Sati may rest partly on a mistranslated word in an ancient hymn
Sati, the historical Hindu custom of a widow dying on her husband's funeral pyre, was long defended as scripturally sanctioned. One historian argues the Rig Veda described a symbolic rite in which the widow was raised from the pyre, and that a single word was later misread as into the fire.
The name comes from the goddess Sati, who in legend gave up her life over her father Daksha's insult to her husband Shiva. Originally the word meant a chaste or good wife, describing the woman rather than the act; British writers spelled it suttee. Whether early Hindu scripture mentions the practice at all is disputed. Anand A. Yang points to a Rig Veda ceremony in which a male relative lifted the widow from the unlit pyre, and suggests that agre, to go forth, was misread, probably in the sixteenth century, as agneh, into the fire.
The documentary trail is patchy. Greek writers around 300 BCE mention it in passing, and Hindu inscriptions record it from 464 CE, becoming common by the eleventh century. Romila Thapar links its spread to newly powerful warrior lineages, patriarchal kinship and control over women. It was concentrated among ruling and warrior groups, notably Rajput clans in western India, and was rarer in the south. European travellers recorded Mughal efforts to restrict it, Islam permitting widows to remarry.
Property and poverty played a part. In Bengal the practice grew among Brahmins between 1680 and 1830, after widows won inheritance rights, and colonial-era observers noted that relatives could gain by removing a widow who stood to inherit. Missionary William Carey counted 438 cases within about 30 miles of Calcutta in 1803, and documented cases in the Bengal Presidency more than doubled between 1815 and 1818.
Campaigning by Carey and the Hindu reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy led Governor-General Lord William Bentinck to outlaw it through the Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829; the Privy Council turned down a petition from 800 orthodox Hindus and upheld the ban in 1832. Historians such as Lata Mani caution that colonial debates distorted the story with myths of a lost golden age. After isolated cases in the late twentieth century, India's 1987 Sati (Prevention) Act made aiding or glorifying it a crime.
Source: Sati (practice)
