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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Indian courts regulate ritual practice of Sati (widow immolation) by reading legal documents ethnographically. It shows how law records violence selectively, silencing emotion and ritual, and how these gaps are challenged through alternative documents and lived practices.

Paper long abstract

Sati (Widow immolation) refers to a historically outlawed practice that survives today in the form of ritual commemoration and temple worship. This paper examines how legal documents shape and obscure the understanding of violence through an ethnographic engagement with an Indian court case between a temple committee and the State of Rajasthan, which centres on whether such worship constitutes the illegal “glorification” of sati under Indian law.

Rather than approaching the case as a question of legal compliance, this paper treats court documents as partial and politically produced artefacts. Drawing on close readings of petitions, affidavits, and judgments, alongside courtroom observation and ethnographic engagement with temple authorities and devotees, it shows how judicial records prioritise intent, evidence, and procedure while excluding sensory, affective, and performative dimensions of ritual life such as chanting, bodily discipline, emotional display, and gendered ideals of sacrifice and honour.

Methodologically, the paper demonstrates how ethnographers read against the grain of legal texts by tracing silences, contradictions, and moments of juridical discomfort, and by situating documents within the social worlds that exceed them. It further explores how interlocutors contest state narratives by mobilising alternative materials, including temple records, pamphlets, photographs, and oral histories as counter-archives that assert legitimacy and continuity.

By foregrounding the gap between legal reason and lived practice, this paper argues that the partiality of legal documents is not merely a limitation but a crucial entry point for understanding how violence is reconfigured, denied, and normalised through law.