Exempel på sati

• By undermining the possibility of the widows' agency, they could discredit the governmental construction of "voluntary" sati on which toleration of the rite was based.

• Early modern accounts reflect both condemnation and praise, as individual reactions to sati were conditioned by personal experience.

• This heroic treatment of sati was echoed in many of the accounts of the period.

• Archer advances this claim through a discussion of travel narratives that describe sati and other cultural practices representing the paradoxical blend of tradition and degeneration.

• In so doing, the traces of nationalism's genealogy in the earlier discourses on social reform- and, beyond that, sati-become apparent.

• Yet, as scholars have noted, sati does not have legitimate scriptural sanction.#!

• This meant that women were debarred from sati if, among other things, they were under sixteen, pregnant, intoxicated or, most importantly, unwilling.

• Missionaries were influential in the debate over sati and the subsequent outlaw of its practice.

• The implications of sati for the maternal bond were not always understood sympathetically, of course.

• Both the conditions of her former life, and the specific circumstances under which the decision to commit sati is reached rob her of the power of rational cognisance.

• The imperatives of the popular campaign against sati meant that it was in the interests of the anti-sati lobby to present the rite as an act of violence against women.

• Despite the tendency to portray the sati as a passive victim, there was still a potential question mark over the nature of her complicity in the rite.

• In this way the social and financial cost to the state was mitigated, and the sati's abandonment of her child was legitimised in legal if not in moral terms.

• There are also sati deaths.

• The wife cremates her husband and commits sati by jumping into his funeral pyre.