Sati

The word satī has three basic meanings:

1.

a proper name, Satī, the goddess, a previous incarnation of Pārvatī;

2.

an honorific term for a married or saintly woman; and

3.

from the British colonial period onward, a wife who dies by immolation on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband, or the ritual thereof (see below).

This article will briefly note the narratives around Satī and related deities, review the cultural and ethical values around the married woman, and examine historically and textually the phenomenon of satī immolations. 

Stories and Shrines 

The story of Satī, a previous incarnation of Pārvatī and wife of Śiva, is told with some variation in many Purāṇas. Briefly, Viṣṇu and Brahmā approach the Great Goddess Umā and ask her to incarnate herself as Satī, the daughter of the patriarch (prajāpati) Dakṣa, and marry the ascetic god Śiva in the hope that marriage would anchor him within a domestic location and temper his more ascetic and antinomian tendencies. Umā agrees on the condition that if she is ever dishonored, she will abandon her body as Satī and return to her primal Umā form. Dakṣa agrees to this arrangement, and Satī grows up devoted to Śiva and marries him, and they establish their marital household on Mount Kailāsa. Sometime later, Dakṣa hosts a sacrifice (yajña) but excludes Śiva. Satī sees all the other deities going toward the sacrifice and asks Śiva why they have not received an invitation. He explains that he has no interest in such rituals. She insists on attending the sacrifice, and he reluctantly agrees for her to go. When she arrives at the sacrifice and sees that no place has been made for her and her husband, she demands an explanation from her father, Dakṣa. He denounces Śiva, saying that he is an ascetic who lives in a cremation ground, that he has no lineage, and that he had failed to honor Dakṣa at a previous sacrifice. Satī protests her father’s denunciation of her husband and tells him that she will no longer remain in the body she had received from him. At that moment she enters the sacrificial fire, according to some versions, or emits fire from her body through the power of her ascetic heat (yogāgni). 

Sometime later Śiva learns of Satī’s immolation and flies into a rage. He assembles an army of his devotees and proceeds to the sacrifice and destroys it, cutting off Dakṣa’s head and throwing it into the fire. Dakṣa shifts from being the patron of the sacrifice to being its offering. All the gods and sages beg him to restore the sacrifice. He replaces Dakṣa’s head with that of a goat, the sacrificial animal. With his goat head in place, Dakṣa comes to understand Śiva is the supreme lord and begs his forgiveness and becomes his devotee. 

There are two versions of what happens to Satī. Having returned to her Great Goddess form she takes birth as Pārvatī, the daughter of Himavat (“Snow-Clad,” i.e the Himalayas), and marries Śiva; or, Śiva takes her burnt body from the sacrificial fire and, maddened with grief, carries it on his shoulders and wanders into the mountains. Śiva’s grief provokes his doomsday dance (tāṇḍava) and causes the world to become perilously unstable. The gods follow Śiva, and Viṣṇu throws his disk (cakra) and cuts Satī’s body into pieces. As each piece falls to the ground, it reconstitutes itself as the complete goddess. Similarly, Śiva leaves a part of himself in the form of the liṅga at her side. These body parts together form the 51 śāktapīṭhas, or “seats of power,” ranging from Hinglaj in the west (in Baluchistan, Pakistan; Hiṅglāj Mandir) and Guwahati (inAssam; Kāmākhyā Temple) in the east. The Kāmākhyāpīṭha is where Satī’s vulva ( yoni ) fell, and it is widely regarded by devotees and practitioners of Tantra to be the most sacred pīṭha. The emergence of the śāktapīṭhashrines parallels the rise of the Śākta tradition from around the 8th century particularly in the sub-Himalayan regions of north and northeast India and Nepal. The most detailed narratives about Satī are to be found in the later Sanskrit Purāṇas, especially the Kālikāpurāṇa (8–11, 15–17), and theMahābhāgavatapurāṇa (1.10). A number of shrines in the Tamil region in the South also claim to be śāktapīṭhas, indicating that the Satī tradition was well known throughout the subcontinent. 

