An equal death: Satyendranath Dutta’s poem on sati and widow remarriage

ABSTRACT

The Bengali poet Satyendranath Dutta (1882–1922) is admired for his mastery of prosody and metre. “Sahamaran” – first published in 1906 and translated here into English – is one of his memorable poems centring on the themes of child marriage, sati (widow-burning), and widow remarriage, social issues that engaged the attention of the colonizers and Bengali intelligentsia alike in the heyday of British rule in India. Retaining much of 19th- and early-20th-century Bengali literature’s social reformist zeal, the poem spotlights the complicity of patriarchy and religion in the victimization of women and conveys the message that transgressing socio-religious codes is the only means of overcoming patriarchal oppression and violence. It further suggests that a woman’s financial independence is vital to supporting herself and her family and having equality in her relationship with her husband. The poem, however, falls short of envisaging a female subjectivity that is not male-defined.

KEYWORDS:

• Satyendranath Dutta
• Bengali poetry
• sati
• widow-burning
• child marriage
• widow remarriage

Notes

1. The colonial British spelling of “sati” is “suttee”. The poem’s original title is “Sahamaran”, a compound word connoting the “voluntary” immolation of a widow on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. This connotation derives from the word’s literal meaning: saha (co-/together – broadly implying equality, synergy, complementarity, and synchronicity) and maran (death) – that is, “the act of dying together”, or “an equal death”. The poem was first published in the poetry collection Benu O Bina (The flute and the lute, 1906).

2. A speaker is considered polite and courteous when they address a female person as mother irrespective of the addressee’s actual age.

3. The poet uses double entendre here. The wife’s statement can be read in another way: that all her desires were satisfied.

4. A riverside cremation place for Hindus.

5. In Bengal, wearing conch-shell bangles is a sign of a Hindu woman’s married status.

6. Boatmen in Bengal are usually either Muslims, or low-caste or outcaste Hindus. Therefore, a high-caste Hindu widow marrying a boatman amounts to a huge social transgression.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amitendu Bhattacharya

Amitendu Bhattacharya teaches English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani) – K.K. Birla Goa Campus, India. His research interests include South Asian literature, ecological humanities, and comparative and translation studies. He translates from Bengali and Urdu into English.