Back ستي Arabic সতীদাহ প্ৰথা Assamese Sati ritualı Azerbaijani Саці (звычай) Byelorussian सती (प्रथा) Bihari সতীদাহ Bengali/Bangla Sati Breton Sati (hinduisme) Catalan Satí (obřad) Czech Сати (ритуал) CV

Sati (practice)

This article is about ritual suicide/murder. For other uses, see Sati (disambiguation).

Aquatint from the early 19th century purporting to show ritual preparation for the immolation of a Hindu widow—shown in a white sari near the water—on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband.
An etching from the early 19th century purporting to show a Hindu widow being led—past the body of her deceased husband—to the funeral pyre.

Sati or suttee[a] is a practice, a chiefly historical one,[1][2] in which a Hindu widow burns alive on her deceased husband's funeral pyre, the death by burning entered into voluntarily,[3] by coercion,[4][5] or a perception of the lack of satisfactory options for continuing to live.[6] Although it is debated whether it received scriptural mention in early Hinduism,[7] it has been linked to related Hindu practices in the Indo-Aryan-speaking regions of India, which have diminished the rights of women, especially those to the inheritance of property.[8][b][c] A cold form of sati, or the neglect and casting out of Hindu widows, has been prevalent from ancient times.[8] Greek sources from around c. 300 BCE make isolated mention of sati, but it probably developed into a real fire sacrifice in the medieval era within northwestern Rajput clans to which it initially remained limited, to become more widespread during the late medieval era.

During the early-modern Mughal period of 1526–1857, it was notably associated with elite Hindu Rajput clans in western India, marking one of the points of divergence between Hindu Rajputs and the Muslim Mughals, who banned the practice.[11] In the early 19th century, the British East India Company, in the process of extending its rule to most of India, initially tried to stop the innocent killing; William Carey, a British Christian evangelist, noted 438 incidents within a 30-mile (48-km) radius of the capital, Calcutta, in 1803, despite its ban within Calcutta. Between 1815 and 1818 the number of incidents of sati in Bengal Presidency doubled from 378 to 839. Opposition to the practice of sati by evangelists like Carey, and by Hindu reformers such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy ultimately led the British Governor-General of India Lord William Bentinck to enact the Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829, declaring the practice of burning or burying alive of Hindu widows to be punishable by the criminal courts. Other legislation followed, countering what the British perceived to be interrelated issues involving violence against Hindu women, including the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856, Female Infanticide Prevention Act, 1870, and Age of Consent Act, 1891.

Isolated incidents of sati were recorded in India in the late-20th century, leading the Government of India to promulgate the Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987, criminalising the aiding or glorifying of sati. The modern laws have proved difficult to implement; as of 2020, at least 250 sati temples existed in India in which prayer ceremonies, or pujas, were performed to glorify the avatar of a mother goddess who immolated herself after hearing her father insult her husband; prayers were also performed to the practice of a wife immolating herself alive on a deceased husband's funeral pyre.[d] Bride burning is a related social and criminal issue seen from the early 20th century onwards, involving the deaths of women in India by accidental fires, the numbers of which far overshadow similar incidents involving men.[12]


