![]() ![]() In the 16th century, steps to prohibit suttee were taken by the Mughal rulers Humayun and his son Akbar. 1100), which prevailed in Bengal and which gave inheritance to widows such women were encouraged to committ suttee in order to make their inheritance available to other relatives. The larger incidence of suttee among the Brahmans of Bengal was indirectly due to the Dayabhaga system of law ( c. The hardships encountered by widows in traditional Hindu society may have contributed to the spread of suttee. In the Muslim period (12th–16th century), the Rajputs practiced jauhar, most notably at Chitorgarh, to save women from rape, which they considered worse than death, at the hands of conquering enemies. Women sometimes suffered immolation before their husbands’ expected death in battle, in which case the burning was called jauhar. Numerous suttee stones, memorials to the wives who died in this way, are found all over India, the earliest dated 510 ce. It is also mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek author of the 1st century bce, in his account of the Punjab in the 4th century bce. The first explicit reference to the practice in Sanskrit appears in the great epic Mahabharata (compiled in its present form about 400 ce). It is sometimes linked to the myth of the Hindu goddess Sati, who burned herself to death in a fire that she created through her Yogic powers after her father insulted her husband, the god Shiva-but in this myth Shiva remains alive and avenges Sati’s death. Although never widely practiced, suttee was the ideal of womanly devotion held by certain Brahman and royal castes. Suttee, Sanskrit sati (“good woman” or “chaste wife”), the Indian custom of a wife immolating herself either on the funeral pyre of her dead husband or in some other fashion soon after his death.
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