Suttee A Historical And Philosophical Enquiry Into The Hindu Rite Of Window Burning

THE SAME A UTHOR IN COLLABO-
RATION WITH HIS WIFE

Three Eastern Plays

With a terminal Essay on Suttee

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SUTTEE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

VERSE

Via Triumphalis
Selected Poems

DRAMA

Krishna Kumari
Atonement

Three Eastern Plays (with Theodosia
Thompson)

FICTION

Cithaeron Dialogues

An Indian Day

These Men Thy Friends

HISTORY

The Other Side of the Medal
A History of India (Benn's Sixpenny
Library)

"SAIl" MEMORIALS ON THE ROAD TO HAMFI

U T T E E

A HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL

ENQUIRY INTO THE HINDU RITE

OF WIDOW-BURNING

BY

EDWARD THOMPSON

LONDON

GEORGE ALLEN fif UNWIN LTD.
MUSEUM STREET

rights

" THIS last proof of the perfect unity of body and soul, this
devotion beyond the grave, has been chosen by many of
our Western critics as t our reproach; we differ from them
in thinking of our * suttees ' not with pity, but with under-
standing, respect, and love So far from being ashamed of
our ' suttees/ we take a pride in them ; that is even true
of the most ' progressive ' amongst us. It is very much
like the tenderness which our children's children may some
day feel for those of their race who were willing to throw
away their lives for ' their country, right or wrong/ though
the point of view may seem to us then, as it seems to so
many of us already, evidence rather of generosity than
balanced judgment . . . For some reason it has come to
be believed that Sati must have been a man-made institu-
tion l imposed on women by men for reasons of their own,
that it is associated with feminine servility, and that it
is peculiar to India. We shall see that these views are
historically unsound. It is true that in aristocratic circles
Sati became to some degree a social convention, and pressure
was put on unwilling individuals, precisely as conscripts are
even now. forced to suffer or die for other people's ideas;
and from this point of view we cannot but be glad that it
was prohibited by law in 1829 on the initiative of Raja
Rammohun Roy. But now that nearly a century has passed,
it should not be difficult to review the history and significance
of Sati more dispassionately than was possible in the hour
of controversy and the atmosphere of religious prejudice."
ANANDA COOMARASWAMY, The Dance of Siva, published 1924,
91-2.

" The devotion of Alcestis ! Assuredly the heroic unselfish-
ness of woman is a beautiful thing ; and I warrant you that,
the gods helping me, Alcestis shall take no injury from my
hands. But what of Admetus as a husband ? That is an
aspect of the matter upon which our hymuists and our

1 Author's note : "' Social conventions ' are rarely '
laws ' alone."

8 SUTTEE

congregations are little disposed to dwell, and they find
no difficulty in ignoring it. It belongs to the skimble-
skamble thinking which aids and is aided by faith in these
monstrosities never to see anything steadily, never to see
anything whole, but only such parts as please And your
heroic tragedy is beloved for flattering this habit. But
there are flatterers enough ; and, for my part, I intend to "
give you much more of Admetus than of Alcestis He is
much better for you. You are accustomed to rest with
complacency on the picture of the self-sacrificing woman as
the ideal of wives For herself she deserves such admiration,
but for men and for society, no ! I should like to make
you feel, and I mean to try, what a blind, barbarous, self-
defeating selfishness is at the bottom of all this rapture about
the devotion of woman. You will say that the women join
in it. But what sort of women ? What are the women
bred by our system of semi-humanity but the most dangerous
of our slaves ? Prohibited by your generosity from acquiring
intelligence except at the cost of respect, the poor creatures
are so dull that they cannot even distinguish a friend from
an enemy. Your magnanimous satirists have no difficulty
in directing the almost unanimous resentment of the sex
against whoever dares to see and show what mischief to
themselves and to us results from their ill-governed virtue
not less than from their ungoverned vice. I pity Alcestis,
and I pity her husband. What would she make of him ?
What does she make of him ? "A. W. VERRALL, Euripides
the Rationalist, 118-19 (Euripides is supposed to be speaking),

9 It is a strange commentary on the magnanimity of men
that they should seek their deliverance through the self-
sacrifice of their wives/' AKBAR, quoted by ABUL FAZL in
Happy Sayings of His Majesty (Aw-i-Akban, Institutes of
Akbar), Jarret, iii, 398.

PREFACE

I SUPPOSE the impulse to write this book dates back
to my shame and anger in India when men and women
of my own race extolled suttee, and the amazement
with which I first saw the memorials of Hindu kings,
with the satis' crouching forms. But the impulse
was slight, and would have slept but for a publisher's
interest. Messrs. Allen & Unwin passed on to me
questions asked about suttee by their reader when
reporting on my share in Three Eastern Plays. Re-
ceiving my reply, they suggested that I should write
an Essay on Suttee. I said I would ; but the essay at
once got out of hand and became a monograph. I
found with surprise how slight was the attention
given in any language, Indian or European, to the
subject, and how loose and erroneous were many
statements of even the best historians. Our ignorance
of what is commonplace and pervading in the atmo-
sphere and background of Indian thought justified!
the slight terminal essay that appeared as an appendix
to Three Eastern Plays ; but the necessity was
unfortunate, for reviewers assumed an afterthought
as a first cause, and said the plays were about or
even against suttee.

ID SUTTEE

The late Lieutenant-Colonel C. Eckford Luard,
CJLE., helped me with discussion and information.
His death was as heavy a loss as any that Indian
scholarship has suffered in recent years, and to his
friends a thing hard to be borne.

The picture of Chitor is reproduced from Tod's
Rajasthan, by courtesy of the Clarendon Press ; the
other three illustrations are reproduced from Govern-
ment of India publications, by courtesy of the High
Commissioner for India. I acknowledge these favours
gratefully. Part of Chapters VI to VIII appeared in
the London and Edinburgh Quarterlies.

Except when a misspelling was so well established
that accuracy would have been pedantry, I have used
the orthography accepted by scholars. But the
authorities whom I quote made shots at transliteration
which resulted in a wide range of variation. My
printers, noting this, have been at pains to correct
many of these mistakes ; and I have been too tolerant,
when they have done this, to restore the false spelling
of my original.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE g

CHAPTER

I ORIGIN OF SUTTEE 15

XL PREVALENCE AND AREA OF THE RITE: SUTTEE

MEMORIALS 28

III. THE FORM THAT SUTTEE TOOK ... 39

IV. REASONS FOR SUTTEE 44

V. WAS SUTTEE VOLUNTARY ? 52

VI. ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION: LAST YEARS OF

LEGAL SUTTEE IN BRITISH INDIA , . . 57

VII. PROHIBITION IN BRITISH INDIA .... 75

VIII. THE SUPPRESSION OF SUTTEE IN NATIVE STATES 82

IX. ILLEGAL SUTTEE 117

X, LEGAL SUTTEE TO-DAY 12?

XL CONCLUDING CONSIDERATIONS 1 29

APPENDIX: SOME ACCOUNTS OF SUTTEE . . 145

INDEX 159

ILLUSTRATIONS

*' SATI " MEMORIALS ON THE ROAD TO HAMPI . Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

"SATl" MEMORIAL IN FRONT OF THE JAINA TEMPLE BY

THE RIVER, HAMPI 32

CHITOR, SHOWING THE " MAHASATI " .... 34

MEMORIAL STONES OF THE MANDI RAJAS . . IO2

SUTTEE

CHAPTER I
ORIGIN OF SUTTEE

SUTTEE AND THE HINDU SCRIPTURES.

THE rite by which a Hindu widow became soft,
" faithful/' had two forms : sahamarana, " dying in
company with/' and anwnarawa, " dying in accord-
ance witfy/' The latter was the term used when her
lord died and was burned at a distance from her
during a campaign perhaps, or when her own death
was postponed because she was pregnant ; she was
then burned with something that belonged to and
represented her husband his shoes or turban or
some piece of clothing. Sahamaratya and anumamna
were sometimes called sahagamana, " going along
with/' and anugamana. There were other names for
the rite, local or less usual. Sat? is the term used
of the woman, and never of the rite ; its application
in the latter sense is modern and European.

" We have not found the term exactly in any European
document older than Sir C. Malet's letter of 1787 and Sir W.
Jones's letter of the same year." *

For' convenience, I intend to use throughout this

* Sir H. Yule and A. C. Buniell, Hobson-Jobson, article " Suttee."

16 SUTTEE

book sail for the person who commits this form of
ceremonial suicide, and the anglicized form " suttee "
for the act itself.

Anumam^a had its drawbacks in a land and age
of rumours hastily accepted for truth. Instances are
on record of widows hearing that their husbands
had died while away from home and burning them-
selves a few days before their safe return. It was
forbidden to women of the Brahman caste, and,
although this rule was freely transgressed, especially
in Bengal, its existence was ascertained by the British
Government, who prohibited this kind of suicide by
Brahmanis in 1817, twelve years before suttee itself
was prohibited altogether.

Suttee is ancient ; but, as a Hindu rite, not of the
greatest antiquity. The Rig-Veda very fully presents
the funeral ceremonies of the Aryans, but contains
only one or two lines that may, on a dubious twisting
and loosening of their natural meaning, glance at
suttee. The one line which was held to enjoin it
clearly was shown by Professor Wilson x to have
' been deliberately changed ; and Max Miiller says of
it that it was " mangled, mistranslated, and mis-
applied." 2 There was certainly suspicion of its
untrustworthiness, if not full knowledge, long before
European scholars revealed it, for, in the thirty
years of vacillation before the British Government

* See Essays and Lectures Chiefly on the Religion of the Hindus, by
H. H. Wilson, 1862, li. 270-292.

ORIGIN OF SUTTEE 17

dared to suppress suttee, Hindu pundits were con-
tinually asked for their opinion, and rarely cared
to say more than that suttee was recommended,
but not actually commanded, by their shastras.
Rammohan Ray treated the alleged shastric support
with a verbal respect that thinly veiled his con-
tempt for it.
The original text ran :

Arohantu janayo yonwn agre

(Let the mothers advance to the altar first )

By a change of two letters, of ogre to agneh, the
genitive of agm, " fire/' the line became :

Arohantu janayo yonim agneh

(Let the mothers go into the womb of fire )

Max Miiller calls this celebrated change of text
" perhaps the most flagrant instance of what can be
done by an unscrupulous priesthood." l The tag,
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, comes to mind.
Yet, to be fair, we should probably have to substitute
for religio whatever is the Latin equivalent for
" literary conscience." For, though the change from
agre to agneh is almost certainly proved both by
context and by reference to the early Hindu com*
mentators on the Rig-Veda, yet in the uncontaminated
passage the word yoni is used with a looseness of

* Selected Essays on Language, Mythology, and Religion (1881),
i- 335-

i8 SUTTEE

meaning that a purist would dislike. That meaning
is secondary and careless, like the meaning put upon
nice, in " a nice cake " or "a nice girl." The man
who changed agre to agneh was three parts pedant
to one part bigot, and the change illustrates the,
extent to which a thoroughly scholarly mind is pre-
pared to go to get a satisfactory reading.

The original text had no reference to widows or to
suttee, but was an injunction laid on all the mothers
present. G. U. Pope has a comment similar to Max
Miiller's : " Few false readings have had consequences
so fearful ! " x But widow-burning, though the com-
ment is justified, cannot have been established by
this change of text, but only encouraged. It must
have had already a vogue which demanded that
support in the earliest scriptures be found for it.
And the change must have been a comparatively
late one, for though the Atharva-Veda has texts
enjoining suttee, in other sacred books, ancient but
(like the Atharva-Veda) admittedly much later than
the Rig-Veda, the examples of widow-burning cited
are few and plainly exceptional. In the Mahdbhdrata,
one of the two widows of Pandu is, after a lengthy
argument between her and her co-wife as to which
is entitled to the privilege, allowed as a high honour
to share her husband's pyre. Four of Krishna's
wives and four of Vasudeva's burned on their lord's
death. But " after the great war in Kuru-kshetra
1 Dubois (second edition, 1879), 180.

ORIGIN OF SUTTEE 19

none of the numerous royal ladies burned herself." x
The Rdmdyana is free, from suttee. The lawgiver
Manu, commending it^ _does_not i( commanjgLit. Such
scriptural support as Hinduism gave the rite is mainly
jn the much later Puranas, where we find the legend
of Kali as sail, the faithful wife who slew^herself in
grief for an insult to her lord Siva. The few instances
in the Mahdbhdrata are later interpolations. " The
much-abused Tantms forbid it." *

When the attention of the British Government
was first seriously drawn to the rite, it was so
entrenched by centuries of performance that the
enquiry as to whether Hindu scriptures enjoined it
was irrelevant and useless. It was as well established
as the habit of warfare in Christian Europe. Never-
theless, the enquiry had a value, if only because it
helped to encourage the Government at last to break
through its timidity and past its promises of toleration
for all religious rites. This rite was not only obviously
immoral and wicked, it was also not essential to
Hinduism.

ORIGIN OF THE RITE.

By the fourth century B.C. Alexander's soldiers
found suttee prevalent in the Pan jab, and

" that it was practised by the half -foreign city of Taxila

1 Balfour, Cyclopaedia of Ind%a, article " Suttee/'
* Sir Charles Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism . u. 168

20 SUTTEE

along with other startling customs, and that it also prevailed
among the Kathaioi, who dwelt on the banks of the Ravi. 1 ' *

Western scholars often ascribe suttee to " Scythian "
influence. Thus Vincent Smith says :

" The scanty evidence as to Taxilan institutions taken*
as a whole suggests that the civilization of the people
was compounded of various elements Babylonian, Iranian,
Scythian and Vedic. Suttee probably was a Scythian rite
introduced from Central Asia." 3

And again :

" There can be little doubt that the suttee rite was brought
into India by early immigrants over the north-western
passes," 3

brought from what the author has just styled

" tribes in Central and Western Asia, and even in Eastern
Europe, who may be called Scythians in a general way."

This " Scythian " theory is adopted by most writers
who refer to suttee, following the Oxford History.
But the theory dates back to Tod's famous Annals
and Antiquities of Rajasthan.

Herodotus 4 says that the Scythians, at the burial
of their kings, used to kill, embalm, and bury in the
barrow fifty youths on fifty horses, along with the
king's cup-bearer, cook, groom, lackey, messenger,
and " one of his concubines/' But there is only the
slightest resemblance 5 between this holocaust of a

1 Vincent A. Smith, Oxford History of India, 665,
* Ibid., 62. 3 Ibid., 665. 4 iv. 71-73.

5 An exception must be made for Rajasthan and adjacent
territory, where male slaves were often burnt as well as female ones.

ORIGIN OF SUTTEE 21

king's entire range of possessions (golden vessels and
trinkets and robes included) and Hindu suttee. There
is a nearer resemblance between suttee and Thracian
funeral rites.

" Each man among them has several wives ; and no sooner
does a man die than a sharp contest ensues among the wives
upon the question which of them all the husband loved
most tenderly. The friends of each eagerly plead on her
behalf, and she to whom the honour- is adjudged, after
receiving the praises both of men and women, is slain over
the grave by the hand of her next of kin, and then buried
with her husband. The others are sorely grieved, for nothing
is considered such a disgrace/' *

There is no evidence that suttee was introduced
from " Scythia/' or from anywhere outside India
introduced, that is, after the Vedic period, which is
what the Oxford History implies. If it had been so
introduced, it would have been under brahmanical
sanction ; but the Brahmans, while presiding at the
sacrifice and drawing fees from it and in every way
supporting it, kept a memory that it was not a rite
to which their own women were liable, and invented
a text which, while enjoining it for other castes,
forbade it to Brahmanis. Dubois writes in 1816 :

" The Brahman women no longer continue the practice
of burning themselves alive with the bodies of their husbands.
This custom is relinquished to other castes, as well as many
others which require the endurance of bodily pain.*' *

1 Herodotus, v. 5 (translated by George Rawlinson) ,
Manners and Customs of the People of India (1879 edition), 174.
Suttee is forbidden to Brahmanis in the Brhaddevata, which leaves
it open for other castes. " With regard to the other castes, this
law for women may be or may not be."

22 SUTTEE

Dubois' statement holds chiefly of Southern India,
for Brahman women burnt freely enough in Bengal
and Rajasthan to a much later date than 1816. Yet
it is likely that the women of this caste did, even in
Bengal and Rajasthan, enjoy some measure of im-
munity from the rite.

Suttee was a custom to glorify the warrior caste,
and especially princes. It would have been strange
if the Aryans when living in Central Asia had refrained
from copying their neighbours " the Scythians," and
yet, centuries later, when long settled in India, had
imported the rite from a people now at least a
thousand miles away. But, though we must reject
this theory of a later borrowing, the mere, silence of
the Rig-Veda must not be pressed so far as to be held
to prove that suttee was unknown to, or even among,
the Aryan invaders. Sir Charles Eliot states the
utmost that those who assert that the rite existed in
Vedic times are entitled to claim the evidence being
against the claim, but not so conclusively as to make
his qualified form of it impossible:

' Even in the Vedic age the custom had been discontinued
as barbarous " (i.e. it had been in vogue, was still a memory
and perhaps an occasional practice). " But even at this
period those who did not follow the Vedic customs may have
killed widows with their husbands ; and later the invaders
from Central Asia probably reinforced the usage." *

In the Vedic funeral rites the widow lay by her
husband on the pyre. But, immediately after the

1 Hinduism and Buddhism, ii. 168.

ORIGIN OF SUTTEE 23

Arohantu janayo yonim agre

(Let the mothers advance to the altar first),

the hymn, continues with the exhortation :

" Rise up, woman, come to the world of living beings ;
thou sleepest nigh unto the lifeless. Come ; thou hast been
associated with maternity through the husband by whom thy
hand was formerly taken.

" Taking his bow from the hand of the dead, that it may
be to us for help. . . ." l

As the widow descended from the pyre the dead
man's friends took from his hand the symbol of his
caste, whether Brahman, Kshatriya, or Vaisya (priest,
warrior, or merchant) a piece of gold, a bow, or a
jewel. The leader a of the Hindu party who asserted
in the nineteenth century the Vedic sanction of suttee
interpreted these words thus :

" If the widow thus addressed has not made up her mind
for her immolation, she obeys the call ; but should she be
firm in her resolve, she consoles her friends and relatives
and enters the fire " 3

The plain interpretation of the text is that she returns
to the world of the living ; and I suppose no scholar
of repute would now maintain that suttee was a
Vedic rite.

The rite was almost certainly, in my judgment,
indigenous to India, along with human sacrifice and
other primitive cruelties, when the Aryans entered

1 H. H. Wilson, Essays, li. 272

* Raja Radhakanta Deb. See Wilson, Essays, n. 293-305

3 Wilson, Essays, 297

24 SUTTEE

the land. They found it flourishing among the savage
clans of Central India, the clans from whom they
later borrowed the goddess Kali and a whole wilderness
of malignant godlings and superstitions, and it was
taken into Hinduism along with the people who
tenaciously clung to it. Later invasions from Central
Asia may have " reinforced the usage " ; the Rajputs,
who practised suttee on such an awful scale and
relinquished it so late and unwillingly who also
often sacrificed male slaves on the pyres of their
kings represent immigrations later 1 than the Aryan
ones, and from more barbaric tribes. This fact allows
for the entrance of the " Scythian " theory, but by
a different door from that indicated by Vincent Smith.
Widow-r&acrifice was ojice almost, universal. Grimm
states 3 that it was a custom of the Scandinavian
peoples ; the legend of Balder, in which Nanna
ascends his pyre, kept a memory of it, as did the
Norse versions of the Volsunga Saga, which make
Brunhild a $aK. The rite was Slavonic also, and

"the practice of burning the living widow with the corpse
of the husband is stated to have been an ancient Indo-
Germanic custom, based upon the belief that life in the next
world is a reflex of this life." 3

* Some at least two millenniums later.

a Quoted by N. M. Penzer (1926), m Terminal Essay on Suttee,
vol. iv of C. H Tawney's Ocean of Story I have drawn upon
his summary of the evidence of the ancient, almost universal
prevalence of widow-sacrifice, but I have supplemented it from
many other sources.

3 N. M. Penzer, Suttee, 255.

ORIGIN OF SUTTEE 25

In Greek legend, Evadne, wife of Capaneus, one of
the Seven Against Thebes, burned with her husband ;
some of the accounts of (Enone made her do the same
with her false lover Paris, accounts which Tennyson
adopted in his Death of (Enone, a poem coloured by
Anglo-Indian accounts of suttee. We have seen it
in Thrace, as well as in Scythia ; and the visitor to
Luxor can see it still as it was practised in Ancient
Egypt> the most humane (with the exception of
Athens) of the countries of antiquity. The tomb of
Amen-hetep II, the one king whose body is still
in situ, has in an adjoining chamber to the one in
which the king lies four embalmed bodies of slaughtered
wives the guide switches on the electric light and
reveals them huddled there.

' Such customs, however, seem to have belonged to the
early dynasties, and it is only with bloodthirsty rulers like
Amen-hetep II that the old customs were revived." *

Widow-sacrifice used to exist among the Tongans
and Fijians and Maoris,* and in many African tribes.
There were relics of it in the funeral custom of some
American Indian tribes, which required the widow
to lie beside her husband on the pyre, as in Vedic
ritual, till the smoke began to be suffocating, when
she might escape. In China re-marriage of widows

i N. M Penzer, Suttee, 256.

Old New Zealand, by a Pakeha Maori (F. E, Maning), 1863,
218 ff.

26 SUTTEE

" was always looked upon as an act of unchastity, while
those who committed suicide at their husband's death had
honorary gateways . . . erected in their honour by Imperial
command. " r

In fact, the rite belongs to a barbaric stratum which
once overlay the world, including India. That bar-
baric stratum in India kept its first texture of fierce
cruelty longest in the mountainous tract running
across the centre of the land, from the Rajput fast-
nesses to the wooded hills of Orissa and the rocky
jungles where the Vindhyas crumble down in Bihar.

To sum up : this relic of once widely spread savagery
had sunk into desuetude among the Aryans, or their
hymns would have contained clear and full mention
of it the burning of the widow would hardly have
been a less important and interesting incident than
the bringing of the sacrificial butter or the holy
&w&z-grass. The rite came in with tribes taken into
Hinduism, and its performance became common ;
and it survived till within living memory, practised
by a people in many respects highly civilized and
genuinely, though capriciously, humane. The Vedic
religion so changed, from being an imaginative
animism and nature-worship a brook which, though
we need not exaggerate its depth or the purity of
its waters, was at any rate open to the sunlight and
air into a densely overgrown quag of polytheism,
magic, and blood-stained superstition, that we need

1 Penzer, Suttee.

ORIGIN OF SUTTEE 27

not wonder at finding the grossest cruelty ruling in
the far-off descendants of a people once entitled to
the praise of comparative gentleness. Other religions
have suffered a similar change ; but I think that no
religion, not even Christianity in its days of frantic
bigotry and of massacre of heretics and witches, so
completely changed to malignancy as Hinduism did.
Both religions admittedly kept their islands of nobler
belief and practice: the monastic orders during the
long period when they were the most civilizing element
in Europe, and the Indian forest-sages these have
enriched both the social and personal ideals of man-
kind. But there is very little in the official religions
that does not depress the thinker who wishes to keep
faith in his race.

CHAPTER II

PREVALENCE AND AREA OF THE RITE:
SUTTEE MEMORIALS

THE custom was " notorious and well established in
the Panjab in the fourth century B.C./' I but we may
take it 'that it was not confined to the Panjab. There
is an almost unbroken chain of foreign reference to
the rite, from Alexander's time to our own day; it
includes Strabo, Propertius, St. Jerome, Marco Polo,
and travellers from Mahommadan lands as well as
Christian. From the sixteenth century to the early
decades of the nineteenth we have many scores of
accounts of suttee by eye-witnesses ; it was not an
event that a visitor could for long escape noticing.
Yet " the rite was never universal, either in all parts
of India, nor was it ever regarded as obligatory on
all widows/' a However, as Vincent Smith goes on
to say, "the sacrifice was often, and especially in
the case of princes, compulsory, so that scores or
hundreds of women might be, and actually were,
burnt at the funeral of a single Raja, with or without
their consent." As Mr, Coomaraswamy absurdly puts
it, " It is true that in aristocratic circles Sati became
to some degree a social convention, and pressure was

1 Oxford History of India, 665. * Ibid.

PREVALENCE AND AREA OF THE RITE 29

put on unwilling individuals." * It is hard to think
of it as anything but compulsory in certain parts of
India but I shall return to this question.

The rite was an apanage of rank, but was fostered
.and spread by priestly influence.

" It was introduced into Southern India with the brah-
manical civilization, and was prevalent there chiefly in the
strictly brahmanical kingdom of Vijayanagar and among
the Mahrattas. In Malabar, the most primitive part of
South India, the rite is forbidden/' a

In Malabar a matriarchal system prevailed, which
may account for the absence of the rite.

The Marathas are generally included among those
who practised suttee greatly, but this is a mistake.
They rendered the rite a fluctuating and unsteady
allegiance; perhaps the only Hindu principalities
that attempted to prohibit it before the British
prohibition were Maratha ones. In the eighteenth
century suttee became fairly frequent at Poona, but
even then it remained comparatively infrequent. The
suttees at the death of Marathas of the higher rank
are remarkably few. Only one wife of Sivaji 3 became
sail, and one of Rajaram, his son. The masterful
Queen of Raja Shahu was compelled to burn for
political reasons, to get her out of the way. The
main homes of the rite were the Ganges Valley, the
Panjab, Rajasthan, and, in South India, Madura and
Vijayanagar.

1 The Dance of Siva> 92, * Hobson-Jobson, article ** Suttee/*
3 Sivaji died in 1680, Rajaram in 1700, Shahu in 1749.

30 SUTTEE

The extent to which suttee prevailed in Central
India especially is brought home by the innumerable
sa^-stones. There is considerable variety in the
form these memorials take. Many are just upstanding
stones marked with a woman's hand, often a ver-,
milioned hand. The sati, setting out to die, marked
the lintel of her home with her hand, freshly stained
with the red stain that decks the bride. Sometimes
the stain was a saffron one, such as General Hervey
found at Bikanir.

" Each luckless woman was required, by way of sealing
her * determination * to immolate herself, to place the palm
of her right hand upon some yellow daub presented to her
in a platter as she passed out, and to press it against the
wall of the gateway, the hand-mark thus left being subse-
quently cut out in the wall, or, as in some instances, a hand
was fashioned in marble from the model afforded by the
impression and fixed upon it." x

Many of these hands still decorate houses. General
Hervey, in 1879, counted thirty-seven that were still
distinct on the Bikanir palace, where he saw many
others that had faded or were too low down to be
clearly seen.