The story of Satī forms the framework for regional and local shrines in Rajasthan that emerged around the 16th century associated with lineage deities of various caste communities. The temple to Rāṇī Satī Mātā in Jhunjhunu of the Agarwal lineages of Vaiśyas is reputed to be one of the wealthiest in India. Another example may be found at the modest temple to Nārāyaṇī Satī Mātā in Alwar district, near Amanbagh. The foundation myth of this temple tells of Nārāyaṇī’s marriage to a Rajput prince named Karansañjī. Just after the wedding ceremony was completed and they were making their way through the arid wilderness to her husband’s home, the couple stopped to rest under the shade of a tree. As Karansañjī was sleeping, a snake slid down the trunk of the tree and bit him. When Nārāyaṇī saw that he was dead, she immediately called some of the local shepherds to collect firewood for the cremation fire. She told one of them to take a burning stick from the fire; as far as he could carry it, there would always be water available in the temple’s tank. The temple of Nārāyaṇī Satī Mātā, patronized by the Nai (barber) castes, is built on the spot where the cremation took place. Next to the temple is a water tank that remains full even during severe drought (Courtright, 1994). 

The connection between the story of Satī, the wife of Śiva, and the immolation of wives rests on more than the word satī. In the puranic story of Satī, she enters or becomes the sacrificial fire as the ultimate gesture of loyalty to her husband. But, Śiva does not die. Indeed, Śiva is immortal; he cannot die. Here the sacrifice symbolizes the whole universe, and Śiva’s exclusion from receiving a share of its benefits constitutes a functional death. Therefore, Satī’s self-immolation parallels what wives who become satīs undertake in joining their husband in shared death and immolation. 

Satī: Iconography, Dharma, and Auspiciousness 

The practice of satī can be dated from at least the 6th century CE, as evidenced by memorial stones that depict a husband and wife on a funeral pyre. Earlier reports of the immolation of wives filtered into Greek awareness from accounts by members of Alexander the Great’s forces in India. R. Thapar (2000) locates the emergence of satī among martial communities in frontier zones, especially in western and northern India, where defense of land and cattle was the principle activity. Heroic sacrificial death became highly valued as the most exemplary form of dharmic action. A parallel form of sacrificial action became idealized for wives. This form of shared death became iconographically represented in the many memorial or satī stones found across the landscape of India. The most widely attested iconographic representations of satī depicts the warrior on horseback; the wife standing next to him, hands in honorific gesture with bangles in place on her wrist, indicating that she remains married; and a sun and crescent moon in the background. More abstract iconographies depict simply the right arm raised.

The logic of satī is related to notions of dharma that are appropriate to married women, or pativratādharma. Central to the privileges and obligations ( adhikāra ) of marriage for women is the wife’s care and support of her husband. Just as the dharma of the devotee is to the deity, the warrior to his sovereign, or the servant to his master, the marital relation for women is idealized in the admonitions in the Dharmaśāstras, popular narratives about wives such as Sītā and Sāvitrī, whose service to their husbands brings well-being to the family and community, and widespread cultural understandings of the mutual and hierarchical nature of marriage. Women, by nature, are endowed with animating power śakti , which, when disciplined by ritual practices and service directed toward their husbands, protects them from harm. Ritual practices such as fasting and the taking of vows ( vrata ) for the husband’s welfare are vehicles for auspiciousness (maṅgala). Moreover, this devoted service is understood to protect the honor and reputation of the family and community more generally as a reservoir of spiritual capital. 

Hindu tradition understands the wedding ritual to be an act of completing or perfecting (saṃskāra) the bond between man and woman not only for their own thriving but also for the well-being of the husband’s ancestral lineage and descendants. The central event of the wedding ceremony is the seven steps around the sacrificial fire (saptapadī) that merges the couple together ontologically into a single entity, each the half body of the other. This merging is hierarchical, from the wife to the husband, because it is the wife who leaves her natal family and lineage and is adopted into the community of her husband’s ancestors and gods. Part of her dharma as wife is to assist in the ritual preparations of food that her husband offers to the family deities in worship ( pūjā ). 

Given this ideology of marriage and the power of wives, the husband should outlive his wife. In exercising her dharma as wife, she provides auspicious nurturing to her husband as long as she lives. This logic is disrupted, however, in cases where the husband dies first. The husband’s death shifts her location to that of a producer of auspiciousness to the widow, the abject reminder of the death of her husband. Among twice-born castes especially, the widow marks this transition by removing herself from participation in rituals designed to advance auspiciousness such as weddings and rites around childbirth. Because she has been melded into the family of her husband, her maintenance remains the dharmic obligation of his family. In a culture and religion that places such importance on marriage as the foundation of society, it is not surprising that the widow occupies an anomalous position: she is the carrier of inauspiciousness. Traditionally, at the death of her husband, she breaks the bangles on her wrist that marked her as a wife whose husband was living, removes all markers of auspiciousness – jewelry and red power in the part in her hair – and adopts an ascetic way of life even as she remains within the household. In some cases she may move into a community of widows where she lives out her remaining years performing rituals for the benefit of her husband in the next world. 

