The Ambiguization Of Sati By Rammohun Roy

At first, we could be mistaken that Rammohun Roy doesn’t share the ambivalence which other people such as Walter Ewer had but the idea of sati continues to provoke ambiguity into the arguments of even the most committed abolitionist. In the defense of the weak character of the Hindu women, Roy says “…the name of death makes the male shudder, that the female from her firmness of mind offers to burn with the corpse of her deceased husband.” Here Roy unintentionally agrees to the possibility of good sati i.e. voluntary sati. But immediately Roy contradicts himself by saying that it must be taken into account that women are naive and are easily misled by people they strongly believe in. In the end we learn little or nothing about the widows themselves,

It openly glorifies the ritual of sati and describes it as one willingly undertaken by devout Hindu widows. The burden of the orthodox argument was to demonstrate that the prohibition of sati by the East India Company was based on incorrect interpretation of the scriptures. Unlike the official and the indigenous progressive view, the orthodox argument relied heavily upon the custom. The orthodox plan was to sabotage the credibility of scriptures which was given much importance by the British officials and progressive debaters. They argued that in such sensitive matters which involved scriptural interpretations, men such as Brahmin pundits who knowledge in this field must be consulted. The orthodox debaters consisted pundits of the Government Sanskrit College, Supreme Court, Nizamat and Diwani Adalat.
In response to the suggestion that ascetic widowhood is superior to sati, the orthodox view quotes Manu as cited in Nirnaya Sindhu, “On the death of her husband, if, by chance, a woman in unable to perform concremation, nevertheless she should preserve the virtue required of widows.” By this they argue that sati is the first preference and if the woman is unable to perform sati then only ascetic widowhood is suggested. They also argue that ascetic widowhood is a more painful way to final beatitude while sati involved short term suffering and delivers heavenly