ABSTRACT
Imperial concerns featured prominently in the evangelical reform agenda between the 1790s and the 1830s. If the eradication of British involvement in the slave trade and colonial slaverywas among their key campaigningpriorities, then a second preoccupation, viewed as of equal or even greater importance, was to bring Christianity to the peoples of Britain’s expanding empire and, in particular, to transform the society and culture of the immense population of the nation’s growing empire in the Indian subcontinent. Women’s active involvement in anti-slavery campaigns is now well established; much less well known is their participation in one of the first evangelical reform initiatives directed at colonial India: the campaign to abolish sati, or widow burning, a practice generally referred to as suttee in British texts of the period. While female anti-slavery activists highlighted the oppression of black women by white men under the system of colonial slavery, the female anti-sati campaigners who form the focus of this chapter highlighted ‘Hindu’ women’s oppression by ‘Hindu’ men. Both groups of women stressed the importance of combining legislative intervention with direct social action; however, while the former stressed the need to reform the coloniser, the latter stressed the need to reform the colonised.
