page_title: Sati (practice)
section_title: Early British policy
hierarchical_section_title: Sati (practice) / History / British and other European colonial powers / Early British policy
caption_attribution_description: English: Widow Burning in India (August 1852, p.84, IX)
context_page_description: The Sati or suttee was a historical practice found chiefly among Hindus in the northern and pre-modern regions of South Asia, in which a widow sacrifices herself by sitting atop her deceased husband's funeral pyre.
  The extent to which sati was practised in history is not known with clarity. However, during the early modern Mughal period, it was notably associated with elite Hindu Rajput clans in western India, marking one of the points of divergence between Rajput culture and Islamic Mughal culture. In the early 19th century, the East India Company, in the process of extending its rule to most of India, initially tolerated the practice; William Carey, a British Christian evangelist, noted 438 incidences within a 30-mile radius of the capital Calcutta, in 1803, despite its ban within Calcutta. Between 1815 and 1818, the number of incidents of sati in Bengal doubled from 378 to 839.
context_section_description: The first official British response to sati was in 1680 when the Governor of Madras Streynsham Master  intervened and prohibited the burning of a Hindu widow  in Madras Presidency  and attempts to limit or ban the practice had been made by individual British officers but without the backing of the British East India Company as it followed a policy  of non interfence in Hindu religious affairs  and there was no legislation or ban against Sati. The first formal British ban was imposed in 1798, in the city of Calcutta only. The practice continued in surrounding regions. In the beginning of the 19th century, the evangelical church in Britain, and its members in India, started campaigns against sati. The British activism should be considered in the light that British women abolitionists of the time were concerned with promoting the Christian education of the “heathen” women as their distinctive contribution to the foreign missionary enterprise. Leaders of these campaigns included William Carey and William Wilberforce. These movements put pressure on the company to ban the act. William Carey, and the other missionaries at Serampore conducted in 1803–04 a census on cases of sati for a region within a 30-mile radius of Calcutta, finding more than 300 such cases there. The missionaries also approached Hindu theologians, who opined that the practice was encouraged, rather than enjoined by the Hindu scriptures.
  Serampore was a Danish colony, rather than British, and the reason why Carey started his mission in Danish India, rather than in British, was because The East India Company did not accept Christian missionary activity within their domains. In 1813, in a speech to the House of Commons, William Wilberforce, with particular reference to the statistics on sati collected by Carey and the other Serampore missionaries, forced through a bill that made Christian missionary preaching in British India legal, under the guise of combating such perceived social evils as sati and simultaneously converting people by spreading misinformation about Hinduism.
  Elijah Hoole in his book Personal Narrative of a Mission to the South of India, from 1820 to 1828 reports an instance of Sati at Bangalore, which he did not personally witness. Another missionary, Mr. England, reports witnessing Sati in the Bangalore Civil and Military Station on 9 June 1826. However, these practices were very rare after the Government of Madras cracked down on the practice from the early 1800s (p. 82).
  The British authorities within the Bengal Presidency started systematically to collect figures on the practice in 1815.
caption: Widow Burning in India (August 1852), by the Wesleyan Missionary Society.[84]
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