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  1. ^ Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine (1999). Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 182–185. ISBN 978-0226885681. Quote: Between 1943 and 1987, some thirty women in Rajasthan (twenty-eight, according to official statistics) immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre. This figure probably falls short of the actual number. (p. 182)
  2. ^ Gilmartin, Sophie (1997). "The Sati, the Bride, and the Widow: Sacrificial Woman in the Nineteenth Century". Victorian Literature and Culture. 25 (1): 141–158. doi:10.1017/S1060150300004678. JSTOR 25058378. S2CID 162954709. Suttee, or sati, is the obsolete Hindu practice in which a widow burns herself upon her husband's funeral pyre...
  3. ^ Brick, David (2018). Kitts, Margo (ed.). Martyrdom, Self-Sacrifice, and Self-Immolation: Religious Perspectives on Suicide. Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 162–181, 165–166. ISBN 978-0-19-065648-5. To give just one concrete example of sati from the Mahabharata this is fairly representative of its treatment throughout the epic, we can examine the story of the death of Pandu, the father of the epic's five chief protagonists, the Pandava brothers ... this narrative reveals two crucial features of sati as it is presented in Hindu religious texts of the ancient and medieval periods. The first of these is that it is a strictly voluntary undertaking; it is not presented as a mandatory practice, nor does physical coercion constitute a motivating factor in its lawful execution. The second feature of sati is its special goal, which is the unbroken continuation in the next life of a wife's faithful and devoted service to her husband—the very reason for her existence according to many classical Hindu texts.
  4. ^ Feminist Spaces: Gender and Geography in a Global Context, Routledge, Ann M. Oberhauser, Jennifer L. Fluri, Risa Whitson, Sharlene Mollett. Quote: Sati is a practice in which widows commit suicide by burning themselves (or being burned) on their husband's funeral pyres.
  5. ^ Watson, Cameron; Bhugra, Dinesh; Ventriglio, Antonio (2024). "Cultural factors in suicide". In Schouler-Ocak, Meryam; Khan, Murad Moosa (eds.). Suicide Across Cultures: Understanding the variation and complexity of the suicidal process across ethnicities and cultures. Oxford Cultural Psychiatry Series. Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 15–26, 20. ISBN 978-0-19-884340-5. India: The practice of a Hindu widow jumping onto the funeral pyre of her husband and killing herself is described as sati. The word represents many meanings and the most common use refers to the act of dying by suicide, which was fairly common in north India in particular, until the British rulers made it an illegal act. As the term also is reflected as devotion, the actual act may have been due to devotion or coercion partly because looking after widows may have been seen as a burden for the family.
  6. ^ Strong, S. I. (2018). A New Theory of Religious Rights for National and International Legal Systems. Cambridge University Press. pp. 158–159. ISBN 978-1-107-17933-2. The practice of sati, for example, though widespread in India at one time, may not have been followed for religious reasons so much as for social and economic reasons involving the shame brought on a wife and her family if she did not choose to become sati, the absence of any economic provisions to support widows and the existence of financial incentives to other family members resulting from the widow's committing sati. The social reality was such that death was the only perceived option of many sati, regardless of any religious elements.
  7. ^ Stein, Burton (2010). Arnold, David (ed.). A History of India (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. p. 90. ISBN 978-1-4051-9509-6. The positions taken and the practices discussed by Manu and other commentators and writers of dharmashastras are not quaint relics of the distant past, but alive and recurrent in India today – as the attempts to revive the custom of sati (widow immolation) in recent decades has shown. Child marriages, forced marriage, dowry and the expectation of abject wifely subservience, too, have enjoyed lengthy duration and continuity and are proving very difficult to stamp out
  8. ^ a b c Brule, Rachel E. (2020). Women, Power, and Property: The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-1-108-83582-4. Quote: Sati is a particularly relevant social practice because it is often used as a means to prevent inheritance of property by widows. In parallel, widows are also sometimes branded as witches – and subjected to violent expulsion from their homes – as a means to prevent their inheritance.
  9. ^ Ramusack, Barbara N. (1999), "Women in South Asia", in Barbara N. Ramusack, Sharon L. Sievers (ed.), Women in Asia: Restoring Women to History, Indiana University Press, pp. 27–29, ISBN 0-253-21267-7
  10. ^ Dyson, Tim (2018), A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day, Oxford University Press, p. 20, ISBN 978-0-19-882905-8
  11. ^ Asher, Catherine B.; Talbot, Cynthia (2006), India before Europe, Cambridge University Press, pp. 268–, ISBN 978-1-139-91561-8
  12. ^ Arnold, David (2021). Burning the Dead: Hindu Nationshood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. p. 88. ISBN 9780520379343. Sati, as Ania Loomba put it, was "one of the most spectacular forms of patriarchal violence," and all three of those terms—spectacle (though perhaps not quite as Loomba meant it), patriarchy, and violence—are highly relevant to this discussion. And yet, as Tanika Sarkar reminds us, until the mid-1820s "suttee" was described by the British as "self-immolation," as a self-willed act, and only subsequently as "widow burning." And, as she further notes, in Bengal satis were commonly referred to as women who consumed or ate fire, and not, passively, as "women who were devoured by fire." In these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century deaths sati was resurrected in a new form, the kerosene-fueled flame a surrogate for, or adjunct to, the conventional funeral pyre. In highlighting the role of fire in the destruction of women's lives, these deaths further illustrate a pattern, appallingly still found, in which women in India have been far more likely to die from burns than men
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