Sati (practice)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Sati, also spelled suttee, is a chiefly historical Hindu practice in which a widow burns alive on her dead husband's funeral pyre. One of the earliest accounts comes from a Greek source describing 317 BCE. After the Battle of Paraitakene, the wives of Ceteus, an Indian captain serving the general Eumenes, competed for the right to burn on his pyre. The historian Diodorus tells how the younger wife was the one allowed to mount it.

  The widow might act willingly, or under coercion, or because she saw no acceptable way to keep living. Do the sacred texts of Hinduism actually call for such a death? Where did the practice come from, and why did it flourish in some centuries and regions but not others? Who defended it, who fought it, and what did each side stand to gain? And why do reports of it still surface in India today?

  134774

• 2. Words and Texts

  ›

  The practice takes its name from the Hindu goddess Sati, who is believed to have burned herself because she could not bear her father Daksha humiliating her and her husband Shiva. The word first meant a chaste woman. In Hindi and Sanskrit texts it is a synonym for a good wife, so it named the woman rather than the rite. Anglo-Indian English writers popularised the spelling suttee, a phonetic rendering in nineteenth-century English orthography. Scholars now write satī, following the ISO/IAST standard for Sanskrit.

  The rite itself had technical names. Sahagamana means going with, and sahamarana means dying with. Anvarohana means ascension to the pyre. Satidaha also appears, as does satipratha, which signifies the custom of burning widows alive.

  Whether scripture mentions the rite at all is debated. David Brick of the University of Michigan writes that sahagamana is absent from Vedic literature and from the early Dharmasutras of Apastamba, Hiranyakesin, Gautama, Baudhayana and Vasistha. It is also absent from the later Dharmasastras of Manu, Narada and Yajnavalkya. The historian Altekar says the Brahmana literature, dated about 1000-500 BCE, is entirely silent as well. The Grhyasutras, ritual manuals of roughly the same age, describe a different scene. There a brother of the dead man, or a trusted servant, brings the widow back from the pyre.

  One passage in the Taittiriya Aranyaka has the widow take her husband's bow, gold and jewels as she leaves his side. It expresses hope that she and her relatives will live happy and prosperous lives. The Satapatha Brahmana goes further and calls suicide immoral. Hindu scholars of the 11th to 14th centuries, including Medhatithi of Kashmir, later used that prohibition against sati.

  Still, a few verses fuel the argument. Translators have rendered the word yoni in Vedic verse 7 as go up into the dwelling, step into the pyre, mount the womb, and go up to where he lieth. One proposed reason for the discrepancy is that a single consonant was deliberately changed. The change turned a word meaning house into a word meaning fire, giving a text that seemed to justify burning. Anand Yang makes a related claim about the word agre, meaning to go forth. He says it was probably mistranslated in the 16th century as agneh, meaning into the fire.

  A twelfth-century commentary by Apararka, claiming to quote the Dharmasutra of Apastamba, supplies a rare detail. A widow who had vowed to ascend the pyre but then retracted had to perform the penance called Prajapatya-vrata.

  322584723

• 3. Witnesses and Stones

  ›

  Around 327 BCE the Greek historian Aristobulus of Cassandreia travelled to India with the expedition of Alexander the Great. His own works are lost, but fragments survive in the geographer Strabo. Aristobulus reports widows of one or more tribes sacrificing themselves on their husbands' pyres. Another author adds that widows who declined to die were held in disgrace. Megasthenes, who visited India around 300 BCE, says nothing of the kind. Vidya Dehejia takes his silence as a sign that the practice did not yet exist.

  The story of the wives of Ceteus reaches us through Diodorus. Modern historians believe his source was the lost eyewitness account of Hieronymus of Cardia. Hieronymus appears to have assembled his explanation from a variety of Indian traditions, shaping it into a moral lesson that upheld traditional Greek values. Scholars generally treat the episode as an isolated incident rather than a picture of general culture. Cicero and Nicolaus of Damascus separately mention widows who joined their husbands' pyres as a mark of love.