Stones marked with a woman's hand were erected
where suttees occurred, and exist in thousands of
villages still. Especially in the Maratha country,
these stones sometimes carry the sculpture of two
feet (the paduka], or of a foot and an arm. They are
often marked with the sun and moon, to signify the

* General Charles Hervey, Some Records of Crime (1892), i. 217

PREVALENCE AND AREA OF THE RITE 31

eternal endurance of the memorial. In Mandi, a
Himalayan Pan jab state, the sati's memorial is a
cairn 1 on which the passer-by tosses his own con-
tribution, to placate the ghost that is still at large.
4n other Himalayan districts Kulu, for example
cairns and sculptured stones stand side by side. 2
In Gujarat also we sometimes have the mere cairn :

' Unhewn stones, smeared with red-lead, or heaps . . .
loosely thrown together/' 3

In Bengal often nothing remains but a venerated
patch of ground, without any stone. I knew one such
in the jungles of ruined Vishnupur, a piece of slightly
raised ground, uncultivated and believed to be
uncultivable, known as Pati-ghatim-sati-kunda, " the
firepit of the faithful wife who killed her lord/' *
There is another midway between Bankura and
Chhatna, a confused mass of rock called Sinduri-
pdhdda, " Vermilion Hill." To the last place a
blurred legend attaches, which I am satisfied is that
of a half-forgotten suttee.

But many memorials are more elaborate. At some
shrines never, I think, in Bengal there is a larger
stone or a small building engraved with the figure
of the satis' lord on horseback, with spear and

* G. T Vigne, Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo.
a See Indian Antiquary, 1875, 64

3 A. K Forbes, Ras Mala (1878 edition), 691.

4 See " The Clouded Mirror " (Three Eastern Plays, by Edward
and Theodosia Thompson)

32 SUTTEE

armour ; his satis are usually ranged below him.
The commonest of the more pretentious funeral
monuments are raised platforms beneath a stone
canopy ; these are found throughout Northern India.
On the platform is a stone whose sides are sometimes-
embossed with the wedded life of the chieftain that
it commemorates ; his wives are serving him, one
sail walks before his horse with a fly-whisk, another
(on another side) holds an umbrella over him. And
so on.

A few descriptions will further show the range of
variation :

" Engraved head-stones, either standing alone or covered
by the pavilions called chuty^es, and not unfrequently
temples of greater or less size which enclose an image of
the Dev. The sculptured monuments are called jgaleeyos.'
They bear a rude representation of the deceased warrior
mounted upon his war-horse, or driving his chariot, according
to the circumstances which may have attended his fall.
The paleeyo of the Sutee is distinguished by a woman's hand
adorned with marriage bracelets." * (In Gujarat.)

" The deceased is also represented on the slab, riding on
horseback, horse and man finely ornamented ; and in front
of and behind this principal form, or in rows under it, are
also engraved the figures, each with arms crossed over the
bosom, of the poor creatures who became the dead man's
suttees on the occasion." a (In Rajasthan.)

" As a rule, a sculptured representation of the widow or
widows who committed sail is carved on the stone memorial
to the dead husband. . . . This type of memorial is generally
known as a virakal or herorstone, and in Southern India

t! * A. K. Forbes, Ras Mala (1856), 691. The Dev (literally, God)
& the Hero whom the shrine commemorates.
va C. R. W. Hervey, Some Records of Crime, i. 211.

" SAT! " MEMORIAL IN FRONT OF THE JAINA TEMPLE BY
THE RIVER, HAMPI

PREVALENCE AND AREA OF THE RITE 33

they appear to have been set up chiefly in honour of feudal
chiefs and nobles of the Vijayanagar empire who were slam
in battle or killed in some hunting expedition. Some of
these memorials, however, were set up mainly in honour of
those who committed sail, and these . . . are generally
sculptured with a pointed pillar or post, from which projects
a woman's right arm, bent upwards at the elbow. The
hand is raised, with fingers erect, and a lime-fruit is usually
shown placed between the thumb and forefinger. This is
what is alluded to in the old inscriptions, where women are
said to ' have given arm and hand ' . . ." x

Mr. Longhurst reproduces examples of both kinds of
Vijayanagar memorial. The mrdkal has an upper
and a lower panel. The lower holds the Hero and his
two satis, with an elephant (to show that the former
was a man of rank) in charge of an attendant. The
upper shows the three spirits arrived in Vishnu's
Paradise ; they stand before the conch and discus,
his emblems, which Garuda (his vehicle, the kite
demigod) and Hanuman (the monkey-god, the atten-
dant of Vishnu as Rama) are adoring.

Many suttee-stones have been photographed by
the Indian Archaeological Department, but, though
undoubtedly objects of historical and antiquarian
interest, they are so very many, strewn throughout
an enormous tract of country, that it is not worth
while reproducing them indefinitely. All the way up
to the plateau where ruined Chitor lies amid jungle
these witnesses are by the wayside ; the plateau !
itself abounds with them. Above the women's

i A H Lon?hurst. Hambi Ruins, 38.

34 SUTTEE

bathing-place is the Mahasati, " the Great Place of
Faithfulness/' with the monuments of kings and
nobles. To the spectator of any imagination the
place is grirn to the point of oppression. Above are
the city's mighty battlements, and the flashing colour *
of the wild parrots and peacocks that abound here ;
below is the cool, secluded place of waters, collecting
in a perfect bathing-pool before plunging in a long
shining arrow to the plain. Here thousands of women
bathed for the last time before going to their lord's
funeral pile, and here ended the secret corridor from
palace to pool the corridor that leads to the under-
ground caverns that keep the ashes of the brave
women who died in the jauhar when Allah-ud-din
sacked the city. 1 Near by is the Palace of Padmani
(the Indian Helen but in no way like Helen in her
life), looking out on its lake and tangled solitudes.
The Palace is now being "repaired" disastrously.
And all about are towers and temples, each one a
history in itself.

But Chitor is a place to which the mind of India
goes in continual pilgrimage, and its grimness is a
moving and glorious thing, infinitely more than mere
horror. More terrible is the Mahasati outside Udaipur,
Chitor's successor, where the later Ranas burned.
Here, besides the chhattris or stone , canopies, are
lines of stones covered with red tinsel, the Rana's
own stone, central to the whole line, being larger

1 Probably in 1303,

SHOWING THE "MAHASATl"

PREVALENCE AND AREA OF THE RITE 35

and usually covered with silver tinsel. By counting
the smaller stones you may know how many women
perished with one man. It is not unusual to find a
score of these stones, and I have counted over sixty
in one line. Tod cites the instance of Raja Ajit
Singh of Marwar (Jodhpur) another Rajput state
with whom in 1780 sixty-four women burned :

" No less than sixty-four females accompanied the shade
of Ajit to the mansion of the sun. But this is twenty short
of the number who became satis when Raja Budh Singh of
Bundi was drowned ! " z

But the suttees of Rajasthan sink into insignificance
beside those recorded by trustworthy authorities for
some South Indian states, especially Vijayanagar
during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.
Portuguese missionaries once brought the report of
eleven thousand women sacrificed on the death of a
South Indian Raja. This we may hope and believe
was exaggeration ; but we know that at Vijayanagar
it was customary to burn two or even three thousand.

" A cinder-mound near Nimbapuram, north-east of Vija-
yanagar, marks the scene of these appalling holocausts." *

" This mound is composed of alternate layers of slag-like
cinders and ashy earth mixed with small fragments of
calcined bone/' 3

1 Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (Clarendon Press, 1920,
edited William Crooke), 11. 837.

* Oxford History of India, 665 n.

3 A. H. Longhurst, Hampt Ruins. The identification, though
probable, cannot be taken as certain.

36 SUTTEE

When the Vijayanagar empire broke up, the practice
was continued on a smaller scale by its chief fragment,
the kingdom of Madura. Teixeira writes :

" When I was in India, on the death of the Naique of
Madure, a country situated between that of Malauar and
that of Choromandel, four hundred wives of his burned
themselves along with him/' I

This was in 1611. In 1620 a Mahommadan writer
testifies :

" The author arrived in company with his father at the
city of Southern Mathura, where, after a few days, the ruler
died and went to hell. The chief had seven hundred wives,
and they all threw themselves at the same time into the
fire/' =>

For reasons which no one has yet established,
suttee seems to have increased in many parts of India
between 1680 and 1830. As this period comes clearly
under foreign observation, the incredible barbarity
of the rite is luridly shown. The reader will find
abundant evidence of this in later chapters. Nor
was this wholesale immolation of the female household
confined to the palaces of Central and North- Western
India. In Bengal, at the beginning of the nineteenth
or end of the eighteenth century, there are instances
of the burning of a score or even two score women
with one quite unimportant man. We read of a
pyre kept alight for three days, while relays of widows

1 Quoted in Hobson-Jobson, article " Suttee/' a Ibid.

PREVALENCE AND AREA OF THE RITE 37

were fetched from a distance. The dead man was a
Brahman, and these women were many of them only
nominally his wives. Bengal was under the curse
of J^jinism, the power and prestige of the four highest
Brahman clans, the kulin families. Many members
of these made a profession of marriage, selling them-
selves as husbands to a great number of women, few
of whom ever lived with their husband or even saw
him after marriage, except when they climbed his
funeral-pyre.

It was usual to burn slaves and concubines on a
separate pyre from their lord's, unless the slaves were
a queen's personal attendants. A lady of rank was
attended on the pyre by her own female slaves.

I have mentioned the jauhar, the Rajput's act in
utter despair, when he sent all his women to the
pyre before the men rushed out on their foes. At
the jauhar before the sack of Jaisalmer (A.D. 1295)
twenty-four thousand women are said to have perished.
These, of course, were the whole female population,
of all ages. Equal or greater numbers must have
perished in the great jauhars of Chitor. An early
example of the rite, probably before the Rajputs had
begun to enter India, occurred in a town on the Indus
which Alexander the Great invested. The jauhar
shows suttee in its noblest form.

In the Panjab and Rajasthan sometimes a mother
burned on her son's pyre. This, known as ma-sat^
" mother-suttee," was the highest kind of all, and

38 SUTTEE

received special honour. 1 Sometimes sisters burned
with a brother. In Gujarat and Rajasthan men-
slaves often attended their master's corpse as it
burned. Such a slave was called satu, the masculine
of saK. In 1818, together with eighteen women,
eighteen men-slaves burned with the Maharaja of
Jaipur, including his barber, who was sent along to
shave his lord in the next world.*

The tenacity with which some castes and peoples
of India cherished the rite was shown in 1722, when
a leading merchant in the Hindu trading colony at
Astrakhan, in Russia, died. The suggestion that his
widow should burn was received as barbarous and
permission refused, whereupon the Indian traders
removed their factories and commerce from the town.
Permission was then given, and the widow was burnt
with due pomp and publicity.s

1 H. A, Rose, Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab
and North-West Frontier Province, i, 201

2 Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Richardson Evans, Earl Amherst
(" Rulers of India " senes), 197,

3 Peter Henry Bruce, Memoirs (1782), 252 ff

CHAPTER III
THE FORM THAT SUTTEE TOOK

SUTTEE generally took the form of burning alive;
but in the Telugu country, including Vijayanagar, it
was sometimes by burial alive. The weaver caste in
some parts of India in Tippera, for example also
practised suttee by burial. Irregularly, it could be
by drowning, especially when a woman had escaped
from the pyre. We have an eye-witness's account
of a Brahman in a boat in mid-stream at Allahabad
superintending the suicide of sixteen women ; but I
think the Cyclopcedia of India may be mistaken in
assuming this to have been a suttee. Among the
lower castes suttee was unusual, but these sometimes
imitated their betters ; and there are instances on
record of even Mahommadans being burnt and their
widows with them.

In Western India the widow " lay in a grass hut,
supporting her husband's corpse with her right hand,
while she set the pyre alight with a torch held in her
left hand/' J In Gujarat,

"The pile of the Sutee is unusually large; heavy cart-
wheels are placed upon it, to which her limbs are bound,
or sometimes a canopy of massive logs is raised above it, to
crush her by its fall She seats herself with her husband's

1 W. Crooke, Things Indian, 449.

40 SUTTEE

head reclining in her lap, and, undismayed by all the para-
phernalia of torment and of death, herself sets fire to the
pile. It is a fatal omen to hear the sound of the Sutee's
groan ; as, therefore, the fire springs up from the pile there
nses simultaneously with it a deafening shout of ' Victory
to Urnba ! Victory to Runchor ! ' and the screaming horn
and the hard-rattling drum sound their loudest until the
sacrifice is consummated." x

In South India, in Orissa, and sometimes in Bengal,
the pyre was in a pit, into which the widow jumped
after the pyre was alight. In Vijayanagar the husband
was burnt first, and then the widow, having changed
her showy garments for coarse yellow cloth, walked
three times round the pit, holding her relations' hands
with one hand and a branch in the other, and then
went " singing and running to the pit where the
fire is," a poured a pot of oil over her head, mounted
some high steps, and leapt in. In North India
generally, including Bengal, she climbed on the pyre
and sat or lay down, with her husband's head in her
lap or on her breast ; the dead man's eldest son or
nearest relative then lit the pile. She was by no
means always left free. Especially in Bengal, she was
often bound to the corpse with cords, or both bodies
' were fastened down with long bamboo poles curving
over them like a wooden coverlet,3 or weighted down

1 A. K. Forbes, Ras Mala, 6gi.

a Perfiao Nuniz, quoted by Sewell, A Forgotten Empire, 40
3 Rammohan Ray in 1818 spoke of this custom as a recent inno-
vation and confined to Bengal It is significant that this constraint
began to be put on widows about the time that the agitation for
the abolition of suttee became strong.

THE FORM THAT SUTTEE TOOK 41

with logs. Often there was a canopy, which was
cut loose after the pyre was alight and smothered
them.

I give two descriptions of suttee of a kind different
from that best known :

" When a captain dies, however many wives he has, they
all burn themselves, and when the king dies they do the
same. This is the custom throughout all the country of
the heathen, except with that caste of people called Telugas,
amongst whom the wives are buried alive with their husbands
when they die. These go with much pleasure to the pit,
inside of which are made two seats of earth, one for him
and one for her, and they place each one on his own seat and
cover them in little by little till they are covered up ;
and so the wife dies with the husband/' * (In Vijayanagar,
1535-)

The second I condense from the account of a traveller
in Bali a century ago. 3 It was the custom in that
island to burn the king's corpse separately from his
wives, for each of whom a separate fire-pit was pre-
pared. The wives put off their ornaments, wounded
themselves slightly in the arm and smeared their
face and limbs with blood, and then mounted a
scaffold from which they sprang into the pit. The
scaffold was so constructed that it could be tilted
towards the pit if any wife hesitated. If any wife
escaped from the pyre or refused to go to it, she was
killed publicly with a " kriss," or privately if she was
of royal blood.

1 Fernao Nuniz, quoted in Sewell, A Forgotten Empire, 392-3
(1900 edition).

Asiatic Journal, September-December 1830, 242.

42 SUTTEE

Suttee reached its most magnificent and least
squalid form among the Rajputs. I quote Sir Alfred
LyalTs verse, which is substantially exact as a picture
of the rite :

Farewell ! and forth must the lady ride.

Her face unveiled, in rich attire,

She strikes the stone with fingers red,
cc Farewell the palace, to the pyre

We follow, widows of the dead 1 "
And I, whose life has reached its verge,
Bethink me of the wailing dirge

That day my father forth was borne
High seated, swathed in many a shawl,

By priests who scatter flowers, and mourn ;
And the eddying smoke of the funeral

Thus did he vanish ; with him went

Seven women, by the flames set free ;
I built a stately monument

To shrine their graven effigy :
In front my father, godlike, stands,
The widows kneel with folded hands ;

All yearly ntes are duly paid,

All round are planted sacred trees,

And the ghosts are soothed by the spreading shade,
And lulled by the strain of their obsequies. 1

But the roots of the custom in the most primitive
layers of human savagery are laid bare, beyond all
possibility of hiding by those who idealize it, by the
rites that accompanied it ; and sometimes laid bare
very crudely. The Vijayanagar saffi flung into the
fire a cloth filled with rice, also betel leaves, and then

* A Rajpoot Chief of the Old School

THE FORM THAT SUTTEE TOOK 43

" her comb and mirror with which she adorned herself,
saying that all these are needed to adorn herself by her
husband's side/' x

The rice and betel were for his dinner ; it is possible,
too, that the oil that she poured on her head was
intended for his toilet, though it served the immediate
purpose of shortening her own sufferings.

Suttee was particularly practised at the junction of
rivers a sacred spot in India and in towns that
were held in particular veneration, such as Benares
and Gaya. Suttee shrines are usually beside water,
to the west of a stream or tank, and facing east.

1 Sewell, A Forgotten Empire, 41.

CHAPTER IV
REASONS FOR SUTTEE

DIODORUS SICULUS r explains the rite as an insurance
against untimely death of husbands ; it was adopted
because wives poisoned their lords.

" This wicked practice increasing, and many falling victims
to it, and the punishment of the guilty not serving to deter
others from the commission of the crime, a law was passed
that wives should be burned with their deceased husbands,
except such as were pregnant and had children ; and that
any individual who refused to comply with this aw should
be compelled to remain a widow, and be for ever excluded
from all rights and privileges, as guilty of impiety. This
measure being adopted, it followed that the abominable
disposition to which the wives were addicted was converted
into an opposite feeling. For, in order to avoid that climax
of disgrace, every wife being obliged to die, they not only
took all possible care of their husband's safety, but emulated
each other in promoting his glory and renown." *

Strabo heard the same story, and it was told to
foreigners at intervals throughout the centuries. It
may well have been one strand in the complicated
and terrible selfishness that underlay the rite, that
men by this means sought to ensure the most anxious
servility and desire for their comfort in their homes.

Amid the intrigues of an Eastern court wives were

1 xix. 32, 33. Quoted in J, Peggs, India's Cnes to British
Humanity (second edition, 1830), 1-2,

REASONS FOR SUTTEE 45

peculiarly susceptible as tools, as the Old Testament
shows ; and at some Indian courts, on the death of
a Raja, a clean sweep was made of his zenana.
General Hervey, in noting the burning of forty-four
women with one of the Bikanir Rajas, points out
that this number even included the Brahmani who
provided the zenana with water. She, as of a higher
caste than the women to whom she ministered, could
not be considered a wife, and was simply swept away
as a chattel. Hervey remarks :

" Excessive jealousy of their female connexions, operating
on the breasts of Hindoo princes, rendered those despots
regardless of the common bonds of Society, and of their '
incumbent duty as protectors of the weaker sex, insomuch
that, with a view to prevent every possibility of their widows
forming subsequent attachments, they availed themselves of
their arbitrary power, and under the cloak of religion intro-
duced the practice of burning widows alive under the first
impressions of sorrow or despair, immediately after the
demises of their husbands/' *

Hinduism from the first was consistent, and increas-
ingly and inexorably diligent, in one aim that of
surrounding the male creature with every comfort \
and dignity. It is not always fair to blame a religion
for the vices of those who practise it ; but when
we see people as naturally humane as those of
India, certainly as endowed with the power of feeling
pity as any other race, perpetuating so gross and
cruel a glorification of the man, we must seek for the

1 Some Records of Cnme t ii. 506,

46 SUTTEE

reason in the ideas that they were taught. Suttee
was for the aggrandizement of the husband, who took

*.,,, , ... , , w^ftSiSwiw ,. .. . '

with him when he died the most valuable and personal
of his possessions.

" As this awful rite was chiefly an appendage to regal
and princely state, it has been considered as honourable in
itself and as reflecting additional lustre on the caste and
family to which the magnanimous victim belonged. In
very old times it was considered an affront to the memory
of the deceased, and as an evident mark of the want of that
ardent devotion which a woman owes to her husband, when
she showed any reluctance to accompany his body to the
pile." *

" The monuments of this noble family of the Haras are
far more explicit than those of the Rathors, for every such
Sati is sculptured on a small altar in the centre of the
cenotaph : which speaks in distinct language the all-powerful
motive, vanity, the principal incentive to these tremendous
sacrifices " *

A chieftain's women were toys and dolls, just as
truly as the women of the Mogul's harem. Chosen
for their physical loveliness, they were moths who
led a twilight existence that ended in the bewildering
pomp that brought them to the flame. They were
of no moment in their fluttering lives except as orna-
ments, and there was an ethical compulsion in the
doom that sent down the dynasties whose splendour
was nourished by their weakness and misery. On
the score of picturesqueness, Akbar, the wary and
watchful, is a poor figure beside the Rajput heroes

1 Dubois, 172.

Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, ii. 837-8

REASONS FOR SUTTEE 47

whom he overcame ; and the historian marks with
admiration the Sikhs -whose valour exacted blood for
blood from the English at Ferozeshah and Chilian-
wala. But it was a higher civilization that won,
both with Akbar and the English. Hervey has a
passage which brings out the pity of a system which
looked only for prettiness and constancy in woman.
He obtained the names of satis who had died on the
pyxes of Bikanir Rajas ; they were such names as :

" Ray Queen, Sun-ray, Love's Delight, Garland, Virtue
Found, Echo, Soft Eye, Comfort, Moonbeam, Love-lorn,
Dear Heart, Eye-play, Arbour-born, Smile, Love-bud, Glad
Omen, Mist-clad, or Cloud-sprung the last a favourite
name/' *

We may look on suttee as almost inevitable irom
the premiss of Hindu sociology and religion, that the
husband stands to the wife in place of the Deity.
Suttee, this surviving root from the darkest ages of
savagery, was bound to blossom and fruit terribly, for
a host of subsidiary considerations fed it. Families
boasted, as they boast to-day, of their suttees, and
tried to surpass rival families. Jealousy made an old
man unwilling that a young and lovely woman should
survive him.

" Mr. Ewer then went on to show that the sacrifice was
more often designed to secure the temporal good of the
survivors than the spiritual welfare of the sufferer or her
husband. The son , was relieved from the expense of main-
taining a mother ; the male relatives, reversioners in the

1 Some Records of Crime, i. 242

48 SUTTEE

absence of direct issue, came in at once for the estate which
the widow would have held for her life ; the Brahmins were
paid for their services and were interested in the maintenance
of their religion ; and the crowd attended the show with
the savage merriment exhibited by an English crowd at a
boxing match or a bull-fight." *

This sordid greed desire to avoid sharing a dead
man's possessions with his widow was considered
by Rammohan Ray one of the causes that led to the
increase of suttee in Bengal over a century ago.
Hindu writers commonly blame Mahommadan law-
lessness ; women were unsafe, and it was best to
preserve their honour by burning them when their
protectors died. It is usual to blame bad Hindu
customs on to Mahommadanism.

But the main sources of encouragement lay deeper
than greed, deeper than even glorification of man.
Hindu theology, with its doctrine of retribution
pedantic in its exactitude, proved the woman left a
widow a sinner whose previous life had brought upon
her in this one the heaviest of all punishments in
the loss of her visible God. Widowhood, then, must
in rigorous justice be an experience so desolate and
crammed with misery that it was better to perish
in the flames that consumed the husband's corpse.

" The widow shall never exceed one meal a day, nor sleep
on a bed ; if she do so, her husband falls from Swarga."

" She shall eat no other than simple food, and shall daily
offer the tar p ana of ku$a t tila, and water."

REASONS FOR SUTTEE 49

" In Vatsakha, Karttika and Mdgha she shall exceed the
usual duties of ablution, alms, and pilgrimage, and often use
the name of God." x

To-day, when suttee is forbidden, the life of widows
of chieftains in Central India is often too sordid for
contemplation. There are fortresses packed with
these wretched creatures, who exist there without
ornament or amusement or pleasant food, and have
no relief except squabbles among themselves and
banding together to make another newly arrived
consignment of widows more unhappy than them-
selves. A lady who knew well many of these corralled
unfortunates told me that she thought it would be a
reform to reintroduce suttee.

But the widow who mounted the pyre passed from
the condition of a sinner to one of beatification ; her ,
dying curse or blessing had absolute power and
unfettered course. After her death prayers were
made to hr manes, and those prayers were sure of
fulfilment. Her dying redeemed her ancestors from
hell, and she enjoyed everlasting communion with
her lord. That communion was hers, even if in life
he had hated her ; she forced her company on him,
however unlovely or uncongenial she had been to him.

" Accompanying her husband, she shall reside so long in
Swarga as are the thirty-five millions of hairs on the human
body.

* H. T. Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays (1873), li. 136. The
essay, The Duties of a Faithful Hindu Widow, was first published
in 1795.

50 SUTTEE

" As the snake-catcher forcibly drags the serpent from
his earth, so, bearing her husband (from hell), with him she
shall enjoy heavenly bliss.

" Dying with her husband, she sanctifies her maternal
and paternal ancestors ; and the ancestry of him to whom
she gave her virginity.

" Such a wife, adoring her husband, in celestial felicity
with him, greatest, most admired, with him shall enjoy the
delights of heaven, while fourteen Indras reign.

" Though her husband had killed a Brahmana, broken
the ties of gratitude, or murdered his friend, she expiates
the crime.'* *

Everything conspired to point the widow along one
path that which led to the red glow of the funeral
pyre. Once she had announced her sankalpa, or reso-
lution (to die), no after-hesitation or terror could
excuse her. Withdrawal brought ill-luck on all con-
nected with her ; die she must, however weak and
miserable. About the death of a sati there was so
much pomp and noise of applause, and about the
memory of one such praise and exaltation, that often
a psychological intoxication upheld her till she had
passed beyond the reach of succour. It is true that
widows were often drugged or narcotized, so that
they became satis while unaware of what they were
doing. But it is not true, as many writers on the
subject imagine, that such drugging was general;
in Bengal it was common enough, but in Rajasthan
I think it was exceptional, though perhaps not to
the point of being rare. The intoxication was of the

* H. X. Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays (1873), ii. 135-6. Cf.
the saving of Akbar quoted at the beginning of this book.

REASONS FOR SUTTEE 51

spirit, not the body ; and the compulsion was terrible,
being the whole tremendous, impalpable weight of
familiar tradition and of expectation. If the woman
were part of the enormous death-pomp of a king,
going to the pyre as one in the ghostly bodyguard
of a chief of Udaipur or Jodhpur or Jaipur, the
splendid pageant, the women's cries of acclamation,
the blare of conchs and trumpets, the elephants, the
horses with their trappings, her own shining robes
and vermilioned body, the fragrant gums and resin
of the pyre these things hid from her the fate
awarded her. And the upward race and roar of the
flames and the shouts and music of the spectators
drowned any voice of agony from the fire. Our eye-
witness accounts of suttee during the first three
decades of last century are mostly from Bengal, and
many of these speak of the extraordinary levity and
callousness of the spectators. It is a puzzle for the
psychologist to reconcile with this callousness that
super-sensitiveness to harshness inflicted or suffering
endured which commonly marks the Bengali to-day.
Yet in saying this I pause, remembering the mobs
who watched our own Smithfield burnings and public
hangings.

