I Researched Sati in the Archives That Banned It”: Historian Bruce Westrate on Why Altar of Ashes Is the Novel Multiculturalism Fears Most
What happens when a historian takes a question buried in imperial archives and drops it into a modern American courtroom? Bruce Westrate’s Altar of Ashes answers with fire. Westrate did not come to sati through headlines, online arguments, or shallow cultural commentary. He came to it through research. His work as a historian took him into the records of the empire, including the India Office Records, where the British debate over sati was preserved in reports, correspondence, arguments, and official decisions. Long before he shaped the subject into fiction, he had studied the historical moment when British authorities abolished sati in India in 1829. The question at the center of that history was brutal in its simplicity. When a practice is defended as culture, religion, or tradition, does the law have the right to stop it? Altar of Ashes brings that question into the present. It does not treat multiculturalism as a harmless slogan or a decorative ideal. It tests it under pressu...