Sati

Indian Practices

By M.V.Anil Kumar

I was discussing with a foreigner today morning and was pained at a comment made by him - What is so great about India, land of child marriages and Sati.

Is there a truth in it? Well, the answer is both Yes and No. ‘Yes’ because not just these misdemeanors but many more superstitions, bad practices andtaboos have become part of Indian culture over the ages inadvertently or due to external necessities. The answer is also ‘No’ because India neither starts with these taboos nor ends there. It is important to note that Indians have braved most aghast circumstances than any other race in the world and still hold the cultural strings intact.

A discussion on the variety of cultural flavors that India offers is in itself is a never ending fable of wonders. Today’s discussion with my friend just occurred to me to offer my two cents on various practices, superstitions and customs that are observed in India.

Sati:

Sati is a practice where the wife immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her husband. There are many beliefs associated with this practice and multiple reasons why this was done. There was a time when this was widely practiced in entire India and each region and sect had their own reason. But how did it all begun? Indians try to search their ancient scriptures such as Vedas, Puranas and Upanishads whenever they want to find an answer to such questions. Though I am not an expert who possess this immense treasure of knowledge, but I tried to search the answer for this question in the two well-known works of ancient India – Ramayana and Mahabharatha.

In the entire story of Ramayana, there is not a single instance of Sati. If Sati is part of Hindu tradition, then it should have been followed in Ramayana as in those days there was no other religion known to this part of the world. Dasaratha, the father or Rama, died widowing his three wives and all the three wives stayed in good health even after Rama returning from forest 14 years after his father’s death.

This is even conspicuous in Mahabharatha where most of the queens right from Satyavathi to Ambika, Ambalika, Kunthi, Madri and many more such great queens in the course of the Great War got widowed. In the entire story there are only two instances where a reference to Sati has been made. One where Madri immolates herself on her husband’s pyre and the second instance is Uttara, wife of Abhimanyu, wishes to undergo Sati who is held back by Krishna as she had the heir of Hasthinapura in her womb then. Now, in the case of Madri, her husband dies because of her mistake and she undergoes sati as she wants to punish herself owing to guilt consciousness. So technically it was a kind of self-redemption rather than Sati.

So if not during the days of Mahabharatha and Ramayana, then when did Sati creep into Indian tradition and became a practice? It is during the days of early 1000 AD during the days of Muslim invasion on India. Muslim rulers would marry the widows of slain Hindu kings or keep them as their sex slaves, or war prices. Living with men other than her husband is considered as worse than death for Indian women those days. Even today, majority of Indian women marry once in their life time and dedicate their life for their husbands. There are exceptions off-course. So to avoid such humiliation in the hands of Muslim kings, Sati was practiced extensively and then and in due course became a part of Hindu culture; it continued and worsened during British rule further as most of the British generals were worse brutes than Muslim rulers.

It took great reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy to abolish such acts. However, the scar remained in the minds of Indians forever.

Not just Sati, many other practices kept penetrating into Indian culture due to the influence of circumstances existed during different phases of Indian history.

We shall discuss about other practices and their reasons in the next threads.