Practice of Suttee (Sati) in India

The practice of suttee cannot be understood without reference to Hinduism, and the whole of Indian history, culture, and art must be understood with reference to the religious hegemony of the country. The importance of the fact that Hinduism is above all religious rather than aesthetic or sociocultural in character cannot be overestimated, although the religion itself strongly influences the culture. Indeed, Lannoy states that the contemporary political and social history of India has to be understood with reference to the history of strong religious influence in the country. He chiefly focuses on the Hindu influence but synthesizes the religious factor in more general terms when discussing modern Indian politics.

The political history of the Indian nationalist movement has, therefore, always been associated with religion. Reduced to its simplest terms, the legacy of the Muslim period was the division of India into two antagonistic religious communities, Hindu and

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al view of the facts. The informal view, and the record, is that there is a vast difference between outlawing a practice and actually abolishing it. Abolition as a political and social goal, of course, was supported by British and Indian secular reformers as well as by European missionaries in India (Sharma, 1976a), despite efforts by orthodox Hindus to assert religious standing for the practice. In any case, the task was not undertaken lightly by the British rulers, who were reluctant to offend what they understood to be a well-entrenched religious rite (Azariah, 1979). Colonial attempts to end the practice appear to have actually encouraged it for a period prior to the final abolition, for the reason that suttee came to be seen as a form of rebellion against British rule among the nationalistic higher castes. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, nationalistic fervor impinged on religious preferences as well. However, there is also evidence that impoverished widows were more likely than financially secure ones to throw themselves on the funeral pyre voluntarily (Yang, 1989). In this connection, as Stein suggests (1978), the practice of suttee, as late as the nineteenth century, had the effect of simplifying everyday so
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Approximate Word count = 4572
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)

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