(Published in Mint Lounge, March 08 2025)

In 1818 the rani of Travancore confronted a strange problem. A woman called Veeramma, widow of an immigrant soldier, wished to burn herself with his remains. Permission was denied, only for Veeramma to stage a protest. But the rani was firm—sati was not recognised in Kerala. On the contrary, custom offered women a different set of options here. The rani’s mother, for instance, had “repudiated” her first husband, married a second, and on his death, taken a third. The rani herself, having retired her “deranged” first husband, promptly chose his replacement from seven or eight candidates. The idea of a woman burning for a husband was preposterous not just to the queen but to her people at large. In Malabar up north when two women wished to burn, similarly, locals “declared themselves against it”; the ladies had to travel to Coimbatore to perform the rite. After all, Kerala’s elite non-Brahmin groups were largely matrilineal—and whose widows remarried—while patrilineal Brahmins too had a ban on sati. The practice felt altogether alien on Malayali soil, therefore.

Outside Kerala and a few such pockets, however, sati did occur. Yet widow-burning is a subject that triggers many Indians today. Some deny it altogether, taking refuge in that tedious defence: “It is all British propaganda.” It is true that there was much ridiculous propaganda in the colonial period—more on that below—but sati was no British-invented fiction. Another retort is that sati was a response to Islamic violence—it was to avoid falling into the hands of Muslims that Hindu women began to climb onto their husbands’ funeral pyres. But what then of the fact that references to sati exist in, say, the Tamil Purananuru, the composition of which predates the first Islamic invasions of India by centuries? Or that a pillar inscription at Eran in Madhya Pradesh records the 510 CE immolation of a royal widow, one hundred years before Islam as a religion was even founded? The Greek writer Diodorus even records a case in the 300s BCE of an Indian fighter in Persia, whose death saw his two widows quarrel over the honour of going up in flames with his body.

So, yes, sati was very much part of Hindu society. But it is also true that foreign writers—part scandalised, part transfixed by such “exotic” customs—gave it all kinds of strange origin myths. Indians for one cast sati as a matter of wifely fidelity, good behaviour, and even heroism. With outsiders, this logic was twisted. The same Diodorus, thus, explained its genesis as follows: apparently in India, people married “independently of the wishes of their parents”, with the callow youth frivolously choosing partners. But as often happens, couples fought, got bored, and otherwise came to regret decisions made in the heat of passion. Since divorce was barred, women began to poison their husbands, thereby freeing themselves from bad marriages. When the male species figured this out, they devised sati as insurance—if men were to die, their wives would have to burn! Over 1,500 years later, Europeans were still repeating this theory—sati as brown women’s fault for being too lustful, treacherous and untrustworthy. It was a measure to keep them from resorting to those vials of poison.

Into the colonial period, sati appeared regularly in European travelogues; indeed, most writers felt obliged to feature it in their works. Many claimed to be eyewitnesses. Some truly were, but others lied, simply rehashing previous writings to add texture to their own accounts. Responses too were not uniform: if certain Europeans were left in horror by the sight of widow-burning, others felt a degree of awe also at the composure of some of the women. In 1789, for instance, Benjamin Crowninshield, an American, wrote in detail about a sati in Bengal, jotting down details on the woman’s posture, the way Brahmins advised her to place her hands, and so on. While he pitied the lady, he could not help but add that there was something “very solemn” in the proceedings. “I did not think it was in the power of a human person to meet death in such a manner.” Earlier, in 1710, as many as 47 widows of the Ramnad rajah became satis. And while several carried themselves with stoicism, there were others in a state of “abstraction and bewilderment”. Unsurprisingly, one even attempted (and failed) to escape.

Sati’s occurrence varied from region to region, though, and often caste to caste. Bengal in the colonial period saw the highest numbers—hundreds every year in the official count—while in the Madras and Bombay presidencies the figures were typically in the double digits. So, from a total of 6,632 satis recorded between 1815 and 1824, only 635 occurred outside Bengal. And all this from a population of tens of millions. Even in earlier times, the statistical incidence of sati could not have been too high. While memorial stones are strewn across India, their numbers, when placed against the size of the country and its population, suggests it was not an everyday affair. The very fact, that satis were commemorated this way—as with hero stones celebrating warriors fallen in battle—indicates it was a rare enough event. Which is not to say that these fewer deaths were acceptable—even in the case Crowninshield witnessed there were men with sticks ready to push the widow down should she try to run. Considering that reports exist even of child “widows”, every one of those 6,632 cases is tragic.

Into the 19th century, however, with Christian missionaries entering the fray, while on the one hand government came (rightly) under pressure to outlaw sati, the propaganda battle to achieve this also (wrongly) saw wild numbers being aired. This was also linked to the goal of conversion, which necessitated depicting the “native” as sunk in a barbaric religion—and what better, more shocking proof of such barbarism as sati? William Ward, for instance, estimated two satis per village in India, and arrived at a figure of 10,000 annual satis (oblivious, of course, that in territories such as the Travancore rani’s, there were 0 satis, and a woman like Veeramma was even offered a financial incentive to stay alive). But whatever their motives, the white man’s criticism roused Indians—and specifically Bengalis—to urge state intervention to put an end to a cruel tradition. While an orthodox faction resisted, most of Hindu society accepted the shift. Yet as the scholar Julia Leslie observes, even if sati figures were always technically low, this kind of death was still “reverenced”, creating a certain ideal for women. Which perhaps explains why as late as 1987, India still witnessed a stray case of widow immolation.