ABSTRACT
A Sati is a good woman, a woman devoted to her husband. Only in a subsidiary sense is the term ‘sati’ used to designate a woman who ‘is burned on the pyre along with the body of her husband’. Figueira suggests that European travellers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had described sati in India, which suggested coercion as well as devotion. Jauhar is the process of taking one’s own life, committing suicide, fighting desperately to the death. Oldenburg proposes that Brahmins borrowed the practice of jauhar from the Rajputs and modified the concept over time to suit their own sanskrit gender ideology of the good rather than the brave woman. Suicidal ideation must appear secondary to societal/kinship expectations if the woman is attempting to kill herself. Weinberger-Thomas has raised the question of the profile of groups like the Bhats and Charans from western India who have participated in protest suicides.
