Page:History of India Vol 9.djvu/108

 80 THE PRACTICE OF SUTTEE trust. But when she does not burn herself, she is ever after clothed coarsely, and remains among her rela- tions on account of her want of fidelity to her husband. The woman who burns herself with her husband is generally surrounded by women, who bid her farewell and commission her with salutations for their former friends, while she laughs, plays, or dances to the very time in which she is to be burnt." The Persian treatise Dabistan or " School of Man- ners," whose author lived in the first half of the seven- teenth century and knew India, among other countries in which he travelled, writes in harmony with the pre- ceding statements regarding the Hindu widow, and a passage from his work, as translated by Shea and Troyer, deserves citation: " If, on her husband's death, she become not a Suttee, that is burn herself with the deceased, she is then to reside with his relations, devot- ing herself to rigid abstinence and the worship of the Almighty. They say that when a woman becomes a Suttee, the Almighty pardons all the sins committed by the wife and husband, and that they remain a long time in paradise: nay, if the husband were in the infernal regions, the wife by this means draws him from thence and takes him to paradise, just as the serpent-catcher charms the serpent out of his hole. Moreover the Suttee, in a future birth, returns not to the female sex; but should she reassume the human nature, she appears as a man; but she who becomes not a Suttee, and passes her life in widowhood, is never emancipated from the female state. It is therefore