ABSTRACT
It is a human phenomenon that, when confronted with other cultures, the attention is caught usually not by the plain and the ordinary, but by the extraordinary, the fanciful or the bizarre. The striking contrast with one’s own culture creates surprise and evokes numerous questions. It is therefore understandable that the practice of socalled ‘widow-burning’, sutti’ism,2 has from the beginning attracted the attention of travellers who visited India. The sad fate of many a widow was related by them in their itineraries in vivid and contrasting colours.3 This one-sided attention to the tragic and the grotesque has often led to a distorted picture of Indian culture, creating the impression that sutti’ism was once practised by broad strata of the population. This was never the case.4 It was only occasionally performed, and in most cases restricted to members of specific castes. So, during the heyday of sutti’ism at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century H.Th. Colebrooke, a famous indologist and judge in the High Court of Calcutta, could remark: ‘happily martyrs of this superstition have never been numerous’.5
