The wife cremates her husband and commits sati by jumping into his funeral pyre.
There are also sati deaths.
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.
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.
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.
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 implications of sati for the maternal bond were not always understood sympathetically, of course.
Missionaries were influential in the debate over sati and the subsequent outlaw of its practice.
