chap, ix THE BURNING OF WIDOWS 163
life,
and prefer to ascend a funeral pile to be consumed alive with the body
of her deceased husband, rather than be regarded by all the world for
the remainder of her days with opprobrium and infamy. Besides this the
Brahmans induce women to hope that by dying in this way, with their
husbands, they will live again with them in some other world with more
glory and more comfort than they have previously enjoyed. These are the
two reasons which make these unhappy women resolve to burn themselves
with the bodies of their husbands ; to which it should be added that
the priests encourage them with the hope that at the moment they are in
the fire, before they yield up their souls, Ram will reveal wonderful
things to them, and that after the soul has passed through several
bodies it will attain to an exalted degree of glory for all eternity.
But
it should be remarked that a woman cannot burn herself with the body of
her husband without having received permission from the Governor of the
place where she dwells, and those Governors who are Musalmans, hold
this dreadful custom of self-destruction in horror, and do not readily
give permission.1 On the other hand, it is only childless
widows who can be reproached for not having loved their husbands if
they have not had courage to burn themselves after their death, and to
whom this want of courage will be for the remainder of their lives a
cause of reproach. For widows who have children are not permitted under
any circumstances to burn themselves with the bodies of their husbands
; and so far from custom obliging them, it is ordained that they
Brahman
widow is allowed to wear her bracelets till she is about thirty years
old, and then, when another death occurs in the family, her bracelets
are broken, her head is shaved, and she wears the dark dress of a widow
{Bombay Gazetteer, ix, part i, 50. Mrs. S. Stevenson, Sites of the Twice-born, 203).
1 On Mughal efforts to repress Sati see Ovington, 344 ; Bernier, 306 ; Smith, Ahbar, the Great Mogul, 226. At a later time Sleeman (Rambles, 18
ff.) was asked to allow a Sati, and failed to save the woman's life.
Akbar prohibited the burning of a widow against her inclination (Smith,
Ahbar, the Great Mogul, 382). The custom was prohibited by the
Sikh Gurus, and does not prevail among the Nambutiri Brahmans of
Malabar. (M. A. Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion, i. Introd. xxii; E. Thurston, Castes and Tribes of S. India, v. 189.)
