suttee

suttee, the Indian custom of a wife immolating herself either on the funeral pyre of her dead husband or in some other fashion soon after his death. Although never widely practiced, suttee was the ideal of womanly devotion held by certain Brahman and royal castes. It is sometimes linked to the myth of the Hindu goddess Sati, who burned herself to death in a fire that she created through her Yogic powers after her father insulted her husband, the god Shiva—but in this myth Shiva remains alive and avenges Sati’s death.

The first explicit reference to the practice in Sanskrit appears in the great epic Mahabharata (compiled in its present form about 400 ce). It is also mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek author of the 1st century bce, in his account of the Punjab in the 4th century bce. Numerous suttee stones, memorials to the wives who died in this way, are found all over India, the earliest dated 510 ce. Women sometimes suffered immolation before their husbands’ expected death in battle, in which case the burning was called jauhar. In the Muslim period (12th–16th century), the Rajputs practiced jauhar, most notably at Chitorgarh, to save women from rape, which they considered worse than death, at the hands of conquering enemies. The hardships encountered by widows in traditional Hindu society may have contributed to the spread of suttee.

The larger incidence of suttee among the Brahmans of Bengal was indirectly due to the Dayabhaga system of law (c. 1100), which prevailed in Bengal and which gave inheritance to widows; such women were encouraged to committ suttee in order to make their inheritance available to other relatives. In the 16th century, steps to prohibit suttee were taken by the Mughal rulers Humayun and his son Akbar. Suttee became a central issue under the British Raj, which first tolerated it, then inadvertently legalized it by legislating conditions under which it could be done, and then finally, in 1829, outlawed it—using the condemnation as one of its justifications for continuing British rule of India.

Suttee was sometimes committed voluntarily, but cases of compulsion, escape, and rescue are known. Scattered instances of it continue to occur, most notoriously in the case of Roop Kanwar, an 18-year-old widow who committed suttee in 1987. The incident was highly controversial, as groups throughout India either publicly defended Kanwar’s actions or declared that she had been murdered.