Indian Self-Immolation (aka Sati or Suttee)

Indian Self-Immolation (aka Sati or Suttee)

Self-immolation, as one might know, is suicide by burning oneself to death. A popular worldwide hobby from USA to South Korea showing us that great minds think alike.

Nothing connects people like similar ideas on suicide.

Now in the good old days of India, actually, pretty much always up until the british comming and ruining everybody's fun like they always do, indians had the proud tradition of burning the body of dead men on a funeral pyre, which has been a known burial method used across the world since men realized it requires less work to burn a corpse than to dig a hole.

The idea of Sati was something we all expect from our wives when we pass this mortal coil, that is, to kill herself in a painful, horrid way in the public, traumatizing little children forever.

You scored major points if you do it outside a school during lunch break.

Ah such strong love, almost makes me misty eyed. Unlike India, where they got all misty eyed thanks to all that flesh-burning smoke.

Alas, such a burning love doesn't mean infinite pain threshold to burning the fuck up. And naturally, the widows often tried to flee the flames and put out the fire on her by jumping into rivers or whatever else was avaible, including pots with urine.

But in India, a widow not burning up was more offensive to indians than a crudely drawn picture of mohammed with bare tits are to muslims in Mekka, and thus the widow showed shameful display and her husband's honor was shamed. Now, Indians are a pretty helpful bunch, (which is probably why their favorite job is tech support and call centers) and to save the couple from disgrace, they would gladly help out the widow. Like one time when a widow rebelled against the system and doused her flames, a bunch of nice random people passing by chased her around as if they were in a hilarious benny hill chase scene.

(cue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK6TXMsvgQg for effect)

Unfortunatly for the widow, this wasn't an Adam Sandler movie, and when they finally caught up with the fleeing pile of shame and dishonor, they helpfully broke her legs (and arms, because why not?) and tossed her into the flames.

They still prefered burning painfully to death than being in an Adam Sandler movie. They did what we all would do.

And thus was honor and dignity saved that day! Three cheers for humanity!

Of course, often the widow wouldn't even get close to leaving the inferno, as it was common to encourage the grieving and deathly afraid woman with understanding and deeply empathic words of encouragment in form of severe beatings with wooden canes and other handy comforting blunt weapons, or sometimes, they just cut out the middleman and tied her down to the pyre. Saving everyone from a bit of sweat.

"Hey thanks for helping me out with this, guys!"

When the British empire arrived, they found this to really rustle their tea drinking monocled jimmies, and promply outlawing this barbaric act (somewhere in 1830s), before  continuing to force the indians to work under inhumane conditions, playing cricket, drinking tea with cookies and other forms of mustachioed gentlemanly activites, like watching 7 years old children work in coal mines back home.

However, indians was pretty fierce about their ancient tradition, and didn't give two shits about british imposed laws because fuck 'em. So the widow burning kept going. When India finally got independent in 1947, they actually started to bother enforcing the laws (and banning it several times again because some people just don't listen, latest ban being in 1981. You just can't keep them grieving widows down from blazing glory!).

Latest publicly known suttee committed was all the way back to 1999.

http://www.deathreference.com/Vi-Z/Widow-Burning.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suttee#British_and_other_European_territories
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation

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