  In the Sanskrit world, Banabhatta's Harshacharita describes a woman named Yasomati. After choosing to mount the pyre, she bids farewell to her relatives and servants. She then dresses in jewelry, which she afterward gives away. Daṇḍin, in the Daśakumāracarita, also notes that women who burned themselves wore extravagant dresses. The same Harshacharita shows Harsha's sister Rajyasri trying to commit sati after her husband died. Yet in his Kadambari, Bana strongly opposes the custom and offers examples of women who chose another path.

  In Tamil literature, the Silappatikaram, written in the 2nd century CE, tells of Kannagi. Her wayward husband Kovalan is executed unjustly, and she burns the city of Madurai to the ground. She then climbs a cliff to join him in heaven. Kannagi became an object of worship, called Pattini in Sinhala and Kannagiamman in Tamil, and she is still worshipped today. An inscription on an urn burial from the 1st century CE tells of a widow who asked the potter to make the urn big enough for both her and her husband. The Purananuru claims that widows prefer to die with their husbands because of the dangerous negative power attached to them. Padma Sree notes that such glorified sacrifice was not unique to women, since good warriors likewise died for their kings and lands. She raises the possibility that wifely sacrifice grew from the warrior tradition. Women of this kind are still worshipped as Gramadevis across South India.

  Stone gives firmer dates. According to Axel Michaels, the first inscription is from Nepal in 464 CE, and the first in India is from 510 CE. The Indian one, at Eran, describes the wife of Goparaja, a vassal of Bhanugupta, burning herself on her husband's pyre. Such early evidence suggests the act was seldom carried out among the general population. J.C. Harle distinguishes two kinds of medieval memorial stone, the viragal or hero stone and the satigal or sati stone. Both appear in many regions, but rarely before the 8th or 9th century. Sati stones multiply from the 11th century onward, and Rajasthan holds the largest collections.

  In the Chola Empire of South India, the practice was uncommon. Even so, Vanavan Mahadevi, mother of Rajaraja Chola I in the 10th century, ascended her husband's pyre. So did Viramahadevi, queen of Rajendra Chola I, in the 11th century.

  4142445351

• 4. Spread and Sultans

  ›

  The archaeologist Elena Efimovna Kuzmina has listed parallels between the burial customs of the Andronovo cultures of the Asiatic steppe and those of the Vedic Age. The Andronovo cultures flourished around 1800-1400 BCE. She reads sati as a largely symbolic double burial or double cremation, observed strictly in neither culture. Romila Thapar offers a different frame. In the Vedic period, she says, the mores of the clan gave way to the norms of caste. New Kshatriyas, forging their own culture, took some rules rather literally. A variant reading of a Vedic text turned a symbolic act into the pushing of a widow onto the fire.

  Dehejia holds that sati became an active practice after 500 CE. The historian Roshen Dalal reads mentions in some Puranas as a sign of slow growth from the 5th to the 7th century. By around 1000 CE, she argues, it was an accepted custom among higher classes, especially the Rajputs. A stanza in the Mahabharata describes the suicide of Madri by sati, but it is likely an interpolation because it contradicts the verses that follow. Thapar points to the subordination of women in patriarchal society, changing systems of kinship, and control over female sexuality.

  In the medieval centuries, imitation played a role. People seeking the status of royalty and warriors adopted the practice as part of Sanskritisation. Its spread was also tied to centuries of Islamic invasion and to the hardship widows endured. Sati took on an added meaning as a way to preserve the honour of women whose men had been slain. It echoed jauhar, a self-chosen death for queens and noblewomen facing defeat in war, practised especially among the warrior Rajputs. Oldenburg suggests that Greek conquerors enslaving women may have started this. She argues that Brahmins of the north-west copied the Rajputs and recast the sati from a brave woman into a good woman. From those Brahmins, the custom passed to other non-warrior castes.

  David Brick traces another route in Kashmir. Brahmins there first rejected sati, but it spread among them in the later half of the first millennium. His evidence is the Vishnu Smriti, dated 700-1000 CE and believed to have been written in Kashmir. By the 12th century, he posits, the priestly class throughout India knew of the texts and the practice. In Bengal, Yang says it was practised by the 12th century, first among Kshatriyas and later among other castes, including Brahmins.

