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structures. Or, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it, the deconstructive philosophical position( or postcolonial criticism) consists in saying an " impossible ' no ' to a structure, which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately." 35
The potential of this deconstructive position has been explored effectively in the recent readings of the archival documents on the abolition of sati, the Hindu widow sacrifice in the early nineteenth century. The historian encounters these records, as I have suggested elsewhere, as evidence of the contests between the British " civilizing mission " and Hindu heathenism, between modernity and tradition, and as a story of the beginning of the emancipation of Hindu women and about the birth of modern India. 36 This is so because, Lata Mani shows, the very existence of these documents has a history that entails the use of women as the site for both the colonial and the indigenous male elite ' s constructions of authoritative Hindu traditions. 37 The questions asked of accumulated sources on sati-whether or not the burning of widows was sanctioned by Hindu codes, did women go willingly to the funeral pyre, on what grounds could the immolation of women be abolished-come to us marked by their early nineteenth-century history. The historian ' s confrontation today with sources on sati, therefore, cannot escape the echo of that previous rendezvous. In repeating that encounter, how does the historian today not replicate the early nineteenth-century staging of the issue as a contest between tradition and modernity, between the slavery of women and efforts toward their emancipation, between barbaric Hindu practices and the British " civilizing mission "? Mani tackles this dilemma by examining how such questions were asked and with what consequences. She shows that the opposing arguments assumed the authority of the law-giving scriptural tradition as the origin of Hindu customs: both those who supported and those who opposed sati sought the authority of textual origins for their beliefs. In other words, the nineteenth-century debate fabricated the authority of texts as Hinduism without acknowledging its work of authorization; indigenous patriarchy and colonial power colluded in constructing the origins for and against sati while concealing their collusion. Consequently, as Spivak states starkly, the debate left no room for the widow ' s enunciatory position. Caught in the contest over whether traditions did or did not sanction sati and over whether or not the widow self-immolated willingly, the colonized subaltern woman disappeared: she was literally extinguished for her dead husband in the indigenous patriarchal discourse, or offered the choice to speak in the voice of a sovereign individual authenticated by colonialism. 38 The problem here is not one of sources( the absence of the woman ' s testimony) but of the staging of the debate: it left no position from which the widow could speak.
The silencing of subaltern women, Spivak argues, marks the limit of historical
35Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak," The Making of Americans, the Teaching of English, the Future of Colonial Studies," New Literary History, 21( 1990): 28.
36 This discussion of sati draws heavily on my " Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography," Social Text, 31-32( 1992): 11.
37 Lata Mani, " Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India," Cultural Critique, 7
( Fall 1987): 119-56.
38 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak," Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds.( Urbana, Ill., 1988), 271-313, esp. 299-307.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994