CHAPTER V
WAS SUTTEE VOLUNTARY?

I SUPPOSE that no one who has read this study so
far will doubt that the softs of a raja included a
majority of unwilling victims. The slave-girl and
concubine are chattels, and know that resistance is
useless.

But it is generally believed in the West that the
sott who died as an only wife died voluntarily, a
belief which Hindus strenuously and exaltedly in-
culcate among themselves. We have seen that the
Oxford History lends a modified support to this belief.
But it is a belief which was not held by the Europeans
who lived in Bengal during the last thirty years before
the rife was suppressed; and it was not held by
Rammohan Ray, who had seen his brother's wife
burned, a hysterical and unhappy sacrifice. That
there were many instances of a widow dying, as
literature has so often depicted her, serene and
uplifted beyond acknowledgment of pain, is true,
though I have never been able to understand why
Indian men consider this redounds to their glory.
But I believe such cases were a minority.

Rajput ladies burned more willingly than those of
other parts of India ; this is beyond controversy.

WAS SUTTEE VOLUNTARY? 53

" Rajputana women of rank seem to have been the most
willing to accompany their husbands' remains to the funeral
pile/' *

" The proud Rajput women used to consider the disagree-
able duty of burning themselves with their husbands a privilege
attaching to their blue blood." *

The women being members of warrior clans whose
menfolk died freely and readily in battle, the pyre
seemed a smaller matter and the sacrifice a fairer
thing than it did to the women of peace-loving races.
Rajasthan history furnishes innumerable stories, of
the most moving kind, of wives who died with their
husbands ; not wives only, but girls scarcely in their
teens and merely betrothed to the warrior who had
perished before the wedding rites could be performed.
The courage of its satis, no less than the desperate
valour of its men, casts a sombre magnificence
about the story of Chitor. It was barbarous ; but
when we blame a system we must remember that
the men and women who suffer by living in a
system have only a limited responsibility for its
existence.

We may take three testimonies as to the voluntary
nature of suttee during the first twenty years of last
century. The first is that of C. M. Lushington,
Magistrate at Trichinopoli ; it brings out the fact
that the worst of all compulsions is that of society
pressing with a weight of training and of expectation

1 Cyclop&d^a of India, article " Suttee."
a Sir Lepel Gnffin, Ranjit Singh, 65.

54 SUTTEE

on those who, as slaves were, are forced down to a
sub-personal level :

" The act I apprehend is always voluntary, provided a
being in a state of stupefaction and delusion can be said to
possess the power of volition. " x

The second is that of W. Ewer, Superintendent
of Police, Lower Provinces, Bengal Presidency :

"It is generally supposed that a Suttee takes place with
the free will and consent of the widow, and that she frequently
persists in her intention to burn, in spite of the arguments
and entreaties of her relations. But there are many reasons
for thinking that such an event as a voluntary Suttee very
rarely occurs : few widows would think of sacrificing them-
selves unless overpowered by force or persuasion, very little
of either being sufficient to overcome the physical or mental
powers of the majority of Hindoo females. A widow, who
would turn with natural instinctive horror from the first
hint of sharing her husband's pile, will be at length gradually
brought to pronounce a reluctant consent, because, distracted
with grief at the event, without one friend to advise or
protect her, she is little prepared to oppose the surrounding
crowd of hungry Brahmuns and interested relations, either
by argument or force. ... In this state of confusion a few
hours quickly pass, and the widow is burnt before she has
had time even to think on the subject. Should utter
indifference for her husband, and superior sense, enable her
to preserve her judgment, and to resist the arguments of
those about her, it will avail her little the people will not
be disappointed of their show; and the entire population
of a village will turn out to assist in dragging her to the
bank of the river and in keeping her down on the pile Under
these circumstances nine out of ten widows are burnt to
death."

* Peggs, India* sjCrics to Bntish Humanity (second edition, 1830),

IOO-I. ~"~ * ~~*

a Ibid., 14-15.

WAS SUTTEE VOLUNTARY? 55

This witness, who in his official duties probably
had more opportunity of getting first-hand knowledge
of suttees than anyone else in India, was one of those
most urgent that Government should prohibit the
custom.

Our third witness is the Magistrate at Bhuj, Gujarat,
writing in October 1819 :

" There has been only one instance of a woman desiring
to burn herself m our district, in Cutch, since 1816. In
that instance I proceeded to her house, and, as she appeared
firm in her resolution, I could only persuade her to delay
the ceremony for a few days, promising that at the expiration
of that time, if she persisted in her wish, she should meet
with no hindrance. As might be expected, twenty-four hours
produced a total change ! Instead of the hysterical grief
with which she was affected, tears came to her relief, and
she declared her resolution not to burn. Her friends were
very anxious that she should be dissuaded from burning." *

This witness brings out what we should expect to
find : once the rite became rare in a district, a senti-
ment against it grew up, and the weight of opinion
helped widows away from the pyre and not towards it.

It would be easy to find instances of satis dying
with courage and exaltation ; and also, although
Indian tradition has naturally remembered these
instances alone, it would be easy to find mostly
from the testimony of European witnesses at least
as many examples of what can only be called murder
of the cruellest kind. But I have chosen my eight

, India's Cnes to Bntish Humanity, 10.

56 SUTTEE

examples, irrespective of the victims' willingness or
revulsion, solely to show the rite at different times
and in places widely apart; all are the accounts
given by eye-witnesses or obviously derived from eye-
witnesses. 1

* See Appendix.

CHAPTER VI

ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION: LAST YEARS
OF LEGAL SUTTEE IN BRITISH INDIA

ALBUQUERQUE in 1510 prohibited suttee within the
Portuguese territory of Goa. The third of the Sikh
Gurus, Amar B ,pas (1552-1574), condemned it, with
how little result we shall see later. The rite aroused
horror in the Mogul conquerors of India ; Akbar on
one occasion rode at top speed nearly a Hundred
miles and succeeded in saving the Raja of Jodhpur's
daughter-in-law from burning against her will. He is
often said to have forbidden the rite ; but he could
only insist that it be always voluntary, and even
this restriction could not, of course, obtain in the
territory of the great Rajput chieftains. His son
and successor, Jahangir, in 1620 seems to have for-
bidden it on pain of death for those implicated in its
performance ; but a good deal of uncertainty hangs
bver these Mahommadan attempts to suppress suttee.
What is certain is, the Mogul emperors strongly dis-
icountenanced it.

It is customary to say that these early efforts at
suppression failed; but within the regions directly
controlled by Delhi they were substantially successful,
and suttee was driven into native states and outlying,

58 SUTTEE

semi-independent provinces such as Bengal. Charles
Metcalfe, 1 who in 1829 anticipated rebellion in Bengal
as a result of Lord Bentinck's prohibition, eighteen
years before, when Resident at Delhi and a young
man of twenty-six, had peremptorily forbidden suttee.
Only once was it found necessary to resort to a show
of force to prevent the rite, so completely had two
centuries of Mahommadan rule eradicated the senti-
ment in favour of it.

Among the Marathas there seems always to have
been a certain feeling against suttee which struggled
with that in its favour. The Marathas have had
" a bad press " with English writers, just as the
Rajputs have had a conspicuously good one. As
Mr. Kipling has enthusiastically reminded us :

" The Rajput is a man and a brother, in respect that he
will ride, shoot, eat pig, and drink strong waters like an
Englishman. Of the pig-hunting he makes almost a religious
duty, and of the wine-drinking no less." a

But the Maratha, though lacking in these fine qualities
and often as unattractive in personal appearance as
that magnificent person, the Rajput, is attractive, is
a man of high intelligence, and has given his women
a great deal of freedom. Purdah in the West sup-
posed to be of uniform strictness all over India
varies very greatly with the district and the race;

1 Afterwards Lord Metcalfe. Born January 30, 1785 ; Resident,
Delhi, 1811-1819, Governor, Jamaica, 1839; Governor-General,
Canada, 1842.

* JLptters of Marque^ IJC.

ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION 59

and the Maratha, as a rale, has not considered it
necessary either to seclude or to burn his women.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Maratha
distaste for suttee grew, and the famous Queen Ahalya 1
Bai, who died in 1795, discouraged it, and did her'
best, though in vain, to dissuade a daughter from
mounting the pyre. Before the century ended two
Maratha states the Peshwa's personal dominions
and, in the South of India, Tan j ore prohibited
suttee. The prohibition can hardly have been entirely
effective, and Tanjore relapsed later, 1 so that it became
one of the few bad centres of the rite in the Indian
peninsula. A third Maratha state, Savantvadi, was
mentioned by the Governor of Bombay, in a letter
dated May 6, 1821, as having abolished suttee ten or
twelve years before.

Soon after the nineteenth century opened the
Dutch administration prohibited suttee in Chinsura ;
and the French at Chandranagar and the Danes at
Serampur, without making it an offence, suppressed
it by administrative interference. Hindus resident in
these towns had to take their widows into British
territory and to get a British magistrate's sanction
before burning them.

All these suppressions took place in small and
compact districts, with the exception of the only

1 This fact has been overlooked by the Oxford History and other
writings that treat of suttee, and in fairness it must be mentioned,
as well as the temporary prohibition,

60 SUTTEE

partially successful action of the Moguls. The problem
of the British Government was a much more difficult
one, nor could a way be found out by the mere enquiry
as to whether the rite was enjoined in the Hindu
scriptures or not.

" The practice of sati had been in force for so many
centuries that it was an archaic and useless question for
the English administration to inquire whether it was really
in accordance or not with the injunctions of the early Hindu
religion." *

Suttee was there ; and in the early days of a struggling
administration it was simply accepted, and there was
very little notice taken of it. In February 1789
Mr. M. H. Brooks, the Collector of Shahabad, forcibly
prevented a suttee and reported his action ; Govern-
ment approved, but told him that he must not resort
to " coercive measures " or exercise of authority, but
use private authority only. 2 In 1803 William Carey,
the missionary, took a census 3 of suttees occurring
within a circle extending thirty miles from Calcutta ;
the returns were necessarily inadequate, but came to
four hundred and thirty-eight. Next year he placed
ten reliable men at intervals throughout the same
extent of country, each man being given a definite
station and area of observation ; they sent in monthly

1 Demetrius C. Boulger, Lord William Bentinck (" Rulers of
India " series), 79.

z The Calcutta Review, anonymous article " Suttee/* 1867, 224.

3 William Ward, A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology
of the Hindoos, ui. 329 (1822 edition).

ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION 61

reports for six months. The number of suttees
reported was less, but showed that between two and
three hundred widows were burnt. 1 Carey placed
these results before the Governor-General, Lord
Wellesley, who was shocked and strongly inclined to
prohibit the rite. Instead, in August 1805, he sub-
mitted the matter to the Supreme Court, who replied
two years later, recommending that Government guide
its policy by " the religious opinions and prejudices
of the natives." a In this way Government entered
on its course 1 of vacillation and timidity, which lasted
for a quarter of a century.

Meanwhile district officers from time to time found
themselves in positions where the absence of definite
orders concerning suttee caused embarrassment. In
1805 J.^R._Elphinstone J Collector of Gaya, stopped
the burning of a girl of twelve, and reported that she
and her friends were " extremely grateful " for his
interposition. He asked for guidance as to dealing
with suttee. His question, coming with Carey's
evidence, persuaded Government to get judicial
opinion, as we have seen ; but it was not until 1812
that his question was answered. Government were

1 Ward. His language is loose, and may mean that the returns
showed that widows were being burnt at the rate of between two
and three hundred a year, or that this number were burnt in six
months only.

. Calcutta Review, 1867. To this article, very much the best
account of suttee ever written, I am indebted for a good deal of
this summary of the events between 1805 and 1829 ; but most
of its matter is taken from the Parliamentary Papers on widow-
burning, 1830.

62 SUTTEE

harassed by other problems the unsuccessful siege
of Bhurtpur, the growing power of Ranjit Singh, the
war in Java.

In 1812 the question that had been shelved was
again raised by Wauchope, an official in Bandelkhand,
who merely asked what he was to do about suttee.
Government and the Supreme Court looked at one
another, and the Court " then exhumed " their advice
of some years previously, which they had framed
after referring to Hindu pundits the questions which
Government in 1805 had referred to them. Govern-
ment therefore, on December 5, 1812, having con-
sidered both the judicial and the ecclesiastical replies,
observed that:

" The practice, generally speaking, being thus recognized
and encouraged by the doctrines of the Hindoo religion, it
appears evident that the course which the British Government
should follow according to the principle of religious toleration
already noticed, is to allow the practice in those cases in
which it is countenanced by their religion, and to prevent
it in others in which it is, by the same authority, pro-
hibited."

They then forbade compulsion or the use of drugs
v and intoxicants to tamper with the satf's will, and
instructed magistrates to stop the ^ite also in the
case of girls under sixteen or women who were
pregnant, as in such circumstances it would be
repugnant to the principles of Hindu law. The
police were ordered to try to get early information
of an intended suttee, and a police officer (usually a

ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION 63

Hindu or Mahommadan, as the few British officers
could not attend the hundreds of suttees that took
place) was to be present at the pyre to see that
everything was in order. These instructions were
unfortunate.

" The Government and the Sudder Court * were, in fact,
getting into a dilemma by attempting to introduce justice
and law into what was, in itself, the highest kind of illegality,
the most palpable injustice, and the most revolting cruelty " *

There can be no doubt that the new Regulations
increased suttee. In 1825 the Governor of Bombay
disapproved of the presence of a magistrate at the rite

" as tending to give more dignity to the ceremony and to
render the merit of the sufEerer more conspicuous." 3

In the same year C. T. Sealy, a Calcutta Judge,
declared :

" I have always been of opinion that we increased the
number of Suttees by sanctioning them/' *

In December 1818, at the end of the worst year for
suttees of which we have any record, H. Oakley,
Collector of Hooghly, wrote :

" Previous to 1813 no interference on the part of the
police was authorized, and widows were sacrificed legally
or illegally as it might happen ; but the Hindoos were then
aware that the Government regarded the custom with natural
horror, and would do anything short of direct prohibition

1 The Supreme Court. Calcutta Review, 1867, 235.

3 Peggs, India's Cries to British Humanity, 58-9. 4 Ibid., 58.

64 SUTTEE

to discourage and gradually to abolish it. The case is now
altered. The police officers are ordered to interfere, for the
purpose of ascertaining that the ceremony is performed in
conformity with the rules of the shastras, and in that event
to allow its completion. This is granting the authority of
Government for the burning of widows ; and it can scarcely
be a matter of astonishment that the number of the sacrifices
should be doubled when the sanction of the ruling power is
added to the recommendation of the shastra." *

A more cautiously worded, but not less valuable,
testimony can be added :

''The Governor-General in Council is reluctantly led to
express his apprehension that the greater confidence with
which the people perform this rite under the sanction of
Government, as implied or avowed in the circular orders
already in force, combined with the excitement of religious
bigotry by the continual agitation of the question, may
have tended to augment, rather than diminish, the frequency
of these sacrifices." a

In 1821 Mr. C. Smith, second judge of the Sudder
Court, wrote :

" Our Government, by modifying the thing and issuing
orders about it orders which even the Government and
the Sudder judges themselves do not appear clearly to
comprehend have thrown the ideas of the Hindoos upon
the subject into a complete state of confusion. They know
not what is allowed and what interdicted ; but upon the
whole they have a persuasion that our Government, whom
they most erroneously suppose to be indifferent about the
lives of the natives, are rather favourable to suttee than
otherwise. They will then believe that we abhor the usage,
when we prohibit it in toto by an absolute and peremptory
law. They have no idea that we might not do so with the

1 Peggs, India's Cries to British Humanity, 53 8 Ibid,

ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION 65

most perfect safety ; they conceive our power and our will
to be commensurable/' *

I think there can be no doubt that the sanction of
the Government was sometimes misrepresented as an
order that widows should burn.

The vacillation of Government was seconded by
the indifference and unimaginative stupidity of the
legal mind. The judicial reviews of the annual
returns of suttees contain some astounding examples |f
of pedantry. One Collector is rebuked because hej/
had not explained the delay of a day in the case of 1
a suttee ; another is told that a washerman spectator
who had pushed a widow back into the blazing pit
from which she was escaping might be punished " as
for a misdemeanour " ; a third should have stated
the widow's caste, instead of merely returning her as
a Hindu ; a fourth should have written " dissuaded "
and not " prevented." One very bad case of suttee,
the Court remarks, " bears the appearance of irregu-
larity/' Certain Collectors are

"reminded of inattention to valuable Circular Orders and
of neglect to furnish information as to the condition and
circumstances of the deceased/'

The Patna Court, on January n, 1819, wrote :

" We^ hayejthe pleasure to transmit the annual report !
of the number of Hindoo women who have burnt themselves

1 Parliamentary Papers on widow-burning, 1830^ 8.
a Calcutta Review t 1867, 237.

E

66 SUTTEE

on the funeral piles of their husbands in the Zillah of Sarun
in the year 1818." *

The Collector of Ghazipur used the same unexcep-
tionable phraseology, and had

" the pleasure to forward the prescribed annual report of
Suttees."

The Regulations governing suttee were not finally
approved until April 1813, and were further modified
on September 9, 1817 :

" It was then provided with an offensive particularity
that women in a state of menstruation were not to burn,
nor such as had infants at the breast or under four years
old, nor such as had children under seven, unless responsible
persons would engage to maintain the orphans." 3

Also anumarawa was forbidden to brahmams, and rela-
tions of a $<tf& were bound, under penalty of fine and
imprisonment, to give notice to the police before
the burning took place. Another order passed at
the same time forbade the burying alive 3 of widows
of weavers, prevalent in Tippera and other parts
of East Bengal, and now considered not to be in
accordance with the shastras ; magistrates were to
try offenders.

Against the criminal pedantry of the Courts and
the timidity of Government it is fair to remember
the courage of many magistrates, men of generous

* Calcutta Review, 1867, 235. See also Parliamentary Papers.
3 Calcutta Review, 1867*

3 The Calcutta Review writer makes (and repeats) the mistake
of thinking that the weaver caste burned their widowsj

ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION 67

instincts and humanity, who forbade suttee in their
jurisdiction. And from every side the men who
would have to bear the risk of rebellion if rebellion
came urged abolition. So it came about that in the
district round Delhi suttee had been driven out of
existence, and in many wild places and bigoted towns
suttee was prevented by one man's fearlessness. In
some of the native states also the Resident used his
influence successfully to prevent the rite. Tod, after
speaking of the eighty-four satis at the funeral of
Raja Budh Singh of Bundi, adds with justifiable
exultation :

" Budh Singh was . . . one of the most intrepid generals
of Aurangzeb ; the period elapsed is about one hundred and
twenty years. Mark the difference ! When his descendant,
my valued friend the Rao Raja Bishan Singh, died in
1821, his last commands were that none should give such
a proof of their affection. He made me guardian of his
infant heir. In a few days I was at Bundi, and his com-
mands were religiously obeyed." *

In 1823 Sir John Malcolm wrote :

" In the whole of Central India there have not been, as
far as can be learnt, above three or four Sutties annually
for the last twenty years. . . . Those shocking scenes which
still occur on the death of the princes of Jeypoor, Joudpoor,
and Odeypoor, to swell whose funeral honours numbers of
unwilling females are forcibly thrown upon the pile, are
unknown in this country."

And, for one cause and another, the vigorous dis-
approval of such men as Tod and Malcolm being one,

1 Rajarthan, ii, 838. A Memoir of Central India t ii. 207,-

68 SUTTEE

suttee was at last slowly dying out, except in
Rajasthan, Bengal, and the Panjab ; through vast
tracts of country it had practically disappeared. So
completely had it faded out of the tradition of the
district round Delhi and much of what later became
the United Provinces, that even in the mighty
incandescence of Hindu passion and sentiment in
the Mutiny of 1857 we do not hear of suttees. We
should have heard of them abundantly if -Rajasthan
or Bengal had been among our enemies. In those
parts of (what later became) the United Provinces
where suttee existed a hundred and twenty years ago
it was in infinitely less vogue than in Bengal. Maratha
sentiment, after a temporary yielding, was gathering
against the rite. Even at Poona, between 1800 and
1810, its occurrence had dropped to about a dozen
cases annually " on the average of as many years." *
Dubois, in 1816, wrote that suttee was " more rare in
the peninsula than in the northern parts of India " * ;
and Elphinstone, whose impressions were formed
about the same time, though published twenty-three
1 years later, states that it never occurred to the south
of the river Krishna 3 a statement not true, though
'the rite was rare in the south and yearly growing
irarer. In the Bombay and Madras Presidencies,
'during the years 1815 to 1820, the average number

1 Edward Moor, Hindu Pantheon (edited W. O. Simpson, 1864),
318.

Edited Pope, 172. 3 History, 209 (1874 edition).

ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION 69

of annual suttees was well below fifty. In Madras it
was less common in the centre, and in the west and
south unknown, except in Tan j ore and one estate
in Kanara. 1 Tanjore, now the worst district, had
twenty-four cases in eighteen months (circa 1816),
About the same time the Judge of South Malabar
spoke of it as entirely absent ; there had been two
attempts to perform it, but the people themselves
had opposed them, and the funeral parties had been v
compelled to take their widows to Coimbatore to burn.

" Since that time nothing of the kind has been attempted,
nor would the natives quietly permit it on the soil of
Malabar." 3

We must now return to the effect of the 1813
Regulations in Bengal. There are no returns for
1814, owing to the delay in finally sanctioning the
orders originally made out in December 1812. But
the first four years for which returns were made
give the following result in the districts subordinate
to the Presidency of Bengal :

1815. 378 suttees were officially reported.

1816. 442 suttees were officially reported.

1817. 707 suttees were officially reported.

1818. 839 suttees were officially reported.

In 1818, the year when the pyres blazed most
fiercely, Rammohan Ray began to publish his pam-
phlets against the rite, action which aroused such
anger that for a while his life was in danger. But

1 Calcutta Review, 1867, 233 Ibid.

70 SUTTEE

he awakened a conscience in his own countrymen,
which presently found expression in protests in native
newspapers ; and the number of suttees never reached
this height again. The awful record of 1818 disquieted
many officials exceedingly ; and in England indigna-
tion began to gather, which ultimately put upon the
Indian Government a pressure that they could not
withstand. On June 17, 1823, the Court of Directors,
answering a letter of the Supreme Court, Calcutta,
of October I, 1820, pointed out the apparent tendency
of the rules and of official interference to increase
suttee; they added that many considered it not a
religious rite at all, and they invited the Indian
Government to take the question up seriously, pro-
mising their hearty co-operation. Lord Amherst, the
Governor-General, wrote back despairingly on Decem-
ber 3, 1824 :

" Were we to be guided by the sentiments which we happen
to know exist generally among the higher classes of natives
at the place most favourable for ascertaining their real
sentiments, we mean at the Presidency, we should, indeed,
despair of ever seeing the suppression of the practice/'

But on March 18, 1827, we find him soothing himself
in his policy of inactivity thus :

" But after all, I must frankly confess, though at the risk
i of being considered insensible to the enormity of the evil,
that I am inclined to recommend our trusting to the pro-
gress now making in the diffusion of knowledge amongst
1 the natives for the gradual suppression of this detestable
superstition. I cannot believe it possible that the burning
or burying alive of widows will long survive the advancement

ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION 71

which every year brings with it in useful and rational
learning."

It is interesting to analyse the figures for the first
four years of returns. Of the total (2,366) , 1,485 suttees
occurred in the Calcutta Division ; 343 in Benares,
then, as now, the metropolis of Hindu bigotry, but
in this matter far behind Calcutta, where often the
presence of European magistrates and sometimes of
horrified English ladies kindled the crowds to an
intoxication of delight ; 155 in the densely populated
but strongly Mahommadan Division of Dacca ; 155 in
Patna, 1 where the population was perhaps thinnest
but Hindu sentiment was, and is, strong ; 105 in the
Murshidabad Division, another centre of Mahommadan
influence ; 60 in Bareilly,

There was considerable carelessness as to keeping
within even the wide latitude allowed by the Direc-
tions. Between 1815 and 1820 twenty-two widows of
sixteen were burned, and twenty-four under that age,
three being children eight years old. In 1818 forty-
nine widows were under twenty, a hundred and
twenty-two between twenty and thirty, eight were
returned as over ninety, and two as over a hundred.
It was found, too, that in anumarana there was
sometimes a long delay after the husband's death
intervals of five, ten, or even fifteen years were
reported. It is hard to suppose that in these cases

1 Suttee has occurred in this district several times in the present
century.

72 SUTTEE

affection, after so long a space in which memory
was blurring, awakened to such a pitch of resolution ;
but it is easy to see how the wearing misery of a
widow's lot might hound her into a belated martyrdom
to escape from life.

The Supreme Court, though refusing to recommend
the prohibition of suttee, did not allow it to take
place within their immediate jurisdiction ; Calcutta
suttees had to take place in the suburbs. The writer
of the article in the Calcutta Review of 1867, after
observing that in 1819 fifty-two widows were returned
as having been burnt in the suburbs, remarks :

" It is, therefore, quite clear that any respectable British
householder living at Cossipore, Ballygunge, Ahpore, or
Garden Reach, and driving into Town for his daily work,
or any resident within the ditch, might, if they desired it,
reckon on being horrified by a ceremony of this kind, on an
average, once a week " *

After 1818 the number of suttees dropped con-
siderably, though never as low as its pre-Regulation

level :

SUTTEES IN THE BENGAL PRESIDENCY.

1819 .. .. 650

1820 . . . . 598

1821 . . . . 653

1822 . , . . 583

1823 .. .. 575

1824 . . . . 572

1825 . . . . 639

1826 .. .. 518

1827 . . . .

1828 . . . . 463
Calcutta Review^ 1867, 232.

ATTEMPTS AT PROHIBITION 73

I cannot find that any returns were made for either
1827 or 1829. The increased number of 1825 wa s
ascribed to an outbreak of cholera, in which over
twenty thousand died ; the increase led to renewed
protest against the rite.