  The Rajputs also marked a dividing line with the Mughals, because Islam allows widows to remarry. Sultans of Delhi, namely Alauddin Khilji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq in the 13th and 14th centuries, tried to require permission before any sati. That requirement became a mere formality and did not apply to Hindu women of royal families. Humayun reportedly issued a ban and then withdrew it. Under Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, sati became regulated. Governors called kotwals were told to delay the widow's decision as long as possible. They demanded a steep fee and offered pensions and gifts to dissuade her.

  Akbar's own feelings were mixed. According to Annemarie Schimmel, he disliked the practice yet admired widows who wished to be cremated with their husbands. In 1582 he issued a decree against compulsion. M. Reza Pirbhai notes that no primary source except Monserrate actually records an Akbar ban.

  Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627, found sati common among the Hindus of Rajaur in Kashmir. His memoirs suggest he was fascinated by it, and that Kashmiri Muslim widows also burned or buried themselves with their husbands. He prohibited it in Kashmir. His governors and the Deccan Sultanates tried to dissuade requests but permitted sati for a fee. Sushil Chaudhury concludes that Hindus and Muslims alike went in large numbers to witness a sati, and that it was almost universally admired in medieval India.

  In 1663, Aurangzeb ordered, in the words reported by Sheikh Muhammad Ikram, that officials in all Mughal lands must never again allow a woman to be burnt. Bribes could evade the order. By the end of his reign, European travellers wrote that Indian women rarely burned unless they were the wives of some Rajah.

  358687052

• 5. Rite and Compulsion

  ›

  Most accounts show the widow seated or lying on the pyre beside her dead husband. Many others show women walking or jumping into flames already lit, and a few describe women lighting the fire themselves. The 17th-century traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier reports a small hut in some regions, where the widow and her husband were burnt together. In others, he says, a pit was dug and the husband's body laid in it with flammable materials. The widow then jumped in after the fire started. On the island of Lombok in the mid-19th century, the Balinese aristocracy practised widow suicide. Only royal widows could burn themselves alive, and others were first stabbed with a kris dagger. A high bamboo platform stood in front of the fire, and the royal widow dived from it at the height of the blaze.

  Burial was a rarer variant. Most Hindu communities in North India bury only those under the age of two. Yet the Portuguese Códice Casanatense contains a 16th-century drawing of a Hindu widow buried alive. Tavernier wrote that along the Coast of Coromandel, women were buried with their husbands while people danced. The Flemish painter Frans Balthazar Solvyns gave the only known eyewitness account of such a burial. He describes the woman shaving her head, music playing, and East India Company soldiers guarding the scene. He expressed admiration for the woman but called the custom barbaric.

  European visitors left stark pictures. In 1591 Ralph Fitch noted that a wife was burned with her husband if she was alive, and if she refused, her head was shaved and she was never counted again. François Bernier, who lived from 1620 to 1688, saw a beautiful young widow sacrificed at Lahor, apparently no older than twelve. She trembled and wept as three or four Brahmins and an old woman forced her toward the pit. They tied her hands and feet so she could not run. The Spanish missionary Domingo Navarrete wrote in 1670 of different styles of sati in Aurangzeb's time.

  Was the act voluntary? A narrative from 1785 suggests the widow was drugged with bhang or opium and tied to the pyre so she could not flee if she changed her mind. In 1822 the Salt Agent at Barripore, sixteen miles south of Calcutta, reported a woman held down by two men with a great bamboo. In Cuttack a woman dropped into a burning pit and rose as if to escape. A washerman pushed her back into the hottest part with a bamboo. A case from 1821 describes a woman thrown twice back into the fire by her relatives.

  Anant S. Altekar notes that escaping a fiery pit is much harder than descending from a pyre. He points to the pit as especially common in the Deccan and western India. In Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, where a hut was used, the widow's leg was tied to a pillar. In Bengal, where the pyre prevailed, her feet could be tied to posts. She was asked three times whether she wished to ascend to heaven before the flames were lit. Ram Mohan Roy observed that widows consented not from religious prejudice alone. They also saw the distress, insults and slights that befell widows of their rank. Altekar concludes that some records show forced cases beyond doubt, but most instances were voluntary.

