Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 104, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 May 1911 — BURNING OF WIDOWS. [ARTICLE]

BURNING OF WIDOWS.

Ths Horrible Rite India Maintained For Over Twenty Centuries. The abolition of the horrid rite of widow burning in India was decreed by the British authorities in 1829. The dreadful practice was found there by the Macedonians under Alexander the Great 300 years before Christ, and for more than twenty-one long, weary centuries did it repeat its almost inconceivable torture and agony upon the women of India. The sacrifice, while not actually forced on the wife, was so strongly insisted on by public opinion that it amounted to a law, and its victims were legion. Scores of widows were often burned upon the funeral pile of a single rajah. In Bengal, the head center of the monstrosity, thousands were sacrificed annually, and the figure for all India was appalling. The millions of widowed women were completely at the mercy of the remorseless superstition of the times. The ministers of Brahmanism told the widow that her sacrifice was necessary as a means of her own happiness and that of her husband in the future state, and oftener than otherwise she consented to be burned along with the dead body of her husband. Unless she did this she was covered with the maledictions and curses of the people, was virtually outlawed and unceremoniously cast outside the pale of human sympathy and consideration and had to spend the rest of her days in degradation and wretchedness. It'was death on the funeral pile of her husband or a living death of contumely and shame, of loneliness and misery. The women of India can never discharge their debt of gratitude to England for the abolition of the suttee.— New York American.