The logic of satī emerges out of this matrix of marital formations as an alternative to widowhood. According to Hindu tradition, death does not take place formally until the body is cremated and the life force (prāṇa) is released by breaking open the top of the skull as the body is consumed in the fire. The brief period between physical death and cremation, termed in the ritual literature as the “final offering” (antyeṣṭi), marks the moment when a wife may choose to become one who is going with or dying with her husband (sahagamanī or sahamāranī) or, as she is more generally termed, a satī. By dying with her husband, she eludes the highly inauspicious category of widowhood, and her sacrificial death – like that of the warrior in battle – continues to protect her husband through the passage of death. Both the dharmaśāstratextual tradition (see below) and popular lore stress that a wife’s decision to accompany her husband in death is one she must make alone. Among Rajputs especially, a wife who chooses to become a satī is understood to undergo a particular ontological transformation, and her śaktiemerges in the form of sat, a kind of heat that is said to rise within her and empower her to undergo the otherwise terrifying ordeal of death by fire. Wives who vow to become satīs within whom the sat rises become perceived as bearers of the power to bless and curse. Popular lore around satī in Rajasthan is replete with stories in which the satī curses or threatens to curse members of the family that attempt to prevent her from following through on her determination to join her husband (Harlan, 1992). The power of sat rising in the wife moves her toward the category of a goddess whose meritorious sacrifice redounds to the well-being of the family and lineage. She becomes a satīmātā, a “mother satī,” a category most closely resembling a kuldevī or lineage goddess. As we saw above with the story of Nārāyaṇī Satī Mātā, she may extend the powers derived from her sacrifice beyond the immediate lineage to include the community or village as a whole. 

According to this formulation of the satī as a response to the ideal of the dharma of wives, the ideology of marriage, and the meritorious benefits derived from avoiding widowhood, it is not surprising that satī has been such an enduring icon in Hindu imagination even if its practice has been rare except among politically prominent families in the premodern period. Satī serves as a marker of the last full measure of devotion a wife can offer when the husband dies. Her resolve to continue with him in death as she had in life stakes out an ideal that, even if very few pursue it, shapes the moral identities of communities that form themselves according to the values ofpativratādharma. 

Discourse on Satī in the Dharmaśāstras 

The Sanskrit Dharmaśāstra texts, the compilation of moral and social prescriptions put forth by the Brahman tradition that evolved over several centuries after about the 3rd century BCE, generally recommend that the widow continue to honor her husband’s memory through a life of chastity and devotion. The topic of satī only appears in the later texts and digests, suggesting that it was not a practice among vedic Brahmans but may have entered dharmashastric discourse as part of the patronage offered to them by the political (Kṣatriya) class, which did value satī as part of its martial traditions.

It is in the later commentaries and digests (the Dharmanibandhas, 12th to 19th cents.) that a more extensive discussion focusing on the eligibility of the wife to perform satī emerges, including instructions for performing the rite. As part of this Brahmanical construction of thesatī ritual to be followed by priests, the 16th-century paṇḍit from Varanasi, Raghunandana, in his treatise on ritual, the Śuddhitattva, prescribed the inclusion of two stanzas of a funeral hymn from the Ṛgveda:

"Let these women, who are not widows and who have good husbands, sit down with clarified butter used as collyrium; may the wives who are tearless, free from disease and well-adorned, occupy the seat in the front. Oh woman! Raise yourself towards the world of the living; you lie down near this departed one; come, this your wifehood of the husband who held your hand and whose love for you has been fulfilled" (ṚV. 10.18.7–8). 

There is no evidence that satī was practiced in the vedic period. Vedic verses were incorporated into the satī ritual instructions around 16th century presumably to lend vedic/Brahmanic legitimacy. 