It is clear to me, from consideration of the districts
where suttee prevailed most and from such knowledge
of India and of Hinduism as I have, that the custom
was one which Vaishnavism tended to discourage,
while Saktism enormously increased it, in spite of
the fact that the Tantms forbade it. In the strongly
Vaishnava district of Vishnupur, a kingdom which
existed from about A.D. 600 to the end of the eighteenth
century, and was, and is, fervently Hindu, with
hardly a Christian in it and few Mahommadans, and
those uninfluential, there are traditions of suttee,
but they are vague. The only definite one that I
traced during many years of familiarity with the
place was the story that supplied the germ-thought
of my drama " The Clouded Mirror." * I was told
of a suttee in the neighbouring village of Maliara
about a century ago, and I heard occasionally of
others dimly remembered elsewhere, and I know
places where a suttee must have been the original
event that has been twisted into a different tale.
When we remember that this district is scarcely a
hundred miles from Calcutta, it is strange that it
should be without suttee-stones, even at the sangam

1 See Three Eastern Plays.

74 SUTTEE

(junction) of rivers. There are suttee-stones, but the

people have forgotten what they are and explain

them otherwise. But the Jungle Mahals, in which

the district lay, returned comparatively few suttees

in the awful records of a century ago ; and Midnapur,

which lies still nearer to Calcutta, returned still

fewer. I am aware that the rite must have occurred

oftener than men now recall, and in the country

districts the people have kept a name for a sati

agunkhakl, "one who has eaten fire." Where the

word sati is misunderstood or an answer refused,

this less sacred word will enlighten at once and bring

out such records as the village memory has kept.

But the rite was rare where Vaishnava influence

reigned ; the satis died most numerously in Calcutta,

its suburbs and the towns that cling to its outskirts,

and in Nadiya, the metropolis of Bengali history and

Hindu learning and enthusiasm. Calcutta Hinduism,

though cherishing a literary and sentimental fondness

for Vaishnava poetry, in its deeper and fiercer currents

is Sakta, and worships the terrible Goddess Kali, as

does Rajasthan. The great Vaishnava devotee of

Rajasthan, the Queen Mira Bai, had to leave her

home and family and live and die in exile. She was

a Vaishnava from childhood, and for her religion was

persecuted and driven from Chitor.

CHAPTER VII
PROHIBITION IN BRITISH INDIA

LORD WILLIAM CAVENDISH-BENTINCK had served as
Governor of Madras twenty-two years before he was
appointed Governor-General of India in 1827 ; but
he had never seen a suttee-stone, and he brought to
the question of continuing or prohibiting the rite a
mind fresh and independent. A passage in Sleeman's
Rambles and Recollections is of such interest that I
transcribe it a little more fully than is strictly relevant
to my purpose :

" When I passed this place on horseback with Lord
Bentinck, he asked me what these tombs were, for he had
never seen any of the kind before. When I told him what
they were, he said not a word ; but he must have felt a
proud consciousness of the debt of gratitude which India
owes to the statesman who had the courage to put a stop
to this great evil, in spite of all the fearful obstacles which
bigotry and prejudice opposed to the measure. The seven
European functionaries in charge of the seven districts of
the newly acquired territories were requested, during the
administration of Lord Amherst m 1826, to state whether
the burning of widows could or should be prohibited ; and
I believe every one of them declared that it should not. And
yet, when it was put a stop to only a few years after by
Lord William, not a complaint or murmur was heard. The
replies to the Governor-General's inquiries were, I believe,
throughout India, for the most part, opposed to the measure/' *

* Rambles, i. X3V*4 dSgs edition).

76 SUTTEE

Sleeman is speaking from hearsay, and it could be
shown that he was mistaken, except in what he says
of " the seven European functionaries in charge of
the seven districts of the newly acquired territories,"
which were districts that he knew well at first hand.
These districts were all in Central India abutting on
Rajputana, where the pro-suttee feeling was strongest,
and the few Europeans were in charge of

' ' New-caught, savage peoples,
Half-devil and half-child."

Even so, Vincent Smith's comment is fair and true :

" The tenor of the replies given to Lord Amherst's queries
shows how far the process of Hinduizing had advanced
among the European of&cials of the Company." r

But it had not advanced so far among the officials
in parts of India that had been longest under British
rule ; and Peggs collects some forty statements made
by East India Company servants in the dozen years
preceding the abolition that suttee could be abolished
without any danger, and ought to be abolished without
delay.

Lord Bentinck took over in July 1828, and he did
not act without the most careful preliminary in-
vestigation and consultation of officials and pundits.
But he was resolute to act upon a purpose with
which his predecessors had only played Lord Wellesley

1 Rambles (Sleeman), i. 134 (1893 edition).

PROHIBITION IN BRITISH INDIA 77

having been dissuaded by the supposed danger in
the army, and Hastings and Amherst having been
driven into perplexed and unhappy courses of allowing
suttee under legal sanction. Many predicted rebellion
if the custom were prohibited ; the native army
especially was alleged to be bigoted in its adherence
to the rite. But Bentinck ascertained that suttee
was very rare indeed in our native army, which is
not strange, seeing that, except for about a thousand
men in the artillery, the army was not recruited from
Bengal at all, but from the up-country where Moslem
rulers had through two hundred years discouraged
suttee. Of forty-nine British military officers asked
for their opinion, a majority advocated abolition,
some with more or less hesitation, but over twenty
without any ; only five were in favour of leaving
the practice alone. The Governor-General's long
Minute on suttee is as masterly in its summary of
the opposition and reasons for opposition and of the
overwhelming argument in favour of abolition as it is
honourable to himself. And there proved to be no
disturbance, even when the appeal of many religious
and influential Bengalis was rejected by the Privy
Council in 1832.

The abolition of suttee, so far from being, like the
abolition of slavery, an example of our greatness as a
nation and an empire, is an example of our timidity.
In this instance we have taken to ourselves praise
beyond our desert. The credit is almost entirelv

78 SUTTEE

personal, and it is Bentinck's. Many who hated the
rite would have withdrawn from prohibition at the
last moment. Mr. Coomaraswamy coolly remarks that

" It was prohibited by law in 1829 on the initiative of
Raja Rammohun Roy," *

Rammohan Ray was a valiant fighter against suttee,
but he thought the prohibition an inexpedient measure,
as did Sir Charles Metcalfe, who had forbidden suttee
at Delhi more than seventeen years previously.

On Sunday morning, December 5, 1829, a document
was brought to the Rev. William Carey, with the
Governor-General's request that he would translate it.

" It was nothing less than the famous Edict abolishing
sail throughout British dominions in India ! Springing to
his feet and throwing off his black coat, he cried, ' No church
for me to-day ' ' . . . ' If I delay an hour to translate and
publish this, many a widow's life may be sacrificed/ he said.
By evening the task was finished." *

Regulation XVII of 1829 made the burning or bury-
ing alive of widows culpable homicide, punishable
with fine or (and) imprisonment. When compulsion
or the use of drugs deprived the satf of free will, the
offence might be punished with death as murder.
It came into immediate operation in Bengal, and was
adopted in Madras and Bombay six months later.
It was adopted with these modifications in Bombay:

1 The Dance of Siva, 92.

F. Deaville Walker William jCarey, 310.

PROHIBITION IN BRITISH INDIA 79

that the offence was murder if the widow were under
eighteen, and an extreme limit of ten years' imprison-
ment was set for suttee that was not murder. These
laws lasted until 1860, when an Act made assistance
in suttee punishable as abetment of suicide.

The opposition of the religious and learned babus
of Calcutta was fierce, as had been predicted ; but it
was ordained that it should take a comic form, that
the long-drawn-out tragedy might reveal its bitter
absurdity in the end. On January 14, 1830, the
Governor-General received a deputation of Bengali
gentlemen who objected to their loss of the right to
show their religious convictions in the old ferocious
way. The Governor-General later in the day replied,
inflexible in his resolution to suppress suttee, and
pointing out that the protestants had

" an appeal to the King in Council, which the Governor-
General shall be most happy to forward/'

A committee was formed^ and over eight hundred
signatures obtained to an appeal to the Privy Council
to restore suttee. At an enthusiastic meeting Mr.
Francis Bathie was given full power of attorney and
appointed to take the Petition to England; it was
voted that he should have all the funds he needed,
and he assured them that he was certain of success*
The ship in which he first sailed had an accident
with a cable chain and sprang a bad leak ; it was
hastily run ashore. Mr. Bathie wrote to his patrons :

8o SUTTEE

" Such accidents are generally attended with the loss of
life ; but from my being the bearer of the suttee petition,
God has saved all who were with me " *

He further pointed out that the delay gave a chance
for suttee enthusiasts who lived at a distance from
Calcutta and had been unable to sign the Petition
to send their signatures in now. The Chandrika,
the journal that expressed the views of the orthodox
Hindu community, was very impressed with the
friendly attitude shown by Providence in the affair.
But a correspondent in the India Gazette was impious
enough to ascribe the accident to the very fact that
such a petition was on board ; and the Kaumu&l,
the journal of the anti-suttee party among the Hindus,
observed :

" The petition sent to England, to procure the restoration
of the burning of women, so humanely abolished by the
Governor-General, has been brought back, by force of the
virtuous merit of the whole female sex of our country, for
the ship which bore it was very nearly carried to the bottom."

Mr. Bathie ultimately reached England; and
Mr. Lushington argued before the Privy Council on
behalf of the religious rites which Lord Bentinck had
stopped, contrary to the engagement of the Govern-
ment not to interfere with liberty of conscience.
But Rammohan Ray, who was in England, obtained
access to members of Parliament and was consulted

1 Was the good man by any chance remembering Acts xxvii.
23-24?

PROHIBITION IN BRITISH INDIA 81

by the Privy Council, and with all the emphasis and
power of his amazing intellect and personality begged
them to support the action which he had thought
premature but believed to be altogether righteous.
The Privy Council in 1832 rejected the appeal of the
pro-suttee party ; and Rammohan Ray procured a
petition from progressive and humane Hindus thanking
Lord Bentinck for what he had done. His services
were a fitting crown to the brave life of the great
Indian. Next year he died, and his body lies in an
English churchyard.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SUPPRESSION OF SUTTEE IN
NATIVE STATES

WITH Lord Bentinck's prohibition of suttee a new
social conscience came to the Indian Government,
and the next thirty years saw them warring against
female infanticide, thuggee, human sacrifice, slavery,
suttee, and all forms of indigenous barbarity. The
Western reader who troubles about India at all
generally assumes that the 1829 an< i ^SO Regulations
were the end of suttee everywhere, and there is no
historian who indicates how terribly it was still
practised throughout a vast tract of territory. It
took many years to disappear, and it will be instructive
to watch the Paramount Power stamping it out in
one area after another and reducing the extent within
which it was legal.

After the abolition in British India, the rite existed
in Northern and Western India, between the Narbada
and the Indus, and from the United Provinces to
Sind. Within this tract it had three main strong-
holds: (i) the states on the northern border of
Bombay Presidency those clustering along the
Narbada, and Baroda and the Kathiawar states;
(2) Rajputana; (3) the Sikh empire and the states

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 83

lying between it and British India, dependent on one
of these two powerful neighbours or precariously
independent. Suttee existed also in Nepal, which
was outside British influence, and in one or two
outlying wilds such as Assam and Orissa.

As suttee was a matter of internal polity, Residents
at native courts could only express unofficially the
abhorrence of their own Government when it occurred ;
it was not until that masterful man Lord Dalhousie
became Governor-General that interference took a
peremptory form. Nevertheless, the British Govern-
ment let slip no chance that territorial changes or
the revision of treaties afforded of securing promises
to prohibit the rite. It seems to me beyond con-
troversy that Indian opinion and Indian princes
would have allowed suttee, and a host of horrors
besides, to continue indefinitely but for this alien
vigour in the land.

The first chance to extend the area of abolition
came on March 2, 1833, when a Raja was being
installed in Assam. He was made to promise

"to abstain from the practice, of the former Rajahs of
Assam, as to cutting off ears and noses, extracting eyes, or
otherwise mutilating or torturing, and that he will not inflict
cruel punishment in his territory for slight faults " x ;

and also to prohibit suttee.

1 C. U. Aitchison, Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds (1876
edition), i. 172,

84 SUTTEE

SUTTEE IN WESTERN INDIA.

I have said that the attitude of the British Govern-
ment towards the rite in native states was strictly
correct. But progress was sometimes accelerated by
an individual officer going beyond his duty of regis-
tering protest. One such instance, in 1835, started
the Bombay Government on a course of vigorous
and persistent pressure that within five years cleared
suttee out of the states on their borders.

I must go back to an event of 1833. The state
of Idar, a Rajput state close to the Bombay Presidency,
from ancient times had had a barbaric pre-eminence
for its satis.

" Idar is surrounded by a brick wall in fair preservation,
through which a road passes by a stone gateway, marked
with many red hands each recording a victim to the rite
of sati."

On September 5, 1833, before a vast crowd, a cere-
monial took place that shocked British opinion in
India: seven queens, two concubines (of different
caste from their dead master), four female slaves,
and a personal manservant were burnt with the body
of the Raja of Idar, Before the pyres were lit the
eldest rani, addressing the crowd, said that she had
always intended to burn with her lord, and that no
appeal could have turned her from her purpose ; but
she thought it strange that she had heard no single

* Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. xiii.

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 85

word of compassion or dissuasion. She bade those
who were now sweeping her master's household out
of their way to obtain the widows' inheritance to go
and live on the plunder they were getting. The
Karbaris (officers) followed the funeral with an exten-
sive pillage of the Raja's personal property.

The incident * has an interest beyond its pathos ;
it shows what from now on is increasingly manifest
that the women of royal households in native India
were changing in their attitude towards suttee, now
that their sisters in British India were no longer
allowed to burn.

Two years later the Raja of the neighbouring
principality of Ahmadnagar died. His state had
formerly been part of Idar state, as it is to-day, and
it shared the same ferocious traditions. The British
Agent, Mr. Erskine, who was in charge of both states,
was now in the neighbourhood of Ahmadnagar.
Determined to prevent a repetition of the Idar suttee,
he moved on the town with a force of three hundred
men. All day long, on February 8th, the deceased
Raja's sons pleaded with him not to interfere with
their customs ; they used the delay to push on their
desperate measures for the sacrifice of the ranis.
Finding Erskine resolute, they secretly summoned
warriors from the Bhils and other turbulent tribes,
and the British Agent became aware that men armed
with spears and matchlocks were pouring into the

a My authority is the Bombay Courier, September 28, 1834.

86 SUTTEE

fort. He advanced upon it, but was fired on, some
of his men being wounded; he fell back, sent for
artillery, and waited. About two o'clock in the
morning women's screams were heard and the red
glow of a pyre was seen on the darkness. During
the night part of the fort wall had been broken down,
and the widows, five in number, dragged to the river-
bed and burnt. It was too late to rescue them. That
the satis had been unwilling ones was clear. A
woman's arm, hacked off by an axe or sword, lay
in the ashes. The princes fled, but subsequently
surrendered to Erskine. 1

Erskine's action had been beyond his legal powers ;
but his Government supported him against cruelty
and insolence so great. In a lengthy memorandum
dated February 18, 1836, the new Ahmadnagar ruler
provided a scapegoat and confessed :

" My minister Mahadjee Soobhavut is guilty in the affair
of the suttee ; I will not give him shelter within my territory."

He promised also :

" From this time forward neither I nor my children nor
my posterity will perform the ceremony of suttee." 3

In 1840 the Bombay Government clinched matters

* I rely on the Bombay Couner and the Imperial Gazetteer of
India (1909), u. 443. The Gazetteer gives the number of satis as
three. Official documents often omit to count slaves or concu-
bines, and the Couner account is within a few months of the event,
more than seventy years earlier than the Gazetteer.

* Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds. iv ^6

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 87

by a proclamation that any village or district in the
Ahmadnagar territory where suttee occurred would be
placed under attachment.

For many years after the prohibition of suttee in
their own jurisdiction the Bombay Government was
annoyed by the asylum given to it by neighbouring
states. British subjects, refused permission to burn
in Bombay, were taken across the border and burnt
in states where the law against suttee did not obtain.
The chief of the little island known as Angria's
Kolaba, about twenty miles from Bombay, and
Pratap Singh, the Raja of Satara, were particular
offenders. Pratap Singh, a capable ruler but un-
friendly, ignored the protests of the British represen-
tative, and suttee became very common in Satara.
The Bombay Government, sensitive under the loss of
prestige that resulted when their laws were flouted,
although beyond their borders, began to follow up
cases of the burning of their own subjects. On
January 3, 1838, a peccant chieftain, the Nawab of
Junagarh, was compelled to make confession and
promise to prohibit the rite altogether, a course that
the British Government was bound to force upon
native states once it insisted that its own subjects
were not to be burnt :

" After compliments. The cause of writing to you is
this. A certain Bhattianee having arrived from Bombay
and committed suttee at Pragrye, and the Sircar having
issued orders preventive of such a practice, a mohsul is

88 SUTTEE

upon me in order to make me answerable ; and the particulars
of the subject (the suttee) having been reported to Govern-
ment, and it having been considered as a first instance of
the kind, for which reason I have been pardoned, I give
this writing to the effect that from henceforward such
measures in the talooka will be taken so that no person
will be allowed to become suttee in future. But if such
should hereafter occur, I am responsible to any extent the
Sircar may pronounce against me." x

At the same time another chief in the Kathiawar
Agency, the Sidi of Jafirabad, was made to enter
into the same agreement. Then, in September 1839,
the Satara Raja was deposed. His offence was that
he had intrigued with the Portuguese and some
native princes against the British ; but he had been
a nuisance in other ways, his patronage of suttee
being one. His brother became Raja, and at his
accession of his own free will abolished the rite, later
proving his good faith by preventing a woman from
being burnt.

Next year, 1840, in the absence of direct heirs,
Angria's Kolaba " lapsed " to the British Raj. The
same year the Government wrote sharply to the fore-
most prince in the Bombay Presidency, the Gaekwar
of Baroda, and cleansed that side of India from
legal suttee by promises wrung from the leading
chiefs of Rewa Kanta, the territory lying along the
Mahi the Raja of Chota Udaipur, the Maharanas
of Lunawara and Rajpipla, the Rana of Sonth, and
the Thakurs of Bhadurwah, Wankanir, and Deogarh

i Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds, iv. 145

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 89

Barria. The context of the Government's demand is
made clear by the Despatch of Mr. A. Remington,
Officiating First Political Commissioner and Resident
at Baroda :

(Date, April 3, 1840.) " Under instructions received from
the Resident of Baroda, conveyed to me in his letter dated
nth March, 1840, I write to inform you that it having come
to the notice of that officer that a British subject born in
Rutnagherry, but residing at Baroda, died, and his widow
immolated herself in observance of the rite of suttee, which
the Guikwar government took no measures to prevent, the
Political Commissioner addressed a note to His Highness
deprecating the occurrence, and suggesting that, as the
British Government had, after full consideration, abolished
the rite of suttee in its own territory, His Highness should
introduce a similar arrangement within his own, to which
His Highness replied that, according to the request of the
Resident, he would cause proper arrangement to be made ;
and this concurrence being communicated to Government,
it was pleased to declare that no act could have been per-
formed more acceptable to it than the abolition of suttee.
I beg to state that it appears to me advisable you should
take measures to prohibit the practice in your own State,
in respect of which, as the British Government are most
intent on the speedy abolition of this rite, you will have
the goodness, after full consideration of the above, to favour
me with a reply." *

All agreed to suppress suttee,

On the other side of India, Government had
embarked on the task of extirpating the horrible
" meriah " human sacrifices of the Orissa highlands.
Progress was slow, and success was not attained till
some years later. In the meantime fifteen tributary

* Treaties, Engagements t and Sunnuds, iv 251*

90 SUTTEE

rajas, zemindars, and mehals of Orissa were made to
promise, by a statement dated April 14, 1842, to
abolish suttee, adding :

" Further, if on the demise of a Rajah any of his Ranees
should actually desire to become ' suttees/ and should dis-
regard our prohibition, we will restrain them from becoming
' suttees/ and make a report of the circumstance to the
Superintendent, and conform to such orders as we may
receive from him. Without the Superintendent's orders (or
permission) we will not allow any person to become a suttee.
And we engage unhesitatingly to submit ourselves to any
penal orders which the Superintendent of the Tributary
Mehals may issue, if we shall act in any way contrary to
the engagements of this Recognizance/' r

SUTTEE AMONG THE SIKHS.

We have seen the British Government dealing with
native governments prejudiced in favour of suttee
and unable to see why, if a woman had sufficient
virtue to wish to die with her husband's corpse, she
should not be allowed to do so. But they were
states with little power and of secondary rank, and
had no choice but to accept the demands of their
overlord. Their compliance left intact the real strong-
holds of suttee, the powerful Sikh confederacy and
the stubborn and bigoted Rajput principalities. The
former was destined to fight two fierce wars with the
British, and at Chilianwala to achieve a drawn battle
which is merely a sentence in our histories, but with
Halighat (the great Rajput defeat, a glorious one,

1 Treaties, Engagements, and Sunnuds, i. 120.

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 91

by the Moguls in 1576) is the most cherished martial
memory of secret India.
Among the Sikhs

"the suttee murders were atrocious. Four ladies burned
with Ranjit Singh; one, against her will, with Kharak
Singh; two with Nao Nihal Singh; 310 (10 wives and
300 unmarried ladies of his zenana) were sacrificed at
the obsequies of Raja Suchet Singh; in September 1845
four wives of Jawahir Singh were forced on the pyre by the
soldiery ; and, after Sobraon, the widow of Sardar Shan
Singh burnt voluntarily." *

But neither Vincent Smith, in this inaccurate
summary, nor the many writers who have quoted
it, have indicated how incredibly atrocious the suttees
of the last years of Sikh independence were. Con-
temporary British opinion in India was appalled by
the obsequies of Ran jit Singh, " the Lion of the
Panjab/' in July 1839 ; but Vigne, who gives the
number of satis wrongly, speaks justly when he says :

" Seven women only were burned with the body of Ranjit
Singh a very small number, considering his rank ; but it
was no doubt deemed expedient to show some respect to
European prejudices."

We have two accounts of the scene by European
eye-witnesses 3 ; the accounts contradict each other
in minor details, but prove the general inaccuracy
of Thorburn j s graphic and brilliant description.* The

1 Oxford History, 689-690 n
Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo (1842), 86.
s John Martin Homgberger, the Court Physician at Lahore, and
the adventurer Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Steinbach,
4 The Punjab tn Peace and War. 2021.

92 SUTTEE

four queens came first, walking barefooted from the
palace to the body, which was fastened to a wooden
board ; before each of them a man walked backward,
holding a mirror in which the lady could watch her
countenance and detect the first glimmer of terror
or shrinking. Three had already given their jewels
away; the fourth was scattering gifts from a tray
carried beside her by a man attendant. All four
were in plain silk, without any ornaments. The chief
queen, Rani Kundan, placed the hands of the minister
and of the new Maharaja and his son on the corpse's
breast, and made them swear to be faithful to the
Khalsa and to one another, or incur a sail's curse.
The four ranis were then taken up in gorgeous palan-
quins, before which their mirror and a gilt parasol,
the symbol of their rank, were carried. They were
borne between a long double line of infantry as down
a street ; behind them walked seven slave-girls, also
barefooted and plainly clad. The board to which
the body of their master was fastened was placed on
a brilliantly decorated bier, shaped like a ship, with
flags and silken sails embroidered with gold and
silver. The pyre was about six feet high, and its
surface scattered with cotton-seeds and other inflam-
mable stuffs. The queens, Steinbach tells us, were
excited and exultant ; the slaves, some of whom
seemed only fourteen or fifteen years old, resigned. 1

* The Punjaub (1846). Psychologically, his account is the
more detached and valuable, but Homgberger's contains the fuller
details.

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 93

At the pyre there was an hour's prayer, following on
the drums and dirges of the procession ; and then
the state ministers mounted the pyre by a ladder
and set the corpse upon it. They descended, and
the queens and slaves went up, Raja Dhyan Singh,
the chief minister, being particularly officious in
helping them. The ranis seated themselves at the
head of their master, the slaves at the feet ; and all
sat cowering and silent, the ranis ignoring Dhyan
Singh's request that they would pray for the new
Maharaja's prosperity. A thick mat of reeds was
put over all the bodies and drenched in oil ; then
the pile was lit at the four corners and the flames
shot up. The whole took two days to burn.

The heroism and beauty of the victims threw their
fate into lurid relief, though the scene in itself was
merely repetition of countless similar scenes that
India has witnessed through the ages. One of the
women was the famous " Lotus," a dancing-girl whose
loveliness made a great impression on the British
Mission at Ranjit Singh's court the previous year :

" His four wives, all very handsome, burnt themselves
with his body, as did five of his Cachmerian slave-girls, one
of whom, who was called the Lotus or Lily, I often saw last
year in my first visit to Lahore." *

The Hon. Emily Eden, in her charming letters, wrote :

" Those poor dear ranees, whom we visited and thought
so beautiful and so merry have actually burnt themselves.

1 Hon. W. Osborne, The Court and Camp of Runjeet Singh
(letter dated July 12, 1839).

94 SUTTEE

. . . The death of those poor women is so melancholy ; they
were such gay young creatures, and they died with the most
obstinate courage." x

Her letter of the previous day (July 2, 1839), when
the sacrifice was merely reported as in prospect,
contained the cynicism :

" I begin to think that the ' hundred wife system * is
better than the mere one wife rule ; they are more attached
and faithful/' a

The British Government instructed Mr. Clerk, their
representative at Lahore, to convey their horror.
But the six years of murder, intrigue, and anarchy
that followed Ranjit Singh's death years so terrible
in their indiscriminate butchery that it is hard to
parallel them in recent history anywhere found the
Sikhs very careless of what the British Government
thought, especially of what it thought " unofficially/'
With Ranjit Singh's death the last shreds of regard
were quickly swept away. Sixteen months later the
funeral obsequies of his successor were held :

" On the funeral pile of his son, Maharaja Kharak Singh,
one of his chadar dalna 3 wives, a beautiful woman named
Isar Kour, was burnt. She was unwilling to be a sail, and
it is said that she was forced to burn by the minister Raja
Dhyan Singh." 4

1 Up the Country (1867), 310. a Ibid., 309.

3 " Throwing the sheet " a Sikh form of marriage with the
brother of a deceased husband.

4 Sir Lepel Griffin, Ranjit Singh (" Rulers of India " series), 65.

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 95

Dhyan Singh had superintended the scene at Ranjit
Singh's pyre, and had consummated his action by
the hypocrisy of pretending to wish to be burnt with
his master himself, pushing himself forward with loud
cries and being " forced " back.

Kharak Singh had been deposed by his son and his
favourites slaughtered on October 8, 1839 ; he died
a year later, on November 5, 1840, probably by
poison. Two ranis and eleven slave-girls were burnt
with him. His son, Maharaja Nao Nihal Singh, a
boy of nineteen, left the pyre while his father's body
was still burning, and was crushed by the falling of
an archway on his way home, dying before midnight.
Two wives burned with him. His successor, Shere
Singh, was assassinated September 15, 1843, and
burned with " the usual suttee rites/' I no writer
troubling to specify their extent. The minister,
Dhyan Singh, was murdered the same day. His
widow and slave-girls, designated for his pile,

" were kept waiting before the troops to inspire them with
revenge, and the spectacle of their melancholy and dismal
figures increased their fury a hundredfold/' z

After her stepson, Hira Singh, had brought the head
of her husband's slayer and laid it at her feet, the
widow and her thirteen slave-girls mounted the pyre,
first assuring Hira Singh that she would take a good

* Stembach, 38.

