Sati has been a focal point not only for the colonial gaze in colonial India, but also for recent work on post coloniality and female subject, for 19th and 20th century Indian discourses about tradition, Indian culture and femininity, and, most crucially, for the women’s movement in India. The custom of sati, the practice of immolation of widows on their husband's’ funeral pyre, has been at the center of debate over the representation of the East in texts and paintings by the West. Although most recorded incidents of sati can be traced in documents by British officials, who were often present at such occurrences to deter them or dissuade the would-be satis, foreign navigators, missionaries, travelers and even some native intellectuals could vouch for the occurrences of sati as a religious practice. Though the anti-sati law had been promulgated in 1829, late-twentieth-century India witnessed a resurgence of interest in the custom of sati with the immolation of Roop Kanwar, a Rajput widow, in 1987 in the state of Rajasthan, which was notable for its different spiritual interpretation of the custom from that prevalent in other parts of India. The most prestigious historians of colonial India (either British or Indian) have not written at any length on the subject, and nor does the influential revisionist series Subaltern Studies deal with it. There is no conclusive evidence for dating the origins of sati, although Romilla Thapar points out that there are growing textual references to it in the second half of the first millennium A.D. It began as a ritual confined to the Kshatriya caste (composed of rulers and warriors) and was discouraged among the highest caste of Brahmins. She suggests that it provided a heroic female counterpart to the warrior's death in battle: the argument was that the warrior's widow would then join him in heaven. The comparison between the widow who burns herself and heroic male deaths has been a recurrent feature of the discourse on sati from the earliest comment still the present day and has been used to distinguish sati from mere suicide. In a useful commentary on sati, Dorothy Stein points out that it was not unique to India: 'there are accounts of widow sacrifice among the Scandinavians, Slavs, Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese, Finns, Maoris and some American Indians'. This was Edward Thompson's view too: 'the rite' he says, 'belongs to a barbaric substratum which once overlay the world, including India'. Widow immolation is one of the most spectacular forms of patriarchal violence; each burning was and is highly variable, and is both produced by and helps to validate and circulate other ideologies that strengthen the oppression of women. But for the most part, representations of sati have tended to homogenize the burnings and to isolate them from the specific social, economic and ideological fabric in which they are embedded. Thus the spectacularity of widow immolation lends itself to a double violence: we are invited to view sati as a unique, transhistorical, transgeographic category and to see the burnt widow as a woman with special powers to curse or bless, as one who feels no pain, and one who will be rewarded with everlasting extra-terrestrial marital bliss. She is marked off from all other women by her will; thus her desire, her 'decisions' are to be revered by the community even as theirs are consistently erased. Paradoxically but necessarily, this process also casts the burning widow as a sign of normative femininity: in a diverse body of work, she becomes the privileged signifier of either the devoted and chaste, or the oppressed and victimized Indian (or sometimes even 'third world') woman. Historical work on sati in India colonial times suggest that sati’s status as “an Indian tradition” is a far more complicated matter. Lata Mani’s essay “Contentious Debates : The Debate on Sati in colonial India””, analyzes the historical constitution of sati as a Hindu religious tradition in late