  There is also a symbolic version. The widow lies beside her dead husband, and parts of the marriage and funeral ceremonies are enacted, but she does not die. An example from modern Sri Lanka is attested. The Atharvaveda, composed around 1000 BCE, describes a funerary ritual in which the widow lies down by her husband. She is then asked to rise and enjoy the blessings of the children and wealth he left behind. Dehejia argues that this single passage implies no earlier sati custom and may be a later insertion.

  7458737239

• 6. Numbers and Regions

  ›

  Anand Yang calls the data from before 1815 scanty and fraught with problems. A report from a Christian missionary organisation in 1829 lists sati for each year from 1815 to 1824 and totals 5,369. It then states that 5,997 women were burned or buried alive in the Bengal Presidency over ten years, an average of 600 a year. For Madras and Bombay together it gives 635 over the same period. The report gives no sources, admits some figures rest on conjecture, and concedes that no correct idea can be formed of the number of deaths.

  William Bentinck's own 1829 report counts 463 satis in the whole Presidency of Fort William, without naming a year. Of these, 420 occurred in Bengal, Behar and Orissa, and 287 in the Calcutta Division alone. In the Upper Provinces he counted only 43 among a population of nearly twenty million, about one for every 465,000 people.

  The 575 reported cases of 1823 challenge a common assumption. According to Yang, 41 percent of the women were Brahmins, 6 percent Kshatriyas, 2 percent Vaishyas and 51 percent Shudras. In Banaras in 1821, every case came from the upper castes. Many studies stress the youth of the widows, but British figures for 1815-1828 show an overwhelming majority of ageing women. In 1825-26, about two thirds were over 40.

  Yang sums up the geography this way. The practice was never general but confined to the Gangetic Valley, Punjab and Rajasthan in the north, the southern Konkan in the west, and Madurai and Vijayanagara in the south. In Maharashtra, Narayan Kulkarnee believes it arrived in the 17th century among Maratha nobility claiming Rajput descent. It never reached the prevalence of Rajasthan or Bengal, and customs of dissuading widows were well established. He finds no attested forced case in the 17th and 18th centuries. Putalabai, Shivaji's eldest childless widow, committed sati after his death. The widow of Chhatrapati Shahu I was forced into it in 1749, amid intrigue over succession at the Satara court. The most celebrated case was Ramabai, widow of the Brahmin Peshwa Madhavrao I, in 1772. It was unusual because Brahmin widows very rarely followed the practice.

  In the Vijayanagara Empire, only about 50 stones are clearly identified as sati stones. Carla Sinopoli concludes it was fairly uncommon despite the attention European travellers paid it. Records before 900 CE are almost absent in the south. The Madurai Nayak dynasty, which ruled from 1529 to 1736, adopted it more. A Jesuit priest in 1609 observed 400 women burned at the death of Nayak Muttu Krishnappa. The Kongu Nadu region of Tamil Nadu holds the highest number of Veeramathy temples. In the Princely State of Mysore, Dewan Purnaiah is said to have allowed a Brahmin widow to burn in 1805, while an eyewitness in 1827 called it rather uncommon in Bangalore.

  The Upper Gangetic plain shows no sign of widespread sati. The greatest incidence anywhere came in Bengal and Bihar in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In Nepal, an early inscription shows a king persuading his mother not to commit sati after his father died. This suggests it was practised but not compulsory. Nepal formally banned the practice in 1920. On Bali, where it was called masatya, aristocrats practised it as late as 1903. Dutch colonial authorities then forced the princes to sign treaties prohibiting it.

  The practice travelled with Hindu influence. In the early 14th century, the traveller Pordenone mentions wife burning in Zampa, which is Champa in present-day Vietnam. Anant Altekar says it spread to Java, Sumatra and Bali, though Dutch records call it rare in Indonesia and found in royal households. In Cambodia during the 15th and 16th centuries, lords and the wives of a dead king burned themselves voluntarily. European travellers report it in 15th-century Mergui, in the far south of Myanmar. A 15th-century Chinese pilgrim attests it on islands called Ma-i-tung and Ma-i. In Sri Lanka, missionaries wrote that there was no sati at all, although the earlier Muslim traveller Sulaiman al-Tajir said a widow could choose it.

