Commentary

Ram Mohan Roy's campaign against sati, the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, produced some of his most influential writings and petitions. He argued that the practice had no basis in the authentic scriptures and that custom alone could not justify its continuance. Sophia Dobson Collet's account of 1900 documents the petitions and the controversy they provoked among orthodox Hindu leaders, who appealed against reform. David Kopf, in The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (1979), argues that Roy's scriptural method gave his reform arguments an authority that orthodox opponents found difficult to answer. The campaign culminated in the government's prohibition of sati in 1829, a measure that Roy supported. The claim given here is a summary of the arguments, and the English texts of the essays should be used for the precise phrasing.