ABSTRACT
Suttee presented to the East India Company a far more difficult problem than female infanticide. The most grotesque and horrible incongruities would arise had suttee kept pace with our avowed and earnest desire to see natives taking a larger share in the government of the country. The Abbe Dubois gives a dramatic account of a suttee in which the elements of freewill and compulsion were perhaps blended in their normal proportions, and the scene thus described must have been so common as to justify a lengthy quotation. Some authorities hold that suttee was introduced into India from Scythian sources, while others maintain that it was a pre-Aryan custom in India which, along with other primitive and barbarous practices, Hinduism in due course absorbed. Individual officers and even a judge of the Nizamat Adalat, urged prohibition, but the Government of India considered that this would be generally resisted and might lead to rebellion.
