Sati as Profit Versus Sati as a Spectacle: The Public Debate on Roop Kanwar’s Death

Abstract The peculiar mix of fascination, fear, dramatics, moral self-righteousness, and anger with which India’s Westernized middle classes reacted to the sati committed by Roop Kanwar at Deorala in Rajasthan in 1987 should have been a psychologist’s delight. Evidently, the very idea of suicide on the funeral pyre of one’s husband-or the possibility that someone might exploit this ancient and rare rite to hide the murder of a young widow—had its own strange fascination for the modem mind. For a small minority of thinking Indians, however, the middle-class reaction to the sati only deepened the tragedy of the death of a teenage widow.