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Sati (practice)
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Sati or suttee[a] is a practice, a chiefly historical one,[1][2] in which a Hindu widow burns alive—either voluntarily or by coercion[3]—on her deceased husband's funeral pyre. Although it is debated whether it received scriptural mention in early Hinduism,[4] it has been linked to related Hindu practices in the Indo-Aryan-speaking regions of India, which have diminished the rights of women, especially those to the inheritance of property.[5][b][c] A cold form of sati, or the neglect and casting out of Hindu widows, has been prevalent from ancient times.[5] Greek sources from around c. 300 BCE make isolated mention of sati, but it probably developed into a real fire sacrifice in the medieval era within northwestern Rajput clans to which it initially remained limited, to become more widespread during the late medieval era.
During the early-modern Mughal period of 1526–1857, it was notably associated with elite Hindu Rajput clans in western India, marking one of the points of divergence between Hindu Rajputs and the Muslim Mughals, who banned the practice.[8] In the early 19th century, the British East India Company, in the process of extending its rule to most of India, initially tried to stop the innocent killing; William Carey, a British Christian evangelist, noted 438 incidents within a 30-mile (48-km) radius of the capital, Calcutta, in 1803, despite its ban within Calcutta. Between 1815 and 1818 the number of incidents of sati in Bengal Presidency doubled from 378 to 839. Opposition to the practice of sati by evangelists like Carey, and by Hindu reformers such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy ultimately led the British Governor-General of India Lord William Bentinck to enact the Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829, declaring the practice of burning or burying alive of Hindu widows to be punishable by the criminal courts. Other legislation followed, countering what the British perceived to be interrelated issues involving violence against Hindu women, including the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856, Female Infanticide Prevention Act, 1870, and Age of Consent Act, 1891.
Isolated incidents of sati were recorded in India in the late-20th century, leading the Government of India to promulgate the Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987, criminalising the aiding or glorifying of sati. The modern laws have proved difficult to implement; as of 2020, at least 250 sati temples existed in India in which prayer ceremonies, or pujas, were performed to glorify the avatar of a mother goddess who immolated herself after hearing her father insult her husband; prayers were also performed to the practice of a wife immolating herself alive on a deceased husband's funeral pyre.[d]
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- ^ Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine (1999). Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 182–185. ISBN 978-0226885681. Quote: Between 1943 and 1987, some thirty women in Rajasthan (twenty-eight, according to official statistics) immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre. This figure probably falls short of the actual number. (p. 182)
- ^ Gilmartin, Sophie (1997). "The Sati, the Bride, and the Widow: Sacrificial Woman in the Nineteenth Century". Victorian Literature and Culture. 25 (1): 141–158. doi:10.1017/S1060150300004678. JSTOR 25058378. S2CID 162954709.
Suttee, or sati, is the obsolete Hindu practice in which a widow burns herself upon her husband's funeral pyre...
- ^ Feminist Spaces: Gender and Geography in a Global Context, Routledge, Ann M. Oberhauser, Jennifer L. Fluri, Risa Whitson, Sharlene Mollett. Quote: Sati is a practice in which widows commit suicide by burning themselves (or being burned) on their husband's funeral pyres.
- ^ Stein, Burton (2010). Arnold, David (ed.). A History of India (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. p. 90. ISBN 978-1-4051-9509-6.
The positions taken and the practices discussed by Manu and other commentators and writers of dharmashastras are not quaint relics of the distant past, but alive and recurrent in India today – as the attempts to revive the custom of sati (widow immolation) in recent decades has shown. Child marriages, forced marriage, dowry and the expectation of abject wifely subservience, too, have enjoyed lengthy duration and continuity and are proving very difficult to stamp out
- ^ a b c Brule, Rachel E. (2020). Women, Power, and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-1-108-83582-4. Quote: Sati is a particularly relevant social practice because it is often used as a means to prevent inheritance of property by widows. In parallel, widows are also sometimes branded as witches – and subjected to violent expulsion from their homes – as a means to prevent their inheritance.
- ^ Ramusack, Barbara N. (1999), "Women in South Asia", in Barbara N. Ramusack, Sharon L. Sievers (ed.), Women in Asia: Restoring Women to History, Indiana University Press, pp. 27–29, ISBN 0-253-21267-7
- ^ Dyson, Tim (2018), A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day, Oxford University Press, p. 20, ISBN 978-0-19-882905-8
- ^ Asher, Catherine B.; Talbot, Cynthia (2006), India before Europe, Cambridge University Press, pp. 268–, ISBN 978-1-139-91561-8
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