Sakuntala narasimhan biography definition

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Suttee as Heroic Martyrdom, Liebestod and Emblem of Women's Oppression : From Orientalist to Feminist Appropriations of a Hindu Rite in Four Narrative Genres1

Monika Fludernik*

The ceremony of a womans self-immolation on her husbands funeral pyre, designated by the Anglo-Indian term suttee, has haunted the Western imagination for several centuries. Immolations had been noted in a number of travelogues, supposedly first in accounts of Alexanders expedition in the fourth century BC (Thompson ; Thapar 85), and since the seventeenth century became a routinely supplied item on the menu of travellers to India. In these early travelogues very little description is provided, and the woman (the sati who immolates herself in the suttee ceremony) emerges as a paragon of heroic fortitude. The full British involvement in India after the Battle of Plassy (north of Calcutta) in and the subsequent British attempts to abolish suttee gave rise to an extraordinary number of accounts in official documents, missionary reports and newspaper columns. This second type of writings provides extensive descriptions of the ceremony and, despite some residue of the discourse of martyrdom, primarily captures the scene as one of sublime tragedy and sentimental involvement of the Western observer (F

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