Sati (practice)

This article is about ritual suicide/murder. For other uses, see Sati (disambiguation).

A 19th-century painting depicting the act of sati.

Sati or suttee was a Hindu historical practice in which a widow should sacrifice herself by sitting atop her deceased husband's funeral pyre. It has been linked to related Hindu practice in regions of India. Sati appears in some post-Vedic Hindu texts as an entirely voluntary and optional practice.[1] Greek sources from around c. 300 BCE make isolated mention of sati, but it likely 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.

The sati of Ramabai, the wife of Peshwa Madhavrao I in 1772.

During the early-modern Mughal period of 1526–1857, it was notably associated with elite Hindu Rajput clans in western India. 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 through British enlightenment. 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.[a]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference :7 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ 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.


Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).