Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/1025

 VII. ] BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. 979 off from the rest of the world—in her own little home she is trained to an idealism of the highest sort, without the facts being observed by any. She would only be seen in public when she was to ascend the funeral pyre of her husband. Foreign people are apt to suppose that her martyrdom was the result of compulsion, oppression or supersti- tion. But those, who possess a more intimate knowledge on the point, will see in Sw¢¢ee only an excess of that idealism that made Savitri, in our earliest times, shudder at the thought of her com- ing widowhood and Tara express a wish to burn her- self with her deceased husband in the Ramayana. Suttee is the highest realisition of that dream of womanhood, the perfection of which was imagined by the ancients to lie in an all absorbed thought of the husband. Each country has a peculiar idea of its own to inspire its people with a spirit of self-sacri- fice, the growth of which has depended upon a succession of causes and circumstances peculiar to itself. Some people in the world’s history have staked their fortune and life for what they called “a national cause,’’ others for what they believed to be the “ word of God,’’—as the iconoclasts once made it the mission of their lives to destroy temples and images at any cost or sacrifice. Hindu women similarly elected to die out of the devotion they bore to their husbands. Of various reports left of the Suttee by European observers, who were drawn to involuntary admiration on witnessing such scenes, I quote two below. This will be helpful in mghtly understanding the controversy held by the pro- Suttee champions against the attempts of the Raja.