Religion.
The Brahmin religion has had for ages a tenet that self-sacrifice is the most acceptable offering to deity, and five modes of great sanctity are enumerated: 1. Starvation; 2. Burying alive; 3. Drowning in the Ganges; 4. Covering the body with dried cow dung, and setting it on fire; and 5. Cutting the throat at the mouth of the Ganges. See the “Ayeen Akbery.” To throw oneself off the precipices of the Mahadeo hills was also a sacred act (Sleeman), and perhaps above all was deemed the death by crushing under the wheels of the Car of Juggernath.
A collateral religious rite is sati, or the enforced burning of widows after the death of the husband; this martyrdom is now almost extinct, except perhaps in the native-governed states. It was very prevalent as late as 1803, in which year no less than 275 wives were burned within 30 miles of Calcutta.
A male Hindoo will also occasionally burn himself on a wood pile even now, just as did Calanus in the time of Alexander the Great. See “Friend of India,” 1866.
Forbes describes several cases in which Brahmin devotees forced themselves to continue eating until their deaths took place.