Satī in British India

European travelers to India as far back as Marco Polo in the 14th century mention satī as one of the many exotic dimensions of the culture of the “Gentoos” (i.e Hindus). Travelers wrote of their experiences of witnessing satīs, testifying to both the inspiring and horrifying character of such events. Indeed, satī narratives became set pieces in the evolving genre of travel writing that became immensely popular in Europe with the rise of print culture, literacy, and colonial expansion. For example, the Dutch traveler Jan Huygen van Linschoten described the satītradition as he came to know about it.

"It is a custom among the Brahmans that when one of them dies, his kinsmen prepare a pit into which they pour sandalwood, fragrant spices, foodstuffs, rice, wheat and oil to make the pyre burn. When these things are burning, they place the corpse on top. Soon the widow comes, accompanied by her possessions (retinue). Her eager relatives exhort her to follow her husband loyally [so that] she may rejoice with him in another world amid a thousand joys. The widow quite ready in mind, and removing her clothes and jewels she joyfully distributes them to the women near her. Then laughing she leaps into the pyre to be burned alive along with the body of her husband" (van Linschoten, 2004, 36). 

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as the East India Company expanded its authority from the early trading centers in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, the issue of satī became an increasingly significant political issue. East India Company officials, in both London and India, had maintained a longstanding policy of non-interference in Indian religious traditions. By the beginning of the 19th century, it was taken for granted, by Hindus and British alike, that satī was a religious practice, sanctioned by centuries of tradition and textual authority. However, since British officials might have found satī personally morally reprehensible, they concluded that the use of their rapidly expanding police powers should be constrained regarding satī in deference to its larger goal of colonial supremacy. 

Beginning in 1805, the colonial court in Calcutta slowly began to interrogate the religious legitimacy of satī by ordering their Brahman paṇḍits to identify the textual authorities which prescribed satī as a religious obligation. The paṇḍits’ advisory opinions (vyavasthās) concluded that some authorities authorized the practice for wives who met the eligibility requirements: not pregnant, no dependent young children, not menstruating, and fully determined to accompany their husbands. By 1817 the chief paṇḍit for the court, Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, concluded that while satī carried with it the reward of the husband and wife remaining together in the next world, it could not be classified as an absolute religious duty. 

Over the next decade, the court also ordered district magistrates to compile detailed records of incidents of satī in their jurisdictions, including information on the caste and circumstances of the immolations. Police authorities were directed to intervene and prevent the satīs from taking place where there was evidence of coercion brought to bear on the women. Magistrates submitted annual reports to the court that were later published by parliament in three volumes of its occasional papers during the 1820s and made available to the public in Britain. 

While these juridical inquiries were taking place, a complex public discourse was emerging in Calcutta from four directions: Hindu reformers, Hindu traditionalists, Evangelical missionaries, and the public. 

In 1818, the wealthy Brahman public intellectual Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) published the first of three pamphlets in Bengali and English in the genre of dharmashastric debate arguing thatsatī was not authorized in the most ancient and authoritative texts of the Hindu tradition and that it was an inferior path to ultimate religious achievement ( mokṣa ) for the wife. His denunciation of satī also opened up a broader attack on the condition of Hindu women and the extent to which religious attitudes and practices contributed to their abject circumstances. 

Rammohun Roy’s opponents among the Bengali elite in Calcutta published contrary interpretations based on dharmaśāstra sources and argued that wives who sought to go into the next world with their husbands should not be denied that option. 

Evangelical missionaries in Serampore, under the leadership of William Carey, and James Peggs in Cuttack, Orissa, published pamphlets narrating accounts of the horrors of wives being forced onto pyres by kinsmen callously eager to avoid their obligation of maintaining a widow and by priests who profited from payments for their ritual services. The Serampore missionary publications circulated in Britain, and J. Pegg’s India’s Cries to British Humanity went through several editions. By the 1820s several newspapers in Bengali and English were in circulation that included reports of satī incidents and letters from readers expressing outrage at the practice. 

The compilation of statistical data on satī mandated by the court lends empirical authority to the view that an epidemic of satī was taking place, especially in Bengal in districts closest to Calcutta. The number of alleged satīs was often used by advocates for abolition to strengthen the perception that satī was rampant. Insofar as a demographic assessment of the number ofsatīs in relation to the number of wives of deceased husbands can be reconstructed, the actual percentage was less than two percent (Yang, 1992). 

Assuming that incidents of satī, especially in Bengal, did undergo a significant increase during the first two decades of the 19th century, what forces might account for such a dramatic change? Some historians have suggested that the generally disruptive impact of an increasingly dominant foreign power, a crisis among the high-status Brahman community regarding polygamous marriage arrangements, and the extent to which British surveillance of satī were interpreted as lending additional prestige to families of satīs (Nandy, 1994). 

