When the matter comes about the typical rituals and customs we Indians are one of them who practiced the most. “Sati Partha” was most likely to practice before it’s abolition on December 4, 1829.
The Bengal sati Regulation which outlawed sati practice in all jurisdiction of British India was passed on December 4, 1829. By that time Governor-General Lord William Bentinck. The jurisdiction delineated Sati practice as a frisky act to the human nature.
On the 188th anniversary of the Bengal sati Regulation, we need to know about this revolting practice and some facts related to this.
Who is a Sati and what is Sati custom?
- Sati, also scribbled as Suttee, was a practice among Hindu communities where a recently widowed woman, either autocratically or by vigor immolate herself in a pyre of her demised husband.
- Woman who immolate herself in pyre of her demised husband known as ‘sati’ and she construed as a ‘chaste woman’ or ‘good and devoted wife’
- There are too many examples in India where widows were deliberately ignored, therefore, sati was an only solution for a woman’s life without her husband. As sati is considered highest articulation of wifely fidelity to a dead husband.
Some typical facts on the Sati practice:
- Sati, or Suttee, is deduced from the name of the goddess Sati, who immolates herself because she couldn’t bear her father Daksha’s humiliation towards her husband Shiva.
- Sati was reckoned as an atrocious practice by the Islamic rulers of the Mughal period.
- In the 16th century, Humayun was the first to try a royal agreement against the practice. Akbar was next to issue official orders proscribing Sati and since then it was done voluntarily by women. He also issued a decree that any woman couldn’t practice Sati without a particular consent from his chief police officers
- Akbar had also tried to minimise the sati practice to instruct police officer to avert or delay her decision.
- Many Hindu erudite have pleaded against Sati, calling it as ‘suicide, and an absurd and futile act’
- By the end of the 18th century, the practice had been banned in territories held by some European powers.
- The Dutch and the French banned it in Hugli-Chunchura (then Chinsurah) and Pondicherry
- Sati still has betided in some rustic areas of India in the 21st century.
- According to some official reports, about 30 cases of Sati practice, from 1943 to 1987, were filed in India