3 Syad Muhammad Latif, History of the Panjab t 517. See also
Major S. Carmichael Smyth, History of the Reigning Family of
Lahore (1847), 85-6.

96 SUTTEE

report of him to his father. A slave-girl aged ten,
spared as too young, begged to be included, and
was allowed to join the other satis before the pile
was lit.

Next year occurred the most horrible of all these
Sikh suttees. Raja Suchet Singh, famous for his
personal beauty and gallant bearing, attempted the
throne, but was slain on March 27, 1844, after a fight
in which he and his companions showed wonderful
prowess. It was followed by suttees suitable to the
rank and valour of the slain. Eleven women died
with Kishari Singh, five with Basanta Singh, eleven
with Nihal Singh * ; but with Suchet Singh, the leader,
ten wives and three hundred concubines were burnt.

" some at Lahore, a hundred and fifty at Ramnagar, where
his head was brought, and the others at Jammu or their
own homes." *

These suttees were scattered over a wide area and
the time was one of utter confusion, so that the case
does not seem to have attracted the attention of
British India till afterwards, nor the appalling scale
of the sacrifice to have been known till Frederic
Drew in his travels learnt it. The evidence, which
comes from many sources, is so contradictory that
neither the Oxford History's statement nor that of
Vincent Smith's authority, Sir Lepel Griffin, can be

* W. L. M'Gregor, The History of the Sikhs (1846), li. 29. He
gives forty-five as the number of suttees with Suchet Singh.
1 Gnffin, Ranjit Singh, 65.

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 97

taken as without exaggeration. But it is certain that
the satis were very many, and the funeral ceremonies
burnt themselves into the Sikh memory and are still
talked of.

On December 21, 1844, Suchet Singh's conqueror,
Hira Singh, son of Dhyan Singh, was killed, and
burned with twenty-four 1 satis at Parmandal, near
Jammu. His funeral was described to Drew by an
eye-witness :

" There was a large square stage made, built up of
faggots, with a rough roof raised over it ; between the faggots
*ghi, that is clarified butter, was placed, to increase the
violence of the flames The women, twenty-two in number,
were seated on the platform; the wood was fired, and the
burning was finished without a scream or a voice being
heard from them." a

Less than a year later, Hira Singh's conqueror,
Jawahir Singh, whom Sir Lepel Griffin calls " debauched
and infamous " 3 though it is hard to see how any
one of the Sikh leaders in these years could claim
the pre-eminence in turpitude that such epithets
imply was executed by the soldiery, who " rightly
suspected him of treachery to the Khalsa." 4 His
body was burnt on the plain outside the Lahore fort
on September 22, 1845. Two wives and three slave-
girls became satis. They begged for their lives, but
were forced in procession between the army's ranks

1 Viscount Hardmge, Lord Hardinge (" Rulers of India" ), 165
* The Jummoo and Kashmir Territories (1875), 52.
3 Ranjit Singh, 65. 4

98 SUTTEE

The trays from which they were to make the sati's
customary distribution of jewels and money were
snatched from their attendants, their own personal
ornaments taken, and even their ear-rings torn out.
We are told that the pillage continued even after
the pyre had been lit, and that soldiers tried to
rescue the gold fringing of the women's trousers, and
that even in the flames one of the satis rose and
cursed her persecutors. The satis 9 cries and appeals
on the way to the pile were answered with jest and
ribaldry. For a crime so terrible and open, the
slaughter of the Khalsa in its war with the British
a few months later seemed a just retribution.

" A sati is considered a sacred object among Hindus, and
her last words prophetic At the feet of these wretched
women, Raja Dina Nath, who was officially present on behalf
of the Rani, and many others fell down, imploring their
blessings. The satis blessed him and the Maharaja, but
cursed the army of the Khalsa. When asked the fate of the
Punjab, they answered that during the year the country
would lose its independence, the Khalsa be overthrown, and
the wives of the men of the army would be widows They
were then forced into the flames of the funeral pile ; but the
prophecy came true, and no curse was more amply fulfilled." *

This scene had behind it a woman's cruelty. The
wazir, whose execution had been irregular and sudden,
was brother of Rani Jindan equally entitled with
him to the adjective "infamous/' His death filled
her with the wildest passion of grief, and she was

* For this and the next two quotations see Griffin, Ranji
S^ngh > 65-67,

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 99

resolved that his funeral should be one with all
honours ; but the army let their loathing of the
dead man vent itself on the miserable chattels that
his sister drove into the flames with him. It is
pleasant to close the story of the Sikh suttees by an
example which shows how loyalty and deep affection,
when the object was worthy, could transfigure even
this awful sacrifice. Sir Lepel Griffin, contrasting the
last two suttees, says :

" The last two widow-burnings in the Punjab were
remarkable as showing this curious Hindu custom at its
worst and at its best ; in other words, where the victims
were brutally murdered in the name of religion, or where
they voluntarily and cheerfully met the death of fire as
the glorious crown of a life of self-sacrifice and devotion "

I will tell the story of the last * Pan jab suttee in his
words ; it is that of the widow of Sardar Sham Singh,
one of the noblest and best of the Sikhs, who was
killed at Sobraon (February 10, 1846) :

" He had denounced the war with the English, and well
foresaw what its termination must be. But he resolved to
fight for the Khalsa, and on the night before Sobraon he
swore on the Granth never to leave the field defeated. In
the morning he dressed himself in white, and, having
mounted his white mare, addressed his men, begging them,
as true sons of the Khalsa, to die rather than yield. During
the first part of the battle he was everywhere present, urging

* So Griffin called it in 1898, and the Oxford History of India
follows him. But it cannot have been, since it is understood
that the Lawrences had great difficulty in suppressing suttee after
the British occupation, though no writer gives any evidence of
this. But see a letter by Henry Lawrence, written November 15,
1846 (Life, 11. So), which shows it still survived.

ioo SUTTEE

the Sikhs to fight bravely ; and it was not till he saw that
all was lost that he spurred forward against the 5oth Regi-
ment, waving his sword and calling on his men to follow
him. Some fifty of them obeyed the call, but were driven
into the river Sutlej, and Sham Singh fell dead from his
horse, pierced with seven bullets. After the battle his
servants begged permission to search for his body. The
old Sirdar, conspicuous by his white dress and long white
beard, was discovered where the dead lay thickest. His
servants placed the body on a raft and swam with it across
the river ; but it was not till the third day that it reached
his home at Attari. His widow, who knew his resolution
not to survive defeat, had already burnt herself with the
clothes which the Sirdar had worn on his wedding-day.
This was the last sail in the Punjab, and the pillar which
marks the spot where it took place is still standing outside
the walls of Attari/ 1

During these last years of suttee in the Panjab
it was equally prevalent in the states that lay between
the Sikh kingdom and the British Raj. Some of
these were tiny ones hidden in the Himalayas and
at the doors of Simla ; but three, the " Phulkian "
states, 1 were Sikh states. The Phulkian states had
accepted alliance with the British ; but, with a storm
obviously beating up from beyond the Sutlej, it was
not advisable to press reforms upon them. Never-
theless, in 1833 the Patiala Agent drew the Maharaja's
attention to suttees that had occurred in that state
on May 20th and 3ist ; they had occurred close to
Subathu, which had been a British cantonment since
the Nepal war, though still part of Patiala. British
prestige suffered when a rite forbidden by British
* Nabha, Patiala, Jhind.

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 101

law took place so near British settlements. The
Maharaja, to placate the Agent, fined those respon-
sible, though their action had been quite legal.

Suttee in Mandi, a Pan jab hill state whose capital
is less than fifty miles in a direct line from Simla,
forced itself on British attention in these years. Sir
William Lee- Warner and Viscount Hardinge both cite
the burning of twelve women with a Mandi Raja as
an outstanding case that troubled people who heard
of it. Sir William gives no date, but his context
implies that it happened between 1829 an( i *&35 l >
whilst Lord Hardinge definitely states * that it was
in the Governor-Generalship of his relative, the first
Lord Hardinge, 1844-1848. But only one Raja of
Mandi died between 1829 and 1851 ; his death was in
1839, an( i we find our firm ground of evidence with
G. T. Vigne, who in that year witnessed 3 a suttee in
Mandi, a short time after the last ruler's funeral.
He appealed in vain to the Raja to prevent the
sacrifice. The Raja next day called upon him and
explained that he could not interfere in such affairs ;
he was very affable, and they went on to discuss
suttee as an adjunct of royal funerals :

" The Rajah also told me that the omission of the ceremony
would be looked upon as an act of disrespect to the memory
of a deceased Rajah ; and of the truth of his assertion there
could be no doubt. I had seen the tombs of the Rajahs

1 The Native States of India, 304.

- Lord Hardinge ('* Rulers of India "), 165.

3 I have quoted part of his account in the Appendix.

102 SUTTEE

of Mundi by the roadside, a few hundred yards from the
entrance to the town. The place of their ashes is marked
by a long, narrow stone slab, standing upright in the ground,
and on each of them is sculptured, in relief, a small sitting
figure of the deceased, attended by other figures m the same
attitude, purporting to represent the satis who were burnt
with him The number of female figures varied, but none
of the later Rajahs had fewer than twenty disposed in rows
above and below him The late Rajah had been dead but
three months, and the puppet representations of no less
than twenty-five women who had been burnt with him
were evidently freshly produced by the rude chisel of the
Mundi sculptor." z

After Sobraon the Sikh Government surrendered,
and Sir Henry Lawrence was appointed Resident and
President of a Council of Regency, the Maharaja being
under age. Lawrence was the real ruler, and attempted
" to conduct the administration on more or less
civilized lines/' * Suttee, accordingly, disappeared
from the Pan jab, though not at once.

It disappeared also from all but one of the minor
Sikh states, and from the nest of petty hill states.
Already, on April 12, 1843, the Thakur of Tiroj,
accepting the British Government as entitled to
settle a succession quarrel, had received a sanad
from it and promised to suppress suttee. At the
close of the first Sikh war the same engagement was
required both from those states on the upper Sutlej
that had been under British protection before and
from those that had only now exchanged the over-

1 Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, I skew do (1842), 85.
3 Oxford History of India, 695.

MEMORIAL STONES OF THE MANDI RAJAS

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 103

lordship of Lahore for that of Calcutta. On October 24,
1846, the Rajas of S'uket and of Mandi promised to
abolish suttee. The engagements entered into by these
fierce little kingdoms usually discriminated against
more than suttee with reason. Thus the Raja of
Mandi promised :

" He shall so put a stop to the practices of slave-dealing,
suttee, female infanticide, and the burning or drowning of
lepers, which are opposed to British laws, that no one shall
venture in future to revive them." *

Often mutilation was added to the list of practices
proscribed.

Between September 1847 and April 1848, Patiala,
Bilaspur, Faridkot, Jhind, and Chamba all promised
to forbid suttee and its kindred abominations. One
Sikh state, Nabha, apparently did not promise until
May 5, 1860.

SUTTEE IN RAJASTHAN.

Meanwhile in Rajasthan suttee continued almost
unchecked, Udaipur retaining its sombre pre-eminence.
A writer in the Asiatic Journal, 1835, describing the
city, speaks of the rite as in its immemorial abundant
practice. " Those whose minds are made up " loosed
their tresses and emptied a pot of \^aer over them ;
after this there was no retreat from the pyre. The
state, as for many years previously, and as it was to
continue for another thirty years, until the British

1 Treaties, Engagement$, and Sunnuds> vi. 144,

SUTTEE

Government imperiously called both parties to order,
was the scene of incessant squabbles between the
Maharana and his nobles; the country remained
impoverished, with its internal resources wasting and
its tribute heavily in arrears and its administration
backward and bigoted. One extravagant and de-
bauched ruler succeeded to another. On March 31,
1828, Maharana Bhim Singh died,

" having learnt neither humility from affliction nor wisdom
frnm poverty, lie held fast by his faults and weaknesses
to his death, am! he was accompanied to the funeral pyre
by {our wives and four concubines/' *

His successor,, Jawan Singh, gave himself up to ten
years of vice and debauchery. His funeral rites call
for something more than passing mention.

** On thfc ^oth of Attgust, 1838, the princely city of Oody-
IMIII? WUH the scfRC of a terrible solemnity. About midday
& prolonged discharge of artillery from the fort announced
thr* imc&pccttid decease of Maharana Juwan Singh; and,
tin i visual in tropical climates, preparations for his obsequies
immrtliatdy commenced. The palace gate was thronged
with the exultant populace. Something, however, in the
excitement of their voices and gestures boded the approach
l n jipactacitt more thrilling than mere pomp could render
tv*n j* royal funeral* It was not the dead alone whom the
ti*g**r crwii w^re waiting to see pass from among them.
Sculptured in tart!ing abundance on the tombs of their
rtitor*, the welt-known effigies of women's feet gave ghastly
MUffanee that a prince of Oodypore would not that day
to gathered to his fathers without a wife, or a concubine,
hta pyre, the only question was how many ? It

& Guatiit** Mtwar Agency. The Resident at
to Fort Willkm (Calcutta) OXL April 9, 1828, says
&f$d otic favourite concubine.

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 105

was known that the youngest of the two queens came of a
family in which the rite was rarely practised ; while the
suddenness of the Maharana's death had given but scanty
time for any of his inferior women to mature so tremendous
a resolution. Great, therefore, was the admiration of the
multitude when they learnt that, immediately on the fatal
tidings reaching the zenana, both the queens and six out of
seven concubines had determined to burn. . . .

" The eight victims, dressed in their richest attire and
mounted on horseback, moved with the procession to the
cemetery There they stripped off their ornaments and
jewels, distributed gifts to the bystanders, and lastly,
mounting the pile, took their places beside the corpse. As
the Maharana had left no son, his nephew, the present
sovereign, applied the torch. The crash of music, the chanting
of the priests, and the cries of the multitude arose simul-
taneously, and the tragedy was consummated ' The father
of one of the queens ' (concludes the native report) ' was
present during the whole. He is here immersed m contempla-
tion and grief, and his companions are comforting him/ " *

Lord Auckland, through the Resident at Udaipur,
unofficially expressed displeasure at the barbarity
and at the prominent part taken by the new Rana.
Udaipur shrugged its shoulders and went its blood-
strewn way. Four years later the new Maharana,
Sardar Singh, died. Again it was unthinkable that a
Chief of Mewar should go to the pyre without " the
dreadful honours of the sail sacrifice/' a But his

1 H. J. Bushby, Widow-Burning, 5-6. The author makes
certain mistakes. For example, when his book was published
(1855) the Maharana was the successor of the one who applied
the torch. Also, nine women became satis, and not eight. And
" women's feet " mark the suttee memorials of the Maratha
country, rarely those of Rajasthan.

3 Cunningham's phrase in connection with the funeral of
Jawamr Singh (History of the Sikhs, edited by H. L. O. Garrett,
Clarendon Press, 272}.

106 SUTTEE

reign had been one of incessant quarrelling with his
nobles, who strongly disliked him, and

"his personal unpopularity was emphasized, even when he
was no longer among the living, by none save one lady
consenting to be burned with his corpse " *

The Guidebook's euphemism veils the plain fact
that public opinion would not have tolerated that a
Rana's funeral should be one of his dead body alone,
without a female chattel to keep it company. The
growing unwillingness to burn manifested at this
time by Indian ladies, even by Sikh and Rajput
ladies, shows that they were influenced by the know-
ledge that outside their narrow barbarous world was
an India from which suttee had passed away.

On September 5, 1843, Man Singh, Maharaja of
Jodhpur, died. One lady with the rank of queen,
four concubines and a slave-girl burned with him.
The reader of Tod will remember this Man Singh and
the part he had played in the miseries of Rajasthan
thirty-seven years previously. He had lingered on
into this new age, when the old India was breaking
up, and his death-pomp was with the rites of that
older world. That older world had yet another
fourteen years of shorn and uncertain existence to
run before the Mutiny swept it away and modern
India came into being.

The Rajputs have had " a good press " in the
West, but it is nothing to the press they have had

1 Udaifiur Guidebook.

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 107

in India. The heroic and terrible history and legends
of Mewar furnish the stuff for the most popular plays
of vernacular theatres, especially among the peaceable
but (in their literature) gore-loving Bengalis. These
plays, and the kindred novels, treat their themes in
a mood of imbecile exultation and adoration. So far
as I have had means to judge, no' breath of criticism
or sanity has yet blown in upon Indian thought
where Raj as than is concerned. The story, as Indian
writers tell it, is without human interest, the dramas
are without probability, character-differentiation,
poetry, or common sense. Once the story of Rajasthan
is faced by minds really moving in this modern world,
that story will produce plays and fiction which will
cause the extant trash to be tossed on the rubbish-
heap where it belongs. Indian writers pay no true
homage to the valour of Rajasthan, and no just tribute
to the pity of its fate, when they represent its people
as demigods with the minds of savage children.

It was this idealization of Udaipur that made the
efforts of the British Government to extirpate suttee
in native states so slow in meeting with success. For,

" whatever a Hindoo knows of chivalry or nationality, he
deems to be exemplified in this model race. Since, therefore,
Rajpoots were renowned for the frequency of their suttees,
the great independent states thought it beneath their
orthodoxy to return any other answer to the remonstrances"
of the British Government against the rite than that ' it
would be time enough for them to prohibit it when Rajpootana
led the way/ " x

1 Bizshby, n.

io8 SUTTEE

But, as in the years preceding Bentinck's abolition
of the sacrifice, so now, individual officers were some-
times able to do more than Government felt entitled
to attempt. The Resident at Kotah obtained an
evasive promise from the Raja that he would do his
best to stop the rite. A few months later, on
October 29, 1840, the Raja refused to act, and a
Brahman's widow burned. The first substantial
Rajput success came at Jaipur. Major Ludlow, in
the Maharaja's minority, was President of the Council
of Regency. He first persuaded the Rajput states
to abolish female infanticide ; then, in 1846, after
long endeavour, his tact and personal popularity won
the Jaipur Council over as to "suttee also. Already
some of the powerful Jaipur nobles had suppressed
it in their own territories ; but his success with the
Council took everybody by surprise, his predecessor as
Resident most of all. Lord Hardinge, the Governor-
General, notified the prohibition in the Gazette, Sep-
tember 22, 1846, thanking Ludlow for his service.
The example set by Jaipur, a state second only to
Udaipur in influence, was quickly followed. Before
Christmas 1846 eleven of the eighteen Rajput states
and five independent states outside Rajasthan forbade
suttee. Kotah suppressed it next year (March 1847),
and Jodhpur in the time of Hardinge's successor,
Dalhousie. The reader, noting these dates, will note
also that the end of the first Sikh war opened on a
period of very vigorous administrative activitv, when

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 109

every effort was made to stamp out surviving inhu-
manities. The fact that the British had defeated
the great Sikh confederacy strengthened their prestige
enormously, and made even Rajput states willing to
meet their prejudices. In fact, it is not too much to
say that it was the victory over the Khalsa that
alone made any sort of move against suttee in
Raj as than possible at all. From first to last Rajasthan
had been the metropolis of the rite, as it had almost
certainly been the original home from which it had
spread over India millenniums before. The Sikh prac-
tice of suttee had been an aberration, contrary to the
teaching of some of their Gurus. Outside Rajasthan,
the ruling families of Rewa Kanta, as well as those
of Idar and Ahmadnagar, were nearly all Rajput ; I
and it was only the accident of these states being near
enough to cause annoyance to the Bombay Govern-
ment by encouraging British subjects in the forbidden
practice that had led to interference in Rewa Kanta.
If the honour of the abolition within British India
is Bentinck's, that of the final suppression of suttee
by native states is largely Dalhousie's. Though
practically no promises were made in his time, he
insisted that promises already made must be kept,
and those who broke them punished. To the extreme
limits of his power he acted with ruthless vigour.
The ruthlessness was necessary, for in the Rajput
tradition, along with magnificent qualities, was a
1 The ruling race in Nepal is Rajput by origin.

no SUTTEE

barbarism so deep-rooted that only a sterner fierceness
could extirpate it. The Encyclopedia Britannica says
that in native states " suttee he kept down with an
iron hand/' x Like almost every statement on the
subject, this needs qualification, which Dalhousie's
own Minute of February 28, 1856 (paragraph 146),
reviewing his administration, supplies :

" The prohibition of suttee by the British Government
is now a familiar tale. In the time of those who preceded
me great progress had been made in persuading all native
princes to unite in denouncing the rite and in punishing
those who should disregard the prohibition. The Govern-
ment of India, since 1848, has had only to follow up the
measures of preceding years When suttee has occurred in
an independent state, no opportunity of remonstrating has
been lost. When it has occurred in any district which was
within our control, no indulgence has been shown to the
culprits. Thus renewed remonstrances have been addressed
to Ulwar, Beeckaneer and Oodeypore ; but in Doongur-
pore, a British state under our direct management, where a
thakoor's son took part in a suttee, the son and a Brahmin
who abetted his crime were condemned to imprisonment
for three years in irons ; while the thakoor himself, for the
same three years, was mulcted in half the revenue of his
possession. The performance of suttee is now a rare occur-
rence, either in Mahomedan or native states/'

Dungarpur, a tiny Rajput state, was temporarily
dependent on the Imperial authority, its chief being
a minor. But I cannot find the proof, with regard
to the three powerful recalcitrant states, Udaipur,
Alwar, and Bikanir, either of the Encyclopedia Britan-
nica' s statement or of Trotter's :

* Article " Dalhousie."

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES HI

" In Udaipur, Alwar, and Bikanir, Lord Dalhousie J 's inter-
ference took the form of threats, which the native princes
and chiefs had the wisdom to accept as positive commands " x

In the case of Alwar and Bikanir, the support of
suttee was one of theory rather than of practice. 3
Before Dalhousie came, Alwar had abandoned the rite
at the funeral of its rulers ; and in Bikanir the last
"distinguished satt"3 was Dip Kunwar, a daughter
of the Udaipur ruling family and wife of Maharaja
Surat Singh's second son, Moti Singh. She died in
1825, and a fair is still held in her honour at Devi
Kund, a village five miles east of Bikanir. But so
long as suttee was legal it was bound to occur ; it
continued to occur even in parts of Rajasthan where
it was forbidden, as when the sister-in-law of the
Bhinai Raja burned in Ajmer in 1857. She exercised
a saK's immemorial right of curse and blessing, for
the Brahmans who attended her to the pyre begged
her to pronounce against the unpopular cess with
which the British Agent supported the schools. In
1857 the British Government was in no case to take
the field against suttee in loyal states, even when it
was forbidden by law. The saK won a victory for
her people ; the cess was withdrawn.

Whatever assurance Dalhousie may have thought
he had obtained from Udaipur, after he had gone

* India under Victoria, i. 258.

* This was true of every Indian state except Udaipur (and,
of course, Nepal) in 1855.

3 Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908).

H2 SUTTEE

the state swung back, and in 1861 Maharana Sarup
Singh's funeral was disgraced by the murder of a
slave-girl. More than thirty years had passed since
suttee had been made illegal in British India, and
eighteen since slavery had been abolished. This
sacrifice may be the one Mr. Kipling had in mind
in his poem, The Last Suttee, but there is no resem-
blance between the two stories except the fact that
a slave-girl died. In every other detail they con-
tradict each other utterly, and the geography of his
poem, though picturesque, is absurd, making the
Boondi King lord of many lands to which he had
no manner of claim and which were far from his own.
I mention this, not as criticizing Mr. Kipling, but
because readers seem to think that his poem gives a
historical account of a real suttee, and that one the
last. As the last suttee at the funeral of a reigning
chief of protected India, the Udaipur one deserves
that we should read of it in a nearly contemporary
official document.

" After the demise of the last Maharana of Udaipur, the
first Hindu prince of India, the acknowledged head of the
Rajputs, and the ruler of a principality wherein ancient
customs and usages are cherished more religiously than
perhaps in any other State, each wife was successively asked
to preserve the honour of the Sesodia tribe, the chief of
which had never burnt alone. One and all most positively
declined, and a favourite slave-girl was then appealed to
by her brother 1 In speaking to the wretched girl, he dwelt
strongly upon the fact that all the late chief's lawfully
married queens had refused to preserve the honour of the

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 113

house, and that the greater credit would redound upon her
were she prepared to set an example of devotion to those
who so wilfully declined to evince any themselves ; that
their perversity, in short, had afforded her an opportunity
to earn a world-wide reputation for fidelity, which it were
madness to neglect. His arguments prevailed. . . . The
royal corpse, dressed up in regal attire, was conveyed from
the palace to the burning-place (called the Mahasati) in a
species of sedan-chair; the funeral procession, composed
of all loyal subjects of the state, one and all, high and low,
even the successor to the throne, proceeded the whole
distance on foot; one alone in this vast multitude was
allowed to ride, and she had but a short time to live.
Mounted on a gorgeously caparisoned horse, herself richly
attired as for a festive occasion, literally covered with jewels
and costly ornaments, her hair loose and in disorder, her
whole countenance wild with the excitement of the scene
and the intoxicating effects of the drugs she had swallowed,
she issued forth with the body. As customary on such
occasions, the victim, as the procession moved on, unclasped
the ornaments with which she was profusely decorated and
flung them to the nght and to the left amongst the crowd.
On reaching the Mahasati, in a space enclosed by tent walls,
the corpse was unrobed, and the slave-girl, seating herself
with the head of the lifeless body in her lap, was built up,
as it were, with wood steeped in oil The kanats, or canvas
walls, were then removed and the pyre lighted ; and as the
flame shot up bright and fierce the crowd around raised a
great clamour, which lasted until the dreadful scene was
over. . . .

