ABSTRACT
Suttee, or widow-burning, is derived from the Sanskrit " sati ", a true wife. This title of honour was applied to a wife whose devotion to her husband caused her to sacrifice hersell on the funeral pyre. Her religion was to serve her husband and to die, if worthy of the honour, at the funeral pyre. 4. Nickolaos Damaskenos, a Greek historian, who wrote toward the close of the first century B.C., says in his Paradoxical Oustoms, that when the Hindus die there is a great rivalry among the wives, each striving to be burnt at the pyre of her husband, and many others refer to the same fact. Although this custom among Hindu women does not seem to have been compulsory, yet the life of the widow was rendered intolerable if she refused to submit to this trying ordeal. In support of this theory we might cite the experience of Ibn Batutu, who visited Hindustan in 1325 A.D. Notwithstanding that this deals with a period very much later than the one we have under consideration, yet it seems to throw decided light upon the early rite of suttee. "A woman burning hersell with her husband is not considered an absolute necessity, but it is encouraged."5 By this means her family
become ennobled. If she refuses to be a. partioipant in the oeremony, she is ever afterward oompelled to olothe herself ooarsely and remain among her relatives. Abraham Roger, a Dutch missionary to India in the first half of the seventeenth oentury, oorroborates this evidenoe. Those who survive, he tells us, have their hair shorn, they may eat no betel, they may never marry again, nor wear any jewelry. If after undertaking the duty of a sati the widow recedes, she inours the penalty of defilement, but she may be purified by observing the feast of the Prajapatya.1 We have a very interesting account of suttee from the Persian treatise Dabi8tan. "When a woman becomes a suttee the Almighty pardons all the sins committed by wife or husband, and they remain along time in paradise, nay, even if her husband were in hell, the wife by this means draws him from thence. " Moreover, the suttee in a future birth returns not to the female state, but she who becomes not a suttee is never emanoipated from it.2
