Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/396

386 Then there is the appeal to her love as well as her duty. She is told, and her uninstructed soul believes the lie, that her husband needs the attendance and care in the other world which she lavished upon him here; nay, more, that he is actually suffering for want of it. Her terrified imagination is appealed to, and he is pictured in a fearful intermediate hell—the counterpart of the Romish doctrine of Purgatory—out of which her merits alone can lift him; and her loving heart urges her to the great effort, which is to save and bless him, and herself with him. Again, there is the motive of fame. By it she can demonstrate the perfection of her conjugal devotion; she rises from obscurity, before her friends and the world, to the eminence of a heroine, a saint, a savior; she avoids a life of insult and misery, and the splendid monument on the spot where she suffers will keep her name and memory before her people in future ages.

I was intimate with a family in India, the head of which, a physician, gave the following description of a suttee at which he was actually present. It was in the city of Lahore, in June 1839, and was witnessed by this gentleman and some other Europeans. The occasion was the burning of the body of the Maharajah Runjeet Singh—he who was commonly called the “Lion of the Punjab,” and who was the last Oriental sovereign that wore the great Koh-i-noor diamond. (The father of the Prince represented on page 47.) On account of his special orders, the funeral pile was composed of an unusual quantity of the precious sandal-wood. It was also made large enough for his eleven wives to burn with his body. Early in the morning, an immense concourse attending to witness the ceremony, the body of the Maharajah, decorated and wrapped in Cashmere shawls, was brought out from the palace and the procession formed, the four Ranees (Queens) in order, unvailed, sitting in open palanquins, followed by the seven other wives on foot, barefooted—some of them, the doctor declared, being not more than fourteen or fifteen years old. Then came the court, the officials, the military, and the crowd. The ceremonies performed, the body was lifted to the top of the great pile; then the four Ranees ascended