The purpose of this research is to examine the practice of suttee (sati), or the burning of Indian widows upon the deaths of their husbands. The plan of the research will be to set forth the cultural and religious context in which suttee was practiced in India from ancient times, and then to discuss when and how it was outlawed in the 1800s in India, under British rule. In this connection, the reasons for outlawing suttee will be discussed, as well as issues dealing with the pros and cons of the issues.
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 Muslim, their symbiosis incomplete, their fusion cut short by the exigencies of power politics . . . . The division into India and Pakistan, the precarious minority position of the Muslims who remained in India (10 per cent of the total population), and recurrent communalist disturbances, are the most significant and well-known features which have resulted from this sad and bitter separative legacy. In accordance with the same tendency for religion ...