WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
happily, showing extraordinary fortitude. Young wives of less than twenty years of age have relinquished life, and bade farewell to their cherished children and dearest relatives, in obedience to the overwhelming impulse of self-destruction as a noble and pious act of devotion to a husband.
English law-makers saw in this practice only the survival of "barbarism." They missed the symbolic meaning, the deep, passionate joy of the sacrifice, and the expression of a love stronger than death. Suttee was forbidden by a law of 1829; but the deep-rooted custom was not entirely abolished. The highest form of human self-sacrifice, as it is described by Sir Alfred C. Lyall, was the last custom to disappear in parts of India.
It has been supposed, quite incorrectly, that men imposed Sati upon women. The rite was introduced entirely by widows of devout faith and strong conjugal affection. Dr. Coomaraswamy traces the custom back to more than a thousand years before the Christian era, and quotes, from an old Persian author, the story of a Hindu girl who gave herself to the flames on the very day of the death of her betrothed.
Sir Frederick Halliday recounted how a widow, desiring to die by the Sati sacrifice, demonstrated to him her indifference to the agony of burning. She held her finger in a lamp "until it was burnt and twisted
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