  39384710100

• 7. Reformers and the Ban

  ›

  In 1510, Afonso de Albuquerque banned sati immediately after the Portuguese conquest of Goa. In 1555, local Brahmins convinced the newly arrived Francisco Barreto to rescind the ban, despite protests from local Christians and the Church. Constantino de Bragança reinstated it in 1560 with serious criminal penalties, including loss of property and liberty, for those encouraging the practice. The Dutch banned sati at Chinsurah and the French at Pondichéry. The Danes, who held Tranquebar and Serampore, permitted it until the 19th century.

  British action began in 1680, when Streynsham Master, the Agent of Madras, prohibited the burning of a Hindu widow. Individual officers tried to limit the practice, but the East India Company followed a policy of non-interference in Hindu religion. The first formal British ban came in 1798 and covered Calcutta only. In 1799 William Carey, a Baptist missionary from England, first saw a widow burned on her husband's pyre. Horrified, he and his coworkers Joshua Marshman and William Ward, known as the Serampore Trio, began lobbying for abolition. They addressed Governor General Lord Wellesley and published essays condemning the practice. Carey worked from Serampore, a Danish colony, because the Company did not accept missionary activity in its own domains.

  In 1803 Carey recorded 438 incidents within a 30-mile radius of Calcutta, about 48 kilometres, despite the ban in the city itself. Hindu theologians the missionaries consulted said the scriptures encouraged the act rather than commanded it. In 1813, as the Company's charter came up for renewal, William Wilberforce used Carey's statistics to win a Parliamentary bill legalising missionary activity. His hope was to end sati by transforming Indian society through religion. The Bengal Presidency began collecting data systematically in 1815. Documented incidents there doubled from 378 in 1815 to 839 in 1818.

  The revival under British rule had several drivers. By the 19th century many believed scripture supported sati. Some unscrupulous neighbours encouraged it to seize the property of a widow entitled to inherit under Hindu law. Julia Leslie writes that sati rose among Bengali Brahmins between 1680 and 1830, after widows gained inheritance rights. Extreme poverty gave some women no other hope of survival. Daniel Grey warns that colonial writers distorted the story by pushing theories of a problem Hindu. Lata Mani adds that every party to the debate believed in a golden age of Indian women, followed by decline after the Muslim conquests.

  In 1812 Ram Mohan Roy began campaigning, driven by seeing his own sister-in-law forced to die by sati. He visited the cremation grounds of Kolkata to talk widows out of immolation. He formed watch groups, sought support from elite Bengalis, and distributed articles arguing that scripture did not require sati. His attack aroused such anger that for a while his life was in danger. He published a tract in 1821, and in 1823 the Serampore missionaries published a book whose first three chapters opposed sati. In Gujarat, Sahajanand Swami, founder of the Swaminarayan sect, preached that sati had no Vedic standing and that only God could take a life he had given. Sir John Malcolm, Governor of Bombay, supported him.

  When Lord William Bentinck became Governor-General in 1828, he said that he felt a dreadful responsibility, in this world and the next, if he allowed the practice to continue one moment longer. Ram Mohan Roy warned him against abruptness. Bentinck saw that the judges were unanimously for reform and put the draft before his council. His most prominent counsellor, Charles Metcalfe, feared the ban could be used to produce insurrection, but still backed it. On Sunday the 4th of December 1829, Bentinck issued Regulation XVII, making sati punishable in criminal courts. The text went to Carey for translation. By one account, he sprang up, threw off his black coat and said, 'No church for me to-day... If I delay an hour to translate and publish this, many a widow's life may be sacrificed.' By evening the work was done.

  On the 2nd of February 1830 the law was extended to Madras and Bombay. A petition from several thousand Hindu inhabitants called sati a sacred duty and a high privilege. They called the interference unjust and intolerant. Bentinck rejected it, and the Privy Council in London rejected a further petition in 1832. Roy and British supporters presented counter-petitions to Parliament. In Sindh, Balochi priests complained to the governor, Charles Napier. He replied that his own nation had a custom too: 'When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property.' According to the account, no sati followed. Burton Stein, echoing Roy, notes that women's lives stayed wretched whether or not sati was legal. Families in Bengal kept casting out widows, some of whom were forced into sex work.