Within the leadership of the East India Company, the discourse around satī was shifting. By the early 1820s, two perspectives were emerging. The senior-ranked leaders of the company in Calcutta and London remained cautious about how the satī issue should be dealt with. Whether or not the practice was authorized by Hindu texts, they took the view that the Hindu populations would perceive any constraints on satī as a betrayal of the company’s policy of non-interference in the religious lives of their subjects. Public unrest would have a destabilizing effect and undermine the company’s larger efforts at providing good government in India and profit for shareholders. 

This view was increasingly challenged by younger officers within the company and the public in Britain who increasingly viewed satī as a moral abomination that could no longer be tolerated, its putative religious sanction Hindus claimed for it notwithstanding. Evangelicals in Britain organized rallies and petitions to parliament, and influential figures within both the company and parliament such as Charles Grant and William Wilberforce pressed for intervention. The discourse shifted toward the view that Britain’s own sense of itself as an imperial state could no longer include tacit acceptance of a morally reprehensible practice in the name of preserving its colonial possession. Indeed, as historian L. Mani has argued, the discourse became less about the circumstances of the Hindu wives – who had no voice in the matter – than it did about the shape and character of Britain’s imperial civilizing mission as an agent of reform and conversion of India toward a liberal modernity (Mani, 1998). 

In 1828 William Bentinck was appointed governor general in Calcutta. William Bentinck, who was aligned with the evangelical and utilitarian perspective on India generally, consulted various military and judicial officials to determine whether an order abolishing satī would likely be met with significant resistance. On November 4, 1829, he issued the order of abolition. From the British perspective, satī was shifted from the category of religion to the category of crime, redefining the colonial state as the protector of Hindu women from their cultural and religious customs.

In the lengthy preface to his order of abolition, William Bentinck argued that research into the Hindu textual traditions had conclusively demonstrated that satī was not a religious duty, the texts themselves were not of one mind on the matter, and the most ancient and authoritative traditions did not condone it. He also sought to reassure Hindus that the British had no interest in abolishing satī as part of a larger strategy to convert them to Christianity. He concluded his minute by positioning himself as speaking with the voice of the Hindu’s better nature.

"The first and primary object of my heart is the benefit of the Hindoos. I know nothing so important to the improvement of their future condition, as the establishment of a purer morality, whatever their belief, and a more just conception of the will of God." The first and most pressing task, he argued, was to disconnect religious belief from murder and brutality. He continued, "thus emancipated from those chains and shackles upon their minds and actions, they may not longer continue, as they have done, the slaves of every foreign conqueror, but that they may assume their just places among the great families of mankind." In what he presumably thought was a gesture of reassurance to Hindus, he wrote "I disown in these remarks or in this measure any view whatever to conversion to our own faith. I write and feel as a Legislator for the Hindoos, and as I believe many enlightened Hindoos think and feel" (Philips, 1977, vol. I, 344). 

In Britain the public overwhelmingly approved of William Bentinck’s order. In Calcutta, missionaries and Hindu reformers welcomed it. Hindu traditionalists, who had bitterly opposed Rammohun Roy’s representations of Hindu dharma, protested. Under the guidance of Radhakant Deb, who had worked closely with company officials in areas of education and agricultural development, a petition was submitted to william Bentinck arguing that the Hindu religion was a sovereign entity and that satī was and should remain an internal matter. Radhakant Deb and his colleagues established the Dharma Sabha (Congress) to appeal directly to the Crown to reverse his order. The appeal was reviewed by the king’s privy council and sustained by a close vote in 1832. Rammohun Roy went to London in part to lend support to the abolition. 

Once the policy prohibiting satī was put in place, company officials ceased its surveillance of the practice. Popular opposition to abolition was limited and quickly dissipated. The abolition did contribute to an increasing suspicion among some Indians that their religious traditions were under attack by various colonial forces: missionary critiques, Anglicizing of the educational system, and an increasingly patronizing and racist attitude toward Indians. 

