“Sati: Evangelical, Baptists Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse” is a history of the practice of Sati written by Meenakshi Jain, a professor of history in Delhi, and published by Aryan Books International.

Next to the caste system, the practice of Sati has been used by groups such as Christians, Communists, and Indian Secularists, as evidence for why Hinduism is bad. Jain makes a convincing case that this obsession with Sati exaggerates what is a very rare occurrence. She also argues that widows who committed suicide as Sati did not do so with religion sanction. They were not forced by priests or family members. What the Christians, the Communists, and the Social Reformers say about Sati is thus wrong.

This then raises the question of why Sati has been ubiquitously discussed since the eighteenth century, even by Hindus themselves. Here Jain puts forwarded a very interesting connection between the changes that took place in English society as a result of the French Revolution, the concomitant change of policy enforced on British India by two English groups known as Evangelicals and Utilitarians, and the resultant effect of this on how Hindus themselves began to view Sati.

Jain writes in a sober and clear language that is a joy to read. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the book such as that the first foreign reference to Sati is by Diodorus in 316 BC, and that the oldest example of Sati in Indian literature might be Madri’s suicide in the Mahabharata. We learn of the respect that eighteenth-century British people in India had for Hindu traditions, and how this later changed thanks to the Evangelicals and Utilitarians. An interesting villain in the story is William Wilberforce, who is celebrated in today’s England as the politician who abolished slavery in the British Empire. While many Indians know about the role of Ram Mohun Roy in the abolishment of Sati, not many people know of the contemporary progressive Indian opponents of the abolition, such as Radhakant Deb and Bhawanicharan Banerji.