" Shocking as this sail was felt to be, the fact that every
wife had, for the first time in the annals of Mewar, declined
to die on such an occasion cannot but react favourably on
the feelings and sentiments of other Rajput families." *

The Mutiny was one of those rare episodes that are
not only impressive in themselves, but mark the end

1 Report on the Political Administration of Rajputana> 1865-1867.
by Colonel W. F. Eden, Agent of the Governor-General.

114 SUTTEE

of an era. It left the native chieftains dependent
on the paramount Power as they had never been
before no longer princes, but at best barons. Those
that kept their status were those that had shown
themselves friendly to the British Raj ; their salutes
were augmented, but no additional ceremonial could
keep their real importance undiminished. Inevitably,
popular sympathy had been with the insurgents, and
those chieftains who had helped the British were
aware that they were out of favour with their country,
even with their own subjects. They had to draw
closer to the protecting Power, and in subtle ways
this sense of dependence moulded even their deepest
and oldest prejudices. They could not ignore the
strong feeling of the British Government even in such
an immemorial custom as suttee. The Udaipur suttee
of 1861 was an isolated instancethe last. It was
possible, partly because during the Mutiny Udaipur,
by giving asylum to British families, had established
a claim on the gratitude of the Supreme Government,
partly because the state was in a condition almost of
anarchy, in which old traditions alone were powerful
and no one could be made responsible. Between
1860 and 1862 the British Government overhauled
its relations with the native states ; sanads were
given> guaranteeing and defining the status of each,
and engagements were taken. The lesser states
fenewed their promises to prohibit suttee ; and,
such a promise was not required explicitly

SUPPRESSION IN NATIVE STATES 115

from the greater states, we may take it that it was
understood between the contracting parties that suttee
was to cease. Sarup Singh was succeeded in Udaipur
by a minor, and the real power rested with the
Political Agent ; even so, the Council was found
inefficient and unsatisfactory, so that it was " found
necessary to entrust greater power to the Agent," *
who proceeded to introduce many reforms and to
pull the state out of its long-continued anarchy.
The revenues were managed so economically, that
when the Rana took over the government, in November
1865, there was a balance in the treasury; life and
property were made secure, and the law courts over-
hauled. The fourteen first-class nobles now try all
cases of crime or complaint in which both parties
are their subjects ; but cases of murder, satt, highway
robbery with violence, traffic in children, and coining
have to be reported, and the barons 7 decisions sub-
mitted for the Maharana's approval.

We are justified, then, in taking 1862 as the
approximate date when suttee became illegal in
Rajasthan and in states where it had already fallen
into desuetude Kashmir, Bhopal, and Bharatpur.
It became " illegal " in this sense, that the paramount
Power would not have tolerated its continued exist-
ence ; and it ceased because Rajput ladies refused to
mount the pyre.

The story of the suppression of suttee in native

1 Rajputana Gazetteer, Mewar Residency.

n6 SUTTEE

states is one of the minor stories of Indian history,
and one that has never been told, partly because
the Imperial Government keeps its correspondence
with the greater states strictly secret, and the tale of
what happened is scattered 'over many hundreds of
memoirs, district gazetteers, and contemporary news-
papers, most of which have long ago perished and
survive only in some quoted scrap. The story has
not the obvious importance that attaches to that of
a great campaign in the field, but I think that there
is no story that more clearly brings out the watch-
fulness and courage that were required in the thirty
years during which British officers, bound by their
instructions which were rarely exceeded, and then
only for such terrible reason as Erskine had at
Ahmadnagar not to go beyond verbal and diplo-
matic protest, slowly and patiently persuaded princes
to abandon their most cherished honour. If the
British Government were needlessly timid in pro-
hibiting suttee in British India, and delayed this act
of humanity by many unnecessary years, they made
amends by the persistence with which they took their
opportunities in the native states in the thirty years
following their own prohibition.

CHAPTER IX
ILLEGAL SUTTEE

IN NATIVE STATES.

THOUGH 1861 was the date of the last suttee at the
funeral of a ruling prince, the rite died hard, and
often swelled the death-pomp of a Rajput thdkur or
baron. The late Colonel Eckford Luard gave me
the note :

" Before our greater interference in state af airs had come
say, from 1880 on thakurs, especially big landholders,
were practically independent within their estates. Now this
is no longer so, as state administrations are assimilating
themselves to ours far too much so, I think ! They are
losing that elasticity, wrongly called 'want of efficiency/
which is really the human touch in administration even if in
some directions it is occasionally rather perverted humanity ! "

I give some examples of the Rajput suttees that
sprinkle the last forty years of the century. I have
referred to the remarkable one in Ajmer in 1857.
In 1862 there was a sail at the funeral of the thdkur
of Rewa in Sirohi ; the persons responsible were
punished by imprisonment. In June 1864 the widow
of the son of the thdkur of Begun, in Udaipur, was
burnt, as was the widow of Sham Singh, the thdkur
of Utarna, in Jaipur, in 1883. The latter instance
resulted in sentences of seven years' rigorous im-

n8 SUTTEE

prisonment for the sons and brothers of the husband
and three years for minor accomplices. The last
suttee in Central India took place in the Rajput
state of Datia x in 1895.

There have been suttees in other states also. I
mention two late occurrences of the rite. On Octo-
ber i, 1853, the widow of the Waghela chief of Aluwa,
in Kuri, a district in the Gaekwar's dominions,
burned ; and in 1860 there was a suttee of extreme
atrocity near Guna, in Gwalior. The widow's reso-
lution failed her, and she escaped from the burning
pile ; the spectators struck her with sticks and twice
wounded her with swords, but she was maddened
and managed to hide in reeds on the banks of the
river Parvati. She was discovered, dragged out, and
drowned.

IN BRITISH INDIA.

The learned Judge who tried the appeal of Ram
Dayal before the Allahabad High Court in 1913
noted that

" the Regulation of 1829 seems to have had immediate
effect, and the practice was almost completely stamped
out. In fact, I can only find three reported cases of safi
in the Law Reports for these provinces and for Bengal since
that date. They occurred in 1834, 1854, and 1871."

I do not understand this summary ; illegal suttee
was much commoner than this, especially if we

1 For this information I am indebted to Colonel Luard

ILLEGAL SUTTEE 119

include cases followed by no prosecution. In the
first few years after prohibition it might almost be
called common.

Mr. Coomaraswamy, in a footnote to the passage
that I have quoted at the beginning of this study,
reminds us :

"'Social conventions' are rarely 'wcw-made laws*
alone." *

That is true ; and when suttee was first prohibited,
widows, disconsolate at deprivation of the right to
burn with their husbands, sometimes starved them-
selves to death. The Chandrika composed some
suitable elegiacs on one such case that occurred in
Bengal in 1830 :

" Words cannot express the distress we have felt on
hearing this intelligence ; for in this case a virtuous and
faithful wife has given up life, after great mental compunction,
through the irresistible prohibitions imposed in regard of
suttees by Government. Yet this virtuous woman after her
death has attained felicity, for the husband is the only
instructor, the only God of a wife ; for that blessed woman,
overwhelmed with various anxieties, though she was not
able to burn her own body with that of her husband, reflecting
on her husband's feet as though they were her tutelary
deity, has liberated herself from the body by refusing food.
Yet it is a matter of the deepest regret to us. How the
children to whom she gave birth are able now to drag on
their existence it is beyond our power to say. . . , What
shall we say to them ? It was beyond their power to burn
their mother. It is customary for those in deep distress
to make it known to the sovereign ; but the sovereign of
this country is himself become the destroyer of this practice.'*

* Tk? Lance of Siva, 91.

120 SUTTEE

But our old friend the Kaumudi, on October
of the same year, brought forward another case, in
which the widow had stopped short of tragedy :

' After two days her hunger overcame her sorrow, and
she with much importunity and distress requested some
food, which was brought to her immediately. From that
day she has remained contentedly with her family and
busied herself with the work of the house/'

To show how stubbornly suttee persisted I give a
few examples from the early days of prohibition.
In January 1830, in the Tirhut zila of Patna, a
widow appealed to the ddrogd (head constable) who
tried to stop her from the pile and won him over.
She burned herself, and the ddroga lost his post.
There were suttees at Ratnagiri (February 1830) ;
Chibotu, in Patna (May 10, 1830) ; Madhurikand,
thirty-five miles north-east of Agra (September 16,
1831) ; near Gaya in 1832 ; at Muttra (May 13, 1833).
The reader should note the frequency with which
places in Bihar recur in connection with suttee ; the
district has had several suttees in the present century.
The Madhurikand case resulted in a prosecution ;
three men were sentenced to seven years' imprison-
ment, two to five years'. But the High Court reduced
the sentences, and the Governor-General pardoned
all except one of the accused, who was cap-
tured after absconding and received a year's hard
labour, Next year, 1832, the first case from Bengal
to be tried under the new Regulation reached the

ILLEGAL SUTTEE 121

courts ; the accused pleaded, and the plea was
allowed, that the village authorities had not pro-
mulgated the Regulation. But the excuse that they
did not know that suttee was illegal was pushed
aside by a higher court. Ultimately Lord Bentinck
pardoned them personally.

In these early years of prohibition the name of
Angria's Kolaba frequently occurs. This is an island
twenty miles from Bombay, formerly the haunt of a
pirate chief Angria. For many years, as I have
mentioned in Chapter VIII, widows from Bombay
and other British territory were taken here and burnt.
I find such instances in contemporary newspapers
mentioned as having occurred in August 1830 and
in 1834. The Bombay Gazette, commenting on the
latter case, says that the practice was common. The
chieftains ruling other adjacent territories gave the same
hospitality to suttee, as we have seen.

In addition to the few cases that reached the law
courts, or were authenticated by clear report, there
can be no doubt that suttee often occurred undetected
and unpunished. A missionary writes (June 27, 1845) :

" A sliort time since a suti was performed in a village
near, almost under the eyes of the authorities, yet the
murderers could not be found out." *

Careful search shows suttee, though quickly growing
rare, still from time to time recurring. I have found

1 Memoir of J. J. Weitbrecht, 139, K[e is writing of the
clistrict of

122 SUTTEE

one case in the Mutiny area during the Mutiny period
a bad case in the Farakhabad district in 1858.
Suttee has persisted into the present century. Bihar
had cases in 1901, 1903, 1904, 1905 ; there was one
in a small village in the Panjab in 1905 ; and in 1906
there were suttees at Cawnpore and in Calcutta.
Sixteen persons were charged in connection with the
1903 Bihar case, which occurred in the village of
Kaltaki, Gaya district. In the 1904 case, which was
a suttee in the Patna district,

" Among the articles in evidence " (i.e at the trial) " there
was an invitation issued by the son to the sraddha m which
it was stated that his father was dead and his mother had
become a satti Another document showed the line of defence
to be taken in case of prosecution " *

That line of defence was the usual one one that
came up frequently even before Bentinck's Regulation
of 1829, whenever some illegality of detail brought
the supervisors of a suttee into court: the widow
had persisted in burning herself and had perished by
spontaneous combustion, which was supposed to
occur with exceptionally holy satis. But it was made
clear that the spectators provided a great deal of
assistance by pouring ghi and other inflammable
substances on the widow and by throwing wood on
the bodies. What cannot be considered too deeply
is that no one considered he had done anything
wrong by helping in the act, and that these suttees

* gir Andrew Fraser, Among Ind^an Rajahs and Ryots, 102,

ILLEGAL SUTTEE 123

gave intense delight to Hindus who read of them
and almost delirious pleasure to the spectators.
Within a very few hours of the death of the Patna
district saK a shrine had been made and lamps were
burning in her honour ; booths and shops were erected
to supply the needs of pilgrims.

The classical instance of illegal suttee took place
in the Allahabad district in 1913. I propose to treat
this interesting case at some length, quoting and
condensing from the judgment of the Court of Appeal.

Ram Lai, a Brahman resident in the village of
Jarauli, died early in the morning of June 27, 1913.
He had been ill for some months, and his widow's
intention to become a saK was well known. Her
relations and neighbours failed to dissuade her, and
sent the chaukidar to the police-station, eight miles
away, to give warning. They meanwhile hurried on
preparations for the funeral, and with quite unneces-
sary haste completed the double burning before noon.
The accused persons prepared the pyre, which the
widow walked round seven times in orthodox fashion
and then mounted. She then stripped off her orna-
ments, which she threw into a cloth held by the two
principal accused. She demanded ghi, which was given,
and which she poured over herself and the pyre.

Five persons were convicted, and the Sessions Judge
sentenced Ram Dayal and Dodraj to two years*
rigorous imprisonment and three minor offenders to
one and a half vears. Thev annealed, and the Tudsre

124 SUTTEE

of the High Court issued notice to them to show
cause why the sentences should not be enhanced.
After re-trial, the lesser sentences were confirmed, and
that on Ram Dayal and Dodraj enhanced to four
years' rigorous imprisonment.

The defence alleged gross negligence on the part
of the police in arriving late, and that they them-
selves had acted under fear, the saK having threatened
to curse them if they withheld assistance. The
morning that she died she had shown her chastity
by many miraculous deeds she had held burning
camphor in her two hands clapped together, she had
smitten an impudent girl into a fit with a glance of
her eyes and had restored her again, and she had
made the rain cease at about nine o'clock. The
sympathies of the witnesses were with the accused,
and they refused to say who had fired the pile. The
two principal accused

admitted carrying out certain details under her orders ;
but knew that these would be infructuous without the final
act of setting fire, which they never did . . . Both the
witnesses and the accused stated that when all was ready
and the widow demanded fire, Ram Dayal and Dodraj refused
to give it to her, telling her that if there were any virtue
in her she could produce it for herself, whereupon she
whispered into the ear of the corpse, and, raising her arms
aloft, prayed to God, and shortly after the pyre burst into
flame.

The learned Judge pointed out that the whole
country-side had been roused, and that there were

ILLEGAL SUTTEE 125

fifteen hundred to two thousand spectators, many of
whom must have come from a distance. Further :

A very little force would have been necessary to prevent
the woman ascending the pyre. Moreover, it was not abso-
lutely necessary to burn the corpse at so early an hour.
Though information had been sent to the police, no serious
attempt was made to await their arrival on the scene
Sixteen miles had to be walked before they could arrive,
and the accused must have known that no police officer
could possibly arrive until after midday. . . .

Any relaxation of the severity of the law in such a matter
will result in the recurrence of the evil which took so many
years to decrease to a minimum. The feelings and beliefs
which prompt a sail still exist, and but little encouragement

was needed to revive the rite. In conclusion :

Sati may or may not be forbidden by the Hindu religion,
but it was once a common practice, and the sympathies of
the people, at least of the unenlightened people, are all with
sati and it is looked upon as a meritorious deed.

There have also been many instances of private
suttee. Some of these have shown extraordinary
determination, as one that occurred in the Tinneveli
district of South India in 1876.* The widow dug a
pit inside her house, filled it with sandalwood, and
dressed herself as a bride ; she shut the doors, lit
the pile, and leapt in. This case is the stranger in
that Tinneveli is not a district where suttee lingered
with any great persistence, though it is close to
Madura and Tan j ore, where suttee had been an
apanage of kings and nobles.

i Globe. Tanuarv 10, 1877.

126 SUTTEE

The commonest form of irregular suttee is when a
woman drenches her clothes with paraffin and burns
herself in her own home. Such suttees have been
fairly frequent. One occurred in Calcutta in 1911 ;
there was a rush of hysterical women to the place
to pick up relics, especially fragments of the vermilion
lac. I well remember the imbecile enthusiasm of the
Bengali press.

No doubt there are suttees of this kind that never
come to official notice, and these may sometimes be
compulsory. Mrs. Sinclair-Stevenson, 1 asking what
became of unwanted widows, often had the reply,
" Paraffin is cheap." But I do not think such immo-
lations are anything like as common as she fears, or
as the latest writer on suttee, Mr. N. M. Penzer,*
seems to think on her authority. And these are
crimes on the borderland between suttee and ordinary
brutal murder, and as such hardly call for more than
slanting notice in this study,

It is impossible to collect or collate all the evidence
of illegal suttee in British India and native states ;
but I think it would be easy to show that suttee, in
one form or another, public or private and irregular,
has occurred almost every year in some part of India
between 1829 and 1913 ; and probably it will still
occur, though at longer intervals.

* See Rites of the Twice-Born, 207-8.

See <f Suttee " essay in The Ocean of Story, vol. iv.

CHAPTER X
LEGAL SUTTEE TO-DAY

IN Nepal, which is outside British jurisdiction, suttee
is still legal Mr. W. Crooke, in 1906, writes that
" the rite still survives." * But very little information
about the country gets outside Nepal.

Sir Jung Bahadur, the famous soldier and statesman
who helped the British in the Mutiny, discountenanced
suttee, so that the practice became rare; but his
own funeral, in 1877, was a magnificent affair, with
three satis. This is often said to have been the last
instance of suttee in Nepal ; I am sure that it was
not, but have no definite information.

After its virtual extinction in India, suttee flourished
still in the hinduized islands of Bali and Lombok,
as it had formerly flourished in Java. Slaves were
burnt, wives were burnt or, especially in Bali,
butchered with the " kites," the Malay knife, Horrible
accounts exist of widows slowly and clumsily
slaughtered, the spectators indifferent or laughing.
As in India, suttee was chiefly to glorify rajas, whose
funerals were never without these sacrifices, to which
priests' widows were not liable. The Encyclopedia
Britannica speaks of suttee as still practised in these

1 Things Indian, 449.

128 SUTTEE

islands ; so do other authorities, whom I quote with
hesitation, as I doubt if they have more information
than I have myself. "It is believed still to take
place m noble families." * " The custom of widow-
burning is still occasionally practised " a (in Bali).

* Sir Charles Eliot, Hinduism and Buddhism (1921), iii. 183

* N. M. Penzer, in The Ocean of Story (1926), iv. 257.

CHAPTER XI
CONCLUDING CONSIDERATIONS

I HAVE not conducted this enquiry into an obscure
subject from any love for the gruesome or the cruel,
or only because in India the stories and traditions
of suttee stirred profound pity in my mind and made
me wish to win for its victims at least this post-
humous justice, that their fate should not be mis-
understood. I believe that the history of the rite
sheds light on dark passages of Indian and British
relations, and on certain periods and personalities of
the last century ; also that conclusions of value for
to-day can be drawn,

EFFECT OF SUTTEE ON EUROPEANS.
Suttee, as Sir Vernon Lovett remarked to me, by
arousing the disgust and abhorrence of Englishmen
who saw it or were contemporary with it, caused
them to do injustice to Indian thought. It was
impossible to think of Indian civilization as anything
but a barbarian civilization. Macaulay's often-abused
Minute about the relative value of Sanskrit literature
and of "a single shelf" of modern European books
had this background of barbarities shadowing his
mind. If it was a mistake to set Indian education
on solely Western lines, it was a mistake for which

I

130 SUTTEE

Indians had themselves to thank, for the fruits of
Hinduism a century ago were bad. As an Indian
student of mine, a fervent Hindu, said to me, " A
hundred years ago, not only Christian missionaries,
but the early Brahmos also, thought that Hinduism
was idolatrous." That is so ; they also thought it
cruel. There is a simple explanation of both beliefs,
strange as they seem to neo-Hindus and theosophists
to-day. Hinduism was what it seemed to be.

There were many other barbarities practised in
India a century ago ; but some might be dismissed
as mere superstition, or as the crimes of backward
tribes and perverted sects of Hinduism, such as those
who practised human sacrifice. Infanticide had an
economic cause. But suttee cut to the very roots
of social morality, and the society which practised
it and gloried in it made itself an outcast from
the civilized comity of nations. It is often made a
reproach against the British that, after a century and
a half of predominance in India, they have not
advanced the people any further along the road of
fitness for self-government. I am not, I think, likely
to ignore or forget the mistakes and shortcomings
of our administration. But India's primary need
to-day is fair judgment from us to it and from
it to us. And if we have written Indian history
with unfairness, Indians have with equal unfairness
put upon us the blame for many things for which
they have been responsible. I have no doubt what-

CONCLUDING CONSIDERATIONS 131

ever that such things as suttee kept back Indian
political progress by many years ; until the rite was
abolished, even a beginning in self-government was
impossible.

" To put the matter in a lower but a very practical light,
we say that advancement of natives to Mgh posts of emolu-
ment or responsibility was simply impossible while such
relics of dark ages and dark superstitions were fostered or
endured The most grotesque and horrible incongruities
would arise had suttee kept pace with our avowed and
earnest desire to see natives taking a larger share in the
government of the country. Imagine a native gentleman
dying who was a member of the Governor-General's Council
for making laws, and the Viceroy, on sending a message of
condolence to his family, being quietly told that his wives
had all burnt themselves the day before ; or the native
Justices of the Peace for the town of Calcutta stating their
inability to attend a discussion on the waterworks of the
metropolis because they wished to follow the widow of one
of their number to her husband's pile at Chitpore or Garden
Reach ; or a Bengalee member of the Civil Service, for such
there may be, refusing to subscribe to the civil fund because
he would, under the Shastras, be only survived by his widow
for the space of twelve hours ! It was in one sense truly
said that such practices were incompatible with the spread
of education, but the sound rule, we submit, for our guidance
would have been to put down violent crimes first and then
educate and refine afterwards. The demoralization of the
survivors entailed by the rite of suttee was palpably spreading,
and was a worse feature than even the cruel tortures of the
dying wife, which is saying a good deal." *

But India paid an immeasurable price, in other
than practical ways, for the practice of suttee. The
rite aroused in foreigners a contempt, especially in

> Calcutta Review, 1867, " Suttee/'

132 SUTTEE

Bengal, where the men were and always had been
exempt from risk of death and maiming in battle,
which is not yet eradicated. Its apologists and
hymnists to-day are the large body of sentimental-
ists who are unteachably inaccurate, Europeans and
Americans incapable of any intellectual process higher
than unthinking ecstasy in the presence of what they
imperfectly understand and wholly misrepresent,
Indians incapable of any statement that is not tilted
by some nationalist bias. India has been damned
by the mental slackness of its exponents ; we who
love it are most of us people entitled to very little
respect on intellectual grounds.

It may seem unjust and illogical that the Moguls,
who freely impaled and flayed alive, or nationals of
Europe, whose countries had such ferocious penal
codes and had known, scarcely a century before
suttee began to shock the English conscience, orgies
of witch-burning and religious persecution, should
have felt as they did about suttee. But the difference
seemed to them this the victims of their cruelties
were tortured by a law which considered them
offenders, whereas the victims of suttee were punished
for no offence but the physical weakness which had
placed them at man's mercy. The rite seemed to
prove a depravity and arrogance such as no other
human offence had brought to light.

' ' Something may be urged in support of every kind of
custom, show, or amusement of a national character, however

CONCLUDING CONSIDERATIONS 133

barbarous and demoralizing in many respects. In gladia-
torial exhibitions, the old Romans, who, amidst all their
fine qualities, had no sentiments of chivalry or generosity
to the vanquished, learnt to admire the skill of the exhibitors,
as well as the calm determination with which they passed
by the Chief Magistrate, saluting him as dying men. In
the bull-fights of Spain the adroitness of the matador some-
times half-drowns the pity felt for the mangled and dis-
embowelled horses. Even at a prize-fight, gentlemen of
taste and education have dwelt on the artistic position, the
muscular, well-shaped, and healthy frame, and the exquisite
skill in attack and defence manifested by the pugilists. Yet,
in spite of skill and activity and heroic resolution, the almost
universal consent of civilized nations now pronounces such
spectacles to be barbarous and demoralizing. But in these
cases the actors, anyhow, are men, strong and independent,
and capable of judging for themselves. Suttees were made
out of the weakest part of the creation. Illiterate women,
preyed on by relatives, cowed by priests, morally if not
physically drugged, were urged to continue to their husband
after death that servile obedience to which they had been
condemned in their lifetimes, or to encounter a state of dull
and dreary widowhood to which death was almost preferable.
Suttee appears to have sprung from, as well as to have
perpetuated, some of the vilest feelings of our human nature.
It began in selfishness, it was supported by falsehood, and
it ended in cruelty such as might give support to fiends.
No language is too strong for it. When we read the long
record of human lives sacrificed to what was called our
national good faith, the vacillating minutes, the elaborate
reports, the indignant remonstrances which the subject
excited, and the inactivity of a Government presided over
at least by one able statesman, we can but sigh, as we read
the blood-stained page, for one hour of either Bentinck or
Dalhousie." *

Contemporary accounts of Bengal suttees a century
ago, and the cases that, for one irregularity or another,

1 Calcutta Review, 1867, " Suttee/'

134 SUTTEE

reached the courts, show that the rite was a huge
public tamdsM, 1 in which the lowest Mahommadans
joined actively with the dregs of the Hindu populace.

BENTINCK AND DALHOUSIE.

We have seen that we cannot claim the abolition
of suttee as a triumph of " British justice " or an
example of the righteous and fearless character of
our administration. The garland belongs to one man
almost alone, and no praise is too high for him.

Another thing that has become clear is the under-
lying motive of Dalhousie's annexations, some of them
carried out against the strong disapproval of such
men as Sir Henry Lawrence. His humanitarianism,
reinforced and sharpened by his experience of the
unwillingness of native states to set their houses
in order in matters of elementary decency, was
responsible for his anxiety to annex whenever possible.
I believe that there was no " earth-hunger " behind
his doctrine of " lapse " ; and while criticizing him we
should remember the exasperating refusal of many
states to abolish suttee and female infanticide.

" A saying of his quoted by Hunter has, as that author
observes, ' the ring of a great soul/

" * I circulate these papers/ he wrote hastily on one case
in which he had successfully insisted on justice being done
at the risk of a tumult ; ' they are an instance of the principle
that we should do what is right without fear of consequences.

* Show.

CONCLUDING CONSIDERATIONS 135

To fear God and to have no other fear is a maxim of religion,
but the truth of it and the wisdom of it are proved day by
day in politics/ " *

1829 TO 1857.

We have further seen that the 1829 Regulation
opened a period of intensive warfare against violent
and cruel crime ; British officers fought against
dacoity, suttee, human sacrifice, thuggee, female
infanticide. It was not kid-glove work ; even the
rites of the Aztecs were not more depraved and
ferocious than those which marked the " meriah "
human sacrifices of Orissa, and the officers who
extirpated them were dealing with sub-human beings.
Thuggee was stamped out by a ruthlessness that was
unavoidable and well deserved.

" During the years 1831-1837, 3,266 thugs were disposed of
in one way or another, 412 out of that number being hanged
and 483 admitted as approvers The approvers and their
descendants were detained for many years in a special
institution at Jubbulpore (Jabalpur)." *

The work of these years was largely summary; it
necessarily developed the summary outlook and
method. The period was marked also by four hard-
fought wars those with Sind, Gwalior, and the two
Sikh wars as well as two outside India, with
Afghanistan and Burma. The summary mind was
working in the aggression which forced Afghanistan
* Oxford History of India t 709. * Ibid., 668,

136 SUTTEE

and Sind to fight us, and in the annexations that
made the period one of growing exasperation against
the foreigner. The summary mind, when it is an
individual dealing with unwilling and wild subjects,
becomes the gamekeeper mind. These years, which
saw province after province added to British India
Sind, the cis-Sutlej lands, and the Jullunder Doab,
Kashmir, Hazara, the Pan jab itself, Oudh saw the
improvisation of a loose and mainly personal system
of administration for the vast tracts and fierce frontier
where Nicholson and his compeers won their reputa-
tions and formed their characters. If we remember
that the men who served in India during these years
often felt that they were exterminating vermin, and
that they were flung widely over newly conquered
territory where their authority was almost entirely
personal and their power enormous, the ruthlessness
and spiritual arrogance with which our people con-
fronted the Mutiny become explicable, and there is
the less reason for the whitewashing of our text-
books and their extraordinary moral judgments. The
Pan jab administration, before and after, as well as
during, the Mutiny, was terribly stern. These years
of suppression of inhumanities and of conquest and
subjugation, after the explosion of 1857 threw a
wild storm-light over all our thinking, produced
the hard, unattractive English life in India which
our novelists, consciously and unconsciously, have so
successfully made us realize. That life was perhaps

CONCLUDING CONSIDERATIONS 137

the most cynical (and yet confidently righteous) and
least humorous phase in all our history as a people.