The abolition of satī, along with its criminal penalties, effectively eliminated the practice in Bengal. Over the next several decades, the British prevailed on Indian princes to adopt a similar policy within their states. While the practice of satī was effectively eliminated, the ideal of satī – absolute devotion to the husband by the supremely virtuous wife – became a trope in the independence movement. The category of the husband became the imagined nation; the devoted wife became the movement itself. This political imaginaire joined with its alternative: the nation as the virtuous mother (Bhārat Mātā) who inspired and required devotion from her devotees. Both paradigms gave religious and moral shape to the movement under Gandhi’s leadership, with him taking on the role as the renunciant sage or guru. 

The Case of Roop Kanwar 

With the achievement of Independence and full political sovereignty in 1947, the Indian penal code maintained the ban on satī and continued to define aiding or abetting satī as a crime. From the 1950s to 1980s, satī came to be viewed as a relic from a medieval or primitive past, a practice and tradition buried amid India’s exotica. In the city of Jodhpur, Rajasthan, the wife of a prominent official of the former princely state of Marwar became a satī. The event generated little attention, and reports of it were buried in the back pages of the newspapers. 

The notion that satī had become extinct was dramatically contradicted in 1987 by the death of a young woman named Roop Kanwar who had been married less than a year when her husband died suddenly from appendicitis. Roop Kanwar was a member of the Shekhawat Rajput caste, the prominent community in eastern Rajasthan. She was living with her husband and his family in Deorala, a town about 70 km north of Rajasthan’s capital, Jaipur. Her immolation was picked up by the media and quickly became a major story, both in India and abroad. Within a few days, tens of thousands of local people were flocking to Deorala for the blessing of the new satīmātā, even as reporters and investigative journalists and researchers from various women’s organizations were pursuing what happened at Deorala. Contradictory accounts insisted that Roop Kanwar was an authentic satī. When she learned of her husband’s death at a nearby hospital, she immediately put on her wedding clothes and announced she would join his cremation. Her in-laws insisted that they had done all they could to dissuade her. Other accounts insisted that she was coerced by these same in-laws; confused and overwhelmed, she was quickly moved through the streets of Deorala and perished in the fire. A few days later, local police, who did not arrive in time to prevent Roop Kanwar’s death, arrested several of her in-laws and others. 

Within a few days, the immolation of Roop Kanwar became a national political scandal. The Rajasthan state government, a few weeks later the national parliament, enacted tougher laws prohibiting satī. The negative press and political pressure contributed to a defensive reaction by some leaders of the Rajput community. Quickly Roop Kanwar became the contested symbol of a regression to reactionary and antimodern values, on the one hand, or an example of ancient Rajput virtues remaining vital even in the face of a corrosive secular consumerist and decadent modernity, on the other. Editorials in the English-language press, opinion pieces by public intellectuals, and academic conferences and journals taking up the historical, social, political, and psychological dimensions of satī kept the story going over the next couple of years. It came to light that, in fact, some 40 satīs had taken place in the several districts in eastern Rajasthan and western Madhya Pradesh over the previous decades since Independence. Montage photographs of Roop Kanwar’s wedding were combined with iconographies of regionalsatīmātās sitting with their husbands in their laps in the center of the fire. 

Women’s organizations took the lead in interpreting the Roop Kanwar immolation as a threat to Indian modernity particularly with regard to issues of the status of women and the tenacious hold of patriarchal institutions and values. It was not a simple polarity between tradition and modernity; Roop Kanwar and the community she came from lived modern lives. The prosecution in local courts bogged down and dragged out. All those arrested were acquitted for lack of evidence; appeals followed, and the case languished for over 20 years until the last appeals were exhausted. In a paradoxical way, Roop Kanwar also became a useable icon for galvanizing women’s organizations and increasing political resolve for improving the conditions of women. Since 1987 there have been a few incidents of alleged satīs in rural areas of north central India. Responsive investigation and media attention together with more vigorous law enforcement have contributed to preventing an epidemic of satī similar to what the British faced a century and a half earlier. The combination of greater surveillance by state authorities, vigilance by women’s organizations, and a distancing by Hindu religious and Rajput community from any validation of satī as an act worthy of veneration have effectively contained it. 

While contemporary Hinduism rejects satī as an appropriate expression of pativratādharma, the image of the devoted wife joining her husband and crossing through the fire together into the next world retains some romantic appeal in both India and the West. At the same, time satī remains a potent symbol of female abjection. It is the convergence of these contradictory interpretive trajectories – romantic devotion and abuse of women – that contributes to the mythology and symbolization of satī remaining a haunting presence in both Hindu and Western imaginations.