Original sentence: Sati refers to a funeral practice among some Indian communities in which a recently widowed woman immolates herself on her husband’s funeral pyre
Edited sentence: , in average 600 per year.A description of suttee appears in a Greek account of the Punjab written in the first century BCE by historian Diodorus Siculus.A local indication of the numbers is given in the records kept by the Bengal Presidency of the British East India Company.Akbar (1542–1605) was next to issue official general orders prohibiting sati and insisted that no woman could commit sati without the specific permission of his Chief police officers.Although sati, or the practice of immolating a widow on her husband's funeral pyre, was officially outlawed by the British Raj in 1829, the rite persists.An 1829 reported statistics for the period 1815-1824 yields a total of 5997 instances of sati for the Bengal presidency in that period, i.Few reliable records exist of the practice before the time of the Gupta empire, approximately 400 CE.However, this later became more of a formality.In the same statistics, it is said that the numbers for the same time period in the Madras and Bombay presidencies totalled 635 instances of sati.Mughal emperor Humayun (1508-1556) was the first to try a royal fiat against sati.Mughals interfered little with local customs, but they seemed intent on stopping sati.On 4 December 1829, the practice was formally banned in the Bengal Presidency lands, by the then-governor general, William Bentick.Sati (practice) (widow-burning).The British, following the example of the early Moghuls, for a while tried to regulate it by requiring that it be carried out in the presence of their officials and strictly according to custom.The most high-profile sati incident was in Rajasthan in 1987, when an 18-year-old, Roop Kanwar, was burned to death.The total figure of known occurrences for the period 1813 to 1828 is 8,135; another source gives a comparable number of 7,941 from 1815 to 1828, thus giving an average of about 507 to 567 documented incidents per year in that period.There are no reliable figures for the numbers who died by sati.Under the Delhi Sultanate, permission had to be sought from the widow prior to any practice of sati as a check against compulsion