ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the project of historically contextualizing Rammohun and nineteenth-century debates on women includes specifying the notion of tradition that they seek to reinterpret. It shows that analysis of the debate on sati, the conception of tradition that Rammohun contests, and that the orthodoxy defends, is one that is specifically "colonial." The chapter examines the constitution of official knowledge about sati. Official knowledge was generated through questioning pundits resident at the courts. It also discusses the convincing case that such an approach is fruitful and that it raises serious historiographical questions regarding the place of brahmanic scripture in precolonial India, the nature and functioning of precolonial legal systems and pre-British indigenous discourses on tradition and social reform. The accent on "will" in Ewer's analysis signals the ambivalence which lies at the heart of the official attitude to sati. It suggests that within the general and avowed disapproval of the practice, there operated notion "good" and "bad" satis.
