati. He had by then come close to the government, having been made a professor at Fort William College, founded by Wellesley to train English administrators. Unfortunately for Roy and Carey, Wellesley was a dyed-in-the-wool colonialist who believed that any interference in the religious beliefs of the native people was fraught with dangerous consequences.

Their moment arrived when Wellesley was called back and William Bentinck, who was governor of Madras, was appointed governor-general. Of course, he knew that as early as 1680, the Governor of Madras had forbidden sati in his province. It was Bentinck, a reformist in his own right, who introduced Indian vernaculars as court languages in place of Persian, introduced bythe Mughals. Carey, who was close to Bentinck, used all his influence to have sati abolished. It was on a Sunday that the notification came. Carey, who also worked as the government translator, did not attend church that day for he wanted to translate the notification into Bengali right away "lest some widow should die on the pyre of her husband". That was perhaps the first time he missed church on a Sunday.

Though sati -- described by Macaulay as "voluntary culpable homicide by consent" attracting "imprisonment for a term, which may extend to 14 years, a fine or both" in the IPC -- was made unlawful, the practice continued here and there as underscored by the celebrated Barh sati case that occurred a hundred years later. It ended in the conviction of Murli Manohar Prasad, editor of The Searchlight, whose case was pleaded by such legal luminaries as Tej Bahadur Sapru, Motilal Nehru and Sarat Chandra Sen. Chief Justice K. Turrel refused to believe that Shyamavati Devi took her bath in the Ganga, held herhusband's head in her lap and "rubbed her toes" to produce "swaymbu" (self-ignited fire). As it happened, when the heat became unbearable, she jumped into the Ganga, was arrested and sent to jail where she died of burn injuries. Not only the instigators, but even the witnesses were punished. "We do not expect a judge, fresh from Europe, to understand or appreciate the grand concept underlying the martyrdom of Hindu widows," thundered the newspaper. The case was considered a clash between western and eastern idealism. Now there is no such clash. All the more reason for Hindu organisations to come forward to denounce the practice, which is pure and simple murder. Any failure on this count will show them in a bad light.