Quote:
Originally Posted by Narz  What's sati? |
in a nutshell when the husband dies he is cremated, the widow is (alive) place on the funeral pyre with her dead husband
in a famous incident during the Raj, Cololnel Napier, a british officer outlawed it, and the brahmans protested saying it was their custom and british promised to respect their customs. Napier replied: In my country we have a custom, when men burn women alive, we hang them.
The Straight Dope: What's up with those Indian widows who commit suttee?
the wiki link doesn't work but you can look it up in wiki:
Sati (practice)
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Satī (Devanagari: सती) (also suttee) was a Hindu funeral custom, largely defunct in modern India[1][2][3], in which the dead man's widow used to immolate herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.
The term is derived from the original name of a goddess (see article on Dakshayani), who immolated herself, unable to bear the humiliation of her (living) husband. The term may also be used to refer to the widow herself. The term sati is now sometimes interpreted as 'chaste woman'.
i would like to emphasize , however, the custom is all but vanished from india - as i said there are isolated cases, but to be fair, in rajasthan the woman who committed it in 1987 has hundreds of thousands of pilgrams a year to her cenotaph