I am not justifying anything that happened; I
am trying to explain ; and I do not believe that to
explain is to justify. Between 1830 and 1880 a
beneficial ruthlessness was busy, and a self-satisfaction
and an isolation from the people of India reigned.
If I would see the writing of Indian history a franker,
less cautious thing, and salted with a magnanimous
and less narrowly political philosophy, it is because
this would go far towards winning the interest of my
people, who are weary both of the querulous plaints
of Indians and of the angry pompousness of our own
satraps and apologists. I believe, too, that another
long step towards winning interest will be taken if
we can arrest some of the excessive attention that
has been given to the men prominent in 1857 and
later years and turn it towards the able and generous
men who worked in India in the period immediately
before the great annexations and the great rebellion
towards Munro, Malcolm, Elphinstone, Tod.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE " SATIS."

I had intended to try to examine this ; but the
truth is, it has ceased to seem a puzzle to me.
Obviously the mental state of the women who were
sacrificed varied infinitely, as that of martyrs for
religion or patriotism, The Rajput lady who died

138 SUTTEE

when a foe girdled in her city and her whole sex was
swept away, or who ascended the pyre with her lord
newly slain in battle, was in a mood that had no
contact or resemblance with the mood of the cowed
and unwilling slave-girl. Yet even Rajput queens
ultimately refused to go to the pyre.

Indians cherish with a rapture of exultation their
many stories of satis who died calmly or with lofty
ecstasy. Those who saw Dip Kunwar, " the last
distinguished mil in Bikanir/' go to her death in
1825 spoke of her radiant heroism as long as they
lived. Yet, after all, even such cases as this are
only examples of what the history of every country
has shown that men and women, not only separately
but in the mass, can be disciplined and trained to an
extent to which no limit can be set. Soldiers, members
of communities dedicated to destruction as some
warrior tribes and sects have been in times of national
despair slaves, the labouring classes during the long
industrial depression now slowly lifting all these
have been trained to accept without question a fate
that to sober thought is horrible. It is but a few
years since men of almost every nation in Europe
were disciplined to the point that they would accept
a command to go to inevitable death with resignation
or even joy. Women especially have shown a power
of passive acceptance of a drab and colourless plane
of existence in which their personality was crushed
out of even a claim for recognition, that may be to

CONCLUDING CONSIDERATIONS 139

their credit I am by no means sure that it is but
is certainly not to that of man. That large sections
of Indian society trained their .women to look forward
to the funeral pyre of their lord as the crown and
glory of their lives is true. It is true also that to
this day many Indian women cherish a sentimental
worship of that mood, in which their menfolk
encourage them, and that the writer who lays the
facts in sunlight and thereby slays the ignoble and
slavish folly that has given them so much satisfaction
will receive only resentment. Nevertheless, the dis-
cipline that made suttee possible was a discipline of
slaves ; and the civilization that hounded widows, in
the first moments of grief or surprise, into a declaration
that they would die, and then forbade any withdrawal,
was a barbarous one.

WOULD SUTTEE REVIVE IF THE BRITISH LEFT INDIA ?

Not as an established custom at any rate, not
where the nationalist movement connected with the
name of Mr. Gandhi has been strong. For that
movement has been a cleansing one, since it has
brought with it the deepest and most radical criticism
to which Indians have ever submitted themselves ;
it has loosened a great many things, besides the
British hold on India.

But there would undoubtedly be instances of suttee,
especially where Brahman or Rajput influence is strong ;

140 SUTTEE

and in some districts the rite might become not
uncommon. The disquieting thing is, suttee has
troubled the Hindu conscience hardly at all. Even a
saint such as Kabir mentions it with detachment, as
an illustration of his theme, the extent to which
love, whether of a husband or of God, can move
those it possesses.

Yet, as European history has shown, it is not fair
to expect even saints to be in all ethical questions in
advance of their age. What we are entitled to
consider strange is that, while some Indian writers
whom the West has deeply influenced for example,
Romesh Dutt and Rajendralal Mitra have con-
demned suttee uncompromisingly, it is common
indeed, usual for Hindu writers to glorify it to-day,
and there is a widespread belief that it proved the
superior chastity of their women. Suttee and nation-
alism are the two subjects on which the irony-loving
Bengali is nearly always heavily and solemnly serious.
The courage of the satis appeals to something in even
the most " advanced " Hindu that is absent from
the normal-thinking person in the West, and that
courage is the only thing that Indians have fixed
their eyes on. It is at last worth while trying to
draw attention to other aspects of the rite. The
last few years have brought to the younger generation
of Indians, especially those studying in the West,
such a feeling of weakness and humiliation that they
are anxious to be right in their thinking, and are

CONCLUDING CONSIDERATIONS 141

ceasing to be sensitive lest a confession that they
were mistaken in some matter lower their dignity
with foreigners: The free man can face the opinion
of others, for their condemnation is nothing to him
unless his own conscience go along with it.

Indians are with reason resentful of much that is
said on missionary platforms in Europe and America
and in missionary journals. Missionary apologetics
have stressed the weak points in Hinduism, and have
brought to the comparison only the strength of
Christianity, ignoring such matters as its stormy
and poetic but chaotic and mistaken eschatology.
India has a right to point out to her critics the
materialism of Western civilization and Europe's
record of aggression outside herself. The weakest
thing in Hinduism is its ethical record, which is a
shocikng one. There is no single instance of a cruelty
or an injustice which the religion or the people have
shaken off from within. Reform has always come by
forcible interposition from without, and without that
forcible interposition would never have come. If the
positive programme of Mr. Gandhi is followed, in
such matters as the removal of untouchability, this
record of Hinduism will be for the first time broken.

The refusal to glorify the past where it was vile
is the only course consistent with self-respect. It is
also the only way to win the respect of the world
and, I believe, the help of English men and women
in the struggle for Indian self-determination. For it

142 SUTTEE

is one thing to recognize the abstract justice of a
cause, and quite another to move to its assistance.
Greece and Italy have been trumpet-calls to civilized
men everywhere ; India is usually only a Ducdame,
and will be until more sense is talked by us who love
her. It is possible for a civilization to spoil its women
by adulation and by attaching importance to their
silliest and most trivial opinions. But Indian civiliza-
tion has spoiled its men, a fact written large on
Indian literature, making much of its finest poetry
and fiction unreadable outside India without con-
tempt mingling with admiration. I am sure that in
India generally, and in certain parts especially, the
men have for millenniums accepted and commanded
from the women more than they could afford to take.
As a result, the thinking and imagination of peoples
second to none intellectually have been largely sterile.
I believe the time is come for a much more radical
sifting of Hindu tradition by Indians themselves ;
and they will be wise if they adjust their attitude to
the past by one consideration only that of truth,
and if while doing this they forget that they are a
dependent people and exposed to a galling criticism
from outside. The criticism that matters is then-
own; and on this question, of woman's position in
society and her duties towards man, that criticism
has not been searching or brave enough. I have
tried to make it as impossible for an educated Indian
to defend suttee as it is now imt>ossible for an educated

CONCLUDING CONSIDERATIONS 143

Englishman to defend execution by torture ; and
when the defence is abandoned, the contempt that
the defending inspires will pass away. What is more
important, once the light of honest thinking is let in
on this sacrifice of woman, other ideas that have
sheltered behind this idol will be dragged out to
question. The nonsense about the wonderful purity
and spirituality of the Hindu marriage ideal cannot
survive 'examination ; still less can the sex-obsession
of the civilization and the social system which, in
making one sex the unpitied servant to the other,
drains and destroys both. If the matter is brought
to the political test, which not unnaturally is what
appeals most to educated Indians to-day, then we
may say this : they have friends who gladly acknow-
ledge their right to complete self-determination, yet
cannot see what use freedom can be to them until
the whole of their sex-thinking has been ruthlessly
overhauled and the plain conclusions of reason and
justice put in practice. Suttee has gone, but its
background remains. Children are married and
ravished, their bodies maimed, their minds mutilated.
If a generation could arise with the physical and
mental vigour that in nearly every other land is a
normal possession, much that is now thought admirable
in Hindu literature and religion would be seen as a
revolting nightmare. There are communities free
from man-worship and sex-obsession, such as the
Brahmo Samaj and kindred Churches ; but even

144 SUTTEE

these are dishonoured, and their humiliating sense of
impotence deepened, by the inability of the vast
majority of their fellow-countrymen to see anything
amiss in Hindu civilization or anything that needs
to be done in India except political agitation. If
there is any "gulf" between East and West, it is
where sex and the family are in question, and woman's
function and her relation to man. India cherishes
some exquisite stories of wedded love. But if even
the tales of Sita and Savitri and Damayanti, or to
bring the matter on to the plane of history those of
Dip Kunwar and the gallant ladies who burned for
Prithviraj and Sardar Shan Singh, represent the whole
or the best of what they can conceive of the comrade-
ship of man and woman, then there is a gulf between
East and West indeed.

APPENDIX
SOME ACCOUNTS OF SUTTEE

B.C. 317. " Finally, having taken leave of those of the
household, she was set upon the pyre by her own brother,
and was regarded with wonder by the crowd that had run
together to the spectacle, and heroically ended her life, the
whole force with their arms thrice marching round the pyre
before it was kindled. But she, laying herself beside her
husband, and even at the violence of the flame giving utter-
ance to no unbecoming cry, stirred pity indeed in others of
the spectators, and in some excess of eulogy ; not but what
there were some of the Greeks present who reprobated such
rites as barbarous and cruel." l (In the Panjab.)

Circa A.D. 1520. " They hold that the wife who weeps
beyond measure has no desire to go in search of her husband ;
and the mourning finished, their relations speak to them,
advising them to burn themselves and not to dishonour
their generation. After that, it is said, they place the dead
man on a bed with a canopy of branches and covered with
flowers, and they put the woman on the back of a worthless
horse, and she goes after them with many jewels on her and
covered with roses; she carries a mirror in her hand and
in the other a branch of flowers, and (she goes accompanied
by) many kinds of music, and his relations (go with her)
with much pleasure, A man goes also playing on a small
drum, and he sings songs to her telling her that she is going
to join her husband, and she answers also in singing that so
she will do. As soon as she arrives at the place where they

i Diodorns Siculus, Biblioth., xix, 33-4. Quoted in Hobson*
Jobson, article " Suttee."

K

146 SUTTEE

are always burned, she waits with the musicians till her
husband is burned." * (In the Vijayanagar Empire.)

" About the year 1796 the following most shocking and
atrocious murder, under the name of suhu-murunu, was
perpetrated at Mujil-poori, about a day's journey south
from Calcutta. Bancharamu, a bramhun of the above place,
dying, his wife went to be burnt with the body. All the
previous ceremonies were performed ; she was fastened on
the pile, and the fire was kindled ; but the night was dark
and rainy. When the fire began to scorch this poor woman,
she contrived to disentangle herself from the dead body and,
creeping from under the pile, hid herself among some brush-
wood. In a little time it was discovered that there was
only one body on the pile. The relations immediately took
the alarm and searched for the poor wretch ; the son soon
dragged her forth, and insisted that she should throw herself
on the pile again, or drown or hang herself. She pleaded
for her life at the hands of her own son, and declared that
she could not embrace so horrid a death but she pleaded
in vain. The son urged that he should lose his caste, and
therefore he would die, or she should. Unable to persuade
her to hang or drown herself, the son and the others present
then tied her hands and feet and threw her on the funeral
pile, where she quickly perished/' *

1813. " The following circumstance took place at Gondul-
para, about twenty miles north of Calcutta, on the i8th of
March, 1813, and was communicated to the author by Captain
Kemp, an eye-witness. The description is nearly in his own
words : ' On Thursday last, at nine in the * morning,
Vishwunat'hu, one of our best workmen, who had been sick
but a short time, was brought down to the river-side to
expire. He was placed, as is customary, on the bank, and
a consultation held respecting the time he would die ; the

1 Chronicle of Fernao Nuniz, published in Seweli's Forgotten
Empire. As Longhuxst remarks (Hampi Ruins, 41), Nuniz's
extraordinarily vivid account, of which part has been quoted
earlier, must be based on personal experience.

* William Ward, A View of the History, Literature and Mythology
of the Hindoos (1822), iii. 316-17.

APPENDIX 147

astrologer predicted that his dissolution was near at hand.
The sick man was then immersed up to the middle in the
river, and there kept for some time ; but death not being
so near as was predicted, he was again placed on the beach,
extended at full length, and exposed to a hot sun, where he
continued the whole of the day, excepting at those intervals
when it was supposed he was dying, when he was again
immersed in the sacred stream I visited him in the evening ;
he was sensible, but had not the power of utterance. He,
however, was able to make signs with his hand that he did
not wish to drink the river water, which they kept almost
continually pouring into his mouth by means of a small
shell. He remained in this situation during the night. In
the morning the immersions commenced, and were continued
at intervals till about five in the evening, when he expired,
or was literally murdered. His wife, a young woman about
sixteen years of age, hearing of his death, came to the
desperate resolution of being buried alive with the corpse.
She was ' accompanied by her friends down to the beach
where the body lay, where a small branch of the mango tree
was presented to her, which (as I understood) was a setting
a seal to her determination, from which, after having
accepted the branch, she could not retreat. I went to her,
and questioned her with respect to the horrid act she was
about to perform, whether it was voluntary or from per-
suasion. Nothing of the latter appeared ; it was entirely
her own desire. . . . The mother declared that it was
her daughter's choice, who added that she was determined
to "go the road her husband had gone " There was not
the least appearance of regret observable in the mother's
countenance or conduct. . . . At 8pm the corpse, accom-
panied by this self-devoted victim, was conveyed to a
place a little below our grounds, where I repaired, to behold
the perpetration of a crime which I could scarcely believe
possible to be committed by any human being. The corpse
was laid on the earth by the river till a circular grave of
about fifteen feet in circumference and five or six feet deep
was prepared, and was then (after some formulas had been
read) placed at the bottom of the grave in a sitting posture,
with the face to the north, the nearest relation applying a

148 - SUTTEE

widow now came forward, and having circumambulated the
grave seven times, calling out " Huree Bui ! Huree Bui ! "
in which she was joined by the surrounding crowd, descended
into it. I then approached within a foot of the grave, to
observe if any reluctance appeared in her countenance or
sorrow in that of her relations. In hers no alteration was
perceptible; in theirs was the appearance of exultation.
She placed herself in a sitting posture, with her face to the
back of her husband, embracing the corpse with her left
arm and reclining her head on his shoulders ; the other
hand she placed over her own head, with her forefinger
erect, which she moved in a circular direction. The earth
was then deliberately put round them, two men being in
the grave for the purpose of stamping it round the living
and the dead, which they did as a gardener does around a
plant newly transplanted, till the earth rose to a level with
the surface, or two or three feet above the heads of the
entombed. As her head was covered some time before the
finger of the right hand, I had an opportunity of observing
whether any regret was manifested ; but the finger moved
round in the same manner as at first, till the earth closed the
scene. Not a parting tear was observed to be shed by any
of her relations till the crowd began to disperse, when the usual
lamentations and howling commenced, without sorrow/ *' *

June 9, 1826. " About five o'clock in the evening of the
gth instant I received a note from a gentleman that a suttee
was about to take place near his house. On hastening to
the spot, I found the preparations considerably advanced,
and a large concourse of spectators assembled, and continu-
ally increasing, till they amounted to six or eight thousand.
On my left stood a horrid pile. It was an oblong bed of dry
cow-dung cakes about ten feet long and seven wide and
three high. At each end of it a rough stake about eight
feet in length was driven into the ground, and at about a
foot from the top of these supporters was fastened, by cords,
a frame of the same dimensions as the bed below, and
forming a fiat canopy to the couch of death. This frame
must have been of considerable weight, as it was covered

1 Ward, iii* 324-26.

APPENDIX 149

with very dry small faggots, which the officiating Brahmuns
continued to throw upon it till they rose two feet above
the framework On the right sat the poor deluded widow,
who was to be the victim of this heart-rending display of
Hindoo purity and gentleness. She was attended by a
dozen or more Brahmuns ; her mother, sister, and son, an
interesting boy about three years of age, and other relatives
were also with her. Her own infant, not twelve months
old, was craftily kept from her by the Brahmuns. She had
already performed a number of preparatory ceremonies, one
of which was washing herself m a strong decoction of saffron,
which is supposed to have a purifying effect. One effect it
certainly produced it imparted to her a horrid ghastlrness ;
her eyes indicated a degree of melancholy wildness ; a forced
and unnatural smile now and then played on her countenance ;
and, indeed, everything about her person and her conduct
indicated that narcotics had been administered in no small
quantities She was clad in her best apparel, which had
been tinted by the same decoction with which her body
alas ! so soon to be fuel for the flames had been washed.
Her jewels for the last time were employed to ornament
her person ; in her fine long black hair at the back of her
head, as in a bag of network, were enclosed so large a
quantity of small white odoriferous flowers as almost to
prevent her head from being turned ; and about two yards
from where the unfortunate woman sat, immediately in her
view, was the corpse of her husband, tied by a cord to a
kind of hurdle made of bamboos. Her attention, however,
so far as I could observe, was never, even for a moment,
directed towards it. To divert her thoughts from dwelling
on the scene around her, and in which she was shortly to
become so conspicuous an object, and doubtless to prevent
her resolution from failing her at the approaching crisis,
the Brahmuns continued plying her with betel-leaf, plantains,
cocoa-nuts, etc , etc , to distribute among her fnends as
presents ; and the manner in which these presents were
received sufficiently evinced the almost divine regard with
which the giver was contemplated. Besides these different
kinds of fruits, several small brass pans filled with parched
rice, sandal-wood powder, etc., were before her. From these

150 SUTTEE

individuals by pinches of their contents ; and the receivers
of these presents appeared to consider them as peculiarly
precious. When, however, an interval, though but momen-
tary, occurred amidst these employments, her countenance
assumed an expression that indicated indescribable appre-
hension and horror.

" Close by me stood the Fouzdar, a native officer, who,
besides regulating the police, is the chief military officer
at the station. Under his authority and personal super-
intendence this inhuman business was carrying on. So
heartily did he engage in the murderous work that he gave
the poor widow twenty pagodas between six and seven
pounds sterling to confirm her resolution to be burned !

" All my hopes of prevailing on the widow to retract her
rash vow and openly to declare her determination not to
burn were precluded, as she was a Gentoo woman, of whose
language I had no knowledge. Happily, however, Mr. Camp-
bell, of the London Missionary Society, was present, and with
the hope that she would understand him he advanced to
address her in the Carnatica language. His attempt in this
respect was successful, for, notwithstanding the prohibition
of the Fouzdar, he succeeded in getting near enough to her
for her to hear his address ; and from the attention she paid
to what he said and the fact of her answering it was evident
that she understood him. The effect of Mr. Campbell's
solemn and feeling address was counteracted by the influence
and exhortations of the Brahmuns, who surrounded their
victim like so many beasts of prey, fearful of its escaping
their grasp ; and he was obliged to retire, without having
effected anything more than to exhibit the striking contrast
which exists between the spirit of the Gospel of Our Blessed
Lord and that of what has often been termed 'mild and
amicable * Hindooism.

" By this time the pile was completed, and a quantity of
straw was now spread on the top of the bed of cow-dung
cakes. An increase of activity was soon visible among the
men whose ' feet are so swift to shed blood/ Muntrams
(prayers or incantations) having been repeated over the pile
and the woman, and everything being in readiness, the
hurdle to which the corpse of the husband had* been fastened
was now raised by six of the officiating Brahmuns ; the end

APPENDIX 151

of a cord about two yards long, attached at the other end
to the head of the bier, was taken by the widow, and the
whole moved slowly towards the pile. The corpse was then
laid on the right side upon the straw, with which it was
covered, and four men furnished with sharp swords, one
stationed at each corner, now drew them from their scab-
bards. The trembling, ghastly offering to the Moloch of
Hindooism then began her seven circuits round the fatal
pile, and finally halted opposite to her husband's corpse,
at the left side of it, where she was evidently greatly agitated.
Here five or six Brahmuns began to talk to her with much
vehemence, till, in a paroxysm of desperation, assisted by
the Brahmuns, the hopeless widow ascended the bed of
destruction. Her mother and her sister, unable any longer
to sustain the extremity of their anguish, went up to the
side of the pile and entreated that the horrid purpose might
be abandoned; but the woman, fearing the encounter and
the strength of her resolution, without uttering a word or
even casting a parting glance at her supplicating parent
and sister, threw herself down on the pile and clasped the
half-putrid corpse in her arms. Straw in abundance was
then heaped on the dead and the living ; gums, resins and
other inflammable materials were thrown upon the straw
which covered the bodies by one party of the Brahmuns,
while muntrams were repeated at their heads by the other.
Six or eight pieces of kindled cow-dung cakes were introduced
among the straw at different parts of the pile, ghee and
inflammable materials were applied, and the whole blazed
in as many places. The men with swords at each corner
then hacked the cords which supported the flat canopy of
faggots it fell and covered the lifeless corpse and the living
woman ! ! !

" The flames now began to ascend, and comparative silence
was restored. The active agents in this work of destruction
were fearlessly and explicitly charged with murder and
warned of the future awful account which they would have
to render. The Fouzdar, in a haughty, irritated tone of
voice, inquired, ' To whom shall I have to give an account ? '
He was informed, ' To Jehovah, the true and living God.*
To the charge of murdering the widow and hurrying her
oul to perdition, the chief Brahmun, in a frenzy of

152 SUTTEE

siastic triumph, exclaimed, accompanying what he said with
the most extravagant gesticulations : ' She is now in heaven
she is already in glory f ' At this moment a piercing
sound caught my ear ; I listened a few seconds, and, not-
withstanding the noise of the multitude, heard the shrieks
of misery which issued from the burning pile ' ! In an agony
of f eehng we directed the attention of the Brahmuns to this,
and while doing so, again, still louder and more piercing
than before, the burning woman rent the air with her
shrieks ' ' Several of the Brahmuns called out to the half-
consumed, still conscious and imploring widow to comfort
her. What the real effect on the mind of this wretched
victim to Hindoo infatuation would be is easily conceived.
They then sang in chorus a Sanscrita hymn declaring that
her soul would be wafted to heaven on the zephyrs of their
holy praise. The pile was now enveloped in flames, and so
intense was the heat that, as by one consent, the Brahmuns
and the spectators retreated several paces ; and the hymn
ended, but not the shrieks and groans of the agonized
sufferer : they still pierced our ears and almost rent our
hearts ! Effectually to overpower them, the Brahmuns in
a body began calling aloud, ' Rayana ! * Rayana ' Ray ana ' *
(one of the thousand names of Vishnu). Scarcely conscious
of what I did, in the midst of these vain repetitions I left
this scene of fiendish barbarity." 3 (At Bangalore, Mysore.)

" On Tuesday, November 24, 1829, I had an application
from the heads of the most respectable and most extensive
family of Brahmans in this district to suffer this old woman
to burn herself with the remains of her husband, Ummed
Singh Upadhya, who had that morning died upon the banks
of the Nerbudda. I threatened to enforce my order and
punish severely any man who assisted, and placed a police
guard for the purpose of seeing that no one did so She
remained sitting by the edge of the water without eating
or drinking The next day the body of her husband was
burned to ashes in a small pit of about eight feet square

1 Narayana.

* Missionary Notices, No xxviii, June 1827. The letter is
prefaced, " Mr. England dates his letter June 12, 1826,"

APPENDIX 153

and three or four feet deep, before several thousand spectators
who had assembled to see the suttee. All strangers dispersed
before evening, as there seemed to be no prospect of my
yielding to the urgent solicitations of her family. . . . She
remained sitting on a bare rock in the bed of the Nerbudda,
refusing every kind of sustenance and exposed to the intense
heat of the sun by day and the severe cold of the night,
with only a thin sheet thrown over her shoulders. On
Thursday, to cut off all hope of her being moved from her
purpose, she put on the dhaja, or coarse red turban, and broke
her bracelets in pieces, by which she became dead in law
and for ever excluded from caste Should she choose to live
after this, she could never return to her family. ... I
became satisfied that she would starve herself to death if
not allowed to burn, by which the family would be disgraced,
her miseries prolonged, and I myself rendered liable to be
charged with a wanton abuse of authority, for no prohibition
of the kind I had issued has as yet received the formal
sanction of the Government. 1

" On Saturday, the 28th, in the morning, I rode out ten
miles to the spot, and found the poor old widow sitting
with the dhaja round her head, a brass plate before her with
undressed rice and flowers, and a cocoa-nut in each hand.
She talked very collectedly, telling me that ' she had deter-
mined to mix her ashes with those of her departed husband,
and should patiently wait my permission to do so, assured
that God would enable her to sustain life till that was given,
though she dared not eat or drink/ Looking at the sun,
then rising before her over a long and beautiful reach of
the Nerbudda river, she said calmly : ' My soul has been for
five days with my husband's near that sun ; nothing but my
earthly frame is left ; and this I know you will in time
suffer to be mixed with the ashes of his in yonder pit, because
it is not in your nature or usage wantonly to prolong the
miseries of a poor old woman/

1 Sleeman, on taking civil charge of the Jabalpur district, in
March 1828, issued a proclamation forbidding anyone from aiding
or assisting in suttee, saying that if a woman burned with her
husband anyone who provided wood for his pyre would be liable
to punishment.

154 SUTTEE

" 'Indeed, it is not. My object and duty is to save and
preserve them ; and I am come to dissuade you from this
idle purpose, to urge you to live, and to keep your family
from the disgrace of being thought your murderers.'

'"I am not afraid of their ever being so thought; they
have all, like good children, done everything in their power
to induce me to live among them, and, if I had done so, I
know they would have loved and honoured me. But my
duties to them have now ended. I commit them all to your
care, and I go to attend my husband, Ummed Singh Upadhya,
with whose ashes on the funeral pile mine have been already
three times mixed.' *

" This was the first time in her long life that she had
ever pronounced the name of her husband, for in India no
woman, high or low, ever pronounces the name of her
husband she would consider it disrespectful towards him to
do so. . , . When the old lady named her husband, as she
did with strong emphasis and in a very deliberate manner,
everyone present was satisfied that she had resolved to die.
* I have/ she continued, ' tasted largely of the bounty of
Government, having been maintained by it with all my
large family in ease and comfort upon our rent-free lands,
and I feel assured that my children will not be suffered to
want ; but with them I have nothing more to do, our inter-
course and communion here end. My soul (prari) is with
Ummed Singh Upadhya, and my ashes must here mix
with his/

" Again looking to the sun : ' I see them together/ said
she, with a tone and countenance that affected me a good
deal, ' under the bridal canopy ! ' alluding to the cere-
monies of marriage ; and I am satisfied that she at that
moment really believed that she saw her own spirit and
that of her husband under the bridal canopy in paradise.

