Jessica E. M. Patterson’s article “An Eighteenth‑Century Account of Sati: John Zephaniah Holwell’s ‘The Religious Tenets of the Gentoos’ and ‘Voluntary Sacrifice’ (1767)” offers a reappraisal of Holwell’s motives and an implicit spatial portrait of mid‑eighteenth‑century Calcutta.

In Patterson’s close reading, Calcutta emerges as a layered administrative and ceremonial landscape, in which the ritual of sati becomes the central lens through which British observers—and through them, European readers—encounter the city’s religious and political geography.  

Imperial Hub and Observational Stage

Patterson begins by situating Holwell in Calcutta’s colonial infrastructure. After joining the East India Company as a surgeon, he rose to become the presidency’s principal physician and then its zamindar, charged with revenue, law and order in the city itself. Calcutta, in this phase, is portrayed as the Company’s nerve center—Fort William on one side, the presidency hospital on the other—where European authority and indigenous customs continuously intersect. The city is not merely a backdrop but an active spatial construct: a nexus where medical wards, administrative offices, and Hindu funeral rites abut one another.

The Suburban Pyre and the Urban Frontier

Against the grid of streets and ramparts, Holwell’s account thrusts readers into Calcutta’s “outskirts,” where the cremation ground becomes a liminal sphere. The teenage widow’s “voluntary sacrifice” unfolds in an arbor built beside her husband’s funeral pyre. Here, the boundary between private home and public spectacle dissolves. In Patterson’s analysis, these peripheral spaces—once seen as marginal—are revealed as integral to the colonial city’s imaginary. The funeral arbor, with its ritualized geometry, replaces the European drawing room as the true site of cultural encounter.

Domestic Space Transformed into Sacred Arena

Patterson emphasizes how Holwell narrativizes domestic interiors as stages for “heroic” acts. The widow’s movements—measured “two steps” onto the pile, a silent minute of “meditation on his face,” the precise setting of conflagration “in three places”—are described with almost architectural precision. These details map a spatial choreography: the drawing‑in of incense, the positioning of the pyre, the sequence of flame‑lit gestures. Calcutta’s domestic spaces, in Holwell’s telling, become hallowed by the widow’s self‑immolation. Patterson reads this as an explicit mediation: the city’s homes are not private retreats but sacred arenas in which the “Gentoo religion” manifests itself.

The Riverine Metaphor and the Flow of Belief

While Patterson does not dwell extensively on Calcutta’s watery topography, her analysis hints at the Ganges’s presence throughout Holwell’s work. His hospital stints along the riverbank and his own survival of the Black Hole narrative underline the city’s dependence on fluvial lifelines. The funeral pyre thus rises beside a river that carries both corpses and commerce. In Patterson’s reading, sati becomes an extreme expression of Calcutta’s “flow”—crossing social currents just as barges cross currents of water. The widow’s act, in this view, is part of the city’s larger circulation of bodies, goods, and beliefs.

Calcutta as Space of Knowledge Production

Patterson foregrounds Holwell’s claim to “unique authority” over the “original tenets” of the Gentoo faith. His alleged discovery of the “Shastah” and his linguistic prowess (Persian and Bengali) mark Calcutta as a site of scholarly excavation. Yet Patterson unpacks how these claims rest on shaky philology and missing manuscripts. The city thus appears as a contested epistemic terrain: a place where European and Indian sources collide, where rival scripts and lost texts shape—and misshape—the colonial narrative.

Sati as Spatial Mediator of Calcutta’s Otherness

At the heart of Patterson’s argument is the role of sati in forging Calcutta’s image as an “exotic” capital. The widow’s self‑immolation is framed as both “heroic” and “rational,” traits Holwell ties back to his heterodox Christian belief in metempsychosis. By presenting sati not as a superstitious aberration but as a coherent doctrinal act, Holwell—and by extension Patterson’s reading—casts Calcutta as a city where religious conviction overrides physical space and bodily pain. The pyre mediates the city’s “Otherness,” drawing European observers away from administrative offices into its peripheral inflammations.

Calcutta’s Spatial Hierarchies Undermined

Patterson highlights Holwell’s subversive comparison of Mughal tolerance with European interference. He notes that Mughal authorities never withheld permission for sati—“a privilege…never withheld from them”—while Europeans had at times “forcibly rescued” widows from the flames. This inversion upends spatial hierarchies: the ostensibly “civilized” ruling class appears more tyrannical than the Muslim nawabs. Calcutta, in Patterson’s summary, is remapped as a zone where moral and juridical boundaries shift, and where the colonial project’s self‑image is unsettled by its own spatial practices.

The Liminal Widow and the City’s Moral Geography

By focusing on a single act of sati, Patterson shows how Holwell constructs the widow as both margin and center—marginal because she stands outside the city’s administrative grid, central because her sacrifice commands Holwell’s—and his readers’—full attention. In doing so, he transforms Calcutta’s moral geography: the widow’s body becomes the axis around which notions of rationality, piety, and gender revolve. Patterson reads this as a deliberate spatial strategy: by locating the widow at the edge of the city, Holwell collapses the distance between spectator and spectacle, between British governance and indigenous ritual.

Patterson demonstrates that Holwell’s account of sati does more than describe a ritual. It constructs Calcutta as a layered palimpsest—administrative precincts, hospital wards, suburban cremation grounds, and imperial archives all overlaid by the heat of the pyre. The city emerges as a contested terrain of belief and authority, where the act of voluntary sacrifice mediates European anxieties about power, religion, and knowledge. In Patterson’s interpretation, Holwell’s spatial imagination of Calcutta reveals as much about British intellectual culture as it does about Indian religious practice.

Source

Patterson, J. E. (2017). An Eighteenth-Century Account of Sati: John Zephaniah Holwell’s ‘Religious Tenets of the Gentoos’ and ‘Voluntary Sacrifice’(1767). South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 40(1), 24-39.