How Nicoló Manucci, the Venetian who settled in India, saw and reported incidents of ‘Sati’

It is during his return trip to Agra that Manucci, like so many Europeans before him, witnessed one of the most disconcerting Hindu practices, sati, the controversial custom of widow immolation on her deceased husband’s pyre. That custom, though involving only a minority of widows (specifically of the Brahmin caste), was widespread and deep-seated among Hindus and, as the Mughals realised on several occasions, difficult to eradicate.

Among all Indian acts of ritual violence, sati was the most striking and upsetting for European observers. They were suspended between horror for the widow’s suffering and admiration for her bravery. Manucci was no exception, and in more than one passage of Storia do Mogor, he lingered over rather crude descriptions of this cruel practice. Nonetheless, unlike other European accounts, he did not limit himself to describing with morbid accuracy the ritual of immolating widows; though revealing moralistic and chauvinist accents, he also asked himself what fate was reserved for those widows who refused immolation:

After a husband’s death, a widow adopts one of four courses. Those most sprightly and vigorous burn alive with the corpse of the defunct husband (. . .) Widows who on their husband’s death lose their modesty, depart as soon as he expires to one of the large towns, and become public courtesans. Some pursue the same course in their husband’s lifetime, for which crime there is no legal punishment inflicted in this country. Others who are not filled like the first set with the spirit of honour, nor like the second give themselves over to an abandoned life, remove upon their husband’s death to their parents’ house, and wait on them like the servants (. . .) Other women, when the husband dies, since it would be disgraceful in their caste to marry again, and they cannot remain as they are, go from door to door selling rice. They think nothing of this dishonour, which would be counted among Europeans as the depth of misfortune. Yet it may be said that those who adopt this plan are generally the wisest, for the work occupies them and frees them from the evils which follow in the train of laziness and idleness. For it may be said that idleness is the mother of all the vices.

Within a few days Manucci witnessed two immolations in the vicinity of Agra. In both cases, something remarkable happened. In the first of the two immolations, also written about by François Bernier, a furious reparatory gesture accompanied, amid general astonishment, the widow’s gesture:

During the second immolation, which happened near Agra in the same period (a fact that testifies that this was a frequent practice), something extraordinary occurs again, though in this case it is caused by Manucci himself and the Armenian rider with him:

During my stay in Agra, I went one day to make an excursion into the country on horseback, in the company of a young Armenian. We came where a Hindu woman had begun to move round the pyre, which was already blazing; she rested her eyes on us, as if she appealed to us for help. The Armenian asked if I would join him in saving the woman from death. I said I would. Seizing our swords, and our servants doing the same, we charged with our horses into the midst of the crowd looking on, shouting “Mata, mata!” (Kill, kill), whereat the Brahmans, being frightened, all took the flight, and left the woman unguarded. The Armenian laid hold of her, and making her mount behind him, carried her off. Subsequently, having had her baptised, he married her. When I passed through Surat I found her living there with her son, and she returned me many thanks for the benefit done to her.

The rather encomiastic tone of this tale could raise some doubts about the episode’s authenticity. However, in this and other dubious cases I have chosen, in the absence of other trustworthy accounts or evidence, to take what Manucci writes to be true prima facie.

To give him credit, given the innumerable historical confirmations for most of his assertions and what he declares in the Note to the Reader – that is, his decision to take up the pen (so to speak, since he did not write himself but dictated his words to scribes) flowed, unlike those who limit themselves to reporting others’ accounts, from the need “to write of all that happened to me and of all that I saw, without exaggerating any one thing, for that is abhorrent to me”:

As I know that other persons have written their travels, with descriptions of the countries they have passed through, and of the kingdoms where they remained for a time, these descriptions dealing often with the mogul Empire, I long judged it a vain labour to make public any account of my journey from Venice through Asia, and of my sojourn in the land of the Mogul, where I have passed the better part of my life; but I could not resist the importunities of my friends, who have a great belief in my knowledge of that country, and a conviction that certain persons have written falsehoods in their books (as I myself have observed in several places). Therefore, although already old, I have resolved, with the encouragement of those who know me and who have written to me, to give the reader true information as to what passed there in my time and before it, emphasising several particulars which could not have come to the knowledge of others.

To go back to the episode of the widow being snatched from death by the two Europeans, one fact is certain: seen through contemporary eyes, the written episode seems to have been constructed to exemplify that which, in years closer to ours, the feminist philosopher Gayatri Spivak, an American of Bengali origin, described as the fantasy of “white men saving brown women from brown men”.

The dark-skinned woman sends an implicit plea for help; the virile Europeans (white) feel they are being called upon and (without resorting to violence) frighten off the cowardly Brahmins (also dark skinned) and save the woman from the flames; later one of them (white) marries the woman (thus saving her from her uncontrolled sexuality) and converts her to Christianity (the ultimate form of salvation); in conclusion the woman’s grateful thanks sanctions the moral value of the Europeans’ intervention. This saviour fantasy is not an isolated case in western literature. It can also be found, for example, in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days.

Excerpted with permission from A Venetian at the Mughal Court, Marco Moneta, translated from the Italian by Elisabetta Gnecchi Ruscone, Vintage.