Quotes About Suttee

Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long.

The attitude is summed up by a famous scene from the novel Memoir of a Bengal Lancer by Geoffrey Bampfylde, in which the young and naïve titular hero is shocked by Englishmen standing by and not acting while a Hindoo widow is hurled onto her husband's funeral pyre in the practice of suttee.[ 52] His more cynical flinty-eyed Irish sergeant advises him that "To be sure, sor, this would raise a few eyebrows on Hampstead Heath: but you're not on Hampstead Heath any more.

I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.