SUTTEE, s. The rite of widow-burning; i.e. the burning of the living widow along with the corpse of her husband, as practised by people of certain castes among the Hindus, and eminently by the Rājpūts.

The word is properly Skt. satī, 'a good woman,' 'a true wife,' and thence specially applied, in modern vernaculars of Sanskrit parentage, to the wife who was considered to accomplish the supreme act of fidelity by sacrificing herself on the funeral pile of her husband. The application of this substantive to the suicidal act, instead of the person, is European. The proper Skt. term for the act is saha-gamana, or 'keeping company,' [saha-maraṇa, 'dying together'].[[260]] A very long series of quotations in illustration of the practice, from classical times downwards, might be given. We shall present a selection.

We should remark that the word (satī or suttee) does not occur, so far as we know, in any European work older than the 17th century. And then it only occurs in a disguised form (see quotation from P. Della Valle). The term masti which he uses is probably mahā-satī, which occurs in Skt. Dictionaries ('a wife of great virtue'). Della Valle is usually eminent in the correctness of his transcriptions of Oriental words. This conjecture of the interpretation of masti is confirmed, and the traveller himself justified, by an entry in Mr. Whitworth's Dictionary of a word Masti-kalla used in Canara for a monument commemorating a sati. Kalla is stone and masti = mahā-satī. We have not found the term exactly in any European document older than Sir C. Malet's letter of 1787, and Sir W. Jones's of the same year (see below).

Suttee is a Brahmanical rite, and there is a Sanskrit ritual in existence (see Classified Index to the Tanjore MSS., p. 135a). It was introduced into Southern India with the Brahman civilisation, and was prevalent there chiefly in the Brahmanical Kingdom of Vijayanagar, and among the Mahrattas. In Malabar, the most primitive part of S. India, the rite is forbidden (Anāchāranirṇaya, v. 26). The cases mentioned by Teixeira below, and in the Lettres Édifiantes, occurred at Tanjore and Madura. A (Mahratta) Brahman at Tanjore told one of the present writers that he had to perform commemorative funeral rites for his grandfather and grandmother on the same day, and this indicated that his grandmother had been a satī.

The practice has prevailed in various regions besides India. Thus it seems to have been an early custom among the heathen Russians, or at least among nations on the Volga called Russians by Maṣ'ūdī and Ibn Fozlān. Herodotus (Bk. v. ch. 5) describes it among certain tribes of Thracians. It was in vogue in Tonga and the Fiji Islands. It has prevailed in the island of Bali within our own time, though there accompanying Hindu rites, and perhaps of Hindu origin,—certainly modified by Hindu influence. A full account of Suttee as practised in those Malay Islands will be found in Zollinger's account of the Religion of Sassak in J. Ind. Arch. ii. 166; also see Friedrich's Bali as in note preceding. [A large number of references to Suttee are collected in Frazer, Pausanias, iii. 198 seqq.]

In Diodorus we have a long account of the rivalry as to which of the two wives of Kēteus, a leader of the Indian contingent in the army of Eumenes, should perform suttee. One is rejected as with child. The history of the other terminates thus:

B.C. 317.—"Finally, having taken leave of those of the household, she was set upon the pyre by her own brother, and was regarded with wonder by the crowd that had run together to the spectacle, and heroically ended her life; the whole force with their arms thrice marching round the pyre before it was kindled. But she, laying herself beside her husband, and even at the violence of the flame giving utterance to no unbecoming cry, stirred pity indeed in others of the spectators, and in some excess of eulogy; not but what there were some of the Greeks present who reprobated such rites as barbarous and cruel...."—Diod. Sic. Biblioth. xix. 33-34.

c. B.C. 30.—

"Felix Eois lex funeris una maritis

Quos Aurora suis rubra colorat equis;