सती प्रथा

The tradition & historical record

Sati or suttee is a chiefly historical Hindu practice in which a widow burns alive on her deceased husband's funeral pyre, either voluntarily, by coercion, or by a perception of the lack of satisfactory options for continuing to live. Although it is debated whether it received scriptural mention in early Hinduism, it has been linked to related Hindu practices in the Indo-Aryan-speaking regions of India, which have diminished the rights of women, especially those to the inheritance of property. A cold form of sati, or the neglect and casting out of Hindu widows, has been prevalent from ancient times. Greek sources from around c. 300 BCE make isolated mention of sati, and Hindu inscriptions from 464 CE onward, common by the 11th century, record the practice of a real fire sacrifice. The first references to sati in Brahmin law-books appeared in the 7th century. It was widely recognised, but not universally accepted, by the 12th century. Records of sati exist throughout many time periods and regions. There were significant differences in different regions and among communities; however, figures are scarce and incomplete for the number of widows who died by sati before the advent of the British period. In the early medieval era, sati was prevalent mainly among certain groups of feudal elites, but it became more widespread across Hindu social groups during the late medieval era. ¹

The practice is named after the Hindu goddess Sati, who is believed to have self-immolated because she was unable to bear her father Daksha's humiliation of her and her husband Shiva. The word sati was originally interpreted as 'chaste woman' and it appears in Hindi and Sanskrit texts where it is synonymous with 'good wife', therefore, initially referring to the woman, rather than the rite. The word suttee was commonly used by Anglo-Indian English writers. Variants are: Sativrata, an uncommon and seldom used term, denotes the woman who makes a vow (vrata), to protect her husband while he is alive and then die with her husband. Satimata denotes a venerated widow who committed sati. The rite itself had technical names: ¹

Sahagamana ('going with') or sahamarana ('dying with'). Anvarohana ('ascension' to the pyre) is occasionally met, as well as satidaha as terms to designate the process. Satipratha is also, on occasion, used as a term signifying the custom of burning widows alive. The Indian Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987 Part I, Section 2(c) defines sati as the act or rite itself, of "burning or burying alive". The spelling suttee is a phonetic spelling using 19th-century English orthography. The satī transliteration uses the more modern ISO/IAST (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration), the academic standard for writing the Sanskrit language with the Latin alphabet system. ¹

The origins and spread of the practice of sati are complex and much debated questions, without a general consensus. It has been speculated that rituals, such as widow sacrifice or widow burning, have prehistoric roots. The archaeologist Elena Efimovna Kuzmina has listed several parallels between the burial practices of the ancient Asiatic steppe Andronovo cultures (fl. 1800–1400 BCE) and the Vedic Age. She considers sati to be a largely symbolic double burial or a double cremation, a feature she argues is to be found in both cultures, with neither culture observing it strictly. ¹

Comparative linguistics and mythology suggest that the roots of widow sacrifice may date back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) society. In early Indo-European traditions, the ritual is believed to have originally taken a symbolic form, as reflected in the Rigveda (10.18.8), where a widow is instructed to briefly lie down next to her deceased husband on the funeral pyre before being called back to the world of the living by a relative. Over time, this shared Indo-European heritage evolved along different trajectories; while it remained symbolic or faded in some regions, it manifested as literal widow immolation or execution across several ancient branches, including the Thracians, early Slavs, Norse, and Germanic tribes, before eventually crystallising into the historical practice of sati on the Indian subcontinent. While classical Greece did not practice literal widow burning, clear cultural remnants of the Indo-European tradition survive in Greek mythology. A prominent example occurs in the legend of Evadne, who, out of consuming grief and devotion, threw herself directly onto the flaming funeral pyre of her husband Capaneus after he was slain during the siege of Thebes. ¹

According to Romila Thapar, in the Vedic period, when "mores of the clan gave way to the norms of caste", wives were obliged to join in quite a few rituals but without much authority. A ritual with support in a Vedic text was a "symbolic self-immolation" which it is believed a widow of status needed to perform at the death of her husband, the widow subsequently marrying her husband's brother. In later centuries, the text was cited as the origin of Sati, with a variant reading allowing the authorities to insist that the widow sacrifice herself in reality by joining her deceased husband on the funeral pyre. Anand A. Yang notes that the Rig Veda refers to a "mimetic ceremony" where a "widow lay on her husband's funeral pyre before it was lit but was raised from it by a male relative of her dead husband." According to Yang, the word agre, "to go forth", was (probably in the 16th century) mistranslated into agneh, "into the fire", to give Vedic sanction for sati. ¹

Sati as the burning of a widow with her deceased husband seems to have been introduced in the pre-Gupta era, since 500 CE. Vidya Dehejia states that sati was forced into Indian society through Hindu cultural practice, and became active practice after 500 CE. According to Ashis Nandy, the practice became prevalent from vedas and declined to its elimination in the 17th century to gain resurgence in Bengal in the 18th century from British ethical involvement. Historian Roshen Dalal postulates that its mention in some of the Puranas indicates that it slowly grew in prevalence from 5th–7th century and later became an accepted custom around 1000 CE among those of higher classes, especially the Rajputs. One of the stanzas in the Mahabharata describes Madri's suicide by sati, but is likely an interpolation given that it has contradictions with the succeeding verses. According to Dehejia, sati originated within the Kshatriya (warrior) aristocracy and remained mostly limited to the warrior class among Hindus. According to Thapar, the introduction and growth of the practice of sati as a forced fire sacrifice is related to new Kshatriyas, who forged their own culture and took some rules "rather literally", with a variant reading of the Veda turning the symbolic practice into the practice of pushing a widow and burning her with her husband. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Sati (practice)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

sati is funerary women sacrifice, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 9 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²