  The princely states followed at different speeds. Baroda and the other states of the Kathiawar Agency banned the practice in 1840, and Kolhapur followed in 1841. Jaipur banned it in 1846, and within four months 11 of the 18 independently governed states in Rajputana had followed. Hyderabad, Gwalior and Jammu and Kashmir acted in 1847. Mewar resisted longest. The last legal case in a princely state came at Udaipur in 1861, when the widows of Maharanna Sarup Singh declined to become sati and only a concubine followed him in death. Later that year a proclamation from Empress Victoria banned sati generally. Some states never accepted it at all. In 1818 the regent Gowri Parvati Bayi of Travancore urged the British Resident not to permit a sati, since it had never been acceptable in her domains.

  7576798190

• 8. Living Memory

  ›

  Lindsey Harlan, after extensive fieldwork among Rajput women, describes how those who burned are still venerated. A woman becomes a sati in three stages. First she is a pativrata, a dutiful wife who protects her husband. If he dies first, some blame attaches to her for failing to protect him. A solemn vow to burn at his side lifts that blame and lets her protect him in the afterlife. Having made the vow, she becomes a sativrata, a transitional figure between the living and the dead called the Antarabhava.

  As a sativrata she is believed to hold supernatural powers. Lourens Van Den Bosch lists prophecy, clairvoyance, and the ability to bless women with sons. On her way to the pyre, people try to touch her garments, and her gifts are kept as relics. She sets conditions called ok, such as restrictions on the colours family members may wear. She can also issue curses, called shrap. One woman cursed her in-laws for bringing neither a horse nor a drummer to her pyre. She said that whenever they needed one in future, it would be unavailable.

  After death she becomes the satimata, a spiritual embodiment of goodness and a family protector. She appears in the dreams of family members and teaches the women to be good pativratas. Yet she may let children fall ill or cows' udders wither if a living wife has neglected her duties. In the 20th century a tradition arose of venerating jivit, or living satis, women who once wished to burn but lived after giving up the desire to die. Bala Satimata and Umca Satimata were two famous examples, and both lived until the early 1990s. As of 2020, at least 250 sati temples existed in India, where pujas honour the goddess Sati and also the practice itself.

  The case of Roop Kanwar, an 18-year-old, brought the question back into law in 1987. The Government of India enacted the Rajasthan Sati Prevention Ordinance on the 1st of October 1987, and later passed the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987. Supporting sati, including coercing someone, can bring the death penalty or life imprisonment. Glorifying it carries a prison term of one to seven years and a fine of 5,000 to 30,000 rupees. This glorification clause is heavily criticised from both sides. Defenders call sati part of Indian culture, while opponents worry the clause could be read to punish the victim. The Calcutta Marwari have been noted for sati worship and insist it is part of their culture. In 2002, a mob of about 1,000 people attacked two police officers trying to stop a sati.

  India recorded 30 reported cases of sati or attempted sati from 1943 to 1987, though the official number was 28. Later reports include Charan Shah, a 55-year-old Dalit woman, in November 1999 in Satpura village, Uttar Pradesh. In 2002, Kuttu, aged 65, died on her husband's pyre in Panna district. Janakrani, aged 40, burned on the pyre of her husband Prem Narayan in Sagar district in August 2006, and reports say nobody forced her. In May 2023, a 28-year-old woman in Ahmedabad died by suicide after her in-laws allegedly forced her to commit sati.

  Scholars disagree about how to read these cases. Dinesh Bhugra suggests severe bereavement may trigger a state of depersonalization, though he thinks culture likely played a role in Roop Kanwar's case. Inamdar, Oberfield and Darrell note that such women are often childless or old and living in impoverished misery. Colucci and Lester point out that none of the women reported by the media was given a psychiatric evaluation. Without that, no objective data can say whether culture or mental illness drove the deaths.

  1517451