** I tried to work upon her pride and her fears, I told
her that it was probable that the rent-free lands by which
her family had been so long supported might be resumed by
the Government, as a mark of its displeasure against the
children for not dissuading tier from the sacrifice ; that the
temples over her ancestors upon the bank might be levelled,

* It was a common belief of a widow that she had died as a
$&$ previously with her husband.

APPENDIX 155

with the ground, in order to prevent their operating to
induce others to make similar sacrifices ; and lastly, that
not one single brick or stone should ever mark the place
where she died if she persisted in her resolution. But, if
she consented to live, a splendid habitation should be built
for her among these temples, a handsome provision assigned
for her support out of these rent-free lands, her children
should come daily to visit her, and I should frequently do
the same. She smiled, but held out her arm and said . ' My
pulse has long ceased to beat, my spirit has departed, and
I have nothing left but a little earth that I wish to mix
with the ashes of my husband. I shall suffer nothing in
burning, and, if you wish proof, order some fire, and you
shall see this arm consumed without giving me any pain/
I did not attempt to feel her pulse, but some of my people
did, and declared that it had ceased to be perceptible. At
this time every native present believed that she was incapable
of suffering pain, and her end confirmed them in their
opinion.

" Satisfied myself that it would be unavailing to attempt
to save her life, I sent for all the principal members of the
family, and consented that she should be suffered to burn
herself if they would enter into engagements that no other
member of their family should ever do the same. This they
all agreed to, and the papers having been drawn out in due
form about midday, I sent down notice to the old lady,
who seemed extremely pleased and thankful. The cere-
monies of bathing were gone through before three, while
the wood and other combustible materials for a strong fixe
were collected and put into the pit. After bathing, she
called for a pan (betel leaf) and ate it ; then rose up and,
with one arm on the shoulder of her eldest son and the
other on that of her nephew, approached the fire. I had
sentries placed all round, and no other person was allowed
to approach within five paces. As she rose up fire was set
to the pile, and it was instantly in a blaze. The distance
was about one hundred and fifty yards. She came on with
a calm and cheerful countenance, stopped once, and, casting
her eyes upward, said : ' Why have they kept me five days
from thee, my husband ? * On coming to the sentries her

156 SUTTEE

supporters stopped , she walked once round the pit, paused
a moment, and, while muttering a prayer, threw some
flowers into the fire. She then walked up deliberately and
steadily to the brink, stepped into the centre of the flame,
sat down, and, leaning back in the midst as if reposing upon
a couch, was consumed without uttering a shriek or betraying
one sign of agony.

" A few instruments of music had been provided, and
they played as usual as she approached the fire, not, as is
commonly supposed, in order to drown screams, but to
prevent the last words of the victim from being heard, as
these are supposed to be prophetic and might become sources
of pain or strife to the living. It was not expected that
I should yield, and but few people had assembled to witness
the sacrifice, so that there was little or nothing in the
circumstances immediately around to stimulate her to any
extraordinary exertions ; and I am persuaded that it was
the desire of again being united to her husband in the next
world and the entire confidence that she would be so if she
now burned herself that alone sustained her. From the
morning he died (Tuesday) till Wednesday evening she ate
pans, or betel leaves, but nothing else ; and from Wednesday
evening she ceased eating them. She drank no water from
Tuesday. She went into the fire with the same cloth about
her that she had worn in the bed of the river ; but it was
made wet from a persuasion that even the shadow of any
impure thing falling upon her from going to the pile con-
taminates the woman unless counteracted by the sheet
moistened in the holy stream.

" I must do the family the justice to say that they all
exerted themselves to dissuade the widow from her pur-
pose. . . .*' r

1839. " Her countenance had assumed a sickly and
ghastly appearance, which was partly owing to internal
agitation and partly, so I was informed, to the effects of
opium and bhang and other narcotics, with which she had
been previously drugged in order to render her less awake

1 Major-General Sir W. H. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections
of an Indian Official (1893 edition, Constable), i. 23-28.

APPENDIX 157

to the misery of her situation. She was not, however, so
insensible to what was passing as to be inattentive to two
persons in particular amongst several others who were
stooping before her and were evidently imploring her
blessing. . . .

" In about half an hour the preparations were completed.
She was regularly thatched in upon the top of the pile,
whilst her husband's body yet lay outside. It was finally
lifted up to her ; the head as usual, and which is the most
interesting part of the ceremony, was received upon her
lap. . . .

" The woman became a sail when she crossed the threshold
of her door, and would most probably (so I was told) have
been put to death by her relations had she afterwards
retreated. So long as she remained in the house she had
the power of refusal." x (In Mandi.)

November 5, 1845. " I have just returned from a suttee;
after twenty years' residence in India this is the first I have
seen. A terrible sight, but less so than I expected. The
woman was cool and collected, and evidently under no sort
of coercion. The corpse was that of a Goorkha commandant ;
it was laid on a small platform, raised on six or eight stakes
driven into an island, eight or nine feet square, in the bed
of the Bagmutty. The platform had a double bottom;
between the two was laid wood, resin, and ghee ; the corner
stakes met above, forming a rude canopy. About a hundred
spectators, chiefly beggars and old women, were collected
to view the spectacle. Ten or twelve Sepoys and as many
Brahmins were assisting around the pile. When Dr. Christie
and I arrived the woman was inside a small (open) rattee
close to the river, apparently dressing ; we could just see
her tinsel head-dress. In about five minutes she came out
mounted on the back of a man. At the edge of the rattee
her carrier stopped, and she, dipping her finger in a platter,
took red dye stuff and made teekas on the foreheads of some
of the assistants. He then carried her to the pile, and
round it four or five times, during which time she took rice
and spices from a platter and threw it to the people around,
who held out their hands, and many their sheets, to catch
* G. T. Vigne, Travels in Kashmir, Ladak f Iskardo, 82-3.

158 SUTTEE

it; others begged for alms and her ornaments. Two or
three tomtoms were all the time being beat After finishing
the circuits, she dismounted, stooped, and washed her hands
in the river, and then uncovered her husband's feet, placed
her head to them, and kissed them. She then ascended the
pile, made more distributions of rice, etc , and some pice,
and commenced disrobing herself, taking off her tiara and
upper coloured silks, and gave them to persons around.
She then sat down and took off: her armlets and bracelets
and gave them. All this took at least a quarter of an hour,
during which time she was as composed as at a festival.
She then lay down close behind the corpse, her head close
to her husband's. The platform was so narrow that she
had to be squeezed between the corpse and the stakes on
her side. Her hair throughout was loose, hanging over her
shoulder. She was a Goorkha, about thirty-five or forty
years old. When laid down, the coloured sheet over her
husband was drawn so as to cover her too, and then three
strong bamboos were placed across the pair, and each held
at either end by a man so as to prevent her rising. They
did not press on her, but would have effectually kept her
down had she struggled. Over these bamboos some loose
faggots were thrown, and then two lighted lamp-wicks were
placed on the head of the corpse ; and a minute after a torch
was applied under the platform close to the heads, when a
strong flame broke out. The crowd shouted and the tom-
toms beat more loudly so as to have drowned any cry that
may have been uttered by the victim ; but whatever were
her pains, they could not have lasted a minute. The fire
was fed with ghee and sulphur, and a strong flame kept up
so as in five minutes to have quite consumed all the head
of the platform. I have seen the sad spectacle, and shall
not willingly witness another. The old hags around me
grinned with delight ; ours were the only sad countenances.
I saw two or three women near the victim who were prol>
ably relations, but such could not be known from their
actions ; all was utter unconcern." (In Nepal. Sir Henry
Lawrence's Diary.) I

1 Sir Herbert Benjamin Edwardes and Herman Menvale, Life
of Sir Henrv Lawrence (1872^, ii.

INDEX

Abolition of Suttee, 78. See

Bentinck, Lord William
Abul Fad, 8

Acts, Reference to Book of, 80
Admetus, 7 ff

Afghanistan, War with, 135 ff.
Agunkhdki (name for Sail), 74
Ahalya Bai, 59
Ahmadnagar, 85 ff , 109
Ain-i-Akban, 8

Aitchison, C. U , 83, 86 ff , 103
Ajit Singh, Maharaja of Jodhpur,

35

Ajmer, in

Akbar, 8, 46 ff , 50, 57

Albuquerque, 57

Alcestis, 7ff.

Alexander the Great, 19, 28,

37

Allahabad, 39, iiSff
Allah-ud-din, 34
a, 118
r, uoff.
Das, 57
An'en-Hetep II, 25
,o3tnencan Indians, 25
Amherst, Lord, 70, 75, 77
Among Indian Rajahs and Ryots,

122

Angria's Kolaba, 87 ff., 121
Annals and Antiquities of Rajas-

than, 10, 20, 35, 46, 67,

1 06
Anugamana. See Anumarana,

15 ff , 66, 71

Army, Suttee in Indian, 77
Aryans, 16 ff , 24
Asiatic Journal, 41, 103
Assam, 83
Astrakhan, 38
Atharva-Veda, 18
Attari, 100
Auckland, Lord, 105
Aztecs, n^

Balder, 24

Balfour. See Cyclopedia of
India

Bah, 41, 127

Bandelkhand, 62

Bangalore, 152

Bankura, 31

Bareilly, 71

Baroda, 82, 88 ff , 118

Bathie, Francis, 79 ff .

Begun, 117

Benares, 43, 71

Bengal and Bengalis, 29, 31, 36,
40, 50 ff., 54, 68 ff, 72 ff.,
77 ff , 107, iiSff , 131 ff

Bentinck, Lord William Caven-
dish-, 58, 75 ff , 82, 109, 120 ff ,

^34

Bhadurwah, 88

Bharatpur (Bhurtpur), 62, 115
Bhils, 85
Bhim Singh, 104
Bhinai Ra]a, in
Bhopal, 115
Bhuj, 55
Bihar, 26, 120 See Gaya,

Patna

Bikamr, 30, 45, 47, no, 138, 144
Bilaspur, 103
Bombay Courier, 85 ff .
Bombay Gazette, 121
Bombay, Governor of, 59, 63
Bombay Presidency, 78, 82,

84 ff ., 87 ff .
Boulger, D C., 60
Brahman Influence, I7ff., 29,

37, 54- 139
Brahman Women Forbidden to

Burn, 16, 21 ff , 66
Brahmos and Brahmo Samaj,

130, 143
Brhaddevata, 21
Brooks, M. H., 60
Bruce, P. H., 38

i6o

SUTTEE

Briinhild, 24

Budh Singh, 67

Bundi (Boondi), 67, 112

Burdwan, 121

Burial Alive, 39, 66, 146 ff .

Burma, War with, 135

Burnell, A. C. See Hobson-

Jobson
Bushby, 105, 107

Calcutta, 60, 71 fi., 122, 131,

146 ff .
Calcutta Review, 48, 60 fi., 65 ff .,

69, 72, 131 fi.

Campbell (missionary), 150 ff.
Carey, William, 60 E., 78
Cawnpore, 122
Central India, 24, 26, 30, 67,

75S.

Chddar Ddlna, 94
Chamba, 103
Chandranagar, 59
Chandrikd, So, 119
Chliatna, 31
Chhattrts, 32, 34
Chibotu, 1 20

Chilianwala, Battle of, 47, 90
China, Suttee in, 25
Chinsura, 59

Chitor, 10, 33 ff ., 37, 53, 74
Chota Udaipur, 88
Christie, Dr., 157
Clerk (British Representative at

Ranjit Singh's Court), 94
Clouded Mirror, The (play), 73
Colebrooke, H. J., 49 ft.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 7, 28,

78, 119
Court and Camp of Runjeet

Singh, 93
Court of Directors of East India

Company, 70
Crooke, W., 35, 39, 127
Cunningham, J. D., 105
Curse, A Sail's, 49, 98, in, 124
Cyclopaedia of India, 19, 39, 53

Dacca, 71

Dalhousie, Earl of, 83, 109 ff.,
134

Dance of Siva, The, 7, 28, 78

Danish Administration at Sex
ampur, 59

Datia, 118

Death of CEnone, The, 25

Deb, Raja Radhakanta, 23

Delhi, 57 ., 67, 104

Deogarh Barria, 88

Devi Kund, in

Dhyan Singjh, 93 ff.

Dinanath Singh, 98

Diodorus Siculus, 44, 145

Dip Kunwar, in, 138, 144

Dodraj, 123 &.

Drew, Frederic, 96 E.

Drowning, Suttee by, 39

Drugs, Use of, in Suttee, 50, 62,
113. 156

Dubois, Abb6, 21, 46, 68

Dungarpur, no

Dutch Administration at Chin-
sura, 59

Duties of a Faithful Hindu
Widow, The, 49 fi.

Dutt, Romeshchandra, 140

Earl Amherst, 38

Eden, The Hon. Emily, 93 E.

Eden, W. F., 113

Edwardes, Sir Herbert, 158

Egypt, Suttee in Ancient, 25

Eliot, Sir Charles, 19, 22,

128

Elpninstone, J. R., 61
Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 68,

137
Encyclopedia Britannica, no,

127

England (missionary), 152
Erskine (British official), 85 flc.
Euripides the Rationalist, 8
Evadne, 25

Evans, Richardson, 38
Ewer (police officer), 47, 54

Farakhabad, 122
Faridkot, 103
Ferozeshah, Battle of, 47
Fijians, Suttee among, 25
Forbes, A. K., 31 -ff., 40

INDEX

161

orgotten Empire, A t 40 ff , 43,

145 ff
;er, Sir Andrew, 122

aekwar. 505 Baroda

/andhi, M. K , 139, 141

rarrett, H. L O , 105
aruda (demi-god), 33

"raya, 43, 61, 120, 122

.nazipur, 66
lobe, 125

lossary of the Tribes and Castes
of the Punjab and North- West
Frontier Province, A, 38

Soa, Prohibition of Suttee at, 57

"iondulpara, 146

rranth (sacred book of Sikhs),
99

'nffin, Sir Lepel, 53, 94, 96 ff

Trimm, 24

-ujarat, 31 ff , 38 ff , 55 500
Baroda, Kathiawar

juna, 118
Gwahor, 118, 135

Haldighat, Battle of, go

Hampi Ruins, 33, 35, 146

Hanuman (derm-god), 33

Hardinge, Lord, 101, 108

Castings, Lord, 77

"rTazara, 136

xlelen, 34

Herodotus, 20 f.

Hervey, General Charles, 30, 32,

45,47
fanduism and Buddhism, 19,

22, 128

Hindu Pantheon, 68
Hira Singh, 95, 97
^story of the Panjab, 95
History of the Sikhs (by J D

Cunningham), 105
History of the Sikhs (by W L.

M*Gregor), 96
Hobson-Jobson, 15, 36, 145
Honigberger, J M , 91
Hooghly, 63

Idar, 84 ff., 109

Imperial Gazetteer of India, 84 &.,

India's Cries to British

Humanity, 44, 54 ff , 63 S
India Gazette, 80
India Under Victoria, in
Indian Antiquary, 31
Institutes of AKbar, 8

Jabalpur, 135, 153
Janrabad, Sidi of, 88
Jahangir, 57
Jaipur, 38, 67, 108, 117
Jaisalmer, 37
Jammu, 96 fi.
Jauhar, 34, 37, 138
Java, 62, 127

Jawahir Singh, 91, 97 ff , 105
Jawan Singh, 104
Jerome, St , 28
Jhmd, 100, 103
Jindan, Ram, 98
Jodhpur, 35, 57, 67, 106, 108
Jones, Sir William, 15
Judicial Pedantry, 65
Jummoo and Kashmir Terri-
tories, The, 97
Junagarh, Nawab of, 87
Jung Bahadur, Sir, 127
Jungle Mahals, 74

Kabir (poet), 140

Kali (goddess), 19, 24, 74

Kaltaki, 122

Kanara, 69

Kashmir, 115, 136 See Jammu

Kathaioi, The, 20

Kathiawar, 82, 87 fL

Kaumudi, 80, 120

Kemp, Captain, 146

Khalsa (Sikh Army), 92, 7^,

109

Kharak Singh, 91 ff., 94 ff.
Kipling, Rudyard, 58, 76, 112
Kotah, 1 08
Krishna (god), 18
Krishna (river), 68
Kriss (Malay dagger), 41, 127
Kulimsm, 37
Kulu, 31

Kundan, Rani, 92
Kuri, 118
Kurukshetra, Battle of, 18

162

SUTTEE

Lahore, 93 # , 96 ff .

Z,0stf Suttee, The, 112

Latif, Syad Muhammad, 95

Lawrence, Lord, 99

Lawrence, Sir Henry, 99, 102,

134, 157 ff.

Lee- Warner, Sir W , 101
Letters of Marque, 58
Life of Sir Henry Lawrence, 99,

157 ft.
Lombok, 127

Longhurst, A H., 33, 35, 146
Lord Hardmge, 97, 101

Lotus, The (slave-girl burnt
with Ranjit Singh), 93

Lovett, Sir Verney, 129

Luard, Colonel C E , 10, 117 ff

Ludlow, Major, 108

Lunawara, 88

Lushington, C M , 53

Luxor, 25

Lyall, Sir Alfred, 42

Macaulay, Lord, 129
M'Gregor, W L , 96
Madhunkand, 120
Madras, 75
Madura, 29, 36, 125
Mahabharata, 18 ff.
Mahdsati, 34, 113
Mahommadans, 28, 36, 48, 57 ff.,

71, 77, 134
Malabar, 29, 69
Malcolm, Sir John, 67, 137
Malet, Sir C , 15
Ma-Sati, 37

Mandi, 31, 101 ff , 156 ff
Maning, F. E., 25
Man Singh, 106
Manu, 19
Man-worship m Hinduism, 45 ff.,

143

Maons, Suttee among, 25
Marathas, 29 ff , 58, 68 ff.
Marco Polo, 28
Marwar. See Jodhpur
Men-slaves, Suttee of, 20, 24, 38

8 4

Meviah Sacrifices, 89, 135
Merivale, Herman, 158

VEetcalfe, Lord, 58, 78
Mfewar. See Udaipur
VTidnapur, 74
Minute on Suttee, Lord Ben-

tinck's, 77
Vhra Bai, Rani, 74
Missionanes, 141
Missionary Notices, 152
Mhtra, Rajendralal, 140
Moguls, 46, 57, 91, 132
Moor, Edward, 68
Mother, Suttee of, 37
Moti Singh, in
Mujilpuri, 146
Muller, Max, 16 ff
Munro, Sir Thomas, 137
Murshidabad, 71
Mutilation, 83, 103
Mutiny, Indian, 68, 106, 113 ff,

136 ff
Muttra (Mathura), 120

Nabha, 100, 103

Nadiya, 74

Nanna, 24

Nao Nihal Singh, 91 ff , 95

Narbada (river), 82, 152 ff.

Nationalism and Suttee, 140

Native States of India, The, 101

Nepal, 83, 100, IIT, 127, 157 ff.

New Zealand, Suttee in, 25

Nicholson, John, 136

Nihal Singh, 96

Nimbapuram, 35

Nuniz, Ferfiao, 40 ff., 145 ff

Oakley, H., 63

Ocean of Story , The, 24, 126, 128
CEnone, 25
Old New Zealand, 25
Old Testament, 45
Onssa, 26, 40, 89 ff .
Osborne, The Hon. W,, 93
Oudh, 136

Oxford History of India, 20 ff .,
24, 28, 35, 52, 59, 91, 96, 99,

IO2, 134 ff.

Padmani, 34
Paduka, 30, 104 ff.

INDEX

163

Pandu, 1 8

Panjab, 19, 28 ff ., 37, 145 See

Sikhs, Lahore, etc.
Paraffin, Use of, in Suttee, 126
Parliamentary Papers, 65
Parmandal, 97
Paryati (river), 118
Patiala, 100
Patna, 65, 71, 120, 122
Peggs, J , 44, 54, 63 ff , 76
Penzer, N M , 24 ff , 126, 128
Peshwa Prohibits Suttee, 59
Petition against Prohibition of

Suttee, 79 ff
Phulkian States, 100
Poona, 29, 68
Pope, G U , 18, 68
Portuguese, 57, 88
Pratap Singh, 87
Pnthviraj, 144
Privy Council, 77 ff.
Propertius, 28
Punjab in Peace and War, The,

91

Punjaub, The, 92
Pur anas, ig
Purdah, 58
Psychology of Satis, 137 ff.

Rajaram, 29
Rajpipla, 88
Rajputana Gazetteer, Mewar

Agency, 104, 115
Rajputs and Rajasthan, 24, 26,

29, 32, 35 ff 3 8 * 42, 4 6 fi - 5 2 .
58, 67 ff., 76, 90, 103 ft ,
I37ff S0e Tod, Udaipur,
Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bikanir,
Alwar, etc.

Ramayana, 19

Rambles and Recollections of an
Indian Official, 75 ff., 152 ff.

Ram Dayal, Case of, 118 ff.

Ramnagar, 96
, Ranjit Singh, 53, 62, 91 ff , 96 &

Ranjit Singh, 53, 94, 96 ff.

Ras Mala, 31 f , 40

Ratnagm, 89, 120

Rawlinson, G,, 21

Regulation Prohibiting Suttee,
78 ff., 82, 122

Regulations Governing Practice
of Suttee, 1 6, 62 ff

Reigning Family of Lahore, His-
tory of, 95

Remington, A , 89

Report on the Political Adminis-
tration of Rayputana, 113

Rewa, 117

Rewa Kauta, 88 ff , 109

Rig- Veda, i6ff.

Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, 38

Rites of the Twice-Born, 126

Rose, H A , 38

Roy, Rammohan, 7, 17, 40, 48,
78, 80 ff.

Sahagamana. See Sahamarana,

15 See also Suttee
Saktism, 73 ff

Sangam (river- junction), 43, 73
Sanskrit Literature, 129 See

Rig-VedaMahabharata, Rama-
yana, etc
Sardar Singh, 105
Sarup Singh, 112, 115
Satara, 87 ff
Satu, 38
Savantvadi, 59
Savitri, 144

Scandinavia, Suttee in, 24
Scythian Influence in Suttee,

20 ff , 24
Sealy, C. T., 63
Serampur, 59 See Carey
Sesodias, 112

Seven Against Thebes, The, 25
Sewell, R,, 40 ff,, 43, 146
Shahabad, 60
Shahu, 29
Sham Singh (Rajput thakur),

117
Shan (Sham) Singh, 91, 99 ff.,

144

Shere Singh, 95
Sikhs, 47, 82, 90 ff,, 106, 108,

135 See Panjab
Simla, 100
Simpson, W. O., 68

164

SUTTEE

Sinclair-Stevenson, Mrs., 126
Sind, War with, 135 ff.
Sita, 144
Sivaji, 29

Slaves, Burning of, 20, 24, 37 ff.,
84 fi, 92 ff , io6ff., Ii2ff.,

127

Slavs, Suttee among, 24
Sleeman, Colonel, 75 ff., 152 ff.
Smith, C , 64
Smith, Vincent A , 76. See

Oxford History of India
Smyth, S. Carauchael, 95
Sobraon, Battle of, 91, 99, 102
Sonth, 88
Sraddha (Hindu post-funeral

ceremony), 122
Stembach, H , 91 ff , 95
Strabo, 28, 44
Subathu, 100
Suchet Singh, 91, 96 ff .
Sudder Court, 61 ff , 70, 72, 120
Suket, 103

Sutlej (river), 100, 102, 136
Suttee, Instances of

at Ahmadnagar, 85 ff., 109

at Ajmer, in

at Aluwa, 118

at Angria's Kolaba, 87 ff , 121

at Astrakhan, 38

at Attan, 100

at Bangalore, 148 ff.

at Begun, 117

at Burdwan, 121

at Calcutta, 146 ff.

at Cawnpore, 122

at Chibotu, 120

at Datia, 118

at Dungarpur, no

at Farakhabad, 122

at Gondulpara, 146

at Gunaj, 118

at Jammu, 96

at Jarauh, 123 ff.

at Kaltaki, 122

at Lahore, 91 ff

at Madhunkand, 120

at Mujilpun, 146

at Parmandal, 97

at Raranagar, 96

Suttee, Instances of, continued:

at Ratnagrri, 89, 120

at Rewa, 117

at Subathu, 100

at Tinneveh, 125

at Udaipur, 112 ff

at Utarna, 117
Suttee Stones, 30 ff , 75, 102, 104

Tanjore, 59, 69, 125

Tantras, 19

Tawney, C H , 24

Taxila, 19

Teixeira, 36

Telugu Country, 39, 41 See

Vrjayanagar
Tennyson, 25

Thakurs, Rajput, no, 115, ii7ff
Things Indian, 39, 127
Thorburn, S. S , 91
Thrace, Suttee in, 21
Three Eastern Plays, 9, 31, 73
Thuggee, 135
Tmneveli, 125
Tippera, 39, 66
Tirhur, 120
Tiroj, 1 02
Tod, Colonel, 137. See Annals

and Antiquities of Rajasthan
Tonga, Suttee in, 25
Travels in Kashmir, Ladak,

Iskardo, 31, 91, 101 ff , 156 ff
Treaties, Engagements and Sun-

nuds, 83, 86 ff , 103-
Tnchinopoh, 53
Trotter, Colonel, iiofL

Udaipur, 34, 67, 103 ff , iioff,,

117*

United Provinces, 68, 118
" Untouchability/' 141
Utarna, 117

Vaishnavism, 73 ff.

Vasudeva, 18

Vermilion Hill, 31

Verrall, A. W., 8

View of the History, Literature

and Mythology of the Hindoos,

A, 60 ff., 146 ff.

INDEX

165

Vigne, A. T., 31, 91, 101 ff.,

156 ff.
Vrjayanagar, 29, 33, 35 ff , 40 ff ,

145 ff

Vindhya Mountains, 26
Vishnu, 33
Vishnupur, 31, 73
Volsunga Saga, 24

Waghela Chief , 118
Walker, F Deaville, 78 S
Wankamr, 88
Ward, William, 60 ff , 146 fi.

Wauchope (Bntish official), 62
Weavers, Burying Alive of

Widows of, 39, 66
Weitbrecht, J. J., 121
Wellesley, Marquess of, 61, 76
Widow-Burning, 105
Widowhood, Miseries of, 48 ff...

133
Wilson, Professor H. H , 16

Yule, Sir H See Hobson-
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